Babies' health, spiritually and for the economy

It's a sign of the times, and not a good one, that many of you might wonder what the health of infants has to do with the economy and the current economic crisis. These modern times are so ill informed and warped in their priorities that obvious connections are no longer recognized or well understood. So here are some thoughts and background for you to contemplate.

For virtually all of human history parents have had many children, and several of them have died young. As recently as the early 1900's this was an unsurprising pattern. Everyone knew a family who had a baby die at birth or soon after. It was a great sorrow and not spoken about, not because people were ashamed of the poor baby, but because that was how everyone was "in the same boat" and coped by feeling sorrow but moving on.

We then had tremendous health breakthroughs in the middle 1900's where prenatal care was better understood and provided, hospitals provided rapid response to problem births, and people began to learn how to treat many birth defect conditions and other problems that put a baby's life at risk.

I don't know if young people today know the old expression of relief that new parents would express, saying "As soon as he or she was born we counted all his or her fingers and toes." This is from the time when there was no sonogram or other prenatal diagnosis of fetal health, and upon first sight virtually all parents "checked" the hands and feet of their newborn for all the fingers and toes. Birth was a time of suspense because as I said, everyone knew a family who had lost a baby in birth or in young childhood and the counting the fingers and toes was a kind of "laughing in the dark" ritual that accompanied the sigh of relief when a birth was healthy and successful.

Humans have a horrible problem of back sliding, though. One would assume that infant health would only get better and better as society and technology "progressed," but it has not. For example, just as infant prenatal and post natal doctor care improved, women took up smoking cigarettes. Women did not smoke, either while pregnant or normally, until pretty recently. So in a way, much of the health of infants that was achieved through technology progress was canceled out by women taking up cigarette smoking. A study announced today shows that women who smoke while pregnant put their children at higher risk of being aggressive. That is a risk factor that simply did not exist throughout human history, just to give you one example. During more socially prurient times mainstream women did not smoke cigarettes, drink or take illegal drugs, including marijuana. Thus on the one hand women gained the benefits of prenatal care and more prosperous lives in which to have safer births (housing, heating, vaccinations, antibiotics, for example). However, on the other hand, "liberated" women started putting substances into their bodies both before and during pregnancy. See, I am not explaining this to blame, but to educate especially the young people about why things change the way that they do in human social and medical history. As having babies became safer women (and the fathers) accelerated their unsafe choices that canceled out much of the progress.

Further, lifestyle and environmental situations changed around all humans, both those having children and not. For example there is a huge influx of food additives, chemicals such as in plastic, medication and hormones that are in the drinking water, and toxins in the air and even more insidiously in the household. Again, the health gains of safer prenatal care and post birth delivery and treatment of any birth defects or conditions has been canceled out by the acute toxicity of the environment. In my time I have witnessed houses that used to be made out of natural materials (wood, stone, brick, etc) be replaced by houses made out of artificial chemically produced and "treated" materials. People were slow to recognize that humans have built two generations of "sick buildings." Upholstery and carpet used to be made from cotton and wool. Now it is filled with toxic material. We used to wash our bodies and homes with soap and water. Now the "cleansers" are worse than the dirt and those that kill germs only breed stronger and stranger germs to replace them.

So now we see all sorts of mysterious physical, emotional and mental reactions in babies and children and lots of them look like "allergies." The asthma crisis of several decades ago should have been the first wake up call. Mold and the dander and leavings of vermin such as roaches are a large contributor to the asthma crisis. But now it is even more insidious because even the "cleanest" modern house is filled with toxins. Just as an example, those expensive lovely granite countertops in the finest homes sometimes emit radiation. Scented products are no longer scented by the actual flower or herb but potentially toxic chemicals. So your "cinnamon"candle does not have cinnamon but a chemical that is "derived" from or "smells like" cinnamon.

Thus there is a confluence of three tragic things:
1) People have very high and unrealistic expectations about the health and survivability of all of their children since they only remember the good times where people could take it somewhat for granted, and thus forget that there has always been a real risk of losing a child to death or being presented with very serious life curtailing conditions.
2) People have unwittingly canceled out much of the progress in infant and child health by engaging in optional activities (drugs, drinking, smoking) or enduring unwittingly enforced (surrounded by toxic products) high risk conditions.
3) People have not invested their economy's wealth into addressing these problems and promoting the best of healthcare, free healthcare, for all pregnant women and their fetuses, and their born infants and growing children.

So here is the economic kicker. No economy thrives or survives that is not based on a high child bearing population.

"It's not the spending, stupid."

People think that "spending" is the key to the successful western economy. It is NOT. The key to the (previously) successful western economy was an economy that was highly child and child birth oriented.

The "baby boom" was a great time, not because babies were born with charge cards and thus we had "more spenders."

The "baby boom" was a great time because genuine economic growth and thriving relies on lots of people having lots of children and building child friendly communities and thus jobs.

Where there are many children there were investments in health care facilities, schools, infant and child clothing and products, nutrition industries... you name it.

What is key is that these were lasting products. A school is not a video game.

This country has invested in total trash for thirty years now while losing all the gains of "progress" regarding our infants and children.

I do not understand how the economy can survive and recover, especially in the form of the "faux capitalism" that I've explained previously that has ruined genuine capitalism, if it does not reform to have a new orientation toward the having of children in families.

We lack babies, we lack children, we lack jobs, we lack health care for those who do have children, we have more, not less, troubled children with grave medical or emotional woes, we have less healthy communities that are structured around schools and family place of worship, and ultimately we have less workers and people who participate in the grassroots life and growth of the economy.

While people are yapping about "carbon credits" they are letting their babies (if they even had any) crawl on artificial chemically infested surfaces, letting water get polluted, ignoring sewage treatment plant needs, not researching childhood diseases and conditions as much as they could have been, and letting communities that used to be child-centric dissolve into narcissistic enclaves of "self actualizing" garbage oriented "entertainment."

If I were President Elect Obama I would not sign funding for a single "project" that does not have an "invest in our children" orientation, one way or the other.

Healthy or desperately sick, all children should live within a total network of family and community support. I cannot believe the crap that this country has invested its treasure in while parents of sick children lack proper care and have to fight for the smallest of gains.

That's why I believe that there should be free medical care for prenatal and young infants and children and kick the stupid and greedy insurance companies right out of it. I've blogged about this before, presenting my vision and arguments for why this economy will never recover (say nothing of the country's spiritual goodness) if there is not comprehensive and free prenatal (NOT "market driven") preventative and medical care for prenatal to age of majority children, period.

With such a system you would also address the problems that are now plaguing our children, whether asthma, diabetes, obesity, autism, rare or common birth defects, teenage depression and nihilism, addiction etc. All children need in a just and prosperous society comprehensive medical care and a system of preventative medicine that includes components such as vitamins and nutrition.

I don't understand how economists and other "experts" do not realize that a successful economy relies on a vigorous and loving birth rate in a stable child-oriented community structure nationwide, not on "spending" in and of itself.

Meanwhile, start to educate yourselves about the housing materials that you take for granted. We are all living among materials that are hazardous and unnatural and it is only getting worse, not better.

Some of it is "lazy safety" thinking. Rather than being careful around fire and so forth people started pouring "fire retardant" chemicals onto the fabrics and building substances around them. This is just an example of where what looks like a safety "break through" is the addition of needless chemicals. The same with food additives: rather than cook fresh food people eat pounds of "preservatives" in every bite of food that they consume. I remember the days when things were packaged in waxed paper and glass; now it is plastic and God knows what added to the handy packaging for "microwaves."

Think about Korea and Japan, who used to have traditional housing of wood such as bamboo and even paper. As they moved to modern housing they have also had increases in instances such as the recent discuss of Kawasaki syndrome. Japan is a useful study and I've blogged about this before. Breast cancer among Japanese women was extremely rare until the 1960's when those who moved to the USA and also adopted western diet and probably trigger substances in their environment observed that their numbers now converged on what western women experienced.

This country will not "get back to good" unless it becomes child oriented again and we look long and hard at the environmental pollution of home and work place substances, and until we treat all children, sick and well, for free and comprehensively. I get lots of sheer frustration headaches whenever I think about this topic and look at the horrible mess that everyone is in today.

Sad anniversaries & problematic societal change

The problem with sad anniversaries

Modern humans have an obsession with remembering sad anniversaries. It has become such a powerful and self reinforcing part of the culture that it is now assumed that it is a “natural” part of the human experience, and that it is “helpful” to the “grieving process.” Now, before I continue the discussion, let me explain that I do not critique or question the mourning of a loss or thoughtful remembrance of the tragedy or loved one. I am talking about the feeling that one must be weighed down and focused upon the tragedy on “significant dates,” usually the anniversary of the loss. Many people this past weekend, for example, are commemorating the horrible and inhuman loss of Flight 103 to terrorism on this, its twentieth anniversary. This is a complicated subject, and one that has given me a great deal of concern about human health and well being, so let us use this as a case study.

First of all, do recognize that sensitivity to calendar dates and times is a very recent human development, one that cannot be argued as being inherent to the human condition or an evolutionary “advantage.” For example, many people did not know what day they were born, right up until the last century. They may barely have known the month. My own stepfather had two different traditional birthdays, separated by four months, and no one was positive which the correct one was. Large farm families, and large urban families, lacked any “day of the week” context except for going to Sunday worship services. For most of human history people did not read, count, have calendars (or even know what they were) except for two purposes. One was the natural calendar of the seasons, so that one could plant and build shelter according to the needs of that time of the year. The second was the religious calendar, according to the local faith. This is something that the Jewish and Muslim faiths, for example, have in common: they love the moon as a gift from God, because it provides them with a natural light at night and a means to measure seasonal time for planting and for worship, but they do not worship the moon, or the time that it represents, itself. So to be accurate, one must understand that a sense of date, week, month or even the “specific” numeric year is not natural to the human condition nor did it evolve to provide some sort of survival instinct advantage.

In fact, the significance of secular dates and times of the year did not come from religion, as some would suspect, but because pressure to have reliable means of accounting for time came from the aristocracy, the ruling class, military leaders, tax collectors and other accumulators of wealth and power. The demand for a secular calendar did not come from “God’s” side of civilization but from “Caesar’s” side, to use the analogy first expressed by Jesus Christ of religious obligations compared to secular obligations. The religious people possessed calendars as inheritance of the agricultural and the worship cycle heritage, and thus they had a great say in how secular calendars were established but they were not the drivers or motivators for secular calendars! It was those who accumulated wealth in cycles, power in cycles, and who controlled the subservient populace according to cycles who motivated the development and intense focus on secular calendars. Look in the Bible to understand the difference. No one gave a hoot about when a baby was born; they only cared that certain religious obligations took place a certain number of days after the birth. The ancient Israelites following the Law given to them by God offered a precise amount of sacrifice at the temple at a precise time after a baby was born, but no one really cared what particular day, week, month or year the baby was born.

In fact, if anything, you must realize that religious focus on calendar time actually loosened in direct proportion to the increasing focus and tightening of the rulers grip on secular time. We see this in the Catholic faith where there is infant baptism instead of a temple offering, but the timing of when the infant is baptized is very loose. Further, the Protestants did away with infant baptism and view it as a childhood or adult decision to make when they “accept Christ as their savior.” So far from being concerned about calendar time, the great faiths have all moved away from even their relativistic interest in dates (this number of days after a birth, instead of caring about the birth day itself) to one that is more significant only in the liturgical year and in the individual path to salvation, the sacraments and other milestones of intersection of human life and faith. As society became less agricultural (the first “calendar”) and less ritualized in worship (the second “calendar”), it became more time, money, resources, body count and elite power transfer absorbed, and this required a strong, common secular calendar. Thus focus on specific dates and “anniversaries” were the tools of tax collectors, rent collectors, army builders, men and women of title and lineage, and “office holding” rather than any natural inclination of humans, either biologically or spiritually. Sensitivity to specific dates, and later to “anniversaries” is not at all a natural trait of humans, either individually or socially. Calendar dates and their sensitivity is a tool of ruler ship of the majority by the minority. It is not a coincidence that date obsessed practices such as astrology did not percolate “up” from the masses as a form of “common knowledge,” but rather was invented and pushed down by as a handy dandy tool of pharaohs, rulers, despots and those in their courts who practiced occult “arts” in service to those absolute rulers.

It’s not like ancient Egyptians or Indians were all sentimental and loving of their children that they cast their horoscopes in order to make sure they had the right “career” or were “happily married,” since neither concept existed for either the elite or the common people. No one had “careers,” they all farmed the land for survival, and no one had as an objective to be “happily married” since that presumes a leisure and survival rate of individuals that just did not exist during the time that secular calendar obsession started via tools such as “astrology.” Rulers and the power elite wanted tools to enhance their holdings and their war capabilities, period.

In fact, focusing on sad events and making them part of numeric ritual is an anti-survival strategy, one that works against human survival and thriving, rather than as many assume, being a “civilizing” and hence helpful practice. Again, one looks at the Bible for historical guidance. The Israelites were nomadic people who very quickly buried their dead and “moved on.” This does not mean that people individually or as a group mourned any less deeply the loss of their loved ones and leaders, far from it; they felt the love and loss very keenly for the rest of their lives. But they did not compartmentalize mourning and memorializing on the calendar: only religious ritual was performed according to a calendar, and that was the natural one of the moon. Why is it anti-survival strategy to do otherwise? You can understand this on many practical levels. In a time of high infant and child mortality, one needed to be ready to have another child as soon as one was physically and emotionally ready; no one could afford or wanted to be stultified into a calendar driven mentality of grief or recovery. Thus a parent who lost a child might think about how, sadly, they lost their most recent child during the harvest moon, and thus they would have memories around that time, but they were not focused on the mindset we see today which is “Well, on this day it was exactly one year ago that he or she died.”

To explain this more broadly, humans are biologically and mentally programmed to remember the pleasant far longer than the painful. The obvious example is childbirth. If humans were more sensitive to pain memories over a long period than over pleasure memories over a long period, they would have been immobilized by fear of pain from not only childbirth, but from the pain and risks of agriculture, hunting and necessary travel. A survival trait that is essential to all life, and especially to humans who have the brain capacity to “think about things” is to shed memory of bad pain as quickly as possible and retain memory of good sensory experiences as long as possible. That, by the way, is one reason addiction is so hard to kick. Substance addiction relies on the fact that pleasurable sensation is stronger and longer lasting in the memory than the feelings of pain associated with the consequences of addiction. If humans had evolved to cling to painful memories stronger than to the ordinary memories that are hallmarked by the pleasant memories, depression and fear of pain would have stunted the evolution of humans at all. Humans would have avoided childbirth and any at risk activity, which included the daily working in the fields and hunting that was their only means of survival.

So there is absolutely no reason that humans should, to return to our case study topic, self-remind and focus emphasis on normal grief and return of normality according to the calendar. If anything, calendars are a set back to recovery. Yet what does society do? Society focuses more and more on the calendar, especially whenever the power structure is involved. Just think about “grief counseling” and how that is offered, controlled and reimbursed by insurance (if even covered) strictly by calendar, and not by natural healing or periods of deep and spontaneous need. Society has become enslaved to the secular calendar and it is to such an extent that people no longer remember what I am describing, which is the natural and pro-survival healthful way to grieve and heal. In fact, people now give dirty looks to those who have suffered a shared loss if they do not put on the sackcloth and ashes on the “anniversary dates,” yet those same disapproving people do not at all understand the individual nature of the healing process.

In fact, timetable grieving has joined all the other slaveries of the calendar to contribute to the mental and physical health breakdown of individuals and society. For example, it is well documented that heart attacks congregate just before the “work week begins,” which is for western society Sunday night into Monday morning. People feel enormous stress that builds up on Sunday (which is supposed to be their day of rest) and often peaks Monday or Tuesday with a heart attack or other condition. This is an entirely fallacious condition that should never have developed the way that it did, where humans are expected to be automatons that turn on and off their work and rest “clocks” according to work week schedules. When God mandated the Sabbath, the day of rest, remember that was against a backdrop of not a “work week” but the continuous labor that humans had, without peaks or valleys, to tend to their farms, flocks and crafts. God forced humans to take one full day off with no work pressure whatsoever; the Sabbath was never meant to be the “gearing up” day to the first day “back at work” in a calendar driven work week! You can make all the arguments about how organization is necessary for civilization that you want, but you must remember two things. One is there is a difference between necessary organization and obsessive slavery to the date and time. Thus, yes, if companies must have work schedules, do so, but do not then layer additional stress filled time constraints one on top of the other and then call that the “natural” condition of humans, as it most certainly is not. For example, when humans were agricultural, the work was hard but it varied by month, not in lockstep in a work week. A month would be spent preparing the fields, then the next month sowing the seeds. Work was scheduled on what inventory managers call today an “as needed basis.” But that is certainly not how the vast majority of “work week schedules” are designed and strictly enforced today!

Therefore, even if you accept that modern life requires a rigid workweek schedule, society as a whole is crazy to add layers of pressure of time sensitivity that is optional, but they have come to think of as logical, natural and mandated. I mentioned the example of mental health, where the very people who are in a great deal of confusion and pain are given long drawn out schedules of “relief,” such as a once a week therapy session, and a once every half year or so fifteen minute checkup with a psychiatrist who provides their medications. Even if health care professionals were more numerous and had more hours to give, the insurance companies and the state payers would never tolerate a natural flow of resources as the individual patient needs; if they need “more” they are told to check themselves in on an inpatient basis, regardless of family situation (and then inpatient is heavily regimented but usually too short in duration and certainly is not residential in cycle or benefit). Thus a patient with great psychic pain is told to suck it up for a week, and then spill it all out in their given one hour therapy session. To say that is unnatural is to put it mildly. Having seen my share of patients it is obvious to anyone with a brain and a heart that one patient may need someone every day for a while, while another needs intense periods of “on call” availability, while a third may flourish with a cycle, and a fourth needs a residential role modeling experience, which they do not get in inpatient structures, obviously. Whether a patient has a psychosis, a low grade depression, or is a healthy person who just suffered a trauma, all of them are expected to “obey the tyranny of the calendar obsessed society.” Worse, that is even condescendingly explained to them as “part of their therapy” to “restore structure in their life.” What? It is no joke that the system is crazier than the patients, because at least the patients know when something is wrong and they yearn for it to be right.

So do you begin to see the foundation of the problem as I am explaining it? Humans are biologically and emotionally evolved to follow a natural calendar that is of nature and of religious ritual that punctuates and frames a less defined calendar of day to day ordinary necessity. Farmers would have busy periods during, for example, harvest, and then in some climates do almost nothing during the winter except tend to the animals and repair their gear. Contrast that to the mess that humans have made while “organizing” themselves in modern times. They have the necessary schedules of schooling and genuine job needs. Fine, that is obvious and logical. But the workforce with their work schedules are far from being managed on genuine job needs basis; they are structured to be cookie cutter mindless enslavements to schedules. This is especially true as we’ve gone from a manufacturing to a paperwork society. The service industry seems to remain the sanest because it is truly “on demand” and thus logical in its workforce scheduling, with natural flows that employees can benefit from. My point is, though, that society as a whole has created a dictatorship of the work week that has little or nothing to do with either productivity or employee natural health.

Then, on top of the necessary school and work schedules, you have unnecessary work schedules and assessments and compensation that depend more on the delusion of work than the delivery of actual productivity. For people to “get ahead” they have to work “longer hours,” provide more “face time” to the influential and, often, have to “get another degree,” thus cramming education into what is left of their non-office time. Honestly, I’d rather have a sane employee who works half time in the office and is the other half time in school (if the degree is really necessary) than to have the new form of slavery that I have seen over the past thirty years. To make it worse, recreation (especially for children) and health care are also all too, as I explained, slaves to their own overlords of the calendar. Certain days of the week, hours, times of the month, all artificial numbers and constructs that make up the “calendar” have taken over, growing to mutant giants of “importance” that steer, for better or for worse, every aspect of one’s life. Even those who say they want to “fix it” only push their fellow slaves further into the tyranny of the calendar, rather than guide them back into natural life. How many times have we heard these gurus talk about children’s “play dates” and even the wisdom of adults who “do not have enough time for their love lives” to “make dates with each other?” What? Sure, that’s what every couple needs for their libido, another schedule, another pressured “delivery date.” Everyone has become enslaved to the calendar and have both forced and lured everyone else into the same pit.

And so we come to the anniversary of a tragedy. The media has been brainwashed by this magical thinking of the significance of the calendar into being some of the worst promoters of the slavery of the calendar. I am not criticizing them; far from it. They think they are being respectful by bringing up tragic anniversaries. But please notice two things. One is that they rarely bring up a “good” anniversary. For example, when was the last time that someone mentioned in March that “so many years ago today George Washington, our first president, took office?” The media has been brainwashed into thinking that they must mention tragic anniversaries to show respect (and sometimes that is true, and sometimes it is not) but they NEVER mention positive or educational anniversaries, including ones that changed history in a meaningful way. For example, how about mentioning on the nightly news, “This is the anniversary of when President Abraham Lincoln first mentioned the problem of slavery in a speech.” But the media has been brainwashed and now have become the obedient slaves in turn to the calendar mentality that one must mention only the tragic and the heartbreaking, and only on the anniversary of when it occurred (or an "in progress" or "update" “human interest” story of a survivor.) It is unbalanced and hence not ultimately respectful in the long run, even though very well intentioned at the time.

Whenever you analyze the goodness or error of something, do not just look at “what is there;” look also for “what is missing.” If you look at the anniversary grief of tragedy syndrome, you must look at what is missing, which is the entirety of anniversaries of good and positive events. One is much more respectful of loss and can put it in perspective if those losses are not the only news, as if the rest of life does not happen, and there is nothing to learn from or role model on “their" anniversaries and, instead, have a more worldly perspective. If the media is going to do the tragedy anniversary business, they MUST also do the “let’s not forget on this day these great things happened” side of human history.

The second problem with the media tragedy anniversary business is that like the teachers, workers, health care workers and recreationalists, they are buying into the lock step calendar management of grief and social progress. For an example, let’s look at someone very good in the media who has fought this tendency with mixed results. Anderson Cooper on CNN has had an admirable holistic appreciation of what happened to the Gulf Coast, particularly New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina. Anderson is the one example I can think of in the entire mainstream or cable media who attempts to keep understanding of Katrina reality in a real time continual natural life context, rather than as the tragedy anniversary. It ought to be like that for all of the news. Progress should not wait for reporting until a grief anniversary. Otherwise even those who grieve find themselves being structured by the media and the calendar in presentation of the messages they may genuinely want to deliver. Why is a loss assumed to be felt the worst, and also most logically reported, on the tragedy anniversary?

Here is an example. My father died on a certain day forty two years ago. My mother is one of those people who has been totally brainwashed by the magical thinking of the grief anniversary and here is what happens as a result. Several years ago I was there on the death anniversary, watching late night television. She came storming out and attacked me for “not seeming to care” that it was the anniversary of my father’s death. When I said, “Um, mom, I miss him every day and think of him every day” she was dumbfounded: that never occurred to her. Why? Because she has compartmentalized her grief by calendar, so that she feels lousy (and a lot of self pity) on the actual date, but does not really miss him (she of course remarried so that is logical and healthy) the rest of the time. I, however, do not forget a father because it’s not like one “moves on” from having had a father. As a result of calendar slavery people have forgotten what each other feel and think as normal people. Gosh, it never occurs to my own mother that I might actually you know, miss my father on dates such as my birthday, Christmas, or when I see a bowling alley (he loved to bowl) rather than just missing him on the day he died? This is the tyranny of the calendar in action.

Those of you who have lost someone dear to them know what I mean. You see something and you think, “Wow, he or she would really have liked to have seen that.” You don’t wait until the death anniversary to think that, do you? Of course not, but we have as a society given a magic power to the calendar that almost dictates that very restricted slavery of thought. Thus when someone, like me with my father’s death anniversary, does not put in face time of grief on that day and only that day, people feel entitled to judge and assume! Nowadays ordinary people who lose someone due to accident or crime are often interviewed on the spot and often become media personalities, and thus go into the file folder based on calendar slavery. The disappearance of a child such as the little girl in Florida becomes an entirely time driven event, with regular reports on the number of weeks missing and key tragedy anniversary dates. The same is true with the plane crashes that receive ongoing attention: the natural power of healing has become enslaved to a calendar mentality, both privately and publically.

Part of the reason this has taken place is that modern society for all its brash confidence has really kind of lost its way, and looks for numinous or “special” reasons-almost magical-for how and why tragic things happen. One component of this almost magical thinking is to put great weight upon the tragedy anniversary especially as one can explore “What if” and “Could that have happened to you or me” scenarios. This is a cousin of the natural distancing human reaction that some use toward crime victims (“Well, what was she doing out so late at night and alone?”) When one reflexively blames the victim one is trying to distance one’s self from the thought that such a crime or tragedy might ever happen to you. The focus on the anniversary tragedy rather than the day to day reality of healing, or not healing, is related to that impulse to distance one’s self from the thought that one could have been in that or a similar tragedy. It is human nature to do this, but the problem is that the media is inadvertently codifying a “too close for some” and “too distant for others” emotional rollercoaster by focusing only on tragedy anniversaries. The slant of much of the media (and the consumers’ interest) is in people who didn’t take that flight, for example, and thus “cheated death.” That is human nature but it is only one of the many resilient mindsets and reactions that the well balanced human has. No one used to think like that. When a chariot ran wild in Rome and trampled down a bunch of poor people, no one was philosophical about “why him or her” and “if only she had gone to the agora earlier.” People grieved and bemoaned their fate or lot in life but nothing like today because back then everyone, even the wealthy, understood that life itself is risky. Today it is like people live in cotton fluff of illusion that life can end suddenly (and it will end for everyone eventually, of course) but only for someone else and that there is some sort of great hidden meaning in every date and every event and every circumstance. In the old days when often half of the infants born in a family died in their first year, people understood that life can end suddenly and with no particular “meaning” or “message” in the “timing.”

Another reason that there is this misbalanced tragedy anniversary focus is that as I pointed out, people live increasingly less calendar and ritual based religious lives, and more and more calendar and secular based lives. When religious participation used to be the majority of the structure in one’s life, one had a perspective of continuity that gave greater strength and fiber to those who lived through very tough times, such as tragedies or wars. A religious based natural calendar strengthens fortitude and provides more assurance of the continuity of life, while a secular calendar seems to be comprised of “reward” or “punishment.” One shows up at work at the right times, look busy, has the right attitude with the right people at the right times: one gets good performance reviews, raises, perks. One shows up whether one is sad or not for therapy on the appointed time and one gets his or her weekly hour of therapy: miss it for some reason and you are punished by not being given a replacement hour. If your kid misses football practice he’s in trouble. If you miss your filing for tax returns or for insurance reimbursement, you are in trouble. The secular calendar is a slave driver of reward and punishment. The religious calendar is the continuity of God’s presence, love and promise of eternal life. Oddly, secularists call God the bully for having heaven and threatening hell, yet one can go a year or a decade to church and never hear hell mentioned once. Go ahead, just try being late to work one day if you are not the boss, and try getting through one month at work without hearing about an upcoming performance review. The religious natural calendar (being close to the natural cycles of the earth and life with religious observances the steady markers) is actually the positive and uplifting reality based foundation for balanced life, while the secular calendar is so highly artificial and heavy in its burden that it has contributed to much of the malaise, depression, fright, seething anger and despair that stalks society today. The secular calendar is like a cruel stalker that society has not only invited into one’s house, but has given to it increasing power every year, and forced more and more to obey. Eventually the stalker takes over and one does not even realize that he or she not only enabled the stalker but invented it, handed it some of its weapons.

Here is another example of the irrationality of the calendar. When I first went to work for a Wall Street bank in the 1980’s I had severe allergies. I was otherwise a healthy person. We had two weeks of sick leave per year, and since I was rarely ill, but did have occasional bad and disabling allergy days, I would call in sick perhaps three times for one day, compared to a person who was out sick with the flu for a week. I quickly received a warning letter of bad performance for having had “3 incidents” of being sick, while a person, who is out for the entire week, or even two, receives no such letter. That was the bank wide corporate policy based on calendar days and number of times one used the same block of two weeks. I could not believe that for using three sick days that I was entitled to for genuine miserable allergy spells I got a warning and an incident report in my personnel file (and I was a vice president no less) and was highly embarrassed. Their explanation for this quaint practice was that all employees used to be tellers (the clerks that served the public) and thus being out for a day at a time was a higher inconvenience than being out for a week. The fact that this was no longer true meant nothing to the slave drivers of the calendar. The calendar rules and overrules common sense. People came in sick rather than use the days they were entitled to, and I learned to do the same.

In a related story I worked for a petrochemical company that had on site medical facilities. One day my office mate told me that she had seriously bumped her head over the weekend and that it still hurt. Alarmed, I realized she might have a concussion and walked her across the driveway to the medical facility. There the staff was angry and refused to see her. Why? I’m not making this up: the sign said “Emergencies from 10 to 11 a.m.” Yes, the expensive medical facility for employees accepted employee “emergencies” only one hour of the day. You had to schedule your emergency to happen between 10 and 11 o’clock, otherwise they refused to see you. I am still boggled when I think about this and how I knew it boded very poorly for where medicine, ethics and attitudes were headed back in 1980-1981 when that occurred. By the way, they thought I was the bitch for not understanding their refusal to treat my office mate.

The religious calendar is about mercy; the secular calendar is about punishment. It is never a good time to do something bad, and it is never appropriate to delay doing something good. Yet the secular calendar and the tragedy anniversary mentality, and other dysfunctions of societal attitude, have created a system of inappropriate response, like laughing at a funeral. Here is another example. I was told by corporate trainers to give employees bad news on Friday so they would suffer with their families over the weekend and not be a bother at the workplace. Yes, that same Wall Street bank taught all managers to give bad performance reviews to employees on Fridays, to lay them off or fire them on Fridays, and to have difficult conversations with them on Fridays, so they would then go home and be their loved one’s problems and not be miserable at work and thus make everyone else “uncomfortable.” Friday (the Jewish Sabbath by the way) was by policy transformed into the killing fields’ day. The secular calendar was used to hurt people in a way that they could get no immediate relief or continued dialogue because they were enforced away from work due to the two day weekend and rather than sympathy for the family, managers taught this with glee that the injured employee was “now the problem” of the loved ones. These are the same banks who are taking handouts and bailouts of billions of dollars on the tax money of those they fire on Fridays (and they happily accept the loot any day of the week). This same bank, by the way, had a history of doing painful reorganizations on Pearl Harbor Day. The long time manager who told me that didn’t know why they did it, but knew it was deliberate and thought that they thought it was funny. Yep, nothing like using a tragedy anniversary of hundreds of bombed and burned American veterans to do a reorganization that rewarded or punished in new assignments. Gosh, who can’t see the connection? Very funny-not-and again, this was in the 1980’s, so this is what I mean about multiple decades of a disastrous trend for humanity and well being of individuals and societies. And conservatives wonder, by the way, why the auto unions hesitate to give up anything they have, even if it is the right thing to do? When a society lives and dies based on a reward and punishment secular calendar mentality, you’d be a fool to willingly give up any protection and buffer zone that you have, even if it harms the long term well being of the company itself.

So you see what I mean? I am far from saying that we should not mention or cover tragedy anniversaries, such as the weekend’s Flight 103. And first let me say something about that particular horrible event. I was glued to my chair in horror as I watched the reporting from Locharbie, and I can remember it as if it was yesterday. I will never forget the astonishment and the horror of seeing the first reports, and of the burning hole that fell upon that town, killing townspeople along with all those on board. I was horrified and stricken and remain so to this day: and that was well before I realized that many students from the city near my hometown were on board. I grieve for all and do not need to think that it was “my people” on board. Further, while the pathos of Christmas week when this happened is obvious and heart rending, it is no less so for people who lose loved ones on an “average” day in an “average” week. You know what really hurts me? When I read one of our soldiers was killed in Iraq weeks or only days before they were scheduled to return safe and sound. It’s not the date that matters, there is no “magic” or “luck” or “destiny” in the day, week, month or year, it is the individualized tragedy of personal loss, of the pathos that he or she was just about to arrive home safely when tragedy strikes.

The other side of the coin is those veterans who return home safely and then end up killed in an auto accident or some other mishap. I grieve when I read that too, and I think of how the surviving family is just as hurt by that irony as they might have been had he or she been killed in action before coming home. At least they have the time together of having returned home. You see, it’s all about the heart and not about the calendar.

People are too stressed and burdened by the tyranny of the secular calendar and how those in power wield that calendar like a mace or a pointed spear; I think they need to stop and recognize what has unconsciously crept up on them and what they themselves have enabled. What happens when Presidents decide there is “no more time” “on the calendar” for negotiating? What happens when thousands lose the calendar game and therefore their jobs, while the money looters “won” the calendar game? In Wall Street you don’t just “follow the money” you “follow the calendar.” What kind of societies fire on the Sabbath so that the sad, frightened or angry employee gets “escorted to the door” by security and dumped on their family, so that Pontius Pilate can wash his or her hands of them? So why does the media buy into the brainwashing that only the tragic must be reported on anniversaries, and that there is nothing in between? Why have children lost their childhood to the calendar? (Another reason I think homeschooling for all its drawbacks is now the more natural route, or at least a faith based school that does not view the calendar as the means for reward and punishment). Why is tragedy elevated and memorialized in the media while absolutely nothing of joy is given the same attention? Why are calendar “face time” “jobs” more important than real jobs? Why is Sunday evening the saddest and least favorite time of the week for the vast majority of employees? Why is healthcare, such as it is, one of the worst of the slave drivers of the calendar?


One of the things I had hoped to do by this time and since that didn’t happen maybe in the future was to try to get people to understand the flexibility and health of a more natural calendar, one that is reality based and not reward and punishment based. Remember, civilization arose from a natural calendar, not a secular calendar of enslavement. Even schools were not forced march identically scheduled full days but were scheduled around farming and ranch activities. Yes, in the 1800’s the hours of school in a locality varied by when and where the children were needed at home. Even the wealthy students at private schools had structures that recognized apprenticeships. Calendars used to be tools of convenience for growing industrialization, but now they have become slave drivers and bull masters that bludgeon people into reward and punishment conformity. Where calendars are used for joy (such as Christmas) they are attacked but where they serve the masters dominating purpose, people wring their hands and claim that “it’s the rules” and “they can’t help it.” With every innovation and recreation we enslave our children more and more toward calendars, away from real life, rather than toward real life. Now even the youngest children have timetables for unrealistic goals and joyless waiting, instead of fruitful natural ordinary life, until the “key dates” and “events,” such as “wealth and fame.” One could not write a more insidious science fiction about robots “taking over” than what society has already unconsciously done to its self and worsens with every passing year.

I hope that you will give what I am advising some serious thought.

And another charity on my Christmas idea list

I have just donated $100 online to the USA arm of Caritas Internationale, Catholic Charities USA.

Catholic Charities/Caritas remains probably the most low key in terms of publicity and knowledge by the general public of all the charitable social services organizations in the world. As a result, few people realize that Catholic Charities is rated the TOP provider by Charity Navigator:

11/17 - Catholic Charities USA Named Top Provider of Social Services by Charity Navigator, Ranked #2 Overall in NonProfit Times Top 100

In 2007 Catholic Charities helped over 7,700,000 people! They report on their web site that they are already in the midst of helping people who are suffering in the mortgage crisis.

Do visit their site, find out more about what the quiet Catholics are really up to in following the steps of Jesus and ministering to the poor and those in need, and consider following my example and giving them or the international branches of Caritas a donation (I wrote about Caritas about a week ago regarding the crisis in Zimbabwe).

https://www.catholiccharitiesusa.org/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=1174

There is an easy to use online donation page.

Also, if you are interested, you can learn what the Catholic Social doctrine and tradition is, as defined by the USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops). Also, there are great prayer resources and personal seasonal reflections (such as each day of Advent) by Catholic Charities members.

Next charity from my Christmas idea list

I have just donated $75 online to the Salvation Army. This is in addition to my usual adding of change and dollar bills to their collection buckets.

Folks, in this time of economic crisis, never forget what a debt the USA owes to the Salvation Army. They are one of my favorite organizations and I can tell you this personal story of why.

My father had a good friend who was a co-worker, who was a child in the 1920's-1930's, during the time of the Great Depression. This friend would always support the Salvation Army because he told us how as a child he would stand in the soup line when they were destitute and his only food came from the Salvation Army: they absolutely saved his life. I, in turn, since hearing that story during my childhood, have never forgotten them for their generosity during our country's great need, and in particular to my father's friend and his family. My father's friend, by the way, was an Irish Catholic (even an altar boy) and in those days no one asked for "special interest group" identification when the way of Jesus Christ was walked by those who serve him by serving their neighbors. Further, in a time when there was scandal around many charities at disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, the Salvation Army, so far as I can tell, has maintained exemplary morals and ethics, and responsibility for the charitable treasure that is placed in their hands.

Media reports that donations to the Salvation Army is also at a low, due to the economic crisis. Those who can still donate, do not forget them. They are one of the ones that will see people through such times.

www.salvationarmyusa.org

Capitalism/financial crisis with history excerpt

Today I want to explain a kind of catch bag of economic concepts. While I am fully aware of professional terminology such as “the fundamentals” and “money velocity,” I’m not going to use them for the reasons I’ve explained previously, which is they are definitions used to describe warped and skewed capitalism, not genuine capitalism as it first emerged in its true form. I had the misfortune of working with highly paid and arrogant bank economists and I observed first hand that their education, and subsequent “Unreal Greed Street” job experience, hardened their misunderstanding of the origins of their own profession. Also, I obviously am not trying to train the people who read my blog to do more of the same of what has not only not worked, but was incorrectly crafted in the first place. However, I mention my background so that I can reach out to economists who genuinely do wish to do well and help the country-and all of the people and also, by implication, those in the world who depend upon the health of the USA to ensure their own. There are so many well formed ideas that I have, and so much background information that I would need to convey, that this is why I decided to lightly touch on a number of topics rather than go in depth in any one of them today. I know both the financial experts will get what I am saying nonetheless, as will those who have been following what I’m teaching as concerned citizens. I especially want at this time to reach out to local governments (states, cities, towns, counties, parishes and so forth) in order to help them cope and be heartened that there is a reasonable approach to solving our problems, one that is still firmly grounded in the Constitution.

So here I will introduce and explain a number of topics, in no particular order, just as they occur to me today, having been on my mind for many years.

The first is to understand money (in the form of currency, not theoretical measures of wealth) and how to properly assess the best uses of it. The trouble with money, and let’s use the American example of the dollar bill, is that like I’ve explained previously, people jump too quickly to thinking about some end goal without considering how the dollar bill has made its way there. Think of a dollar bill in an analogy (you knew one was coming, didn’t you?) Let’s think of a given dollar bill as an old fashioned antibiotic, such as penicillin. I’m not selecting penicillin as a hidden symbol of the dollar bill being less effective or out of favor, but because penicillin was the world changing discovery that first allowed humans to treat themselves successfully against infection. Likewise the use of standardization of currency was a wonderful development that allowed humans to do many things they could not otherwise do. Also I’m not implying that only the sick need a dollar bill, LOL, (though it seems like only the sick are the money managers, but that is a whole other problem!) I want to use the analogy so everyone can understand how a dose of money works its benefit throughout the economy and just as importantly, how it does not work as a magic cure all for every situation.

When doing some important financial planning task, such as trying to stimulate a local economy, there is a concept of looking at how quickly a dollar bill moves within that area, and whether it stays in that area, and how many hands touch and presumably benefit from it. This is a wise concept but one that has been totally misapplied and has become misunderstood. Would be economic planners sometimes think that if a dollar touches, let’s say ten local merchants, that it has done more “good” for the “local economy” than a dollar that touches two or three local merchants. But that is not always true. Using the penicillin analogy, if the penicillin touches ten local merchants, but only one of them was sick, what was the benefit of that? It’s almost as though the genuinely sick merchant was lucky to get a touch of the penicillin dollar bill. Suppose the dollar bill that touched “only” two or three merchants, however, was targeted to touch those that who were genuinely sick. Therefore the analogous penicillin dollar bill proved the wiser investment where it touched “only” two or three genuinely “sick” merchants than the dollar bill who touched ten merchants, only one of whom was “sick.” Economists, local planners and the hidden money plutocrats and mandarins who pull the strings behind the scenes both innocently and deliberately misunderstand this concept and abuse it accordingly. So my first lesson is that money that does not touch the right hands and settle in the right places does not perform its function.

Now, before I hear the howls of those who accuse me of wanting to “redistribute wealth,” you are totally wrong and I am not saying that. I am telling you how to invest your money properly, not trying to take it away from you. I have seen over the decades people make what they think are both wise and compassionate investment and charitable donations, and who might as well have burned the money in the parking lot, because they did not understand what I have just explained. I’m not trying to “redistribute your wealth,” I’m trying to be the wise investment planner that you never had as your partner. So whenever one assesses a dose of penicillin dollar bill, do not be tempted by visions of that dollar bill going from let’s say gas station to grocery store to bank account to paycheck to buying some home furnishing and compare it to some other use of the dollar bill and immediately conclude that since the first use, to use a baseball analogy, “touched five bases” that it is automatically more “stimulating” to the community that let’s say a dollar bill that went into a much need school repair. In the latter case, that dollar bill might only have moved “once,” from the payer hands to the contractor payee (and to keep the comparison pure, let’s assume the contractor sent the earned dollar out of state and had brought supplies in from out of state), nonetheless that dollar bill might have had a cascading economic benefit that was as if one hundred dollar bills “magically” appeared. The wise penicillin dollar bill might have kept a few more kids in school who might have dropped out and turned to crime, it might have stimulated more after school scholarly or sports activities for a dozen other kids, it might have avoided some insurance payout due to decaying school conditions, and thus avoided a future loss, etc. I know for a fact that hardly anyone understands and uses that concept of measuring a penicillin dollar impact on a local community or in fact in any given fiscal problem. Instead they retreat to the standard talking points, which over time they have come to believe, which are, to list just a few, “trickle down,” “keep the money local,” “stimulate local business,” “give back to the community” and so forth. Thus both the left and the right totally misunderstand how to properly gauge and manage the best impact of any penicillin dollar in either their personal planning or their community, or national, fiscal spending.

I’m reminded of one of President Grant’s stories from his memoirs and will repeat it here because you will see how that mindset crept into society as it happened. Here Grant sees himself as the average educated white man who understands money (this was in the beginning of his Army career), so please do not read this with the usual prickliness about racism, but consider that he thought he was actually observing an ignorant practice by the local Native Americans. That is one of the problems with today (I first observed it in my Ivy League university in 1971-5), which is that people refuse to read any further and learn from historical literature if they think the author was, despite the context of the times, “racist” or “sexist.” So if you want to own your own mind you need to learn to read without wincing and prejudging the observations that people made during certain times in history, period.

OK, so think about the penicillin dollar when you read this.

When I was stationed on the Pacific coast we were free from Indian wars. There were quite a number of remnants of tribes in the vicinity of Portland in Oregon, and of Fort Vancouver in Washington Territory. They had generally acquired some of the vices of civilization, but none of the virtues, except in individual cases. The Hudson’s Bay Company had held the Northwest with their trading posts for many years before the United States was represented on the Pacific coast. They still retained posts along the Columbia River and one at Fort Vancouver, when I was there. Their treatment of the Indians had brought out the better qualities of the savages. Farming had been undertaken by the company to supply the Indians with bread and vegetables; they raised some cattle and horses; and they had now taught the Indians to do the labor of the farm and herd. They always compensated them for their labor, and always gave them goods of uniform quality and at uniform price.

Before the advent of the American, the medium of exchange between the Indian and the white man was pelts. Afterward it was silver coin. If an Indian received in the sale of a horse a fifty dollar gold piece, not an infrequent occurrence, the first thing he did was to exchange it for American half dollars. These he could count. He would then commence his purchase, paying for each article separately, as he got it. He would not trust any one to add up the bill and pay it all at once. At that day fifty dollar gold pieces, not the issue of the government, were common on the Pacific coast. They were called slugs.

Now, here is what Grant meant by saying the Indians would pay for each item. Suppose you went to the grocery store to buy milk, bread, meat, a carrot and an apple. You let the check out clerk total your purchases and you pay once the total, receiving change. However, the Indians would have the clerk ring up the bread, and then pay for the bread, ring up the milk, and then pay for the milk, ring up the meat, and then pay for the meat and so forth for the five full separate transactions. Grant said it was because they did not trust the clerk to add up the total correctly, but you know, do you not see now, that it was more than that. The Indians maintained control and value judgment over each item piece by piece. The value of each individual item was not hidden in the total. It’s not that they just didn’t trust the adding up of the total (and I bet they had good reason to not trust in many situations!) Even if someone could prove that the clerk was always honest and that the total was the same as each price individually, they still would have stuck to the individual payment of individual items. This is because despite being “ignorant” they instinctively understood both a benefit and danger of capitalism. The benefit of capitalism was money they could trust (even though the slugs were not minted by the government, they were based on the gold standard) and so they readily accepted as wise that development of capitalism, which was a trustworthy standard means of exchange of a precious metal. However, they instinctively recognized that a danger of capitalism was the tyranny of the “sum total” mentality. When one manages money using sum totals, the meaning and wisdom of individual purchases is hidden and indeed lost. We all experience this feeling ourselves when we “throw a few things in the grocery cart” and then find a higher price than we expected at checkout, just because we no longer pay attention to either the individual item’s merits of purchase or the running sum total. Now, imagine an entire people, and entire world, that only looks at sum totals of millions of individual decisions, never analyzing the impact or the wisdom of any one of them. That is what I call the tyranny of the sum total.

So I’ve introduced to you here two concepts that it is important that everyone genuinely understand. One is the need to examine alternatives when deciding how each “dollar bill” is used in order to truly discern the best usage, and not to implicitly assume that frequent rotation through a lot of hands is “good” when in fact it is often what I call a “shallow” use of money. Money that is used shallowly is flash money, usually paid for transitory goods and services that is usually justified as “adding salaries to the community” yet does not “stick” to any place in the community where it can genuinely generate on its own “new dollars,” almost out of thin air. The second concept is the tyranny of the sum total, which we see everywhere from the problem of the bloated and still ineffective Federal budget, all the way down to a business man or woman accepting a plan from one of their staff that is “bottom line” and has not been examined not just for accuracy but more importantly for more substantial individual choices of expenditure and alternatives that could be more meaningful.

It is critical that today’s money managers, no matter how great or small your budget or investment pool, look at each item, rather than the sum total, and act as though you had never heard of such a thing, and need to be persuaded anew that this is a necessary or wise usage of funds. That’s the third concept that I want to introduce which I call “what if” financial analysis. It’s different from the concept of “valuation,” the “value chain” or “value analysis” because it constantly questions the chain of production and assumptions itself, rather than valuing the pieces of production that one takes for granted and never questions. People are incredible creatures of habit and easily slip into both information overload and what we call in the vernacular “being on auto pilot” in our decision making. A lot of this is not malicious, but those who have ruined the economy are guilty of this kind of thinking themselves and at the same time exploiting it in others. Here are some examples so you know what I mean.

The entire problem of providing social services and welfare is an example of sides that hardened into two alternatives (“provide welfare” or “make them work”) and the result is a horrible and at times dastardly mess. This is the tyranny of sum total thinking that totally lacks “line by line” “what if” thinking. Welfare is an example of “one miserable disaster fits all” sum total planning. I don’t need to list how many ways welfare as it is constructed today has failed individuals and society as a whole, especially the children. Yet whenever someone mentions that welfare is the nightmare that it seems as though we will never wake up from, the “other side” can’t wait to jump in and have a hardness of heart that is shocking. Both sides are “wrong” because both are enslaved to sum total mentality combined with a lack of visionary and genuinely well intentioned “what if” analysis of real alternatives within the system. It would take me about one hour to list ten different scenarios for providing necessary services for the needy, tailored to the actual context of the needy that we are discussing (their community setting, for example) rather than assuming that throwing penicillin dollars, to go back to our analogy, hits the right hands. Yes, in one hour I could give people a list of at least ten alternatives that they could select from that would address a particular welfare based problem or case study. Yet no one even tries to come up with a third alternative these days, they just fall into arguing their two sides, each atop an ignorant sum total tyranny. Welfare as it is structured today is a disaster, and so is the touted “put them to work” “alternative.” I cannot believe how willfully ignorant humans seem to have become and what miserable failures everyone has become at analysis and problem solving based on both wisdom and compassion.

I have just paused for a minute in order to resist slipping into one of my rants about the freak show society. What triggered it was what a woeful spectacle “job creation” has turned into, and I dearly hope and pray that with the new administration they recognize that meaningful jobs are not just the means of getting a paycheck for producing more garbage to throw into society as the “product.” In other words, I totally support the vision that the new administration seems to have of real jobs related to infrastructure and schools, for example, rather than enabling shake your money maker entertainment “jobs.” Entertainment is a vital sector of the economy and you might be surprised to hear that I do not oppose entertainment such as casinos, on principle. But the incredibly shallow output of much of American “entertainment industry” rather than infrastructure entertainment, such as Boys and Girls clubs or local sports and music programs is shocking. So when one argues that people need to “get a job,” its more than just a job because in this economic crisis, those who can make these decisions at the federal, local, corporate, agency and individual levels must make some wise decisions based on alternatives, for once. Here is an example.

Suppose that I have one hundred penicillin dollar bills, and I want to create a business so I can earn a good living, create some jobs and help the community. I decide to manufacture violent video games because it will “provide the poor with good jobs.” Huh?

That’s not free market, despite the fact that both the left and the right will argue that, saying “Well, if the public didn’t want violent videos they would not buy them.” Yeah, but you could have thought about creating a business that is genuinely “free market.” How about if I had used the one hundred penicillin dollar bills to open a Boys and Girls after school club where they could apprentice making video games under ethical teachers? I could have generated salaries (the teachers), made money (by selling the supplies), and gotten dozens if not hundreds of local kids to learn skills (video making and also business and creative skills) and best of all, THAT is free market. After all, suppose you had a thousand students in your business lifetime. Many would not go into that career but it was character building. Some might have become young entrepreneurs themselves in civic areas since you did not bind them to just learning the lowest common denominator of product. For example, one of your students might have developed an idea for a video game that teaches local kids how to discover areas of pollution in their community and how to be a genuine activist! A few might go on to make violent video games, LOL, but that is free market in truth, not brainwashing. Maybe you would not be a video game millionaire. But see, that’s the problem with the mindset today. I referred to that in earlier blog postings as being the “make a killing” mentality instead of the “make a good living” mentality that capitalism is genuinely founded upon, and needs as its basis, not greed, or it is doomed to dismal, crushing moral and fiscal failure.

I’m just painting a vivid example but one that is not too far off of the mark.

I’ll say “it’s a wrap” on this particularly posting, having introduced three economic concepts, and there’s of course much more, but these are essential to reorienting the thinking that is killing this country. I hope that you have found this helpful. To summarize:

1. Always analyze the flow of dollars and do not assume anything about the benefit of any particular dollar volume, location or frequency without examining purported benefits and alternatives thoroughly, especially looking for dollar usage that beneficially “sticks” and generates new dollars.
2. Beware of the tyranny of the sum total and wherever possible examine each item, questioning if a better usage or placement of dollars is possible on that “line by line” basis. Use "what if" analysis to generate alternatives for even what one thinks are obvious inherent portions of investment.
3. Genuine free market means the open ended creation of both jobs and skill sets that are wisely discerned and targeted for maximum benefit and both economic and civic worthiness.

Capitalism/financial crisis: How to repair

I urge President Elect Obama and his staff to consider and implement this urgent suggestion, as it is essential if the economy is going to be repaired and put back on track. I would say that is it THE foundational decision that will allow all other ideas to succeed.

By the way, before you read this, remember I have the "bona fides" of never having voted for a Republican President, going back to the days of George McGovern, the first election that I was old enough to vote in, and as recently as when I voted for John Kerry (in a separate blog I've documented my political history). So when you read this urgent suggestion, do not have a knee jerk reaction that this is coming from "obstructionist Republican" feelings. The opposite is true because I was infuriated when the USA first erred in this problem.

The problem is that the USA should never have left the gold standard for its monetary system. I remember when the decision to leave the gold standard was made, and if anyone would have asked me, I would have told them point blank on the spot that this is a dire error that would ruin the economy sooner or later. And this is exactly what has happened. So I urge you to study and implement the return of the USA to the gold standard with as much haste as is possible.

Young people who read this, you can read on your own details of the gold standard workings. But I will summarize its benefits, no, I don't want to say "benefits," I want to say its "essential service" in two general points.

The first reason the gold standard is necessary is that it guarantees that the USA dollar (USD) will always have a value, and one that is a reasonably high value. It ensures that the USD will not wildly fluctuate or plunge in value. It will always be a worthy and valuable currency because every dollar is backed by gold. All other currencies that peg (determine their own value) against the gold standard USD also benefits from this stability and value.

(You may ask why the USA ever got off the gold standard if this is true, which it is. Don't believe propaganda that you may read. The obvious real reason is this was the birth of people who realized they could enrich themselves by currency manipulation, such as the birth of foreign exchange trading. This decision was made in the early days of when people wanted to "look for the angle" to "make a killing in the financial markets," whether it was good for the economy, the country or even the world, which it most assuredly was not, as recent events of the past twenty years have shown. It's been great for the currency vultures, but not for anyone else. People made enormous money by pushing up and down the value of individual currencies of countries, so they could trade on the differences in current and future value, pocketing the profit. Thus they made money without manufacturing any goods or providing any services, and robbed countries of the value of their currency to provide services and goods to its people. This would be a different and much more prosperous world for the poor and middle class if we had not gone off the gold standard).

The second reason this is important is that it maintains a budgeting mentality for our country. A country that spends outside of its real means cannot and will not survive. It has been the fall of many empires and the cause of much war, when countries spend more than they have in treasure, or can borrow without the collateral of real gold. When the country operates its currency and hence its economy off of the gold standard, to put it very simply, it is like having a genuine savings account and a budget that one cannot spend outside off of and so one has a budget. The country cannot turn repeatedly to the printing press to just run off more money, as the USA has done to the point of today's most dire peril of its very stability. The gold standard forces a budget, but one that can grow (one can always obtain more gold to back up expansion) but it is done in real terms of growth, not imaginary or false growth. Far from denying the country loans, the gold standard guarantees the worth of the USA to those countries who lend it money, and opens up rather that dries up credit lines, which happens in crisis. One is never in peril of disaster when one is operating on the gold standard.

I cannot emphasize how crucial it is that the USA returns to the gold standard with measured but definite haste.

I hope that you find this helpful.