College Days

When I was in college, wow, almost 47 years ago, that's almost half a century!, I remember writing a paper on the consequences of automation in our industrial world.  What would happen when robots took over the work force?  Wow, was I pretty dumb, way beyond naive, just a dumb college kid.  I was an idealist and a bit of a romantic, not at all the cynical hard nosed guy I have become!  I had imagined a return to the Renaissance, a resurrection of literature and the arts, real live theater in every town and huge libraries everywhere.  We were given the best gift of all:  time, and I had hoped we could have put it to good use.  I had imagined wonderful schools teaching us the languages of the world, poetry, theater and the arts.  All kinds of things because we had the time.  I thought we could return to building great buildings and bridges, structurally sound and full of art.
   I imagined a far shorter work week, an earlier retirement, greater advances in medical care, an end to world wide strife and poverty and a blossoming of the human race.  In fact, no race at all.  Machinery could now bear the brunt of labor and people, finally rising above survival necessities could thrive with the better part of what makes us human.
   Remember this was a long time ago.  My father was a History Professor and made a salary of $900 a month with no benefits, no medical insurance.  Minimum wage was about $1.25 an hour and a boss, the CEO of a corporation made about six times the wages of his hourly workers.  I bought my house when I was making less than two dollars per hour, working at a local factory where the big bosses might have made three of four dollars per hour.  Oh we had supper rich people back then too, maybe the lumber mill owner, especially if he also owned thousands of acres of forest land to feed his mill.  Back in those days we had a graduated income tax and fair or not if you made over a million dollars a year you paid a lot of taxes on money over this amount.
It seemed like this system worked.  The divide between regular working people and well off people with really good jobs was three times the money and this was a hurtle and horizon, an obstacle that was conquerable.  I put myself through college with a part time job, working less than 15 hours per week.
   Initially robotics and this post modern industrial revolution made things much cheaper.  Modern manufacturing and conveyor belt construction with robots on the line could keep a five cent candy bar at a nickle.  What happened?  Why was I so very wrong?
   The government gives us so much more than they did in the old days and modern industry gives us much less.  Some CEO's make six hundred times the money of their average worker, some make six thousand times that much!  The distance between the average worker and the the wealthy with their great paying jobs have become an abyss; reasonable hurdles have become insurmountable obstacles.  The tax structure has changed so that people like Mitt Romney pay less than half what a regular worker would pay.  I was naive to have thought that this new found wealth created in the post modern world would have been shared.
   The problem for Society, as I see it, isn't that some have a great deal of wealth and really, they do not pay their fair share, it is that we have created a divide impossible to get across, a chasm so deep as to be impenetrable.  We lose our values of working hard because that experience is meeting with defeat and our dreams now are tied up with lottery tickets, the government approved way to wealth!
   It was a good essay; I got an "A" on it.  It was just so very wrong.  But, it coulda been! 

Let Them Eat Cake!

That is what Marie Antoinette said when confronted with her people starving, not being able to eat simple bread.  I believe they beheaded her!  Simple solutions for a simpler time.
   There is no shared hard times during this recession.  No shared costs to the wars we are fighting.  In fact there is no cost at all.  It is all on borrowed money!  There is no rationing, no war tax as we have done in the past.  For the most part we can go about our day, live our lives and be blissfully unaware of what is going on.
I wonder if this is done on purpose?  If we were to receive a bill in the mail each month, or if we were only allowed twenty gallons of gasoline each month, if there were long lines at the grocery store and the shelves were mostly empty, maybe we would feel a little different?
   It is comfortable living on my little island that I have created, with my garden, my shop, my welding, my art
but that does not mean that I do not know what is going on in the world, that people are suffering, on the edge of despair as I sit here with my nice cup of coffee in my office.  I read a lot and I read both sides of every issue.  I watch CNN and Fox News.  I listen to Conservative and Progressive Radio.
   You don't really have to do any of this to realize that there is a problem.  You can go to the grocery store and realize that $100 doesn't go very far any more.  In my town 40% of the people buy groceries with food stamps.  On the way to the store I see all the unkempt houses, some occupied by people who have lost interest in mowing their lawns or who can no longer afford the gallon of gas for their mowers, if they have mowers.  Others are clearly abandoned, foreclosed on and now bank owned.  We have hundreds of empty houses in my town and thousands of homeless, people living on the streets!  Each day it seems, both these numbers increase.
   That is so funny, in a sad macabre kind of way, twisted and strange.  People sleeping under a bridge when, a hundred feet away is an empty house!  People hungry when there are eighteen Super-Mega-Grocery Stores so near by.  So much abundance and such a big divide.
   The homeless, the unemployed, the poor have no power.  Can you imagine a Fifty Million March on Washington D.C.?  There is no shared cost to these problems.  If you are lucky to have a good job, are one of the few left to have good health insurance, or, like me and get a check every month, none of this affects you.  We can be amongst the 60% who "have it made"!
   It used to be 90%, over 90%! then 80, then 70, now 60% and tomorrow it will be worse.  At some point you have to realize that they will be coming for you!
   They have done this to Social Security already and we didn't even whimper!  There is no debate on Social Security it has already been destroyed.  There is no rioting in the streets by old people because we are tired and it doesn't effect us today.  Do you even know what has happened to it? or did it just slip by?
   There is no longer a cost of living increase to SS.  It is frozen and will be devalued to nothing within a few short years.  They claim that a letter to your Congressman is worth 30,000 votes.  That is how lazy and complacent we have become.  Yes, we are "sheeple".
   Marie Antoinette did not listen to her people and lost her head!

I am always HERE

Consumers Have Power!

     You don't need a Government Decree to change the world.  You don't need protective tariffs and restrictions on imports to preserve local jobs.  You can do it yourself.  You only have to discover this power that you already have.  Like any good argument, there are two positions to this story and you can choose which side you wish to be on. 
    One side is production, the manufacturing side, which is after cheap at any cost.  This side is in competition with China and basically states that we have to lower our wages, lower our standards to attempt to make what they make at competitive pricing.  This is the side of advertisers that tell us what we need. It is no mystery why we see the same white (I think they come in green now too) vinyl lawn chairs all over the world, even into the far reaches of Africa and the Outback of Australia, your own country, in your city, maybe your backyard.  We have been convinced these are good, easy to clean becomes a world-wide virtue and they are cheap.  Without making a thousand page list I want to make it clear that it is advertising and mass production that is dictating our desires.  It is the Mall.  I refuse to believe that we have 10,000 years of Human History for the soul purpose of acquiring the same plastic stuff.
     I think back in American History and the trickery we did with the Indians, trading plastic beads for beaver pelts.  I remember not that many years ago that antique dealers would traverse the world, trading "Tupperware" for copper bowls.  These copper bowls are now found in our antique shops and the Tupperware is long gone.  We are tricked into buying things we don't need and things that won't last.
    None of this is cheaper and all comes with a price.  Trees are cut down for packaging, oil is fought over to provide the fuel for distribution, our environment is being trashed and we are losing local employment.
     Consumers have power too and this is the other argument.  We don't have to continue into this destructive abyss where we have found ourselves.  We have power and we don't need the government to protect us. Just don't do it.  Here is my challenge to people in Bloggerville:
    A One Week Challenge to discover your power.  It makes no difference where you live and what country you are from.  For one week don't buy anything imported from anywhere.  For one week don't buy any genetically modified food, don't buy milk with Bht given to the cows.  Buy from local farmer's markets. For the artists out there, don't buy paint, brushes or papers that are imported.  Don't buy junk. Other than food, if it won't last at least a year, don't buy it at all.
     You all know how LOCAL money works, don't you?  You give the local mechanic $100 to fix you car.
He gives that same hundred dollars to his doctor for his check-up, who in turn gives it to the carpenter for repairs on his house.  The carpenter then gives it to the local farmer for meat and vegetables, who then gives it to his feed supplier for grain for his animals. and so on and so on.  Once you pass that money out of town it is gone forever.
My Other Blog is Here.

Economics

     What is Rich anyway?  How much money would you need to consider yourself rich?  The town next to me is considering an income tax to help support the local schools.  The first $50,000 is exempt and then the tax kicks in.  Some are saying this is a tax on the rich but their first $50,000 isn't taxed either.  If the schools need money where are you supposed to get it from?
    Our President wanted to increase taxes on those who made OVER $200,000!!! Not the first $200,000 they made but on money over that amount!  I can't even imagine money like that and in my wildest dreams I could never spend it.
    I can reminisce and tell you of a time when I was at my wealthiest.  This goes back to the days when the dollar was actually worth something and just a different math to the economics of living entirely.
    It used to be, previous to 1980, that one could buy a house for 25% of his wages.  It was always the same 25%, the only difference was if you made a lot of money you could afford a nicer, bigger house.
I was working at the local cannery, a seasonal job at that, processing carrots and beets and corn from the local farmers.  I made $2.00 an hour in those days, which was considered average for a not too spectacular job.  I bought my house then, a not too spectacular 900 square foot house on a large lot in the middle of town.  I paid $8,375 for it.  My down payment was $1,500 and the monthly payments were about $85 per month.  My utility bill was about $25 per month.  With overtime and long hours I made about $100 per week.
     In those days, my wife worked at the cannery also, we could work a season, about five or six months and saving our money like fanatics, we could go to Europe and live for three months there. When I wasn't traveling I would be at the University and that would cost $97 for a term. Or you could buy a brand new car for $2,500 dollars, about half a years wages for an average not too spectacular job.
    Those were the days when there was no excuse.  If you had just an average run of the mill job, you could do anything you wanted to:  buy a house, buy a new car, travel the world.  All of that is impossible now, at least impossible with an average job.
    My house now I couldn't afford.  Even in this slumped economy it would sell for about $250,000!!!!!!!
and after a hefty down payment would cost about $1,500 a month with utilities adding another $200. If the math had stayed the same and we were still talking about that 25% of income for a house, you would then need a job that paid $6,000 a month!!! That would be about $38 per hour!!! Travel would be about impossible and a new car pretty much out of the question.
     That's my story for today.  We have created a bleak world of slavery and insanity.
My Other Blog is Here.

Only So Much Money

Sometimes we need to remind ourselves how the world works. Governments that continue to print money only devalue it. So in a stable government there is only so much money available. If you don't have enough you borrow it. Our National Debt now is pretty big, about $45,000 EACH! The interest on this debt represents $4 of every $10 that the government collects in taxes. ONE of the things that has gone wrong in our economy (there are many) is that money is NOT being circulated. The richest 2% are wealthy beyond most of our abilities to count, controlling almost 50% of the money. This would not be a bad thing if they spent it but one can have only so many yatchs and private aircraft. This "trickle down theory" although maybe not fair has worked to a degree in the past providing jobs to the boatbuilders, their repairmen, the sales people, etc. ALL of these tradesmen down the line paid taxes and in turn bought smaller boats and took their families on vacation, bought Christmas presents, etc. This further provided more work to others. The problem is when one has too much money to spend and they just sit on it, often in banks in the Bahamas, causing it to no longer trickle down!
Henry Ford paid his workers enough so they could afford to buy that which they were making. This system worked well so long as 90% of the money available went to 75% of the people. That hasn't happened for awhile. To get the economy "back on track" you need more than a living wage job; you need a surplus, enough to buy and keep this game moving along.
The "2% that control 50%" need to start spending it before it is taken from them. Revolutions never happen when times are getting better.

The Galleries are Closing!

Art Galleries all over Oregon are closing, one by one shutting their doors and giving up! I think this recession, these horrible economic times, are especially hard on artists. We are the luxury of life, our art is purchased with excess money after the bills are paid. Now there is no excess money and we are in trouble. I can't think of a quick solution to this problem, we can reduce our rates only so much. There will always be rich people but the death of the middle class in America has hurt my business considerably.