Gary Rumor’s Anti-Entropic Continuum

Economists at the Urban Institute on CSPAN are talking about the stimulus package. These economists are saying the Stimulus bill was too small and should have been more like $1 Trillion dollars. They are not sure if the Stimulus package has come to a head yet. The CBO analysis claims that the stimulus will reach it maximum impact in 2010. Private analysis all say the impact reached its peak in the fall of 2009. Most of it is infrastructure spending and not really a stimulus package. They think infrastructure is a cumbersome method of providing economic stimulus. At least according to Rudolph Penner former director of the CBO. A job tax credit might help but it may not be as efficient as it could be. Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economic Advisor wants to see a Jobs Tax Credit to stimulate job growth.
A major problem is a lack of credit for small businesses and the President wants to add $30 Billion from the TARP money as a low interest loan for small businesses. Mark Zandi thinks the Small Business Administration should have access to distribute the funds.
Rudolph Penner says a foreclosure mitigation program is hard to design. He says push Freddie and Fannie Mac/Mae to run credit at a loss for the time being. He thinks the housing market has reached its bottom. Zandi thinks the housing tax credit helped, but he said the is a risk of a double dip in the housing foreclosures. He wants to change the modification plan. Zandi says that any mortgage from 2005 until 2008 was a bad loan and should not be honored. He would have a plan for principal write down to 105% to give them a reason to fight to keep that home. With a claw-back that says if you miss a payment you are out. This helps the banks but it is a way to keep people in their homes.
He is saying we consider this as a one time solution. But it is interesting to see establishment types calling for a home Mortgage Jubilee.
Infrastructure spending is good in itself but it is not a good way to stimulate the Economy according to both of these economists.
One commentator is saying why not do a claw-back of the buyouts. Capital was miss allocated and we should reallocate. We should let big companies fail.
Zandi is saying there should be a permanent Too Big to Fail tax because these large entities are getting cheaper capital and this should be an equalization tax on them for getting access to this less expensive social capital. The TARP tax is on companies of over $50 Billion dollars who got TARP funds.
We have a structural problem with a lack of jobs. Where are the jobs going to come from is what one person viewing is asking. Penner thinks things are so bad that they have to bounce back. Home buying and car buying are about half what they should be. Over half the GDP is in the emerging economies. We need to figure out what to sell them. Lawyers, economic consulting services etc are here and as long as people want to come here we can expect to see growth in the American Economy. Interestingly they did not say anything about the new green economy.
$172 Billion of the $787 Billion stimulus bill has been paid out and $384 Billion has been promised but not spent.

The Government is putting the Squeeze on. Tonight Pat Buchanan on Chris Mathews show is making a reference to Anarchist Bombers. Conflating the Christmas attempted attack with a poor activist heading home from a conference who was picked off by a nervous Homeland Security Type.
This is the Democrats State, they don’t need to use storm troopers, they don’t have too and yet when it comes to riding a train while black, watch out!!
For me all they need is a few good bureaucrats with a will. All of a sudden a $1000 tax bill becomes $23,000. How does that happen, well there are penalties don’t you know and if I had kept my mouth shut perhaps I might have been able slip under the radar of government surveillance. Not me, even though I didn’t go to the Anarchist conference, I got picked up in the harassment dragnet.
Not only did I not get unemployment when I lost my job but I have to pay for everything with credit cards, at oh how about 30% interest because after all I am out of work and therefore a bad credit risk. Then when I tried to use that credit card insurance that I paid $20 a month for, guess what I was not eligible. After all I was fired and not laid off. Only people collecting unemployment are eligible for benefits. People who really need the benefits, someone with no income at all like me, don’t qualify because I am not collecting unemployment. Talk about catch 22. I was being charged higher rates for being out of work and refused my benefits because I was, you guessed it out of work.
So then I had to ask for an extension in my taxed because I had no income to pay my instalment plan. That was last year. Now I am working again and I get hit with back taxes at the same time as a Anarchist get busted for talking on a train.
But then that is depressing and nobody likes to read about other peoples sad business. Lets have some happy talk. Talk about things you like to do. Happy Talk.
I like to cook and I cook my soups because naturally I don’t have money for other things. Ooh another bummer, lets talk about happy talk. I make a wonderful carrot and potato soup. I have lots of spices, like fresh ginger, and cilantro that I mix in with the scraps from the restaurant dumpsters I haunt. Ooh but you don’t want to hear about the maggots I have to pull off of the rotting fruit to get my vitamins from old leftover cocktail limes and lemons. No, no, no, that is not what people want to read about. Stop it Gary! Get a grip, have some self respect and pull that hand back in from that garbage can. You don’t really want that day old avocado with the brown rind. Although I am sure if I just scrape off the mold there is a nice juicy layer of golden Avocado close to the skin underneath that grey mold. Potato spores are good for you. That long white stuff sticking out of the soft rotting brown slime is really good for you. Don’t plant it, cook it!!
On to other more important subjects. J.D. Salinger died yesterday also. I know that it was burried beneath the death of Howard Zinn and President Obama’s nationally televised State of the Union Speech. Obama’s speech was more popular than President Clinton’s first State of the Union and less popular than Bush Jr.s, and interestingly enough the channel where people watched it the most was FOX. It means that those FOXites are all over Obama.
It seems today that guy who shot the Abortionist will not be able to claim manslaughter. The judge tricked him into admitting he pulled the trigger thinking he was going to get off with justifiable manslaughter. Nope that wily coyote of a judge said to him that abortion was legal in Kansas and there was no reason to believe that his life was threatened by abortion. Nope. Abortionists generally kill babies not 40 something middle aged men. Rats, outsmarted again.
But the real news was that Bernanke got another term as head of the Fed. Despite all the opposition, he slipped through. Senator Dodd. no longer facing reelection could cry out loud flogging the rest of his Congressional comrades with guilt over letting the Fed be left without a firm hand at the helm. That is Bernanke? Invisible hand of the market perhaps, but a firm hand of leadership? I wonder where the great white Whale is lurking Captain Ahab?
Lets think of something fun. I like to have sex with my girlfriend. She is cute and likes to dress up when we get ready to get busy. Lately she has wanted to do it in the back seat of my car and in the lifeguard station at Redondo Beach. I don’t care for the life guard station it is rough on the knees, I get splinters.
Something nice, lets think, I dreamed about Jesus last night. I thought I would read the four gospels over and over to see if I could glean a message from the leader of one of the major religions on the planet. After all, lots of people think Jesus it king and I am not a believer but I do think he was a pretty right on dude. But then there is the issue of Aramaic, Greek or Hebrew? Which language is more authentic? On top of that, there was a question of well, what did he really say? I mean are the red words in the King James Version the real words of God or simply Shakespeare era Kings English? Did Jesus say “Thee” and “Thou”? Did he wear white and black puritan outfits and wear those big hats with Turkeys coming out of them and stuff? Or am I getting Jesus mixed up with the Salem Witch Trials? Speaking of witches, what about all those voodoo priests in Haiti and New Orleans? Are they taking on some heavy karma or what?

Did you hear the one about the Anarchist on the Train? He was talking to somebody on Am track and one of his neighbors overheard and reported him to the Train version of Homeland Security. Now he is sitting in a La Junta Jail in the boonies of Colorado. Was it because he was an anarchist or more likely badmouthing the government while Black? Are they really following us around that closely or are white people out in the sticks that afraid of minorities? I got stopped for driving in New Mexico last year on my way to Denver. I think this guy was busted on his way back from LA to the east coast. He should have been flying over flyover country I guess instead of taking a train. You can contact Denver ABCF Black Cross to find out if donations are still needed. Apparently the bail was set at $30.000 because he is considered a flight risk. In 1982 he was arrested for something or other and that made him a flight risk.

This is from Denver Anarchist Black Cross.
“URGENT: Anarchist and former Black Liberation political prisoner, Ojore Lutalo arrested in La Junta Colorado!
Posted on January 28, 2010 by denverabc
Ojore Lutalo is an anarchist and black liberation warrior that was a member of a Black Liberation Army formation. He was imprisoned in 1977 for expropriating funds from a bank for revolutionary activities. He was paroled in 1980, and was re-arrested in 1982 for allegedly assaulting and robbing a drug dealer to also fund revolutionary activities. He was widely recognized as a political prisoner and prisoner of war.

This is what supporter and longtime comrade Bonnie Kerness of the recently founded Newark ABCF, of which Ojore is a member says:
“Ojore won release via a court order in August of 2009. He is not under any parole supervision. He took an Amtrak to Los Angeles on January 19th, arriving on the morning of January 22nd. He spent four days there, beginning his return trip home to New Jersey on Amtrak on Monday evening, January 25th. He was arrested Tuesday night, January 26th while aboard Amtrak and taken to a facility in La Junta, Colorado. He was charged with “endangering public transportation”. When he called me the afternoon of January 27th, he said he had no idea of the basis of the charges. He had already been on the train for over 24 hours. His court hearing will be tomorrow on January 28th at 11 a.m. in La Junta, Colorado. One officer told him that his bail would be $10,000.00 and he would need a place to stay if he could make bail. (Denver ABCF has committed to housing him after his release and through this process.)

“I am not exactly sure who arrested him, but this isn’t an immigration case. He is physically okay. In my 24 years of monitoring his situation, since 1986, harassment for his radical belief system has been constant. Any help would be deeply appreciated.”

If you can help with donations for Ojore’s bail, please contact Denver ABCF ASAP at denverabc@rocketmail.com, or call Dave from the Denver ABCF at 785-840-5080. We are sending a delegation to his arraignment tomorrow, and need to scrape together any funds that we can before then. However, if you are receiving this message late, or can’t donate for a couple days, please don’t hesitate to contact us. Every dollar will help.”

This may be a quinky-dink but just as we hear about this the government comes after me for every spare dollar claiming I owe back taxes to the tune of $23,000. I can’t even afford to donate money to my girlfriend’s kids now, they are taking every last dollar I make over the what I need to pay my bills. I guess the credit card company will have to wait this month. A comrade needs some cash. I hope some of you rich pot dealers out there, you know who you are, can spare a little for a political prisoner. There was a time when people used to sell pot to support the movement. Anybody still got principals out there?
Gary Rumor signing off.

President Obama gave a darn good speech tonight. It was conservative, conciliatory and yet humorous. The President moved pretty far to the right with his willingness to consider nuclear power and developing off shore oil. He dared the Republicans to join him and threw the ball in their court noting that the Republican insistance on a 60 vote super majority in the Senate was holding up legislation. As far a progressive points he stated that he wanted to end don’t ask, don’t tell so gays could serve openly in the military.
I did like the President’s zinger about how the Republicans wanted the government to lower taxes, and impose fewer regulations. He noted that was what got us into this mess. It was a pretty good line. He had a few others but for the most part he was conciliatory.
Other than that he seemed to be pushing fairly conservative plans for jobs, a freeze on the budget in 2011 for all discretionary spending except the military and the mandates social security, medicare, and Veterans benefits. He also stated he would end the tax breaks for people earning over 250,000 a year but not the middle class tax break.
There wasn’t much else new, he mentioned that he still wanted health care reform, an energy bill and gave a nod to high speed rail mentioning an event tomorrow in Tampa he was attending. His jobs bill was a paltry $30 billion. He spoke of the nuclear weapon treaty that he is negotiating with the Russians and stated that American combat troops were withdrawing from Iraq this year. He mentioned that the war in Afghanistan is continuing to ramp up and spoke of needing to spend on education and green jobs to compete with China and Europe. Nothing new but at least he seemed to take a positive stance starting out talking about times that test our courage.

On other matters Howard Zinn, the author of “A Peoples History Of The United States” died today in Santa Monica at age 87. He was an icon of the American academic left. I have never read any of his works perhaps I will take time to look into his version of American history.

Today at work I was wrestling with the hassle of having the State coming after me again for back taxes. The taxes I owe are not much, but they assess penalties and interest and that is what kills me. Taxation without representation, I seem to remember there was a revolution around that issue a while back.

As I was scratching my head over that I remembered that there was an Anarchist Book Fair last weekend in Los Angeles. I used to get all excited about those things. I would put on by best anarchist tee shirt and my IWW hat and go to the events planning on meeting people and seeing old comrades. But after the last two times when I would show up, usually finding out at the last minute when a friend in San Francisco or some other part of the country would tell me about it. Once I got to the LA fair I realized that I only recognised 3 or 4 persons who had been around more than a couple of years. Half of them coming from out of the area. Last summer I ran into Gifford from San Francisco, a comrade from the Turkish ICC and I saw Anarchy Jay and Hector from LA. Other than that they were all unknown to me. Weird after living here for 19 years and being active in the anarchist scene here for years, almost everybody at the Anarchist Bookfair or the conference were new to me. The people who had been around had all left town or moved on. Also when I go through the effort to introduce myself and attempt the networking that these events are supposed to promote I never hear from any of these new comrades again.
When I ask someone to let me know when they are doing something and over the years they consistently don’t invite me, I eventually get the hint. They are not interested, or they simply change personnel so often that there are not the same people from one 6 month period to another. In any case the Book Fair in San Francisco is where most of my old anarchist friends go, I guess anarchists are like everyone else, you hang out with the same crew you knew when you were young. Such is life. Perhaps I will see you comrades in the Golden Gate Park this year. I hope I have not rambled too much for my professional journalist friends. But I am just a working guy writing about his impressions of daily life.

I have been criticised recently for my rambling style by someone who said they prefer cut and paste postings from professional writers. The authentic voice is no longer cherished. It is the professional voice people prefer. It is the stage managed corporate voice that is desired. I must apologize to you dear reader for wasting your time with my lack of professionalism. I guess these pages should be left to those who have the degrees and the training, who have been taught the Chicago Rules of Style and who stick by them. Perhaps one of these critics would offer their services for professional editing or better yet offer to subsidize this blog so that I could concentrate on a professional exposition of style.
Instead I am merely a working slob who takes time out from a busy day to write for an hour or two every day. Perhaps I am wasting my time. If I believe that person then I am.
Here is his comment on a site that I often post on.

“I’ll add my two cents here…..

As far as I can tell — I’ve only read maybe a half dozen of them, which was
enough for me — your posts are simply a regurgitation of what’s been
happening in the last week or few days or so and are based, quite obviously,
on what you’ve read, written by *other* people. That shouldn’t be a
surprise, however, for all our thought is a *social* product.

Frankly, I would much rather read the original pieces provided by Sid and
others rather than a collation of thoughts in one posting — thoughts which
tend to meander all over the map, I might add.

So you certainly don’t speak for me or anyone else that I know of when
saying you don’t read the links and pieces posted here. I read the vast
majority of the news items, and for the most part I find them important and
interesting. The reason I find them of import is because the articles are
generally written by people who are able to express their thoughts quite
succinctly and effectively, writers and journalists who are generally
focussed and very knowledgeable about the topics they write about.

Richard Menec”

I guess I have been put in my place and this is as usual from one of my so called allies on the left. I will accept it as constructive criticism. I will wait and see if there are any other comments but as things stand I am chastised and will await further judgment. Perhaps it is time for me to shut up.

Fried tonight. Too much work. Too much bullshit. Done. Tired of reading postings from people that are just links to other peoples postings. Don’t people have their own thoughts anymore? Why do people post constant repeats of somebody elses writing? I certainly don’t read that stuff. I read what people write.
Hunter Gray is a good example of someone who takes time to write their own thoughts. I appreciate that. I don’t mind extracts from other people’s writing if they make a point better than you do on a particularly complex issue. I do that all the time myself. But why do some people post a series of links to other articles as if people were going to read them? I don’t. I am interested in your opinions and thoughts dear fellow bloggers and internet using people. If all we are doing is cutting and pasting what other people have said elsewhere then, well why bother.
Anyway that is all I have to say tonight. Oh and for what it is worth contact your representatives and let them know we really do need health care reform.
I saw someone on Keith Olbermann’s show tonight cavalierly say that the opposition to the Democrats was opposition to the incumbents and the Republicans cannot take any credit for it. That is besides the point. We need health care reform. For poor and middle class people it is really a necessity. If you are on SSI already or are retired, are in the military or live in Massachusetts I guess it doesn’t matter, you have your cake. But for the rest of us, this is a big deal. Don’t play politics with our health!!! We need reform and we need it now and this is the best chance we will get for a while, unless you have a socialist party rising up ready to take over in the next election, then don’t make us wait another 15 years for the next alignment of the stars.

We need to create jobs. The Democrats are facing the loss of control of Congress. If the Health Care legislation fails I think it will undermine the entire Obama reform agenda. This is what I believe is needed.
A) Pass health care reform. I prefer the House plan but at this point any plan is better than none. Single Payer would be even better.
B) Bring back Glass-Steagall Act.
C) Regulate Derivatives
D) Increase Capital Gains Tax
E) Create Consumer Credit Protection Department
F) Penalize Banks through windfall profit taxes.
G) Corporations are not Persons and we need to legislate so that they are not allowed to buy elections.
H) Campaign Finance Reform to 1) create totaly public financing of campaigns.
2) Mandate free time on the media for at least 6 debates among the candidates in prime time. 3) shorten campaign season to 3 months first 6 weeks an open primary for all comers, a primary vote and then 6 weeks final campaign of top 3 candidates.
I) New stimulus plan to create green jobs.
J) Legislation to penalize outsourcing jobs overseas and encourage domestic job creation.

These are a few modest proposals I sent to my congress persons. It would have been better to simply ask them to legislate a revolution to outlaw the ability of the corporations to control congress but I doubt if they would have paid attention. A more radical proposal that I made yesterday would be to make Congress a legislative initiation body and not a voting body. I would take that power from them and put it in the hands of the people just as in ancient Athens. Technology has now made that possible again through the use of the internet. We can have direct democracy. What is needed is an advisory body of experts who can guide the public by intelligently presenting the choices and that is what I believe Congress should be doing in an era of total access. What we don’t have in this modern world is the time to wade through all the data and determine what is and isn’t worthy of consideration and that is what I believe Congress should do.
Let the people vote and let the Congress become an advisory body. Eliminate the lobby groups power by taking the vote out of the hands of Congress. This may lead to a further problem of lobby groups then attempting to influence the legislation prepared by Congress for vote by the people, or the saturation of the media with propaganda on the part of interest groups to influence the peoples votes. The potential is for each weekly vote, as I advocate a weekly vote on all the issues of the previous week presented by Congress to the people, to become a nightmare of partisanship on a grand scale.
But I would say that if this became the norm, then I believe that instead of chaos we would end up with a system that was truly more democratic as people would be forced to become more informed. With daily political hours at the workplace, school or home, every citizen could plug into a national debate on the issues of the day being presented by Congress and then every week the Congress would summarize the issues and present them for an up or down vote. Naturally some people would be more interested than others and might do some politicking at the workplace for issues of their own preference and since the funding of the government would now be in the hands of the people, more likely than not the direction of government spending would be much more closely related to peoples actual interests.
We might see a cash starved government, a sort if very limited minimalist government that libertarians prefer if people decide that all the government should do is maintain the peace and defend the nation. Or it might be a very proactive liberal government with healthcare for all, good mass transit and a very small military.
It is hard to say, since we live in such a distorted state where small moneyed interest groups control the Government, we have almost no idea what the people really want.
I might even advocate that there be no advertising allowed to promote interests on the media. The airwaves are public and if only purely informational advertising be allowed, then perhaps there might not be all the glitzy commercials but there might be more information and less disinformation.
What is required is an informed unbiased electorate. Due to human nature, there are always going to be biases but if we can take the propaganda out of the picture, then perhaps people will be able to weigh the facts. It might not work. People might insist upon bread and circuses but if we don’t initiate reforms we will end up with a system so corrupted that the only agenda will be the special interests agenda. I want to change it to a populist agenda for better or worse.

We are all citizens of planet earth. Even a troglodyte must understand that in today’s world.
The United States is the leading state in the present world but its position is becoming increasingly untenable as it insists on exhausting its energy on chasing shadows and ghosts. This state of affairs is reminiscent of something that happens to the guilt ridden. As we accumulate experiences that we regret then we experience the sensation of regret. This comes especially in the middle of the night. It is like Scrooge in the Dickens tale being visited by the Ghosts of Christmas. Well those ghosts are visiting America. Saddam Hussein is the ghost of Christmas past, Osama Bin Laden is the Ghost of Christmas present and Haiti is the ghost of the Christmas future.
Congress has failed us. The Supreme Court has again shown its true colors first allowing a falsity to stand that a corporation is a person and then this week giving this unreal being the corporation the rights to buy elections by being given the right to unlimited campaign spending. They threw a bone to labor by allowing the same privilege to be granted to unions but unions get their money from dues of workers, a small source of income, whereas corporations have the full weight of the capitalist system on their side. This is a true David and Goliath situation with corporations as the Goliath. In terms of eternal truths the workers have right on their side, and the corporations represent about as close as we can get to evil on this planet, perhaps certain dictatorships are worse, but dictators are individuals who can be overthrown. Corporations are institutions that have spread across the land, first gobbling up the economic landscape and now dominating to an increasing degree the political landscape.
These supreme court justices cannot be blind. They must see the impact of corporate lobbying and the impasse this causes on the Congress. Perhaps they are using the theory that by burying politicians in money they will force them to face the facts of corruption. This may lead to a reform movement to change the way political campaigns are funded. It is for me the strongest argument yet for total public financing of the political process. We must eliminate the ability of private corporations to dominate the political process through campaign reform. Personally I would suggest a sentence of no less than 10 years for any politician caught taking money from a corporation. Public financing of elections and mandatory public access to the air waves durring election campaigns with a concurrent shortening of the campaign season to 3 months for each election.
A) Open primary to anyone interested from any party or independent. This would be a process of 3 public debates followed by a primary election. This could be a 6 week period. Voting should be proportional.
B) Top three candidates for each office then run for it in a 6 week final campaign with a further 3 debates. Each debate should last at least an hour and a half. Then an election.
C) Elections are totaly publicly funded, air time is free for the debates and each candidate is given an equal amount of advertising time to explain their positions on the issues of the day.
D) A possible option of no visual presentations of the candidates. All presentations to be written or oral with no false advertising allowed. This might eliminate the irrational factor of people voting on the basis of someones race or physical appearance.
E) A possible option of a basic qualifications test to make sure the candidates are mentally competent.
F) elimination of lobbying as a function. Citizens certainly should be free to make suggestions as individuals and perhaps a mandatory period of 2 years for each person upon graduation from college would be required in one field or another of public service.
G) Congress changed from a law voting to a law creating body. Congress can initiate laws but not vote on them. House initiates Domestic Laws, Senate initiates Foreign Policy Laws.
H) Direct universal suffrage with each citizen over the age of 16 being able to vote laws into effect in a weekly computerized vote. President still retains veto power with 2/3 of citizens required to override.
I) Daily political meeting of one hour in which citizens are presented the issues of the day by the President and the Congress followed by the weekly vote. This is to be paid through the workplace or the unemployment insurance.
Those are the first series of governmental reforms I would suggest as a means of bypassing the lobby groups and special interests and bringing about direct citizen participation in government.
The USA was once a place where adventurous spirited people were willing to do whatever we wanted. But there is nothing now like that. We are caught up in a battle between the forces of reaction and the forces of change. But it has come to a new crisis point. There was a crisis in the 20th century first in the battle to defeat fascism and then in the struggle between socialism and capitalism. Now in the 21st century we are facing the results of the victory of capitalism. Because capitalism promises material well being as its only value. It cannot ask people to sacrifice for any other purpose than to accumulate wealth. People are not expected to sacrifice for the sake of religion. or the sake of ideology. The only ideology is the pursuit of happiness and in this capitalist culture that has been interpreted as the pursuit of material wealth. This emphasis on things is coming up against the limits to growth.
The present American administration is trying to push green growth as the option and there will be a certain transitional period in which there will be a spurt of economic growth as solar and wind energy devices are incorporated. But this transition may not be happening fast enough to mitigate the environmental consequences of global warming. With the collapse of the Copenhagen conference there will be a more painful transition. Things will have to get worse. Temperatures will rise and ocean levels will increase making certain parts of the world unlivable such as south Florida, Louisiana, and the eastern shore of Maryland and Delaware, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and many island states would all be drowned under the rising sea levels.
The other thing is population. We are a sexual species but we are breeding ourselves to extinction. If we are going to conquer diseases and protect ourselves from physical danger, then we are going to have to do something about all the excess population. One way of dealing with it would be to promote celibacy. But after the sexual revolution in accepting pleasure as a valid social goal, then there would have to be another alternative and that is birth control and homosexuality. People had to be presented with the idea that sex without the goal of reproduction was acceptable in fact desirable. This meant the reevaluation of women in society. Women were encouraged to seek out the same positions as men. This included participation in the military. At the same time it meant a devaluation of marriage, and the women’s role as care givers, mothers and nurturers.
Capitalists were able to take advantage of this by offering women employment at lower wages than men, sort of like minorities. Then there was the devaluation of the dollar in the 1970’s as a result of the attempt to pay for a war in Vietnam and social programs at home. This came to a crisis point with the combination of the end of the Bretton Woods agreement and the oil embargo as a result of the American support for Israel in the 1973 war. The American economy almost came to a stand still, gas was rationed and prices began to rise. By the time of President Carter and the second oil crisis with the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970’s we were experiencing double digit inflation. Families began to realize that women had to work to be able to afford the home and lifestyle of their parents. When Reagan came to office all holds were barred and a war against labor was initiated. Capitalists realized that they would have to do something to accumulate wealth again which had been decreasing and equalizing throughout the American economy since the 1930’s when Roosevelt had initiated various social policies to preempt a very real prospect of revolution. But with the squeeze coming on with resources costing more, the Soviet Union putting pressure on from the left providing smaller nations who did not want to be cheap sources of raw material for the American and western European economies a source of weapons and material support to resist. Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, to name a few and this came to a head in Afghanistan where the islamic and captialist elites came to an agreement to destroy communism.
This was a Faustian bargain. Reagan at home went after the unions and destroyed the energy independence movement begun under Carter. This was in exchange for the Saudi Arabians lowering the price of oil. flooding the market and destroying the effectiveness of OPEC. This set back the policy of energy independence for over 30 years. Bush Sr., Reagan’s front man in this effort began a long relationship between the house of Saud and the Americans that led to the repression of democracy movements in the middle east with the tact approval of the Americans. They combined with the Pakistani intelligence services to arm Moslem fundamentalists to oppose the Soviet Union and the current government in Afghanistan. You have to remember that the Soviets were promoting women’s rights, education for children and attempting to bring progress to the country. The USA, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan respectively armed, financed and led the mujahideen to resist until the Soviets left. Never having lost a battle, they simply had a domestic economic loss of will similar the the American experience in Vietnam and pulled out. The Afghani people were then abandoned by their American allies and in the end the Pakistanis supported the Taliban to bring about stability in a nation that was in a state of civil war as one war lord after another battled over the scraps. Saudi financing of the madras’s where the Afghanis in exile in camps in Pakistan learned a most conservative version of Islam. It was there that the Taliban was born and when they took power they brought with them the most conservative version of Islam born and bred in those camps under the influence of the Saudi Wahhabism.
The world was now full of well trained soldiers of Islam. They were familiar with stinger missiles and CIA methods of sabotage that had been developed in the wars against communism in Vietnam, Argentina, and Brazil where there were local torture squads trained to kill off communists, unionists and student activists. In the 1980’s smarting from the loss of Vietnam and Iran the new Reagan administration decided to take of the gloves, increases spending on the military and go for broke training and supporting the terrorist opposition in Nicaragua in the war to defeat the Sandinistas, the FMLN in El Salvador, supporting Sadam in Iraq to battle the Iranians and supporting the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. Reagan sent the marines into Lebanon where Hezbollah used a suicide bomber to kill the largest number of CIA agents before the recent suicide bombing in Afghanistan.
This period of thirty years of reaction in the USA, including the Clinton administration where there was a stripping away of the welfare system safety net and the elimination of the Glass Stegal act a Roosevelt era financial reform that kept banks from both being investment banks and community banks. They also failed to regulate derivatives, and set the stage for the Bush administration whole sale outsourcing of government functions to the private industry including many war functions.
Now the Obama administration is attempting to take back many traditional government functions but they are discovering that they lack the manpower and the expertise. Government workers no longer do things, they write contracts and outsource just as the private industry has been outsourced overseas, so has the government been outsourced, mostly to domestic private industry. Although Dubai and China have become the homes of much of American Capitalism.
So we gutted the domestic energy industry in the eighties to appease the Saudis, so we could destroy the Soviet Union. We trained the islamic terrorists who then attacked us because we supported the dictatorships that repressed the peoples of the middle east. By we I mean the USA government. We outsourced American industry to China to finance our war in Iraq so that Americans would not be burdened with increased taxes. We destroyed the American labor movement to keep capitalists happy while we ramped up our defense industry to secure access to resources for these capitalists. As long as there were jobs and the now two working person families could afford a lifestyle reminiscent of what their parents had, it was ok. But the bottom fell out and the bubble of unsecured debt supported by the American government that promoted a consumption based economy propped up by Chinese industry and financing of American debt.
Now Obama has discovered that he has to dance to the tune of the Chinese. Our vaunted military means little in a world where we cannot finance our wars. That is what happened to the Soviets. They had a crop failure, they needed to buy grain the Americans would not extend credit, the European bankers refused and the Soviets were faced with the choice of letting their people starve or giving in to western conditions for loans. They gave in and they lost their Eastern European allies. After that faced with more crisis’s at home, rather than institute austerities they decided to give up and let the Americans come and save them. Gorbachev thought he could parlay the former Soviet Union into a Swedish style of gently state capitalism. That was what most Russians wanted. Instead they were betrayed by the west where no aid was forthcoming. They were told to get any aid they would have to accept a Bolivian style neo-captialist sell off of all the resources of the state.
Faced with starvation that is what the Soviets did. But they outsmarted the neo cons in one way, they sold their economy to their own people. It was brutal and it created a massive state of inequity but they did not sell their assets to the west. Now Putin and his crew are attempting to buy back the state and reform a modified Russian Empire, minus the rubric of being a peoples republic. In other words the state takes over again without the Soviet Unions attempt to redistribute the wealth according to the principals of communism, They can become what Russia was before Lenin, a powerful state run by a small ruling elite.
But we are now faced with the results of this captialist victory and we have to decide what we want. More materialism will lead to total exhaustion of the environment. Unbridled growth will lead to exhaustion of the worlds resources. Over population will do the same. We need to become world citizens and take responsibility. We need to think hard about our actions and work for the betterment of us all together. This means slowing down growth, changing to a green economy, cutting the population and accepting alternative values to materialism. That is it for tonight. Please somebody comment on this let me know if you think I am on the right track or full of crap. I appreciate the feedback.

As I get older and less willing to believe in other peoples dreams, I realize that perhaps my day in the sun has come and gone. And yet I keep expecting to get the call again. I am a soldier in the battle for love. Perhaps this is a cliche, but to win out over the powers of darkness and the void, that is something worth living for, to battle for the victory of truth, beauty, and justice for the people, that is something worth living for. When I was young I was out there, a would be mover and a shaker, I had a series of bad relationships and good relationships, mostly with women. I noticed that my self image and sense of the purpose was becoming damaged and twisted. I wavered and walked in harms way, on the dark side of the moon, not particularly evil, I didn’t kill anyone, at least that I know of, but I definitely went from being a sainted graduate from a gnostic school where I was prepared to become a priest in the Order of Melchizedek, and then found myself a small time drug dealer living with a hooker girlfriend. I was seeking the inner meaning of this human life.
One year I was experiencing the memories of being with Moses in the Sinai and hearing ancient Lemurian, in the back woods of the British Colombian Caribou and the next slamming dope in a cheap hotel room in the Mission district. One day I was in Vrindavan chanting with the devotees and listening to the howling of the dogs in the darkest night, then joining in with the Brahmin’s ringing bells and burning incense and chanting Hare Krisna to greet the dawn and the next I was slamming dope in the hippie neighborhood in Calcutta and buying books of beat poetry from the local Dharma bums.
I was giving a press conference at the United Nations protesting the Presence of the Shah of Iran and then I was doing security at a Saturday Nite Live party. Another day I was arguing with Abbie Hoffman when I was working with the Panther 21. and then I was talking to Barry Freed on the phone late one night at Number 9. Next I was listening to the voice of the mystery man from the JDL telling me about Nazis coming to Vineland. There was getting popped for anti psychiatric Graffiti at the Langley Porter Institute one night and the next I did the graphic design for their alumni association. Or the time I was popped for bricking the City Attorney of San Francisco and he gets back at me years later by making it hard for me to see my son when my ex and I break up. There was the time when I was doing my Radio show in Boulder and the manager tells me I am a suspect in a Fire bombing in a city a thousand miles away.
I had a shotgun stuck to my head in suburban Connecticut, a knife to my throat at the commuter parking in Bridgeport, and a hand gun stuck at my balls in Loisada. I have wandered through Harlem at 3 am when there was a panic in Manhattan and coped in the projects off of Army Street, or in the Arab quarters of Marseilles where a gang of Bill Burroughs wild boys tried to steal my girlfriends bags while negotiating for a finger of Moroccan Hash. I have been awoken by the wild boars in the castle forrest of Salzburg and lived on dollar beers and green apples and pretzels while hitching back to Luxemburg.
I have partied with the Rock stars handing out L crystals to Flipper and Frightwig members while gigging in the Sunset Junction and then shared a 40 oz with El Duce at 3 am on the curb at Avenue B and 6th Street. I got drunk on Greyhounds with Siouxie Sioux in Minneapolis playing pool and talking up Rock Against Racism. I managed the Dancing Assholes in Boulder and booked Bad Brains first gig in Manhattan when the 12 year olds spit on us and were their loyalest fans. I put on shows with Mary Malice at the Sound of Music in the Tenderloin and spent the night fighting cops in the battle of Tompkins Square Park. I have been battling with the cops in Denver, in LA, in San Francisco, in New Haven, and in Washington, DC. My conceit is that I am the priest for the street, the gays, the drug addicts, the homeless, the minorities, the commies and anarchists. I have been nailed to my cross getting jumped in high school bathrooms by greasers, having beer cans thrown at me, getting jumped by red necks on the corner of Haight - Ashbury with a drunken Zap while calling Yip Central after midnight, and getting busted in Malibu, busted at UC SF, busted in Boulder, busted in Aberdeen and getting thrown in the drunk tank in Colorado Springs the first day I arrive from the east coast.
Is this just an ego trip? Bragging about a dissolute life? I am a worker now. I get up at 4:30 in the morning, I go to work, I spend 8 or 9 hours a day helping people figure out how to print their stuff in the most cost effective manner. Its nothing exciting, it pays the bills, just barley. It is my penance for having too much fun as a youth. Catholics believe in that sort of thing and I was raised Catholic. But I am a doper revolutionary priest who took off the collar but never lost the desire to preach the holy word that the kingdom of heaven is within and I will do what ever I have to to break down the barriers between my ego and my god, between my self and my Self. I love life and yet I am death creeping around breathing down my own neck. I am Karma and Dharma and a bum and a hard working slave to my desires. Yet I can walk away with a smile on my face and a whistle to attract the ghosts because I have fought like a warrior and a lover and a friend.
For the Revolution that takes us to the promised land. May we all discover what we are here for before we burn this planet up.

First the Republicans pull a classic tactical move by breaking the Democratic hold on the Senate with the election of Brown and then the Supreme Court in a strategic assault on liberal democracy as dramatic and probably more significant than their selection of George Bush as President by allowing the Corporations to have free reign in campaign funding. This shows us the brain power that the right has. People like Rachel Maddow like to present Republicans as back woods inbred ignoramuses. But that is the public face that people like George Bush played up to the American public, masking the true nature of the party. It is made of of successful businessmen who can hire the best lawyers and scientists it needs to push their agenda. They have money and power. Using that they are able to bamboozle the working classes who are in a position of semi serfdom due to the destruction of the labor movement and the elimination of the militant socialist alternative.
I am currently reading an excellent history of the Thirty Years War. It was a period not unlike our own in which religion became the excuse by which various parties attempted to reshape the face of Europe. It was the war that led to the end of organized religion as a serious motivator in Europe to be replaced by nationalism and the beginnings of the modern state, What I found fascinating was the constant twists and turns of the aggressive stances taken by the elites attempting to secure power. It was initially a battle between the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor and the Protestant German member states of the Empire. It evolved into a conflict between the French Bourbon state and the Hapsburg Spanish Empire in which the Germans became pawns and religion became merely another rationale for a power play.
It led to massive destruction and misery in Germany but it also gave rise to the independent secularism of a Hobbes and a Descartes. The result being that by the middle of the century the church had lost its credibility and secular scientific thought and research took off as never before. Out of death and destruction came rationalism and the enlightenment.
I would like to think that we are in an equally intense time of transformation, a life and death struggle between the old forces of nationalism and capitalism and the rising force of environmentalism and collectivism. Not the tyrannical state capitalism that states like Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia represented but a more enlightened collectivism that recognises the uniqueness of the individual while at the same time suppressing the greed and bigotry that capitalism and nationalism seem to breed so effectively.
The Democrats seem to be taking a stance against the Banks by insisting on legislation that will break up Banks that have failed by making sure they cannot become too big. The president seems to want to see if he can take on a somewhat populist air by making an assault on Wall Street. He has stated that he will not give up on the Consumer Protection Agency. But what does that mean? Wall Street didn’t like what Obama said today about taking on the banks with the markets going down 2-3%. We will have a capitalist system that is a little less rapacious? Obviously capital does not like even the idea of that and the Supreme Court has in this decision given them a powerful tool to buy elections and destroy candidates who might be opposed to a corporate agenda. Scott Brown was a perfect example of this, along with the Democrats playing the Hare to the Republican Tortoise.
Obama wants to reign in risk. He said it is not appropriate for banks to take public money and turn around and use it to make a profit. This according to Bloomberg today. Barny Frank came out saying that he would back up the President. This is on top of the Chinese stating that they are going to restrict loans and the French and British moves to tax windfall profits.
This s not that complicated what we have is a wealthy elite that wants to maintain their positions of privilege and a mass of people who are being squeezed and pressured to take less. When people organize and work together they can keep the elites in their place. It is not that being a smart operator is necessarily bad. Leadership is a natural function and people have their strong points and should be able to develop them. The problem comes about when the social contract is distorted and bent out of shape to accommodate the interests of a few at the expense of the many. Just as it is an evil for the majority to repress the few for being different, it is an evil for the few to manipulate the many for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many.
Life is not fair and people are not all equal in their abilities. But we as a species have developed as social animals and that means we are not a wolf pack or a herd of sheep. We are flexible omnivores who are able to adapt to unique situations better than perhaps any other mammals on the planet. I think some insects and microbes are better adapted than we are but when it comes to warm blooded mammals we are on the top of the heap. It is because we can adapt and evolve that leads me to believe that we can create a fair and equitable solution to the crisis of civilization we are in.
If we don’t curb our consumption and waste of the natural resources of the planet we will drive ourselves to a collapse just as the Maya and Easter Islanders who over exploited their environments. It could come as a massive collapse with population dropping due to overexploitation of resources. But a slowdown in a captialist model means unemployment and depression. This leads to hardship in an economy that is based on captialist relations. The transition to a Green economy would be a rational means to replace unsustainable growth with something different. But if it is still within a capitalist framework the inequities will be sustained and the environmental problems will continue with the increased population that green energy will allow. Simply changing over to a green energy system under capitalist relations or for that matter any form of social relations that involves unfettered growth is problematic.
But simplification is not the answer. We cannot return to becoming hunter gatherers, not with the population we have. So we are either forced into a massive die off with the concurrent relapse into some form of lower levels of complexity or we move into a more sophisticated ecological balance that means not doing without but doing with more selectively and in a more rational basis. It is a call for increased intelligence. We could call it intelligent design to coin a phrase. But this means we must weigh every action with more deliberation and act as the Native Americans would say thinking 7 generations ahead and looking 7 generations behind to examine the consequences. This may mean a slow down in movement yet an intensification in the complexity of the deliberative process. Computers can help us take more factors into consideration but we also must be open minded enough and smart enough to understand the correct questions to ask. We don’t need more lawyers but we do need people capable of thinking with the sophistication of lawyers. It is a matter of reorientation of intelligence to deal with the issues of the day rationally and compassionately. Otherwise we are looking foward to oblivion. This is something that ultimately we should all be able to come to terms with no matter what our theoretical backgrounds.

The Democrats are in disarray. Elitism only works in a democracy when it delivers the goods. The Republicans gave us wars, and collapsed the economy but until the bottom gave out they pumped up the economy and people with the credit bubble. People could buy houses and big cars and even though it was all based on a false premise, for as long as it lasted most people went along for the ride.
The Democrats are now trying to clean up the mess but by maintaining the same elites in power without giving the American people prosperity. If they stimulated the economy in a manner that gave people jobs, then they will be able to push through the rest of their agenda but if the people don’t feel that they are benefiting, then they will not go along. When the issue was huge, like 9-11 or Word War 2, people will rally and let the government do just about anything. That was why they elected Obama because he promised to get them out of the economic mess and give us Health care and a war and a green economy and infrastructure repair and if Obama delivered then people would justify the most radical action but instead the administration did things by half measure and attempted to compromise with the opposition that was determined to destroy them.
People need their bread and circuses. If you deny them then they will turn on you. It was true in ancient Rome and it is true today. The standards are different but the concept is the same.
But other than that there are reasons to believe that the forces of reaction if we can call something so all pervasive as that, reaction, it is really the dominant paradigm in this age of the total victory of Capital. The options outside of capital do not seem to exist. On the other hand since capital cannot use all the people that have become redundant there is a crisis in capital. It is the classic crisis of decreasing value that has infected all of human interactions as they become increasingly enmeshed in capitalist relations. The more we become consumers the more we become dependent on capitalist relations.
I don’t usually like to speak in terms of theory, I am not much of a Marxist, I find Marx to be a bit of a bombast but then what person who thought they had something to say isn’t. I am an egotist and an elitist in my own way but I try to keep it in check. I don’t go out of my way to develop interests in trivialities like sports simply to have something to say to other people but I do have an active interest in essential matters. As much as I have time, I try to focus on historical periods but I get lost in my own searching and shift from one area to another attempting to find a synthesis that makes sense.
We are in a period of extreme crisis. The solutions from out of the past won’t work but they can provide guidelines as to the sort of thing that may be needed. For instance I am studying the history of central Asia in the middle ages and in the process I discovered that the early Icelandic culture was pretty close to an anarchist utopia, a bit violent, probably more like Somalia now than any other place in this modern world. But it was a world where there was no state to enforce the rules of society. But people made rules and they banded together to enforce them when needed.
More and more I come to believe that there are organic relationships based on natural human interactions that have only been corrupted by so called civilization. But that begs the question is there a Hegelian path to history, are there Platonic essences that can be discerned and understood? I know that chanting certain mantras can take you to another state. That is a place where sometimes things make self evident sense. I has been a long time since I have been able to have that sort of an experience. it does not go well with working a straight job. In fact it is revolutionary in the sense that it teaches the individual that this life is not meant for work. Man does not live by bread alone. Also look at the lilies of the field they toil not. That is a description of man as a gatherer. Man able to live off of nuts and seeds, fruits and berries but to do that we need to decrease the population or we need to expand outward into the universe.
If this civilization is a stepping stone to interplanetary travel then we have to move up in consciousness, but we must move together and that means we have to give up the values of exploitation. The truth is ineffable but it is real. It has been said that the kingdom of heaven is within. In my mind it is not a religion but a state of being, some call it grace, I call it more like science. But not the science of picking apart, more the science of being there. Unlearning and relearning. But as long a there are those among us who have not, then none of us have. That is the paradox of it all. I wonder.
In that sense I think Philip K. Dick was right we are living in the times of the fall of the temple, these are the end times but not in the Christian dogmatic sense. This end time has gone on for 2000 years and there is no telling how much longer it will last. It is up to us to end history by our willingness to experience the truth of love. Until then, we can expect to continue experiencing the kick in the ass of our collective and individual Karma’s. It is all around us and yet we miss the self evident truth in front of us. I wait here as a servant of that greater understanding holding my own piece of the portal to another world. But until we all understand, we will be enmeshed in the darkness. Strange but true, the fire is burning our butts and we will evolve or be consumed by the flame.
Question comes up, does that mean there is not individual liberation? I think it is possible to experience moments of liberation but we all come down to our daily lives and for some of us it is a decent even heavenly life. but for many it is just this side of the 7th level of hell and those who are in the gated communities of heaven must remember that there are their brothers and sisters in the hellish holes in Haiti burried under concrete. In that sense literally the least of us is the same as the greatest of us and we cannot leave anyone behind. That includes the bombers in jets, in computer simulations and in person blowing up their neighbors.We are all in this together. It is in our collective unconsciousness and it weighs us down until it is all cleansed from our desire driven lives. The Buddha was right in that attachment to desire leads to suffering. But detachment is not enough. We have to participate in our own salvation. Forgiveness of the self, of the mistakes of the past is a starting place. But we have to grow each in our own ways.
I have learned and unlearned lessons over and over. I am a slow moving wheel but I keep turning and I never give up.