Rock Commentaries: Bobby Vee

In what Mr. Vileen calls the “matters of the heart,” one of the finest lyrics must be the sentiment in “Take Good Care of My Baby:

Take good care of my baby

Be as kind as you can be

And if you should discover

That you don’t really love

Send my b]aby back home to me

This shows the self sacrifice of noble love. The Lettermen types with the early sixties clean preppie look used to know these things about love without having to learn, maybe from seeing Humphry Bogart put women on planes in Casablanca. I have just been trying to write on Romeo and Juliet. For the Rock Commentaries, I wrote just a little about the early love songs just before the rock event. And could one imagine a finer lyric to be sung in our beautiful city, our Democratic Callipolis, by teen lovers as they run about like Romeos? Vileen is indeed a master of “matters of the heart,” demonstrating again the superiority of our lyric poets to our psychologists on certain human things.

A Query on Economics: The Value of Money and Job Creation

   One commented that it is better for the economy to give money to the poor than the rich, because the poor spend the money immediately, circulating it into the economy, while the rich store it rather than use it. But it is opposite if the poor waste the money while the rich invest it. And the rich waste more money on luxuries than the poor waste on gambling and drugs, both indeed while walking past those in need.

   This led to a deep question on economics: What is the difference between money put in circulation that was earned by producing value, on one hand, and money that was earned by producing nothing, like a stock trader, or by making things worse, like a mobster, setting a drag on the whole economy for ones own private benefit.? Economics, or wealth, is based ultimately upon real value, real goods, or even natural goods, and the difference between money that represents value and money that represents shysterism ought prove decisive. The question then sets up a problem in Economics that shows the natures of things. When money is earned and enters the economy while it is not backed by real value or natural goods, why, mathematically, this should cause inflation!

   Similarly, no one considers what it means to “create jobs.” What is a job? There are two sorts, first, ones where someone can make more money off your labor than they have to pay you, including the hassle of hiring you, because they have devised the leverage of a company, and second, when someone needs your service more than they need the wealth that they have squirrelled away. Cities buy services, like a homeowner does, while companies buy time, effort and the investment, say, of a carpenter, in knowledge and tools (They are worth 40$ per hour, and come with 40,000$ in tools in their truck, and a laborer). Both these kinds of jobs ae different from the self-employment job of owning, storing and marketing a product for the common store, and owning one of these economic leverage machines we call companies..

    Political philosophers like the question of the original condition of man, for what it reveals about justice, the nature of political society, convention and inequality. In the same way, we like to reduce economic theory to the hunting gathering and hut building/ clothes sewing from which our economy emerged, to see the natural goods in their simplest roots. There is food, clothing, shelter, tools, transportation, weapons, etc. and the goods in our economy are all reducible to these roots. Economics in this sense is about the goods of the body, and so the best things of the heart and mind appear as entertainment, which barely appears for those hunting and gathering. A job is one’s place in the economy, the collective enterprise of providing for the pressing necessities of the body. Classical economics, and the meaning of the Greek word, is much more broad, household management, and as such economics is the root of politics.

A Centrist Solution: The CLC on Health Care

   The Democrats are indeed in trouble on health care. The decision was to save lives now and worry about paying for it in the next administration. Had it been left to the Republicans, though, we would have no health care at all, as the decision was to avoid “socialized medicine,” at the expense of literally watching our citizens, many of whom represent a million dollar investment of the past generation, die in the streets. People would go to the emergency room, and the hospitals would get stuck with the bill, adding confusion and expense.

   If one considers health care in America, it will quickly become apparent that Insurance fraud, prescription drug abuse and the profit motive will make national health care impossible. Doctors and prescription drug companies have used Obamacare and cashed in on the American Taxpayer. The insurance companies and medical testing companies similarly exaggerate costs and expand profitable procedures, according to profit or “shareholder value,” rather than the Hippocratic oath. Pseudo-psychiatry bills more than half the American homes now for drugs that do more harm than good. Congress has been paid by these companies, whose lobbyists have made their campaign contributions.

   Add to this the valetudinarian Americans and their inability to distinguish the medically necessary from the possible and profitable, and our attempt at a national health care will indeed fail. Here again, the solution is not to cancel health care for the poor nor to raise taxed, but, as Bernie Sanders had begun to say, “stand up.” We need to stand upright and get serious about fraud. As regarding food stamps, there is no reason that we cannot secure the minimal conditions, but this cannot be done with fifty percent fraud in the program. Speak to the people, Barack, and Hillary. Ask us to stand up together and make these programs possible, because otherwise they are not possible.

   So the centrist solution is not to raise taxes, but to call on America, that is, everyone, to eliminate fraud so that we can have public programs that take care of the poor and of certain needs in common (as does the fire department), perhaps the minimal conditions regarding medicine.

   These practices, fraud and abuse, and not the true principles of the free market, make health care impossible for the Americans. Donney Trumpet would probably fail to distinguish between cosmetic and necessary surgery, then take kickbacks through the party to allow the drug companies to prescribe oxy and a thousand cat scans, and the insurance companies to bill the taxpayer, all fine with him so long as his chicks get the surgery for him and his bank account benefits! Nor does it seem, though, that we should pay for many sex change operations on the basis of the principle of equality.

Evan McMullin for President?

   The Republicans have finally produced a candidate that does seem capable of being president. Though it may be too late, this election is so strange that he may well win the whole thing. We especially like the combination of his experience in the CIA with his understanding of the principles of the Declaration and adherence to equality. He is running as an Independent, and his candidacy is much more serious than that of Mr. Johnson, because of his possible capacity as chief executive regarding foreign policy.

   Evan McMullin may quickly restore the swollen Trump phenomenon to the eight percent that such an extremist movement might hold, and it is quite possible that McMullin switch places with the Trumpster in the polls, if America would wake up from the bad dream and get back to Kansas here! If he can gain the support of the Bushes, Kochs, Snyders and sane Republicans, John McCain and Paul Ryan, he may still win, but at least will be assured to prevent the disaster of the collapse of republicanism, via oligarchy, into tyranny, from which a worse tyranny of the twentieth century variety might well emerge. Why not, America? Admit that Trump has been revealed, or that the election process has done its vetting and prevented tyranny, which is more evident to the people in the image of rape and vulgarity than in foreseeing the disaster of the foreign and civil war that would result from a Trump presidency. Donney Trumpet can just go home with more wealth and fame than he had before, a “great success,” a “winner'” as he will declare himself, which may work in Hollywood, but does not work in nuclear war. Perhaps he can start a reality T. V. show interviewing his nice white fiends from Russia, telling them “you hired,”  while the Evangelicals watch, and their television watches back.

Tim Wu: The Attention Merchants / Take Back the Internet

   Terry Gross had Tim Wu on NPR’s Fresh Air this afternoon to discuss his new book on how advertising has ruined the internet. He coined the term “Net Neutrality,” and Congress passed a law forbidding companies from censoring content for their own interests. WordPress does exactly this when they require an extortion fee in exchange for the accessibility to ones website, and otherwise limiting writers to small groups or bubbles. The loophole in the law is that there is nothing I can do about this without money to go to court, and my book has already failed and my economy is already destroyed. It was my last chance, and tuned out to be the last rigged game.

   Tim Wu is the second person I have head use the word “fascism” to describe Donald Trump.  Wu had some vey enlightening comments on tyranny and propaganda, and the similarity of these to advertising. He points out that Hitler was not only an artist in his pre-political career, but also an add man.  That’s Ok, America, after the experience of tyranny, we will just do what Germany did after the war, and shop elsewhere. The free market will surely take care of it, and they’ll see if we hire them to do this to the rest of our children!

   What Tim Wu and all others fail to appreciate is the importance of the Fourth Amendment and the disaster of allowing the gathering of information for “marketing” purposes. Congratulations to Facebook for delivering that trove of information to the Russians to use in whatever diabolical way they can imagine. Or to ISIS, or to a future tyrant of America. That was very smart. And we Americans thought is was all a conflict between profit and bashfulness, like the worst problem is the guy with pancreatic cancer getting adds for funeral homes or the girl who found out she was pregnant from Target due to her shopping habits. The very minimum is that if this stuff is allowed, it should be voluntary. But the Big companies have gone to Congress, who has whored our liberty.

   Another thing Tim Wu does not appreciate is the huge gulf between voluntary add watching and compulsory shopping. I retreat and boycott, for example, U-tube when they force me to watch an add. Boycotting may indeed be an effective way for the people directly to take back the internet. Another is to sue every time these excesses cause harms that can be compensated. But especially, Congress must be made aware of the problem, you know, by we who work for free to look ahead for the good of their constituents. The citizens must elect a Congress that can step aside the campaign finance problem by recovering integrity. This is possible, and even easy, since these companies are suck ups to the profit principle, and, like Dolphin safe tuna, we just have to make integrity profitable.

The Rigged Game Economy

   NPR had a report discussing the new term “rigged game” as a description of the middle-class-destroying effects of Campaign finance on Congress. Billionaires are able to set the rules of the game so that only they can make money not by the value they produce and offer in the free market, but by controlling the market itself, so that it is no longer free. And everyone finds they have agreed to this by signing those consent forms no one reads but are required in order to communicate or do anything. Congress is supposed to regulate interstate commerce, and the Constitution explicitly gives Congress this power. If two factories are competing, and one can gain an advantage by poisoning a river, at the expense of the commons (as Garret Hardin discusses what he calls the tragedy of the commons), then Congress can regulate the factories on the issue, so that neither may poison for their own profit. Hence, neither can or must maximize “shareholder value” by poisoning the river for everyone, or setting a drag on the whole economy, the way extortion does. But now, if one factory thinks it is profiting greatly by poisoning the river, their lobbyists can just contribute to some campaign funds, and presto! The issue appears in a different light, and the poison is not so bad after all. And who is funding those expensive studies, say, regarding the Enbridge pipeline, while our Governor cannot receive free thoughts from citizens though the office phone? The playing field is tilted toward the unscrupulous because Congress is doing something other than its job.

   When the internet companies wanted to whore the privacy of every last person on the globe, Congress was easily persuaded to ignore the Fourth Amendment and allow this incredibly profitable and, we argue dangerous pandering.

   But back to the “rigged game.” Bernie Sanders was the first among the politicians to use the phrase, as he was the first to discuss the prescription drug abuse epidemic as a campaign issue. In a letter on the horrors of the tax process, about Christmas eve two years ago, I wrote to my representative Tim Walberg and described the economy as a rigged game because the attempt of the Billionaire interests to use the power of their wealth to set the rules of the economy in their favor. His office does read his constituent’s letters, and that was a very good letter, about how an accountant is needed to fill out the simplest tax form, but the poor cannot afford an accountant, creating an infinite obligation (contrary to due process). I often write about issues to them long before setting these things on the internet, as with the teaching regarding how dolphins do fishing, o the issue of property seizures. I may have picked the phase up somewhere too, as these things occur, but I think I know what studies led me to say this. I imagined Rand Paul and maybe Barak himself seeing that letter, then heard Bernie Sanders say “rigged game,” and recognized it. Someone, by word-of-mouth press, does seem to read the bloggers on the internet, and the CLC invites both parties to com “policy shopping,” as this is the purpose of the McDonald website, and as we do on the issues of both parties. But the phrase comes from having thee times done all that one would think needed to make a living and pay back loans, and come up completely empty. But especially, we were watching that Mob or Russian business model take over among the Googles and Microsofts, where for example payoffs ae required to publish a book, and access to the internet can be withheld for extortion fees, all made legal for a mere few million in “campaign contributions,” otherwise known as bribes. I have watched the prescription drug industry take three of my mother’s ten grandchildren, thirty percent of the next generation, so that they could make money off heroin and oxy. I have watched the press stammering and just unable to comprehend the issue of psychiatric prescription drug abuse, while public shootings now occur weekly, all done by people on antidepressants, people who were under the careful care of the mental health industry, and congress, like the press, is unable to respond.

   If Congress does not regulate according to the common good, the free market itself will be destroyed by power. This is perhaps what the Koch brothers and Republican economists did not realize from their principles, how oligarchy slides into tyranny. Free market libertarianism assumes a free government, or, it assumes that the market and private property will be defended from thievery and tyranny. But if companies can profit by destroying the GNP for their own interest, just by tricking and paying off Congress, then any companies that do not do these things cannot compete with those that do, and the whole quickly gets out of hand, as has been occurring. Business presupposes ethics, without thinking, since what is most profitable in the short term can always appear to be tyranny. The economy is then rigged against lower class attempts to rise by genuinely producing value, say, with new inventions. It is like going to Vegas and tying to win at a rigged black jack table, and these too are the studies from which the phase arises. So, ok America, do we really think that worldly success is the measure of a man and the ability to govern in a free nation? Does Trump think it wrong to rig the game if it is rigged to his advantage? Or is this not how the game came to be rigged in the first place?

   NPR was describing how the phrase is being used now, according to every partisan position, these guys saying this or that that they are against is “rigged,” or that the Washington insiders are the riggers, while these silver tongued money men, who even teach how to deceive for ones own profit, the very ones who have rigged the system by influencing both parties, plan to slide right to the side, the way the prescription drug industry evades responsibility.

   Say Hillary, if you are listening, we invented the idea of putting solar collectors into roof shingles, as potentially cheaper than solar panels, but do not even try to work on the idea, as inventions are impossible for the poor to produce.

Student Loans II: The Ombudsman

   NPR has been considering student loans today, and if I were not blocked from commenting by Facebook etc., I would set a few sentences on their webpage. I just heard back from the “ombudsman,” and they basically said that it was just fine that MGA has added 75,000 $ to my loan, already tripled by interest. Congress has given them the authority to collect fees, and so these might be a million dollars if they want. My suspicion is that this is a recent action by the Republican congress that does not, you see, want to encumber these fine businesses with regulations. They interviewed a default that went three years to a university of Phoenix, you know, like a Trump University, and dropped out after three years. By contrast, my degree was from the University of Dallas, and I completed a Ph. D in politics. I may well have been blacklisted by my government and ejected by the Catholics, but what is sure is that for the ten years I applied for full time teaching jobs, they were not hiring white males for union professorships, due to Federal affirmative action. This is of course contrary to Madison and the Fourteenth Amendment, which does not allow them to hire everyone except white males, and we stick by that Fourteenth Amendment. I have called for the statistics on this, but no one collects them. Sue, I could teach in high school, where the unions have made Ph. Ds worthless and “certification” everything. I could go get certification, which they have made a two year fifty thousand dollar program to learn how to set up a classroom and be sensitive to diverse people. But then when I get out- and everyone knows this is true- the schools will not hire me because I already have a ph. D, and the unions will make them pay me more to cover the same number of students, and the quality of a Ph. D is utterly invisible, to people who have never studied education with the greatest minds. This too, everyone knows, that they have ejected the traditional study of education, and cannot even identify the greatest books on education.

   So, I taught for ten years as an adjunct, because I am called “white.” I do have a rather sever insistence upon liberty, but this has not caused me to lose a single job. I did decline to try to teach at Washtenaw Community college for minimum wage with half a mouth of teeth, because they have a smoke fee campus, and we resolve to obey the rules. But this job would not even provide subsistence, let alone the repayment of loans. And by the way, if I were not “white,” and had gotten a full time job (thee are for practical purposes, no non-“white” Ph. Ds in political science that could not get full time union jobs).

   So, I tied to repay my loans with writing and inventions. Thank You, WordPress, for blocking my internet access in hopes of gaining an extortion fee, and thank you to the Republican Congress that took money to allow such a thing. Thanks to the office of Tim Walberg, who cannot even tell me what laws allow MGA to default me surreptitiously and charge me 75,000 $, thee times that borrowed for a Ph. D, to push a paper across a desk and stamp it. Nor can my state representatives or anyone else tell me, o even take up this question: Are they doing this to everyone, or did they just do it to me? Have they added 75,000$ to very many loans, financially enslaving and ruining a whole class of college educated people? Or did they just do this to me? And if so, why? Thanks to the “ombudsman,” for being a yes man to MGS, allowing them to do whatever they want. What is interesting is that if I ever could afford to pay them, I could afford a lawyer, and we would raise these questions in court. I have a bread bag with twelve pieces of junk mail I have still not had time to open, and we will open these and read them and respond on court time. I never got through my IRS paperwork, let alone answer junk mail proliferated when creditors use and sell our prostituted information. Thee is a limit to the paperwork we can be obligated to do, and I know, because I have hit the limit.