Marx Theoretical: Or, Marx In A Nutshell

   As said in our more practical blogs on Marxism as the left wing of Twentieth Century Totalitarianism, Marxism is no more an economic theory than Nazism or fascism is a biological theory. Both are reductionist, reducing all human things to a much lower, material basis. The theory is very simple, though the “economic” part is only one section. Long ago we collected the basic points of the theory, into these axioms  . We have a different understanding of things as an “intellectual” perversion, or an inversion of the imagination. But as was said, both forms of twentieth century totalitarianism begin in atheism. They then combine to this a strange historicism and an understanding of a necessary march of history, from Hegel, as though what is were not in the beginning. The reason can be described in  terms as a throwing of the baby out with the bathwater in rejecting the medieval assumptions.

   Marx is 1) an inversion of “religion, 2) an inversion of Hegel, 3) an economic determinism setting principles of Locke into historical or dialectical motion, and 4) A strange revolutionary conclusion, since, to be sarcastic, all history is class struggle, and this in the final opposition, that of the bourgeois and Proletariat.” But Marx taught us to see ourselves, our constitution in the broadest sense, as Capitalism,” an utter absurdity if one considers any of the greats of the American Revolution, let alone all of them.

   And for the many who are poor and the few who are rich, Aristotle notices that these are in every human polity. Or, as Jesus says, the poor you will always have with you…” But it is not at all clear, for example, that if there were no rich, simply everyone might be poor, no reason to assume some constant store of natures goods for equal distribution. If income inequality were to increase, it still might be true that the many are twice as rich and the rich four times, etc….

Within each of these four categories or axioms, there is an account with three or four points in each, so that as we say, Marx has only 12 or 16 thoughts.

   In the first, Marx considers the “criticism of religion” to have been completed by Hegel and Freurbach. Religion is now known to have been all along an illusion, an expression of human unhappiness with the world, and flowers on the chains of slavery or the opiate to keep the many pleased with their condition. The truth is that man is the supreme being for man. Knowing this, “religion” can now be resolved into its secular basis, its human core.

   In the second, Hegel was correct that history develops “dialectic-ally,” but was wrong, about the priority of “spirit” to mater. Hence the Marxist dialectic is dialectical materialsm as opposed to the Hegelian dialectic of spirit or “phenomenology of the mind.”The end of history is not in mind but in matter or economic realities, again simply assumed axiomatically to be so, as if by perception acquiring first principles. “Philosophy” is now to “become active, transforming the human material conditions, and here we say that Marxism is a spiritual atheism. Consequently, all history is the dialectical history of class struggle.

Third, All profit or value comes from human activity, or human labor in making or producing value out of the nearly worthless contribution of material nature. Therefore all “capitalist” profits come from the “exploitation” of labor. Marx does not want to hear about Henry Ford meta-making a system that makes the labor of each one more productive of value, nor about the difference in value of our labor in the project of some brainy guy, like labor for a craftsman, compared to the value of our labor in our own back yard, so that we leave home and go to work each morning, if we are able. It is all “exploitation.” Further, as technology increases, and the owners of the “factors” of production become larger, fewer workers are needed, so that an “industrial army of the unemployed” is formed necessarily. Again, Marx does not want to hear of labor unions formed to oppose the owners politically should their use their wealth to compel or tyrannize the workers, nor about the stock ownership that might cultivate a middle class. An impoverished proletariat is a revolutionary proletariat, and Marx just knows this is the last stage of a long history of class conflict.

   And here in the fourth section Marx becomes obviously spiritual, if in a materialistc sense, as there is absolutely no empirical reason to think that because of factories in early eighteenth century London, the last stage of the historical dialectic is soon to arrive. But man, the supreme being for man, produces his own essence, which is then “alienated” when he does not himself own the factors of production, as he would, one imagines, if he chased down rabbits and devoured them for himself alone, without cooking. Indeed, since the present condition is, we just know it, the last and most essential class conflict, the present condition is that of the alienation of the human essence, and hence the proletariat will embody the human essence, and the bourgeois the opposite. Here all ethics is subjected to class, as in fascism, all human ethics becomes a matter of race. But the seizure of the means of production is to be the “return of man to himself, and one of the few things said about the communist utopian condition is that the lack of division of labor allows man to contemplate his own essence in the products of his labor. One imagines that young fellow in the Catskill mountains who burned a hole in the center of a tree large enough to make a house, but Marx does not go this far, because the theory is a delusion, or an inversion of the things said about the coming of the kingdom, or the things imagined from the things said. He talks of each holding every sort of job randomly, which again might make any sensible person consider the value created by expertise and the division of labor.

   But for the sake of this delusion, or as said, perversion of the imagination, a “dictatorship of the proletariat” is to be instituted not by persuasion but by force, through a violence called spiritual, or philosophy become active, a tyranny for the purpose of transforming human nature by eradicating the character of the bourgeois. This condition is universal, occurring everywhere, and involving a magical transformation of the senses. Private property and private families are to no longer exist, as in the Acts of the Apostles or among the few guardians in Socrates’ description of the best regime, though this has nothing to do with many. There is to be no tension between man and the state, nor between man and nature. Nature is to be conquered or subjected by the revolutionary proletariat. And until then, there is to be literally a tyranny with an aristocracy of those who know the march of history, a vanguard elite., in every communist nation. That is Marxism in a nutshell.

   Hence, as it would not be possible to present so concisely the thought of a genuine philosopher, we say that Marx is not a philosopher at all.

Socialism and Communism

   After quite some time, I have found my ‘Tocqueville and begun a study trying to distinguish between “communism” and “Socialism.” For Socialism, we think of the European governments with socialized medicine, way higher taxes, but way more government services. But for communism, we think of the tyrannies where millions of the “Bourgeois” are killed and millions more set to work in labor camps. But this is not quite what either of these words mean, and no one, myself especially, really knows how one should use them.
“Communism” is found in the Act of the Apostles and in its most extreme in Plato’s Republic. Priests who live together, especially without families, can own all things in common because no one cares at all about things or the money that encapsulates their value. But Aristotle is right in practice, when he notes that “what is held in common gets less care.” Plato’s best regime is not at all about practical or possible regimes, irrelevant for almost all practical purposes, and perhaps those who cannot see above practical matters should not even read it, if they are going to be confused from beginning to end. But Plato’s city includes the dissolution of the family even for those who are not celibate, so that the attachment to ones own wife is destroyed, and women and children are shared. The sacrifice of one’s own love is the sacrifice of our attachment to the world at the navel, which is why the loss of love can lead to rebirth. Sometimes truths walk right by us like the philosopher of Al Farabi walked past the gatekeeper by telling the truth when asked his name while pretending to be a reveling drunk, so he was thought to be lying.
But Marxist Communism includes the “class-ocide” of the Bourgeois, and so it must be considered a perversion that has forever, as a side effect, blocked our ability to consider “communism” in theory. Socialism, as the word was first used by Robert Owen and Mr. Fourier, simply means the common ownership of property and the distribution according to need. It is wrong because humans are not able to live that way, though it does indicate the limitations of property rights in theory. In truth, in one sense, people should not own anything they cannot use well, and so the one who knows man deserves to own and distribute all goods. The problem is of course that we do not have a wise man, if such a thing is even practically possible, since one would also have to know the circumstances of each. A second point from Aristotle is that property is equipment for action. What if my friend, since friends have all things in common, borrows my car without asking to go golfing, and I come out to get in my car and go to a doctor’s appointment on which my child’s life depends?
Marx was also a “socialist,” but attributed common ownership and distribution according to need to a Utopian condition to magically occur after torrents of blood far worse that the French Reign of Terror killed all the “Bourgeois.” This is different even from the violence and the state tyranny required for such a project, which indeed leads to the Comment on Gonzalo’s speech in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, that the latter end of his speech forgets the beginning. He forgets that someone must rule and do this by force, while the force of government is to be used in the true function of government, to fight crime, not act as a general store. Hence, under socialism, property rights are violated and things that are not crimes are made crimes. The artificiality is disgusting, and we find things in society to be all ready artificial enough due to human vulgarity. But if private property is natural to man in the usual condition, and as ineradicable as the appetite for sex, the result is a perpetual and pointless war against human nature. One hundred million were killed and tortured in the twentieth century under that flag.

Bank Security and Fraud

   As one might expect, a little trip to the bank is not for me as uneventful as it may be for most. Today, I took in a stack of Capital One junk mail to the bank for them to dispose of, since I cannot do anything with them, throw them away or burn them, and do not have time to either shred them or money to buy a shredder. The bank denies responsibility for them, but it says Visa right on them, they gave me the visa, and then suddenly all these marketers have my numbers. Real mail gets mixed up with these, especially for us old guys who have to find glasses. The bank had just switched our credit cards to Mastercard, and we were compelled to call using our “primary phone” to activate the card. They would not allow us to activate the card in person- a big red flag. Then the report came on NPR that the activation companies are selling the numbers, at least some numbers and in at least one instance. I had complained because our phones go through the Philippines, and a tyranny has taken over in the Philippines, as it will soon here if we do not overturn this election. And #3, in order to do business over the phone, they require the first five digits of the social security number, for which we often give out the last four digits, over the phone, and all the phones are tapped, hacked and spy-marketed. I reported this to the FBI, and was told before being hung up on that I should “document this.” Small wonder the Wells-Fargo scam went on so long, since many people complained. I think my name and number are flagged by the FBI receptionist as one of those frequent callers who thinks they see things and reports them. They are being paid and I am not. I am correct and they are wrong. They hang up on me. Ditto for Congress, where I then reported the matter and asked if they could not see the need for proper regulation. They too are being paid, by both the citizens and the campaign contributors, who include the banks, so nothing will be done, at least until like the Wells-Fargo scam it hits the media and embarrasses them. Again, regulations are so that companies do not have to scam in order to compete, but can focus on making money off the value of their products, rather than the prostitution of their customers, who can go elsewhere for more of the same or do without. The regulation of commerce is a power given in Article One of the Constitution to Congress precisely to prevent this sort of thing, which has now taken over every part of our economy. Since scams do not produce value, and even detract value, our economy tanks or suffers the drag, as from a parasite, and no one can figure out why.

   This circumstance shows some of the reasons that America is tottering on the brink of tyranny. One simply cannot allow infinite spy and scam marketing, regardless of who is being paid, because it will destroy our nation. Two years ago, I wrote that the Bill of rights must be adapted to the internet and imposed by the United States, or the alternative is universal tyranny. This is mathematical, and the only question is how in particular this will take place. I did not suspect that they would have such success interfering with the election, so that our literal tyranny might come in January of 2017. No one on the T.V. will even raise the question of Russian and Bright Bart spy marketing and voter suppression. But it all started when we refused to limit telemarketing and junk mail. So, why is the “activation company” so interested in my “primary phone.” Are we brain dead from Oxy yet?

   So, what if we started a movement where all the junk mail sent us as a result of Visa etc. having our information were simply set on the counter at the bank? If only one percent of the people did this with only the Capital One/ Visa false mailings (one is not really “pre-approved”) the ability of the Banks to shred this fecal matter would be overwhelmed, and they just may stop abusing our mail and the information they compel us to give them in order to have a bank account and function.

   Yes, lets start a movement! WordPress limits my readers access through the search engines, so we will have to do this by word-of-mouth, but let us all, instead of giving them our time by shredding this garbage, use our time to protest by returning these to the bank. I would take them straight to Visa, but I cannot find their desk, though the bank surely can.

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.

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.

Economics and Foreign Trade

In a previous allusion, we commented that it is not clear that the use of a foreign power washer making an American craftsman more efficient- it was smaller, and so hoist-able onto the deck up the ladder- helps or harms U. S. trade. Economics is complicated, a web of interactions. As a result of NAFTA, we have “lost” low paying manufacturing jobs to China, but it is not clear that these have not been replaced by higher value manufacturing jobs, not to mention the increased efficiency resulting from the cheap nick-knacks available now at the dollar store. To simply look at the number of, say, tennis shoe sewing jobs lost in America and count the number of jobs lost is two dimensional thinking, leading these pundits to be baffled when NAFTA expands the economy tenfold. Friendly cooperation in trade between nations is mutually beneficial, as a rule, and we can help other nations and they help us. Then, as with Mexico, when we need their help on some greater issue, it will become clear what value and profit mean when one leaves economics-bounded thought to consider politics.

Hillary has succeeded, with her Methodist talk of doing good and demonstration of her understanding of the fundamental law, at gaining our endorsement, the endorsement of the CLC. We have decided that she is remotely capable of being President, in addition to our negative resolve to stump Trump. We were also impressed to hear that she has shown some concern regarding homosexual rape in prison, separating juvenile from adult offenders for this purpose. Prior to this, I thought I was literally the only political thinker ever to address the issue of the tolerance for homosexual rape in the hierarchic power structure of prison gangs.

Student Loans

Last year, after sending in the tax forms that prove I do not earn subsistence, my lender Nelnet defaulted my loans anyway. It seems that in the pile of junk mailings I did not have time to open, they sent me a form I was supposed to fill out begging them, after I had dealt with them, to allow me to pay the income sensitive repayment amount, likely to be zero or five dollars. You see, I was working then, trying to pay my IRS debt on the subsistence level income I earned in previous years, while cat shepherding and caring for the hole household of a senior. I have not been out from under IRS debt in many years, and this precedes student loan debt. One must pay the tax on the money one earns with which one then repays debts.

Upon surreptitiously defaulting my loan, though I had done exactly as I had in previous years, and even have a whole ‘nother loan to deal with through the Department of Education, the loan was passed to a collection agency called MGA- which stands for Michigan Guarantee Agency, though it is a collection agency. They added 24% to the loan, which they apparently have given themselves the authority to do, and then proceeded to keep adding. What was originally about 30,000$ borrowed to achieve a PhD in politics, and had become 93,000$ with interest, was turned into 163,000 $, with them adding in four months more than double the cost of a phD, and I had no money going in. For all their hard work that they did to produce such value, I immediately complained to both my State Representative, Gretchen Driskell, and my state Senator, Rebekah Warren. MGA simply sent them a contract I had signed in “consolidating” the loan fifteen years age, which apparently gives them the power to charge me 70,000$ in four months, and they will not or cannot do a thing about it. Nor will they raise the question of who the “Michigan Guarantee Agency” even in, what their connection is to the Michigan Treasury Department, whether they do this to everyone or whether they just did this to me. If the latter, it is obviously a question for legislation, the former, a question for the Department of Justice. Nothing. That is the response of government.

I taught as an adjunct in American Government at a Community College, and after about ten years, an opening in the department arose. They hired a white female who did not even have a politics degree, she had a law degree. Everyone knows that the colleges worked this way for just the fifteen years that I was applying for full time, union jobs of the sort that might allow one to repay loans. White males could not be hired to teach either politics or philosophy because the departments were already white male dominated. All the adjuncts at these colleges were, and probably still are, white males, while all the full time positions go to white females. Black rarely study political science. But there are no Black or female PhD’s in politics that lack a full time job, none, in the entire nation. But, oh, you want to do something about this, who are you going to sue? The one college that would hire me when none others would? And have the taxpayers and students pick up the tuition increase?

I was also applying when the liberal arts were disregarded, and Catholic colleges went to the oath, meaning that those like me could not teach at Catholic colleges either. These pay the least, but are the most pleasant, with good students. I taught philosophy courses for four years at one. The rate of pay for a career adjunct is about minimum wage, like working at the 7-11 as a soda jerk, if four classes are a full time job or a full load. College teachers must do a lot to prepare a class, far more in hours than a grade school teacher per hour of class time. I also taught High and Middle school as a substitute, but here, despite a PhD with college teaching experience, we are “uncertified.” The unions made “certification” the only degree, and made a PhD worthless. I could teach American Government in place of the certified B.A. gym teacher in any High school, or even Shakespeare or “Social Studies,” if they would have me to repay my loans. The closest I ever came to a full time job was teaching eighth grade at a charter school, but then the principal got in trouble for hiring an “uncertified” relative. I did not want to take nicotine replacement drugs for them anyway! I got kicked out, ostensibly for third hand cigarette smoke, after obeying all the rules, and have not been back. It pays less than painting, is more slavish, and we do not get to teach in any case. I went then and finished my essay on Hamlet.

I worked also in the trades, not as a craftsman but as a laborer, and for a while even made some payments on my loans. My error was to pay some to the big one instead of paying off the small one, which I missed by 800$, now expanded to over 1100. I did painting and carpentry labor. In my life, I have ruined my body, first my knees in roofing, so that I could no longer roof, then my hands with digging and such, so that from carpel-tunnel syndrome-like wrist problems, I had to spin the blood back int my hands after three hours of sleep, then try again. I did painting and labor putting in windows, but eventually, at adjunct wages, I lost many teeth and have an eye that twitches, possibly from caffeine, and since my mind is alive, I say funny things, so that people do not want me around. Lately I do yard work for relatives and their friends, though yard work sends me into days of cramps, sciatic nerve agonies and such, but I can do a few days of it to get by.  My true place in the economy, as I have said, is to be a cat shepherd for old people, which I have been doing in exchange for rent on the shed, since I have not been able to pay rent in some time. With this comes an infinite number of hours of daily chores and cleaning messes that are not mine, but having no financial existence, I have been reduced to the condition of a slave, with no way to limit what work is required of me, any more than I can limit how much the loan people charge me. The women own all the property. This way true in America in the forties, but has become especially true now that the law has established inequality.

The past three years, I have earned less than ten thousand dollars, been charged 15% Social Security tax, and taken no food stamps, though I am eligible for these. I fear the paperwork and loss of liberty, and am given some food in exchange for work. A charity brings food to the senior, and mostly what she does not like I get, sometimes bread and peanut butter even! But I eat a yogurt for breakfast, PBJ for lunch, and then eggs and cheese or sometimes a real dinner, if there is cooking going on, and sometimes I get a bowl of mashed potatoes or cream of wheat left over. Lately, since I’v been so poor from the end of the winter, they bought me some honey, which is a big deal, since I was out for months and making maple syrup. I still have frozen mulberries to have with peanut butter when there is no jelly, and the mulberries are almost in again!

I have written and printed two books intended to be marketable, since I could no longer justify unmarketable projects. I should easily make a living off these, but they just cannot be produced or marketed as e-books, with Amazon and WordPress set up as they are, and publishing requiring the investment of debtors, through layers of IRS and student loan debt. I am no longer able to work a regular job nor to have a bank account, as any money will be seized, and paypal just tried to crank an empty bank account which the bank treated like a bounced check. Now to even pay a bill is a half-day project of envelopes, stamps and money orders. Soon I will lose car insurance, and not be able to do that.

All this could have occurred even if I were not basically blacklisted from all writing grants and assistance from my former professors, and even if the Catholics did not require oaths. But if such blacklisting did occur, say, because one did not go to work for the government in assumed exchange for tuition grants, or because one questioned having women set on them once they had become suspicious by not going along with the program, or even for not being “conservative” for the conservative funders of education, if such blacklisting were to occur, no one would do a thing about it, so that anyone who likes may do these things and call it academic preference- I just can’t spell! I never did misspell a word on the blackboard, and very rarely if at all on any papers for class. To give preference for non-academic reasons, like one did not go to work for the government or raised the wrong questions, seems yet another great corruption of education.

For a nation to allow these financial powers to complete the destruction of the liberal arts is a national catastrophe, and the root of coming national catastrophe.

Libertarianism and Peaceful Protest

Martin Luther King Jr saved our nation with the idea of peaceful protest. In the face of blatant injustice, as a Christian minister, he saw from Gandhi and Socrates that unarmed civil disobedience was the only way to win a victory worth having. The movement was concerned primarily with equality, but also secondarily with liberty. What I am suggesting is the conjunction of the idea of peaceful protest and the primary concern with our vanishing American liberty.

   The recognition of equality has now become so well established in popular opinion that its excesses are ignored. The idea that keeps recurring is to join the quest for the re-establishment of liberty with the methods and the idea of Martin Luther King and peaceful protest.

   As a student at a conservative Catholic school. we studied the American founders in an exciting spirit of the recovery of our political tradition. Yet we did not study even Thomas Jefferson very much. The Bill of Rights was generally neglected, and we did not even begin to learn about Martin Luther King.

   King found what may be the only way for Christians to participate in politics rather than withdraw from the world’s injustice to the peace and safety of the monastery. As it turns out, they were a government school, and St. Martin was still considered as J Edgar saw him, as a something closer to a communist than an American, despite King’s constant appeal to the Declaration and the Constitution, and to justice.

   Whether the reader can realize it or not, our nation is facing some changes, and is headed for some serious internal dangers. Armed protest has broken out occasionally, with the blacks in Baltimore and the Whites in Oregon most recently. Violence at political speeches surrounding the presidential campaigns is becoming routine. The reason is that the Americans are missing something, and what appears is then drawn toward the emerging opposites or extremes. Meanwhile, in the face of blatant injustice, our politicians will do nothing, at least until complaints are converted into money and power. We could scream bloody murder, about the most obvious abuses, and its like the whole nation is on Oxy, or has been so dumbed down that it goes in one ear and out the other, like we were speaking to a box of rocks.

   But violent protest strikes those who are innocent, like the officers of the peace who daily risk their lives to protect the citizens, and are thrown into the front lines as in the protest in Baltimore. There is no addressing the hidden powers responsible for the problems, we can only scratch and claw at one another.

   It always amused me, studying politics at that Southern Catholic Conservative School, that they did not appreciate the peaceful protest of St. Martin. They were into this idea like the problem with the Christians is that they are too meek and contemplative, and did appreciate the masculine idea of violence or fighting. Christianity turned mankind away from the body, and what we need to do in modernity here is to recover the concern with the things of the body, with wealth and power, and war in defense of liberty. They of course were thinking of our foreign enemies and the suppression of crime, and there is some truth to these Machiavellian thoughts, if it does not quite come out the way the Machiavellians would have it.

   But it remained an enigma, why they were against St. Martin, or why they did not seem to notice what a blessing the idea of peaceful protest is, especially in domestic but also, when possible, in foreign matters.

   Our Declaration of Independence states that it is our right and duty to rebel against our government when a tyranny is established, or when government fails “to secure these rights.” This idea is behind the advocates of the second Amendment, who see the government seizure of arms, or gun control, as the first step toward tyranny. But armed rebellion in our age will fail, and again, would harm innocents. The officers who work a peaceable assembly, where citizens exercise their constitutional right to petition their government for the redress of grievances, have nothing to do with the billionairs who devised the heroin-oxy scandal or the corrupt politicians who cannot even hold office anymore without “campaign contributions,” which are indistinguishable from legal bribery. We cannot get at the invisible internet billionaires who work to stifle free speech even as I write. Nor can we approach the drug companies that persuaded the doctors to set aside medicine for the practice of legal drug dealing. And as has been said regarding the armed opposition to federal property seizures, they do not have a George Washington to lead a rebellion, and the far right in armed rebellion is in fact the straightest road to tyranny.

   What I am suggesting is that this idea be joined not with armed rebellion, but with peaceful protest. As Martin addressed injustice by taking blows like Jesus, without even striking back, so libertarian protest can proceed, and may only be able to proceed, by following Dr. King in non-violent protest.

   The true revolution is within, within ourselves and in the soul, not the body of our nation. We are sliding toward tyranny, but bloodshed will only make things worse. The way to address this slide is within: we just say no to the profiteering doctors, the corrupt internet companies and the corrupt politicians, beginning with us, the people, or from within. We will simply stand upright. Then we will simply sit down, and not participate, like Rosa Parks and the Birmingham bus boycott. We will step aside from the corrupt world, and only live in the just world. We will leave aside the internet, the cell phones now useless because they are so marketed and hacked, and perhaps, for women, even the public restrooms. Much of modern technology has become useless, because without integrity these things do more harm than good. Then, perhaps the voters get off their opium couch and elect some representatives who are capable of more than selling used cars and lining their own pockets to the great applause of the many, when they look up between their serious pursuits of porn, drugs and video games. We will simply not participate, and we will say why, and keep saying why, whether or our speech is blocked and anyone ever listens, or not.

Water from Mexico: Trounce Trump on Economics

Say, before we close up those drug tunnels between the U. S. and Mexico, lets consider bringing water up to the parched Western deserts and and the thirsty farmlands of Southern California. On the BBC, they had a show called the Y factor with Mike Williams, and they considered many interesting points regarding the relation between the U. S. and Mexico, and that show gave me this idea. The show was about a number of things, including the recent change in the attitude of the Mexicans toward the U. S. now that Donney Trumpet has taken the Republican party, or one half of the Republican party, into tyrannic ideology. Many guest workers are going home, workers brought here by U. S. companies because of the Union sponsored disparity in wages. The Mexicans earn about 1/10 or 1/9 the wages in Mexico as they earn here, while conversely the cost of labor in the U. S. is just that much higher. This leaves enough incentive for the companies to go to the trouble of getting around the union-corrupted U. S. wages, just as the companies like to do their manufacturing overseas.

This too raises the issue of the supposed strength of Donney Trumpette regarding economics. He is opposed to NAFTA, the treaty which supposedly would create that giant sucking sound of jobs going out of the U. S. The net job loss is one of those partial view or short term views that, when one ignores the rest of the big picture, makes one meanness or another appear to be a necessary measure. The net job gain of the economic boom caused by neighbors engaging in mutually beneficial trade outweighed the loss of jobs in the narrow view by about ten to one. I still do not know, though, why Obama’s policy of saving the Michigan auto industry worked, though I admit that it did. I’ll have to work on that one, as I seem to be caught in some narrower view myself.

Not only were corrupt and criminally negligent GM executives allowing the ignition switch scandal, but they twice got the trend wrong. First that they were making huge SUV’s when the gas price went high, the were outdone by the smaller foreign cars. Then, remember, they started making all these stupid little electric cars that no one wants except, again, for some non-economic, environmental ideology reason, and that too has been a dramatic failure. Sometimes one wonders if a stupid giant is not just big enough to fail. The cost is in the bazillions, which I could have saved them sitting in my shed and holding up my thumb, or rather liking my finger and holding it up to see which way is the blowing of the wind. But I still do not understand why the bailout worked, and I give Barack mystical credit for the move: I may not have done that, and then we would really hear the giant sucking sound of jobs going overseas, following the industries that employ them.

Here is another thing I do not understand about economics. Remember that old patriotic economics of “Buy American?” There was an incentive to buy American products for its own sake, rather than the good of the products, and there is something right and something wrong about that opinion. Similarly, as my boss in painting hauled his Honda power washer up onto a deck in Birmingham (I apologize for taking a job from a needy Mexican when I ought be teaching (and would be if only I were the right gender, maybe I should switch to fit the economy!)), I wondered about foreign products. If a Honda power washer makes a free American craftsman more efficient, what is the net impact on the ecomony? I’ll bet it is 10 to 1 again.

So, I think that for mystical reasons friendship is more productive than meanness, and Donney Trumpette will prove wrong by a factor of ten to one regarding the economy. His short sighted or narrow viewed xenophobic policies make friendly cooperation impossible, and the economic impact of the human factor is, well, difficult for the econo-heads to measure. Politics is more than economics, by a factor of at least ten to one, just as politics is more than mathematics. And that, Mr. Koch brothers and scamway brothers, is why you have just destroyed the Republican party for all your good intentions, just as the economic governor we elected here in Michigan, though not criminal, has caused the Flint water crisis, and will cost our State by a factor of one hundred to one. Credit, though, to Mr Koch for waking up almost in time to recover the Republican party, and cut the pseudo-republican new voters adrift. These are the tyrannic many that form like a precipitate from our national sins, ripe for a demogogue. I do not know if it is going to matter when Hillary asks Donney the tough questions the other weak republican candidates failed to ask, because these voters cannot think and will not listen. “Never Trump” is a new movement, but this means civil war, because they cannot see to leave the Republican name behind and form a third party. We invite them to join the CLC, but they are way too good-looking for that, and cannot admit that the law against marijuana is unconstitutional, but will hold to their irrational conservatism while trying to get their water from the Great Lakes instead of Mexico, till their Enbrige beloved pipeline combines with the roadsalt to destroy one third of the world’s fresh water. For political advantage hey will not speak against Sodomy, just don’t smoke weed.