Submitted By: Mike Spindell, Guest Blogger
When I awoke a short time ago my mind was in its usual morning fog that slowly dissipates as I go through my wake-up routine which includes laying out the 35 or so pills that I take to stay alive. That fog mentally is usually a jumble of wide ranging short thoughts that are later forgotten as the fog lifts after my first coffee. On the way to the bathroom for my morning ablutions I found myself thinking about the biggest news all week which had been the shutdown of the government and the crisis that ensued. Suddenly, as an idea arose that woke me from the fog. Political Theater, it is all political theater. The threatened shutdown by the Republican Congressman, led by John Boehner et. al. was merely a show whose purpose was to destroy the publicity that would have surrounded the inception of enrollment in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) dubbed by the conservative PR geniuses “Obamacare”. How obvious this was took my breath away and also gave me some chagrin that it took me so long to see this con job in the making, while I mulled over the ramifications of a government shutdown. As the President has said and as some Republican have opined the GOP’s great fear regarding “Obamacare” is that it will succeed. Since enrollment was scheduled to begin on October 1st, without the shutdown speculation dominating the news cycle there would have been much publicity on the beginning of people enrolling in the plan. There would have been actual discussion of the plan and not just the cacophony of misinformation deftly spread by well placed conservative rumor mongers, broadcast blaringly on FOX News and flacked by the innumerable leaders of the “Tea Party”. Our mainstream media would play their continuing game of false equivalence by blithely accepting all information as being equal and not bothering to supply context when lies are told in the service “informing” the public.
Instead we have a manufactured crisis that sends the ACA to the back pages of virtual news media and we have faux layoffs and service loss endlessly debated. Now in truth this thought make me even a little sad for those “Tea Party” congresspeople that haven’t been let in on the nature of the game, nor their role as pawns in the manipulations of some the wealthy elite in this country. As I explained awhile ago in these guest blogs: http://jonathanturley.org/2011/08/02/tea-party-and-the-myth-of-a-grassroots-movement/#more-38049 and http://jonathanturley.org/2013/02/16/tea-party-a-phony-movement-mantled-as-legitimate/ the so-called “Tea Party” is not a grassroots movement, but the creation of the Koch, via an organization known as “Freedomworks” which they fund. On the Bill Maher show last Friday night one of his panel guests was the President and CEO of “Freedomworks” Matt Kibbe. From my perspective he was debunked by the panel, particularly Congressman Alan Cranston. What caught my attention though, was that Kibbe was at one point railing about how big government was run by insider lobbyists. None on the panel, or Maher, were perceptive enough to call him out on this since he is the quintessential lobbyist for the Koch Brothers. To my mind there is nothing to see here folks, move along and allow yourselves to be distracted by yet another manufactured crisis, designed to prevent you from actually evaluating the health care plan that is now available to you without adequate health care, or who are paying far too much for what should be a basic right of citizenship, health care. The Affordable Care Act is not my ideal of what American health insurance should be about because I believe in the “single payer” system used in most civilized nations. However, it is far better than what we already have and because of that should be fairly evaluated by the public. Perhaps though that fair evaluation will never get a chance since there are those who consciously work to distract us through propaganda, mythology and political theater into supporting what is in our own worst interests.
After I had written and posted this to my surprise I discovered this article in The New York Times. “A Federal Budget Crisis Months in the Planning” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/us/a-federal-budget-crisis-months-in-the-planning.html?hp&_r=0 . A short excerpt:
“WASHINGTON — Shortly after President Obama started his second term, a loose-knit coalition of conservative activists led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III gathered in the capital to plot strategy. Their push to repeal Mr. Obama’s health care law was going nowhere, and they desperately needed a new plan.
Out of that session, held one morning in a location the members insist on keeping secret, came a little-noticed “blueprint to defunding Obamacare,” signed by Mr. Meese and leaders of more than three dozen conservative groups.
It articulated a take-no-prisoners legislative strategy that had long percolated in conservative circles: that Republicans could derail the health care overhaul if conservative lawmakers were willing to push fellow Republicans — including their cautious leaders — into cutting off financing for the entire federal government.”
Perhaps my subconscious was channelling, but it seems that my idea through the morning fog has some weight to it.
Submitted By: Mike Spindell, Guest Blogger
Gene H:
Maybe so.
Given enough time, a macaque may do precisely that, Bron.
So might a dolphin or an octopus.
Natural selection favors tool users and problem solvers.
Gene H:
Ok, fine. When that Macaque uses a robot to poke around Mars, get back to me.
He’s more of a monkey than he is a dolphin, Bron.
And some monkeys are indeed tool users. Macaques for example.
Gene H:
True, but a man is not a monkey.
RTC:
“The flip side of your position is that anyone who isn’t wealthy must be lazy, and therefore, undeserving.”
nope, that is not the flip side of my position. Nor have I ever said that, nor would I. I am not wealthy but work hard, I imagine you arent either. Most people work hard for what they have. They have a right to it too, we all have a right to the fruits of our labor.
Some of us do better than others, I know many people who do better than I do financially. Good for them.
Some of us are better athletes and become professionals, some of us are better looking and become movie stars, some of us are bettor actors and become movie stars. Some of us have better senses of smell and taste and become great chefs. We all have our talents.
What it seems to me, is that you and others would also cut the tongues and noses off of the great chefs so they can only cook as well as the rest of us. What great culinary delights would we miss out on if that were the case?
Bron,
Monkeys and apes are both of the order primate.
Gene H:
homo sapiens invented the transistor and by the way a monkey is not an ape.
http://www.diffen.com/difference/Ape_vs_Monkey
Family:
Ape – Hominoidea
Monkey – Cercopithecidae
many centuries ago we shared a common ancestor [apparently] with pongids but took our own evolutionary path.
So no, a monkey did not invent a transistor. Nor could a million monkeys or pongids in a million years in a room with circuit boards and wires, develop the prototype for a transistor.
tony c:
So some people earn their money in a bad way, I am not talking about them. I dont deny there are bad rich people, they are only human and have the same problems we all have.
Some are good and some are not.
Humans are primates. A monkey did invent the transistor, Bron. A largely hairless, semi-aquatic plains ape. Just because men build more sophisticated tools than our cousins (or other species for that matter) doesn’t mean that tool use is our sole domain or that it necessarily needs to be monitized to be of benefit.
tony c:
“Money is an abstraction of caloric energy expended. It has nothing to do with whether man owns his mind, or his body, or his effort. ”
Then let a monkey invent a transistor.
tony c:
I dont consider the children of the wealthy to be anything but members of the lucky sperm club.
But Conrad Hilton was something when he started out and so was JW Marriott and Hewlett and Packard and many other people who created great wealth with their creativity.
I am sorry if you dont understand that, it seems pretty clear to me. I was talking about creating wealth, not living off of it. But the money was made by an individual, it was his to do what he wanted and he gave it to his children. In many cases to their detriment but it was his money.
The Zuca Bag is an example of using your mind, of thinking to create wealth.
http://www.mominventors.com/2009/03/05/laura-udall-of-zuca/
Invented by a woman in San Jose, CA to help her children carry books to school.
This is why I love capitalism. The world is a little better off now because of this bag, no not in curing a disease or discovering some life extension system but in making people’s lives just a little bit easier and just a little bit happier.
It will also put people to work in many different industries, steel, aluminum mining, fabric production, wheels, welding rod makers, bolt makers, welders, machine makers [to produce the bag], truck manufacturers [to ship] and a host of other industries will benefit from the imagination of this woman.
She saw a need and filled it, she is serving humanity and will become rich because she has, indeed, built a better mouse-trap.
Bron says: [Money] is, however, a measure of how well you serve other people.
No it isn’t. Bernie Madoff stole tens of millions of dollars and lived like a king for 40 years. The white Southern Slave owners built mansions and plantations and lived like kings on the stolen labor of slaves. Gadhafi, Hussein, and a thousand dictators and Mafia bosses throughout history got rich and lived like kings on theft, murder, and enslavement.
Bron says: Unless you inherit money or win the lottery, the only way to make money is to work really hard and sacrifice those other things people take for granted like family and friends.
Add to that list that other people take for granted morality, empathy, honor, truthfulness, and making a fair deal even when your power or leverage would let you get away with coercion or what “other people” would consider theft, fraud or endangerment of life or health so you can save a buck.
The easiest way to make a buck is to steal it or con somebody out of it.
Bron says: I was told once by a wealthy man that the hardest part about doing good is that you have to do it every single day. He was right and it is a price few people are willing or able to pay.
Wealthy or not, he was wrong. Good deeds are NOT evaporating assets that require maintenance or upkeep to prevent them from becoming worthless. any good deed, including making somebody’s life better through a good product or service, is a standalone event that lasts forever.
I suppose the premier extreme example would a fireman that knowingly risks his life to save a child from a fire. There are easier and far less risky ways to make the same buck, the fireman is a hero despite being paid to take that risk. Once that deed is done it lasts forever, the fireman does not have to continue to be a fireman (and may even die in the rescue) to have done a good deed, and that deed is eternal, it changed the future for the better, no matter how tiny a change that may be in the grand scheme of the universe.
Certainly a simple product or transaction is not the same, but a fair and voluntary exchange can be similar in character. Even something as simple as a good movie, a director and actors can be one-shot wonders and retire for good, the entertainment value they created is not lessened because they did not (or could not) replicate their success.
Doing good is not something that has to be done every day. In business, I know from personal experience that once a “profit machine” is built it can run on its own for a very long time without anybody at the helm working very hard at all; people do their jobs, sales come in, work is executed and profit is the residue.
The Waltons are officially at the helm of Walmart, the vast majority of them acquire new vast wealth on a daily basis while doing literally nothing for it. Like Paris Hilton, who literally never had to do a day’s work in her life (and never will have to do one).
No wealthy person has to work to make Walmart generate profit (and do whatever good it may do by providing products), no wealthy person has to work to make Hilton Hotels generate a profit. Those are profit machines that operate themselves; neither the Waltons (most of them) or Paris know a damn thing about how to run the companies that are making them wealthy, and if they took over those companies would most likely destroy them in short order. (or more accurately, inadvertently provide easy opportunity for business predators to eat them alive).
Bron says: Many people vilify the rich because they are jealous and unwilling to pay the price of admission to that club.
No, we vilify them for ripping off their investors, defrauding and endangering their customers, stiffing their suppliers, endangering their workers and stealing their pensions, destroying the environment to make a buck, and joining sociopathic forces to corrupt our politics to make sure they do not get punished for any of that, or at worst, even when they kill citizens and employees in eminently preventable disasters in coal mines and oil fields and exploding factories, they corrupt the law to ensure their “punishment” is limited to fines and financial liability, not criminal liability.
Bron says: The sole cost of admission [to the millionaires club] is doing good every day and serving your fellow man better than the next guy.
The alternative cost of admission is being a criminal and caring nothing about the consequences, just long enough to be set for life. Then you can pretend you got there by doing good, and also steal the admiration and reverence of fools like you that mistake money for valor.
Bron quotes an idiot: “Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value.”
No it isn’t. Money is not a “principle.” Money, if you need a simplified metaphor, is the abstraction of caloric energy expended over time, thus it can represent food and labor, and other resources can be “priced” in terms of how much the owner will accept in “food and labor” for their property, or labor, or intellectual effort, and so on. Money is much like kilowatt hours, in engineering terms, although that is not a useful measure for this discussion.
Instead think of wealth as being measured in figurative “loaves of bread,” in fact this has been used academically to measure inflation and economic productivity of labor across thousands of years: How many hours must a typical man labor in trade for one pound of bread?
As such, money can be stolen, money can be earned, money can be traded for objects. Unlike loaves of bread, money can be stored indefinitely. Inflation, on the other hand, can be seen as the deterioration of a store of money, which means the money buys less labor than it did (or was expended to get it) when it was acquired.
Bron quotes the idiot: “Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think.”
No it isn’t. You (or the idiot you listen to) is conflating money with wealth; money as a concept is certainly due to man’s ability to think abstractly, plan for the future, and agree to abstract exchanges instead of barter (as many animals engage in frequently).
Wealth is not Money, Wealth is a meta-concept about money; it is the accumulation of a great deal of money that can be exchanged for a great deal of effort or goods.
Bron quotes an idiot: “Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort.”
No, it doesn’t. Slaves were bought and sold for money, certainly slave buyers and sellers did not consider the slaves as owners of their own mind and effort, or presume they had any inherent right to the same.
Muggers steal money by force, certainly they do not subscribe to the axiom above. This is a complete non sequitur. Money is an abstraction of caloric energy expended. It has nothing to do with whether man owns his mind, or his body, or his effort.
Bron quotes an idiot: “When people refuse to consider the source of wealth, what they refuse to recognize is the fact that wealth is the product of man’s intellect, of his creative ability, fully as much as is art, science, philosophy or any other human value.”
When people fail to appreciate what money actually is, they accidentally worship wealth as if the wealthy person contributed that value, when in fact they may have stolen it or acquired it by fraud and deception, or acquired it by unfair trade, or acquired it by exploitation, coercion, and taking unfair advantage of the existential desperation of others, or simply been lucky to be born on a gold mine (like Sam Walton’s kids or Paris Hilton, or to an extent Donald Trump, the real-life counterparts of the fictional Beverly Hillbillies).
I don’t know David. It seems to me like this weight loss program might be exploitive, considering the pressure many people are under to look thin and fit and the general ineffectiveness of nearly every diet fad. Coincidently, however, it sounds like this young Miss Dani just might have a life story compelling enough to sell millions of copies, if only she were to write her biography.
Bron sed: “At the end of the 19th century there was a saying, “rags to riches to rags in 3 generations.”
This kind of palliative, the Horatio Algiers story, came about as an attempt to sooth the unrest that was fomenting the growing populism that was taking root in politics. The truth is that poverty was widespread and generational for the vast majority of Americans at that time, with a severely divided class system, and all the benefits of government were going to the rich.
The flip side of your position is that anyone who isn’t wealthy must be lazy, and therefore, undeserving. That’s the meme behind efforts to cut the food stamp program, repeal Obamacare, and institute means testing for social security. Once it can be established that someone needs social security because they’re basically poor, they can be demonized the way welfare and food stamp recipients have so successfully been by the republicans.
Let me point out preemptively that Reagan’s “welfare queen” has never been found, because she never existed. And there’s no more truth behind the myth about all the lazy welfare recipients today who merely want “to take from the rich”; welfare, as Clinton declared, no longer exists as we knew it.
The drive to cut the food stamp program seeks to punish those who cannot afford to feed themselves. Republicans claim that food stamps reward those who don’t want to work, overlooking the fact that many of Walmart’s working poor require assistance to survive. The punitive intent of this effort can be seen in the fact that there’s no suggestion that the government cease the purchase of agricultural surpluses, which is a of price support program for Big Ag.
The ugly truth about economic conditions in this country is that people are working their butts off and getting nowhere and, often, falling further behind, through no fault of their own. Rags to riches stories, like the Forbes article DavidM linked to above about young Miss Dani, a homeless, drug-crazed hottie with a heart of gold and the pluck to pull herself back from the brink of perdition is just another piece of propaganda assuring the wealthy that everything’s ok because it’s still possible pull on those boot straps and raise yourself out of the mire. “Yes, folks, don’t worry about them, it’s still ‘Morning in America’. Just let it trickle down”
Incidentally, it’s interesting to note that you post a bunch of quotes (from Spencer?) to support your position. What, no original thoughts?
Bron sez: “It is why I am for government getting out of economics.”
*************************************
You do realize, of course, that economics is a branch of science which studies the description and analysis of production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
How would the monetary system, transportation system, communications and all the other things related to money, goods and services work if the government did not have economists on the job?
Do you just live your life day to day without some kind of forecasting your own future money management? If you wouldn’t think of not planning ahead, why not the government?
Bron,
This argument reminds me of a Twilight Zone episode where a guy got his wish to go back in time, so as to patent many inventions, then return to his current time so as to reap the benefits.
When “the guy” arrived at (in?) the past there was no one who could turn his technological ideas into products because either the basic technology didn’t exist in the past he was presently in, (and “the guy” had no idea how to make the basic materials for his “ideas”), or no one took his ideas seriously.
The assumption of knowledge = wealth is based on many things, Bron. Many which are disappearing before our eyes.
Bron,
Sure you are.
Thinking usually leads to knowledge, and both are dependent on cultural biases. Knowledge can lead to wealth, but it can also lead to many other things, (I’ll refer you to Davidm’s diatribes at this point).
Your precious quote — all alone in its own paragraph — specifically said that knowledge leads to wealth.
There are many steps needed to turn knowledge into wealth, Bron.
The first is defining what constitutes knowledge. As stated above this is culturally defined. As an example, would you trust a shaman with a diagnosis of your health? If that’s all you knew and your culture accepted this interpretation you would.
Then, to discuss your presumed knowledge = wealth connection within our own broad culture you are assuming an infrastructure, (both cultural and physical, e.g. law, roads, etc.), that enable the coining of knowledge into wealth.
The relationship between knowledge and wealth is not automatic, as your precious quote implies. It is reliant on the steady accumulation of societal gains, otherwise, where is your “market” for your “knowledge?”
gbk:
I am not spinning it, I am saying that if knowledge is a function of thought as you suggest, then wealth must also be a function of thought if it takes knowledge to become wealthy.
In any event most everything man does is a function of thought.
So no, I am not spinning anything.