tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38932695128113089952024-03-15T18:11:01.496-07:00Economic Revolution for the WorldAuntie Greedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06567258618457726501noreply@blogger.comBlogger21125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3893269512811308995.post-13732768932303019972024-01-24T18:37:00.000-08:002024-03-14T15:07:37.956-07:00a path toward Systemic Change<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">The Reverend Dr. King would have said something like: 'Oh, my friends, our aim must be not to defeat Mr. Bernard Arnault and his family, not to defeat Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, Larry Ellison or Elon Musk. Our aim must be to defeat the evil that’s in them [the evil that is in the system]. But our aim must be to win the friendship of Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, Larry Ellison and Elon Musk. We must come to the point of seeing that our ultimate aim is to live with all men as brothers and sisters under God, and not be their enemies'</span></span></p><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">In 1957, Dr. King laid out four lessons for overcoming oppression. <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/speeches/mlk_birth.html&source=gmail&ust=1706235661928000&usg=AOvVaw2eF8243vFXvtvy_L98ceNB" href="http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/speeches/mlk_birth.html" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://www.edchange.org/<wbr></wbr>multicultural/speeches/mlk_<wbr></wbr>birth.html</a> </span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">We need to apply those lessons in bringing about systemic change. We will not succeed if we simple-mindedly taxing the rich, nor by following the Democrats' formula, nor by defensively hiding from change like Conservatives!</span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">1. Let us overcome identity politics (also called partisan politics). In identity politics a win for the others is seen as a loss for me. Individual equity and reaching for individual potential should be universal aims, not equality among identity groups. We will never reach equality for all identity groups. Meanwhile, for a person to reach one's potential can be achieved, can be achieved each time a person reaches a personal goal and then looks to see what else one can accomplish. </span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">2. Corporations are not citizens, they are owned internationally. We do not allow foreign citizens to advertise and campaign on ballot measures and elections. Stop the corporations too. Drive out their money! Their money is directing our nation to due the bidding of corporate investors. Our governments, legislatures and agencies need to bound to the best interests of the citizens.</span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">3. An income cap at $15 million per person per year. With a 100% tax on all earnings after the first $15 million per year, we can change the incentives throughout the economy. No one will want to pay such a tax. What employers had ear-marked for excessive income can be kept by businesses. Then businesses can efficiently use that money in smart ways, smarter than governments can do with money. And if no one pays the tax on earnings above the income cap, then governments will not get those funds. </span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="color: #222222;">4. Human rights can be strengthened in a Civil Society where the exercise of Civil Liberties are encouraged. Thomas Jefferson was wrong to suggest "All . . . are endowed by their Creator with certain, inalienable rights . . . . " God did not give our rights during the lifetimes of Yosef (interpreter of dreams) or of Moses or of Jesus or of Mohammed or of Martin Luther. God did not change and God did not give out rights in the 1770s. People demanded respect from monarchies, and when citizens demonstrated they could be responsible when exercising their civil liberties, then human rights evolved. Those Rights evolved out of civil societies where civil liberties can be exercised. That is why human rights are in doubt in Myanmar, and Russia and Yemen and North Korea. God is not forsaking those societies. They have not achieved civility, so human rights are in doubt.</span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">WE NEED SYSTEMIC CHANGE like these principles would usher into our nations. Let us tear apart the dominate partisan politics that aim to advance their own parties more than advancing the best interests of their citizens, allow #RegulateGreed to redirect the economies, and #Aim4Equity, individual equity in all that our governments do for citizens. </span></div>Auntie Greedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06567258618457726501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3893269512811308995.post-17171701605228943232023-05-06T21:42:00.000-07:002024-03-14T16:32:35.431-07:00What are the orgins of Human Rights?<p> </p><p class="x_MsoNormal x_ContentPasted0" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="x_ContentPasted0" color="inherit" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span class="x_ContentPasted0" color="inherit" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span> </span></span>We should doubt the theology espoused by Thomas Jefferson. In the US Declaration of Independence, he wrote, “…all…are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” We can be critical of this assertion that rights are a gift of the Creator. </p><p class="x_MsoNormal x_ContentPasted0" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="x_ContentPasted0" color="inherit" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span class="x_ContentPasted0" color="inherit" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span> </span></span>God was not handing out such gifts, not before or after Yosef was first interpreting the dreams of Pharaoh, and especially not as Egypt brought nation after nation into slavery. God did not hand out such gifts as Moses led the Israelites out of bondage. The people of Jesus’ time knew little of the freedom of self expression, nor of freedom from fear and want. God did not hand out such gifts during the life time of Mohammad. Nor when 95 theses were nailed to a monastery door. Over all the ages, God has been a constant and has not changed. We need not believe Jefferson who, during the era of the Enlightenment, thought that human rights appeared from the hand of a changed God. </p><p class="x_MsoNormal x_ContentPasted0" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="x_ContentPasted0" color="inherit" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span class="x_ContentPasted0" color="inherit" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span> </span></span>And why would we reduce human rights to the status of mere gifts?? All of us have been through the practices of gift giving. When the wrapped package first appears, the recipient acts humble and shows some level of disbelief. The pretty wrapping is dispensed with and the shock and wonderful excitement and gratitude are expressed. Finally, the gift is laid aside, to be put away later on. When the gift is brought back out, the occasion is a special time, not “every day,” and the giver is praised again for the gift. We should not be treating human rights like we treat physical gifts we have received! Human rights are to be part of everyday life, are to be recognized with us at all times, they are something more than a gift. </p><p class="x_MsoNormal x_ContentPasted0" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="x_ContentPasted0" color="inherit" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span class="x_ContentPasted0" color="inherit" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span> </span></span>Around December of 1948, speaking about the adoption of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Hernán Santa Cruz of Chile, a member of the Declaration’s drafting sub-Committee, wrote: “…a consensus had been reached as to the supreme value of the human person, a value that did not originate in the decision of a worldly power, but rather in the fact of existing—which gave rise to the inalienable right to live free from want and oppression and to fully develop one’s personality.” </p><p class="x_MsoNormal x_ContentPasted0 x_elementToProof" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="x_ContentPasted0" color="inherit" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span class="x_ContentPasted0" color="inherit" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span> </span></span>From Santa Cruz’s grasp of the matter, rights come into existence simply when a person exists. Are human rights actually provided to every human?? Are human rights hanging in the air at all times, around every human? Let us ask the people of Myanmar in the year 2023. Or ask the people of Russia as they are expected to serve a war that does not benefit but a few Russians. Or check in with those fleeing violence and desperate want in Central American countries as they begin the arduous and unpredictable immigration to the north. Or look to those people living through the strife of Sudan and Ethiopia. Do any of those people see human rights hanging in the air to be enjoyed simply because they are human? Or has God forsaken those people, this omnipresent and omnipotent Creator?? <br /></p><p class="x_MsoNormal x_ContentPasted0 x_elementToProof" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="x_ContentPasted0" color="inherit" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span class="x_ContentPasted0" color="inherit" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span> </span></span>As gifts or as flowing from the very existence of humans, these both appear to fall short in the role of giving us an origin of human rights, and begs the question, “If we can not be sure of their origins, how can we be secure in protecting and advancing human rights?” </p><p class="x_MsoNormal x_ContentPasted0 x_elementToProof" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="x_ContentPasted0" color="inherit" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span class="x_ContentPasted0" color="inherit" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span> </span></span>From the history of the British Isles, I want to recall the importance of the Magna Carta. This is the start of "a worldly power" that eventually led to human rights. In effect, the Magna Carta was an effort by the noble families to pressure the British King to treat them with civility. Those noble families had suffered from whimsical and indifferent decisions from the King. In their Magna Carta, they demanded that the King stop mistreating them in that way. They were calling for a civil society between the royal family and all their noble families. In the course of their history, the House of Lords was created, in effect expanding the civil society on that exclusive level of community between ruler and nobles. Later a House of Commons was created, giving law-making abilities to a Parliament in British history, again advancing a civil society to even more of that island's population. </p><p class="x_MsoNormal x_ContentPasted0 x_elementToProof" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="x_ContentPasted0" color="inherit" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span class="x_ContentPasted0" color="inherit" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span> </span></span>When Jefferson and his committee drafted the US Declaration of Independence, their demands were actually the result of more than 12 years of efforts to have the mother country in the British Isles treat the colonists better, to treat them in a more civil manner. Since the King and the Parliament were unwilling to heed those requests, the representatives of 13 colonies declared their separation from the colonial power, so they could explore self-governance and the creation of their own civil society. </p><p class="x_MsoNormal x_ContentPasted0 x_elementToProof" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="x_ContentPasted0" color="inherit" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span class="x_ContentPasted0" color="inherit" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span> </span></span>Along with advancing the ideals of what a civil society could be, in each of these historic cases (Magna Carta, Parliament, US Declaration of Independence, UN Universals Declaration), those who demanded to be treated with civility also accepted some growing responsibilities. The responsibilities could be described along different dimensions. Through the Magna Carta, all those noble families promised each other that they would not abandon the principles they had set forth there. If some families had relinquished responsibilities, then the monarch might have moved back to their previous mistreatment of them all. By forming a Parliament, the Lords and the Commons agreed to rules of decorum and how they would stand behind the decisions they agreed to as a body. Building on independent decision making, the United States formed a brand new country that became a model for governments around the world, governments that wanted to aspire to self-governance and overthrow dictators and authoritarian forms of government. By taking up these never-ending responsibilities, those who were experimenting with self-governance, were exercising their civil liberties. </p><p class="x_MsoNormal x_ContentPasted0 x_elementToProof" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="x_ContentPasted0" color="inherit" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span class="x_ContentPasted0" color="inherit" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span> </span></span>The existence of a civil society and the ongoing exercise of civil liberties then appear to be the source of human rights. Nations and other regions of people who cannot depend upon civil society, most probably will not find human rights, nor can they predict when their rights will be reliable. Plus, if no-one is free to exercise their civil liberties, and take responsibility for maintaining the civil society, they too might question how solidified their human rights are. </p><p class="x_MsoNormal x_ContentPasted0 x_elementToProof" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="x_ContentPasted0" color="inherit" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span class="x_ContentPasted0" color="inherit" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span> </span></span>Meanwhile, if a civil society is strong, is reliably based on the institutions within it, and if people do routinely and intentionally exercise their civil liberties (unlike gifts you only bring out for special occasions), then the human rights can be offered to even those who can not exercise their civil liberties: infants, those with severe disabilities, new immigrants, people punished by living in cages, etc. </p><p class="x_MsoNormal x_ContentPasted0 x_elementToProof" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="x_ContentPasted0" color="inherit" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span class="x_ContentPasted0" color="inherit" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span> </span></span>From this understanding of human rights, we need to concentrate our self-governing efforts on strengthening and maintaining our civil societies, and we need to recognize the importance of exercising civil liberties and responsibilities. <br /></p>Auntie Greedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06567258618457726501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3893269512811308995.post-2676293280857137592023-03-29T22:11:00.009-07:002023-10-12T11:11:43.012-07:00Morality not Economics determines when exploitation happens<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua",serif;">In the
science of Economics, is there any way to measure the difference between
take-advantage and exploitation, a demarcation between the two, a way of
knowing when take-advantage turns into exploitation? I have never seen the
articles that mark where the difference is. Yet we know that exploitation goes
on in the economy. How do we know when it happens?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua",serif;">We can define
take-advantage. The entire market economy works on a basis of take-advantage.
When I go to the grocery, I could buy all the ingredients to bake my own loaves
of bread. Those loaves would probably cost me $5 each, with my own efforts, my
own kitchen, my own dishes to be washed, etc. They would never be as
consistently sliced and good as those available from the grocery bakery aisle.
The grocery sells loaves of bread for $3.50 each. So I take advantage of the
grocery every time I buy a loaf a bread. The loaf of bread that is worth $5 to
me sells for so much less than that. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua",serif;">In that same transaction, the grocery
takes advantage of me, the customer, and in a sense every customer. The grocery
buys loaves of bread from a bakery, possibly at $2.50 per loaf. So the grocery
is making a dollar of revenue greater than the cost of the loaf of bread. This is not profit, just revenue over cost. The grocery still needs to pay for rent,
equipment upkeep, employees and their benefits, utilities, and more to keep the
business going. Eventually, when all the sales of a week or year are measured
against all the costs, the grocery does need to record a profit. If there is no
profit, the grocery will go out of business. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The point is that throughout the market
economy, every transaction is possible when both the buyer and seller can
expect to take advantage and come away with an economic benefit. Think of it,
even the bakery takes advantage of every grocery because the loaves of bread
they sell might cost them $1.50 each to produce. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua",serif;">Even with
employment, the market economy works because both employers and employees take
advantage of each other, otherwise the relationships would not be formed. The
employees provide their labor, skills, connections, loyalty and so many other
possible qualities while creating value for their employers. They receive pay, but pay
that is less valuable than what the employer measures as each employee creates. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua",serif;">for each employee:<br />paycheck < value created<br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua",serif;">For the employers, each employee needs to create enough value to justify the
paychecks they receive. In fact, if an employer sees that an employee is not
pulling ones weight, not creating enough value, then the employer could be
expected to fire that employee. An employer can not expect to lose money from
an employee not contributing enough, not creating enough value for the business' success. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua",serif;">If the
economy were that simple, based only on take-advantage transactions, then we
would not expect to ever have recessions or busts or contagion bank failures?
Exploitation happens when a person takes home pay excessively greater than the
value one creates for their employer without any consequence for that
exploitation. The results from systems of exploitation are those economic
failures that are occurring so many times within one lifetime. Yet again, how
do we measure where the line is crossed between take-advantage and exploitation? </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua",serif;">Exploitation happens when:<br />individual paycheck >>> value created<br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua",serif;"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua",serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua",serif;">There are
extreme cases we could identify as exploitation. If those examples can lead
science and society to identify the systems of exploitation then ways could be
found to possibly reduce the number of economic disasters, or they could be less
severe, or . . . how much better?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua",serif;">Here is an
example. When all the parts are gathered at the start of a truck assembly line,
there are fantastic amounts of value in the parts themselves. All the metallic
alloys, all the tinted, tempered glass, the wiring and electronics, the different
forms of plastic, the leather and other materials are all valuable, each on
their own. Then think of the design and coordination required between all the
parts, think of the engineering value to make the precision parts that
integrate into so many systems in the truck. There is value in the designs, for
the interior of the truck cabin, for the exterior lines and aero dynamics, for
the powerful engine, for the dependability of the braking systems, etc. So
many people have contributed their employment in creating value in the safety
tests and in the inspections before the parts go into the assembly line.
Remember too that modern truck models have variations to make them more
attractive to different segments of the buying public. All of those and more considerations
go into the value of the parts before the assembly begins. The assembly process
itself can take as long as 25 hours for each truck, 25 hours of effort from all
the diverse, coordinated and highly skilled teams, robots, automated paint
sprayers, more inspectors, plus the utilities required by the assembly plant.
In the end, a new pickup truck could cost as much as $50,000 to simply roll off
the assembly line. (This is not a reference to the sales price, which would
include transportation costs for the final product, and mark ups by the manufacturer
and by the auto sales company.) The cost of producing the new pickup truck
stands for all the contributions from so many sources, laborers and history,
resulting in a $50,000 valuation.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua",serif;">What if there
was a person who expected to be paid more than the value of a new pickup truck
every working day of a year? Could any of those assembly team members, or anyone
who sees the true value of their combined efforts in making a truck, could any
such person stretch their imaginations to believe there is anywhere a person
who creates more than the value of a new pickup truck, creates more than
$50,000 for one’s employer and for the whole economy, every working day of the
year?? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The comparison is difficult to
grasp. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua",serif;">Could there be a situation where:<br />paycheck > $50,000 per day = value created by individual per day ??<br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua",serif;">Let’s be generous. Let’s imagine that a person works so hard and with
such talents for 10 hours in each of 300 days a year. That would be an
extraordinary, even superhuman effort! Such a person would get two weeks of
vacation and only one day off each weekend, but work all the other days. That
would allow for 300 days of work in a year. And if deserving of that level of
pay, that person would take home more than $15 million per year. Does that
level of pay then seem to fit the take-advantage level of market transactions?
Or does accepting pay greater than $15 million per year sound like
exploitation? Does such an paycheck mean that the individual is exploiting other employees, or exploiting earth systems, or exploiting the financial systems of banking or stock exchanges or some other community system?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua",serif;">In the
vocabulary of some Economic theories, people may earn wages or may earn rent.
In a sense, if a person invests in publicly traded stocks, and then sells the
stock for a profit, those Economic theories might label those profits as rent.
And if those profits are highly excessive, they would still be labeled as rent.
The definitions offered by this essay are to suggest that maybe there is
exploitation if pay rates and incomes for an individual actually total to more
than $15 million per year. <u>If the individual did not create value for the
economy on levels in excess of $15 million per year, then that person is not participating in the economy through
take-advantage transactions, but is exploiting some system or systems, and
expecting other people to create enough value to allow for excessive pay rates and not
allowing those who did create the value to be compensated for what they
created.</u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua",serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua",serif;">If that
conclusion is possible for profits from the sale of stocks, then similar
arguments can be made about salaries in excess of $15 million per year, and for
those who are paid by multiple companies to combine different sources of pay to
exceed $15 million per year. If an executive for one corporation receives more pay by sitting on three boards for other corporations, could there be
exploitation? With one set of knowledge, that person is assisting four
corporations to garner value from extensive numbers of employees who are not
being paid for all the value they create. Instead the value from underpaid
employees is synergized and siphoned up to be paid to board members and
executives and individual investors, adding to systems of exploitation.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua",serif;">To be more
specific, John Munkirs studied and wrote about the Interlocks between Western
corporations and industries that create organically operating Central Planning
Mechanisms. The Interlocks result from every corporate board needing members
who are aware of some facets of the suppliers and their plans, and of the
customers and their plans. So customer corporations and supplier corporations offer
the most strategically valuable members to have on a corporate board. Not only
do those corporations have relationships with each other, their very decision
models require that they interlock with each other, coordinate to ensure that
each corporation around those Interlocks is succeeding. If one corporation
starts to fail, it could mean an interruption in the supplies of other
corporations. So if there is exploitation occurring, the Interlocks work to
ensure all are creating exploitations and benefiting financially. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua",serif;">If some chain
of morality could start to question the exploitation, then could the interlocks
start a process where more and more corporations agree to work against exploitation?
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua",serif;">An
influential enough customer could possibly start this questioning of the
exploitation. The governments of self-governing societies could require a cap
on individual incomes from among those who sell to the governments. If defense
contractors, and utilities, and state-sanctioned monopolies, and medical
providers, and other industries that rely so heavily on government contracts
and purchases could be brought to accept individual income caps, then their
interlocks with other corporations and industries could reach some critical
mass and start to undermine the systems of exploitation. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua",serif;">This does not
suggest that corporate boards and executives give up any fiduciary responsibilities.
The corporations and industries should continue to compete in the market
economy and collect revenues greater than costs and demonstrate their capacity
for profits at the same level as before any individual income caps. But since
those corporations will not be paying their board members and executives and
individual investors as much money, the corporations will have to find other
uses for those funds. Simply put, those funds could be used to investigate
where exploitation had been occurring, leading to stopping most forms of and systems
of exploitation. Gender pay gaps could be ended. Greater safety, accident
prevention and advanced training could be sought. Innovations could be
developed. Those funds that use to line the pockets of top executives, or that
were destined for overseas tax havens, could be repurposed as the
corporations and business sense sees as profitable and beneficial to the
long-term life of their companies. The emphasis would not be so heavily focused
on short-term profits, but rather on long-term sustainability of the companies.
Those executives who hit the income ceiling have no incentive to exploit right
away in gaining another million dollars personally. They do have the incentives
to ensure that for years to come they reliably reach that earnings ceiling
every year. That in itself would be a systemic change to benefit individuals
who are no longer in a “rat race”, benefit their peers, companies and the
larger societies. Plus, we might see less volatility in the macro-economy. <o:p></o:p></span></p>Auntie Greedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06567258618457726501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3893269512811308995.post-35421479832767812132021-03-04T09:06:00.000-08:002021-03-04T09:06:45.293-08:00 A review of the book The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee<p> One of the mistakes that Karl Marx made was in predicting
that the proletariats would rise up to supersede the bourgeois. The
proletariats do not act as one body. Within the proletariat class, individuals
make their own choices and move on their own timing. Some individuals aim to
become part of the bourgeois. Some individuals have no ambitions about raising
their own status or raising up their cohort. The possibilities for individuals
are just so numerous and the class as a whole could never rise up to dominate the
employers, land-owners and business elite.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">McGhee does a splendid job of describing and narrating some
individual choices made by white citizens in the United States who continue to confound
analysts. She notes that white citizens do not seem to understand the economic
and social costs they are creating for themselves, hyper-exemplified by the
filling in of swimming pools when communities decided to prevent Blacks from
attending those community venues rather than allowing integration. McGhee has
realized the limits of research and numbers in convincing people to act in
their own best interests. The neo-classical economics view of rational decision
making to maximize utility has been dashed against American rocks.
Philosophers, writers and researchers need to pursue some other understanding
of American consumer/voter’s psychology. “…questions of belonging, competition,
and status {are} questions that in this country keep returning to race.” (page
9) Joe Bageant in his 2008 book <i><u>Deer Hunting with Jesus</u></i> and in
other essays added other insights on the ways so many white citizens make
purchase decisions, will campaign, rally and vote in ways that are
counter-productive to their own best interests. I can highly recommend Bageant
to McGhee! <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">So very similar to Michelle Alexander’s historical prespective
in <i><u>The New Jim Crow</u></i>, McGhee identifies that the plantation owners
and employers of the 1600s antagonized the distrust between racial cultures in
order to have those of European descent accept lower and lower pay, and to
marginalize those of African and of Native American descent into enslavement.
”Whatever form these rationales took, colonizers shaped their racist ideologies
to fit the bill. The motive was greed; cultivated hatred followed.” (p. 23) Surprisingly,
she also finds a contemporary of Cassius M. Clay (1810 – 1903) to argue against
the institution of slavery. While Clay is praised as an abolitionist, McGhee’s
example in Hinton Rowan Helper was an outspoke racist. In 1857 Helper noted in
his publications that the Northern states invested a multiple times more in
public goods and community services, enhancing the life of Northern citizens.
Comparing the number and character to those public goods for Southern states,
Helper blamed the institution of slavery for sapping the desire to improve
their communities with libraries, public schools, transportation improvements
and other ventures. Since the plantation owners had free labor through
enslavement, under-educated white citizens who did not participate civically,
and their only markets were international, the Southern decision makers and
politicians could ignore public improvement efforts. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>McGhee draws to a conclusion that the mindset
seems to have continued into the 21st century. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">As a counter point, in the 1850s, Cassius M. Clay (as
described by Ronald White, Jr. in the book <i><u>A. Lincoln: A Biography</u></i><u>)</u>
saw slavery as leading to a strange monopolization of valuable skills. When
Clay returned from New England where he amassed his own fortune, he saw in
Kentucky that the poor whites were being offered no marketable skills, the
Black enslaved people were becoming the master craftsmen in all arts, and the
plantation owners were ignorant of these ramifications from their dependency on
slavery. Clay then marshalled his academic skills and found that the US
Declaration of Independence needed to be revived and brought it’s democratic
principles to the forefront in his arguments for abolition. Clay’s thinking and
arguments impressed Abraham Lincoln so much that he too adopted the Declaration
of Independence as the base for his arguments against spreading slavery into
the territories west of the Mississippi River. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Unfortunately as her thesis question, McGhee might have
better pursued multiple causes and multiple answers instead of early on in her
book asking for one answer, “what is the stubborn belief that needs to shift
now for us to make progress against inequality?” (page 10) There is not only
one stubborn belief. According to the vote count for Trump in 2020, there may
be as many as 75 million stubborn beliefs to identify and rectify. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">She did find some value in the concept of a zero-sum game.
Yes, according to the evidence presented by<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Michelle Alexander and by McGhee, the early plantation owners did set up
a belief system that persists today. If one class of the population gains, then
another class is losing to the same degree. Academically and historically and
statistically we can dismiss such an absolute view of trade-offs. Yet many of
those white citizens can not dismiss it so easily. Many are still of the
mindset that status can be more important than financial well-being. Many of
McGhee’s stories demonstrate how whites will sacrifice financially/economically
in the hopes of maintaining their perceived status above the racial minorities.
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This zero-sum game means that if whites can not advance in
some way for themselves, they must at least hold back the progress for the
fuller society as a way of ensuring the racial minorities do not have greater
opportunities to advance. Plus, McGhee’s evidence can be explained by a
defensive nature to the actions of white individuals. More and more stubborn
beliefs can be found and compound the complexity of these racial issues that
McGhee uncovers throughout her book. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Meanwhile, I suggest that the Plutocrats and the
extravagantly rich in the United States are still framing political problems as
a zero-sum game to the conservative voters and to those economically struggling
white citizens. The owning class still benefits from having the racial classes
in clashing culturally, morally and physically against each other. Yet, that zero-sum
could be turned against the Plutocrats. Our GDP has grown by less than 6
percent per year since 1985. For the foreseeable future, the GDP can not grow
at any faster pace. There will be no exponential growth in the near-term. So
our economic situation is a zero-sum game. If the top 10% of households take
home 50% and then 52% and then 54% of the GDP in successive years, then the
bottom 90% of households must be getting lower and lower proportions year after
year. Based on such a seemingly-endless fear of losing out more and more every
year, then the 90% can concentrate on the singular topic of income inequality and
find ways to rectify that injustice.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Why is it an injustice?? According to McGhee and Michelle
Alexander, the inequality in the Americas was started by plantation owners
pitting racial groups against each other. Much of the racial strife we have
experienced can be traced back to that zero-sum game invented by the earliest
colonial Plutocrats. If we can place the racial groups on equal terms
economically and remove the perceived threat for the white citizens, then
possibly we can remove much of the future racial injustice. That is one facet
of the injustice. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Another facet of the injustice is that the richest people
can only claim such high incomes when they take advantage of and even exploit the
employees who actually create the values that are sold by the businesses. I
have identified this as Capillary Action in Micro-Economics. When a business
hires an employee, that employee must create value in order to keep the
employment. Specifically, each employee must over time create more value than the
dollar value of one’s paycheck. If a particular employee is creating less value
than one’s paycheck, then the business is losing money on that one employee.
Every business owner knows that such a scenario is financially unstainable and such
employees will need to be replaced or else the employer will go out of
business. When employees coordinate with each other and equipment and inputs to
create more value than the business’s costs, then the employer gets to
accumulate the extra value as profits to be reinvested in the business or to be
pocketed by the employer, owners and investors. That kind of advantage is
acceptable because in a sense employees are taking advantage of the owners and
investors who are facing the financial risks involved in running a business. The
exploitation comes when employees are mistreated and denied fair compensation
for the value they are creating, which leads to excessive earnings for owners
and investors. Society could define what is excessive and exploitative, and how
it rises to the level of injustice. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Eccentric incomes are also possible when customers and
natural resources and financial systems are exploited. The Plutocrats usually
are not being paid based on the value they create, but rather based upon their
capital investments leveraging opportunities for exploitation. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In light of such injustices, the moral fight can be to
#RegulateGreed with an income cap on all individuals. Or we might
#RegulateGreed by setting an enforceable ratio so that top earners in any
company can not earn more than say 300 times that of the lowest paid employee.
If the top earners want to take home more money, then they will have to raise
the pay of the lowest paid employees by the same proportion. Or other ideas can
surface to #RegulateGreed. These types of direct actions to combat income
inequality may eliminate the references to zero-sum games as employers and
employees see their combined success as tied to each individual’s success. <o:p></o:p></p>Auntie Greedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06567258618457726501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3893269512811308995.post-35500322704763024612020-09-18T15:01:00.015-07:002023-10-12T11:22:10.837-07:00Would You Allow someone at 34 to threaten a toddler named Civil Liberties?<p> </p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><u>Have you ever met the
toddler named Civil Liberties?<o:p></o:p></u></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">An essay in support
of Peter Joseph’s book <i>The New Human Rights Movement</i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">More than 1400 years before the time of Jesus of Nazareth,
Yosef was sold into slavery by his half-brothers. Yosef became part of the
house of Egypt’s Pharaoh where he earned a reputation for insight and for the
interpretation of dreams. The Pharaoh was so impressed with Yosef’s prediction
of seven years of bounty followed by seven years of plight, that Yosef was
placed into a seat of power to administer the programs and planning to get the
kingdom through those fourteen years. Yosef’s planning was an early example of
codifying the possessions of the Pharaoh, giving birth to Property Rights.
Property Rights were conceived long before then, whenever rich families or
individuals demonstrated their authority over possessions, land, stored foods,
livestock, women and the enslaved. By writing down those rules of acquisition,
parceling out and disposing of foods and other property, Yosef and the Pharaoh
advanced civilization within the Neolithic Era.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>The transition from nomadic lifestyles to agrarian, settled
communities is well described by Peter Joseph.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">Roughly 12,000 years ago the human
species transitioned from nomadic hunter-gather societies (tribes foraging and
hunting with no agricultural skills), to farm-cultivating, settled societies.
This transition has been termed the Neolithic Revolution and set the stage for
civilization as we know it today. This change marked a kind of technological
shift. Like the advent of the mechanization in the Industrial Revolution of the
late eighteenth century, the discovery of agriculture was also the application
of new economic technology. …When very large changes in applied technology
occur, human culture and behavior tend to change as well. Page 60.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Nomadic people did not have the energy nor the technology to
collect and carry with them great amounts of possessions. Due to this, theft
was nearly non-existent since those met on the trails likely did not have much
of value. If one nomadic clan earned a reputation for violence and theft, then
they would lose out when simple trades were needed or when asking for
assistance of any kind. Plus, societies were not highly stratified. There was
general equality in strength, in ability, in health, and in the toil of living.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">All of this changed through the Neolithic Revolution. Once
an established farmer gathered a store of foods and staked a claim to a piece
of productive land, then there was need to keep all trespassers away. When
difficult weather arrived, the well-stocked farmer could stave off starvation
and keep his family healthy only if outsiders were kept from his bounty. As families
of farmers settled nearby to each other, then could collaborate on keeping out
the nomadic clans, giving rise to skirmishes and battles and defensive
measures. Farmers could become prosperous to the point of hiring or enslaving
people who had no land or material possessions, having them work the fields for
the wealthy who had claimed Property Rights. They could show their status and
wealth in several ways, with clothing, shelter, and livestock. The wealthy
could find days for rest and for cultural advancements while inequality grew
between the haves and the have-nots.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Before Yosef’s time, there might have been rulers who had
written down their records of possessions, or ancient courts may have justified
the Property Rights of one person or group over the protests of others. Yosef’s
effort is an example of those codified Property Rights that can be linked into
the chain of events we call history. We can show a relationship between his
time and actions, and the coming centuries of practices that have established
Property Rights as a major concern of governments, courts, entrepreneurial
efforts and the organization of families. Yosef’s time was 3400 years ago and
Property Rights are now well established due to that longevity of historical
precedence.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Before 1776 A.D., in Europe and in the Americas, enthusiasm
was heightening around what we call the Age of Enlightenment. During the 1600’s
and 1700’s ideals began to be advanced such as individual liberty, social
progress, majority rule, identifying the unwavering rights of individuals protected
from majority rule, constitutional forms of self-government, and the separation
of church and state, along with the pre-eminent power of logic and science.
With this idealism as a catalyst, some of the richest people in the British
colonies of America staged an effort to gain independence from the most
powerful nation in the world, Great Britain. To be truthful, these rich, white
men were distraught over many practices of the government of King George III.
Many of those practices had been sapping the wealth away from these upper-class
colonists. Based on a number of previous colonial efforts to declare the
practices of King George to be illegitimate, a committee of five (Thomas
Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston and Roger Sherman)
drafted a Declaration of the thirteen united States of America which was
unanimously adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776 and
printed for distribution on the following day.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Careful reading of the document and acknowledging the
history of the delegates to this Continental Congress, we can understand that
much of the impetus for adopting this declaration was to better preserve the
Property Rights of these upper-class, white, male colonists. Meanwhile,
interlaced in this declaration is also the birth of Civil Liberties, the
codification of Human Rights for all the world’s advancement since we have all
been “created equal.”</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Along parallels, Property Rights and Civil Liberties were
conceived of over long histories. If not codified first by Yosef, then
certainly his example of Property Rights can be sited within the long chain of
history for our present societies. Property Rights are at least 34 centuries old.
Even if the Second Continental Congress did not mean to give such heightened
importance to Civil Liberties when they adopted their Declaration of
Independence, still less than 2 and a half centuries ago they gave birth to those ideals
that have grown to be in conflict with Property Rights. Compared to one and other,
Property Rights is like a 34 year-old adult lording over the toddler Civil
Liberties which is not yet two and a half years old.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><u>Why the name Civil
Liberties and not Human Rights?<o:p></o:p></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>Several components and meanings behind these words argue for
the adoption of Civil Liberties. To suggest that rights are available to
individual humans is to ignore the civil nature of our cultural and community
existence, and layered underneath that are the social requirements each person
has for being raised and for maturing into adulthood. If you could endure and
live as a hermit, then you might claim human rights, but then who would you
claim them from?? Property Rights could very easily be imagined as
individualistic. We can all recall stories of a family or a single person
living in such seclusion that they need not interact with others. They may live
in an underground shelter or cavern stocked up with plenty of food, or on a
piece of land that is heavily fortified and defended (envision moats or high
stone walls), or they could live on an island without contact from others.
Those Property Rights could be defended in those cases and we know they need
not depend on anyone else to create their materials for living nor worry about
how they dispose of and use up their material goods. We also know that their
opportunities for technological advancements, for inventing new uses and
expanding their appreciation of materials can be heavily restricted, because
they are not being civil towards others. This is why we latch onto the word
“civil” in place of “human.”</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>We recognize that each individual must learn from others as
to how to act and how to interact and how to grow in our own abilities and
understandings. That requires a civil setting. Our individual and communal advancement
require that we treat each other with civility. If we are warring against each
other in order to get ahead, or if constantly competing with each other, then
we will find ourselves diverging towards a hermit’s existence, only seeking
superiority for oneself through the down-casting of others and triumphs over
others. Those others will not support or under-gird our accomplishments, only
seek to move away from such champions.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>All of our lives are drastically eased due to the
technologies invented before our births. We have inherited highly complex
medical procedures and equipment, computer components, energy capabilities,
written languages and recorded knowledge and so much more! As Peter Joseph
spells out if not for the cumulative social and civic nature of our existence:</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“…each
human would need to reject the social reality and evolution of eco-scientific
development and, upon birth, begin to create the entire world’s industrial
network from scratch.” Page 270.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>We remain and are drawn to a civil way of life.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>In many respects, people expect “rights” to be given to
them. The U.S. Declaration of Independence memorably has the phrase, “…endowed
by their creator…” suggesting an implied gift from God. Too often people take
for granted any gifts that are given freely.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>The owners of property are likely to respect their
possessions by demonstrating a responsibility for upkeep and improvement and
for maintaining productivity. When exercising their Property Rights, farmers
will learn to not allow weeds and entanglements to grow reducing the health or
the yield of their crops. They will take responsibility for the maintenance of
their lands, killing the weeds early, treating the plants for blights and
fungus growths, irrigating their fields for reliable amounts of water, and
keeping animals and trespassers from eating their bounty before the proper
harvest times. Property Rights demand responsible actions be taken otherwise
the value of the property will deplete from neglect. Time and effort invested
can result in losses unless the property owner takes responsibility.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>How can Civil Rights imply responsibility upon the citizens?
By realizing that these are not gifts, but they are liberties. If citizens do
not exercise those liberties, if they do not add to them and concentrate their
efforts to ensure the healthy expression of those liberties, then those
liberties will die away from us. A famous quote comes from George Bernard Shaw:
“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>The “Free Press” is then not a free gift! Our Civil
Liberties as expressed in the availability of newspapers, magazine and
broadcast news implies that each citizen must responsibly and critically read
the news and reward those media sources that honestly and fully present the
most important information. Our religious choices and freedoms as Civil
Liberties will cease to exist if we do not attend our religious duties and
contribute to our houses of worship. Our freedom of speech will become
worthless as Civil Liberties if we ignore the opportunities to march in parades
and in demonstrations, and if we do not decry the invasion of foreign powers
into the electoral campaigns that are to be the exclusive realm of citizens.<sup>1</sup> Over and over again, our Civil Liberties
demand our attention, and we name this way to force the issue that every
citizen take responsibility in bringing life to these liberties. Citizens do
not set aside Civil Liberties, expecting to pick them up only once in a while.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><o:p> </o:p><u style="text-align: center;">Can a 34 year-old
threaten the viability of the toddler Civil Liberties?</u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Civil Liberties started out in a very odd way. With variations
in each of the states, and by the time of adopting the U.S. Constitution in
1789, white men who owned land were given the fullest Civil Liberties including
the right to vote in elections. How odd that the fullest Civil Liberties were
only provided to those who could claim Property Rights. The framers of the
young nation might have seen property as the proof necessary for distinguishing
responsible actors from others, while not owning property marked some people as
being less trustworthy.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The most essential part of “the American Experiment” was the
concept of self-governance. All previous forms of democratically organized
governments on this Earth had failed. All of the European dictatorships were
keenly aware in the 1700’s and 1800’s that success for the American Experiment
could threaten their long-standing forms of government, leading to revolts and
the toppling of royal families. What gave the concept of self-governance any
legitimacy was the power to vote. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black in 1964
expressed in a majority decision that: “No right is more precious in a free
country than that of having a voice in the election of those who make the laws
under which, as good citizens, we must live. Other rights, even the most basic,
are illusory if the right to vote is undermined.” (<i>Wesberry v. Sanders</i>) The founding fathers of the United States did
not trust the common man with the vote, restricting that power to land owners.
The slow pace of history took until 1856 (in time to elect the 15<sup>th</sup>
President) before every state allowed all white men to vote without requirements
for property ownership<sup>2, 3</sup>.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">By 1870, the U.S. Constitution was amended to not restrict
voting rights based on race, color, or previous conditions of servitude, at
least on paper. Several states did turn away from their obligations, violently
and systematically discriminating against Black citizens. Yet the conclusion of
the U.S. Civil War did testify to the rest of the world that self-governance
could survive after such a bloody challenge of secession. As early as 1804, colonies
in the Caribbean Sea and other areas due south of the United States began
claiming their independence from European rulers. Colonies in Africa, on Pacific
Islands, in the Middle East and Eastern Europe also fought for independence
based in some measure on the success of the U.S. Constitution. In time, all the
European countries too created their own models of democratically organized
governance owing to the example from the United States.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The United States was among some of the last nations to
outlaw slavery. That exceptional nation also was following behind many others
when recognizing the suffrage rights of women by the 1920 amendment to the
Constitution. This marks again the slow and sometimes unwilling rolling out of
Civil Liberties in the advanced countries to those who “are created equal.” In
the birthplace of Civil Liberties, 131 years passed between the Constitution of
the United States and the offering of full Civil Liberties to the fifty percent
of the adult population who are women. The suffragists and their supporters
struggled for over 70 years to win the right for women to vote in the United
States. Other struggles for Civil Liberties are continuing, notably for women
and for minority races, for people with disabilities, for people of unique skin
colors, for recent immigrants, for migrant workers, for the incarcerated and
for those released from prison and for children.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Civil Liberties have been spreading throughout the world. In
1948, due to lessons learned over the years of World War II, the United Nations
adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with 48 out of the 58 member
states voting in favor of the Declaration.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">The Declaration has served as the
foundation for two binding UN human rights covenants: the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and for the International Covenant on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The principles of the Declaration are
elaborated in international treaties such as the International Convention on
the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the International
Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, the United
Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the United Nations Convention
Against Torture, and many more. The Declaration continues to be widely cited by
governments, academics, advocates, and constitutional courts, and by
individuals who appeal to its principles for the protection of their recognized
human rights. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights)
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Since 1948, two other declarations of human rights have been
endorsed, addressing cultural needs of the Muslim religion, and another to
address the uniqueness of eastern Asian cultures and Pacific Islanders. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">For eighty years the offer of Civil Liberties has been
extended to most of the earth’s population yet protections are not too
extensive, especially when compared to the institutionalized protections for
Property Rights. In many countries, Property Rights have four types of
protections: incorporation and other business methods for reducing the risk of
losses, systems of insurance, police protections, and court precedence that
bases all remuneration on the transferring of property from the losing party to
the winning party. Over 3400 years, our societies on earth have evolved to find
ways to protect Property Rights, yet we have had less than 250 years to
understand Civil Liberties and how to ensure that every person’s rights are
guarded and safe. How will we come up with protections for Civil Liberties?</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Incorporation is a method for limiting the risk for the
owners to only the funds they have invested in the corporation. All their other
possessions would be protected from lawsuits. Even if the corporation acts
illegally or has liabilities for broken contracts, the owners can not be sued
for any greater amounts than their investments. In the cases where the
corporations financially succeed, then the owners can reap all the benefits,
enriching themselves without risking everything they owned. Plus, owners can
anonymously sell their shares and end their risk by a simple action. Can we
ever dream up such levels of protections for Life (breathing, reliable food
sources, shelter and healthcare), for Liberty and for the Pursuit of Happiness?</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Individuals may purchase insurance policies to reduce their
losses in case of natural disasters or crime or accidents or business decisions
that cause major losses. Property Rights can be protected by this second
method, yet we have not developed any similar protection for media outlets and
the “free press.” Nor an insurance policy in case your voice and guarantees to
speak your opinion are drown out by large corporations or diverted by social
media that operates for their own interest instead of the Constitution.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The systems of policing have been developed to ensure
Property Rights primarily. They will investigate civil crimes after they are
committed. For the protection of property though they will dress in riot gear
and form human barriers. To calm some racist ideas that immigrants and
non-whites being the sources of the worst crimes, police will harass immigrant
families and “stop and frisk” black men without probable cause, over-policing
urban areas while suburbs are allowed to manage themselves unless a citizen calls
in a complaint.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">From our modern frame of reference, the ownership of land is
quite understandable. Putting ourselves in to the mindsets of people 12,000
years ago, questions of land ownership would be very troublesome. Since
people’s lives are so short and the land is eternal, how could one person claim
that a piece of land was theirs and theirs exclusively? Slowly over generations
of fences, plowing, profiteering, and legal arguments, the idea that land is
available for ownership, for sale and for disposal has become the standard
view. The court systems of the Western societies and their former colonies have
been based on settling most every dispute over Property Rights, biasing their
jurisprudence in those terms. Those Property Rights are based on at least 3400
years of precedence. Slowly the courts have been transforming to consider Civil
Liberties in some ways, slowly building up that precedence beside the much
larger Property Rights.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">No such protections exist for Civil Liberties. The citizens
of Hong Kong have been watching their Civil Liberties evaporate since 1997.
They appear to have dwindling recourse as the authorities in Beijing expect to
express power over the choices available to the residents of Hong Kong. The
authorities in Beijing still wish to dominate based upon their Property Rights
and are stifling or even eliminating the Civil Liberties of their citizens to
ensure the Property Rights are fully expressed without distraction. People
within the spheres of influence of Russia know that poisonings and deportation
of opposition figures are the default methods for taking Civil Liberties away,
included in Belarus and the Ukraine, and even reaching into the United Kingdom.
Dictators and military rulers around the world are figuring out ways around the
declarations of human rights. Even in the United States, police activities and
federal troops threaten to end protests.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Coming up with ways to ensure the Civil Liberties will be a gigantic
task that may take generations. For now, we need to remain vigilant, aware that
the focus on Property Rights by some may override by the tides of this world,
as Civil Liberties ebb and flow in advancing our freedoms.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">END NOTES:</p><p class="MsoNormal">1. (here is one of my own pet peeves: corporations and
enterprises of business ARE NOT citizens!! They should not be contributing to
electoral campaigns!! Corporations should not be giving second and third and
multiple voices to the opinions of their board members nor executives. Those
board members and executives were given one voice only. Their corporations
should not be drowning out the voices of other citizens. If we allow
corporations to speak as if they were citizens, then true citizens are being
alienating from their Civil Liberties, being crowded out from being heard! This
is especially true for multi-national corporations and for those with stocks
owned by foreigners!!)</p><p class="MsoFooter"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoFooter">2. Stanley L. Engerman, University of Rochester and NBER;
Kenneth L. Sokoloff, University of California, Los Angeles and NBER (February
2005). "The Evolution of Suffrage Institutions in the New World"
(PDF): 16, 35. “By 1840, only three states retained a property qualification,
North Carolina (for some state-wide offices only), Rhode Island, and Virginia.
In 1856 North Carolina was the last state to end the practice.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoFooter">3. Janda, Kenneth; Berry, Jeffrey M.; Goldman, Jerry (2008).
The Challenge Of Democracy: Government In America (9. ed., updated ed.).
Houghton Mifflin. p. 207. ISBN 978-0-618-99094-8.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Auntie Greedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06567258618457726501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3893269512811308995.post-43540429551971000392017-10-29T10:46:00.001-07:002017-10-29T10:56:57.849-07:00Everything We Study Centers on Our Collective and Ever-Increasing HumanityOne in a Series of First Lectures<br />
<br />
As we open our books and our minds to a new class this semester, I want to set out a broad universal-view as your starting point, and as my starting point. Everything we will study in this time together will center upon our humanity. What is our humanity? What is the definition of "humanity?"<br />
<br />
Our humanity is the sum total of all of our emotions and how we express those emotions. By all of our emotions, I am not talking about you only assessing your own, and each of the others assessing only ones own emotions. No! Since we are social animals, because we are capable of empathy and sympathy and we can each extend our understanding to approach each other, and each others' understandings, and have some sense of what the other might be feeling, then to say "all of our emotions" means the sum total of all emotions of all human beings, of all human beings that have ever lived up to this point.<br />
<br />
Additionally our humanity includes every method we have for expressing and sharing our emotions. Our arts and our fashions can be seen as methods of expressing emotions. How we talk and interact with each other expresses emotions. Even our graphs and our physical sciences express emotions.<br />
<br />
So humanity as the sum total of all our emotions, encompassing all the emotions ever felt by any human being and every way we have of expressing and sharing those emotions. Our humanity includes thinking back to the experiences of families that lived in caves some 30,000 years before our time. Our humanity includes the stage performances of actors following some Utopian script of a playwright, or musical score and choreography. This includes real-life hatred and anger, bigotry, and radical racism, and faking an orgasm. The pride of a child showing a simple crayon drawing to grandparents is as much a part of our humanity, as the frustration of a person lost in the wilderness unable to catch fish for food.<br />
<br />
Suddenly, you and I can agree that this definition of humanity and this opening lecture can apply to any class that might be offered in an educational setting. The learning exercises in storytelling for literature and the study of language arts (foreign languages and grammar and public speaking, etc.) all are more topically interesting by playing out the human emotions. Each of us (learner and the learning leader) take the lessons more to heart if we see that we can share in the emotions, and we have relationships to the emotions being examined.<br />
<br />
For art classes and the study of music, the application has to be quite obvious: music is the expression of emotions, art evokes emotions.<br />
<br />
Further than that, history classes, social studies and political science can be re-defined and given an interesting light when we think of each case study as an expression of humanity: Nixon, Catherine the Great, Alexander the Great, King Tutankhamen, Joan of Arc, Confucius, Bolivar, etc.<br />
<br />
Physical sciences are also given a rejuvenating perspective when we recast them as expressions of emotion and as refining the methods for expressing those emotions. Geology is the study of minerals and rocks. We have advanced in our study of soils, ground nutrients, bedrock, volcanic formations, and the bonds between sediments over the centuries. At one time Western science divided all matter into earth, wind, fire and water. Today scientists are agreed on more sophisticated views of matter, and we pursue our interests in this field while following the leads of our emotions, following what inspires us to tease out one chain of questions, or another chain of questions, thoughts and excitements.<br />
<br />
Through math we can express our joys at doubling or tripling the recipe for a massive batch of chocolate-chip cookies. If that is not our emotion over mathematics, then possibly we find our challenges in trigonometry, or astro-physic applications of Euclidean models. Or some might feel amazement at y=mx+b formulas graphed upon a two-dimensional plane. Again these offer examples of how every study we may take can be sharpened and provided more meaning, become more meaningful when we identify our emotions entangled in the study, any study at all.Auntie Greedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06567258618457726501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3893269512811308995.post-2861037640953045472017-10-07T09:33:00.000-07:002017-10-18T14:01:33.813-07:00The Smoldering American Civil War© of the Twenty-First Century<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">INCOMPLETE DRAFT</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">The Smoldering American Civil War© of
the Twenty-First Century<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Under a pile of forest debris, a fire
can linger, quietly and unsuspectedly burning at a low intensity. Smoke might
be seen rising up from a few places and animals might avoid the hot spots in
the debris, yet no one would think to put out something that was not producing
flames. Now turning the analogy in our minds, do we really think a modern political
conflict can be “put out” like a campfire? Or does any such smoldering conflict have to burn
through its own historic route? Do the very elemental conflicts in human nature
and within our shared national values have to burn with all intensity before we
realize the epoch we live, and realize its meaning to our shared life as a
nation?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">The thrust of this article is that the
differences between American citizens is not stark, is not lining us up on warring
sides. The differences are not so volatile until the political gamesmanship of
the Congress, White House, lobbyists, state legislatures, issue-driven groups,
journalists and talk show hosts, etc. start jockeying for position, competing
to outdo each other over the issues of liberty and community life. When the rhetoric turns hostile under those considerations, and civilians beyond those halls of rhetoric begin internalizing the diametrically opposing views from the media, then we can see people picking up arms against each other. To avoid war, can we find some middle grounds for dialogue, for discussions, for education, for empathy with the fears expressed by others?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Calling our current epoch a Civil
War is a way of referring back to the Civil War of 1861 – 1865. That war had a
smoldering beginning too. The young nation was learning of its own prosperity
and its ability to self-govern without royalty or lords or despots. All of the European
principalities and colonists, Russia, the Turkish Empires were watching to see
if this American experiment would last or if it would collapse for some reason,
offer some proof this democracy was a flash-in-the-pan, destined to fail as it
had in the ancient Roman example. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">The young nation had serious setbacks
too!! The War of Independence had cost them dearly, in treasure, debt,
infrastructure, relations with the Mother Country England and lives, valuable
lives. Then the new nation tried out their Articles of Confederation (1777) which
failed miserably by 1787. A new constitutional convention did convene. They
wrote a Constitution based on a great deal of learning and the experiment of
the first ten years of running the nation. This Constitution spelled out civil
rights for citizens in the ten Bill of Rights, voting and balloting privileges
for land-owning men, a census for counting people and counting those enslaved
people who were calculated as only three-fifths of a person each. The
Constitution set up three branches of government to check and balance out the
power between each other. The document also noted that the powers not
specifically assigned to the federal government were to be allowed to the
states to perform and oversee. This was an experiment, The American Experiment,
and we have been living through that experiment ever since, still testing
individual liberty within collective progress. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Individually, each land-owning man
could feel like a king in these United States. Prosperity was wide spread
between the European descendants, and even for some of African descent. The
populace agreed in a feeling that their own generation and communities could have improved lifes, better than
the previous generation. The American model, the American dream was coming to
fruition for countless people, and quickly (relatively speaking). At another
time, in more discussions and another space, we should face the truth that much
of this prosperity was based on theft from the native people, and enslavement
of foreign people. To the privileged of European descent, the prosperity was
remarkable and reason enough to be proud and expectant for the economic
benefits to only grow. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">This was the belief for both sides of
the 1860’s Civil War. The Confederates and the Unionists both believed in the
prosperity they had earned and deserved. Their views on how that prosperity was
generated brought on the schism that led to bloodshed and war. The Unionists
held tight to the American experiment, that national strength and common bond
allowed for this prosperity in a market based economy. The Confederates agreed
to those ideas but they clung to slavery and their perception that very cheap
labour was absolutely necessary for the prosperity to continue at the current
pace of growth. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Cassius M. Clay, a scion from the same
family as the Senator Henry Clay, returned to his Kentucky home after growing
his own personal fortune in New England and foresaw a dystopia for the
enslaving Southern states of the US. The population of Kentucky and all states
south of it were being segmented into three extreme classes: the plantation
owners, the skilled craftsmen who were enslaved, and the white poor who were
relegated to overseeing the field workers or scraping by on subsistence farming
on the least productive land. In Clay’s future-vision, the white poor could not
expect to gain anything from education since they could never offer their
labour at a lower cost than the enslaved tradesmen. These tradesmen were
specializing in leather-work, animal husbandry and veterinary medicine, blacksmithing,
musical performances, culinary arts, and all the valuable economic pursuits.
All the highly skilled trades would surely be monopolized by the enslaved
people unless slavery came to an end. America could be imagined as departing
from a market-based economy and returning to serfdom with the vicious
attributes of slavery included. So Cassius M. Clay went to studying
and searching for the fundamental arguments to support the end of slavery. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">He had plenty of examples of moral
arguments towards that end in the work of the third political group in the
young country, the Abolitionists. To the Unionists and the Confederates, the
Abolitionists were a bother and were to be brushed aside. In a nation that
believed without remorse in the ideals of white supremacy, the Abolitionist
cause was without grounds and without a redeemable (little lone worthwhile) end-goal.
Without taking up their cause, and without endorsing their rationales, Clay
looked back to the "dead document" called the Declaration of Independence for his
legal arguments against slavery. He lectured around the country on the
fundamental truths of the Declaration and how its undergirding to our
Constitution and to all other laws of the nation and its states obligated us to see
all people born on this soil as free and equal by the endowment of their Creator.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">In July of 1854, Cassius M. Clay was
invited to speak at the Illinois State House. Once he was in town due to
growing tensions about his abolitionist messages, he was uninvited. He spoke
anyway, outdoors for more than two hours. Abraham Lincoln listened to his lecture
and was inspired by the legal arguments along with many other reasons for
absolutely opposing the spread of slavery. When Lincoln entered the 1858
campaign for the US Senate and opposed the “Little Giant” Senator Stephen
Douglas, he incorporated the arguments from Clay into that series of great
debates chronicled between the two candidates. Here are Lincoln’s words that
demonstrate his acceptance of white supremacy but also demonstrate his reasons
for halting the spread of slavery:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">I will say
here, while upon this subject, that I have no purpose, directly or indirectly,
to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I
believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. I
have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white
and the black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in
my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the
footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there
must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to
which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the
contrary, but I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the
world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the
Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree
with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects-certainly not in color,
perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the
bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my
equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man. (https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/debate1.htm) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">He did not see any way to end slavery, but instead wanted to stop it from spreading. In other speeches, Lincoln questioned
the basis for enslaving one group of people instead of enslaving another group
of people. Here Lincoln was also afraid of losing the American Experiment, afraid of departing from the market-based economy and returning to an economy based on
serfdom. If the nation were to adopt serfdom with the edge of violent slavery, then who would say what new
bases would be adopted by the plantation owners for enslaving more and more
groups of people?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">July 1, 1854:
Fragment on Slavery<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Lincoln often
encountered views supporting slavery. In this fragment, he countered the
arguments that slavery was justified based on color and intellect.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">“If A. can
prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B. -- why may not
B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A?-- You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is
color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By
this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin
than your own. You do not mean color exactly?--You mean the whites are
intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to
enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first
man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own. But, say you, it is a
question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right
to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the
right to enslave you.” (</span><a href="https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/slavery.htm"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/slavery.htm</span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">)
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">This was the call that forced the
Confederates to secede from the nation after the election of Abraham Lincoln to
be President of the United States two years after the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The differences
between the Unionists and the Confederates could have been glossed over except
for the formulation of political power in the US Congress and in the state
legislatures. The Confederate leaders were gaining absolute power in the
slave-owning states, and their representatives in Congress knew that to ensure
their political power, they had to work for new states (such as Kansas and
Nebraska and all the other territories to the west) to allow for enslavement. If
the growth of slavery were halted, then Confederates would become the minority
in the Congress and lose all future political battles. The Unionists of the
northern states were working against that expansion of slavery again largely
for their own political benefit, and Abraham Lincoln was the most articulate
politician on this cause. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">During his train trip in 1861 to Washington
DC for his first inauguration he committed himself to ensuring the sanctity of
slavery in the states where it was already practiced. Abiding to the interpreted
wishes of the Founding Fathers, slavery could not be allowed to spread beyond
those established states. He proposed an amendment to the Constitution enshrining slavery where it already existed. That could not have pleased the Confederates who were concerned about their political power in
the Congress. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Lincoln did slowly mature in his view
of African Americans as equal in every respect to white people. Unfortunately
the battles waged and people died in the bloodiest war for the United States
while Lincoln contemplated the questions and tried to figure out how to fight
this war. His Emancipation Proclamation was a strategic measure to allow for
the recruitment of black soldiers by the Union and to take away some economic
might from the rebel states. Not until Lincoln came into a friendship with
Frederick Douglass and drafted the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution did
he publicly demonstrate his realization of the equality between the races. Then he
maneuvered to pass that Amendment, finally fully adopting the moral code of the
Abolitionists. Did he force the nation into accepting equality between the
races, and this was well before the self-governing citizens were ready for that social change? Yes, most
definitely he and his followers did codify equality too early, too quickly, and
without the education necessary to fully accept the change. The
nation has continued to struggle in developing the morality and understanding
and values necessary to live out the ideals of equality between the races. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">That racial filament runs throughout the culture of the United States, even to the point where some individuals from minority ethnic groups carry and live out racist views about themselves and about others in their own castes. Today, I say the Smoldering Civil War is not about race, and is not about returning to any form of slavery. No. The dividing lines are splitting us between urban and rural (based on voting records). We are allowing greater riffs and gulfs to grow between Republicans and Democrats. Looking at the voting patterns between those counties throughout the states is what worries me. Our divisions may even be understood as lining up the sides between protecting conservative liberty and seeking segmented or fragmentary or factional progress.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Conservative liberty to my mind is a specific type of liberty, a specific view of the liberties that are under threat by the needs of urban life, requiring some historically unusual adaptations to allow for greater density of population. Unregulated gun ownership is highly problematic in a densely populated city, while having less companion concerns in a rural community. On another issue, community efforts which too often become government regulations to curb obesity, caloric intake (i.e. sugary sodas), diabetes, smoking related disease, diseases related to stress, and communicable diseases are of high importance in a city, but less so in rural areas where manual labor can be a daily expectation and open spaces do not result in smog and concentrations of toxins. Yet economic opportunities are disappearing in the rural areas, forcing many of the younger generations to seek livelihoods in the cities, and leaving the rural populations all the more worried about the threats to conservative liberties.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Meanwhile, progressives have uphill battles trying to win over some hoped-for-society that is potential but untried. If greater gender diversity leads to same-sex marriage, what are all the implications for society and future generations. No one can say for sure, and so conservative liberty often sets against that progress for a fragment of the population. With a one-payer system of healthcare, will the pattern for losing the numbers of doctors and medical facilities in the rural areas be stopped, or will rural populations be all the more forced to travel for medical attention? How can progressive advocates reassure those fighting for conservative liberty? The progressive causes can be named and supposed over several pages and hours of discussions. Many progressive campaigns seem to be unrelated to the others. They do not coordinate into any unifying grand vision. In the current political environment then we can understand generally why proponents of conservative liberty oppose the progress, hold fast to the status quo, and are suspect of anyone opposing their traditions and worldview. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">These generalized differences between conservative liberties and factional progress can be pushed to a warring cause when one party holds super majorities in state after state legislature, teamed up with politically aligned governors and court judges who champion the same causes as the elected officials. This sets us to the point of having a Smoldering Civil War. </span></div>
Auntie Greedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06567258618457726501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3893269512811308995.post-10854979763236100772016-10-13T14:33:00.000-07:002017-10-29T11:06:14.519-07:00The ideas of each of us can have life, once you write them out and share them with othersPlease accept this post in part as an attempt of inspiring myself, while also being a prompt from me to you, reader. We can each succeed in bringing new ideas to light and bringing them to life. That can't happen if we fervently say them out loud only to the mirror! We need to work through the details, say the words to listening ears and risk having them be cut apart by criticism, and maybe even parceled out (even stolen) for others to take only what are the truly valuable nuggets of our thoughts. <br />
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I have always told myself (and those around me) that we don't know what we think until we say it out loud. We really must do the work of expressing those fragments of thought and seeing how they are joined together by logic or by intuition or by emotion or by what ever other human expression. <br />
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I've been searching for a publishing company, yet have not finished any of my eleven chapters. I have outlined the entire book, but have yet to work out all those details. I wish I could find an illustrator, or really a graphic artist who would put comic book character and explanations to my ideas on income inequality. What good would it do to find a graphic artist when I don't have the text from which to draw the characters?? I need to do the hard work. <br />
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Re-writing the sections of each chapter could even be a useful exercise, I have told myself. Giving myself permission to express the ideas in a different way, coming at them from different angles could be liberating, invigorating. I have even been told that the best writers through away some 90 percent of what they write, are hyper critical of their own writing. I have not been that disciplined nor deliberate in letting go of something I have created. I too often think each is too precious. I hang onto the writing for too many wrong reasons, sentimental and self-aggrandizing reasons. By re-writing, I may find very good reason to pitch out one day's writing in favor of another day's advances. Let me get to it!<br />
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1. Profit motives are <u>THE</u> organizing principle for growing each of our households, enterprises/businesses and national economies if we are striving for and can measure greater value creation and continuous self-improvement each year. <br />
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2. Under the three options for modern economic life (owner, or employee, or dependent), great majorities of people must become dependent on keeping a job, being employees in this monetary-based world.<br />
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3. <u>THE POWER</u> of the market-based economy is found in the coincidental benefits possible for both buyer and seller, and in the mutual benefits for both employer and employee. The 2016 Nobel Prize in Economics celebrates the contracts between buyers and sellers, and the contracts between employers and employees.<br />
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4. While owners/employers take on the greater financial risks and other risks, they relieve the employees of some risks. Profits are among the benefits for employers, profits which can be traced back to taking economic advantage over the employees. The employees transform inputs into valuable and marketable goods and services. The employees must create more value than the value of their paychecks combined with the costs of the other inputs. That is a truism about profits. If there are no profits and no money to reinvest in the business, then the business must go bankrupt. Employers must take economic advantage over employees for the business to survive.<br />
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Now for two fronts of restraint on unlimited profits and unlimited income for employers/owners:<br />
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5. Individual rights and dignity of employees are not to be ignored because of profit opportunities (similar to court measures to prioritize minority rights before majority rule). Options other than ever-expanding profits are available to employers: expanded markets and expanded product lines, more training for employees, greater safety protocols, higher pay rates, etc.<br />
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6. Social norms and values restrain monetary profit opportunities within social systems created by culture, history and the consensus of communities.<br />
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7. Owners, corporations and the ultra-rich too often take unnecessary risks with employees, non-participants, and public resources. High monetary incentives and the associated social status with wealth become the focal objectives of business owners and the ultra-rich. Risks placed on others have been and continue to be ignored while seeking these high monetary incentives.<br />
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8. We live in a REGULATED-MARKET ECONOMY, and ours has never been a free market economy. Human values, morals, and culture have always regulated business agreements. <br />
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9. Society can regulate greed and regulate the associated risk-taking, especially once society members agree The Market does fail in regulating itself. <br />
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10. Human rights are unalienable rights. Our laws endow political organizations, corporations, labour unions, government bodies and other legal inventions with some abilities. Extending human rights to those legal inventions alienates those rights from the citizens. <br />
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11. Excessive income gaps create a second class of citizens. <br />
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Someone recently confronted me with the notion that writers work alone. During hours of writing sessions, work days are lonely. So I need to quit complaining about my solitude and get the work done, get the writing rolled out!Auntie Greedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06567258618457726501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3893269512811308995.post-11328434331621818622015-11-19T09:21:00.002-08:002015-11-19T09:21:40.941-08:00Three options to economic life<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The choices for living (in a world that will become market-based economies only) then have come down to three options. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Be unemployed and depend on others to provide for your material means of living (food, shelter, clothing, transportation, etc.). This choice is not helping to grow the economy, this is not demonstrating the self-improvement that has been our focus. (I remember one economics professor starting out a semester of study with the assumption that all people are lazy and helped his class to understanding the world based first on that assumption. The assumption is not true, and what that professor did not help us understand is that the lazy people are the least important to the workings of any economy. Discarding the assumption of that one professor,) The group of unemployed people in society does include the very young, adult students who are investing in skills, training and knowledge, and the elderly, and some adults who are (the very pinnacle measure of our humanity) disabled. ("If we want to discover the full potential in our humanity, we need to celebrate those heartbreaking strengths and those glorious disabilities we all have. It is our humanity and all the potential within it that makes us beautiful." -- Aimee Mullins) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The other two choices ARE expressions of financial self-improvement and I would even term as seeking "financial livelihood." </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Second you might be employed and manage to spend, save and invest the income that is earned from an employer or several employers. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The third choice is for you to be a business owner, an employer. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> What about employment by the government? How is this different from employment by a business owner and why can't we all just be employed by the government, letting the government be the business owner? The difficulty in depending upon government employment too heavily is that government agencies do not operate on a profit basis as a decision-making mechanism like businesses do. This same reasoning can be applied to non-profit employers. Let's demonstrate with a long example. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> (Hopefully readers will not become confused if outside of this book pundits use the term Mixed Economy as a substitute for a Regulated Market Economy. The substitution does not work. A mixed economy depends upon the government to produce some sizable proportion of the country's gross domestic product. Well in that case, most every economy is a Mixed Economy since governments produce the education, roads, military training, and so many other portions of the economic whole. The emphasis here is to point out that by "Regulated Market Economy" we are dismissing the misleading phrase of Free-Market Economy since no market organizes freely, free of regulation or free of societal restraints.) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> In a business, the owner is managing the capital, the loans, the costs of maintaining those two, the labour costs, the input costs and quality of goods and services, and is trying to squeeze profits out of every sale. The mathematics behind each of those costs and any revenue streams are all comparable (in dollars or Euros or Yen or other national currencies) and all directly affect each other by the measure of the currency. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> How is this different in a government agency? First of all, if government agencies generate surplus revenue (or profit) for one year's budget, then their funding is cut with the expectation that they will be able to perform like that in the next budget year. That is wrong. Government agencies are not organized to generate "profits" or excess revenues. If there are excess revenues, then it's as much of a fluke as any roll of the dice. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Secondly, the managers of a government agency have not been trained and conditioned to notice how extra revenues are being generated, so they don't specifically know how to repeat those steps that led to any excess revenue. In fact those managers will see any reduction in funding as a demerit, or a disciplinary action. This will be a dis-incentive for them trying to repeat the effort at generating excess revenue. Along this same line, the agency managers do not have any personal financial incentive in generating excess revenue -- they do not personally get bonuses for easing the burden on the tax payers. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> By those two reasons, we see how a business operates with an advantage by using the currency and the mathematics possible through the currency to gauge costs, revenues, profits, the success of any planning, to look into future months and deal with shortages, to see peaks and valleys in the seasons of their industries and of their communities. Using the flow of currency works dramatically well for the business owner. Government agencies and their managers do not have the same tools or insights. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Why can't that principle be applied to government agencies or to non-profit organizations? The first answer is that those agencies and organizations often times have to respond in reverse to the business cycle. So while a business owner may forecast a slow season based on the mathematics behind the money flow (laying off employees, cutting the size of orders, not purchasing replacement equipment, etc.), government agencies may have to increase their expenditures at that very time because of greater unemployment, greater demand for low-cost housing, bread-winners experiencing greater difficulty in feeding their families, or when a natural disaster disrupts the smooth working of the market economy. Then when a community is more self-sustaining based on the general health of the market economy, the government agencies need to remain vigilant and those managers need to fight to keep their budgets at levels high enough to keep the agencies intact even though demand may be low for their services. This type of management is counter-intuitive to the management of a financially based and profit-seeking business. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Non-profit organizations can base many of their decisions on cash flows. At the same time they need to base their decisions on the missions and objectives and goals set out for them to accomplish, which justify their operation as non-profit organizations. A church may offer free cooked meals to groups of homeless or disadvantaged people. They are not looking to profit from this, but they do need to manage their costs, predict how much food to prepare, not be too wasteful with left over foods. Funds still need to be collected to pay for all those costs. A church could be collecting excess food from restaurants and grocery stores, and could be collecting cash donations from members and finding other sources of funding. Instead of delivering cash dividends as a business would, such a church needs to be sure they communicate the success of their programs to all those who generously give to the non-profit mission. Still those "returns on investments" or returns on donations are very difficult to measure, unlike the ease of measuring cash flow, costs and revenues, profits and capital values. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> In spite of these complications and the differences between business employers, government employers, and non-profit employers, a principle of </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Capillary Action </span></span><a href="http://bit.ly/1SI4HIj" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">http://bit.ly/1SI4HIj</a> <span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">must still be recognized</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">. On the micro-economic level, each employee must be creating value for the employer, value that is greater than the paycheck which the employee receives. The justification becomes more complicated and sometimes more difficult to gauge for the government agency and for the non-profit organization. They cannot judge the value of the employee's contribution solely on monetary values. In fact, businesses should not judge solely on monetary values either. For instance, a business does need to build loyalty and trust with its customers, which is difficult to measure in monetary amounts, but employees do create that loyalty and trust in their relationships with customers. Employees do create some value that is beyond monetary measurement. Business managers and owners can base their decisions more weightily on monetary values since the cash flows are involved in every facet of a business. Government and non-profit employees will be evaluated on more loosely defined values (expressed in mission statements and funding directives) they create beyond any savings of costs or generation of revenues. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> For an economy to be stable and healthy, we might wonder what proportion of people can be employed by business owners and how many could be business owners. And is it possible to have too many business owners and not enough employees? If everyone decides to own a business and not be dependent on an employer, what would the economy look like, would if function properly? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> According to experts including master restaurateur Gordon Ramsey and small business advisers Second Wind Consulting, your business should be all right if you are spending approximately one-third of your gross income on payroll. Spending more means you're not making enough profit, or unable to make investments to support the business. Spending less means you might lose your best employees because you're paying them too little. . . . </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Those numbers work well for businesses that manufacture a product. However, you can afford a higher percentage for payroll if you run a service business. Service businesses don't have materials costs, and thus have more room to pay their staff -- who are essentially their product. Even in service businesses, Second Wind Consulting recommends keeping payroll below 50 percent. (Wayne, Jake, of Demand Media, http://smallbusiness.chron.com/percentage-payroll-vs-income-small-business-13026.html) </span></h4>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Since businesses need employees and their labour to create value, then some people must be convinced to remain as employees and depend on the income earned from employment. Within businesses, employees are necessary. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Employees do become dependent on their paychecks and dependent on their roles within businesses, under the management of owners. In a market-based economy, financial livelihood is possible from ownership (which not everyone can have) and from employment. Considering Capillary Action, if value is flowing up hill to the owners through the work efforts of the employees, then there is a clear possibility of taking excessive financial advantage over the employees. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Changing jobs is not a process that can be taken without a great deal of planning and considerations. As an employee, a person has a certain skill set that is valuable and employable, but often not quickly transferred to another employer nor to another industry. So while there may be pay and other incentives attracting an employee to keep a job, there are also heavy potential costs to leaving a place of employment to seek other opportunities. Employees can not specify one point at which a current job will be abandoned. More reasonably, they have a range of issues to consider before looking for and applying for a job with a different employer. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Secondly, an employee is not fully informed about how an employer is taking advantage. A group of coal miners may be very happy as a group when they are kept ignorant of the level of income and life styles outside of their "company town." Meanwhile the coal company executives could be living excessively lavish lifestyles based on the value created by the coal miners. Those company executives will want to keep the employees ignorant of the differences in their lifestyles. A company executive may even believe that one deserves the better pay and lifestyle given ones investment in education and social graces and tough negotiating skills. This is a complication. Once the miners learn of the inequities between the levels of pay and living standards, they as a group could organize and demand better pay, and demand that their lives not depend solely on the coal company. That history offers a great many trying lessons. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> So far in this economic treatise, I have dealt only with employment, labour and management. Much of economics examines the role of capital too and its level of earnings. Investors and silent partners, owners of land and wealthy individuals who lend money to a business but take no role in managing the business practices, are they "owners" or are they "dependents" under this model? Precision in naming the distinctions can be difficult. If a person offers capital until such time as some level of returns has been reached, then the capital is withdrawn, then that person is acting as a dependent. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> (This does not speak to the role of any lending or investing business such as a bank. Those businesses are acting in far more complicated ways. We are speaking about the actions of individuals, basing our model on the actions of individuals. i.e. The committee did not act, rather individual members within the committee voted and their majority rule placed some processes into action by agents, individuals, who agreed to carry out the directives of the group.) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> In opposite extreme to these dependent capitalists, if an investor or lender places pressure upon business managers for the business to emphasize some value(s) other than earning profits, then that capitalist may be seen as acting an employer. An involved investor can be seen managing some resources and directing the actions of employees to achieve something other than simple profits, or to achieve profits by a particular expression of personal character or culturally shared values.</span>Auntie Greedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06567258618457726501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3893269512811308995.post-6770860935861782732015-01-01T22:06:00.000-08:002015-01-03T07:53:04.007-08:00spelling out my bias for Stiglitz’s prefaceStiglitz’s preface does not bode well for his 2012 book “The Price of Equality” to accomplish very much, nor to open up new discussions, nor to impress enough decision makers about the value of his work. In the preface, he points to a downward spiral of inequality corrupting the political and business processes of a country. This corruption leads to less efficiency for the markets and less stability for the markets. With markets being less efficient and less stable then there is growing inequality and then more corruption. I want to see how Stiglitz develops this theory, and what evidence he can offer to convince his readers. But then for the rest of the preface, he seems to be whining, “It’s unfair, it’s unfair, it’s unfair, and it’s unfair,” like a second-grader. And then I saw him slip in the idea of government redistribution of wealth. <br />
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Life is unfair, and if he expects to undo that reality, then I am biased against his book and I need to deal with my bias against him before continuing the reading. Holding on to my bias is not going to allow me to read and best understand what he does have to offer. I will write out this essay so that I can work out my bias, and then maybe I will be able to read and better appreciate what his book has to offer.<br />
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And get off the idea of government redistribution of wealth!!! Before government can lay their hands on wealth, capital, assets, or possessions, they have to offer due process. Through due process a government can claim imminent domain, or public goods, or “the needs of the many out weigh the needs of the few or the one.” (Star Trek reference there, and I think Gene Roddenberry had a beautiful vision for a future economic system.) Wealth should be out of the reach of the government. Income meanwhile is within reach, through monitoring and through taxation (payroll taxes apply with every paycheck and April 15 is coming). But wait, the government can not know what’s best for the redistribution of the income. We cannot trust a corruptible government to best decide what to do with one person’s income in assigning it to other people!! If we are striving for efficient markets, then what about allowing the markets to decide about the redistribution of income?? (Specifics on how can come in a bit.)<br />
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First we much realize that all questions of income and markets and economics are rooted in micro-economic questions. Let’s toss out Stiglitz’s downward spiral and replace it with the micro-economic story. Individuals are the only ones who act within an economic system. Maybe a statistician or scientist can spot a trend based on watching and measuring the actions of many individuals, but you can realize that the individuals act. Within a corporation, individuals act to create the value that is marketed and sold to individual customers. Within the stock market, individuals write the code for the computerized buying programs and then individuals decide the prices that will trigger bids to buy and to sell. Individuals in representative bodies and in executive offices decide to lead on a legislative initiative, or to vote one way or the other. All those individual actions accumulate together to play out the economic system. This is micro-economic actions playing out to cause macro-economic trends and realities. <br />
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Individuals will act based upon perceived incentives which should pay off compared to risking some investments of time, labour, skill, strategy, reputation, weighed against other opportunities and other dimensions of a decision to act. If the incentives can be increased for growing numbers of people, then more might risk starting their own businesses, more might risk an embarrassment in front of a supervisor and a work team to offer a revolutionary production method, more might risk investing in a new home, real estate or new vehicles and equipment. If more incentives can be offered to more individuals, then the economy can grow based on what opportunities the individuals seek (not based on the government’s corrupted notions). From this micro-economic view, the growth of the economy is based on individuals perceiving and acting upon greater incentives which drives those prospering individuals to seek out even more opportunities and understanding the incentives that keep compelling them to make economic investments and striving for greater efficiencies and stability and to all the more appreciate predictable markets, those being the markets that do not fail so often and probably that have less volatile business cycles. <br />
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Of course when we say incentives, we mean cash. We mean getting more money out in front of more people. We mean offering them more income, that is what is meant by incentives. (Along with prestige, and individual autonomy, and self actualization, but economists don’t do well at measuring those things. We measure money.) <br />
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(Are we a bit further on yet? Can we now turn to the specifics of how income can be redistributed if not by government?) <br />
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What’s needed then is some extra incentives, but where can they come from?? They will not magically appear.<br />
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If inequality is an unwanted outcome, is there a way to lessen the inequality as a method for increasing the incentives for more people? Is there a way to lessen the inequality as a method for increasing the incentives for 99 percent of the people? Income can be taxed. But we don’t want the income to go to the corruptible government as tax revenue. What if instead of a tax, we capped all individuals so that no one in the whole world could earn more than 10 million Euros in a year, or no more than $15 million in a year, or the equivalent per country in a year (remember countries wish to keep their sovereignty)? What could corporations do with those revenues that no longer can be offered to their executives, their superstar employees (a term from Freeland‘s book “Plutocrats”), to their board members, to their consultants, nor to their richest investors? How would corporations and businesses redistribute those revenues? <br />
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Now how would a cap work?? Well, yeah, . . . let’s call it a tax. After earning the income up to that annual cap within a year, all further individual income will be taxed at 100 percent. This is a tax that the government does not want to collect -- how awful it would be to allow the government to collect that money!!!! And it is a tax that no millionaire would want to approach or to deal with! After all, not only is the millionaire loosing all of that extra income, but one would still have to deal with the costs of accounting for the money earned over the cap. So the tax rate really would feel like 102 percent or 105 percent when you figure in the accounting costs. Then there would be the embarrassment among ones peers should they find out you tried to earn money over the annual cap (which they are all denied) and then got busted by the feds!! Yes, we’ll call it a tax that is never intended to be collected. This will be a 100 percent tax on all income over the annual cap. <br />
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What could corporations do with those revenues that no longer can be offered to their executives, their superstar employees, to their board members, to their consultants, nor to their richest investors? How would corporations and businesses redistribute those revenues? Would corporations and their markets find some efficient means for steering funds toward more research and development? Efficient means for raising the pay of deserving employees who are not near the annual cap? Efficient means for investing in equipment, real estate and manufacturing opportunities? Efficient means for green and sustainable developments? Efficient means for greater training, education, workplace safety? More creative ideas on serving customers, earning greater loyalty and reducing the risks to the lives of customers? <br />
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I believe in the markets, and in people’s abilities to recognize economic opportunities and incentives. Things would still be unfair with an income cap in place, would still be unfair regardless of how society evolves (even if guided by Roddenberry himself). But I do want to understand the price of inequality in economic systems, and I hope Stiglitz can help open my eyes. Auntie Greedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06567258618457726501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3893269512811308995.post-55946979263017888212014-10-03T07:25:00.001-07:002014-10-03T07:25:36.844-07:00Summarizing Two Actions Proposed after all the preliminary truths<div>
Trevor, Brian and Jordan, (who commented on http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/12/05/u-s-income-inequality-on-rise-for-decades-is-now-highest-since-1928/?moderated#comment-546050) </div>
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<div>
I agree completely!! Corporations are non-citizens and should not be influencing ballot measures or candidate campaigns at all. We already rule out any influence from Japanese citizens, or German citizens. Corporate stock can be owned by anyone around the globe, and thus corporations have interests that conflict with our national interests. Restore the privileges of citizenship to the citizens exclusively (see the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, and my arguments about how courts have been alienating citizens from their rights and privileges)!! And after all corporations are merely legal inventions -- why should they be represented in any manner similar to the representation of citizens??</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
Following Trevor's second point, the circumstances from Ferguson (and so many other communities) demonstrate how people are not represented adequately in our Republic! We need to get more people to be active citizens through voting and through constant conversations with their representatives. </div>
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<div>
Similar to Trevor's second point, we need to be sure there are enough incentives for all people to be community involved and to seek out adequate income. Knowing that you own part of this country will make you more interested in what is important to keep the country on the right track.</div>
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My most striking proposal (I suspect this will take 30 years to happen) is to have an income cap. If the top earning people are taxed at 100% for every dollar they earn after the first $15 million in a year, then they will walk away from the table after that ceiling is reached. Then the market systems (not governments) can help to redistribute (not the dollars but) those financial incentives to larger and larger groups of people. Plus, corporations (not allowed to have their finances prying into political balloting and not overpaying their top executives, managers and investors) will have to find efficient ways to spend their money (R&D, equipment investments, greater workplace safety, higher wages for employees, greater quality of products) and/or lower some prices in the market place. Yes, the market mechanisms can redistribute all this without the government trying to decide IF we regulate the greed. As a bonus, if we regulate the greed with an income cap, then a lot of other minor regulations can be eliminated -- those regulations that are merely nibbling at these problems of income inequality. </div>
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I'd like to stay in touch with people of your thinking!!</div>
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AuntieGreed@gmail.com</div>
Auntie Greedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06567258618457726501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3893269512811308995.post-11022828051940271202014-09-05T10:43:00.003-07:002014-09-05T10:43:53.270-07:00Three arguments against corporate involvement in citizen ballots and campaign funding <div class="paragraph" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="paragraph" paraeid="{94699dba-6cfa-46bb-8668-20e72365e94f}{157}" paraid="894797118" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span xml:lang="EN-US"><span xml:lang="EN-US"><span style="color: #222222;">A</span> complete</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">political </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">restriction o</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">n corporations </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">needs a bit more discussion</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">. Corporate laws</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">as far back at the 1700's </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">originally </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">were</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">written to allow people
to take risks that they personally and professionally could not take</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> as individuals</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">. So while a partner in a
firm could not take</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> the </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">ris</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">k</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">s</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">financing </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">of </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">spice trade with India</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">, a corporation could</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">take th</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">ose</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> risk</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">s</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">. Th</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">rough our </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">e</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">volution of </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">corporation</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">s, eventually they</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">would operate with
investments from people who were not directly involved in the management of the
company, with decision making by boards that held wide-ranging perspectives on
several related industries, and based on the expert abilities of managers and
directors who could focus on the best </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">financial </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">health of the company and its projects. </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">The risks were not
personal or individual risks, and so each individual was protected from the
heaviest, most onerous </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">of risks. The corporation, as a legal entity
or </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">as
a </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">legal
invention,</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> could accept those risks and act based on the outcomes. </span></span><span class="eop"> </span><span style="font-size: 6pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="paragraph" paraeid="{94699dba-6cfa-46bb-8668-20e72365e94f}{159}" paraid="1788965509" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<br /></div>
<div class="paragraph" paraeid="{94699dba-6cfa-46bb-8668-20e72365e94f}{165}" paraid="578295785" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span xml:lang="EN-US"><span class="normaltextrun"><span style="color: #222222;">Something went wrong when
corporations started being compared to people</span></span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> --</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> legally, socially, in marketing efforts, and
politically</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">. {explain the moral questions raised by giving corporations and
businesses the same rights as citizens}</span></span><span class="eop"> </span><span style="font-size: 6pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="paragraph" paraeid="{94699dba-6cfa-46bb-8668-20e72365e94f}{167}" paraid="1837511100" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<br /></div>
<div class="paragraph" paraeid="{94699dba-6cfa-46bb-8668-20e72365e94f}{174}" paraid="875730134" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span xml:lang="EN-US"><span class="normaltextrun"><span style="color: #222222;">The United States is the longest
standing republican form of government, and the vitality of its markets over
the past 200 years offer</span></span><span xml:lang="EN-US">s</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> testaments to the validity of a market based
economy. The example of the United States has also been one leading basis </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">for framing the laws,
constitutions and market institutions throughout Latin America, western Europe,
Japan, Korea and other </span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> nations of the eastern Asia, India and
nations of Africa and Arabia. So the United States' example will lead in our
discussions here followed by examples from other nations.</span></span><span class="eop"> </span><span style="font-size: 6pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="paragraph" paraeid="{94699dba-6cfa-46bb-8668-20e72365e94f}{176}" paraid="1993828338" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<br /></div>
<div class="paragraph" paraeid="{94699dba-6cfa-46bb-8668-20e72365e94f}{198}" paraid="1962950767" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span xml:lang="EN-US"><span class="normaltextrun"><span style="color: #222222;">Ballot measures are issues for
citizens to determine. Corporations are legal inventions, not citizens. </span></span><span xml:lang="EN-US">Corporations represent
the interests of their owners and investors and executives and manager</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">s</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">. </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">Corporations can base
themselves in any nation</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">,</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> s</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">tate</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> or province</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">, and even be multi-national</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> -- m</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">eaning they could have
conflicts of interest</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">with and </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">between the</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> best interests of the</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">ir multiple nations!</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> And in a very real
sense, the corporations and businesses are mainly interested in the value of
profits which for them supersede any community </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">values </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">or national values. </span></span><span class="eop"> </span><span style="font-size: 6pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="paragraph" paraeid="{94699dba-6cfa-46bb-8668-20e72365e94f}{200}" paraid="1051464185" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<br /></div>
<div class="paragraph" paraeid="{94699dba-6cfa-46bb-8668-20e72365e94f}{227}" paraid="338009841" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span xml:lang="EN-US"><span class="normaltextrun"><span style="color: #222222;">Non-citizens are restricted from
voting. Non-citizens are banned from giving </span></span><span xml:lang="EN-US">financial</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> support </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">to </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">political campaigns. </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">{offer examples of laws
from several countries} </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">Why </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">then should corporations </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">(defined as non-citizens)
</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">be
allowed to give financial support to political campaigns, or e</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">ven </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">e</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">xpress opinions about the
ballot issues that are solely for the consideration of the citizens</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">?</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">I am seeking agreement on
the idea that c</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">orporations should not be</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> allowed to express opini</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">ons</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> on ballot measures be</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">cause of the influence of
the non-citizens </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">i</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">n those corporations and their interests</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> which may be contrary to the best outcome for
the citizens</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">. That concludes one argument. </span></span><span class="eop"> </span><span style="font-size: 6pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="paragraph" paraeid="{94699dba-6cfa-46bb-8668-20e72365e94f}{229}" paraid="1222431942" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<br /></div>
<div class="paragraph" paraeid="{94699dba-6cfa-46bb-8668-20e72365e94f}{239}" paraid="1725331167" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span xml:lang="EN-US"><span class="normaltextrun"><span style="color: #222222;">By</span></span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> recent decisions of US courts, </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">rights to free speech
have been extended to corporations and businesses. From that basis,
corporations have found themselves completely free to give unlimited amounts of
financial support to politically active groups that are swaying voter opinions
on</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">
ballot measures throughout the US. (Even the selection in states of their
Secretar</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">ies</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> of State is being
politicized {</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">...</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">}.)</span></span><span class="eop"> </span><span style="font-size: 6pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="paragraph" paraeid="{94699dba-6cfa-46bb-8668-20e72365e94f}{241}" paraid="1506949492" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<br /></div>
<div class="paragraph" paraeid="{8e25cc0e-af57-48f2-8531-57a89bf56ecc}{32}" paraid="920804301" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span xml:lang="EN-US"><span class="normaltextrun"><span style="color: #222222;">From the US Declaration of
Independence, there is a recogni</span></span><span xml:lang="EN-US">tion</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> that human rights to "life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness" are unalienable rights. Saying this in another
way, no action or inaction by anyone or any group should allow citizens to be
alienated </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">or separated</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">from their rights. Yet</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> by</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> giving </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">rights to the non-citizen corporations</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> these court decisions
are alienating the citizens from their rights as voters</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">. As those corporations
exercise</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">
to finance political campaigns</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">, the</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">liberties </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">and free speech</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">of citizens </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">are being drowned out, are being overshadowed
by the power of these corporat</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">e voices</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">. </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">T</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">he </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">negative advertisements,</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">the extremely loud and
too-often repeated advertisements</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">,</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">and many other efforts </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">financed by corporations</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> are </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">alienat</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">ing</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">the citizens </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">from their rights to </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">speak and </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">to </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">be heard, and </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">from </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">their rights to </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">consider and vote on
ballot measures</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">. </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">Some growing apathy and antagonism towards "government by the
people" is the very sign that the people are being alienated from their
rights. That concludes the second argument.</span></span><span class="eop"> </span><span style="font-size: 6pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="paragraph" paraeid="{8e25cc0e-af57-48f2-8531-57a89bf56ecc}{34}" paraid="221440142" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<br /></div>
<div class="paragraph" paraeid="{8e25cc0e-af57-48f2-8531-57a89bf56ecc}{46}" paraid="72874417" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span xml:lang="EN-US"><span class="normaltextrun"><span style="color: #222222;">Lastly, </span></span><span xml:lang="EN-US">Section One</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> of </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">the</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> </span><span class="findhit"></span><span style="color: #222222;">Fourteenth</span><span class="normaltextrun"><span style="color: #222222;"> Amendment to the US Constitution </span></span><span xml:lang="EN-US">reads, "</span></span><span xml:lang="EN-US"><span class="normaltextrun">All persons born or naturalized in the United
States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United
States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any
law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United
States</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">,
</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">nor
shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due
process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal
protection of the laws.</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">" </span></span><span class="eop"> </span><span style="font-size: 6pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="paragraph" paraeid="{8e25cc0e-af57-48f2-8531-57a89bf56ecc}{48}" paraid="921558387" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<br /></div>
<div class="paragraph" paraeid="{8e25cc0e-af57-48f2-8531-57a89bf56ecc}{58}" paraid="1477545491" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span xml:lang="EN-US"><span class="normaltextrun">Did you notice the change in terms, the
difference that is expected between citizen</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> and person? Any person shall not be deprived
of life, liberty or property without due process. Yet a citizen </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">falls into</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">a more specific </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">group </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">and </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">the privileges and
immunities of a citizen shall not be abridged. </span></span><span class="eop"> </span><span style="font-size: 6pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="paragraph" paraeid="{8e25cc0e-af57-48f2-8531-57a89bf56ecc}{60}" paraid="703302972" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<br /></div>
<div class="paragraph" paraeid="{8e25cc0e-af57-48f2-8531-57a89bf56ecc}{88}" paraid="483582540" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span xml:lang="EN-US"><span class="normaltextrun">One privilege of being a citizen is that citizens
can not be anonymously influenced by non-citizens in voting matters, in
discussing and deciding upon ballot measures. </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">I point to the "free speech of corpor</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">ations</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">" </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">a</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">s an abridgement of the<span style="color: #222222;"></span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">privilege of citizens to exercise their right to vote</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">because those</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">non-citizen</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">s</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">do attempt to influence
and </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">affect
the citizens</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">,</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">their opinions, and their resolve </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">in</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> c</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">asting</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> ballot</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">s</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">. </span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> </span></span></span><span class="eop"> </span><span style="font-size: 6pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="paragraph" paraeid="{8e25cc0e-af57-48f2-8531-57a89bf56ecc}{90}" paraid="194807087" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<br /></div>
<div class="paragraph" paraeid="{8e25cc0e-af57-48f2-8531-57a89bf56ecc}{106}" paraid="1612372810" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span xml:lang="EN-US"><span class="normaltextrun"><span style="color: #222222;">If a non-citizen is permitted by
some state law to </span></span><span xml:lang="EN-US">keep a citizen away from the ballot box on election day, then that </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">directly affects</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> the citizen and that </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">state </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">law is abridging a
citizen's privilege</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">. If a non-citizen, permitted by states or by courts,</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> overwhelms citizens with
any opinion on a ballot measure, especially by way of negative advertising,
then those efforts are</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> abridging a citizen's </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">privilege. Finally, if
the number of advertisements, financed by a non-citizen,</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> and then some confusion
from those advertisements brings a citizen to not vote out of frustration</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> or a sense of apathy</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">, then the advertisements
are abridging a citizen's privilege.</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> </span></span><span class="eop"> </span><span style="font-size: 6pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="paragraph" paraeid="{8e25cc0e-af57-48f2-8531-57a89bf56ecc}{108}" paraid="34559540" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<br /></div>
<div class="paragraph" paraeid="{8e25cc0e-af57-48f2-8531-57a89bf56ecc}{116}" paraid="2106847836" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span xml:lang="EN-US"><span class="normaltextrun"><span style="color: #222222;">Based on the history of </span></span><span xml:lang="EN-US">court decisions and other
du</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">ly</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> passed laws, only an
amendment to the US Constitution may reverse this </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">current </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">trend in the corporate funding of political
campaigns. </span></span><span class="eop"> </span><span style="font-size: 6pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="paragraph" paraeid="{8e25cc0e-af57-48f2-8531-57a89bf56ecc}{118}" paraid="1128265816" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="normaltextrun"><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 11pt;"><span xml:lang="EN-US">Beyond</span></span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> these three arguments </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">the US Declaration of
Independence reads, "</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span xml:lang="EN-US">That to secure these
rights</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">
</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">[</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">we are focused on the
right to vote]</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">, Governments are instituted among Men [we understand this to be
citizens, not legal inventions</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">, but a special group of persons</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">]</span><span xml:lang="EN-US">, deriving their just
powers from the consent of the governed,</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">That whenever any Form of Government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People [again the right of
citizens] to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying
its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to
them</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> </span><span xml:lang="EN-US">[exclusively citizens]</span><span xml:lang="EN-US"> shall seem most likely
to effect their Safety and Happiness."</span></span></span><span class="eop"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> We citizens have the right to exclude non-citizen corporations.</span></span></span><br />
<br />Auntie Greedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06567258618457726501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3893269512811308995.post-67798302088820951362013-11-25T16:47:00.002-08:002013-12-03T20:14:07.270-08:00Wisdom from Aristide's "Eyes of the Heart"pg 36 of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Eyes of the Heart: Seeking a Path for the Poor in the Age of Globalization. Common Courage Press, 2000.<br />
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Do not confuse democracy with the holding of elections every four or five years. Elections are the exam, testing the health of our system. Voter participation is the grade. But school is in session every day. Only the day-to-day participation of the people at all levels of governance can breath life into democracy and create the possibility for people to play a significant role in shaping the state and the society that they want.<br />
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Auntie Greed: maybe this is a nice point to emphasize about the November 24 referendum vote in Switzerland. The youth wing of the JUSO had proposed and won more than 100,000 signatures to a petition. That led to a referendum on a proposal that the top pay within any Swiss company be held to no more than 12 times the pay of the lowest wage earner in the same company. If the measure would have passed, then executive pay would have been lowered for those companies, and lowest wages in those companies would have been raised to allow the top executives to earn greater amounts.<br />
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The referendum failed with 35 yea vote to 65 no vote margin. Remember now, Aristide said the vote was merely the grade. The fact that Swiss citizens are engaged with the issues demonstrates the true power of their democracy. Salute to the Swiss and their attempts (there have been other ballot measures) to raise questions about inequality of pay scales.<br />
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My opinion is that such a ratio based policy on pay scales would not have worked. If the Swiss would have passed the measure and executed the letter of the resulting laws, then companies would have exited the country and conducted their business under more favorable laws. That is a crucial point I have been making about corporations and businesses. They are not citizens. They are not bound to any location or nation. They are only bound to profits and the good of their owners/stock holders. Switzerland would have lost out if the measure would have succeeded on the ballot. <br />
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Also, nothing would have prevented a company wanting inordinate pay for their top executives to end up subcontracting a great deal of their business. That would be a pretty simple model for a company to operate. A bank could contract each of its branch locations to some pseudo firms. The top earners of those sub-contractors could only receive the maximum pay of 12 times the lowest paid bank teller. But the true bank would get to set it's executive pay at some higher level because it would no longer employ those underpaid tellers.<br />
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What I hope the Swiss leaders and the rest of the world appreciates is that the democratic systems are working, and the voices of those who are hurt by the current level of inequality are being heard. As their voices join together under some common mantras, they will organize and find solutions that fit the needs of the many countries around the world.<br />
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All my best,<br />
Auntie GreedAuntie Greedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06567258618457726501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3893269512811308995.post-68351213877870230492013-11-08T12:45:00.002-08:002013-12-03T20:15:12.404-08:00 The book "Eyes of the Heart" was published in the year 2000 with the controversial Jean-Bertrand Aristide as the author. He ends <u>Chapter One: A Crisis in Faith</u> in this way:<br />
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"Behind this crisis of dollars there is a human crisis: among the poor, immeasurable human suffering; among the others, the powerful, the policy makers, a poverty of spirit which has made a religion of the market and its invisible hand. A crisis of imagination so profound that the only measure of value is profit, the only measure of human progress is economic growth.<br />
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"We have not reached the consensus that to eat is a basic human right. this is an ethical crisis. This is a crisis of faith.<br />
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"Global capitalism becomes a machine devouring our planet. The little finger, the men and women of the poorest 20%, are reduced to cogs in this machine, the bottom rung in global production, valued only as cheap labor, otherwise altogether disposable. The machine cannot and does not measure their suffering. The machine also does not measure the suffering of our planet. Every second an area the size of a soccer field is deforested. this fact alone should be mobilizing men and women to protect their most basic interest -- oxygen. But the machine overwhelms us. . . ."<br />
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I agree with him and wish that I could make many of the same points in my arguments for an individual income cap. <br />
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Behind the economic turbulence there are other factors, other measurements we should be addressing. (First we would have to notice them.) Too many of the scholars and pundits are concentrating on the financial economy as the priority and hoping that other issues render their own solutions once the prosperous times return. My concentration is on limiting greed. My highest expectation though is that we humans will then recall how much we value so many other aspects of humanity (community, arts, leisure, wellness, family, etc.) once the profits and the excessive wealth are capped. <br />
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As Aristide points out, the worshipping of the excessively wealthy, the aspiring to have what they have, the competition for status (Veblen) among those wealthy, has wrenched the spirit out of so many well-to-do people that they are not noticing their roles in turning up the suffering on the poverty stricken. Not only do the poor own nothing, they also have no opportunities in their futures because the richest people are drawing more and more of the value and the finances and the wealth to themselves. <br />
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Let us shake off this money worship by limiting the income of individuals. Once a person earns 10 million Euros in a year's time, have that person walk away from the table and give others chances to earn better incomes. Then we could move towards recognizing all those things that are more valuable than profits, more valuable than individual greed. And we can measure the happiness indices, we can live upon some more humane indices in addition to our economic growth. <br />
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In his second paragraph, Aristide names a crisis in faith. A crisis in faith is when one does not believe in a proposal, is doubtful about some aspect of the future. Societies do not see food for all as a basic human right, comparable to the right we all have to free speech, or the right to practice our religions without persecution. We individuals may not have faith that there will be enough food for "my own family" if all people are promised food. That is a crisis of faith. My argument is then that the excessively wealthy and those who wish to emulate them, will grab up all they can (expressing their greed) to protect their own families (or their individual futures). They will take financial advantage over others to express that individual greed. If we can cap that greed, and if our economic systems can keep growing under the conditions of capped individual incomes, then we may grow in our faith, grow in our confidence that the world can feed all people, that all people can be provided for without threatening the futures of anyone who contributes. I hope more people can give consideration to these ideas and raise their faith.<br />
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There is wide agreement on the points of his third paragraph. The laborers are thought to be disposable. Any workplace lay off is judged simply on the balance sheets and profit calculations -- hardly ever in humane ways. Meanwhile those unemployed are powerless against the machines of capitalism and of nation-wide politics. As the working poor watch the mistreatment of the unemployed, they are simply relieved that they were able to hold on a little longer. They too are powerless against the machine. And we do not value our natural resources, our held-in-common societal resources while our focus remains on the dollars, Euros, Yen, Reals, etc. <br />
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I hope to clearly state my eleven points in such a way that the crisis in faith can be remedied, turned around. Auntie Greedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06567258618457726501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3893269512811308995.post-10185153926507912292013-02-07T08:35:00.000-08:002013-02-07T08:35:15.217-08:00Capillary Action in micro-economics<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Century Schoolbook;">Trickle Down Economic Stimulation can be declared dead. The “Capillary Action” on value creation and financial gain that occurs in every business eliminates any chance for economic stimulation in Trickle Down theories.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Century Schoolbook;">Trickle Down Economic Stimulation suggests that if tax breaks are given to established business owners, then their investments in the communities and business and in increasing payrolls will allow the value of those tax breaks to trickle down to the citizens who are at lower income levels of the economy, of the community and of the state. The problem is that established businesses are successful in drawing all that value back up into the owners’ controls (discretion, management). The citizens at lower income levels do not see appreciable increases in their well-being. My illustration begins with a stalk of celery. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Century Schoolbook;">You might recall Capillary Action from a second-grader’s science project. A cut stalk of celery is placed in a dish of colored water. Over time the color of the water and the water itself flows up hill into the celery and its leaves. (Yes, water is flowing up hill!!) This process is nicely explained at the <u>ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/capillaryaction.html</u> webpage.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Century Schoolbook;">“Capillary action is important for moving water (and all of the things that are dissolved in it) around. It is defined as the movement of water within the spaces of a porous material due to the forces of adhesion, cohesion, and surface tension.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Century Schoolbook;">“Capillary action occurs because water is sticky, thanks to the forces of cohesion (water molecules like to stay close together) and adhesion (water molecules are attracted and stick to other substances). Adhesion of water to the walls of a vessel will cause an upward force on the liquid at the edges and result in a meniscus, which turns upward. The surface tension acts to hold the surface intact. Capillary action occurs when the adhesion to the walls is stronger than the cohesive forces between the liquid molecules. The height to which capillary action will take water in a uniform circular tube . . . is limited by surface tension and, of course, gravity.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Century Schoolbook;">“Plants and trees couldn't thrive without capillary action. Plants put down roots into the soil, which are capable of carrying water from the soil up into the plant. Water, which contains dissolved nutrients, gets inside the roots and starts climbing up the plant tissue. As water molecule #1 starts climbing, it pulls along water molecule #2, which, of course, is dragging water molecule #3, and so on.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Century Schoolbook;">All businesses in our market economy do a similar thing with value creation (as the water) and financial gain (the color of money). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Century Schoolbook;">For instance, a fast food franchise owner invests in real estate, in a license from the national franchise chain, in the supplies, equipment and food, along with other tangibles. The owner builds a business (analogously a stalk of celery). Employees are then hired to take all these tangibles (inputs and capital) and to create value for the business. Labor creates value -- this is a widely understood principle of economics. So the minimum wage front-counter staff conduct the business with the customers, and while these individuals are paid (let’s say) nine dollars per hour they might on average be creating for the business 15 dollars of value per hour. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Century Schoolbook;">If any employee is not creating more value than what is received in wages or salary, then that employee needs to be eliminated, fired. No business can survive if employees are creating less value for the business than their paychecks. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Century Schoolbook;">So in our example, the lowest paid employees could be creating six dollars per hour in value above the hourly wages they are paid. If not into their paychecks, where does that $6 in value go? Part of this excess value pays for the inputs and capital that allowed the employee to create any value at all. Beyond this, for a business to succeed some value must also translate into reserves for the health of the business (possibly future maintenance of equipment and business expansion), and some of the value must translate into profits. In a sense then the excess value is “flowing up hill” to the owner who decides how to manage any marginal profit. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Century Schoolbook;">Imagine now that a second tier of employees who are paid a little better should be creating larger flows of value for the business. Imagine a tier of low-level managers paid even better and producing even greater flows of value for the business. Plus a higher tier of managers could be producing greater and greater flows of value. And the business owner may be then profiting from all of this value creation. Then again, as a franchise, the owner will need to share profits “up hill” with the national chain. So by this example, we see that Capillary Action is drawing value creation and financial gain to the apex of each business across the whole of the economy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Century Schoolbook;">Economic stimulation by Trickle Down methods supposes that if business owners are provided tax incentives and tax breaks, then they will invest more and hire more people and by these investments and hires the economy over all will be strengthened. Yet we can see that the Capillary Action works counter to any Trickle Down effect. For every drop of value that may Trickle Down, the owners are highly likely to absorb it back up their businesses, since the Capillary Action is constantly at work while growth in investment and hiring are not constant. Those on the lower part of the ladders are not having their financial situations improved. They are more accurately enabling the businesses to better absorb any value creation, or the abilities of the lower paid employees allow the businesses to better absorb any “trickle down.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Century Schoolbook;">Under this model of the micro-economy, what is more suitable for improving more people’s financial situations is to enable more people to become owners. If the numbers of businesses are increasing in the economy with owners seeing success by Capillary Action, then those extra numbers of owners will have their financial situations improve. How can the social systems and government create structures and supports that better allow lower earning employees to take the risks involved in starting more businesses? Does the Affordable Care Act and its vision for a Health Insurance Exchange address some risks that have prevented people from opening new businesses?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Century Schoolbook;">If former employees are becoming owners, then businesses may realize a tightened market in the labor pool and move to pay greater amounts to attract employees who can create value for the businesses. Then could employees too see improvements in their financial situations. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Century Schoolbook;">Finally, we may come to realize that Job Creators are not the business owners. Successful business owners have incentives to keep their number of employees at a level that fits the business opportunities. Business owners should not be creating more jobs simply because of tax breaks or tax incentives. They will likely create more jobs once demand increases. So the Job Creator in a market economy is actually Heightened Consumer Demand, which becomes all the easier to envision when more people’s financial situations are improving. With more business owners achieving improved financial situations and with employees seeing their financial situations improving, then all of those improvements can feed into Heightened Consumer Demand and will grow the market. Trickle Down Stimulation does not exist in a business model where Capillary Action in constantly drawing value up.</span></div>
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All my best,<br />
Auntie GreedAuntie Greedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06567258618457726501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3893269512811308995.post-21354065887025765082013-01-29T07:44:00.000-08:002013-01-29T07:44:03.307-08:00Reaction to Oxfam themes and recommendationsConversations are where we go exploring. From Davos, Sweden, this month a conference offered pronouncements about the world economy (<a href="http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GlobalRisks_Report_2013.pdf" title="">Global Risk report</a> pdf). In response Oxfam issued its reaction <a href="http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/cost-of-inequality-oxfam-mb180113.pdf">The cost of inequality: how wealth and income extremes hurt us all</a> as a 5-page briefing. <br />
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Their themes are spot on! They cry out against conditions in line with my own concerns. My view is that they want to nibble at the edges of the problems rather than seeking full prevention of the problems in the future. They are suggesting measured responses at one place and then at another, over one policy issue and then at another. What must be regulated is the greed. If the greed is not regulated, then the innovations that greed inspires will simply circumvent any policy changes they propose. <br />
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Quoting from the Oxfam Brief:<br />
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"Free public services are crucial to levelling the playing field. In countries like Sweden, knowing</div>
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that if you get sick or that you will receive good treatment regardless of your income, is one of the greatest achievements and the greatest equalisers of the modern world. Knowing that if you lose your job, or fall on hard times, there is a safety net to help you and your family, is also key to tackling inequality. Similarly, access to good quality education for all is a huge weapon against inequality.</div>
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"Finally, regulation and taxation play a critical role in reining in extreme wealth and inequality.</div>
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Limits to bonuses, or to how much people can earn as a multiple of the earnings of the lowest</div>
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paid, limits to interest rates, limits to capital accumulation are all only recently-abandoned policy instruments that can be revived. Progressive taxation that redistributes wealth from the rich to the poor is essential, . . . ."</div>
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Each of the gains from these policy changes will be short lived in every Western-style democracy as long a the powerfully rich see these changes as stifling their abilities to profit and draw up their economic advantages. Free services will become "separate yet unequal" then some times done away with for being without worth; healthcare promises can skew the market place's demand and price setting mechanisms, safety nets and education systems have been dismantles time and time again. Finally tax policies have been set to progressive intentions in the past and then redirected gradually and strategically to favor the powerfully rich.</div>
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My idea is to put a limit on individual income per year. If we can have 80 percent of people in democracies agree on this regulation, then the fix is permanent. Enforcement will take some doing and nations will need to be vigilent, but we could under such a system agree to the limit and prevent the problems caused by excessive inequality.<br />
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All my best,<br />
Auntie Greed</div>
</span></span>Auntie Greedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06567258618457726501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3893269512811308995.post-20218600268899967212012-04-10T13:54:00.002-07:002012-04-17T08:12:14.871-07:00A more far-reaching answer than Barnanke's<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The Federal Reserve of the US has several responsibilities to the US government and to the US businesses and people: to manage inflation, to regulate the money supply and to watch over the banking system, being the lender of last resort for banks. They have had difficulty recently in offering policy remedies to the US economic situation, since they have already put short-term lending rates at their lowest, they have already bought up US treasury bonds, they have already leveraged to support banks which were crippled from the bursting of the housing bubble. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">On April 9, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve was speaking on the next steps he expects the Federal Reserve to take to promote stability in the money system. His remarks included the topics of new liquidity requirements, shorter maturity limits, enhanced disclosure mandates, strengthening the tri-party repurchase agreement market, and . . . </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Bernanke said that the wave of new rules created since the crisis are likely to push business into areas that will be tougher to regulate. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">“An inevitable side effect of new regulations is that the system will adapt in ways that push risk-taking from more-regulated to less-regulated areas, increasing the need for careful monitoring and supervision of the system as a whole,” he said. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">(source: <a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bernanke-calls-for-better-shadow-bank-regulation-2012-04-09-1915250?siteid=rss&rss=1">www.marketwatch.com/story/bernanke-calls-for-better-shadow-bank-regulation-2012-04-09-1915250?siteid=rss&rss=1</a> <u><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Bernanke calls for better shadow bank regulation</span></u><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> by </span><a href="mailto:sgoldstein@marketwatch.com"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Steve Goldstein</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">, MarketWatch</span></span>)</span></div>
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This appears complicated. And the effort appears to be only nibbling around at the margins of a problem that will mutate and demand constant monitoring as the markets evolve. This monitoring will not simply be watching the firms and actors, but rather will involve some level of intrusive monitoring to see how the firms and actors might subvert the intentions of the laws and regulations, keep their actions out of the sight of the regulators, and try to come up with even more creative ways to make even greater amounts of money. My speculation is that the actors to be monitored will be the ones who are striving personally to be among the richest classes, not those who are simply looking to find better deals for their investor clients. </div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Bernanke said that infrequent use of emergency programs as well as new abilities to supervise different types of firms should help reduce moral hazard, or excessive risk-taking by firms that expect a government bailout. "Anytime you have a safety net" regulators need a mechanism "to minimize moral hazard," he said. (source </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">finance.yahoo.com/news/bernanke-calls-regulators-curb-shadow-040100925.html </span><u><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Bernanke Calls on Regulators to Curb Shadow Banking Risks</span></u><span style="font-family: inherit;"> by Joshua Zumbrun and Steve Matthews | Bloomberg)</span></div>
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Bernanke then has named the root problem: a need to "help reduce moral hazard, or excessive risk-taking by firms" and I will add the risk-taking by the managers, executives, board members and owners of those firms. Those actors are taking risk in hopes of achieving greater earnings. The market forces do not curtail their risk-taking. The risks themselves do not diminish their excesses. As the business cycles and histories of recessions have shown, their actions put more as risk than their own fortunes and businesses. Their actions have (and presumptively will again) put the entire economic system in jeopardy. What can we do to prevent the excessive risk-taking, to prevent the moral hazard?<br />
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My answer is a more far-reaching policy: an annual individual income cap. Let's have the conversation!!<br />
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If every individual, world-wide, is restricted to earn no more than 10 million Euros per year (or the equivalent) then the actions of those who would have otherwise taken excessive risks will be altered. Earnings can be capped by a 100 percent tax on all earnings after the first 10 million. Each country can enforce this taxing authority within their own sovereignty, and hold other countries accountable by their international trade agreements. This is a tax that would never be collected. The intention is not to draw in revenue for any government. Rather, the intention is to diminish the risk-taking behaviors of those who wish to out-do each other in the business world or in the arenas of upper-class-society.<br />
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Research is needed to better understand how a gradual enactment and enforcement of this cap will alter the world of finance, and consumption, and trade innovation. We would need to worry about possibly some slowing of technological innovations. We could also start to piece together how corporate, partner and contract law will alter in the face of this restriction on individual earnings. Corporations and businesses would not be restricted by this tax. So how would business owners and managers rewrite their corporate bylaws in the face of not being able to earn unlimited amounts each year?? My speculation on the results to such areas would be useless. I do sense though that businesses would alter and become nearly unrecognizable to us within 50 years of the income cap. <br />
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Through this blog, I hope to start a conversation and see if I can encourage more ideas and more explorations around this idea. What can you imagine? What research would you suggest?</div>
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With all my best,<br />
Auntie Greed </div>Auntie Greedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06567258618457726501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3893269512811308995.post-39960761108152755832012-03-12T21:17:00.002-07:002023-12-09T06:08:24.988-08:00One Consideration on Economic GrowthRecalling my first lessons on Economics, one instructor misled me with one of his "first order" presumptions, saying that we can start out with the idea that all people are inherently lazy and build our understanding of how the world works from that base. <u>He was wrong</u>, yet this lesson stuck with me for years and I did not easily shake off this presumption. He was wrong, but I accepted it and even saw my laziness as more acceptable since the generalization was not denied. He was wrong, as I later found out that the least important people in any study of Economics are the lazy people. He misled me and I wasted too much time in trying to pull myself away from that presumption.<br />
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The same might have happened for people who were introduced to psychology with simplified generalizations on the theories of S. Freud. If the generalization that all human activities are centered around sexual ambitions and predilections, that introduction can really taint and even injure the efforts of students in pursuing understanding of psychology and true human nature.<br />
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My dearest hope is that I do not mislead any reader, not mislead any student of Economics. My considerations here, at this root discussion for the 11 topics of my discussions, must be firmly rooted in solid thinking. I will take my time then to develop those thoughts and <u>ask for the readers to criticize and challenge the course of my thinking</u>. <br />
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To understand the systems and networks and ongoing functions of an Economy, studying the driven, hard-working, visionary people can truly indicate some valuable lessons. Seeing how they interact with each other, how they feed off of each others' successes and ideas can truly enlighten our understanding of how the innovations occur, how the daily routines can turn to fortune for some, how ambition really is to be marveled after. <br />
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Now to the new presumption that we watch the most energetic Economic actors, add the observation that the population keeps growing. With the growth of the population, more food is needed and better distribution systems are needed. More educational services, health services, transportation, entertainment, housing, etc. are all needed in greater abundance to serve the growing populations, for one city or locality, or one province, or one nation, or for the whole world. We see that the Economy is pressured to grow in volume, in mere size.<br />
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Those most energetic actors, each taking a unique perspective may see opportunities to hone their skills, produce greater amounts, or more desirable qualities in their products, employ greater production methods, buy at a low price and add value to sell at a higher price, each envisioning ways to benefit from the pressure to grow the overall Economy. They are each acting on profit motives, or seeing themselves creating value, or possibly improving the situation around them (of their community or their family or of some limited facets of living for themselves and others). There is pressure for a growth in the Economy simply by the increasing population. The growth will not occur unless individuals act to improve the situation, improve ones own self, or ones family's or ones community's situation. By this, greater value can be created, and we can even see a profit motive developing in those forward-looking individuals.Auntie Greedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06567258618457726501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3893269512811308995.post-22561249618986386952012-03-06T19:26:00.001-08:002023-12-09T06:10:33.965-08:00Proposed: An International Income Cap for IndividualsOver the course of this blog, I will put forward arguments supporting the creation of an international individual income cap. To illustrate, international trade agreements could include tenets that require countries to tax all individual earnings after the first 10 million Euros (or equivalent) at a 100 percent rate. In that way, no individual would be able to earn more than 10 million Euros in one year. <br />
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All the implications of this income cap need to be dealt with in extensive examinations. I intend on doing that by discussing the following topics over the coming days. I expect that I'll have to work out many different issues under each of these topics, write multiple articles under each topic.<br />
<ol>
<li>Profit motives, value creation and self-improvement are paramount and foremost for THE GROWTH of our market-based economies. </li>
<li>Market-based economies work best when sellers and buyers both realize their own gains from the exchanges. </li>
<li>Monetary profit opportunities are permitted under social norms and values, and within the social systems created by the culture, history and the consensus of a society. </li>
<li>In market economies, great majorities of people become dependent upon earning monetary incomes from employment by business owners (subsistence farming vanishes in market economies). </li>
<li>Business owners do and must take economic advantage of employees in the creation of economic value if they are to continue their businesses. Business owners should not be allowed to recklessly profit based upon this advantage over employees. </li>
<li>The rights of individuals should not be violated by others . . . neither because a majority votes to do so, nor because some potential economic profit may be gained by doing so. </li>
<li>Business owners, corporations and the ultra-rich too often take unnecessary risks with employees’ lives and rights, the lives and rights of others, and societal and public resources. High monetary incentives, and the social status associated with wealth, seem to become focal objectives for business owners, corporations and the ultra-rich. The risks created and placed on others have been and continue to be ignored as a result of seeking these high monetary incentives. </li>
<li>We live in a Regulated-Market Economy, not in a Free-Market Economy. </li>
<li>Society can regulate greed and regulate the associated risk-taking in some ways, especially once society members agree that The Market does at times fail in regulating itself. </li>
<li>Human rights are unalienable rights. Our laws endow corporations, unions, political organizations, government bodies and other legal entities with some abilities. If human rights are extended to those legal inventions, then those rights are being alienated from the people. </li>
<li>An excessive income gap creates a second class of citizens.</li>
</ol>
To comment on these 11 ideas, please visit the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEV4SkVaV0JKT3JsMHRMZHJxNndEN3c6MQ" target="_blank">https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEV4SkVaV0JKT3JsMHRMZHJxNndEN3c6MQ</a> survey.<br />
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I still do not clearly see how I will move from proving these 11 ideas to be true to the recommendation that an income cap be placed on individuals. My hope is that the effort of working out these ideas will lead me to such a leap. Hopefully too, others will see the blossoming of this idea and contribute what criticisms and other links are necessary to better round out this hypothesis.<br />
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All my best,<br />
Auntie Greed <br />
Auntie Greedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06567258618457726501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3893269512811308995.post-4636733741635717292012-02-26T19:10:00.002-08:002012-03-06T19:26:48.015-08:00Example of Lincoln again -- private thoughts contrasted with public actionsDoris Keairns Goodwin in her book <i>Team of Rivals</i>, depended heavily on the public actions of Abraham Lincoln in portraying a man who was strategic, political, and plodding in his efforts to steer the American ship of state and the American people towards Black emancipation and freedom from slavery. Another biographer relied a good deal more on the private reflections and letters of Lincoln.<br />
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<a class="subtle" data-bntrack="Contributor_1" href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/c/ronald-c.-white" id="yui_3_4_1_1_1330309734625_6402">Ronald C. White</a> in his biography <i>A Lincoln</i> time and time again emphasizes how Lincoln spoke out against slavery. Yet again Lincoln did not want to dictate to anyone else that they solve their problem, their moral conflict, when he did not know himself what steps to take in ending slavery. He spoke out on the issue of slavery all during the 1850's and was elected to the Presidency in 1860. Yet between his November triumph at the polls and his March 1861 inauguration, he offered to support an amendment to the US Constitution allowing slavery to forever be acceptable in the states that were threatening secession if only slavery did not spread to the other federal territories (Kansas, Nebraska and beyond).<br />
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His actions were strategic in contrast to the deep and clear sentiments Lincoln held about slavery. Here is such a stirring quote from him in helping to make this point:<br />
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<div style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace; text-align: justify;">
When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he
governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than
self-government — that is despotism. If the negro is a man, why then my
ancient faith teaches me that "all men are created equal," and that
there can be no moral right in connection with one man's making a slave
of another.</div>
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He made this argument while speaking out against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, a good two years before he started debating Stephen Douglas in the 1858 Senate campaign. Lincoln seemed to have well situated himself and his moral compass. Patiently he guided this country over the 1850's and during the term of his Presidency, logically and gracefully (maybe even with a Christian grace) leading his countrymen into seeing that slavery had to be removed like a cancer in a surgical and purposeful way.<br />
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In my previous post, I suggested a hope for people's attitudes and perceptions of greed and wealth to mature into some new revolutionary understanding. I am not sure what that result will be. Over the days of this blog, I hope to explore some ideas and even attempt a method for regulating greed in our world-wide societies. The result could be revolutionary, but not within my vision to be predicted.<br />
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I am writing under a pen name. Maybe this will protect my family in case some see my ideas as too revolutionary, too threatening to the status quo. My inner thoughts may not match my actions or my blog posts. I do insist though on opening up this conversation, raising the coming questions, and inspiring the discussions that result.<br />
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All my best,<br />
Auntie GreedAuntie Greedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06567258618457726501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3893269512811308995.post-67433675912564923072012-02-24T08:20:00.000-08:002012-02-24T08:20:04.739-08:00Abraham Lincoln matured while in office like we may have to mature over issues of wealthProvidence seemed to be at play in the full life of Abraham Lincoln. He was a noble and well thought-out man for all his life. He should have reached success time and time again. Instead, he was dealt set back after set back and not permitted to be content until the Union finally triumphed over the Confederacy (April 7, 1865), just a week before John Wilkes Booth shot him. <br />
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As a young man, Lincoln fell in love with Ann Rutledge. Historians tell us that he was bound to marry her, but she died. Another woman did not suit him and Mary Todd did not suit him, for a while. Lincoln had at one point promised to marry Todd, but then ignored her over several months hoping to pursue a fourth available woman. When the other married, Lincoln slowly returned to Mary Todd, apologizing, not sure of his choice for a bride but eventually honored his promise and they were wed on the same day that she told her eldest sister. (Surprise!)<br />
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Lincoln was a great orator and political strategist. Yet he had to give up his ideals to support Zachery Taylor instead of his hero Henry Clay. After several terms in the Illinois House, he lost an election. In getting elected to the US House of Representatives, he had to allow two others from his political party to go before him, as a matter of "turn about is fair play." He lost in a bid to be re-elected to the US House because he was too distant from his Illinois constituency.<br />
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In an epic contest for our history, Lincoln debated Stephen Douglas running to be the Senator from Illinois in 1858. Lincoln did not win the election. More pointedly from our vantage point, Lincoln was arguing that slavery merely needed to be contained in the states where the Founding Fathers had seen fit to leave it, expecting it would die eventually as long as it did not spread into Nebraska, Kansas or other western territories. Douglas argued that each new state's citizenry should be allowed to decide whether their state would be slavery bound or free soil. <br />
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Once he announced his Presidential candidacy and before he was inaugurated as our 16th President, he was pulling madly to try to keep the country together. He even offered an amendment to the Constitution to allow slavery to permanently remain in the states that were seceding. No success there. <br />
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Once the war started, he was frustrated by at least five top generals who did not pursue the enemies when they retreated. They did not prosecute the war to end it, they were denying him and the nation an end to the war. But during all this time, providence seemed to be at play, IMHO, allowing Lincoln to come to understand that slavery needed to be outlawed. Doris Keairns Goodwin lays out that the Emancipation Proclamation was a war strategy more than a humanitarian act. <br />
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Lincoln matured over time to understand that slavery must be abandoned. In the coming entries to this blog, I hope to inspire new maturity about greed and wealth. We shall see how things develop.<br />
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all my best,<br />
Auntie GreedAuntie Greedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06567258618457726501noreply@blogger.com0