Carey Rowland's blog

The Swan Song of J. Al DasCapital

For some it's a good thing; for others a bad,

   to be like the capitalist, or provoke socialist rad.

Back in the day, Rockefeller and Carnegie forged the enterprise deal;

   JPMorgan and Ford cranked up  capitalist zeal.

But then in '29 the machine broke down; all hell broke loose.

   It was a train wreck for sure, from engine to caboose.

Smart as he was,  Hoover was thought clueless in '32,

   so they brought in Roosevelt to set up a new deal crew.

The gov from New York saved us, so they say,

   with a big shot of socialism,  making work for payday.

 

Now these days, since the meltdown of '08,

   we've the same situation, but reverse, on our plate:

Big Spender Barack's in the driver's seat; he's catchin' the flack,

   while Money-movin' Mitt says its time to get back

to those good ole days when investors and innovators were calling the shots,

   before all these Keynesian Krugmanites got the hots

for quantitative easing, and stimulus, and priming the pump;

   'cause they give us a ride, but we don't get over the hump.

 

Now out here on Main Street where the grassroots grow,

   in the shops and garages where the mom and pops know,

we whip up the long tails; we push pins in the bubbles;

    we wink at the black swans and laugh at the troubles. 

Class warfare's just a phrase in some socialist goad, 

    inequality  just a pothole, a mere bump in the road.

No flash-tradin' froth, no credit default fizz,

    we just work with what can be, and we deal with what is.

 If the day ever comes when the gov regulates us beyond reason,

    or corporations have all the wealth tied up for the season,

we'll just stick out our necks and  we'll sing our swan song,

    cuz life in the free market goes on and goes on. 

Glass half-Full

 

 

 

 

 

 

North Carolina simplicity

Among the institutions and opinions of mankind, marriage has been, for millennia, acknowledged as a natural arrangement that is beneficial and productive. 

When a man and women hook up and thereby create new life, society itself would do well to encourage and enable the parents to act responsibly toward their offspring, lest the burden and expense of child-raising fall upon society as a whole. When a father and mother commit themselves to each other and to their children--to love, teach, and discipline those children--this is better for the child, for the parents, and for society in general than what otherwise might happen if the father and mother were to just  do their own thing apart from the family they have created.

Sure, it takes a village to raise a child. But that's the big picture. At the heart of a healthy, progressive society is a child who is nurtured and trained in the love, discipline, and education of mother and father. This is why marriage, in its original naturally-occurring state, needs to make a comeback in the modern world. Otherwise, all hell could break loose. And I'm not kidding.

A resurgence of marital commitments between fathers and mothers would actually solve a lot of societal problems. Think about it. 

There are many ways, of course, to think about this enduring cultural arrangement called marriage. But lets just choose one analytical approach, to define what marriage actually is. A logical analysis, for instance, may demonstrate that:

if A+B=M, where A is man, B is woman, and M is marriage, 

can A+A=M, or B+B=M ?

No.

A+A is not the same as A+B; nor is B+B the same as A+B.

A+A is something else.  B+B is something else. These two collaborations, being qualitatively different from A+B, require their own definitions.

Therefore, let us say:

A+A= P (partnership), and B+B=P (partnership.) 

There is, in the real world, empirical evidence for the validity of this reasoning. 

When you observe A and B in their natural habitat, it can be seen that A and B fit together in a certain way, somewhat like a screw and a nut fit together, and that they can be threaded together as one integral unit. Furthermore, the combination of A and B has biological potential to yield newborn A's and B's. 

This procreative manifestation cannot happen when A and A are combined, nor can species reproduction occur naturally between B and B.

Therefore, A+B remains as it has been for so many thousands of years: marriage.

A+A we will name "partnership." Likewise, B+B we will call "partnership." 

This is the way we in North Carolina, or at least 61% of us, think about this. It very simple, really. Some may say its simple-minded, or too simplistic.

Whatever. Down here in the state of North Carolina, we prefer this arrangement, as has recently been seen in the voting booths.  Speaking of "state," let me remind you that we do have fifty of them. And they are all different for a reason. Let each state decide for itself how it wants to live and reinforce certain familial arrangements. We don't need the Feds making these determinations for everybody. What works in North Carolina may not play out the same way in Oregon, or Maryland.

For more about the state of North Carolina, listen to this song I wrote about our state: 

my silly North Carolina song

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

 

Couch potatoes, or real food?

Most Americans will not do the hard physical labor required to harvest our nation's crops. 

But in these days politicians, thinking that they're doing us all a favor, want to meddle with immigration laws that effectively kick out the migrant workers who perform that hard work. 

But most of us Americans are just not up to the task. Workers just will not do what many of our grandparents did  back in the day to get all that food out of the fields, into the supply chain, and into the pantries and bellies of consumers.

Here's what has happened in Georgia in the last year or so, after the legislature went trying to meddle with the sensitive dynamics of supply/demand in agricultural labor markets.

In a conversation with Neal Conan of Talk of the Nation last Monday 4/30/12, Dick Minor, partner of Minor Produce, Andersonville Ga., and President of Georgia Fruit and Vegetable  Growers Association, said this: 

". . . that just anybody can come do this job is also a misnomer. We consider these people skilled workers because they are pretty much professional harvesters, and they're even skilled to particular crops.

So people harvesting watermelons may not be able to pick peaches, and people picking blueberries may not be able to pick peppers. So certain crews that work in certain crops, and they do that year-round, as you know it's very tough work. It's very tough conditions - long hours. You've got to be in really good physical shape. You've got to know the process of harvesting crops."

When Neal Conan asked Mr. Minor about using parolees to do the work, the President of the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Associations said:

"It hasn't worked out. I was actually one of the test farms that we did that on, and we tried to make it work. It runs into the same problem of using any other domestic workforce: They're just not skilled in the technique to harvest the crop, nor are they physically able to do that work.

I mean, you have to imagine being in 100-degree days for 10 hours, and, you know, very physically demanding work, stooping down, running, lifting. You've got to be, sort of, trained, almost like an athlete. You've got to be trained to be able to do it, and we offered open employment to them all summer long, and we had just a constant turnstile of people coming and going.

And nobody was excited about doing it. A lot of them did it for several days, but none of them lasted."

The net effect of the legislature's misguided micromanagement of labor markets cost the state of Georgia, in Mr. Minor's estimation, lost revenuers of $140 million, which, when the "multiplier" effect of that money is factored in, amounts to about $390 million.

This happened because 40%  of workers needed to harvest  Georgia's crops in the last year were not there to do the work. The accustomed agricultural pickers did not show up because they were not hired because of  bad law, or the workes were afraid of the consequences of showing up and risking deportation.

But American couch potatoes wouldn't get out in the fields and gather all those watermelons and peaches and whatnot.

In this country, we've traded real potatoes for couch potatoes. This is largely the result of our leisurely lifestyle, and obsession with entertainments, and government welfare that robs workers of incentives to prosper, and just plain old-fashioned laziness.

Americans don' know how to work any more. Its no wonder that the corporations sitting on all that funny Federal money are unwilling to take a chance and grant us more employment.

CR, with new novel, Smoke,  in progress

 

Wage Deflation

It is no coincidence that the last three callers--Shawn in Cincinnati, Philip in Louisville, and Edward in Baltimore-- on yesterday's Diane Rehm show made comments about wage deflation, because this is what is happening in America.

The developing world, BRIC countries et al, are now cranking consumer goods much cheaper than we can. No way around it. The great expansion of national wealth and productivity that we were manifesting a hundred years ago is what the emerging countries are now in the midst of. There is nothing wrong with this; its the way the world has always been. The lean and vigorous youngsters have always surpassed the older folks . This applies to nations and whole economies as well.

I enjoy listening to the Diane Rehm show immensely, and frequently. I caught it yesterday while painting and cleaning a vacant apartment, which is part of my job. Thank God for my job. 

Susan did a nice job of filling in for Diane, as usual, although no one will ever really fill Diane's unique footprint in public discourse. The panel was, as usual, well-chosen, with Jim, Jerry and Betsy, all of whom are highly qualified to talk about their topic at hand, jobs and the economy. 

But the illustrious panel spent the first twenty minutes or so, as is typical for today's talking heads,  in the predictable media obsession about what Bernanke said, and the snail's pace increments of labor statistics and GDP and all the gov numbers and blahblahblah. 

I got a little upset when Jerry said the major reason we're not getting job recovery is because growth is slow. Well that's like saying the sky is blue and leaves are green. Now Jerry had some very good points, as did the other panelists, points about international competition in business and manufacturing, discouraged workers and their segment of the unemployment statistics, the "sugar high" of Fed-generated liquidity, the "still real dangers" that threaten our hyped-up recovery, gains in the first part of the year with declines in the second half of the year and how that may be a pattern in the last few years, whether and how/why companies are producing more goods with fewer workers and less pay, the necessary once-and-future skills development and job training programs that our country needs and the emperor's new clothes and so forth.

But those three callers from the rust belt--they really drove, and without planning it, the point home: wage deflation. Too many people looking for work in a short production economy--wages go down. Its just supply and demand, as supplied to employment. No rocket scientist needed there.

But its time that some Americans start taking new directions; we need to find something else to do. And it is no coincidence that the first caller, Chad in Lansing, spoke about his chosen field of training and employment--agriculture--and how strong that sector is in our economy just now. 

Agriculture has always been the heart of our great American expansion, and perhaps it always will be, because we have an abundant resource that many nations have a shortage of--land. And, as Jerry pointed out during the enlightened part of the discussion--the demand for food is high. Always will be. Not to mention energy sustainability, appropriate technology, etc. which is another topic altogether. Gotta go to work now; have a nice day.

Glass half-Full

The Gunpowder Guard Guy

While visiting Seattle last fall, I observed the Occupy Seattle for a couple of days. I thought it would be interesting to see what was going on in that city's setting where riots had erupted in 1999 during the World Trade Organization meeting. It was. 

One thing I noticed at Occupy Seattle was a particular mask--several of them, actually--being worn by some of the Occupyers. You may have noticed it in a photo or two taken during the coverage of that movement last year. The face depicted on the mask resembles the classic Greek drama/comedy symbol. It is male face with a thinly styled handlebar moustache, presenting a rather bizarre plastic smile.

My later research revealed the visage to be a representation of some guy named Guy Fawkes. Guy who?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes_mask

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta_(film)

Guy Fawkes was a fanatic Catholic terrorist who almost succeeded in blowing up the House of Lords in the year of our Lord 1605. http://www.britannia.com/history/g-fawkes.html

England and Scotland had been all asunder over religion at that time. The great divisive issue of the day was whether the Protestants were to have the run of Great Britain, or whether the Catholics could muscle their way back into power after the 1603 death of Queen Elizabeth I.

Elizabeth's father, the infamous King Henry VIII, had brought the religious contentions to a boil during his reign (1507-1547.) His multiple marriage escapades, along with an independently brewing Protestantism in England, had severed the ecclesiastical bonds with the Roman church. Elizabeth I had sought, after her father's death, to stabilize the church of England by encouraging both strains of Christian religious devotion--the popish ceremony and the protestant emphasis on holiness.

According to David Starkey, http://acornonline.com/product.aspx?p=monarchy&sid, the accession of King James I after Elizabeth would manifest an even more Protestant direction for Great Britain. Certain extremists of the Catholic faction did not like this development one bit. So they decided to take manners into their hands with some strategically placed gunpowder fireworks.

Sound familiar? Very modern it was.  This sort of thing has apparently been going on all along in human history, perhaps directly proportional to the pyrotechnic capabilities of each era.

In our time, what's alarming about the Occupy movement is this terrorist revolutionary undercurrent. Are they willing to identify their movement, and their tactics, with this Guy Fawkes guy? He was a terrorist, outright--caught red-handed on the night Nov 4, 1605, with a fuse to detonate a large gunpowder stash that had been gathered in a cellar chamber directly beneath Parliament in London.

Early IRA stuff it was, and Al Qaidaesque too.

Fawkes and his popish co-conspirators should have been taking their inspiration from the founder of their faith-- the Risen Savior-- instead of bullish church politics. And that goes for the protestants too. Damn their death-wielding tactics and machinations!

As for the Occupyers, they would do well to take their cues from the Prince of Peace,  resurrected from being dead, instead of any violent revolutionary like that Guy guy.  And I think Rev. Dr. King would agree if he were here.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

The wreck of '97

Scene 1, Tuesday, Feb 5 2012: I'm listening to DRshow radio discussion about  the foreclosures debacle, and being informed, to whit...

Back in '07, the decades-long  housing boom starting turning to bust. In the retractive credit  emergencies of '08, a plethora of foreclosures broke out rather suddenly, like mushrooms on neglected suburban lawns. Since the big banks had been set up for many years to mostly just dish out loans, the sudden onslaught of foreclosures caught them bureaucratically unprepared.

Swamped with overwhelming unprofitable paperwork, the banks sought to simplify their numerous foreclosure processes. They cut corners and got sloppy in documentation. The big banks got together and devised a way to cut costs, most notably those expenses incurred through courthouse fees and title registrations; they instituted the Mortgage Electronic Registration System (MERS). Unfortunately, this newly-improvised MERS  greatly complicated the later questions surrounding actual ownership of each home.  According to Arly in Vermont, a caller on yesterday's (Tuesday, Feb 7) Diane Rehm show, the MERS "broke the chain of title." This later gave rise to mucho confusion. The banks had put MERS together in--remember this--1997.

About ten years later, as the sheer volume of mortgaged-backed-securities slicing and dicing jammed up our banking system, the loss of an easily identifiable thread of ownership for each foreclosed house became, cumulatively, a huge problem, a can of worms, as it were.

But Kathleen Day, of the Center for Responsible Lending, used a better metaphor to describe the situation. During Diane Rehm's discussion, Kathleen referred to the foreclosure mess as a "train wreck."  A few minutes later on the radio program Ed Pinto, of the American Enterprise Institute, also used the "train wreck" analogy in his description.

Scene 2, blast from the past...

All of which solved a problem about a phrase--the "wreck of '97-- I had written into a song  a few years ago. In composing Boomer's Choice, I included a verse about each decade of our collective American experience, beginning with the 1950's, then covering the '60s, '70s, '80s. After the turn of the century, I was having motivation problems in the writing of a verse for the 90s. In fact, I dilly-dallied around and didn't get to the 1990s verse until the mid-'00s. And when I  finally did write that last verse, I combined that decade with those first years of the '00s. I don't know why. But I tossed the phrase "wreck of '97" into that last verse, perhaps flippantly, because I didn't know why the image of a wreck in 1997 arrested my imagination. In fact, I have often wished that I had sung the metaphor as "wreck of '07' because 2007 is when the housing boom really jumped the tracks and ran off the rails.

But now I understand. The wreck of '97  was the MERS contortion of ownership tracks that  later provoked a jumping off the financial rails-- the  wreck of '07!

 

 

So this is what it's come to

As a working citizen of these United States, I am struggling with this notion of personal responsibility.

Many leaders, most notably our President, speak publicly about the idea that everyone is duty-bound to "do their fair share." This is certainly true. 

How do we construct a society in which everybody can be incentivized to "pull their own weight?"

Almost everybody seems to be running out of money. The government is gone hog-wild with uncontrollable spending. Its as if we've got a monster perpetual motion societal machine that grinds up resources and assets and then extrudes them as public benefits--"benefits" if you're poor, "profits" if you're rich. 

Some people game the system and do really well at it; they come out smelling like a rose, and richer. The liberals call these "the rich," or the "1%." The Dems and the Occupyers  want to up the ante on these opulent types by raising their tax rates, so that there is more for the rest of us. I'm not so sure the system actually works that way. Once assets get ground-up in that perpetual motion spending machine, maybe they're lost forever. Maybe they come out in a black hole somewhere out in space beyond the demoted Pluto.

Other Americans, on the low-income end, barely get by. They wander around looking for employment, and get public assistance--welfare, subsidies, disability, and whatnot. But there seems to be a dropping point, a precipice, at the end of a slippery slope of public assistance. If po' folks have been on the dole long enough they forget (or do they?) how to really look for work. Do they forget how to think like a person who needs a job and must go out and just dam-well find one? Like, the next-one-that-comes along! What if it IS McD's? What if they DO have a diploma that is irrelevant to our present situation? Do they, instead of taking that minimum-wage insult, then choose to ease on into the public fix? Will they drift into our 12-step welfare enablements until they have at last lapsed into a prison of their own making?--a hazy cubicle smoked-up with cigarettes, beer, narcotizing tv, maybe little pops of legally-acquired or not-so-legally-obtained pills? These are the ones that the Repubs and the Tea Partiers want to cut off, because they are not pulling their weight. 

In my helpless opinion, we've got dead weight on both ends--the rich skaters and the poor slackers--and there's very little we can do about it. The Dems and the President cannot fix it; the The Repubs and Romney cannot fix it, although they claim that they can. Ha! We'll see about that round about this time 2013. Furthermore, Congressional supercommittees, God help 'em, have passed the buck as business as usual.

I certainly don't know what to do about it, so I guess I'll just go to work this Monday morning--thankful that I have a job-- and hope for the best, and pray: May God help us work this dam mess out in some kind of way that every citizen will somehow find cause to  somehow "do their fair share."

So you see I'm praying for a miracle here. But I have faith in God.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

Foundation for Debt Ceiling Research

Now is the time for all top dawgs to come to the aid of their country, y'all.

I'm talking about heavy hitters like Warren Buffett and Donald Trump, people whose impact can really make a difference.  If Donald and Warren want to contribute their money-gathering expertise to our national improvement, I propose they should organize three great charitable fundraising events. I'm suggesting that these guys do it because I'm just, like, one little guy with a big idea. But these two have the real wherewithal to get something done in the interests of balanced fiscality. 

So, the first  fundraiser would be a prize-fight in Atlantic City featuring George Soros v. David Koch.

The second would be a fight in Las Vegas between Bill Ayers and Charles Koch.

The third would be a tag-team wrestling match with the four heavyweights in Chicago.

Referees would be Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid.

Rush Limbaugh and Chris Matthews would serve as the official voices of USA Spurts.

All proceeds would go to the brand-new Foundation for Debt Ceiling Research, to be fiduciarially managed  jointly by Goldman Sachs and ACORN.

So Warren and Donald, when you get a minute, give me a call and we'll get going on this thing.

Glass Chimera

 

a little Vaclav Havel family history

  Almost 23 years ago, Vaclav Havel led the people of Czechoslovakia in a revolution that ousted four decades of Soviet communist rule. Early in his life, Vaclav had been a dissident playwright; When the Soviet was rejected in 1989, he became, despite persecution and imprisonment,  President of liberated Czechoslovakia, and in 1993 President of the Czech Republic.

Vaclav Havel died a few weeks ago, on Dec. 18. 

Vaclev had come from a good family. His grandfather, Vacslav Havel, had held a venerable role as a civic leader in Prague during the the first decade of the 20th century.  A notable component of Vacslav's (with an "s" in the middle) legacy, and the legacy of his family, was a grandiose Prague landmark, called the Lucerna Palace, the construction of which was begun in 1907. 

Consider this historical account of what happened to the Havel family's creatively constructed heritage,  before and after a communist government nationalized it in 1949.

From page 37 of Eda Kriseova's biography of Vaclav Havel:

http://www.amazon.com/Vaclav-Havel-Authorized-Eda-Kriseova/dp/0312103174

"Vacslav Havel, Vaclav's grandfather, built Prague's Lucerna Palace, an arts and entertainment center that was on a par with that of any great European city. It was his life's work. He loved Prague and wanted to do something that would promote Prague from an Austro-Hungarian provincial town to a great city…

"…and from time to time, he consulted his wife, Emilie. In his memoirs, Vaclav's father writes: 'When his (Vacslav's) project was finished, he showed my mother his suggestion for the facade on Vodickova Street. As soon as she saw it, she exclaimed that it was like a great big lucerna, or lantern. May father jumped at her remark, saying: That's a good name for the whole building, Lucerna, It is a Czech word that even a foreigner could pronounce well.' "

"During the first stage of development from 1907 to 1908, they built the building on Vodickova Street and its courtyard wing. Grandfather Havel built Lucerna in three stages at his own expense with the help of bonds and mortgages. He and his wife, Emilie, guaranteed the repayment of the loans with all their property as collateral." 

Continuing, from page 38 of Eda Kriseova's biography of Vaclav Havel:

"The ambitious concept of a single enterprise for entertainment, haute cuisine, and culture was crowned by the construction and inauguration of the Great Hall in 1920. The hall was submerged three stories below ground; above it stood a seven-story building. It was the largest underground concert hall in Prague. For the construction of the hall, Vacslav Havel innovated the use of steel-reinforced concrete for the pillars and ceilings, designed and engineered by Stanislav Bechyne, later a member of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. The construction was a worldwide rarity.

"…after the war (World War II), the Communists nationalized the Lucerna Palace."

But 18 years before World War II, When Vacslav had died in 1921, ownership of the Lucerna had passed to his son Vaclav (senior, father of the late President Vaclav), from whose possession it was later taken when the communists took over in 1949. From page 84 of Kriseova's biography of Vaclav Havel:

"According to Vaclav's father's memoirs, 1952 was the family's most difficult year. Mr Havel had to leave the Lucerna. It had not belonged to him for three years, but they had allowed him to work there. He worked well and his employers liked him. The final parting was hard for him, because he was attached to the business by countless emotional ties, by his family tradition, by his whole life."

Something tells me that this is not the way things should happen. A family was robbed of its legacy by a communist government. The government later allowed the former owner to work as an employee.

If you care to know more about this Lucerna Palace of Prague and the Havel family who built and managed it until it was taken from them, then look it up, or google it. My point here is that there have been times in human history when the hard-earned legacy of an enterprising family was absconded by a redistributive totalitarian government. Among the many forms of injustice in history, this misappropriation is one of them. It happens  when a meddlesome State steals property from the so-called bourgoisie (merchant class), or when a statist government, for purposes of leveling income inequality, occupies the assets of "the rich."

Here in America, we value and constitutionally protect the rights of individual citizens and families to own private property and manage it as they deem necessary. Let's keep it that way.

Glass half-Full

 

The Two Trees

I took just a few bites of it--
a few chapters--
and already I knew too much,
more than I can handle now.
To know the truth
if it is the truth
(for who can you believe?)
To know that terrible truth,
to hear the dark pinochet ricochet
even now
thirty years later--
that the so-called chicago boys
put those chile storm troopers up to it?
This knowledge is to terrible for me,
if it is knowledge,
And that sinister suharto shock
heard round the world
Am I supposed to feel
like responsible for this mess?
like I can do somethin about it?
Am I supposed to go out
and clean up all that shit
thats going down?
still going down?
Take up the jacobin club?
--start down that lenin road
that leads to the stalin road
the mao path--
cultural revolution, because of classified wikileaks
because of class-war hijinks
what kinda revolution do they have in mind
when the mob turns impatient
starts to turn
to occupy what? the human condition!
schmoccupy!
a fruit stand in Tunis?
a flaming vision of hell on utube.
There's no end to that burning.

A plague upon your houses!
There must be a better way
than pissin in the ocean
or in the park.
There must be a better way
than jerkin' cia strings
and coup d'etat blings.

I can eat no more from this tree now.

I just need to find something else
now,
because all my yankee hope
was sunk into that american dream
and if that dream of hard work bootstraps and get ahead of the game
turns nightmare behind the ugly scenes
with shock doctrine and torture,
i just cant...

I know now why the other tree
satisfies.
Its not too late for the other tree
the one that brings life
not guilt.
I'm not responsible for this stuff.

Come out of it my people.
Because of what Jesus did
I will eat from the other tree.
That's a better choice than Abraham had,
and sure the hell better than Mohamet
or Mao.
That's my story and I'm stickin to it.
Merry Christmas from the Garden,
Gethsemane, that is.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress