Muddled Thinking: The angry public

I ventured into blog reading some time ago to get a feel for blogging sentiment and thought structure. . . The sentiment is angry and the structure of the blogging is lame attempts to tar a feather someone, usually the president for the economic ills being felt today. The equivalent to blaming the nurse who is taking your temperature because you are sick with a high fever, for your sickness. The first clue might be that the recession began a year before the current president was sworn in, and the crashing sounds of the great stock market, which began last year, was the house of cards fashioned from deregulation gurus. . . and I'm not thinking they come from the current administration nor the democratic side of politics.

The shrill attacks coming from the loudest critics are arguing both sides of the coin. They argue that the government is totally incapable of doing anything correctly nor at a reasonable cost. Only business can do that. Really? The second argument goes like this. . . On President Obama's watch, jobs are being lost. . . so his stimulus idea isn't working and he's pissing away our precious money. The second clue would be that it is business that is sheding the jobs sited. The rest of the rant was aimed at the fact that all the jobs remaining in this country. . . were loser jobs that paid nothing. Again, business has those jobs, sets those pay rates, offers the hours, benefits, time off and other issues, not government. The reason for the above situation where the mainstay of living wage jobs is no longer available in this country is rather simple. Those jobs have been filled in other countries. When manufacturing jobs were 'outsourced' to other countries as in China, Phillipines, Thailand, Hong Kong and the like, or maquiadora labor south of the border in Sonora, Mexico, Americans moved to service sector jobs. . . they paid half what manufacturing did. That lasted a few years until they too were outsourced to India, mostly. Bombay, Calcutta, Bangalore.

All this paid huge dividends for business. Labor amazingly cheap and lower taxes on top of that with the tax cuts put into place. The problem with all that is simply this. What is good for business is good for business. What is good for business more often than not is not good for the citizens of this country or the social structure they live in. It is not the case that business is evil or that business is bad. Business is a very good thing, if, it isn't distructive to the society it is attached to. Government is not evil or bad either. It is an instrument to which the populace rely upon for the structure for which they depend for long term social, and personal survival.

I have owned my own business for thirty years. Paid my share of taxes and taken my lumps. I have been around long enough to have observed first hand the changes in 'business' over that time period. Business is much like Love. . . there's every meaning to what that might mean. The growth of the 'too big to fail' businesses. . . began with the 'Greed is Good!" creed. You saw where that led us, and it begs the question to ask. . . "so how's that working out for you?". . . .

And the idiots that created this subversion of business and shook down all those that did business with them. . . we paid them well with our tax dollars for their. . . losses, so they would be insured of getting their million dollar bonuses. . . on top of their million dollar salaries. How many government workers even get to keep their jobs if they make billion dollar mistakes? The criticisms coming out of the ranting blogs are misplaced, but then that's never stopped such pontificating and blustering. It would seem that if the social body hands over trillions of dollars of it's treasury to wealthy individuals, corporations and wall street. . . it's a tax cut. If the same social body spends it's own money on public projects, education or health care for its citizens. . . it's welfare, or. . . . . . socialism. How quaint a notion.

Realizing the Dream

Standing on the ownership side of the home deal feels too good to put into words at the moment. But that will pass. . . as all things do. More life-lessons to absorb along the way, all good in the end, however. The real show in the big tent was unfolding all around our own small side venue of home buying, not really affecting what we were doing in any major way, yet altering things in major ways in the larger arena of life for the social body of this country; and likely the world.

As I marched through the machinations of home buying, dealing with one stumbling block after another to reach the hopeful goal, the comparison of my ordeals to the ones unfolding in the big tent of the larger social body were drawn into sharp contrast. I was buying a home while millions of Americans were losing theirs. My life was finally arriving at a point of comfort and security when so many other lives in this country were finding their lives and livelihoods evaporating by the day. I am not here posting feelings of personal guilt for social loss or misfortune of others. I do certainly empathize for other's misfortune, as any caring individual might. It is comment on the juxtaposition of my life as it was, to what it is now, and the reversal of fortunes in the larger social context due to 'business cycles' and practices, as they are applied in today's world of monetary policy.

I arrived at this thinking from reading "Paper Money" by Adam Smith, a pseudonym for Georgy J. W. Goodman; 1981. One of those books I picked up a number of years ago in a used book store finding it to be one of those. . . "I'll read that someday when I have some time. . ." I've lost count of the passing years since that purchase. Possibly, the interval of time has been a good thing, with the message of the book being what it is, focusing on the fundamentals of how money, especially paper money, affects the social body and in turn is affected by the social body. Much like Einstein's principle of participation, when dealing with Quantum Physics. In order to measure active components or variables of the quantum world, one has to sort of actively participate or be a part of the quantum world, and thereby one alters things in perceptible ways. Just a bit, but enough to change things as they might have been without the participation. One cannot measure without participating, and participating alters things. Much like money in a society. Goodman's thesis is precisely this point. Monetary policy in theory is not the same as the flow of money in an open society, due to the participation of those that handle the money, borrow the money, profit from the money, etc. That's even without the concept of credit. Things become far more complex with that variable added to the mix.


The historical flow of this monetary policy covers roughly the past two-hundred years, with the focus of this flow centered during the 1930's, being the defining point of 'before and after' much like BC and AD is for our calendar of historical time. There were recessions and depressions of sorts before 1930, but none that stuck in the social psyche as the 'big one' did. What is most interesting to me is that the old dictum of history repeating itself still holds so true to course. The loss of confidence in the currency of the dollar, which has been the world standard since WWII, drives individuals to put their money into more seemingly valid items, such as gold, silver, and real estate. His historical overview of the 1970's and the real estate boom is but a precursor to what unfolded in the years after 2000. Deja Vu all over again. . . Apparently we had a much bigger party this last time around than during the '70's. Same results, just farther flung and more painful to more individuals.

The results of these recurrent actions are pricely the 'participation' of individuals upon the makeup of money in society. We are not all out to achieve the same ends or use the same means to those ends. The very thought of this is philosophically repugnant to "Free Market Capitolists". Everyone living comfortably, within their means, in a steady and progressive manner brings up words like 'socialism', 'communism', 'Maoism', 'mediocrity' and 'anti-Americanism', to name a few. The American psyche was built upon H. L. Mencken's "manifest destiny" which heralded the gold rush fever of 1849 which has never truly abated our ideals of rags to riches dreaming. For who doesn't want to strike it rich? Be famous, idolized and adored? Can we forget programming like "The Lives of The Rich and Famous". . .? Or the reality television programs post-ceding that. It's all about invisioning ourselves as those we see being idolized and worshipped for their wealth or notoriety. Money flows to where the action is in the big tent, and the barkers are always on hand to direct us to the latest must see event or star, and we're always eager to follow the way so as not to be left out or appear as bumpkins.

The thing that constitutes wealth. . . changes over time for each of us. For now, I'm feeling rather wealthy. Not to merely compare myself to someone else's current economic condition. That relationship can change as quick as a car wreck. But from that condition that tells us. . . 'enough'. I have enough. I'm full. Stop eating. I don't really want more. What my new house has given me it time. How interesting is that. . .? Being semi-retired I have time I can spend now, and on anything I choose. It tastes delicious to just write about it. What this brings about is thinking, as one tends to reduce the time spent on spending the entire attention span to doing one's job; for whomever that is for. Turning that time onto one's self, expands the normal time spent therein exponentially. And that is powerful medicine.

Finding A Home:

After experiencing living in a nomadic fashion all my life I have come to feel the roots of nesting, settling in at my tender advanced age. My sweet woman has come to love our home to be; soon. And my thoughts of the changes I have in mind to make, tease me into implementing old ideas held in reserve since I was a young man. Set aside areas of one's abode designed for quiet contemplation and solitude from the cacophony of modern living. It is not hard work that kills the spirit then the body proper, it's stress. Stress, in a modern society such as ours, is a built-in feature.

Observing things as a home buyer, I am riding the perfect storm of situation and opportunity, where a stressed housing market has made homes affordable again, relatively speaking, and interest rates are are historically low. And the storm arrived on the wings of skulduggery and unabridged greed, from those that will be handling our home loans, finances, investments and retirement funds. I am not feeling all that fuzzy warm over that thought. I couldn't help but think about how far I would go in using the current weight of it being a buyer's market, where distressed owners are in the straights of having to seel their homes. . . as leverage to work the asking price over like a crazed boxer in the tenth round. Get that deal.

We offered the asking price. The owners signed within three hours. Karma won. And I take close note of the feel of the energy that pervades the process, and me. Something of the order of 'paying it forward', or just plain Karma for us that think in such terms. The Law of Attraction which governs the character of our intentions and the outcome of our decisions. Socially, we've spent thirty years shaping our society through valueless rewards and unrealistic expectations. It was enticing and we fell into its charismatic spell. It induced a crazed race for materialistic dominance for trinkets and toys. Eventually, we all feel the depressing reality that we're not happy, nor content. Just stuffed from the gorging and overburdened with debt. And feeling empty.

What gives me hope for a new paradigm to take form and branch out to touch each individual through the process of social interaction, is the same function of Perfect Storm conditions. When global corporations began gobbling up smaller ones and eventually dominating entire industries such as agri-businesses, the traditional family owned business, family owned farm all but disappeared. Everyone worked for the Company. The downside to that is the same with that of the old multi-player units of my youth, where one unit held a radio, 33rpm record player and sometimes a built-in reel to reel tape recorder. When one unit failed, nothing worked. Which is why component technology came to be. When one component failed, the others worked and the component could be replaced separately. So goes the practice of agriculture, where agri-business grow 25% or more of any given crop for all the U.S. Or the case of Iowa, the corn capital of this country, growing pretty much seeding all of it's arable land for feed corn, to be sent to Kansas to feed the millions of beef cattle for slaughter. If there was say. . . a draught in California in the San Joakuin Valley which grows much of the country's vegetables. . . or corporate beef sales died and Iowa couldn't sell all that feed corn. . . corporate trucks aren't able to carry food to market. . . there's going to be a rather huge problem, and damn little to do about it.

Which is where the perfect storm of situation and condition come together to realize a different means of doing business, and perceiving something larger than immediate material gain for the social body. As was posited thirty years ago by Alvin Tofler in his writings on The Electric Cottage, we have it within our means to take control of our lives by utilizing the connection we all have at our disposal. The computer and the internet. As I am doing now. I have a photography business that is directly connected to the internet, with a web-site as well as doing web-mercials for small businesses to put on their web-sites. With the stunning losses of jobs over the past years, and with much more to come, it is becoming more and more evident that the era of corporate domination of business may be closing, and rising is the growing sense of many of us that we don't need global business jobs to live, we just need an income. If we have a talent or expertise that can be sold to a corporation for a job position, we have that same talent to sell our expertise to the public at large. And depending on our service or product, there are half a billion computers with people sitting at them strolling the internet for things they want or need.

The change is us. The new paradigm is merely changing our routines and automatic lives, to live in the moment and know what we are doing. Changing a habit is not possible, until one wants to change the habitual behavior, and that usually always demands replacing the habit, or habitual behavior with something else. An alternative. Another behavior, a replacement for the habit. And that takes volition on our part. After we've come to realize we want the change in the first place. Cognition first, volition thereafter. After being on autopilot for a lifetime cognitive self-realization is not the simple act it would seem. It tends to piss Ego off like nothing else. Usurping power over self.

So the house we will shape into home brings with it a good energy that wraps itself around the entire deal. And our lives for some time to come. I'm still working on the new paradigm.

What are the people thinking?

Like most of you, I'm hip deep in keeping the work thing moving and staying afloat while looking for a paddle. Which isn't all that bad a position to observe things. It's the sort of thing that keeps one honest and open to the larger picture. I don't believe I'm not overstating it when I say family and home are the things on most of our minds right about now. Having said that, it also isn't hard to notice that there are divisions forming in so many areas once thought solid and sacrosanct. The conditions having changed over the past thirty years, from the opening official toast of "greed is good", bringing with it a momentum of social applause and a mindset for what America was, and is.

It is that mindset that defined America in terms of international competitiveness via multinational corporations. "What's good for America is good for business. And what's good for business is good for America" became unfettered laissez faire capitalism. How can one not feel that to be a good thing? Personally speaking, I don't feel that is a bad thing. I believe it is a naive belief. In theory it can be argued that the 'trickle down' theory works. In theory it does. What is missing in the theory is the simple variable of basic human nature. One only needs look at the repetiveness of history on this issue. My interest isn't so much on the economic theory of good business, but the philosophical question it poses. Business in the context above, as equavelent to America's very prosperity and stability, then, to be protected as an entity or agrieved aspect of society, then has apparently some innalien rights or due process. Not being an attorney or legal scholar puts that thinking into my opinion column.

However, it doesn't stop us from realizing that there is much more to a healthy and vibrant society, America, than having just that, and a vibrant society is not one that is decaying within structurally. The citizens aren't held captive to the whims of high rolling investors and the fallout throughout the business community that is the lifeblood of working Americans. It is easy to lay blame at the feet of corporations, but I think it would be misplaced. I believe the basic issue is that we the people took our eye of the goal, our collective hands off the controls, to sit back and marvel at the opulence of materialism, allowing the train to become derailed right before our eyes. And now we can't believe our lieing eyes.

A number of years ago. . . more than I'll admit, while thinking on the issues stated above, it struck me of the perils to come with the continuation of the policies set forth at that time. I smuggly thought to myself that there would come a reconning, a social payment that would be so nasty as to be poetice justice for the mindless incompitence I was seeing. And, being one within the social masses, was included in that smug thought. Though I kept that thought aside at the time. And, as things usually do in historically repititive fashion, things have gone to hell quickly. What I hadn't factored into the early thinking was that those that bring about such social & economic devastation are not themselves caught up in the tidal wave that sweeps over the social landscape. It is us commoners that finally stare disbelieving as the wave lifts high, just before it comes crashing down and sweeps away pretty much everything.

I have come to fully realize the interconnectedness of the social body, the social spirit. The energy that passes through us as we find ourselves in the same leaky boat with what we are learning are our neighbors. We aren't alone, and we are far more powerful as a group than as an individual. Relearning the basic values of village, of tribe, of community. We are not strangers or in compitition with each other, even if we each sell our wares in the same market. It is apparent to me now that any poetic justice to be handed out won't be at the high end of the social strata. It is and will be us. And that doesn't make me feel smug. It brings a sort of resigned sadness philosophically, and a pain to the heart. Those people I see out there. . . are neighbors, even though they have a different zip code or state to call home. The thing that makes it all doable for me is knowing that at some point in time, there will be a social realization of interconnectedness and stewardship of our America. Which I truly believe was the original intent of our founding documents and the thinking that went into writing them. Things just tend to get altered along the way while erstwhile hands tune our destiny.

A short beginning:

I have been writing since I was a young teenager. My fancy for words came in the form of prose. I continue to appreciate that form of writing for my personal work, yet over the ensuing years of study found myself writing in scientific form or business form. On the one hand, these forms have an advantage of being a concrete set of standards which if followed, led to a formal conclusion that was then peer reviewed for form, thesis and conclusion; backed up with conclusive evidence.
Prose on the other hand, demands a sense of the Muse along with a boat load of imagination and perseverance. And loads of time. Writing a blog. . . for me. . . is a stream of consciousness activity. Formal rambling, really.

The most socially watched event today is the state our nation is in. This affects each and every one of us, like it or not. There are of course many paths of exploration into the current events unfolding, from a number of perspectives and persuasions. The perspective I personally take in observing a social event is from the studies in anthropology I have had, which I find to be very good tools for such a task. I bring this up as this will define the message as I progress through the issues I see as pertinent to the events within our social body, our culture as Americans.

The one element most lacking for me right now is time. Work demands, home and family, buying a house. . . normal stuff for most of us. And it takes most of our waking hours to address. Which will be one of the rambles. . . I mean blogs that will be forthcoming. As I said, this will be a short beginning; an further introduction of sorts. What I can only hope is that with cool heads and hard work it is possible to dig our collective selves out of the hole we are currently in. That's the plan.

Blogger's Intent:

The intent of this entry is little more than acknowledging my blogging begins as inspiration from my daughter Shawna who had led the blogging way with her own blog page. The issues that have surfaced in our society over the past years now demand our collective attention, as a social body. However, it is not the intent of this blog to directly address the social issues as a focus, but the social body itself, as a means of addressing what we as individuals have in common during times when the social issues are manifest and have control over our individual as well as collective lives.
At this time there will also be a blogging page on my personal business' site, ImageAssociatesAZ.com. This business is a partnership with my son, whom is and will be a driving force for the business, which deals in digital photography and video. My family, as yours, is dealing with the fallout from the economic shakedown that is currently unfolding, in every sector. Banking, housing, finance, large and small businesses. What we are learning now, as individuals, family members, business owners and citizens is that we all count. We are all worthy of making it past this time of upheaval and uncertainty. Non of us are better than anyone else. It is in our best interest to change the primary focus on life in America from the old tenets of. . . "Greed is good". . ."everyone for themselves" and "I got mine screw you!" and other refrains having found social acceptance over the past thirty years. And I have been around long enough to remember life before such self-defeating social practices.
Over time I will be commenting on various issues concerning the above focus on getting beyond old and socially destructive policies, and discussing a new paradigm in thinking that can be applied individually, and that can have potentially positive consequences for the larger social body. This takes time to formulate and expound upon in order to reach a workable thesis for review. The bloggers are us. We the people have a platform that can reach everyone, and belongs to us; the people, the individual. Let us use it wisely.

Pops