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The devil can sing, but only for a short period of time.

The bad warrior faces real bullets.

As I think about it, Fascism is nothing but the application of the military model to society. Everyone is assigned a place, and it is expected that there be no friction and no competition between the parts. A Command economy is one based upon Generals who know what is best for all of us. They decree it, and it happens (even if a few lose fingers and toes in the machinery).

That this mindset would lead naturally to aggressive militarism seems obvious. You have everybody forcibly confined to little boxes, many of which are not suitable for them. This breeds anger, and you then need some sort of outlet for that. Go invade someone. Simple enough plan.

And as I have said often, Communism is just Fascism confined to a border. The aggressive militarism is directed at the population itself. Cuba has in fact more or less invaded other countries, but for some years now it has existed as a figurative as well as literal island. The secret police are everywhere, ready for action; but the people have learned to suffer in silence. What is left for them is decline: all the energy is gone.

Edit: I will add that we might usefully define Communism as “Fascism without hope”. Mussollini and Hitler found outlets for the aggressive energies of their nations. Even if you didn’t like your station in the order, you had the opportunity to go take other people’s stuff. In this respect, Napoleon–whose soldiers were in large measure always paid in booty, and the opportunity rape other men’s wives, mothers, and daughters–was clearly a Fascist. He kept the French busy for quite some time, while Emperor.

To be clear, when they invade other nations, Fascists don’t even try to pretend it is for their own good. They are simply Vikings on a raid, who intend never to leave, and to do like the Vikings did, and enslave anybody they want as slaves.

The paradigmatic Communist War, on the other hand, is that of internal subversion, in which they get Fifth Columnists in key posts, and desecrate and denigrate the cultural and political institutions by which that nation maintains itself. The lie is always that they are rescuing the nation from some evil supposedly superior to their own.

This applies even in the case of naked aggression, as in the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, the invasions of Czechoslavakia and Hungary, the invasion of South Vietnam by their Communist neighbors, and many others. Such incursions were claimed to be for the good of all concerned.

Practically, though, they were still Fascist. The confiscated wealth of Eastern Europe was used to buoy the Soviets up long after the failure of their economic system became obvious; and of course Party bosses to this very day in China and Cuba are able to live much better than those they rule over, since they have legally protected access to the fruits of their labor, like plantation owners of old.

Again: Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme merde.

I’m still reading “FDR’s Folly”, which not only decisively demolishes any residual beliefs poorly informed people might have that FDR helped this nation economically–on the contrary, he nearly turned us into the Fascist State many of his top New Deal advisors wanted, and would have but for the Supreme Court–but also eerily prefigures what Obmama is trying to do now. What FDR did in the 1930’s–not let a good crisis go to waste–Obama and his Communist czars are trying to do now, using the same language, the same imbecilic economic and social theories, and which will end in the same result.

I will deal with this at length elsewhere. For now, let me make one point he made that I hadn’t considered.

Inflation is always wealth transfer. I make that point often, and did in my last post. If prices are going up, SOMEBODY is taking money from the people paying higher prices. If oil goes up, and the cascade effect causes anything that is moved by truck, train, plane or boat to go up, then either the oil companies are increasing profit margins, or the cost of oil exploration has gone up, which has created business and wealth for oil explorers. If, due to cartelization, the production of oil has simply been slowed intentionally, that is still effectively a profit margin increase, and the obvious solution is decartelization.

How would we break up OPEC? That is actually an interesting question I won’t address here.

Getting to my point, taxes increase the cost of business for employers. Take the Social Security Tax. We pay 6.2% of our income, but so do our employers. This cost has to be factored into the cost of doing business. Consequently, it necessitates, directly, an increase in prices charged. So our government takes money from us by force, supposedly for our own good, and thereby causes everything in America to cost more.

Self evidently, this inflation is a wealth transfer from the private sector to the public sector. All of the homes that public sector employees buy, all the cars they drive, all the 401K accounts, and pensions, and boats, and vacations, and anything they consume: we pay for it. Our wealth becomes their wealth.

With about 2.0 million civilian employees, the Federal Government, excluding the Postal Service, is the Nation’s largest employer.

The postal service–which in my understanding has to be constantly underwritten by taxpayers, but which does in fact provide a useful service, and which is clearly Constitutional–employs 596,000.

Consider this: Federal civil servants earned average pay and benefits of $123,049 in 2009 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation

Multiplying $123,000 by 2 million gets me 248,000,000,000. This is the amount of private wealth that is transferred from the private sector to the public sector every year.

The subtle point I want to make here is that every dollar in taxes paid to support these workers–some of whom we plainly need, like the military–is not only diverted from private investment and following sustinable job creation, but also causes the cost of services and products to rise correspondingly. Your net profits are sales less costs, and taxes, being a cost, necessitate higher sales prices.

This point is ineluctable, and worth pondering. There has been so much stupidity over the last 100 years. Maybe, just maybe, we can reverse it.

I think we need to keep some things clear in our minds with respect to inflation. Prices, the amount of money in existence, and the amount of money in circulation are all related but separate things, even though practically they get used interchangeably.

If oil costs go up, everything that gets transported–which is pretty much everything–will go up in cost. This is a means of wealth transfer to oil producing companies, if their costs have not gone up, and if their costs have gone up, then it transfers that wealth to those who are charging more. Perhaps they have to look longer, or dig deeper wells, or whatever. The people that do that, are doing well.

When the amount of money in existence goes up, then the people who create it and first spend it benefit most. This would be first and foremost people with first access to Central Banks, but also all banks generally, who create the money they loan.

When the amount of money in circulation goes up, it would seem to there is no net difference. To get the money out of the supply in the first place, people would have to buy dollars at then market value. When they then spend them, they get better deals, since the absence of the money on the market will have caused prices to drop, but on balance this seems to me not a big deal. China, for example, might exchange $10 billion Mao’s for $10 billion. If the yuan is devalued relative to the dollar, they don’t get a great deal.

Certainly, one could take advantage of the ebb and flow of currency exchange rates, like Keynes did personally, but the primary agent of true inflation is in my view related to number two, the banking system.

To cognize is to think. To recognize is to think twice, or so I would suppose, without confirming the etymology.

To think is to create or acknowledge a pattern. To re-think, is really to see that pattern again.

I recognize him. To do that, I must have seen him before.

How much of our perception is original, and how much recognition? If the world is constantly in flux, what is the proper role of recognition? It is difficult to imagine a world in which every pattern had to be created anew. It is equally difficult to imagine an interesting world which consisted ONLY recognition.

In my view, perhaps the simplest definition of psychological well-being is the ability to consistently accomplish chosen goals with enjoyment. This is really pretty simple. Do you exercise the way you want to? Do you eat the way you want to? Do you interact with others, and with your job, and pursue your career the way you want to?

Most of us, and I clearly belong in this category, are some combination of well and ill. We go to work every day, we more or less get our work done, albeit often without enthusiasm. We sort of stick to our diets, but not completely, and not without some resentment. We more or less do our fitness programs, but without excitement.

Higher level self organization, though, would enable each of us, over time, to do superior work in all areas of our lives, and enjoy it. This is the obvious path forward, that can be pursued independent of religious or spiritual beliefs. It is quite adequate even for atheists.

What I wanted to say, though, is that failing to pursue the goals we choose, is in some measure to fail to be who we are. My own goals are ridiculously ambitious, but even so, I do not pursue them with the diligence with which I know I am capable. If you are going to climb a mountain, it makes sense to keep going up, and not to circle it. One sees this terms self sabotage. I like the term self mutilation better, as the habit of paralysis has lasting consequences.

And I would draw a parallel with cutting as well, which most people–certainly all kids–are familiar with now. How does cutting ease pain?

In answering this question, I think one must look not just at psychological data, but to our broader culture, which most psychologists seem loathe to do. It may be that if it is not in a lab it is not science. At the same time, you have to look for the truth where it is. To do otherwise is to be like the drunk Irishman, who when asked why he was looking for his keys under the lamp, when he had dropped them a dozen yards back outside the pub, replied “because the bloody light is better.”

Our modern world lacks rules. Our children, by and large, are only reliably taught that you can’t judge people based on race, and that their chief task in life is to consume. To put it bluntly, this is a really shitty identity, and more or less a form of child abuse. We can’t ask them to do our damn job, which is to give them some sense of moral compass, and some reason to persist in the face of difficulty.

It seems to me that to relate to others deeply, you have to be able to feel deeply, and to feel deeply you have to have some means by which to contextualize suffering. It can be as simple as “life is like that”. It must involve the rejection of self pity, however it is accomplished.

And it must involve pain. I think any child that is too comfortable throughout childhood will be lacking in empathetic capacity. I think of sterotypical Valley girls, whose entire lives involve nearly perfect weather, malls, beauty salons and cosmetic surgery, and sex at an early age.

Sex: what a hopelessly lifeless word. A penis and a vagina or some other orifice coming together rhyhmically for some period of time, until some degree of biological tension is released, temporarily. No emotional connection need be implied.

I don’t like sex–well, actually I enjoy it like everyone else–but what I really WANT is to do it with someone I can see sitting on the front porch with 40 years from now, long after I have the need, or possibly even physical capacity, to do it.

Most kids nowadays, certainly not the boys, don’t think this way. They watch hard and softcore pornography, and come to view women–girls, initially–as existing in some sort of parallel world devoid of emotional committment. For their part, girls come to view themselves in much the same way. They give of themselves, but always think in the back of their minds that the boy will appreciate them much more than he ever does.

The best model for depression I have seen is that of the dog on the electrified plate. It has, I think, been some time since I’ve talked about this, so I’ll run through that quickly. I think the following is correct, but I may have slightly altered some detail.

Experiments were done, in another time and age when ethical concerns were not so prevalent, in which dogs were placed in a cage with an electrical plate. It would be turned on, and initially the dogs were given a pathway out, so they could avoid the pain. Then the door was locked, and there was literally nothing they could do. After having endured this for some time, the door was reopened; yet, the dogs would remain where they were, enduring the shock. This phenomenon is called Learned Helplessness.

What I think many kids nowadays learn is that our common culture is so weak that what deep feelings they have can nowhere be communicated. Nobody seems to want to listen. Nobody wants to hear about feelings of rage–say, at some boy–or confusion as to what to do in life, or fear about the future, when there are so many ways the world could end in a nasty way.

They are alone. Maybe you the reader feel alone. Nobody wants to hear the thoughts you think may be silly, but which are yours. Maybe you are a poet, but afraid to share it with anyone. Or maybe you share it with everyone, and nobody reads it; or maybe they think you are stupid.

How do we connect with one another? Who are we? Have we not all been through this synchronizing mechanism in which we compare tastes in movies, or sports, or music? You listen to the Killers? Cool, I think they are the best. You a Packers fan? Me, too. Somebody was doing the dialogue to Caddy Shack the other day. I only saw that movie once, 25 years ago. I don’t remember anything but Bill Murray and the gopher. I was left out of that conversation.

This is the root of cutting. Pain is real, is it not? It is not ambiguous. And I think all the piercing and tattooing we see going on is just a thinly veiled extension of cutting. Eyebrow piercings? Ear gauges? We are all looking at one another, lonely at the core of our being. We can all be cool with each other, but who will get up in the middle of the night to save you? Who will run into a burning building for you?

The Portuguese have this word “saudade”. I may have mentioned this, but if so it’s been a while. It is the feeling an ocean faring people get, that is sort of a longing for what is in the distance. As I understand it, it can be both a longing for home, when you are far away, and a longing for far away, when you are home. It is a sad restlessness, a lack of contentedness, a need to move.

This is what the Buddhists and Taoists called desire. To be happy, is to be happy where you are.

I have things to do. As I note on the side there, this blog is for open thoughts, and random musings. Thoughts can be like paintings or scultures. The Goodness Movement blog is sort of my museum, and this is my workshop. You have to play with the materials, you have to hit things roughly the same way, but from many different angles. These are all sketches. Some I complete, some I don’t.

Always, I am trying to learn, though: to see what I should see, if my eyes were clear.

This is an interesting graph. Just click on it, and it will expand. You will note a substantial decline in relative Defense expenditures over the years. It definitely went down to its lowest amount at the end of the Cold War, but does not even approach what it was in the 50’s, relatively speaking.

The point I wanted to make is we have spent some $16 trillion in todays dollars on the War on Poverty, and poverty is winning.

Let us use the analogy of an actual war. We have been fighting this one for 45 years, and we can list as casualties most of the people killed in poor areas, due to destroyed cultural institutions, most notably the family and church.

The War in Iraq will in the end have cost us about $2.4 trillion or so. That is one sixth what we have spent on the War on Poverty, and in the end we will (or should have) a democratic Arab nation in the Middle East. The War on Poverty has made things WORSE.

Food for thought–unless you are a leftist, in which case your only decision is what combination of fool, corporate apologist and racist I am. Whatever you do, don’t think about the ghettoes of Detroit and your role in their creation.

For once, he has not said anything I find objectionable. I only read this column once, and I had a Guinness for St. Patrick’s Day, but he makes sense.

Banks need to be held accountable for hurting people. It is one thing to knowingly enter a loan you can’t pay–and even there, the bank should not make the loan if this is the case. It is another entirely to willfully mislead people.

Once you truly grasp how the fractional reserve system works, particularly as it combines with central banking, you just want to tell many of these banks to shut up and fly right. Not many of us can imagine million dollar bonuses, but they are not uncommon, I don’t think, in the banking world.

If Krugman wants to attack our banking system as parasitical, I would be prepared to support him, at least up to a point.

The “rich” are not the enemy. Bill Gates, for example, earned his money. He has created some ten thousand millionaires-something on that order–and ten’s of thousands of well paying jobs. This is a useful activity.

What is not useful is creating money from scratch. All banks do this. Money that should be in the proverbial vault is instead cloned and given to other people. This is money that would not be in the economy otherwise, and is thus intrinsically inflationary.

Moreover, this Quantitative Easing the Fed is doing is nothing but printing money and giving it to a small elite that is already very, very, very rich, so they can lay ownership claims on more of the world’s property. Yes, we lose the purchasing value of our money through inflation, but only if that money is spent HERE. What I expect to happen, now, is that a lot of $600 Billion or whatever it is–how would we know, when we can’t audit the Fed?–will be spent buying up Japan. That won’t cause inflation here, but it WILL cause a net transfer of wealth from Japan to here.

I won’t defend this. This is not a matter of patriotism. Theft by any of us is the responsibility of all of us, and theft is what this is.

We need to end the Fed, and end fractional reserve banking. The latter idea makes peoples heads want to explode, but in my view it is quite doable. I will link my series again: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page14.html

I have said this often, but what I propose is fully congruent with the spirit in which Marxists approach economic matters, except that I care about getting the damn thing right. There are fundamental inequities n our system, but they will not be fixed by “revolution”, or the empowerment of an unaccountable elite. On the contrary, such an outcome would likely work to the BENEFIT of those who already hold most of the wealth and power in this nation.

I recommend this book from time to time. That was where I pulled the Stuart Chase quote from, and where he quotes Mussollini calling Keynes ideas “pure fascism”.

I was unable to validate all the personal crimes he catalogues in the chapter on moral depravity, except the note Keynes wrote to Strachey about “bed and boy” being cheap in Tunis. One wonders how any positive spin can be put on that; that he was referring to pedophilia and child prostitution seems almost inescapable.

One last comment I will add is that it is interesting to me to note how much people assume of our world. Things happen in a certain way, in a certain order, day after day after day, so they complacently believe that they must always remain that way.

I was on a 12′ ladder the other day, working over peoples desks with them at them, with two pairs of pliers, removing 3# speakers. Some of the people were alert enough to realize that pliers do not always remain in hands. Most of them were not. They were at their desks, that was their place, and I was just going to have to deal with it. That is perhaps understandable, but I was not the one risking something dropping on my head from 15′.

There is a book called Deep Survival, which is uneven, but which makes some good points. He goes through some tragic accidents, and points out that quite often they happen because people blindly ASSUME that things do not change. A group of snowmobilers was killed in what I believe was an avalanche, after going up a hill they had gone up dozens of times. They knew that conditions were right for disaster, but it was THAT HILL, they knew it, it was their friend. Nothing had ever happened before. How could it happen now?

Many of the people out there today are the same. They blithely assume that since America has been free for 200 years (to varying degrees, depending on who you are or were), that it will always remain free. This is mouth-breathing complacency at its worst. So is trusting “governemnt” to fix anything. History is quite clear that if you are going to get some large-scale disaster–like war or tyranny–then it starts with the government. There are no examples of corporations exercising direct power (outside of, perhaps, the British East India Company, which however itself was a Crown-granted monopoly), but history is little BUT the naked abuse of power by governments. That is not the exception, it is the rule.

No one living today should be so stupid as not to realize that.

As I hopefully made clear in the post where I discussed Hugh S. Johnson, Time Magazine’s Man of the Year for 1933, point man for the New Deal, and admirer of Fascism, our government has had people in high office for many decades who held free markets in contempt, and thought they knew better how to do EVERYTHING.

The role of Fannie Mae–a New Deal agency–in the meltdown of 2008 has not been made as obvious to all concerned as it ought to have been, but it has not been fully ignored either. The short version is that when it failed, its backing of something on the order of a trillion dollars worth of mortgage-backed securities became suspect, the Credit Ratings Agencies downgraded their ratings, and sales dried up, forcing massive cashflow problems for very, very, very large banks, like Lehman Brothers.

What has been little remarked upon is that the government holds most of the mortgages in this country. The number is something like 80%. Ponder that. The Federal Government, either through direct ownership (you write a monthly check to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac), or through final backing of securities consisting of packaged mortgages, has the title to 80% of the homes built in America. I am not talking public housing. I am not talking urban renewal projects. I am talking ordinary homes, “owned” by ordinary people. That is phenomenally important. We are using our own tax dollars to buy ourselves homes, and in the process ceding ownership to one monolithic entity, the Federal Government. This is a MASSIVE transfer of power, even if the consequencs of this are not obvious, yet.

Keynes was a Fascist. Mussollini himself said so, and presumably if anyone knew what Fascist economics looked like, the founder of Fascism did. Certainly, Keynes mentor–George Bernard Shaw–looked at Mussollini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, and Lenin’s Soviet Union with the same enthusiasm.

In “The End of Laissez-Faire”, which was not a well-thought out body of thought, but rather an erudite expression of the most cartoonish thinking, Keynes makes a case for what he called “semi-autonomous” bodies, which support the power of the State, but not in an obvious way. He used the example of the Bank of England, and if memory serves the London Port Authority. What he wanted were agencies ultimately accountable to no one, which could be subverted in a political direction he desired. Some years you make progress in the government; in other years, you have people doing things in the dark that nobody can see. Somewhere, every year, you are moving your plan for autocracy forward.

It is within this context that the patent Fannie Mae filed for a system to turn off power remotely to any home in the nation must be viewed. This is not the best link, but it will do for now.

What were they doing? They were thinking ahead to when the government actually flexed its muscle, and under the guise of preventing global warming exercised the right to determine how much power people could use, directly. They literally want a line into your home, such that they can kill your power whenever they choose to.

We are told the lie that the role of Fannie Mae is increasing home ownership. What has in fact happened is that, yes, people were approved for homes who would not otherwise have qualified. Those people, being unqualified, have in very large numbers defaulted on mortgages that never should have been written in the first place, at ENORMOUS cost to American taxpayers.

To be clear, what happened was that local banks wrote mortgages they NEVER would have kept for themselves, but which they wrote simply because Fannnie Mae buys everything. Even though everything they did put the American taxpayers on the hook, nothing they did was regulated, at the insistence of Democrats, with Barney Frank and Chris Dodd being the most egregious defenders of this terrible system.

I will note as well in conclusion that the man who wrote the book “A New Deal” was an open admirer of Soviet Communism. He went there, liked what he saw, and wrote “why should they have all the fun”. By fun, he seems to have had in mind mass murder:

Best of all, the new regime would have the clearest idea of what an economic system was for. The sixteen methods of becoming wealthy would be proscribed—by firing squad if necessary—ceasing to plague and disrupt the orderly process of production and distribution. Money would no longer be an end, but would be thrust back where it belongs as a labor-saving means. The whole vicious pecuniary complex would collapse as it has in Russia. Money making as a career would no more occur to a respectable young man than burglary, forgery or embezzlement. “Everyone,” says Keynes, “will work for the community and, if he does his duty, the community will uphold him.” Money making and money accumulating cannot enter into the life calculations of a rational man in Russia. A society of which this is even partially true is a tremendous innovation

We underestimate the extent to which our order has ALREADY been subverted at our peril.