The Swamp We're In -- came from NOT TAXING THE RICH

Seems to me that the 53% of us who pay taxes -- and especially those like you who are  in the middle third of that bracket -- are the ones who really got screwed by the cockeyed Trickle Down scheme for not taxing the Rich and the Super Rich at all -- or maybe only at half the rate their secretaries pay.  So our current tax scheme probably needs an adjustment it won't get.

You might spend some time parsing Paul  Krugman, who has many interesting takes  on why continuing to think inside the box will get us deeper into the swamp.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/opinion/rabbit-hole-economics.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

Of course, Krugman  won't go for the Trickle Up! Economics miracle that would actually pull us out of the mess fairly quickly.  The problem now is that there's no liquidity at the bottom of the system.  The top's doing fine ....

Sometimes it seems to me that all economic theory is just cleverly disguised  political theory aimed at promoting the interests of a particular class at the expense of the others.  We've mostly been fascinated by one variant or another of eitehr Keynesian economics or Trickle Down economics since the thirties -- since, in fact, Keynes proposed it.  And the result has been that 37% of this country is stuck below the poverty line, while 10% of the country owns 90% of the wealth producing assets. The "middle class" -- YOUR 53% -- has been shafted by the R&SR clique, and even worse, the "middle class" by and large has bought into the notion that "cutting the deficit" will somehow ameliorate our current economic malaise.  The  ill-gotten gains enjoyed by the super rich combined with a climate of financial de-regulation and two long-running very expensive foreign wars to  produce, first -- the housing bubble and (2) now a self-defeating spiral into what  seems long-lasting, if not a terminal recession.

Quite a lot of the smart money went over to China during the last 20 years --  chasing high returns  in Chinese industries blessed with very low wages and a government that provides neither health care, health insurance, a social safety net, financial regulation nor any pollution controls.  Without those blessed benefits of the pirate/slave economy, bolstered by Western investment, your iPhone never would have happened at a cost-effective price, and Steve Jobs would have continued floundering along like he did with the NEXT.

Jeffrey Sachs has argued persuasively that general prosperity won't return to America during my lifetime because there has been little  investment in education, worker training, infrastructure ... and without a balancing overhaul of the tax code, we're all down the tube anyway.

My favorite part of the Chinese swindle over the last 20 years is  the reverse mergers scam -- 18 Billion dollars worth of good ole American dollars contributed  mostly by medium and small investors.

You could simplify it all by opining that Trickle Down economics and/or Keynesian economics produced disproportionate prosperity for  the rich and the super rich, who invested in China.   But at least we can all be glad we sent the pollution overseas and got back some really cool gizmos that make it easier to send email and take pictures.  That was a fair trade, right? mmmmmm  ...

You might loke at Oliver Stone's documentary South of the Border if you'd like a clearer understanding of how difficult it is to change the corporatist economic policies that prevent real general prosperity. Those policies were part of the American hegemony that impoverished most of Latin America.

More of the same will only get us more of the same.

Writing and the Internet

Three important notions apply:  1.  Color Screen Addiction;  2.  The rat experiment demonstrating that the absence of an expected reward produces increasingly frantic performances of the conditioned task (rat pushes button frantically even though no reward appears; and finally -- a basic concept equally applicable to rats, adults and children:  3.  Internet (and television) usage should be rationed or even prohibited while working.  And while writing.  If you're working on a long piece, don't look at the net before you begin or even during a break.  Interacting with a color screen is rarely a creative act.  Turn on the typewriter sounds and go go back to composing in Word.  Better yet, order some new Palomino Blackwing 602 pencils and write your draft by hand, then retype it -- seems clunky, I know, but often it's the only way to get your focus back.   If all else fails, start a chapbook and copy passages from your favorite and most inspirational writers for 5-7 minutes to reset your mind from "watch naked color pictures dancing on the screen" to "Write It Now."  

The Swamp! Let's get out!

A sensible and fair tax policy creates prosperity. Trickle Down Economics, on the other hand, created a plutocracy by impoverishing 37% of Americans. Trickle Down gave us an unending cycle of boom and bust, plus endless expensive foreign wars. Printing money is not the answer: nor is lending money to corporations and stock brokers. Lending money to human beings, on the other hand, as an advance against future tax refunds during prosperous times, will work very well. See note below regarding Trickle Down Economics. It's time to get out of the swamp!

TRICKLE UP! ECONOMICS

Money belongs in the pockets of the people. -- Thomas Jefferson

Written in 2011.

Paul McCulley did a good job at PIMCO before the economy got stuck in the current liquidity trap. But based on a discussion reported by John Mauldin, McCulley can't really think outside the box. The liquidity trap results from America's 40 year war on the working class. This war solidified the position of the American Plutocracy -- 10% of the people own 90% of the wealth; 37% of the people are living below the poverty line. The result of 40 years of Trickle Down Economics: an endless cycle of boom and bust, along with a continuing series of expensive foreign wars. Right now the bottom of the economic spectrum -- the bottom third of all taxpayers! -- doesn't have enough money to spend.

That is the trap we're in, and it is the swamp from which flow all our other stagnating ills. The solution is Trickle Up Economics: 

1.  The IRS can loan every individual who has filed a tax return in the last five years $20,000 in equal monthly installments to as an advance against future tax refunds -- to be repaid over the next 20 years, all money to be spent on items produced by American labor. 

2.  The minimum wage can be doubled in three increments of 33% over the next 18 months -- or, just double the minimum wage. 

3.  Payouts on all entitlement programs -- Social Security, Railroad Retirement, welfare and food stamps can be doubled, with a requirement to spend the extra money on goods produced by American labor (penalties, with rewards for whistle blowers to be built in). 

4.  The renminbi can be revalued upward to a rational level, and at the same time we can put a substantial tariff on Chinese imports -- this will raise enough money to upgrade our airports and roads.  And put a tariff on all imports from countries that don't have health, retirement and environmental protections -- a tariff sufficient to level the playing field.

5.  All legally constituted operating companies doing business in or producing goods in America, whether corporations or partnerships, that have been in business for at least three years (unless their main business is investing in the stock market), can receive a $1 million dollar loan from the IRS to be repaid over the next 20 years. 

6.  And certainly, the Rich can pay taxes at the same rate as their secretaries, no matter how much they lost at the Wall Street Casino last year.  Will these measures cause some inflation? Let's hope so. We need the money at the bottom -- for small businesses and the people those businesses employ. We don't need more money poured on the top -- that won't stimulate aggregate demand. But Trickle Up Economics will do the job handily. It's time for McCulley to stop flapping his hands and saying "I hope I'm wrong." He's not wrong. The current game is rigged against American prosperity -- which means the prosperity of the working classes. America is prosperous when grocery baggers and assembly line workers can make enough money to live on working one job, and by working two jobs or a job and a half can make enough money to save up to get into a properly-valued house. 

7.  Finally, it's time to tax shares directly -- in kind, at the same rate as real estate is taxed -- on average -- around 2 or 3%. A hundred years from now the dividends on the investments held in trust will pay all our healthcare and infrastructure expenses.  

Clutter produces Dither

Always .....

Of Story

Waking in

your arms

the ink

jar's full .... 

For All Writers

Can't write when you're broke?

When you don't have a job?

Are you much of a writer ....

I know, I'll just wait until I'm rich ... until I have a job that takes all my energy ... and then I'll finally begin to write? 

The Rich and Their Wars

I voted for Hilary. When I had a choice. The last Bush seemed at least misguided and impossibly corrupt; he embroiled us in several wars, which helped his friends the Saudis -- and others -- profit from the huge cost of the wars and the run up in the price of oil. Wars, and especially wars of revolution, come about when the rich are too rich by comparison with the poor. That is the lesson of the last 2,000 years. It is difficult for me to believe that anyone could think the last Bush was "the sexiest candidate;" he looked a little too much like Alfred E. Newman to me. And he created the Great Recession almost single-handed. No one gives him enough credit for that. The only difference between this Recession and the Depression is the flow of money from the government. Trickle down economics never worked for anyone but the rich. The playing field's not level. Read The Rich and the Super Rich and as much of Alexander Del Mar -- The History of Monetary Crimes, for example -- as you can find. It's time for trickle up economics. Time to set the minimum wage at $20 an hour with an annual increase pegged to inflation. Time to build a sidewalk/bikepath next to every country road in America. Put people back to work -- that's the real trickle up. Pay the highest wages possible.  Double the minimum wage.  At least set the minimum wage high enough so a 40 hour job puts anyone who has a job above the poverty line. Let grocery baggers earn enough to live on. You don't understand fascism very well if you think the right wing has ever been good for this country; however, in a similar way, Hitler was good for Germany. The last general prosperity we saw was during the Clinton administration. Clinton  was good at bond issues. And that's what we need more of. Sensible bond issues. Not just borrowing our  current account deficit from Red China so we can go on fighting yet another war at the crossroads of nowhere in Central Asia.  That's your idea of prosperity?  

The House of Breath

"I came out and felt alone and lost in the world with no home to go home to and felt robbed of everything I never
had but dreamt of and hoped to have; and mocked by others' midnight victory and my own eternal failure, unnamed by nameless agony and stripped of all my history, I was betrayed again ." -- William Goyen, The House of Breath (still in print)


"My side is on the side of the human being, and the human being moving in nature, which is spirit; and nothing else seems important to me, and if I thought I could not spend my life laboring to perceive and to understand and to clarify what happens to us in the world, then I would want to die." - William Goyen, Selected Letters, 114–115

Today - Nombre de ______

Love is a beautiful dance that spins
Into the world when the day begins




Sometimes the beautiful are good
And true as they are fair
Sometimes they say please call me up
-- Build castles in the air .....

Her  hands.

Now Snow Again

Now snow again —
“Snow everywhere.
A cold house.
The bright colors of the women”
And my mother
Dying
As if peacefully
at Ten Broek;    I
Can’t cry about that much
Nor about being here
In Yankeeland
Not just so close to homeless, but
So far from home

The 36 Comic Situations

Also in line with Polti's The 36 Dramatic Situations -- can anyone help me think of some of the main comic situations?

The Ghost River

"The ghost river – everything you are right now, that you will forget when you’re grown up, but that you’ll never stop being."

– from La Vie Promise with Isabelle Huppert.

The 25 Lyric Modes?

With a nod toward Georges Polti's The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, I have been wondering if anyone might like to help me formulate a taxonomy of the lyric modes (or moods) (or authorial stances) perhaps beginning with these:

Anger

Astonishment

Atonement

Complaint

Curiosity

Depiction of or Appreciation of Beauty

Depiction of or Deprecation of Ugliness
Exultation
Fury
Historical Narration
Humor
Joy
Love
Narration
Outrage
Praise
Regret
Sadness
Sarcasm
Wry Wit

Dragging My Shield Behind Me

     Dr. Crofts, as he rode home, could not keep his mind from thinking of the two girls at Allington.  "He'll not marry her unless old Dale gives her something."  Had it come to that with the world, that a man must be bribed into keeping his engagement with a lady?  Was there no romance left among mankind -- no feeling of chivalry?  "He's got another string to his bow at Courcy Castle," said the earl, and his lordship seemed to be in no degree shocked as he said it.  It was in this tone that men spoke of women nowadays, and yet he himself had felt such awe of the girl he loved, and such a fear lest he might injure her in her worldly position, that he had not dared to tell her that he loved her.

From The Small House at Allington -- by Anthony Trollope

The Painter's Paramour

“To keep their certainty, they must accuse
All that are different of a base intent,
Pull down established honor,
Hawk for news whatever their loose fantasy invent ....”

William Butler Yeats, "The Leaders of the Crowd"

     “For years, I never knew what to call those colored lights, and before I had a name for them the memory was different.  It was mystery, and close to myth.
     But then my omniscient friend told me that the colored lights were called globos illuminados.  He said the globo man was famous in that part of Mexico, and much in demand at parties and all public celebrations.
     I liked the lights much better, though, when they were just a memory without a name – whey they were dreams.
     And I still think your dreams can rise serenely on the breeze until they self-destruct.  I think your dreams are beautiful and awesome and serene. But life’s not like that.  Life is like the pole.  You know there is a prize.  You know it is impossible to get there by yourself.  But what you don’t know is the way the effort will take all your strength and all of your attention, or how the hecklers in the crowd will hope you don’t succeed because they are afraid to try.”

Christian Gehman, beloved Gravely (Scribner’s, 1984)

     Ah, well, you know -- sometimes things don't work out.  Some books were not meant to be written.  And then there still remain the very real questions -- of what to do next?  of where to go?  where to live? of who still loves me?

They, too, counted for something ....

"Now when the darkness was coming on rapidly, when lights were twinkling below, and when it seemed as though the mists were hiding a fathomless abyss, Lipa and her mother, who were born in poverty and prepared to live so till the end, giving up to others everything except their frightened, gentle souls may have fancied for a minute perhaps that in that vast, mysterious world, among the endless series of lives, they, too, counted for something, and they, too, were superior to someone; they liked sitting here at the top, they smiled happily and forgot that they must go down below again all the same."

Anton Chekhov, The Ravine

En Pau

"In Barcelona he had had his first experience of being a wonder-figure, of that pleasing flattering veil which, if it grows too thick, can cut a man off from the refreshment of contact with ordinary life and which can cruelly distort his relationship with others, even with those nearest to him in blood. Few people speak to a wonder as if he were a man, which is disagreeable no doubt and impoverishing; but how much more painful when he finds that he is a wonder even in his own home, worse still when he is living on the other side of an invisible barrier -- a wonder that can be exploited, and therefore by definition an outsider. If that were to happen to a suspicious mind every word, gesture, or kindness would come to have an ulterior motive. At some point, unspecified in time, but certainly after Barcelona, he said to Gertrude Stein, "You know, your family, everybody, if you are a genius and unsuccessful, everybody treats you as a genius, but when you come to be successful, when you commence to earn money, when you are really successful, then your family and everybody no longer treats you as a genius, they treat you like a man who has become successful.""

-- from that wonderful and brilliant book

Picasso A Biography,
by Patrick O'Brian

Writing Is FUN?

Very few writers believe this, and yet it is quite a common conception among people who don't write, and especially among those who don't even read for pleasure. Why else would anyone do it -- if not to make money? or "have fun?"

Into this conversation we ought to insert one or two of Roland Barthes' little ideas that he set down in The Pleasure of the Text. Not that these ideas will do most non-writers any good whatsoever.

Shall we call them "civilians" ... in the War of Words?

One of Barthes' main ideas seems to be that the pleasure of the text -- of the "dream of reading" -- resembles the pleasure of the species-specific human bonding and imprinting interaction, which coincidentally happens "at the reading distance" between two pairs of eyes. Perhaps I have interpolated this idea from Desmond Morris's book The Naked Ape?

The eyes, they make an 8 shape -- lying on its side. A symbol of infinity.

The Pleasure of the Text is a brilliant short book full of luminously paradoxical and counter-intuitive insights. But in describing the pleasure of the text as an intense experience which can be recognized only as one "wakes up" from it, does Barthes give adequate consideration to he startling implication that "pleasure of writing" -- of creating a text? ... must be even more intense than the pleasure of simply reading a text? that the pleasure of creating a text that makes the world "disappear" for the reader is necessarily a jouissance even more intense for the writer.

But fun?

Not that I mean to imply that the pleasure of the text is one of life's simple pleasures. More likely it is astoundingly complex and intensely erotic. Yet another term we should investigate. But alas, my copy of the great anthology Les Chefs d'Oeuvres de l'Erotisme was jettisoned -- with all my other books, many of them irreplaceable -- by that illiterate rascal, the "painter" -- The Strathmore Stripe-ist Shane Guffogg. While he was divorcing my half-sister Martha Gehman.

Other more or less unreplaceable books in the jettisoned-by-Shane-Guffogg category included

My copy of the Kelmscott Chaucer ...
All my father's books but Gary Cooper...
About twenty of my stepfather Lowell Bair's translations, including Liaisons Dangereuses, The Three Musketeers, and the Bantam dual-language edition of Candide ... along with a manuscript for Delgado's A Tikipan Coule le Rio Chongo ...
Signed copies of two dozen books published by personal friends over the last 30 years ...
My copies of the Tolkien game role-playing manuals I wrote for Irown Crown Enterprises ... The Silmarillion and The Book of Lost Tales...
My almost antique (from the Sixties) two-volume Gourmet and many other cookbooks ... my small Revere ware chili pot.  My three inch butcher block cutting board.
My Abrams Art book about the Woodstock painter Fletcher Martin.
My book of the paintings of Ellsworth Kelly that I got at the Guggenheim show in New York.
The truly irreplaceable last remaining copies of my first two novels, "Upstream to Die" and "Croatan" ...
My science fiction collection containing almost all of Jack Vance and Heinlein ... among other writers.

Total  replacement cost  -- somewhat less than the $3,000 dollars that Shane Guffogg, The Strathmore Stripe-ist owed me at the time and still does owe me for work done around the Courtyard that he never paid for, although he did collect money for the work done from the Courtyard's owner Ed Ruscha.

The Strathmore Stripe-ist!
Because after all, "a stripe is a stripe is a stripe."
Will he ever be more than just another Wall Batterton?  However, Wall Batterton is, after all, not only a better than average painter in his own right, he is also a teacher of painting -- in addition to being a "Friend of Ed."

Of course there are a great many painters in Los Angeles who  who won't rise much above the level of those set decorators whose work has always been so popular with interior design consultants; and most of them probably believe that Roland Barthes is (a) unintelligible or (b) a glibly gibbering  idiotic Francophone "theorist" -- who never wrote a screenplay.  So I say ....

Baja Hollywood Forever!

Why People Don't Write?

Why people don't write has always interested me -- not least because I often don't write myself. Could it be as simple as Simone Weil's notion that "To be free and sovereign as a thinking being for an hour or two a day, and a slave the rest of the time, is such a torment to the soul that, to avoid the pain, most people will renounce the higher forms of thought."

Of course most people aren't interested in much more than the next very satisfying but bad cheeseburger movie anyway.

But we have all known people ... indeed, we have all known some very talented people ... who either judged (perhaps correctly) that they lacked enough of the talent they would need, or lacked the courage and drive that would enable them to make something of the talent they actually had.

But I always think it is a pity they just didn't try.

On the other hand, I probably would have made more money by sitting still holding my breath than I have ever made by writing.