The Secret King -- from beloved Gravely -- (Scribner's 1984)

            Spook’s book The Secret King demolished modern economic theory by demonstrating the utter unreliability of conclusions based on such highly unstable data as government statistics, corporate reports, and the fluctuating value of modern currencies; Spook said the Never-Never Land approach just ignored the fact that any overall treatment of “the economy” always reflected the author’s innate political bias, and usually little else.

            He then went on to point out some of the similarities between modern times and the last stages of dynastic monarchism.  In both cases, according to Spook, the principal sources of wealth were controlled and/or owned by what he called “immortal agencies.”  The principal source of wealth in modern times, of course, is industrial production.  Under the last stages of dynastic monarchism, it was agricultural production.

            In modern times, the immortality of industrial corporations, subject only to the very realvicissitudes of mismanagement and cut-throat competition, is not a matter for dispute because it is one of the attributes of the “legal fiction” which created corporations in the first place.  Pretty much the same thing was true under the dynastic monarchies; even though individual members of the ruling class might die, the titled offices or patents of nobility from which their privileges derived did not die.  In both cases the “immortal agencies” – corporations or princes – were granted an immunity from prosecution on capital charges for all but the most atrocious crimes, and even in the event of those crimes it was only the individual who was prosecuted, not the “immortal agency.”  Modern corporations, said Spook, have been created by the state in much the same way and for many of the same reasons that dynastic monarchies created patents of nobility: to enforce the laws, to regulate production, and to collect the taxes.  A reciprocal relationship exists in both cases, and both systems are characterized by heavy taxes laid on the less wealthy citizens, and also by vast differences in wealth between the rich and the poor.

            There was a real revolution in America, but unfortunately it occurred just as the source of wealth was changing from agricultural to industrial production.

            Spook said that anti-monarchist sentiment in America and in most of the rest of the world was so strong that those people who were naturally a part of the monarchist party had been forced to call themselves by a different name.  But, he went on, the history of the “secret monarchy” that they controlled could easily be traced.  The monarchists, before the Revolutionary War, were by far the stronger party.  Fully a third of the population were avowed Royalists.  Geographical factors, along with their reliance on the English armies – mostly hired mercenaries – coupled with some French intriguing, were responsible for the defeat of the Royalist party.  But the Royalists themselves went right on prospering even after losing the war – whereas the starry-eyed idealists who had signed the Declaration of Independence, for the most part, suffered a decline in wealth and died poorer than they had ever been under the Old Regime.

            For several years, however, the apparently inexhaustible reserves of new land in the West retarded the reconsolidation of power in Royalist hands; before too long, however, even Jackson had to fight the bank, and after the rise of finance capital and the immortal agencies that controlled it, the die was cast; the agrarian democrats were no longer fighting agrarian monarchists, but the far stronger forces of the capitalist plutocracy.  Then as the source of wealth shifted more and more from land to capital, so did the government shift back to “secret” monarchy from what had been American democracy.

            This conflict ended with the War Between the States.

            The Secret King, triumphant in the war, proceeded to consolidate his power; and his vassals, the new corporations, soon were abusing their privileges to such an extent that the central government itself was forced to make efforts to curb the power of capital, but now lacked the necessary philosophical justification for doing so.

            According to Spook, the problem was precisely that the government had – either intentionally (at the behest of the Secret King) or inadvertently (through clumsiness and inattention) – allowed the re-creation of a monarchical system of government controlled by immortal agencies: much the same as things had been before.

            The results of this state of affairs – the creation of a permanent underclass, the establishment of a society based on differing degrees of privilege and entitlement in which the poor pay taxes and the very rich do not – could not be ameliorated, except temporarily, Spook concluded, without attacking the problem at its root – e.g., by breaking the power of the federal government and the corporations in the same way that the power of the English kings and their vassals had once been broken.

The Merkin Way?

Posted in The Atlantic, months before the date of this post  --   Though I paid so little attention to news regarding the OWS protests that I can't "parrot" any of their slogans (in fact, I never heard that they had a slogan other than "Down with Corporate Greed") -- it would be fair to note that a very distant cousin, Joel Gehman, seems to be an organizer of the Occupy protest in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.   I never met the man.  I doubt you'll try reading Ferdinand Lundberg's book The Rich and the Super Rich because you don't really want information about the history of  favorable tax treatment paid for in the halls of Congress by  the 10% of the American population that owns 90% of the wealth. It's not quite fair to opine that they got so rich by cheating the rest of us.    It's an old, old story in America -- but I doubt you'll pay any more attention to Alexander del Mar's notes on the Greenback Bond Scandal after the Civil War than you will to the even older news about the Yazoo scandal.   Funny, ain't it, how "the facts" often seem so strongly biased against special deals for the rich and their pet politicians and toward liberal theories of prosperity?  And how liberal, centrist American politicians -- like Nelson Rockefeller -- have managed to produce long periods of the sustained prosperity that comes  with rational government?   "A rising tide lifts all boats" is the Liberal shibboleth.   If you're not appalled by the notion that Warren Buffet pays tax on his income at less than half the rate his secretary pays, I'll need to remind you again that  "_______ don't have politics, they just have enemies."    Fill in the blank any way you like -- "fascists, corporatists, the Rich and the Super Rich  ...   or even liberals."    It would be unfair to assume that your politics depend on willful ignorance ....  Greed and personal interest likely have a stronger influence.   I'm not sure we all want to agree that "Work hard and pay for tax breaks" has often been the American Way to get rich -- but those are the facts.   Real and lasting general prosperity, however, means a strong, relatively stable market for bonds -- not the false promise of artificially inflating equity values during the boom phase of the Keynesian cycle.  We're all paying for that last boom now.

The Sheltering Sky

The Sheltering Sky is a novel by Paul Bowles. I love everything Bowles wrote. Bernardo Bertolucci filmed this novel. I found the movie less entertaining than the book; scarcely worth watching, is how I remember the film (and a big letdown after The Conformist).  It's fair to note that, alas, Bowles's novel struck me as scarcely worth finishing: it seemed to me, while I was trying to read it, that after writing about a third of what could have turned out to be a very, very good book indeed, Bowles just got bored with it .... but continued writing it anyway. He had got hold of a theme that wouldn't support a whole symphony?  Not even a film score?  Bowles is much better at writing short stories -- he's really at the top of his form, perhaps because they hold his attention.  Or because he doesn't get bored before they are over?  Possibly a logline for a film would be his ideal length?  Maybe The Sheltering Sky was just too big and too ambitious (as a book); or perhaps it needed a strong passionate romance at its core, and I don't think Bowles was temperamentally any more capable of writing a strong passionate romance than he was of living through one himself.  Bowles spent much of his life in, and preferred living in, Morocco, a country where most of the natives despised him as a foreigner.  What hapened to Bertolucci's flim, I don't know.  Got lost in Morocco, I guess.  Don't miss visiting the great Moroccan / Mediterranean restaurant Aromas  in Charlottesville.  Next time you're here.  It is at Barracks Road.  You might be here at the film festival, maybe -- at the beginning of November 2012?  For the Messiah Sing In at Old Cabell Hall in early December?  Thank you, NetFlix for making "a life with film included" possible here in Bumpass, Virginia.

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