A man with a duck on his head ....

If you see a man walking down the street with a duck on his head, you will probably say that you saw a man walking down the street with a duck on his head.  No spin required.  You won't seek out someone to say for you that it was a duck walking down the street with a guy on its derriere.

Feel free to disagree; I'm sure the duck will appreciate your efforts.

Our observations span decades, you and I of the boomer generation.  Here's what we've seen ...

A better quality of life; the decline ...

This first graph looks at the years with high taxes and growing inflation  (1949-1979) compared to the following three decades (1979-2009) that saw lower taxes and declining inflation.

Real income growth has disappeared since the 1960's for all except the wealthy, and the gap between the rich and the rest has widened dramatically.  It's more significant in the marketplace than most of us realize.  The solution we were offered... 'Let them eat credit.'  A crash followed where the middle class suffered much more than the wealthy, and the poor most of all.

The ever-widening gap between rich and poor. 

Here, the average income (which reflects the overbalanced effect of the wealthy few) is compared to the median (which better reflects a midpoint for us all).  Note the accelerating change.

The middle class produces more each year and receives a
progressively smaller and smaller share of the benefit.

As the middle class strangles, the wealthy take a larger and larger bite out of the national economy and out of the profit of our labor. Their disproportionate and continually increasing share of national productivity (chart, left) indicates systemic flaws in national policy, law, and governance.  The middle and lower classes have received a progressively smaller share of the rewards of their labor. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats, it appears, have offered a plan for mitigation of the risk inherent in such imbalance.

Still rudderless ...

Balance of trade, a balanced budget, and a reasonable tax structure are all missing from the agendas we're offered by the candidates, their parties, and the media.

Financial reform is still in the 'pretend' stages.

"There are three big fault lines — one is rising inequality, which pushes inappropriate spending such as encouraging households to buy houses subsidized by government lending. Second is the inadequate safety net which causes a whole lot of inappropriate stimulus in bad times, and I'd say especially stimulus coming from the Federal Reserve in the form of low interest rates. Third is the fact that many countries have grown in a way that emphasizes exports, which leads to overconsumption in countries like the U.S."

~ From the economist who predicted the '08 crash in detail.  Read more HERE> 

Bi-partisan attempts at regulating the financial marketplace follow the recommendations of the financial industry rather than sound principles.  Changes favor a continually more powerful position for the financial behemoths.  Patchwork legislation continues to ignore the underlying problems.  Neither party, despite good intentions, offers a coherent solution.

The frustrating failure of leadership ...

The graphic right shows the growth of government over the last 40 years.  Our income is up a quarter, and our government expenditures are up more than ten times that amount.  That's government spending, not industry growth.

The graphic below shows that the ability or inability to balance the budget is truly bi-partisan.

Click on this graph to see the details.

Just so we're clear, that's what we've seen.  This or that politician becoming president, this or that party ruling in congress offers no suggestion that these things will change.  The issues are not partisan, they're systemic and fundamental.

Living the Dream

A 'simple home', available to only the wealthiest of the world's families

The American Dream! 
What does that mean to you and your life?

Ever talk about it?  Your life goal, I mean.


Most of us see the American Dream as described here (right) with perhaps minor variations across the generations. 

But is this 'American Dream' big enough to qualify as your life goal?

Is it a great enough purpose to fill your mind and hours and efforts?  Is it worth all your days going to work and all the years of commitment?

Or might the dream by itself be somewhat narrow?  What if it focuses so much on 'me and mine' that it misses some larger purpose and opportunity that being an American offers you and your family.  What if you wanted to be a world changer?  Could you add 'change the world for the better' to the top of the list above?

Got guts?  Read on.

What if by choice and plan, we lived simply and well within our means?  We and our family would perhaps have some financial flexibility, and we could pitch in where it mattered for someone else.    We'd be a little odd, perhaps, from our friends' point of view.   So?  Could we live with that; being a little odd?  Or even a lot odd?

A friend of mine in Texas was old and wealthy. I didn't know about the 'wealthy' part until after he'd died; he and his family lived simply and generously. He paid for me to go Colorado when I was 18 to attend a summer youth festival (another story) which pretty much reshaped my thinking. I owe him, big time. So do a lot of other folks from those days, apparently.  Odd fellow, right?

R. G. LeTourneau was another screwball.  As a multi-millionaire, LeTourneau gave 90% of his profit to God's work and kept only 10% for his own purposes. He also founded a university that is thriving to this day.

LeTourneau said that the money came in faster than he could give it away.  He was convinced that he could not out-give God.  "I shovel it out,” he would say, “and God shovels it back, but God has a bigger shovel."

LeTourneau planned his life around a dream larger than just what he could own personally or how comfortably he might live. He is considered to this day to have been the world’s greatest inventor of earth-moving and materials handling equipment. And his generosity was extraordinary.  An odd fellow indeed.


On LeTorneau's grave - "Seek ye first..."

We can spend our lives chasing the American Dream, you and I. We'll probably achieve it in some measure, and we'll probably wish, when we reach the end, that we'd dreamed bigger.

Jesus was odd, too. So were his disciples and the folks in the churches. The world didn't receive them well, but they lived the dream for real. I wonder what it would look like if we did too.

Republican or Democrat? ... or Hippie?

If you're a Republican because you think they're the conservative bunch, it's not really that simple anymore.  You'll perhaps want a better reason.

If you're a Democrat because you think they're the liberal, human rights oriented, environmentally sensitive bunch, they're not so easily defined now. You'll perhaps want to rethink that position.

Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Merrill Lynch,
Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, BoA, Credit Suisse,
Lehman Brothers, and others are responsible for
the world market crash of 07'/08' and the
resulting deaths of hundreds of thousands.

They have inordinate influence still; you  and I
have almost none.

Simple debates on issues are helpful, but promises are often shelved after the race.  What the parties actually do when they're in power is more revealing.  Both groups are much more complex than their simple campaign slogans suggest.  (A little exasperation showing here ...)

The historic differentiations in the two-party system have less effect on their performance in office than we might expect.  Many issues have succumbed to power plays and influence peddlers.

Those of us who were pro-government during the Vietnam conflict have begun to realize, the hippies were probably right about at least some things. Government doesn't deserve our blind trust.

Those of us who chafed during the civil rights and feminist revolutions are faced with the fact that the issues of discrimination were real and inexcusable.  Dissidents then and now are treated like criminals or anarchists.

To a great degree, our most difficult problems are formalized and perpetuated by policy and law.  Visionary leadership, inside and outside government, must go against both party lines to effect needed change. 

When I was a kid, it was against the law for a black kid to drink from the water fountain marked 'white'.

Like issues in the past, today's economic issues are equally inexcusable and are not yet addressed by either of the two parties' offered simplistic perspectives. The fundamental questions being asked by dissidents are valid.  The problems were and are with national policy and practice.

Students protesting at Kent State University in the 70's saw it first hand.  Four were killed, and nine more were wounded.  Some of those shot were protesting the invasion of Cambodia by the U.S.  Others were just bystanders.

They were called un-American,  traitors, and revolutionaries. "I think that we're up against the strongest, well-trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America."^[18] Their accusers didn't get it, of course.  Questions and protests had been waved aside too long for folks with a conscience to tolerate.  The same is happening again on Wall Street and elsewhere.  We're right there again today.

Today's dissidents are being brutalized and arrested as we speak. This week.

The Occupy Movement has dozens of focal points from Wall Street to college tuition, from national government to private corporations.  The general dissatisfaction they express is being resisted as though they were criminals.  It's the same way they abused the peace activists of the Vietnam era. Exactly the same.

The derivatives debacle is one example of government responding to corporations rather than the best interests of the American people.  When the crash came, the government rescued the businesses and shafted the citizenry rather badly.  The bail-outs went to the Wall Street, not main street.  Wall Street firms paid their folks multimillion dollar bonuses in the same year the government bailed them out.  They paid off their congressmen that year as well.   Middle class folks paid the bill.  The poor suffered most.

Senior players in both parties seem to be crooked as a dog's hind leg when it comes to influence, power, selfishness, and hubris.  To be fair, both sides have attempted good initiatives they hoped would serve well.  For example, social aid programs such as welfare have in fact addressed some immediate problems and many folks in need were given a hand up out of poverty. The same programs (since more is better) have gone on to do more harm than anyone thought possible.

Trickle-down didn't.  Welfare wasn't.  Fanny and Freddie failed.  More than One Child got Left Behind; in fact, most suffered loss.  The cheerleader who said, "WE CAN," can't, and now, neither can the rest of us.  Government sanctioned fiscal policy and partisan squabbling over the national debt crisis have tanked the global economy twice in recent years.

Occupy Wall Street is just another round of citizens asking hard questions a bit more emphatically.  

There are no believable answers coming from either party, there are no reasonable responses to the catastrophic state of the global economy which their best efforts have given us, and there are no particularly believable leaders moving toward reasonable change.

Sound familiar?  Almost biblical?  Has either party said anything coherent about the catastrophically fragile and vulnerable financial system?  Beyond patchwork attempts at repair, not word one.

From the New York Times, "The Obama administration is far from perfect, and government is not beyond becoming bloated and being abused, but right is right and truth is truth: government can play a very positive role in protecting the less-well-off from the interests of the more-well-off, and this administration’s view of government is much more benevolent than those of the people who are seeking to unseat it."  True in some respects, perhaps.

I suspect that some (not all) of our current leaders are doing their best amidst the failures to serve the American people, yet their efforts seem to be more of the same.  The Republican alternative offers no more credible solution to our functional failures than does this administration.

Did you know that half of our Congress folks are multi-millionaires?  Congress doesn't feel your pain!
Instead, they make money on the inside information they have from the programs they approve or disapprove.  They sell short while the market approaches free-fall, all while telling the American people everything is fine.  If they weren't congressmen and women, they'd be in federal prison.  Equal under the law is a sad joke.

The gap between rich and poor continues to widen, the economic swings are wider and more destructive, and the magnitude of individual economic events increases at an accelerating rate.

We're flawed not so much in intent, perhaps, as in structure.

Personally, grass-roots-driven change appeals to me.  Not that it's likely to make the problems go away, of course, but if we choose, then we'll own the problems and perhaps be a bit more thoughtful about the process.

So, is it time to think about reengaging our political process personally?  Kinda looks that way, doesn't it.  Heard anything meaningful from your representatives in Congress lately?  It's been strangely quiet there since the debt crisis screw up, if you ask me.

"Suppose you were an idiot.  And suppose you were a member of Congress ...  but I repeat myself."

~ from a letter fragment, 1891, Mark Twain 

They're not idiots, of course.  Foolish, perhaps, 
hubristic, arrogant, inappropriately 
influenced by money 
and power,  ....

It's a little frightening, considering the government's attitude toward such, to discover that I am perhaps more of a dissident than a party participant.  Not interested in being tazed or maced, but definitely had enough of dis-information (lies), market mismanagement (theft),  and patchwork solutions (rule by fiat).

Digital Weaponry

Shared ideas, shared thinking,

... shared vision! 
Jump in?

Bloggers now out-produce all the world's publishing houses combined.

People blog for many reasons; for creative expression, for entertaining their friends, for provoking thought, for changing the world, ....

Bloggers now out-produce all the world's publishing houses combined, and Pew data suggests that 80 percent of bloggers have started publishing only in the last few years; it's still a new and growing crowd of writers.  While most writers are lighthearted about their blogs, many are thoughtfully hoping to ... well, to change the way people think.

Capturing the moment so the world can know ...

So thanks to bloggers (and tweeters), welcome to Egypt and the Arab Spring, welcome to murderous Syria, to Wall Street's back rooms, to Mombasa from inside the government circles, to Nigerian oil-sodden wastelands, to the mass media as seen through the eyes of someone whose vision is larger.

Slammed by the overwhelming will of the people
expressed worldwide and instantly.

 Regarding bloggers and social media publishers, "... be prepared to see the world around you change more rapidly than usual, thanks to their influence, story telling, discoveries, and open sharing of ideas.  Nothing beats the potential that sharing information can have on humans: this is the real digital weapon of our future."  John Blossom

The simplest of examples, a short blog
article on the global economy published
last night has a couple dozen hits already
by early this morning from inside and outside
the U.S.   :)

The Intimate Enemy

Everybody is self-centered at the start.

Until other people become important enough to us, and we love them enough, they're not part of our decisions.

That's how marriage begins.  Two selfish people getting intimately tangled up in each other's lives.  There's no chance that we fully understand each other in the early days (years).  As time passes and the glow of being together settles down, tension escalates.   

• Where did you put my razor?
• No, I hate that tv show.
• Why didn't you get gas?

The issues are irrelevant nonsense, of course.  No one remembers what all the angry fighting was about.  The amount of time we spend being angry is in direct proportion to how selfish we still are.

So without any religious overtones, what's the practical counsel we're given?

John 15:12 My command is this: love each other as I have loved you.

He's not telling us to be spiritual or religious, he's telling us to care.  Do I care what's important to them?  And why it's important?  Can I back them up?  Can I help carry that piece?  The goal is not fight to win, it's fight to love like He did.

Ephesians 5:25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church ...

That's a high bar, and it'll take some thought and change, won't it.

So then, some suggestions for walking it out in real life:

1. In marriage, winning an argument is something you’ll end up celebrating on your own. If you’re going to get healthy in married life, you’ve got to learn how to lose an argument. And to do that, you’ve got to learn how to be wrong.
   Ever been wrong?  Of course you have.
   Ever had a less than perfect attitude in an argument?  Of course.
2. Issues 'between' you are always a problem.
   Between!  That is the problem!
   For every issue, sit side-by-side with your spouse and put the issue over there on the other side of the table/ room/ battleground.  Now, the two of you address the issue.  What do you see in the issue (not in your partner) that's annoying, important, problematic, whatever.  After you've heard each other and fed back what you heard, solve it together.  Don't let there be anything 'between'.  Marriage is not a contest, it's a continual negotiation where you learn from each other and change and grow up.  And grow closer.
3. Practice makes perfect (or better, at least).
   Don't avoid disagreements, dig them up and examine them.
   Schedule the resolution/diplomatic meeting; "Let's do this one over coffee tomorrow morning at Panera!"  (Having your negotiations in a semi-public arena is a great inhibitor of stupid stuff.)  Okay, maybe home is better, but no hollering.
4. Remember the goal, and say it to each other out loud, often.  We're on the same side, two against the world and every destructive influence.  Two becoming one means every battle is to draw closer, grow wiser, and love deeper.
   
   Warning Note:  It is unlikely that the two will mature simultaneously.  Growing up is personal and independent change.  It is not uncommon for one to continue being selfish and the partner to become accustomed to acquiescence.   Don't do that.

Class and the absence thereof

In a country far away, class distinctions are vividly portrayed.  Although tribal ties seem essential, the primary element for distinguishing between classes is wealth (possessions, land, productivity, liquidity) and influence. 

• In the upper reaches, it may be family wealth, leveraged wealth, and corporate ownership that determine ones placement.

• In the middle realms, regular labor and income are the wealth elements.

• At the lowest, individuals have neither possessions nor significant income nor even perhaps fair labor opportunity.

Class perspective includes a sense of superiority looking from upper to lower as though there was greater human and social worth associated with the upper positions.  Individuals relegated to the lower echelons are presumed to be of lesser value, lesser intellect, lesser ability and significance.   Lower class members are artificially and deliberately constrained from moving upward.  

Oh wait, that's US. And the rest of the wealthy world. My mistake.

Interestingly the wealthier people become, the less relevant they tend to be as members of a community.  

Generally, the wealthier a family is, the fewer truly meaningful connections they have to others.  They have no need of connection and are aware of the risks associated with being too available; it might make demands.  The children of the wealthy are often narrowly constrained to their 'social class' and its associated thinking.  Great attention is given to educational development, but perhaps little attention is given to character development.  The fundamental elements of humanity may be neglected, even unknown for generations within a wealthy family lineage.

Among the wealthy, life tends to focus on position, prestige, power and profitability.  Upward mobility, bigger/ better/ more  house/ car/ clothes/ gadgets/ vacations.  Humanity is slowly squeegeed out of the mix.  

Decisions become of greater significance but are made with progressively less awareness of the risks and impact on others.  Ford's Pinto and its tendency to explode are an illuminating example from decades back.  The high probability of killing someone in an inferno and the human need to preclude it happening, those issues never made it into the boardroom decision making process.  GM's deadly ignition switch followed a similar conscienceless path this year.

The world has turned upside down.  Everything you thought ... may not be.

If a wealthy fellow had to survive apart from the shelter of his wealth, he'd die within days, and his family would die with him.

If a poor fellow had to survive apart from wealth ...  what's new?  He's been doing it for years, and taking care of his wife and kids too.  He's the more extraordinarily capable of the two.

On the other side of that equation ... 
If you're looking for good-hearted openness, got to the poor.  
If you need a place to be accepted, to be received, to be loved, go to the poor.  
If you want to see whole-hearted sacrifice or courageous nobility, go to the poor.  
The wealthy, as a rule, are unable to do such things.  They fear you are after their wealth.  Sick, broken creatures, they're poisoned by their luxury.  They have difficulty even making an overture of genuine friendship.  They worry about what it might cost them.

Upper class
Middle class
Lower class

There's no such thing as a lower, middle, or upper-class of course.  There is a middle income group, however, that continues under duress these days.  The gap between rich and poor is widening at an accelerating pace, and the middle income group is disappearing, merging into the 'working class'.  That's the salaried folks and the hourly folks that provide the wherewithal for rich folks to get richer.

So where is the virtue in such an arrangement?  Where might one find a hero worthy of admiration?  Should we look among the ... ?