Toppers

When you're at the top, you see yourself and others through the lens of personal normalcy. I'm normal, but those down there ... they're not.

Toppers commonly minimize the privilege and favor they've enjoyed; they presume they've earned and fully deserve their comfortable lives.

Toppers in western culture are likely to look down on the less privileged as less diligent, less willing to work.

An objective analysis reveals that those at the top are not more intelligent or hardworking than normal folks. They are privileged, though, and tend to be ethically ambiguous. (ref)(ref)

Toppers rarely understand how little they have in common with 90% of humanity, the normal folks.

Normal folks in the world today live quite simply on perhaps $3000 per person/year or less. Many live on less.  Most don't have savings for college or for old age. Or air conditioning.  In the U.S., 20% of our own children live in poverty and most are trapped there, just like their parents and grandparents were.

Toppers live on perhaps $25,000 per year per person or more. Or much more. They have more than they need ... and they need not pray, "give us this day, bread."  There has always been that problem with wealth. It can cloud principles, warp reality, and obscure the pathway we perhaps should follow.

Wealth makes life easier in some regards and harder in others.  It doesn't, by itself, make us happy.  (link: a multi-factor Pew Research Center report on life and happiness)

Regarding modern thinking about wealth and its place in the definition of a good life, “The character at the heart of 20th century economics presents a pitiful portrait of humanity ... But human nature is far richer than this.”  Professor Kate Raworth is a Senior Visiting Research Associate and lecturer at Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute.

National GDP is a measure, but of what?  Is it of national integrity, of justice, of a healthy nation?  We might need to change our thinking and the way we live. It may sound corny, but we are all better off when everyone is better off.  Imagine what that might look like, where everyone had at least enough; a healthy diet, a safe neighborhood, a good education, and opportunity to grow.

Perhaps the most difficult question we face ... am I perhaps like that rich young ruler/politician who walked away sad ... ?


What's next?
Most Powerful Good
Helping Without Hurting
Breaking Gridlock

Escape Plan

Reality is a furious assault against life and reason.  You need an escape plan.

Every day, everything grabs at you to draw you in, pushing you to keep up with the flow, and shouting in your face to force your concurrence.

Living unprotected in this world is deadly.  At the end of life, how much of what's good will we have missed?  Much of life can be spent on nothing, lost in confusion and alone.  Much of life, but perhaps not all.

If you want a life that's worth the effort, you have to understand the direction the masses are going.  You have to have an escape plan.  And a refuge.

Find God, and you'll find shelter and hope and help and strength.  (That's the objective, non-religious analysis without any biblical quotations.)  Life will kill you, it will suck everything good out of you and leave you to die if you don't escape.  If you can shelter underneath God's hand, that's the starting point to survival.

That's why we have churches.  Not every group that calls itself a church really qualifies, but the real ones are a refuge for us, especially when we've been beaten and bruised by the world's ways.  The number of wrong choices that living the world's way can bring is astronomical.  The worldly norm of misinformation and prejudice, selfishness and bias, twisted thinking and amorality, all empty like a sewer into our minds.  We have no escape, no refuge unless we make our way to God and the place he has set aside just for us, the gathering of those who follow the path God has laid out for them.  They will welcome us, gather us in as family, and help us along the way.  Some will be wiser than we are, they'll help us understand, and they'll teach us about the journey.  Some will be stronger than we are, and they'll teach us to grow and stand strong.  Some will be personally familiar with the valleys we've crossed, and they'll lead us by the hand out into the light.  We won't have to walk alone any more.  That's the real church.

Find God.  Take the shelter he offers.  That's the safe place, the rear echelon where combatants are cared for, equipped and fed, and it's the base camp from which they advance into life where everything they do matters.

That's the refuge He offers.  Don't stop until you find it, the real refuge.

Our Troublesome Foundation - the Declaration of Independence

The sole purpose of our 1776 declaration -- to cut our ties with Great Britain and take our place among the independent nations of the world. 

Thanks to its famous preamble, however, the document quickly came to mean much more.  All men are created equal, with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -- ideas of freedom and equality planted in the heart of the newborn nation.  

Was that our intent?  There's much that perhaps clouds the answer.

• The declaration was written by a slave owner and accepted by the 13 colonies, each of which allowed slavery.  
• It was written at a time when the transatlantic slave trade delivered 60,000 Africans per year to the new world.  
• We eventually fought an uncivil war among ourselves over the right to own slaves, and we killed 620,000 of us. 
• It was written when we were at war with native Americans who refused to cede their land.  By 1900, their population had been reduced by 80% or more.

None of this happened quickly.  Generation after generation, millions of men, women, and children faced cruelty and death.  They've not yet recovered.  Africa lost more than a century of population growth, and native Americans lost almost everything.  The cruelty and human suffering cannot be adequately described though there are thousands of individual accounts of the atrocities in historical records.

August update: White supremacists gather at the statue of Robert E. Lee, Charlottesville VA.

We've tried hard to live up to the declaration of equality,

to understand what it means to be the same, human,

but there's so much more that needs to change
in our collective understanding.  Today's
 polarization is similar to that at the
beginning of the civil war.  It is
 arguably ... identical.

Today, we treat that promise in the declaration as though it has always been the true heart of the nation, yet prejudice, discrimination, and inequality, all are intentionally maintained among us, and again we see supremacists rising up.

At the root of it all, we find the concept of self-supremacy or superiority, a corrupt heart that values self and some but not all.  

The root problem is broadly unacknowledged as public sentiment prefers to blame others rather than acknowledge any personal flaw.

Liberty and Equality
The principles are self-evident truths.
The task we face is difficult.
The solution is not in law but in living for something besides ourself; "love as I have loved you;" (just practical instruction.)  Such caring is expensive, and it changes things.

The founding fathers left us a difficult challenge that we've struggled with for more than two hundred years.

__________________________________________________________

How has it played out?

Racism is understood in every scientific venue ... race as biology is fiction; racism as a social construct is real and it rises exclusively from ignorance, selfishness, and fear.  Race isn't the root; it is self.

__________________________________________________________

Remembered ... 15 million men, women and children who were heartlessly torn from their homeland on the African continent.   They were forced to cross the Atlantic in slave ships; and they then lived and died under an inconceivably brutal system of slavery in the Americas.  UN Secretary-General's Remarks in General Assembly on the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

War -- America was born fighting Indians.  Because a significant number of Indians consistently rebuffed demands that they cede their lands and because Americans were determined to acquire them anyway, the United States constantly pursued war against Indians.  

In 1779 the United States declared war on the Iroquois to punish them for raids they had undertaken to roll back colonial settlement.  The object, in George Washington’s words, was “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements.”  When the Continental Army invaded, the Iroquois decided not to risk the loss of life that would result from defending their towns and instead evacuated them. This allowed U.S. troops to burn dwellings and crops, but as Chief Old Smoke later explained, “we lost our Country it is true, but this was to secure our Women & Children.”(Ref)  The number of Iroquois directly killed by the American army was around two hundred (including some women and children), though as many as a thousand died from disease and starvation in refugee camps. Out of a population of 9,000, the death toll from all causes was probably around 15 percent. Had the Iroquois decided to defend their towns, it would almost certainly have been higher.

All told, from the late 1770s through 1815, U.S. forces burned hundreds of Indian towns in New York, western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, western Virginia, the western Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and western Florida.  In most instances, Indians’ intelligence-gathering systems alerted them to impending attacks and so U.S. forces found towns emptied of most inhabitants. 

Sometimes, however, U.S. forces managed to achieve surprise. When they did, they demonstrated little restraint. In an attack on the Indian town of Ouiatenon on the Wabash River in Indiana in 1791, for example, a Kentucky militia fired on Indians in five canoes who were trying to escape. The official report stated that militiamen “destroyed all the savages with which five canoes were crowded,” without stating the sex or age of the Indians. Almost certainly, many were noncombatants. 

In 1782 a Pennsylvania militia surprised a group of about one hundred Christian Indians at Gnadenhütten in eastern Ohio.  In a chilling example of what sociologist Michael Mann has termed the “dark side of democracy,” the militiamen voted on whether or not to kill their captives.  When the majority vote was tallied, the militiamen proceeded to slaughter men, women, and children alike.(Ref)  The militia tied the Indians, stunned them with mallet blows to the head, and killed them by scalping.  In all, the militia murdered and scalped 28 men, 29 women, and 39 children.  Two Indian boys, one of whom had been scalped, survived to tell of the massacre.  

In 1810, Tecumseh reminded future President William Henry Harrison, "You recall the time when the Jesus Indians of the Delawares lived near the Americans, and had confidence in their promises of friendship, and thought they were secure, yet the Americans murdered all the men, women, and children, even as they prayed to Jesus?"

After 1815, the United States intensified its efforts to expand. To do so, it adopted a policy, formally institutionalized through the Indian Removal Act of 1830, moving all Indians from east of the Mississippi River to Indian territories.

It hasn't played out well for many, and today we continue to struggle with the issue.  All are indeed created equal.

Explicitly

Law and policy need not explicitly discriminate in order to isolate and divide effectively.  As François Anatole Thibault wrote years ago, “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.”

Our poverty-level minimum wage, applied similarly to rich and poor alike, is perhaps today's most lucid illustration.  Poverty can be an inescapable cage for our minimum wage earners.

A reasonable minimum wage is not, by itself, a solution to poverty, but it begins to address the issue of fairness.  An employee is not a consumable resource (e.g., a mop or paper towels) to be used and discarded.  So there's minimal pay, and then there's reduced hours and irregular scheduling that can be abusive impediments to survival, as many folks must often work more than one job.  You can tell how much an employer cares about employees by such practices.

From Pew Research  Minimum wage earners make up a smaller share of the workforce than they used to. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, last year 1.5 million hourly workers earned the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour; nearly 1.8 million more earned less than that because they fell under one of several exemptions (tipped employees, ... and others), for a total of 3.3 million hourly workers at or below the federal minimum.

Among them, less than a fourth are teens making their way into the workforce.  Most are adults trying to earn a living.

______________________________

Here's an excerpt from MY WORKING LIFE NOW by Peter Van Buren, author, retired US Department of State, Foreign Service representative, Iraq.  He went to work at a national retail chain to understand the circumstances of the working poor.

...   I worked for a month and a half at a national retail chain in New York City. While mine was hardly a scientific experiment, I’d be willing to bet an hour of my minimum-wage salary ($9 before taxes) that what follows is pretty typical of the New Economy.

Just getting hired wasn’t easy for this 56-year-old guy. To become a sales clerk, peddling items that were generally well under $50 a pop, I needed two previous employment references and I had to pass a credit check. Unlike some low-wage jobs, a mandatory drug test wasn’t part of the process, but there was a criminal background check and I was told drug offenses would disqualify me. I was given an exam twice, by two different managers, designed to see how I’d respond to various customer situations. In other words, anyone without some education, good English, a decent work history, and a clean record wouldn’t even qualify for minimum-wage money at this chain.

And believe me, I earned that money. Any shift under six hours involved only a 15-minute break (which cost the company just $2.25). Trust me, at my age, after hours standing, I needed that break and I wasn’t even the oldest or least fit employee. After six hours, you did get a 45-minute break, but were only paid for 15 minutes of it.

The hardest part of the job remained dealing with… well, some of you. Customers felt entitled to raise their voices, use profanity, and commit Trumpian acts of rudeness toward my fellow employees and me. Most of our “valued guests” would never act that way in other public situations or with their own coworkers, no less friends. But inside that store, shoppers seemed to interpret “the customer is always right” to mean that they could do any damn thing they wished. It often felt as if we were penned animals who could be poked with a stick for sport, and without penalty. No matter what was said or done, store management tolerated no response from us other than a smile and a “Yes, sir” (or ma’am).

The store showed no more mercy in its treatment of workers than did the customers. My schedule, for instance, changed constantly. There was simply no way to plan things more than a week in advance. (Forget accepting a party invitation. I’m talking about childcare and medical appointments.) If you were on the closing shift, you stayed until the manager agreed that the store was clean enough for you to go home. You never quite knew when work was going to be over and no cell phone calls were allowed to alert babysitters of any delay.

And keep in mind that I was lucky. I was holding down only one job in one store. Most of my fellow workers were trying to juggle two or three jobs, each with constantly changing schedules, in order to stitch together something like a half-decent paycheck. In New York City, that store was required to give us sick leave only after we’d worked there for a full year—and that was generous compared to practices in many other locales. Until then, you either went to work sick or stayed home unpaid. Unlike New York, most states do not require such a store to offer any sick leave, ever, to employees who work less than 40 hours a week. Think about that the next time your waitress coughs.

MINIMUM WAGES AND MINIMUM HOURS

Much is said these days about raising the minimum wage (and it should be raised), and indeed, on January 1, 2016, 13 states did raise theirs. But what sounds like good news is unlikely to have much effect on the working poor.

In New York, for instance, the minimum went from $8.75 an hour to the $9.00 I was making. New York is relatively generous. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 and 21 states require only that federal standard. Presumably to prove some grim point or other, Georgia and Wyoming officially mandate an even lower minimum wage and then unofficially require the payment of $7.25 to avoid Department of Labor penalties. Some Southern states set no basement figure, presumably for similar reasons.

Don’t forget: any minimum wage figure mentioned is before taxes. Brackets vary, but let’s knock an even 10 percent off that hourly wage just as a reasonable guess about what is taken out of a minimum-wage worker’s salary. And there are expenses to consider, too. My round-trip bus fare every day, for instance, was $5.50.  [It costs 60¢ per mile to own a vehicle, on average.]  That meant I worked most of my first hour for bus fare and taxes. Keep in mind that some workers have to pay for childcare as well, which means that it’s not impossible to imagine a scenario in which someone could actually come close to losing money by going to work for short shifts at minimum wage.  

In addition to the fundamental problem of simply not paying people enough, there’s the additional problem of not giving them enough hours to work. The two unfortunately go together, which means that raising the minimum rate is only part of any solution to improving life in the low-wage world.

At the store where I worked for minimum wage a few years ago, for instance, hours were capped at 39 a week. The company did that as a way to avoid providing the benefits that would kick in once one became a “full time” employee. Things have changed since 2012—and not for the better.

Four years later, the hours of most minimum-wage workers are capped at 29. That’s the threshold after which most companies with 50 or more employees are required to pay into the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) fund on behalf of their workers. Of course, some minimum wage workers get fewer than 29 hours for reasons specific to the businesses they work for.

IT’S MATH TIME

While a lot of numbers follow, remember that they all add up to a picture of how people around us are living every day.

In New York, under the old minimum wage system, $8.75 multiplied by 39 hours equaled $341.25 a week before taxes. Under the new minimum wage, $9.00 times 29 hours equals $261 a week. At a cap of 29 hours, the minimum wage would have to be raised to $11.77 just to get many workers back to the same level of take-home pay that I got in 2012, given the drop in hours due to the Affordable Care Act. Health insurance is important, but so is food.

In other words, a rise in the minimum wage is only half the battle; employees need enough hours of work to make a living.

About food: if a minimum wage worker in New York manages to work two jobs (to reach 40 hours a week) without missing any days due to illness, his or her yearly salary would be $18,720. In other words, it would fall well below the Federal Poverty Line of $21,775. That’s food stamp territory. To get above the poverty line with a 40-hour week, the minimum wage would need to go above $10. At 29 hours a week, it would need to make it to $15 an hour. Right now, the highest minimum wage at a state level is in the District of Columbia at $11.50. As of now, no state is slated to go higher than that before 2018. (Some cities do set their own higher minimum wages.)

So add it up: The idea of raising the minimum wage (“the fight for $15”) is great, but even with that $15 in such hours-restrictive circumstances, you can’t make a loaf of bread out of a small handful of crumbs. In short, no matter how you do the math, it’s nearly impossible to feed yourself, never mind a family, on the minimum wage. It’s like being trapped on an M.C. Escher staircase.

The federal minimum wage hit its high point in 1968 at $8.54 in today’s dollars and while this country has been a paradise in the ensuing decades for what we now call the “One Percent,” it’s been downhill for low-wage workers ever since. In fact, since it was last raised in 2009 at the federal level to $7.25 per hour, the minimum has lost about 8.1 percent of its purchasing power to inflation. In other words, minimum-wage workers actually make less now than they did in 1968, when most of them were probably kids earning pocket money and not adults feeding their own children.

In adjusted dollars, the minimum wage peaked when the Beatles were still together and the Vietnam War raged.

WHO PAYS?

Many of the arguments against raising the minimum wage focus on the possibility that doing so would put small businesses in the red. This is disingenuous indeed, since 20 mega-companies dominate the minimum-wage world. Walmart alone employs 1.4 million minimum-wage workers; Yum Brands (Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC) is in second place; and McDonald’s takes third. Overall, 60 percent of minimum-wage workers are employed by businesses not officially considered “small” by government standards, and of course carve-outs for really small businesses are possible, as was done with Obamacare.

Keep in mind that not raising wages costs you money.

Those minimum wage workers who can’t make enough and need to go on food assistance? Well, Walmart isn’t paying for those food stamps (now called SNAP), you are. The annual bill that states and the federal government foot for working families making poverty-level wages is $153 billion. A single Walmart Supercenter costs taxpayers between $904,542 and $1.75 million per year in public assistance money. According to Florida Congressman Alan Grayson, in many states Walmart employees are the largest group of Medicaid recipients. They are also the single biggest group of food stamp recipients. In other words, those everyday low prices at the chain are, in part, subsidized by your tax money. Meanwhile, an estimated 18 percent of food stamps (SNAP) are spent at Walmart.

If the minimum wage goes up, will spending on food benefits programs go down? Almost certainly. But won’t stores raise prices to compensate for the extra money they will be shelling out for wages? Possibly. But don’t worry—raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would mean a Big Mac would cost all of 17 cents more.

TIME THEFT

My retail job ended a little earlier than I had planned, because I committed time theft.

You probably don’t even know what time theft is. It may sound like something from a sci-fi novel, but minimum-wage employers take time theft seriously. The basic idea is simple enough: if they’re paying you, you’d better be working. While the concept is not invalid per se, the way it’s used by the mega-companies reveals much about how the lowest wage workers are seen by their employers in 2016.

The problem at my chain store was that its in-store cafe was a lot closer to my work area than the time clock where I had to punch out whenever I was going on a scheduled break. One day, when break time on my shift came around, I only had 15 minutes. So I decided to walk over to that cafe, order a cup of coffee, and then head for the place where I could punch out and sit down (on a different floor at the other end of the store).

We’re talking an extra minute or two, no more, but in such operations every minute is tabulated and accounted for. As it happened, a manager saw me and stepped in to tell the cafe clerk to cancel my order. Then, in front of whoever happened to be around, she accused me of committing time theft—that is, of ordering on the clock. We’re talking about the time it takes to say, “Grande, milk, no sugar, please.” But no matter, and getting chastised on company time was considered part of the job, so the five minutes we stood there counted as paid work.

At $9 an hour, my per-minute pay rate was 15 cents, which meant that I had time-stolen perhaps 30 cents. I was, that is, being nickel and dimed to death.

ECONOMICS IS ABOUT PEOPLE

It seems wrong in a society as wealthy as ours that a person working full-time can’t get above the poverty line. It seems no less wrong that someone who is willing to work for the lowest wage legally payable must also give up so much of his or her self-respect and dignity as a kind of tariff. Holding a job should not be a test of how to manage life as one of the working poor.

I didn’t actually get fired for my time theft. Instead, I quit on the spot. Whatever the price is for my sense of self-worth, it isn’t 30 cents. Unlike most of this country’s working poor, I could afford to make such a decision. My life didn’t depend on it. When the manager told a handful of my coworkers watching the scene to get back to work, they did. They couldn’t afford not to.

The author, Peter van Buren, spent 24 years with the State Department and, as a problematic whistleblower, was forced to retire after a long battle, 2011-2012.  This narrative was part of an article published by The Nation in February, 2016.

All the Lies

American thinking is being dulled by the flood of false statements from the media, politicians, and disappointingly, even by the oval office.  Not every president has been honest and open with the citizens.  Some have made inaccurate statements along the way and some have lied to us, but today is perhaps different.

False facts abound. Insulting responses to critics are reminiscent of sibling insults when mom and dad weren't around. 

Most of us are at a loss to know how we should react to such behavior.  If it were in our family, our options would range from serious to severe.  Chronic untruth would not be left unaddressed in our children or tolerated in our primary relationships.  What are our options in the public arena?

There's a problem with false statements being left unchallenged, of course.  

When we are overwhelmed with false, or potentially false, statements, our brains pretty quickly become so overworked that we stop trying to sift through everything.

Our brain responds to lies in two steps.

     We (1) accept and visualize the content as valid before (2) reviewing the facts and considering whether we should unaccept it or not.  The first step is automatic and effortless while the second requires conscious thought and a detailed relabeling of the lie's content in our mental file system.  A flood of lies and misrepresentations can overburden our already demanding mental tasking, and it can distort our understanding, our view of things.  Unless we're exceptionally careful, the flood can change our worldview based on falsehood.

Manufactured misinformation is not a new problem.  Over the years ...
Referring to Jews or non-whites as an 'inferior race' is one example.
Insisting nicotine is not addictive and smoking is not a health problem is another.

Referring to abortion as 'reproductive health care' and an unborn child as a 'fetus' is another.
Referring to climate science as a 'liberal hoax' is another.
Suggesting Mexico sends us their 'rapists and criminals', etc., is another.
Categorizing Muslims in general as 'terrorists' is another.
Describing folks receiving assistance as 'leeches' is another.

Whether it is from an office holder, the news media, or some extremist, we face a deluge of conflicting information, much of which is demonstrably false.  These are indeed interesting times, especially for those concerned with traditional values and national integrity.

Everything Changes; wonder what's next?

The end of the automobile industry and the global oil industry are both predicted by economic and industry modeling.  Perhaps.  Maybe.  This fellow (Tony Seba) describes the progression of technology, industry, and consumption according to what we've seen so far, and he's perhaps right about what's ahead.  We've been surprised before, of course; for example:

• “I do not believe the introduction of motor-cars will ever affect the riding of horses.” Scott-Montague, 1903.  😃  In 1900 NYC was filled with horses and buggies, they were essential.  It took about a decade and a half to replace 95% of them with automobiles.
• “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” Ken Olson, genius engineer, 1977   😀 We know how that turned out.
• Landline telephones were in every home when the first clunky mobile phone was marketed in the 80's.  AT&T's 15-year prediction said there would be perhaps 900,000 customers for mobile phones.  There were 109 million.  They missed the actual number by 120x.  In 2014, the number of mobile devices exceeded world population, 7+ billion.
• Mixing computer things with telephone things would never be popular according to most industry participants.  Then came smartphones ...
• And ... Apple's $600 smart phone would never be popular according to business analysts.
• Electric vehicles are 5x-10x more energy efficient than their fossil fuel competitors, they have fewer moving parts and are more reliable, maintainable, and cost effective.  What happens when Uber moves to autonomous (self-driving) electric vehicles?  What happens when an integrated EV can power your home for a day or two?

Such changes in the consumer culture are not trends, they're disruptions.  Changes over time are often portrayed as linear, straight-line changes that advance predictably, a little each year.  Reality is otherwise, and there's a driving factor -- population.

Population growth continues as does urbanization. Consider the changes that might trigger in the marketplace.

Our centralized power grid is costly and inefficient.  I wonder what will change.
Our healthcare industry is clumsy and expensive.  Our transportation industry is inordinately complex and costly.  Our mega-super-store model is inefficient, and so are our shopping malls.  Our banking industry is crooked as a dog's hind leg.  Our international trade mechanisms are proven to be deadly.  I wonder what will change.

It's worth noting that everything changes, often rapidly.  Except truth; that doesn't change.  What's right and fair doesn't change, but literally everything else does.

Had a recent Skype call with a young African friend.  When we first met just a few years ago, he and his family were unreachable without mail or phone service.  Now he and many of the rest are on Facebook.  😎  What do these changes mean to our rapidly evolving cultures?

If politicians are smart, they'll perhaps get out of the way and take credit for the improvements.  🤣