[GJM] #834, TWP In Labor Markets & TOP In Corporate Markets

[wesburt at juno.com]

Dear Urban, and friends lurking on my copy list,

Thanks again for introducing Wendell Berry.  I 
looked at two of his many Web articles.  In his 
"Thoughts in the Presence of Fear," he writes, in part:

        "IV. The "developed" nations had given to the "free 
        market" the status of a god, and were sacrificing to 
        it their farmers, farmlands, and communities, their 
        forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems 
        and watersheds. They had accepted universal 
        pollution and global warming as normal costs of 
        doing business."

In "The Agrarian Standard" he writes, in part:

        "I believe that this contest between industrialism 
        and agrarianism now defines the most fundamental 
        human difference, for it divides not just two nearly 
        opposite concepts of agriculture and land use, but 
        also two nearly opposite ways of understanding 
        ourselves, our fellow creatures, and our world." 
~~~~~~~~~~ End Excerpts from Berry ~~~~~~~~~~~

There is no end to this eloquent and empty style of writing 
which fills our mail boxes every day.  Here is another 
interesting example from today's mail.

David Gordon, on http://www.mises.org/story/2659 
reviews "Americanism: The Fourth Great Western 
Religion" By David Gelernter, and asks: Are Americans 
the Chosen People?
~~~~~~~~~~ End review by Gordon ~~~~~~~~~

Everywhere we see this playing with words, this mark 
of sophistication, this demonizing of existing American 
institutions, this grasping for the power to change things,
without any specific numbers or details on the necessary 
changes to be made.  Below your note, Urban, is another 
recent contribution which does propose specific changes, 
but is unlikely to persuade the CEOs and CBSs to 
implement the required changes. 

~~~~~ Urban's third reply to #832 ~~~~~~
From: <lurbankohler at yahoo.com>
To: FixGov at yahoogroups.com
Date: Sat, 18 Aug 2007 08:41:23 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Re: [FixGov] #832, Too bad Wes is not a corporation.

Hi Wes, 

You wrote: " 'for some social defects, 
the only cure is the passage of time.' I am 
83 now, so time is getting short. . . . " 

Urban: 
Although not quite as old as you, I too 
am feeling the passage of time. In a 
conversation with a sibling yesterday 
about the death of a cousin we grew 
up with, I found myself again describing 
the Wendell Berry quote --something like 
this: " A corporation does not die . . it 
does not arrive finally at the realization 
of the shortness and smallness of life 
as humans do.  It cannot suffer remorse, 
have a change of heart, or realize that 
whatever meaning we can find will be in 
the lives of our children and generations 
to come. A corporation, unlike humans 
goes about its business as if it were 
immortal --with the SINGLE PURPOSE of 
becoming a bigger pile of money. . . "
~~~~~~ End Wendell Berry ~~~~~~

L. Urban Kohler continues:
For corporations, time is NOT running 
short. Although corporations are a human 
artifact, a human is but a transient part --a 
disposable element -- a cell to be sluffed 
off as soon as it outlives it's usefulness 
or can be replaced by a more vigorous 
or complicit one.

Any CEO who opposes the corporate 
agenda of becoming a bigger pile of 
money regardless of impact on the next 
generation, will be replaced by another 
who will return to business as usual --
serving the "bottom line". We humans 
have allowed corporations to evolve 
from a tool for organizing and expanding 
the scope of human activity, to a 
system of expansion and accelleration 
of consuming.  And we are being FORCED 
to consume our planet. 

Forget Republicans, Democrats, illegal 
aliens, Muslims, fundamental Christians 
bent on armaggeddon . . (all of our 
supposed enemies who are just fellow 
victims) The enemy is this debt-money 
system, which governs our activities, 
enables greed and corporate expansion, 
mindlessly creating the conditions in 
which terror and lethal competition reign 
. . . . . We are turning our Eden into HELL 
by not recognizing and getting rid of this 
inhuman monster of our own creation: --
consolidated man acting thru corporations 
whose mandate to grow and profit has 
no checks and balances for preventing 
the collateral damage of the corporate 
agenda of winning at all costs, from 
destroying our living planet." 
~~~~~~~ End L. Urban Kohler ~~~~~~~~

Here is a constructive proposal for change, 
which would begin to correct the 20th century 
legislation proposed by P. T. Barnum in the 1890s 
to keep the suckers on their knees and retard the 
rate of population growth among the lower classes.

 Mike Whitney, on Michael Turner's WAR list, 07-08-19:
        "The impending credit crisis can’t be avoided, 
        but it could be mitigated by taking radical steps 
        to soften the blow. Emergency changes to the 
        federal tax code could put more money in the 
        hands of maxed-out consumers and keep the 
        economy sputtering along while efforts are 
        made to curtail the ruinous trade deficit. We 
        should eliminate the Social Security tax for 
        any couple making under $60,000 per year 
        and restore the 1953 tax-brackets for 
        America’s highest earners so that the upper 
        1 percent, who have benefited the most from 
        the years of prosperity, will be required to pay 
        93 percent of all earnings above the first $1 
        million income." 
~~~~~~~~~~ End Mike Whitney ~~~~~~~~~~~

Again, Urban, everything you, Berry, Whitney, and 
many others say about abusive corporations, their 
maximizing CEOs, and their banks is perfectly true. 
If you truly believe that this is their natural disposition, 
then nothing but bloody revolution will cure them.  But 
they were brought to their present condition by more 
than a century of 50% capitalism TWP in the labor 
market and 100% capitalism TOP in the global market 
for produced goods and services.  I am reminded of 
a question asked a year ago by Walt on list FixGov: 
How much do they pay you guys to keep the public 
in the dark about the simple "Practice Of Management"?

The attached file may shed some light on an urgent 
problem that is seldom discussed.  How can any 
nation moderate its production and consumption 
to match its limited resources?  Our electric power 
grids match supply to demand automatically, as 
demand varies from 30% up to 90% of installed 
capacity and then back down to 30%, in every 24 
hour period.  The "hard wired"simulation of a free 
market shown in Figure 9 TWP & TOP.gif was first 
used in 1953 to persuade the Kansas City P&L that 
the proposed GE equipment would duplicate exactly 
their manual practice for computing and executing 
an optimum dispatch for the KCP&L system when 
connected to the grid.  The equipment was installed 
in 1954 and Paul A. Samuelson compared the digital 
solution to the analog solution in his 1954 article: 
"The Pure Theory Of Public Expenditure," Page 1224,
T.C.S.P.O.P.A.S., 1966, Edited by Joseph E. Stiglitz.  

Also in 1966, Fortune Magazine published, in its 
October issue, an article on Inflation with a graphical 
profile of the US Consumer Price Index from colonial 
days through 1966, showing "The Great Transformation" 
in the 1890s, from a century of 1.2%/year deflation to 
66 years of 2.3%/year inflation.  That "out of control" 
inflationary CPI profile is captured on Figures 10c, 10e, 
and 2-3f on Dr. Priest's web site in the signature below.
That profile is characteristic; of weapon system failure 
rate curves, as well as, of automatic dispatching 
systems where demand exceeds available supply, 
and the system moves to the end of its mechanical 
range and crashes into the mechanical limits.

Of course, electric power is a unique commodity 
which cannot be stored on the grid, while the most 
primitive economy produces many commodities 
that can be stored, with a separate market for each 
commodity, but with common rules for every market.
But there are more sovereign corporations in the 
US power grid than sovereign nations in the global 
economy, and those two hundred odd CEOs have 
learned the hard way how cooperation assures the 
efficiency and integrity of the whole system.  Let us 
not dismiss the idea of national or global cooperation 
because we think human beings are too depraved 
to cooperate.  Or, because a century of the wrong 
policy (TWP) in the US public sector have made our 
politicians and CEOs act like lying deceiving carpet 
bagging Shylocks.  

Again Dear Urban, you expected too much of the 
private sector when you wrote in the subject line:
"Too bad Wes is not a corporation."  In 1953, GE 
and Westinghouse were well matched.  Now, GE 
is still near the top of Fortune's 500 and "W" is 
long gone from the 500, so being a corporation 
might not keep me alive long enough to make 
this topic a conversation piece for sixth graders.  
Recall that Gorbachev promised a group of 
visitors from "Pratt House" (CFR) that he would 
reform the Soviet Union before they could 
reform the USA.  It is beginning to look like 
he did just that, by way of a crash.  We can skip 
the crash phase, if a few of the clerisy could 
find a common cause in TOP.

Perhaps we should promote the idea that our local 
governments aught to act as corporations and fully 
capitalize the expense of developing their most 
productive and most expensive assets, their people. 
The wrong policy does not noticeably impair the 
development of our children, because their parents 
assume the burden, to the best of their ability.  But, 
that burden of debt service and out of pocket 
expense for the parenting families in any society 
creates in each supplier to the market the inverted 
control characteristic of "increasing returns to scale," 
as illustrated on Figure 9.  TWP is a binary mode: OFF 
or ON, employed or unemployed, flush or broke.  
There is no moderation in TWP.

Kind regards,

Wes 
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