Bad Seeds or Good Soldiers? Why Some Cross The Line?

“You take a mortal man, put him in control. Watch him become a god, watch people's heads a roll.”

A Brief History of Soldiers and War:

Throughout the ages, protectors of the community have been part of any multiunit social gathering. Hunters doubled as soldiers, knights, braves, and warriors of every culture are staples that define a “race”. Much akin to music and religion. (The deeper reasons that is part of our natural psychology is an issue more for thehumansystem.wordpress.com.) The approach to the soldier's station in life in more primitive civilizations, were the result of test of skills. In the more civilized societies, they were apprenticed and had to learn not only physical skills but tactical and moral ones as well. In the early days, during war, every citizens was charged with protecting the community. There were no civilians. As early the civil war the US started forcing people to fight as soldiers. Only 2% of the military were forced to sign up to go fight for a the cause. That grew by the time we reached WWII. Also during that time the war machine had been created and had learned the value “pleasure principle” and found a new way to operate. While a full 60% of the soldiers in WWII were drafted, 75% of the voting public felt that such a draft should exist. So a bridge period where people were forced to go to war, but agreed with that concept. An anomaly in logic for sure. By the end of the Vietnam war, a draft was no longer the most efficient way as the community had turned against it. It was also no longer needed, as there were other ways to make people believe such “service” was the most pleasurable option. To contrast, in the early days all citizens agreed upon a perceived thereat and then rose up against that threat. Today, many will kill simply because the threat they feel comes from a source other then the person or obvious distinct threat from the group of people they killed. Many times it is a fear of social rejection that drives them.

Who is a modern soldier?
“Thy shall not kill.” Ironically a large amount of the outspoken members of the US military claim to be “Christian”. However, the Christ left no room for war in his doctrine. So what is it that leads to such complex individuals that make up soldiers to make that decision. Soldiers come from every walk of life. Rich/ poor, academic/ physical dominate, and all races (even natives to the continent which has another layer). From the age of kindergarten we are “groomed” for that possibility by being forced to learn “The Pledge of Allegiance” and “The National Anthem”. There are disproportions when looking at the military as a whole. We have all heard the sayings/ arguments. “Kids aught to be forced into military service 'cause they lack discipline these days.” I know of at least a half dozen personal stories where they faced either jail time or joined the service. Or, “If you want to get out of poverty, go join the service.” What we know about the American soldier, overall, is that they are driven by money and perks. We know this because the volunteer military would not exist if it offered only room and board, no salary. We know that they utilize signing bonuses, free college education, and free medical insurance to increase its numbers. It is a rational conclusion then that people who are driven by a need for money are a common thread. Jesus generally would not have made a good soldier.

I would go one step further and say that , “The belief that the North Korean's, Vietnamese, or Muslims had the desire and means to be a threat was not inspirational enough to staff the military during the past 10 years.” Another benefit is that soldiers get much praise and social acknowledgment. In a “borderline society” where adequate attention is commonly lacking in most family structures, it is a very appealing option for those looking for a “meaning to life”. In their superiors, many “children” find parental (especially “Father”) figures they had been lacking. In their fellow soldiers, many find family and solidarity of values they lacked in their childhood. “Hoo-Rah”. So along with the monetarily driven, a personality type of wanting to be accepted and acknowledged, and directed are also candidates. This makes public schools darn near unfair grounds for recruiting. “Fish in a bucket.”

The Creation of a Soldier
It doesn't matter whether you are plucked from the inner city projects by a recruiter who keeps one from going to jail, or from a well-to-do military family who have financial success and even preconditioned at a place like West Point, the goals are the same. When you emerge from “boot camp” a soldier is to have six specific qualities. First, they must be able to suppress their individualized personal belief, moral and ethical systems and accept the ones the military psychologically conditioned them to. Your personal beliefs are to be conscious and second nature. Second, they must be able to act as a unified singularity in step with their unit and they must be able to do it with mechanical accuracy. Third, they must be able to act without questioning the consequences. Focus only on what is asked of them, there are not allowed to be existential or deeply philosophical. Fourth, one must be able to bond with their new “family” and the lives of the friends they are in the “fox whole” with is as far out as they can think. Fifth, they have to have the ability to close the doors of the past, absolve themselves of guilt, immediately and to only a forward looking perspective. Last, the value of life needs to be a fluid concept. The lives and definition of the enemy are have no meaning. They have no family, nor friends, no community. They have been deemed “the enemy” and therefore as meaningful as a mosquito.

It is the job of the recruiters to find candidates fear, insecurity, or deficiency, and convince them that the military can fill/ accommodate that missing component. Most common are a lack financial, futuristic, or family identity. The easy ones are those who want to impress parents. It is the job of the drill instructors to find those fears and expose them to the group. Tear each individual down in front of everybody else. Forcing the group to share emotional pain, makes them all exposed to the “What happens in..” syndrome. It also creates psychological bonds with the members that have been long documented. The icing is everybody is in the same uniform, looking the same. This suites to see that the mind subjugates what the eye sees to a predisposed kinship whenever they see another soldier. So these feelings of unity easily transfer to other soldiers long after boot camp. We all just “want to go someplace where everybody knows our name.” As evident by the creation of VFW's American Legions, AmVets, and the like.

Out the other side of boot camp, you have members of a society that outwardly advocates freedom, self expression, family, individuality, and value of life that have been conditioned to give all of that up and find comfort in exactly the opposite.

The Creation Of and Enemy.
Just as important of creation of a soldier is creation of the enemy. The war machine has learned to start this via propaganda long before they ask the soldier to go to war. At the end of the day, the soldier spent his formative years in the general population, and family and past doctrines still conflict with the new ones. In this voluntary military constraint, the population generally has to feel a threat from an enemy. Since many of us have German or European roots, it was hard to make an enemy out of them. They looked and acted too much like us. But, the Asians however, that attracted Pearl Harbor, they could be differentiated. This is the key. The military heads need to convince the families of the soldiers to support the act of killing. Carving out a race of people and treating them as if they are an inferior and “less then human” species is pinnacle to that goal. So the short, slant-eye, suicidal, non-christian, jap, gook, yellow, strange food eating, dictatorial, ect.. group of people were deemed as monsters. The military would make allies with the ones would support their efforts. Those were often the deviants of their own culture and monster in their own right. Communist, especially the soviets, and today the Muslims have all suffered the same propaganda. Simply ridicule and degrading a race or society of people isn't enough though. There has to be an obvious act, incident, or threat. The leaders who wanted war had to find a way to provoke the US into fighting in the past had to use such events as rallying points. Most often there is an element of conspiracy behind the events. Information release have shown that the US provoked (http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/con_korea.cfm) the Russians and North Koreans into the Korean war. The Gulf of Tonkin is the event that sparked the Vietnam war AND it was faked. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident). This technique has been part of the American expansionalism since its birth. The continental natives were the first to be treated as something less then human. Today we have 911 and oh so many questions about not only the incident, but the response. No matter, the result was the same, the US war machine had a new enemy. Some of the terms I have heard US soldiers use to refer to Middle Eastern Muslims are “Towel head”, “sand nigger”, “camel jockey”, “desert turds”, and of course they are all “terrorists”. Their religion, philosophy, family structure, governing structure, social laws, and traditions have all been called “inhumane” or “inhuman”. The only reason given for the rag tag group of men who attack the US was that they “hate our freedom”. It doesn't matter that the explanation doesn't make any rational sense, the American culture is one that is designed to desire to extract revenge, and any flimsy excuse will do. With that, the public supports its soldiers. An enemy is created.

The Result: Environment meets Soldiers Confirming The Stanford Experiment.
To sum up the environment that leads to combat, I'll recap. We have a people who are trained to and find value in life by being protectors of the community. In modern US those people are driven by financial gain and/ or family respect, condition not to question or weigh the rationality against their own beliefs, and willing to kill without question and feel socially justified in doing so. The society has to support the soldiers and affirm the belief that the targeted group are something less then human and a threat. You have to have leadership willing to absolve themselves from guilt for being the trigger finger on the weapon.

When you have these elements and combine with the psychology of war, the result of soldiers treating the entire population, enemies and allies alike, with degrading disrespect is a given. It has to work out that way. This was proven during the Sanford Prison Experiments. (http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/stanford-prison-experiment.htm)

So are they “bad seeds”.
The simple answer is a resounding “NO!” In fact they turned out exactly how the military expected them too. They are actually too good of a soldier. The acts of Abu Ghraib, Mahmudiyah, and the incident with the peeing marines are all natural results if you have any belief that psychology exists. It is one of the rare test we could conduct on human psychology that we can prove as a law with scientific method validity. People granted authority will use it to maintain their power. Once the group starts to participate in something of this nature, even the one with the weakest indoctrination will come around. “Causalities of War” made a great movie, but the reality is that would be so much the exception then it would the rule.
What we do in the west to the psyche of a human to make him/ her a soldier is dangerous to say the least. It is why we must only use them as method of last resort, and only when confronting real and inevitable threats.

Why Are People So Angry And Frustrated?

I believe that this spreadsheet will shed some light into what it is that people know, but can't seem to touch. Money can never be a gauge of the equality of people. People can have vastly different amounts of money. Only in time and in duration of life can we find true equality. Only in understanding that every person desires time where they may do what brings them joy. During those times they are truly "free". Our lives have become so jam packed just doing the activities needed to say alive, that we gravitate towards activities that can happen quick and with out patients or much reflection because we haven’t the luxury of time for such behaviors.

What has happened is so many of our previous generations have been willing to sell their own lives out, take advancements on their time, thinking that "keeping up with the Joneses" would benefit their children. It didn't. As everybody was willing to do it, it just drove the price of everything up uniformly.

Comments

Relax People. Charges On Debit Cards Is A Sign That We Are Making The Right Choices.

All of the backlash against the debits fees are misplaced and AGAIN a lack of understanding of how the system works and what it needs to be healthy. It demonstrates narrow mindedness and short sightedness. Much of the reason we are in the economic perils we are in is because of how banks make money. In order to get to a place where we are free from being a debtor nation, we have to make banks change their product. If we didn't it would be kind of like handicapping and legislating cigaret companies and how they make money crippling their sales and at the same time building billion dollar stadiums and/ or a budget based upon taxes revenue generated by the sales of cigarettes.

What Is A Bank?
I could go into the history of banks and what their purpose was. I could draw out a time line of how they change. In fact, I think I have don it here before. BUT, that would get boring and I would loose you to “Bigfoot sighting” videos on youtube. So let us just ask that question of most of us today.

Service Bank
We have 3 basic types of interaction with banks. We have the one we use the services of. (remember that one.) They accept your checks straight from your employer, make it easy to pay your bills online, validate checks, keep your records, and keep you money safer then under the mattress. Every one of these are services that require payment of more then a few people to accomplish.

Loan Bank
This is the bank that give us our mortgages, auto loans, car loans, and school loans. These are the banks that encourage skyrocketing market prices by allowing us to pay a total of $200,000 for a house we bought for $100,000.

Credit Bank
These are the banks that hold your credit card. They give you credit cards for purchases you might want to make in the future. This could be a donation to the LOL or an in service escort. The have no concerns about how responsibly your spend that money. Their interest rates are designed to make it so you spend a certain amount of money and then you can't pay them any more then the interest every month.

While these are 3 different types of banks, all 3 banks participate in all three types of banking. The last 2 have been what has caused the demise of our economy. They are the schemes by which we are imprisoned by the time we are out of college. There is way, way, way more money in the last two types of financial servicing. The first one, makes our lives easier. This type of activty should be encouraged in our economy.

Quick Review of What “Loan” and “Credit” Banks Have Done.
I have made this point 100 different ways on this blog. But here is is again. Market prices are set at the level known as “demand”. This price is the highest price a consumer is willing and able to pay for it. Many of us are willing to pay $1000 for an ear splitting, mind blowing, rock experience. However, few of us are able. We simply don't make that much. So in a world devoid of credit, that concert will not sell out for much more then $5 a ticket. But, along comes a “credit bank” who says, you can buy that ticket at whatever cost, we will let you get us to it in small amounts later. SO, off to the ticket window we go. With enough of us doing that, the going rate for every ticket will be pushed up. This is how the housing bubble was created, and this is how the school tuition have gotten so out of hand that they are the next “bubble” to break. Anything that creates a dual value of a product (one for the ticketed price on the market and one that represents the actual amount paid for the thing) is bad for free markets.

So What Is a Banker To Do?
So, if you want banks to stop making everything so artificially expensive, you have to handicap their ability to make money off credit. This is to be called out and demonized as “bad”. Not given bailout money and complain about how they are unable to offer their poison (credit) to people and struggling businesses. Then you must allow them to make money with an actual socially useful product or service. This will require a customer base that pays for that product. Charges for debit card use, charges for writing a check, charges for having a bank account in general are things that we should be celebrating and offering as alternatives to their “credit” junk. We don't want them to be pushers, but we have to offer them an alternative to earning a living. Now what exactly IS a good price for these services? Let the markets straighten that out.

Look people, these are new and anxious concepts, I understand. But if one is to loose weight, they have to change. It is an anxious proposition. But it is one that we must conquer. If we are going to "fix" this economy, bold acceptance of paying for financial services is going to be required.

(This was a quick response to news in a time when I don't have much time. I might revise this one later.)

Flat Tax, Herman Cain, and Systemic Ignorance.

For years I have heard about the utopia called a “flat tax” nation, where everybody was taxed at the same "rate" with no deductions "and joy and fairness would spread throughout the land on the backs of unicorns". This shows a complete misunderstanding of how (and why) the tax system as we know it came to be. As a system designer, it is the first question I ask anybody paying me to upgrade or replace their current system. "How is it that you came to have the system you currently have, and why was that the best choice at the time?" Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan takes that to a new level where I am not sure if he is being ignorant of malice.

What do Herman Cain and porn stars have in common?
Before we get started I was roused to write about this because of the recent events. I hadn’t been taking it all that seriously. Since Cain won the Florida straw pole, he has gained a little recognition. If you don’t know him, his claim to fame is that he brought a pizza chain out of financial ruin. Now, if you know much about business (even just as a consumer), a pizza joint is a remedial business. Doing well is like being the fastest kid in the Special Olympics. In the small town I am from (approximately 8,000 people), there was 2 gas stations, a vet clinic, a McDonalds and a Rax, a greasy spoon, and 8 pizza shops. The top 6 were very successful. How often do you see pizza places on opposite corners of the same street? Because “Pizza is like sex, even when it is bad it is still pretty good.”. Thus brings me to the point, claiming being “successful in the pizza business” gives you insight into economic success of a nation is like saying being good as a porn star gives you successful insight into being a parent. Anybody can have sex. Porn stars are really good at doing something that anybody can do. But the systemic purpose, the function of sex, is only a small portion of the act of becoming a parent. So this is ludicrous to think just because a guy has financial success earning profit for a simple pizza business, he would make an intuitive economic policy maker. About the same claim rational as a porn star would make great parents.

That’s Gross (or Net)?
Like I mentioned, I have heard the idea of a “flat tax” sine at least the Ross Perot days. It has become the battle cry of the blissful but meaning well inside and outside the Tea Party. I too used to think that this made sense until I asked the question, if something so easy made so much sense, why hasn’t it happened? Which lead to the question, “why is our tax system as convoluted as it is?” (I can’t stop being s system troubleshooter.) Let us face it; what sounds more fair then everybody pays the same number, right?

My understanding of why it wouldn’t work came form my (way too long) 2 yr career as a ditch digger for the cable company working in a 1099 environment. (For those not familiar, this is a tax structure where you get all the liabilities of being a sole proprietorship but none of the advantages. Many illegals are employed under this because it requires little reporting from the employer, gets around minimum wage laws, and cuts way back on office red tape.) It was then I learned the difference between “gross” and net”.

When I hear somebody advocating a flat tax, my first question is, “on the gross or on the net income?” If they say, “gross” I explain how my years would go as a ditch digger. On paper it looked like I made in the area of $20,000 “gross” that year. My tools and equipment were things such as shovels, picks, sledge hammers, specialty crimpers, the cable, pvc piping, and various types of cloths, shoes and boots. Not to mention the computer used partly for mapping out routes and accounting for jobs. Those amounted to about $6000. Another nearly $3000 went into gas and maintenance for my Daewoo. Now, compare that to a friend of mine, a part time tax accountant that also made $20,000 whose overhead was about $1000 for computer, the maintenance, and the software. IF you tax us both 9% on our gross, we would both have to pay 1800. I worked 60 hours a week, and she worked 25 on the average. But the accountant was left with 19,000 in expendable income while I was left with $10,000. How is that fair? So, you say, “well then charge more for your services as a ditch digger.” There are so many reasons that logic fails if you are truly a champion of fixing the economy. Not the least as I mentioned before, this work is already appealing to those who don’t pay taxes. Continuing with this example, your cable bill would see a large increase if I had to chare 50% more for installation in order to compensate for the cost of doing business. As it stands now, it takes your first 2 months of cable at least to pay for the installation. However, the real inequality comes when you apply the sales tax on the tools and equipment. Why am I paying for taxes on stuff I already paid taxes on when I bought it. My accounting counterpart only paid 9% on the 20 grand. I pay 9% on the 20K and another 9% on $10,000 of it if you go with the 9-9-9 plan.

Meet The “Net” Plan, Same as the Old Plan
The other option is a person may answer “Tax the net” then. To which I just look at them blankly and say, “how do you think our system works now?” All of those write offs, loopholes, and tax shelters are created in the pursuit of determining ones “net pay”. I say that steel toed shoes are part of my business cost, while you say you had to take a client out to a day of golf and strippers as a cost of doing yours. Who is going to go over my return to make sure I am on the level with my reporting. If only we had an agency that would look over “internal revenue”. Next thing you know, people will be using the “rapid depreciation” clause to get the government to pay for their hummers. (The automobile kind)
Simply making a blanket minimized list of deductions is an impossibility, and anything but fair as all jobs have different overhead costs even thought they may have the same gross income. And that is how we got the system we have today. Economics of equality is complex and some even think subjective.

The Formula We All Work By (But Have Stopped Living By).
There is one formula every one of us who have ever been employed has come to know. Where (d)= dollars and (t)= time in hours, all offering can be broke down into d/t where “t” is almost always expressed as 1 for the first 40 hours worked of a week. That is the long version of saying, “your employer pays you in dollars per hour.” By moving us to this formula via the monetary system, we have forgotten what that “t” signifies. 1 hour of our life. Now, a “flat tax” on income as it is being earned (excluding the problems cited above) is fair enough. Let us take Mr. Cain’s 9% figure. You make a million dollars a year and you pay $90,000 in taxes (or 187 hrs of your life). If you make $25000 a year, you pay $2,2500 (or 187 hrs. of your life). That is the formula and unarguably fair in that perspective.

Sales Tax Are Inherently Unconstitutional
Wow, talk about an anxious statement. That challenges every thing we First, what people don’t seem to understand about the pizza kings proposal is that he is thinking about adding 9% in addition to your already existing city tax. So if your city has a 6% sales tax, that tax then will become 15%. That is a chunk of change, and with it buying power.

Now, I always get the same nonsensical response when I use “big screen TV’s” as an example when expressing he next point. “Well poor people shouldn’t be buying big screen TV’s” completely missing the concept of simplifying a point. So, let us use the example of a Ford Focus that they are buying which there is no denying having transportation to get back in forth to work or school is important to improving ones position in life AND the trade off between new car payments vs. used maintenance cost is one most Americans struggle with.

Let us say that the cost of a focus is $15,000. We apply the 15% to that cost as the local plus federal sales tax. Here is that number $2250 again. (It was the yearly income tax on $25,000) . So we know that is equivalent to 187 hours of the life of a person making $12/hr or $25,000 a year. However, compared to the guy making $480/hour (or a million per year) that is a total of 4.7 hours of his life. Now I thought our constitution promised us equality in “Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness”? Sales taxes values a one persons life in this example nearly 40 times more valuable then another.

Conclusion and fear:
This type of policy “sounds” so fair on the surface. What could be more so then the same “rate” applied to everybody. Many smart people I know have fallen for believing it. But the story reminds me of the story of the emperor and the guy who invented chess. (look it up, it is a good story.) Here, the misunderstanding of the power of “terms” would have bankrupted the Chinese empire. People just hear marketing slogans; my fear is the average voter doesn’t have the depth of thought or tools to grasp just how much worse for the economy a proposal such as the “9-9-9” would be. Currently Warrant Buffet pays 17.4%. With this plane he would be taxed at a much lower rate of 9% which would amount to savings of millions of dollars, and in turn pay a higher “sales tax” on goods he purchases, which would amount to a few thousand dollars extra per year. All of this and we are not going to mention the affect on the equilibrium price of goods when the cost is driven higher and how that would dive more people out of work. If people can’t get this simple concept of tax rates, complex economics will sent them into comas. People seem not to be able to look at the entire system and because of it, they back the horse that bites them in the ass. Then they blame it on the horse.

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9/11 conspiracy theory – “The motive”

Too many people? Yes Lack of motive? No way.

I just finished watching the history channels special on conspiracy theories and the science. It seemed balanced and the experiment were sound. While some of the science holds up, other things couldn’t be explained. A building be set able on the top leves dropping straight down will always perplex me. However, 9/11 has one of the biggest flaws to have been a conspiracy. To be successful at covering anything up, you need to keep things small. The fact that a vast amount of people involved and it was here on US soil makes a full on cover up impossible.

However, often the other reasoning is there was no motive to invade Afghanistan. That is not accurate, and the way the Bush administration conducted itself prior to and then there after is what breaths life into these theories. The motive would not manifest itself until after Bush would leave office. First things first though.

The timeline

Election 2000: Cheney (Board member of Halliburton) was head of George Bush’s search for a vice president and nominated himself. Cheney Reccomends Himself

Later the understanding of just how close Cheney was to many of the members of the Supreme Court would become evident. The very court that would decide the election. Cheney and Scilia go hunting

Spring of 2001: Between late January and mid May of 2001 Cheney met with heads of energy companies and reused to release the names of these people dictating his policy recommendations. All the way to the supreme court to protect the names and matters discussed during those meetings. Cheney Refuses to release the names of "task force" members.

September 11th happened.

Post 9/11

Quickly to Iraq:
Cheney himself sent Joseph Wilson on a mission to Nigeria as told in the books “Fair Game” and “Truth in Politics”. When Wilson wouldn’t “play ball” his wife was outed as a CIA operative and their lives were ruined. They used trumped up document that had been proven fake to Justify and scare the American public all the same.
Valerie was Covert

Haliburton, Cheny’s old company was getting “no bid” contracts and forked over money at alarming rates. Many of the names leaked from those meetings were getting benefits directly or indirectly.

Why Afghanistan?: This was something that distracted me for some time. I “reasoned”, “assumed”, or “guessed” that it was merely a distraction for the greater war on Iraq. Then the missing piece of the puzzle came to light. At first I thought Afghanistan was the distraction. But it turns out Iraq was the distraction from the real prize. Seeing the need for “green energy” and independence from the middle east.

June of 2010: It was announced that the largest deposit of Lithium had been found in Afghanistan. Now they couldn’t find Bin Laden, but they found lithium? What were they doing looking for it? Lithium found in Afghanistan

If there was ever a motive to go into Afghanistan with an army instead of a small strike force it would be the need to find and mine this “$1 trillion lithium deposit”. That is a lot of money for a bunch of greedy heartless bastages looking to profit off the lives of American blood. If they were a little more honest with their actions they wouldn’t fall under so much suspicion.

But alas, there is just no way to have contained it for this long with that many people involved.

Mining in Mongolia, The Horror Story

'Mine-golia': Across the steppes, new wealth emerges

I saw this story on CNN this morning. Meant to be a “feel good” piece about wealth being discovered in a poor nation of Mongolia. There are a few things about it that are spun as positive but IF one takes the long view at it, the whole thing is more of a curse then a blessing. Those of us from Northern Ohio can relate.

Mongolia past and present:
If you are claiming to make life better for a people, it is important to know their status now as well and have an agreement on what “better” mans. Mongolia is a predominantly nomadic herding and farming culture. It has been this way since at least its founding by Genghis Khan in the 1200’s. Their per capita GDP is $4000 (compared to the US $47,000). They are a sustainable agricultural society. What individuals don’t supply for themselves they get from bartering. That is a brief economic overview. Culturally they are predominantly Buddhist and atheist. (Thank God. We are not pissing off another Islamic culture again. The two groups mentioned are the most peaceful groups in the world). As in any agricultural society, every parent is a “stay at home” parent. Use of Antidepressants and suicide is unheard of in the outlying regions away from the developed cities. Due to an industrial movement in the 1990’s they are literate and educated.


Economic impact:

Definitions:
There are some key phrases that stick out in this short article. The first big zinger is “Boost the average earnings of Mongolia by 60%.” I am not certain if they mean of the country or the people. But lets us say they mean they are going to boost the average earnings Mongolians. Good thing, right? It is as long as you are one of those select few that get hired by the mining company. But even then, how do you measure. If your average wage is $0 cause you barter for everything, how do you gage that 60%? Say that each of them make $1 a week equivalent and now they will get $1.60?

Supply and Demand:
Let us just take the price of goat’s milk for the example, a staple to the Mongolian diet it would be safe to assume. Now if a goat herder is hired as a miner, a few things happen to supply and demand. First, supply of goat’s milk reduces causing an increase in cost. But he now no longer supplies himself and adds to the demand. The increase in demand also edges the price higher. It doesn’t matter to him, he can afford to pay it. However, the wheat farmer he used to trade with is now forced to find a way to grow more wheat and find another trading partner.


Money issues:
The herder turned miner goes off to get his paycheck every week, he is paid in money. This is a much preferred method of accepting payment as it can represent wheat, corn, milk, smith work, and/ or livestock. A wheat farmer needs to find a goat herder that actually needs wheat in order to make the trade. As time goes on, many of the producers will require money for purchases to be made. The minor will have no problem paying for stuff with is 60% increased wages. But a wheat farmer who has never had to earn money has to now. So he sells his wheat at the market. Now everybody is hooked on the monetary system. (This makes it easier to tax.) The traditional wage earners basically has to work twice. Farming then marketing. And then will need to grow more to meet the demand and produce the amount of income to buy the stuff they need. Everybody has stopped working for the one thing they all have in common, the one thing that kept them all equal in the past, "time".

Culturally speaking:

That is economically. How about culturally? For the family of the herder turned miner you have a major shift. Now instead of having both parents stay at home passing on the family values and traditions, dad will have to leave to go to work most of the child’s life. This was a nomadic family that turned into a stationary one. Children instead of having self value and awareness as was the result of being part of a working farm or caravan, will find themselves lost, anxious at the loss of direction from their parent, and bored.

Besides the lands that were taken by the mining operation, lands that were free to roam for hundreds of years, permanent housing developments and western style market places will require permanent lands. Lands used to be free for all to use are off limits and come with a cost.. Of course as cost rise and the ability to even support one on a miner's salary come to pass, mother too will have to go off to the workforce. Maybe she will work at one of the new malls. With this “progress” this whole culture is changing into something it never was.

Now from the guy who remains a farmer point of view, life got much harder. He has to find a way to harvest more crops to bring to market. The cost of things went up. Why did theh go up, because "the price of things are set at the highest price consumers are willing and able to pay for them." With people well financed by the mining wages, they can pay more for things. He will need either more land (which cost more) or crops that produce a better yield (that they can get by buying into the genetically enhanced market.) This will mean less time for family and leisure and passing on of cultural values. Kids will grow up valuing that which the miner's children have.


A terminal proposition:

All of this is said to only have a life expectancy of 50 years. Two or three generations down the road, the well will dry up. The traditional way of living and existing will have been forgotten. Children will not be able to conceive of actually processing their own food or water. They will have lost what it meant to be self sustaining. For all the freedom they were promised, they were enslaved to the mining mentality and the monetary culture. In 50 yrs when the slave drivers drop the chains and leave them, they will be unequipped to handle themselves on their own. Even one minor was quoted as saying, "We think we can work at the mine and take care of our herds. My three children will get a chance to go to school and have a better education," But what happens when that education cost 3 years wages, would he still do it. What happens when he finds himself in debt for it and the mind dries up? A half of a century is just long enough to forgeth who you are and where you came from.


Creating of western hating monsters.

In the mean time this “nomadic society” will have lands taken from them that are now off limits. Men holding western riffles guarding places with western architecture will stand guard over these lands that were free for hundreds of years. More land will be developed to house the now stationary minors. They will throw up McDonald’s, McMansions, and a Wal-mart on even more previously “unowned” land. You can already hear the frustration in the comment of the one herder they interviewed who was quoted as saying, Says one nomadic herder: "At the moment it's impossible to graze our herd near the mine. Officials might say it is only 10-kilometer limit, but because of the traffic and dust you don't see any herds within 20 or 30 kilometers." Who do you think the less advantaged are going to blame when bad weather brings less productive yields? These are Buddhist, but what happens if some of them grow angry and start blaming the invasion of western capitalism for their troubles. Would they really be all that wrong? (On a side note we found the world’s largest deposit of lithium in Afghanistan while looking for Bin Laden.) Some will get jobs, others with get handicapped by it. Will we deem then “terrorist” and talk about them as less then humans.



From experience:

In the Cleveland area where I am from this story played out at the beginning of the 1900’s. My home was a fishing port and an agricultural center. Even in the 40’s and 50’s the majority of the surrounding area was supported by its self sustaining roots. Then in came the auto and steel industry promising big and quick money to anybody who would come work. People migrated into this previously unknown speck of an area from all over the world. They formed little communities of people like themselves and different then the natives of the area. They were know as “Little Italy”, “Slovak village”, Latin, and African American sections of town. They came and started buying up land, forcing up demand, and bringing temporary prosperity to the area. There was much money to go around and nobody thought anything of it. They started rejecting and polluting the life giving source of Lake Erie. Many of them had never grown up with such a resource or understood how to care for it., let alone its importance. So the culture turned into one that treated it like a toilet or at best and “extra” that we could live without. Then one day industry found this gift from our government called “free trade agreements” and hundreds of willing cultures to exploit. So those industries left to places like Mexico and China. The children of the children of the children of the farmers and fishermen of the early 1900’s had no clue how to self sustain. Dear god what had we done to the lake?! The Cuyahoga river, once flush with fish, had caught on fire and we didn’t see that as a sign. By way of the “good wages” brought by the industry our houses, colleges, food, and booze had grown to cost too much and we had no way to pay for them now that we had been abandoned. Worse, the “walleye capital of the world” had since banned commercial fishing. So you couldn’t even get a locally caught walleye at a restaurant. If it weren’t for a friend of mine, perch fishing would have went the same way in order to honor the likes of Bass Pro Shop. Our century old sustainable industry and we “banned” it because some sports fishermen wanted to blame their poor skills and the lack of fish in the polluted lake on the industry.

So it is not with sheer speculation that I make these suggested possibilities for Mongolia. I have read and experienced the history of my own town and it wasn’t much different.

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If They Really wanted to Balance the Budget…

This is going to be a rehash of my main economic soapbox. But A) I don’t write here often so not even John is looking anymore I don’t think, and B) I am working on a new more readable writing style for these complex idea posts.

The problem:

There isn’t enough wealth flowing through the system to generate the needed revenue to run all the government responsibilities and culturally driven expectations. Being aware that the government only collects taxes on money that changes hands between American citizens (at least at the federal level) and all attempts to inject “cash money” that was empty and void of actual wealth (determined by taking ones assets then subtracting liability obligations and coming up with ones “wealth” amount) has failed. A way to encourage that flow while respecting the constraints of a free market society is in order.

The proposed solution:
Exchange the current practice of requiring a minimum wage for one of a minimum percentage of highest income. This would be known as a “minimum percentage”. This would require a company to pay it employees no less then at least a minimum percentage of its most paid employee. For purposes of this policy all incomes will be considered to be on 52 weeks with 40 hours worked. Every CEO will be makinging OT on the golf course. Overtime will not be considered when determining a company’s minimum pay rate. This rate once assessed will apply to all wages paid not only to direct employees, but to contractors and subcontractors. The 1099 environment will be abolished or limited to those who make more then $60,000 a year. A specific date will be assigned at which all stocks will be considered at that days rate. (Hey, they are stocks, they are a gamble.) Say Dec. 31st. everything that an employee was paid in cash other compensations and benefits. This will result in attaching the success of the top income earners to the backs of those laborers people they employ.

A real life example.

The CEO of Wal-Mart made nearly $19 million last year. Divide that over (52) forty hour weeks and you have a rate of $9134.61 per hour for Michael Duke, the CEO. His in store workers made and average of $250 a week or 6.26 an hour. That is a wage disparity of .07% (that is not a typo. That is 7/ 100ths of a single percent). (Note: this doesn’t consider an audit of every company that supplies goods and services, either foreign or domestic to Wal-Mart subject to this policy.) He made many thousands of times more then his least paid employees.

As an example, the policy is enacted with a requirement of all companies to pay .04% (4/10 of a percent). So, the janitor, the stocker, and the clerk will all be paid at a rate of $36.54 If Wal-Mart chose to continue to pay its CEO $19 million dollars. Instead, Wal-Mart could choose to pay its CEO less. For instance they could choose to pay its CEO $1 million dollars and the employees $1.92 an hour. Of course the CEO will have to accept an $18 million pay cut and its employees will be very undependable if they pay the minimum. At the end of the day, they will still have to offer their employees enough money to keep them interested in work. They will have to compete with McDonalds who is paying its employees 19.23 cents an hour since they pay their CEO $10 million.


What will the corporation do with all that money?:

If a company chooses not to raise their employees’ wages, (or to lower them) they will have a surplus of cash. Some companies will be obligated to pay out that cash in dividends. Those are taxed. If those dividends are paid to employees, then that is considered part of their compensation. Others are taxed at a standard rate. This can be anywhere from 15 to 39% depending on your tax bracket. They could use the surplus to negotiate a benefit for all their employees. They could let it sit in a bank, which would allow for more money to loan at a lot cheaper rates. That would spur small business. They could donate it to charity. They could lower their cost on their products leaving more money in the pockets of the consumers. They could lobby for a tax increase. Any of these would put money back into circulation.



What about the employee making $2 and hour?:

First, nobody is going to work for such a low wage in this economy. (Only 50 years ago minimum wage was under $1 an hour.) Most likely the CEO won’t take a $18 million dollar cut. If Wal-Mart tries 2 things would happen. 1) their employees would seek work elsewhere, their customer base would shrink as much of their sales come from their own employee. More then likely something like paying Mr. Duke $3.5 million and continue to pay their employees the same wage. But for all the reasons above there will be money circulating in the system. However, we could leave in place a minimum wage as well, or a phase out of it over years. Somebody will open a resteraunt selling burgers to the local carpenter and pay their employees more then these low wages.

Who decides that actual rate?:

This would be a legislative passed plan. It is designed to give the legislator control of economic flow. Just as the minimum wage might be preserved, the initial rate may be in the area of the current wage disparity. A “phase in” period designed to bring the economy to a rate of 1% wage disparity should be considered. This would allow the policy to come in with no impact at first. But, corporate America would know it was coming. After that, the legislators could use this rate as an open and direct tool in order to squeeze money back into the economy. The economy starts to stall, increase the rate. The government starts making more then it spends, relax.

Who determines if a company is following the regulations?:

Like any other tax obligation, steep penalties for anybody caught intentionally violating the minimum percentage policy would be assessed. A hiring of auditors who not only go through the US corporations records, but also those of their overseas suppliers to ensure that every employee in a Chinese factory makes as much as the Wal-Mart clerk. We will need a lot of accountants and ones that speak foreign languages. That can’t be a bad thing in DC.


Result:

The US economy will be awash with cash. Cost of goods will be driven down. Small business will be able to compete with the giants. US manufacturing will be able to compete with its foreign counterparts. It does it all without raising a single tax.

Remember to pencil in "LOL" for president.