things I learn this week

Eight Senators on Monday voted not to consider the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act, a bill that protects victims of domestic violence. The Senators who voted against moving to debate on the bill were: Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Mike Lee (R-UT), Tim Scott (R-SC), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Mike Johanns (R-NE), Rand Paul (R-KY), Pat Roberts (R-KS), and James Risch (R-ID).

Why are they all white and Republican and from red states?  

Instead of just grabbing bleach for disinfecting one can use a combination of vinegar and baking soda.  A quarter of a cup of each in a five gallon pile for 20 minutes will clean up most fungus or bacteria.   Another approach is oregano, the herb.  A little oil of oregano or some crushed leaves in a bag will disinfecting any item.  Now we know another reason why our ancestors uses herbs frequently.  I found that a half cup of baking soda in my washing machine works very well in keeping my whites their original color.  The reason for considering using less bleach is our water system, less chemicals. 

A way to have less problems with raccoons and squirrels is to use a product called Nixalite.  It can be purchase off the Internet and my gardening friends have had good results.  Of course, a pit bull dog also works but then that is another issue. If you are a gardening in urban or rural settings raccoon s are a big problem and they can wrap out a crop in one evening. 

If planting fruit,  consider plums instead of apples trees.  In many ways they are easier to grow and healthier to eat and simpler to preserve. Stanley as an European along with Brooks plum.  Europeans plums hold on the tree for 10-14 days.  Japanese plums are very juicy hold less time on the tree, 7-10 days, bloom earlier which maybe a froze problem.  Hollywood variety, Japanese ,  is a landscape beauty for every front yard and is an excellent tree for fruit.  

I have lost my daily interest in politics because I watched the history  of New York City that was produced for PBS a few years ago.  I got it on Netflix and found it a very informative and entertaining series to watch.  Frankly, watching this history taught me in a kernel, the history of the U.S. This country was there before-- politically.  It had the very same exact political non function, greed driven, imbalances in the last century.  Sadly, the only differences this time is we as a nation has done some serious damage to our water, air and soil this time around.   The million year type damage, I fear.  We'll see.  Oh they will work it out after a shock or tragedy that shakes the core of this nation.  In the meantime, I don't use chemicals on my one quarter acre, I compost and live as much as possible in a green charitable manner. 

The waves of immigrants is covered in this series.  All of us European blooded Americans should view this film periodically to be reminded of what bravery is all about. 

The Year End Dinner Party Guest List Continues

            Charles, Price of Wales I would like to sit at my table because he is an organic farmer.  While waiting around for his job title as King he as found a passion for farmer, ecology, horticulture, watercolor painting and design of cities and villages.  His passions has replaced disappointing lack of opportunity to rule from the British throne.  Being born in that dysfunctional family Charles seems to have make a career of searching for meaning in his life in the most common of occupations - a farmer, yes growing his own food.

           Another royal I would like to spent time with one evening at a dinner table is King of Jordan for the opposite reasons as the British man.  Hussein was born in 1962 educated extensively in the United States, lived around the world and very suddenly made King in the sea of whirl pools of politically dead ends. His blood line is connected to the religious founder of Muslims and his country's historic sites tells of very ancient people, yet his education was largely Western.
I would question his views of what the future holds for peoples in the region country by country with the mix of his genes and his education.

             The last two gentleman are from the famous world of entertainment and California.  Stedman Graham, life partner of Oprah and Steven Spielberg. 

              Graham has been the silent partner to the most singular  successful Mississippian black woman this country has seen.  There is no lower place of birth than being born in that state and with that skin color.   Graham has been at her side for thirty some years and seen the raise of fame, wealth and international recognition showered on Oprah.  What funtion has he played?  What events and decisions did he play a capital role for her? 

               So little is known about his man Spielberg except the movies he produces.  What are his guiding principles that makes that repeated success on film and in his personal life?   Has he learn them over the years or are they basic to his personality?  I once heard that he believes if others know of your charity then it will not count in the afterlife, credit was received here on earth!  I wonder about other principles that guide him.

              The evening will have a beautiful set table and simple food of perhaps  Moroccans dishes.  It would please the vegetarians along with those who eat meat and love spicy food.  Water with mint and rose petals along with a selection of wine for drinking.  Candle light and soft unidentifiable music will add to the evening.

              This dinner party will be added to many ones I have hosted with less known people but just as interesting.

Younger Next Year

Reading an interesting book about ageing, perhaps the best I have run across.   It is about 5 years old but it held my attention because of the science of one of the co-authors, Dr Henry S. Lodge. Younger Next Year for Women: Live Strong, Fit, and Sexy - Until You're 80 and Beyond by Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge M.D

There is the usual chapters on exercise, although it is explained by the Dr. Lodge in new and profound manners using our three different brains and how we have evolved more the million of years.  The phase 'grow or decay' is used repeatedly.  It seems beyond the age of forty our body is a wash is the tide of aging , slow and steady and we have to stand firm and fight the wash of this aging tide.  We replace 1% of our cells each day we are alive but to help the distant sleepy cells of our body we have to use them.  That is my picture of how it works.  Dr. Lodge uses much more scientific imagine and facts.  I was amazing by the science of this book way beyond the good tides of exercise, eating right and having loving relationships in one's life.  Imagine that every three months all my thigh muscle cells are new!  Imagine that lifestyle diseases kill most people, it is not bacteria or viruses spreading person to person.  As individuals we can live healthy to the end of our lives instead of living years on a slide down hill we can die as a shoting star fast quickly at the very end of our life. 

The messages of the book include six days of week of 45 minute exercise.  Cold turkey start, no excuses and one day off!  Then there is level two and three that move into things that include weight training and heart moderating.

Harry’s Rules
1. Exercise six days a week for the rest of your life.
2. Do serious aerobic exercise four days a week for the rest of your life
3. Do serious strength training, with weights, two days a week for the rest of your life.
4. Spend less than you make.
5. Quit eating crap.
6. Care.
7. Connect and commit.

 

To simply read this rules would short change the message of the book.  The writings of Dr. Lodge should be reread periodically to understand the importance’s of our brain and our function as humans.  His long chapters on caring connecting and committing are so well written, I am changing a few small things in my life.  The heart of old age is living with these activities and it takes work and planning. 

     

Most of these numbers are billions

TomDispatch.com: Picking Up a $170 Billion Tab

The True Costs of U.S. Military Bases and Military Presence Overseas

Click here for a full research paper providing a detailed discussion of the calculations in this article (and below). 

Table: Calculating the Costs of U.S. Military Bases and U.S. Military Presence Abroad

All data FY2012 unless indicated by * where some data from 2004, 2008, 2011.

OMITTED SPENDING CATEGORY	TOTAL
Pentagon “Overseas Cost Summary” Total	$22,148,900,000
Missing Countries	435,404,000
Territories,* Possessions, and Pacific Island Nations	3,621,220,000
Naval Vessels and Personnel outside U.S. Waters; Prepositioned Ships and Stocks; Other Sealift, Airlift, and Mobilization	5,244,562,000
Health Care, Military and Family Housing Construction, Exchange* and Postal Service Subsidies	12,526,099,520
Net “Rent” Payments and NATO Contributions (Funds from Other Nations Subtracted*)	6,850,087,520
Counternarcotics, Humanitarian, and Environmental Programs	681,420,000
Classified Programs, Military Intelligence, and CIA Paramilitary Activities	13,558,891,583
War Costs (Personnel, Operations & Maintenance, Military Construction, Health Care, 18% of State Department Aid as “Rent,” Other)	104,896,568,660
GRAND TOTAL	$169,963,153,283

Opinion is different tha fact

The 6 Economic Facts of Life in America That Allow the Rich to Run off with Our Wealth

December 5, 2012  |  

Do you ever wonder why it takes the average family 47 years to make as much as a hedge fund honcho makes in one HOUR?

Does it bother you that in 2010, after the crash, the top 25 hedge fund chiefs made as much as 685,000 teachers who educate 13 million children?

Are you worried that cutting government debt means raising your social security eligibility age and cost of living adjustment, so that you have to work longer and receive lower retirement benefits?

Have no fear. The super-rich are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to sell you their economic fabrications. Why so much inequality? They say because the rich have the most important skills and you don't. Why so much unemployment? They say it's because our skimpy unemployment insurance keeps people from looking for work. Why so much government debt? They say it's because you have too many "entitlements." Why the Wall Street crash? They blame poor people for buying homes they couldn't afford.

In short, the super-rich want us to believe that any effort to tax them a bit more or control Wall Street will only kill more jobs and harm our economic well-being. And most of all they don't want us to know the six economics facts of life that explain how the super-rich are running away with our nation's wealth.

1. The super-rich are stealing our fair share of productivity. The U.S. economy is enormously productive. Since 1947, the amount of goods and services we produce per hour of labor has risen by nearly 300 percent. That's because as a nation, we blend together a potent mix of effort, skills, technology and organizational capacities. Our enormous productivity is why we are the richest nation on earth.

Yet, why don't we feel that rich? Why are we told we must tighten our belts?

Until the mid-1970s, the more productivity increased, the higher the real wages of the average working person (after taking out the impact of inflation). As a result, our standard of living doubled in 25 years. But, as you can see from the chart below, after the mid-1970s, productivity (the red line) continued to boom, but the average wage stalled.

It wasn't an accident, or market forces, or an act of God. It was a result of human polices designed by and for the rich. Tax cuts for the rich, financial deregulation, support for moving jobs overseas and union-busting combined to give the super-rich more and more of our economy's productivity gains. In 1970, the top 100 average corporate executive earned $45 for every $1 earned by the average worker. By 2006 it had jumped to a whopping $1,723 to $1. That's the very definition of greed run wild.

Think about this: If the average wage had continued to rise along with productivity as it did after WWII, your real wage today (after inflation) would be twice as high!

We've been had.

2. Americans really want a wealth distribution more like Sweden's. Here's a nightmare fact of life the super-rich don't want you to know. Two researchers recently tried to find out just how much economic inequality Americans were comfortable with. Michael Norton of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke University conducted a nationwide poll with more than 5,000 respondents to see how Americans saw our current level of equality, and what level they wanted to see. (“Building a Better America – One Wealth Quintile at a Time [3]”)

The results were startling. First, virtually all Americans greatly underestimated the degree of inequality in our economy today. They had no idea how extreme the U.S. wealth distribution really is -- which goes to show you what a good job the super-rich have done in mis-educating us.

Second, when asked to construct an ideal distribution of income, 92 percent of Americans preferred radically more equality – on a par with the social democratic state of Sweden! What’s more, it didn’t matter whether the respondent was a Republican or Democrat, rich or poor, black or white, male or female. Everyone wanted more economic fairness.

Imagine that! Americans, even Republicans who voted for Romney and Ryan, would rather live with the Scandinavian distribution of wealth. Little wonder that the super-rich and their minions do all they can to belittle so-called "Euro-socialism." They don't want us to know that maybe we are hard-wired for fairness instead of the staggering inequality that helps no one but the super-elites.

3. Everything we hear about government debt is wrong. Right now, the biggest target of public mis-education is the government debt debate. And the biggest spender on the mis-education of the American public is billionaire Pete Peterson (who personally has added to the government's debt by dodging hundreds of million in taxes through the 15 percent "carried interest" loophole that blessed his private equity fund). Having no sense of shame, he and other super-elites want to convince us that government spending and debt will ruin us all. Unfortunately, very little of what they claim is true:

• China owns our all our debt? Wrong! There's a chilling ad put out by a Peterson front group that features a Chinese lecturer in the year 2030 addressing (with English subtitles) a packed audience of Chinese students about the rise and decline of the U.S. The confident, smirking teacher describes how the U.S. abandoned its principles as it "tried to spend and tax its way out of a great recession" and then crumbled beneath its "crushing debt." He then provides the kicker: "Of course we owned most of their debt...ha ha ha, and now they work us," he says to the raucous laughter of the students. The ad is a complete Peterson lie. China owns only 8 percent of our debt. Most of our debt is actually owned by our own quasi governmental agencies like the Federal Reserve and Social Security.

• Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are bankrupting the country? Wrong! The current deficits are the result of two unfunded wars, the Bust tax cuts for the super-rich and the Wall Street crash of the economy that killed 8 million jobs, and led directly to the ensuing bailouts, lost tax revenues and increases in unemployment insurance payments.

• We will become like Greece if we don't balance our budget? Wrong! Greece can't print money to pay back its debt because it no longer has its own currency (and neither does Mississippi). The United States does. Also, our economy is more than 50 times larger that Greece's. The chances of the US ending up in a Greek debt crisis are about the same as finding a Martian in your bathtub.

• We have to solve the "debt crisis" right now or the economy will crash? Wrong! We have an unemployment crisis, not a debt crisis. Interest rates are at all-time lows because the world wants to park its money here in dollars. In fact, this is the time to borrow more to put our people back to work by rebuilding our crumbling, fossil fuel-dependent infrastructure and educating our children. If our people go back to work, the economy grows, unemployment costs go down, tax revenues rise, and the debt ratio shrinks without paying back one penny of it.

Why so many lies? Because financial elites like Peterson don't want to pay their fair share of taxes. They don't believe in funding a safety net for all Americans. They don't want to the government to help put Americans back to work. Instead, they want an economy by and for the elites.

4. We are under-taxed, not over-taxed. The super-rich want us to believe that taxes are too high and that those taxes are harming job creation and economic growth. It's a fabrication. First of all, taxes for most Americans have declined, according to a recent New York Times analysis [4]:

..... most Americans in 2010 paid far less in total taxes — federal, state and local — than they would have paid 30 years ago. According to an analysis by The New York Times, the combination of all income taxes, sales taxes and property taxes took a smaller share of their income than it took from households with the same inflation-adjusted income in 1980.

Second, we have much lower tax rates that our chief European competitors. For example, Germany, an economic powerhouse, has an average tax rate of 40.6 percent while the U.S. rate is only 26.9 percent. Germany uses that money to rebuild its infrastructure, invest in education and find creative ways to nearly eliminate unemployment.

Third, the super-rich use a sleight of hand to make middle-class taxpayers believe that lower-income people are moochers. Like Mitt Romney, they are found of saying that 47 percent of Americans don't pay income taxes and that the rich pay most of those taxes. But income taxes are but a small portion of the tax bite on lower-income people who pay through payroll tax deductions, sales taxes and property taxes.

Finally, because our taxes are declining, it means that our public services are decaying as well. This creates a downward spiral the super-rich want to encourage: the more services decline, the less we want to pay in taxes, the more services decline. If you're really wealthy you don't care about public services since your life is entombed in private services -- private schools, private airports, private planes, private gated villas and so on.

5. Government jobs are just as good as private sector jobs. Another major con job concerns the attack on public employees. The greedy rich are trying to pit public and private sector workers against each other in large part because public employees still seem to have benefits the rest of us have lost (and they have unions and vote mostly Democratic). Corporate greed demands that we snuff out those benefits so workers won't demand them in the private sector. To further denigrate government, elites want us to believe that a private sector job is somehow more righteous that a public one -- that public employment is sort of like being on the dole because government workers are immune to the rough and tumble of competitive pressures that drives the private sector.

It's another hoax.

The truth is that some jobs are better done by government on behalf of the public. We learned almost 200 years ago that it didn't make sense to have competing fire and police departments. We also learned that if we wanted the average person to go to school, we needed public school systems, and not just private ones. Most countries (but not ours) have learned that much of the healthcare system runs better when it's publicly financed and controlled -- that for-profit hospitals and clinics do not provide the best care. In short, every modern economy is a combination of private and public sector jobs that are valuable to our society.

6. Wall Street needs to be shrunk (until we can drown it in a bathtub). The function of finance is simple: moving our savings into productive investments. By doing so, money supposedly moves to where it will do the most good for our economy. This function is considered so simple that most economics textbooks ignore Wall Street entirely.

However, when Wall Street is left to its own devices, it tends to create vast casinos that dramatically increase financial profits at the expense of the real economy. Worse still, as the speculative casinos grow and grow, the economy as a whole is endangered. Wall Street's grew rapidly just before the great crash of 1929 and just before the Great Recession of 2008-'09. It was stock manipulation during the 1920s and it was the housing casino over the last two decades. But in both cases it happened because Wall Street was deregulated and got too damn big. As the chart below shows, Wall Street is gobbling up more and more of our country's profits.

We learned after 1929 that economic stability required severe financial regulation. We sat on Wall Street for nearly 50 years and it worked beautifully, especially between WWII and the 1970s. There were virtually no financial crashes anywhere in the world. But once we deregulated finance again, all hell broke loose as the world suffered through more than 150 smaller financial crashes. Finance grew and grew until it took down the entire U.S. economy. Along the way, Wall Street offered the easiest path to great riches for the few.

The simplest solution is the one hated by the super-rich: a small sales tax on each and every financial transaction involving stocks, bonds and every kind of derivative. By taxing the casino, we shrink its size and make it less dangerous to the rest of the economy. We also create new revenues for our economy, nearly all of it coming from the top fraction of the top 1 percent. No wonder they don't want us to know that.

Is Knowledge Power?

It's not enough for the greedy rich to buy politicians. They also need to buy our minds. That's why they pay for all this misleading economic education. But if we master the basic economic facts of life, we won't get conned. And we will have a much better chance at building a more just and healthy economy.

See more stories tagged with:

economy [5]

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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/economy/6-economic-facts-life-america-allow-rich-run-our-wealth

Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/les-leopold-0
[3] http://www.people.hbs.edu/mnorton/norton%20ariely%20in%20press.pdf
[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/30/us/most-americans-face-lower-tax-burden-than-in-the-80s.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
[5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/economy-0
[6] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

Garden Notes

       John is home all day on Wednesdays with me.  Yesterday it was sunny and so we sat outside and get some sunlight on our skin.  I arranged two chairs in a comfortable spot to watch the chickens roam the yard and dig around the apple trees. The chickens love to scratch and find morsels, perhaps more bugs than greens as they travel across the yard.  They are just like running water or a fireplace- one can't take one's eyes off them  They have not laid an egg, I believe,  in six weeks but yet they hold my heart.  Since they are older, the short daylight and the period of growing their new annual feathers, this is always a slow time of the year, so no eggs are not a problem.   John sat quietly for the whole hour and occasionally I would walk around doing little jobs that caught my attention but also not too demanding or needing lots detailing.

       This time reminded me of a line I read in Anne Morrow Lindbergh's book that included her notes and letters.   She said as we age we come to appreciate nature much more.  Not the travel to Kenya type or the whale watch boat trip but what is at hand in our own environment.  She went on about the change of the seasons, the light of the sun or the moon, the flying insects and birds.  Since Olympia has not had a killing frost yet it is amazing to see the tiny flying spots looking toward the shadow.  They were numerous and the sunlight made their bodies white sparkles moving in some strange pattern. I realized I am the person she was talking about, the older person noticing the smallest detail in my own yard.

        Studying branches on a slow walk along the back fence I saw many buds on the Asian pears, truly don't need more of them.   I could easily read my silver tags on the espalier trees this time of the year and I see that I can create another line/level for one of my apple trees.  Trying something new, I am leaving all my leaves in place as nature placed them.  The raked cleaned orchard look is currently out of style in this yard.  There is an idea being put forth that nature knows best and we have been cleaning up and then artificially adding back to our soil.  It will be interesting to see how broken down the winters rains will have on all the leaves in this yard.  One thing I know for sure my ground is not being pounded by rain, the soil is being protected and maybe the critters are multiplying under all this cover.

         I found last summer the transplanted kale plants that went from the raised beds to the open ground garden grow so much faster and bigger than the ones that remained in raised beds.  I believe it has less to do with watering but more to do with the opportunity to grow deeper roots.  These plants are over three feet tall and will be harvested all winter along.  I have fenced them to protect them from the chickens but on the other hand I have allowed them to munch on some Swiss Chard and a few other kale greens.   Surprisingly, also, in the same area are many parsley volunteers that are making it to my dinner table almost daily.  In the summer I have cilantro growing that I use daily but it is nice to have a few herbs that can survive year around and that includes Rosemary , some mint in a pot along with a sage plants.

        Pruning is a constant job with the varieties in this yard and as I sat there momentarily yesterday, I mentally ranked the order of how I should approach the winter job. A month ago I pruned one of my peach trees.  I may have seriously limited my harvest for next year but on the other hand I could not allow it to get so large that I can't reach it with a short ladder- I am not donating a broken bone for a few peaches.  The found joy of all those cut branches, I will be using in the spring for munch after they get chopped up, that is new to me.  Of course, in the meantime, there is a pile of branches sitting there as an eye sore.

        Jefferson said it for all of us gardeners, "Tho' I maybe old, I am a younger gardener."  John and I walked into the house with some kale to chop for lunch and add to to a stir fry.
        

the story teller

http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html--------over 6 million people have seen this one.  there is a reason....it is a few years old, this year she did another one..also watch that one.......