Best prescription for statemanship ever -- on Lincoln

 

"In the President of the United States Providence has vouchsafed a leader whose moral perceptions are blinded neither by sophistry nor enthusiasm—who knows that permanent results must grow, and cannot be prematurely seized—a man who, whatever he has not, has that inestimable common sense which is the last best gift of Heaven to all who are clothed with great authority." 

 

[Finally dug this out of the internet -- after years. Saw it once in Sandburg's 1000 page, one book biography of Lincoln. Never could find the whole quote with the common sense ending anywhere again -- in the same book edition. ??? Best prescription for a statesman I have ever seen. Written by the editor of Harper's Weekly, May 3, 1862.]

GOOGLE search settings won't don't save -- 2 step fix

Two steps to reset search setting (this problem started yesterday, 9/10, when GOOGLE introduced instant search, apparently as default):

One: go into PREFERENCES and deselect "instant search" in favor of the old search -- THEN GET OUT.

Two: go BACK into PREFERENCES and reset your old preferences (if you try to do both at once it wont work -- "nice" ambush for troubleshooters).

WINNING ECONOMICS ISSUES FOR DUMMIES (meaning Democrats)

Economists – males most appropriately – suffer physics envy. Economic interactions are convoluted by government formulae. Distorting their look at those wheels within wheels are mostly unheard of male pack instincts along the well understood cultural biases (we have been "domesticated" to live with us for 100s of millennia).

Pack hunter midbrains channel groupthink – with a preference for on-the-spot doability: prey not tarrying while predators squabble. Wheels within wheels of groupthink: economic pros must in turn persuade mostly unknowing political and journalistic packs if they are actually going to cause any change. There seems walls within walls to innovation – to males.

Living too remotely from the day-to-day interactions – no pitfall in organic chemistry – can fuzz out crucial ifs, ands and buts. Economists of all stripes (most are progressive) start every minimum wage dialogue with ye ole first week supply and demand chart and mostly end there – skip selling fewer units (or hours) for more dollars – miss that a raise that increases teen unemployment may have attracted more trainable adults (labor price was too low) – forever blind to the missing American-born workers behind Chicago fast food counters where the state minimum wage recently reached Eisenhower's 1956 level, $8/hr – and even behind San Francisco counters where annual inflation adjustments will maintain the city minimum wage, at LBJ's 1968 level, $10/hr. $7.25/hr ($5.50/hr!): fuggedaboutit!

The first commandment of medical practitioners is making daily rounds to observe patients. Would it really take a "small army" of economists, as recently supposed, to plow enough data to explain income inequality (a wishy-washy phrase that sounds more like a shave than a haircut)? Or are everyday bad to worse American labor experiences enough to make the culprit perfectly plain: the almost total (but one-step undoable?) coast-to-coast blackout of labor bargaining power -- and political sway.

American unionized (!) labor hell: "Dr. Pepper Snapple Group made $555 million in profits last year. CEO Larry Young made $6.5 million but says Mott’s applesauce workers must take a $1.50 an hour pay cut" [see http://blog.aflcio.org/2010/09/07/motts-corporate-greed-rotten-to-the-core/]: specific fit to this specific occasion – where is the missing legally mandated, sector-wide labor agreement to neutralize management’s squawking about “above market pay”? Minimum wage hell: now $2.75/hr below LBJ's 1968 level, double the per capita income later: zero labor lobbying -- and going down.

The second commandment of medical practitioners is “studies show” -- even when they can’t pinpoint all contributory factors. Studies show that only legally mandated, sector-wide labor agreements (instituted originally along with welfare guarantees to contain labor costs to more quickly rebuild postwar Europe) have been proven effective in preventing the race to the wage and benefit bottom -- in decades of “trials” across first, second and third world labor markets.

Under sector-wide all employees in the same geographic locale doing the same work -- even for different employers – work under common collectively bargained contracts.

Card-check legislation would be to re-unionizing America what the $2.75/hr short-of-1968 hike was to restoring the minimum wage (in the poorest section of America, a $15/hr minimum would raise the price of: housing, medicine, transportation, food, clothing – what?). Today’s median wage is $15/hr – a teeny-tiny $2.50/hr more than the 1968 median. There appears no wholesome economic reason why the median could not have doubled to $25/hr as average income doubled. Is “shanghaied” be a better fit than “inequality”?

Will someone please shout out “sector-wide labor agreements” at their next crowded economic or political forum? They won’t cause a panicked stampede – except maybe from the outside-in. Supermarket workers and airline employees (for a start) are ready to kill (even vote) for mandatory sector-wide bargaining. 50 million voting age toilers out of 100 million say they want to be unionized – before any nationwide re-unionizing dialogue has even begun.

Should Dubai laugh Israel out of Gaza and the West Bank?

Should Dubai laugh Israel out of Gaza and the West Bank?

Was it oil mad money that empowered a couple of hundred thousand native Dubains -- along with a million or so foreign workers -- to "build them" a global showcase? Not recently; these days Dubains realize about 2 billion dollars a year from oil, some more from natural gas. Their natural resource is their natural business sense (a resource unknown to Israelis?). [See Vali Nasr's 2009 book "Forces of Fortune."]

After downing 200 billion (2010) US direct aid dollars over 40 years Israel has little to show but a vastly overbuilt military which could literally repel an invasion by British, French and German ground forces at the height of their Cold War force levels -- 3,000 NATO quality tanks on defense equal 9,000 on offense; Central European armies 1980s tank count: only 6,000. (Throw in 3,000 more for, then, active duty US Army and we have a match after all. :-])

Israel smashed a 1973 all out surprise attack by Egypt, Syria and Jordan BEFORE collecting hundreds of billions to pay for high tech weaponry but after the Arabs were overloaded by Russia with the then novel Sagger anti-tank and still deadly SA-6 anti-aircraft missiles. [Read up on the 1973 war in US Army chief historian, Col. Trevor N. Dupuy's book "Elusive Victory."]

Great green gobs of US military aid may have enabled Israel to embrace an ultimately self-destructive -- muscle-flexing/sandy-land grabbing -- lifestyle: can be honestly likened to "welfare mentality." Do land grabbing "Tell Tale Hearts" add to very real Holocaust memories to provoke irrational invasion fears (2010 Middle East nations, including Iran, are preoccupied with their modern middle classes struggles to get the upper hand zero inclination for any knock-down-drag-outs)? Could two millennia of neighborhood building rather than nation building have confused Israelis about the difference between the two?

Doing a Dubai -- instead of a Zionist "1984" -- with even half those US aid dollars could have profited enough to procure all the land in the sand that Israel could ever covet.

DIRECT AID TO ISRAEL SINCE 1970 (millions of dollars)
Year------ Nominal------- Adjusted-------------------- Total

1970---------- 93.6--------- 530.00

1971--------- 643.3------- 3,489.70

1972--------- 430.9------- 2,264.00

1973--------- 492.8------- 2,438.47

1974------- 2,621.3----- 11,681.53

1975--------- 778.0------- 3,177.07

1976------- 2,337.7------- 9,026.23

1977------- 1,762.5------- 6,389.79

1978------- 1,822.6------- 6,141.49

1979------- 4,888.0------ 14,791.92-------------- 59,930.02

*****************************************

1980------- 2,121.0------- 5,655.14

1981------- 2,413.4------- 5,833.05

1982------- 2,250.5------- 5,123.66

1983------- 2,505.6------- 5,526.91

1984------- 2,631.6------- 5,564.61

1985------- 3,376.7 ------ 6,894.62

1986------- 3,663.5------- 7,343.71

1987------- 3040.2-------- 5,879.68

1988------- 3,043.4------- 5,885.87

1989------- 3,045.6------- 5,656.11-------------- 59,363.36

*****************************************

1990------- 3,034.9------- 5,377.16

1991------- 3,712.3------- 5,988.20

1992------- 3,100.0------- 4,854.38

1993------- 3,103.4------- 4,178.46

1994------- 3,097.2------- 4,591.46

1995------- 3,102.4------- 4,472.42

1996------- 3,144.0------- 4,402.40

1997------- 3,132.1------- 4,287.37

1998------- 3,080.0------- 4,050.36

1999------- 3,010.0------- 3,969.37-------------- 46,171.58

*****************************************

2000------ 4,131.85------- 5,144.00

2001------ 2,876.05------- 3,569.88

2002------ 2,850.65------- 3,481.31

2003------ 3,745.15------- 4,471.79

2004------ 2,867.25------- 3,334.75

2005------ 2,612.15------- 2,938.50

2006------ 2,534.5--------- 2,762.05

2007------ 2,500.2--------- 2,649.75

2008------ 2,423.9--------- 2,474.59

2009------ 2,550.0--------- 2,611.82-------------- 33,438.44

*****************************************

-------------------------------------------------198,903.40

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf

http://www.minneapolisfed.org/

A school paddling is a BEATING (instictive hunters don't spank) + new DOUBLE BARRELED insight!

http://nospank.net/n-u88.htm

When I first wrote my 5 part essay opposing school corporal punishment I wrote:
"Being a male of the species who evolved primarily to swing a bat on meat I would have no problem personally paddling kids if only I could see their little office management inefficiencies as morally offensive (if only I could forget that kids who mess up the most are most likely to be emotionally messed up the most; a teacher can never tell)."

Lately I have been thinking that I must have been too insensitive to the pain I would be meeting out to the harmless school kid (for nothing yet: tardiness is just traffic control -- we don't beat people, least of all children for traffic control).
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Then I saw a silly auto insurance commercial where the lady salesperson for some reason brandished a full sized wooden paddle. Seeing the paddle I could fully envision myself pounding away on some poor kid"s flesh -- as hard as possible; can't cause any permanent physical harm; do the job!

What's behind this? Sociobiological answer: powerful male hunting instinct (overall concept filled out below -- point will be that there is very much an instinct).

What is the point of the hunter/killer insight for opposing school corporal punishment? Hunting instinct delivers a spanking BEATING -- not a spanking, doesn't it? [3 second illustration, click here: http://nospank.net/paddler3.wmv]
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Now that we have established a school paddling as a beating on a visceral, emotional level, we can fully appreciate why paddling a student for no legitimate reason could be prosecuted under the law as a violent assault.

Which in turn makes it harder to justify the exception for violent school beatings from Fourteenth Amendment mandated equal protection of the law. 90 of female corporal punishment and 75% of male are for tardiness -- traffic control. The rest could be said to be for office management (dress code, etc.).

Anti paddlers make a sales error -- they "define deviancy down, undercutting their own purpose -- by concentrating on the secondary mal effects of paddling. The correct sociobiological (how we are emotionally wired) approach, if you ask me, is that paddling is a violent beating (large) to correct little inefficiencies (small) on the part of school children. The core problem is that teachers have got this very backwards. If we don't seem to emphasize the serious violence itself why ask anybody to care about the secondary damage.
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(More info on evolved human male hunting behavior -- just to fill out the concept: Got claws -- or only nails? Got fangs -- or only HUGE fang roots (check them out -- ask your dentist what they are)? Got four feet? Send you off into the woods with a club and a sharp stick and you are not likely to return with the bacon? Got an idea -- like get the other boys? That is the only way you (plural) are going to trap a feral animal that relies on it's body -- not it's brain. UPSHOT OF ALL THIS: you, human male tend to think in the third person-cooperative. Try to get a new idea through to you and the first thing you are likely to think is what everybody else is thinking -- likely you will (instinctively) see no way to rearrange all that and the new idea may pass out of your head like it was never there. Just to fill out the concept...)
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FLASH -- NEW DOUBLE-BARRELED INSIGHT:
A few days ago it occurred to me that this hunter/paddler link could be stretched further: that maybe we beat children as an unconscious OUTLET for hunting instinct in our modern paperwork lives (who is into paperwork more than teachers and principals?). This is not to portray anyone as vicious. It can explain stories mostly from decades ago of some men volunteering to do the then frequent paddling for other teachers -- that is, explain that they might not be the monsters such stories make them out but possibly totally unconsciously just outletting hunting instinct.

Today it occurred to me why we cannot beat adult fellow school employees with the all out effort with which we customarily paddle school kids (think of the gasping boy in the Boonville video). When we beat a kid like that we are not thinking of the pain we are inflicting at all -- not at all -- we are only thinking of the job. We could not beat an "equal" adult without thinking of the pain -- while only thinking of the job -- which is why we cannot beat a "social equal" employee we are obligated to fully respect.

At very least we can never do "the job" if we can think of the pain (not if we are normal I would say). Next thing to figure out (to wait for it to "occur" :-]) is exactly what allows us to think of the job only when beating a child -- a perfectly normal sociobiological (evolved behavior) expectation. In the meantime it might help the cause to share with school paddlers the insight that they could not beat a school child if they thought of the pain they were trying to inflict (they are trying to do "the job" with all their might) -- just could stop a lot of them in their tracks.

One more question on DADT

One question that could be added to the DADT is how many straight male service personnel have ever in their lives or would ever hang out socially on a regular basis with gay acting males. Likely answer: pretty much zero.

First, no homophobe talking here. The first place I moved to as an adult was the Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan in the '60s, had a gay boy half my age living with me for a year in the late '70s, drove a San Francisco cab for three years (earned a good part of my living "hustling" in the Castro, picking up gay men and taking them home for a fee; also gay women, or anyone else who would pay the fare :-]).

Second, no homophobe here. Was approved for training to get a Ph.D. in psychology in the early '70s (still high school grad) -- so having a gay boy living with me for a year could teach me what homosexuality is all about mechanically: gays of both sexes merely see what straights see as the big MALE ego as the big FEMALE ego and are permanently blind to seeing any such thing in males. Has to be some big difference, right? But that's all there is.

Now for straight male camaraderie -- mechanically. We link up with other males on a basis gays males would consider very narrow and one-dimensional: activities we share a common interest in. That is all there is to that. If we know the biggest thing on the other guy's mind (the biggest thing on every guy's mind) is the last activity we want to do with another guy that tends strongly (understatement?) to break said link as about as much as it can be broken.

Sociobiology: nothing anyone can do about it. Doesn't have to work in every case -- or even most cases; everyone is different. But it will work that way for at least half of servicemen (how many will hang out with, etc.?). I would conjecture that it might have the most effect on straight males who are most into doing the job at hand.
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LATE NOTES ON DADT
Gays may not understand why we fear gay males as dangerous, grasping and invading -- because gays don't see men that way (!); they see said dangerous, over weaning ego in females. (Lesbos are doing their best to radiate that image.)

Think straight male aversion to paling around with gay males (see one-dimensional camaraderie above) is rationally overcome with just some common sense and good will? How much would you be willing to depend on that -- in a very liberal, upper end grammar school (especially if you watch "Law & Order" :-]) -- to advise your gay 12 year old to come out of the closet? Or how much would you fear how naturally endemic the problem is?

Questions, questions about female firefighters

Why doesn't someone find out exactly how many women firefighters have been graduated by the NYFD year in, year out since 1982 -- and then do a "where are they now"? How many have been hired in all that time, nearly 500? Why are there never more than 30 something on the force -- especially since their supporters claim they have to pass overly stringent testing?

What is the comparative drop out rate between men and women?

How many are on light duty today? I read someplace back in the '80s that 12 out of first 38 (that's the number the story quoted) NYFD female firefighters immediately opted for light duty like public relations right out of the academy.
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Jan. 10, 1983 New York Magazine cover story on rookie female firefighter by Michael Daly.

BART officer Mehserle either guilty of deliberate homicide or not -- adrenalin and stupidity

Adrenalin can make you as stupid as alcohol. When I was I Bronx cab driver the closest I came to accidents was with police cars who had ALREADY made an arrest -- blowing through red lights without lights or sirens. Whatever happened in the BART station could reasonably have raised the BART officer Mehserle's -- or anybody's -- adrenalin level.

He either intended to shoot a gun or he intended to shoot a Taser when he pulled the trigger. Given a normal adrenalin rush, carelessness can not be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

As far as the rioters, they can be compared with supporters of Israel who always call its critics anti-Semitic -- they unfortunately (if maybe not consciously) may be the actual racists.

Save the polar bears -- from the penguins???

A post over at Fred Pohl's http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com gave me an idea to save the polar bear species from habitat destruction brought on by global warming. Just transfer several dozen males and females to the Antarctic and let them feed on penguins who don't have enough sense to run away.

Penguins may have to spend more time in the water. Be interesting to see how long a race of gang biting penguins takes to evolve. How will killer whales survive should penguins start to thin out? Whales can add polar bears swimming after the remaining penguins to their menu.

One further "ecological" complication could be killer whales, having learned to feed on four legged mammals, might become a danger to humans whenever they wander into our habitats. No more happy animal interest stories: get me Steven Spielberg!

Wouldn't take a government program, just one private boat could do the experiment -- may not even be a law against it!

Right to bear arms a personal right -- STUN GUNS next

Modern-tech fits under the 1st, 4th -- AND -- 2nd Amendments.

Including stun guns under the Second Amendment could mimic including TV and radio under freedom of speech and limits on telephone wiretapping under unreasonable search prohibitions: technology that wasn't available when the amendments were passed may fit inarguably under the original intention of the amendments.

Now that the Supreme Court has recognized gun ownership as an individual right I would further claim that the right to bear arms is the right to own an instrument (new tech or old) to protect one's self with. I always held that the "militia" mention in the Second Amendment was place there because bearing arms was not a "natural" right like freedom of speech or privacy (in the days of sociobiology -- the evolution of behavior -- the Bill of Rights seems sort of the "human genome" of human social instincts) but a need-based right (a "militia" being the most statesman like example to put in the first ever constitution). The right to protect yourself outlook could be joined to the newly arrived technology approach to make the latter sound perfectly sensible.

Thoughts for today, Thursday, June 17

Thoughts for today:

Maybe it was just as well that Bush the First did not go all the way to Baghdad. Supposedly Saddam was set to rain his so-called weapons of mass destruction down on Israel if he did so. Saddam was an Armageddon kind of guy: he had already set fire to one country, 600 oil wells, while flooding the nearby Gulf with oil (why I was worried about Saddam building or much more likely buying a bomb -- my justification for the second Gulf war).

Had Saddam showered poison gas and anthrax spores on Tel Aviv does anyone doubt that Israel would have hesitated to nuke Baghdad or more, potentially killing millions -- histories second Hiroshimas?

******

No need for a new American political party that prioritizes both protecting the country from outside threats while upholding the interest of the average person's economic good (the latter mostly ignored by Dems as well as Repubs). Today's parties just have to return to the policies of both Democratic and Republican parties of the '60s and early '70s -- against which low-life segregationist George Wallace railed: "There isn't a dime's worth of difference."

He was right (good thing): Nixon signed a $9/hr minimum wage to go into effect immediately -- at 60% of today's average income -- and was poised to finish LBJ's health care work by extending coverage to all ages and incomes. LBJ stuck by Vietnam harder than Nixon who withdrew our financial and air support just at the moment the South Vietnamese took up all the bloody ground fighting.

Today's Republican party tries its best to destroy our economy by distorting the balance of every market -- financial, real estate, and labor -- heavily in favor of its rich patrons. Today's Democrats give most all their economic attention to mopping up after Republican damage to the financial and real estate markets -- while totally forgetting the labor market which not only dominates the lives of most middle class (and going down!) but ultimately perverts the political forum -- in favor of Republicans (a vicious circle Dems really must bust out of if sanity or Dems are ever to rule again).

What Social Security?

MY COMMENT ON THE "We learn why they hate Social Security" post on "ANGRY BEAR" today.

What Social Security? I worked all my life and now I'm 66 and get $675/mo + 162 in Food Stamps + Medicare/Medicaid. When my nearly 90 year old mother can no longer keep me indoors in the fashion to which I am accustomed I could be on the street.

[Note: Don't take up a collection. After 10 months of hard work I am finally getting a handle on online poker: earned 44 cents today in only 1 1/2 hours. There is a catch 22 that keeps poker less than excessively profitable: a good player by definition folds most hands pre-flop, more at the flop; more at the turn, loses often at the river, mostly doesn't make much when he wins -- often enough gets the perfect hand and everybody just happens to fold. That's why pro grinders [my future?] two and four table: they have to combine dribbles to make a few bucks. By Christmas that hopefully will be me. If not, I can exercise my option for Irish citizenship [5 Irish grandparents counting my mother's stepmother] and go to Europe and get on the dole -- anywhere in Europe.)

Back on topic. When I started cab driving it paid enough to live on but not to pay taxes on. Good for everybody else: they pay us less for a ride now and nothing for our retirement later. As should be plain from my "good jobs" post that was back when I started. It quickly went downhill so you couldn't make a living now (maybe compared to that steel mill in Pakistan). Ended up moving 2000 miles to San Francisco -- giving up free rent, cable and use of my brother's Towncar -- to make a living driving a cab (San Francisco is so liberal they treat you like you have a union even if you don't have one -- maintain a 1968 minimum wage level too!).

Like just about every other problem discussed in this and other progressive forums, it all goes back to unconscious American labor and the resulting distorted labor market and political arena. Wake America up and wage America up. (i was a poet and I didn't know it.)

There are some real simple, things that Americans could grok at the common sense level without a Ph.D. in economics (the reason America listens to Gingrich and company on complicated things like the economy and health care is that the know the Dems and the media are lying to them -- or at least acting like there is only one-liberal-side -- on all the social issues; issue which they can understand at the common sense level).

Tell Americans just a couple of too plain facts like the federal minimum wage is now 75 cents below what it was in the Eisenhower administration (not to mention $2.75 below LBJ's!) and that sector-wide labor agreements work just fine all over the world to fairly balance labor markets. Let loose a couple of simple truths and let the market for ideas sort out the result.

Did I say: what Social Security?

Answer to the question: "where will the good jobs come from?"

JUST DROPPED THESE THREE COMMENTS ON "ANGRY BEAR" -- BEING ABOUT LABOR, DON'T EXPECT MANY OTHER COMMENTS TO APPEAR.

I never stop being shocked at how the most obvious solution to the "good jobs" question eternally escapes our best and brightest economic brains. BIG HINT: such a question does not exist in Europe in the same desperate way it does here -- in Europe where they work many fewer hours yet.

Anybody ever going to recognize what is America's CORE economic problem: quite a bit more than anemic labor strength at the bargaining table. Opps; what bargaining table? That is the CORE problem; Americans -- including apparently our best and brightest and most progressive (they think -- but totally useless to working folks like myself!) -- have no idea you are supposed have an actually working ability to withhold your labor from the production process until you get the right price.

Simple, no-sweat way of going about this used all over the much better compensated and insured OECD world (excepting labor squeezed Japan) -- legally mandated by the labor majorities everywhere: sector-wide labor agreements.

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My personal experience as a starved American worker -- in particular as a Chicago cab driver -- which used to be what Mark Thoma would have called a "good job":

1) one 30 cent increase in the meter mileage rate between 1981 and 1997 (by which 16 year mark I was hacking in San Francisco);
2) at which 1990 point the city began building subways to both airports and making the number of limo licenses unlimited, taking away most profitable long rides (a bit of explanation here: as taxi drivers were paid less and less, the quality of drivers naturally enough got worse and worse, scaring everybody into limos);
3) at which 1990 point the city also began putting on 40% more taxis (now on the way to 50% -- the city profits selling medallions to drivers willing to work for more than the steel mill in Pakistan paid).

This would never happen in labor market conscious (that doesn't sound very Marxist) Europe. Maybe you can tell me how to get cab drivers paid again (in America that is) -- and make that job a "good job" again, Mark and Rdan. Oh; I already explained the basic process for reinstituting American labor power in the comment above -- used all over the better paid OECD world: sector-wide labor agreements.

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The Crips and the Bloods could not whip an honest Ronald Mcdonald and would be the first to say so. Double the minimum wage and end all street gangs. Double the minimum wage and the price of a Big Mac goes up 1/3. Who buys Big Macs: people earning less than $15/hr -- seems no problem for Ronald there. Nothing else goes up much at all.

Double the minimum wage and overall prices may jump 5% -- haven't worked it out lately. [See an earlier computation here:http://ontodayspagelinks.blogspot.com/2008/08/3-cost-of-gdp-output-and-inflation.html ] Double the minimum wage and end crime and the worst poverty for a bit of inflation (what the economy needs right now?). DOUBLE THE MINIMUM WAGE AND MAKE EVEN FAST FOOD JOBS BECOME "GOOD JOBS" AGAIN -- FOR THOSE THAT NEED IT MOST.

Anyone ever expect Obama to ever so much as inform American labor that his minimum wage is now 75 cents below Eisenhower's minimum wage -- 250% the average income later?

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Whoa (re: my "good jobs" post above)! $15/hr, double today's federal minimum wage, is today's median wage. Double the minimum wage and half of America will be restored to some sort of "good job" -- if today's median wage job is considered some sort of "good job."

Why not double it -- 40 years after LBJ's minimum wage was $10/hr (adjusted) and 200% the average income increase later? If LBJ's minimum wage had kept up with average income increase, then, today's MINIMUM wage would be $5/hr more than Obama's MEDIAN wage.

Wake up America. Good jobs are just a matter of getting paid fairly for your present jobs. "Wage Up America" might be the right good slogan.

Replace derelict Yankee Stadium with rebuilt track and field

MY LETTER TO MOST ALL NYC COUNCIL MEMBERS

Replace derelict Yankee Stadium with rebuilt track and field.

I grew up in sight of the old Yankee Stadium (I snuck -- or rather dashed -- into the second-half of the early '60s Giant-Packer NFL championship). The new stadium was build over a track and football field that was utilized by 39 Bronx schools (don't worry; not rehashing).

The previous stadium is still there which reminds me of my brother's and my 1960s East Village slum lord not removing the old fridge when he put in a new one to raise the rent.

It just occurred to my "big brain" that if the old Yankee Stadium block was big enough to contain a football field plus 50,000 spectators there must be enough room on that same block for a track and football field and a bleachers for a few hundred people like the old field had -- with room even to replace softball and baseball fields that were all on the old block (I played softball there in the New York Post paperboy league).

Have half a mind to go back to the Bronx and start a stink to do it (what else to do at age 66? :-]).

The scene is what happens when middle class outrage disappears along with the middle class and their majority votes -- the fault solely and wholly if you ask me of a CRAZILY distorted American labor market (federal minimum wage now 75 cents below 1956 -- 250% average income increase later).

Over the hill (other side of Grand Concourse) NY's mayor replaced the brand new criminal court house (at least new when I was going there weekly with kids in the late '70s) and the court you used to see in the background of the old stadium's outfield -- probably the most beautiful building in the Bronx (don't laugh) -- with a new 400 million dollar Taj Mahal courthouse (after crime dropped more than half). More of the same; let the middle class disappear and any kind of purposelessness goes unchecked.

Our mayor's legacy in the Bronx seems to be leaving behind three more derelict structures right in its civic and geographic center of gravity -- nice!