Woodstock CT Café

From AnonyFriend

This post (Our Perverted and Corrupt Socio-Economic System) was meant to clarify that it is not just Republicans in general, but corporate conservatives who promote corporatism-thinking, i.e. “corporations are people too, my friend”, and that type of thinking is what is doing the most harm to all of us who have personal valuations of less than a billion dollars. Clearly, our nation is being coerced into supporting endless wars as part of the solution to our economic problems and it’s just making matters worse. This war machine is supported by those who promote the “corporations are people” message because they gain political power every day that they are allowed to anonymously finance the campaigns of dunderheads. Unfortunately, that now includes the current administration.

This corporation-think is evident in Woodstock Connecticut where a multimillion-dollar athletic expansion (albeit a spectacular expansion – though I wonder if the artificial field is safe enough, given its short sideline area that ends in a cliff) is carried out at the same time that the local school systems are cutting teachers and educational resources. Clearly, Woodstock does not appreciate the true value of the educational professional, an attitude that is a growing trend on the national level.

That the attitude of corporation-promotion is being displayed by whatever group of people is in charge of Academy decisions is obvious. They care little to not at all for public input and they reveal extremely little about their long-term goals for the school and the community (who can HONESTLY argue this point? Oh, LibDem, but her difficulty with the English Language makes her twist everything backwards, so…right, no one).

A capitalist democracy has never existed, nor shall one ever exist for more than the first moment of idealistic thinking. After that moment every citizen must depend on every other and a form of socialism exists where it takes a group effort to accomplish anything. This includes group ownership of and responsibility for many things everyone in a society depends on like the infrastructure of roads, bridges, hospitals and the military, essential housing, basic food availability, basic medical care, mass transportation, etc. The United States of America has always been a socialist democracy, where at first only an elite group of wealthy, white, male, land-owners were allowed to make governmental decisions. As our democracy grew so did the ability of those in control to take advantage of their position (Congress allows its members to participate in insider trading – an outrage, a downright national shame). Somewhere along the way a federal court decision led to a court clerk negligently stating that corporations were to be treated as though they were individual citizens (which was NOT EVEN CLOSE to the original court ruling). Read the rest of this entry »

From Pete

A relative of Janette’s (Pete’s wife) died today he was a very nice man.

In 1982 Janette’s grandmother (Mamow) said she was having family over to dinner and asked me to come too. I told her I could not get there for dinner because I was working but I would stop by after dinner to say hi. It must have been summer because when I got to the house that evening the door was not closed there was just a screen door. Through the door I could see a man sitting in a big chair holding a guitar. As I came in the house Mamow saw me and said well come in, come in. I kept some dinner warm for you. The man in the chair stuck his hand out over the arm of the chair without turning towards me and said you must be Peter; boy I’ve heard a lot about you. I shook his hand and said I’ve heard a bit about you too, Doc. That night they all sang songs and I was sitting on the couch with two young girls (one of them was Janette) nudging me in the side saying ‘come on Peter sing, sing Peter.’ So I would pretend to sing while tapping my foot with the rest of them. I did not know at this time that Doc was a well known musician. Here is one of his great songs. The next day at work I asked them if they had heard of Doc Watson and they laughed at me they said who hasn’t heard of him. When I told them I was singing with him last night they just walked away. Later when some found out it was true, they asked if they could come over next time Doc was visiting and meet him. I said sure but never told them when Doc was visiting but every once in awhile I’d announce to all the workers at my job that I’m a little tired and don’t ask me to sing. My throat’s a little sore Doc came by last night and we were singing till pretty late. Everyone would get mad at me.
Peter and Janette who live in Deep Gap NC.

Anyway, the little I new of Doc and his wife Rosalee every time I saw them we always had a great time and they could not have been nicer.

From AnonyFriend

It’s not really capitalism, though, is it? It’s more like a socialism-supporting-corporations-in-the-guise-of-a-free-market-ism … and these corporations are too backbone-of-our-economy to fail. NASA “privatizes” the space effort, but those “private” corporations that supply NASA are still receiving public funding. The military relies on many “private” corporations to create the weapons and supply the war machine, but those companies are also receiving and depending on public tax revenue. What is most amazing is that the citizens continue to go along with these anti-socialism slogans while they’re supporting and even working for corporations that are funded mainly through taxes. The wealthy have taken over the government to the point where the politicians are able to precisely funnel a certain percentage of public funding to whichever CEO they want. It’s got to be the most perverted and corrupt socio-economic system in history … analogous to a starving slave being forced to slice off parts of their own body to eat while performing work that the master devalues daily. US workers are all a kind of Prometheus.

AND

I am AMAZED that the beautiful artificial turf field (as part of the Bentley Athletic Complex Expansion) receives stimulus funding while at the same time, teachers receive LESS funding. That certainly is a beautiful athletic field (BRAVO, Woodstock!). But at a time when our children’s education is receiving the highest priority and the least support, it also appears to be a community-based slap-in-the-face to all teachers and the educational system itself. Our nation is calling teachers to account at the same time that it gives them less educational resources, lower salaries and less benefits. The painfully obvious result of this pressure is that soon there will be less teachers who were born and educated in the USA.

This seems to be part of the corporate conservative world market thinking: get rid of local workers and “allow” lower-wage worker “immigrants” to take their place. This is really the philosophy of the corporate conservative (mostly Republicans, but also too many Democrats) and when Reagan made amnesty the policy of the USA, reaching out to essentially any and every one of the millions of Central and South Americans who could make it across the USA’s southern border without being caught (or dying), the lowest wage-earning US citizens were put out of work, unions were weakened, and the minimum wage was rendered meaningless for all time (or until immigration laws are appropriately enforced at the federal level). It shows the future that is intended by corporation-controlled politicians: get ready for your kids to be taken care of by immigrants, taught by immigrants, treated by immigrant health care workers, marginalized and replaced in the work force by immigrants, managed by immigrants and ultimately politically-controlled by immigrants. Let’s face it, immigrants are people too and they need a society to disrupt (payback’s a bitch). I feel certain that most of the CEO’s currently in control of our government are NOT US citizens…or at least they wouldn’t be able to run for President…YET!

Fifteen Slides on the history of the Bridge ending with our bridge walk on the 50th anniversary.

One of our favorite activities in San Francisco was, and still is, walking the Golden Gate Bridge. Whenever my kids who lived in Odessa TX would visit, we would make a point of spending a day in San Francisco and having a date with the Bridge.
(click to enlarge the small pictures)

In May of 1987, I noticed that the 50th anniversary of the bridge was going to be celebrated in the evening with a spectacular fireworks display and a concert at Chrissey Field (near the Presidio) with the bridge lit up in full view for the ocassion. So Becki and I reserved a room at the Stanford Court on Nob Hill (our favorite hotel in SF) for the nights before and after the event. Read the rest of this entry »

From JTO

Con is right again on the VC/Private Equity distinction.

Venture Capital is either public or private equity and involves high risk investment in emerging companies with new technologies. these funds assume they willl lose on most of their investments, but the successful ones are so successful they more than pay for the losses. There is a very substantiL VC industry in San Francisco that funds new technologies/firms often located in “incubator” buildings containing dozens or even hundreds of tiny tenants with 1-2 employees in very small spaces.

Private equity firms are just as they are labeled – private cash invested in any sector with a design on making money for investors. Private equity funds are an importNt part of the financing system and should not be demonized in the political process, and I do not think Obama is doing this.

Private equity funds that specialize in distressed companies with the intent of using the bankruptcy laws to protect investors, while liquidating the physical and financial assets of the companies, often including tapping the pension funds of the workers, are called “Vulture Funds”. again, I would not demonize these investors as they move cPitL from less productive to more productive endeVors.

These are some of the “creative” and “destructive” forces in the financial system that are the basis for Peter Scumpeter’s “process of creative destruction” that finance the overall wealth creation inherent in capitalism. But the capital formation system operates in a public policy context – a system of laws that protect property rights, enforces contracts, etc. But the political system in a democracy also protects the public interests such as environmental regulations and labor laws that protect children and rights of workers to organize unions to negotiiate working conditions, etc.

So a pure free market capital system, as sen by a libertarian, requires government to provide only those services that protect the capitalists. It is the democratic imstitutions that do the rest. Keeping these systems running side by side has been the key to our success as we have gotten the advantages of wealth creation inherent in the private market economic system, while managing the negative impacts such as pollution and caring for those unable to do so themselves.

But make no mistake, this system has proven over history that it will continue to maximize short term profits at the expense of the public interest. And Mitt Romney is a poster boy for this mentality. It is clear that Obama will make this the central issue in the campaign and after 30 hears of deregulation I would say it is about time.

From Con

The World has learned that what we think is not possible can actually be more likely than we’d ever believe. Whatever has happened in the past 100 or so years of any period of History always seems to have the possibility of happening again (or something similar). After WWII nobody ever considered it possible for such atrocious behavior to ever happen again, never mind within the lifetimes of those who were alive to have seen it (and been through it), yet the so-called Yugoslavia wars showed us all how wrong that is and how easily a developed nation (that had just hosted the Olympics!) could so quickly descend into that unthinkable conflict all but defined by it’s atrocities instead of it’s military battles. Although centuries old animosity and what Sociologists call First Order Beliefs were the source of so much of the hatred that was behind seemingly normal people suddenly committing unspeakable war crimes, etc., there is still a lesson that it CAN happen again and within our lifetime.

The same holds true for so many other situations. How many of us have vacationed in Kenya, doing safaris, hiking Kilimanjaro and the like? Yet the post-election violence in Kenya exposed a side to part of that society none of us anticipated and vacationing there during that time was unthinkable. Without going into it, consider how many other examples there are of similar historical events of nations deteriorating to such extremes and how it always seems to take everyone by surprise. The question must be WHY is it such a surprise? Who ought to be the ones able to recognize the signs that precede such events?

All this to say that it would seem the people who are living through drastically changing, negative times can be capable of almost anything. It seems to have much to do with the perception of The People (not the leaders or politicians or even the powerful 1%). It does not seem to be any coincidence regarding the stark difference between how Germany changed after WWI vs. WWII – it seems to have depended on the individual citizens and what their experiences are post-war. Read the rest of this entry »

It would be good to here about other war heros Cafe’ers known.

By John

Members of my family have had illustrious records in foreign service which I admire greatly. My father was born in Constantinople in 1913 because my grandfather was stationed at the embassy as a linguist and also taught languages at Roberts College there. Grampa, a graduate of Dartmouth, was literate in many languages including Latin, Greek, Turkish, French, and Dutch. As WWI progressed and the USA entered the war (Turkey was on the other side, the Axis) my father’s family had to leave Turkey. The Turkish military arranged to take over their house near the Bosporus on the European side for officers’ quarters. When the family moved back in 1919 after the war, nothing in the house had been disturbed.

1. Grampa with Granny and my father in Constantinople in 1913.
2. Grampa with the embassy staff, 2nd from the left second row from the top.
3. Grampa commisions for the Paris Peace Conference in 1918.

In 1918, Grampa was commissioned as an officer in the US Army so that he could attend the Paris Peace Conference. His job was to escort T. E. Laurence (e.g. Lawrence of Arabia) and act as an interpreter with Laurence’s entourage. Years later in the late 40s my uncle John (also John Leavitt) was walking down the main hall of the Central Intelligence Agency at Langley when who should come the other way but Grampa. John said “Dad, what are you doing here?” and Grampa responded “Why son, I work here!”

John with Grampa at John’s graduation from Brown in 1938.  Click to enlarge

Uncle John was the real hero in our family. In 1941, while teaching at Roberts College in Istanbul, John became frustrated with the US for not entering the war (against the Nazis). So he went to the British Consulate and enlisted in the British Royal Air Force. After 18 months of training in Southern Rhodesia, he became a bombardier pilot and was shipped off to England. He later flew one of the planes that destroyed the German battleship Turpitz in Tromso Fiord (Norway). In a later mission his was one of the planes that destroyed Lutzow docked in Swinemunde (northern Germany; “ship was badly damaged by three six-ton Tallboy bombs dropped by the RAF in April 1945” Wikipedia). John’s final mission was to destroy Hitler’s “Eagle’s Nest” chalet, but the bomb would not release. Later he was able to release the bomb on a bridge west of Berchtesgaden.

Read the rest of this entry »

From Con

The Republican Party has not only changed drastically, it now applies it’s traditional intolerance to other Republicans if they are not Conservative enough. I have heard many, many reasonable, smart and fair Republicans basically say what Kevin said – they have left the party because it no longer is something they want to be associated with, because they do not share the extremist views, dogma dressed up to look like ideology and the utter intolerance for any view other than theirs.

If I’ve heard it once I’ve heard it 100 times – and from very valuable politicians and voters alike who the Republican Party would have done very well to retain.

When the Republicans misuse the Filibuster as they have, their intent to obstruct is clear – they violate their Oath because they absolutely are NOT serving their constituents or doing the work they were elected to to on behalf of ALL constituents (not just those who voted for him/her or that smaller sub-group of those extremist, often Tea Party types who will brook ZERO COMPROMISE in a profession where compromise is the name of the game (and without it you OBSTRUCT).

Were they elected to ‘send a message’ to ‘protest’!?! NO! They were elected to SERVE, but choose to obstruct and make speeches (protests).

Republicans used the Filibuster MORE TIMES in the past 3 years than it had been used in ALL of the previous 50 Years! Yes, on an aggregate basis! And they get red-faced when accused of Obstructionism – an act that violates their Constitutional Oath, btw, and fails their constituents.

It is shameful behavior.

From Diane

See my addendum. JL

I grew up in New England. I know the unwritten rules. One of them is never EVER let it be know that someone in your family is an alcoholic. “Uncle drinks too much at parties” is okay but “Uncle is an alcoholic” is strictly verboten. The problem with this area-wide conspiracy to hide alcoholism is that the person who is an alcoholic is killing himself bit by bit and no one says a word – think Emperor’s New Clothes. Not addressing an illness doesn’t make it go away and in the case of alcoholism, it can be fatal. You might think that getting drunk is the primary symptom and/or that alcoholics are mostly unemployed drunks panhandling for enough to buy the next bottle. Nice stereotype because it clearly doesn’t describe the six figure executive or the chairman of the town Planning Committee or a respected accountant or lawyer. But that is all it is – a stereotype. Having alcoholism doesn’t mean you are stupid or uneducated or unskilled. It just means that you have found a way to quiet the demons in your mind, for a while. Yes they come back, but you can deal with that tomorrow. Right now, a few more hits and the guilt, anguish, regrets, sadness whatever mental pain you are suffering will go away. You’ll feel the way you know you have a right to feel, superior, smart, attractive, all the good stuff. For now, the fears and doubts are banished. It would be a good coping mechanism, except for the fact that you are killing yourself.

It is almost unbearably sad to watch an intelligent, talented, gifted young man slowly slip into the depths of alcoholism. Amazingly, those bright people don’t see it. They do not have a clue. They think they are in control of the liquor. “See, I haven’t had a drink for 3 days. I can stop whenever I want. I just don’t want to. I LIKE drinking.” Or after getting a DUI proclaiming, “I’m not an alcoholic. I’m a ‘problem drinker’.” Read the rest of this entry »

From Con

The discussion surrounding Greece has focussed on the facts of the economic / debt problem and the difficulty in finding solutions. The Greek people have been trying to communicate a different message to the EU so they could better understand the dynamics of Greek politics and recent voting behavior, as well as the protests against austerity and seeming blindness to the fact that rejecting bail-out terms could mean a far worse future for them than accepting those harsh terms. Many Greeks are saying that no one is listening to them or trying to understand them and all anyone wants to talk about is the big picture, not the individual Greek Citizen.

What I’ve heard the Greek people to be saying is: ‘Please remember that we are NOT the ones responsible for creating this mess – not by a long shot, but we are the only ones who are being forced to pay for it all!’ I don’t know all the facts, but that message sure sounds familiar. The second part of their message is equally important – they assert that given that they are not responsible for the financial mess (and that those who are responsible are not being made to suffer/pay in the same proportion as ordinary citizens), the EU members and citizens don’t seem to realize just how extreme the austerity measures are ‘on the ground’ (the new pet phrase of BBC and other journalists) and, more importantly, just how badly these measures affect everyone’s individual daily life in Greece. ‘We didn’t do anything wrong, but not only are we being forced to pay for someone else’s mess we are being forced to live a life of (sometimes extreme) poverty with no end in sight!’

They argue that the ordinary EU citizen, Nation and economist doesn’t seem to realize that an entire people are simply not given a meaningful choice, but are being forced into a life of poverty for an unlimited time.  The younger generation is being told that they have no future, no possibility for economic advancement and their lives must be wholly dedicated to simply paying down the enormous debt someone else accrued.

Again, I’m paraphrasing what I hear coming from Greece and I don’t know all the facts or the extent to which what they say is true. I do agree that the EU simply ‘doesn’t get it’ when it comes to that part of the message – all they are interested in is seeing the Greek Nation and Greek people toe the line with 100% commitment (so they don’t, in turn, threaten the entire EU Economy with unprecedented and therefore terrifying negative repercussions). Read the rest of this entry »

From Con

This trend (described in “Wage Growth Goes Flat…”) is responsible for creating many problems in American Society as well as the American Economy. In certain sectors of the high-tech world during the 1990′s these issues were taken care of because stock options made it possible for workers / employees to receive often more than their fair share and, importantly, more than they feel they deserve and much more than they expected – AND the same equity based compensation made those in power rich or much richer so they didn’t need to basically steal value from those workers to feed their own greed (or whatever is their motivation – greed seems to simple an answer).

When stock and stock options were no longer viable as the primary means of compensation and economic advancement for those workers, things went back to where things had always been for other industries: the workers creating the value were not paid their fair share for such value-creation because the Owners and Executives were skimming (sometimes deeply) into workers / employee compensation. With a limited amount available for compensation something has to give. I don’t know why this trend started, but once it did it was inexorable as a steam locomotive rolling down the track.

Sure, the Owners and Executives deserve more, proportionately, because they made it all possible and then made it all happen – they created the actual Enterprise responsible for all those jobs. That deserves rich reward. However, once that Enterprise is truly a ‘going concern’ it is the workers who are creating most of the value and wealth.

And for a long time workers were paid more or less fairly in exchange for that value and wealth creation, but somewhere along the line those with the sole power to set compensation policy and scale seemed to have a ‘Dawn breaks on Marblehead’ moments whereby they realized they could simply set compensation so it favored them far more than it already did and really the only power workers had to resist was voting with their feet.

Of course that only works if the worker is in high demand or the like. In a market where people were more or less grateful for a decent-paying job, Owners and Execs smelled the blood in the water and started to violate what had been a working, unwritten Social Contract – a contract between value creators regarding how to equitably divide the wealth created by their collective work and regarding rules of fairness whereby good behavior was rewarded according to it’s merit and economic advancement was readily available to those who played by the rules of fairness and who increased their relative output of value within the Enterprise. Read the rest of this entry »

from Diane

Oh goody, a nostalgia page where senility is a plus (referring to the aged admins below).

This morning I sat down to the computer to see if the world had ended last night while I slept. It hadn’t. I had felt quite sure it would have, given the current state of affairs.

Five miles to the east there is a ridge of mountains that reaches about 1000? above my 4200? elevation. To the west, I can see the San Joachim Valley stretching 100 miles from Modesto to Fresno. In the morning when the sun rises, I can first see the Valley bathed in sunlight. Slowly it fills with Sun, glowing in the early morning mists. Then the tips of hillocks to the west catch their first hints of the new light and the life-giving rays spread like spilt milk creeping across a breakfast table. And still I sit in the pre-dawn, shadowed by the mountains. Waiting… waiting.

See Diane in her natural setting. JL

We are in the present, worrying about today, our jobs, our kids, perhaps even our end. But if you watch and listen, you can see the future coming. It foretells its presence obliquely, almost imperceptibly. Then it begins to rise, clearer, till its full light covers us and then everyone will see it yet if you have patience, you can see it far before it makes itself known to the world.

But first, you have to stop and listen and see.

From Admin

As you can see the Cafe has caused me some gray hairs and then some loss in gray hairs. Becki has faired better. Life was so much more thrilling back in my Hopalong Cassidy days when I rode Sparta (sometimes I wear my Hoppy outfit to work). And then my days hanging out in Tangiers (middle picture). Then there were those days when I subjected myself to the critical views of my colleagues in the realm of molecular biology standing up in front Nobel Prize winners, Academic smarties from Johns Hopkins, NIH, academic hotspots in Boston, and finally Stanford. But nothing can compare to the intensity at the Cafe. I wonder what I will look like in the next picture? #*&!%@

Next page for Becki. Read the rest of this entry »

From John

Actually the numbers show that we have stayed active at the rate that we were in 2006 and 2007 and perhaps increased in unique visitors (see JTO’s last comment under “Loathing Limpdem”). This is quite remarkable given the rise in Facebook and newspaper blogs during the last six years. The Cafe has survived and prevailed inspite of this competition. The one thing that has changed is that the return visitation is less frequent accept for a few. What happened to all those CT blogs especially in Northeastern CT and the most visited blog CT Local Politics? They crashed and burned. Rick Green at the Courant told me that he had noticed a dramatic reduction in people coming to the Courant blogs in 2008.

Our policy is to let all speak if they are willing to. Because of this we have always jumped at the chance to publish Ernie’s, Joe Klusek’s, and even Bill Jenkins’ views. We include anyone who has a different point of view and this is without regard to spelling accuracy, sentence structure, level of education, political party, or anything else. We all saw what happened when the Woodstock Untruth that tried to limit themselves to the “like-minded“.

If you set up your own blog with your preferred limitations, you will be very disappointed.

Labor market for young graduates remains grim.

From JTO

There is a very important chart making the rounds of the policy wonks that I tripped over a few months back that I found very disturbing. It is bound to be Exhibit A in the election this fall. It was developed by the Economic Policy Institute and shows U.S. productivity and wage growth 1948 – 2012. The chart shows productivity growth for the overall U.S. Economy over this period climbing at a steady, even pace – amazingly consistent over time – for over five decades. Then it shows median wage growth which climbs in tandem with productivity growth 1948 – 1978, but then goes almost completely flat 1979 – 2012.

Here’s the chart that JTO is describing (provided by JTO) from the Economic Policy Institute. These figures and all others that we post are captured by a $20 program that you can buy on the Internet. It’s called “Faststone Capture“. It is very easy to download and intuitive to use. JL

Legend to Figure A:

I was literally stunned by this – and disturbed – when I realized it’s implications. This is highly aggregated, very long term data. Productivity growth, which is measured simply as growth in GDP divided by the number of people in the labor force,is the measure of wealth creation in the economy. thought of simply, if GDP consisted of the manufacture of ten automobiles, produced by 10 workers, and Henry Ford figured out a way to build 11 automobiles with the same 10 workers, then GDP growth and Productivity growth would both be 10%. (Measurement gets more complicated than that, but thats the idea. So productivity growth is both the means and the measure of the increased output of our economy.

So what has happened is that something changed in our economic system so that while the benefits of productivity growth were shared by workers from 1948 – 1978, after this, they quickly shared less and less in the continued productivity (i.e. Wealth) gains in the overall economy.

So then I saw this chart again, and someone had added a second vertical axis opposite the x axis to show labor union membership, and this showed the decline in the portion of the work force belonging to unions and guess what? Beginning in 1978, union membership began declining at an accelerated rate in correlation with flattened real wages 1978 – 2010.

So it makes me think of the German model of manufacturing policy. In the 1970?s the Germans were in the same predicament as the U.S. with a large, highly paid,highly skilled manufacturing work force with strong political influence and facing strong competition from Japan, especially in the Auto/Steel/Glass industry at the center of their industrial sector. They worked with their unions to develope a new industrial policy that focused on retaining precision and technology manufacturing and retraining unskilled workers to skilled positions. So while Germany has lost manufacturing jobs steadily, it has retained a strong manufacturing base with better skills and wages. In the U.S., by contrast, we had the investor class – the Bain Capitals of the world – simply take these companies over, chew them up, and spit them out. Or, as with GE, simply gradually move their operations overseas to take advantage of cheap labor and low or nonexistent environmental standards.

Why can’t we do better than this?
From the Economic Policy Institute (JL)