In a capitalist society the mediating force that controls almost every action is money. Think upon those SS troops that hour after hour put guns to the heads of innocent Jewish men, women and children. They were involved in the unmediated execution of their societies’ will as formulated and promulgated in the Führer principle.
The leader wanted the Jews exterminated.
His minions carried out his wishes in manner that will always make anyone of sound mind ill when they head a clear description of the actions (in Littell’s The Kindly Ones for instance).
Round them up, march them into the forest, have them dig trenches, line them up in rows, shoot them in the head, push them into the trench [optional: douse them with gasoline and burn] cover the bodies with soil.
Thousands of operations of this type were carried out by men with families until a combination of what we would now call post traumatic stress and the German natural inclination towards ordnung lead to small moveable truck mounted gas chambers and then the real thing.
Think of a cattle round-up that went on for about three years – boxcars carrying the condemned to their rendering into nothingness. Gassed and poof-up the chimney and then out into the air whose stink, downwind ca. 65 years from history I can still smell.
Sensitive: perhaps, but listen to Montaigne: “I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead, more barbarity in tearing apart by rack and torture a body still sentient, in roasting him little by little and having him bruised and bitten by pigs and dogs tan in roasting him and eating him after his death.”
Capital kills more slowly, of the death, that we are all trapped in is a mediated one. It is hidden by money which rules the game. Marx saw it so clearly. His description of the way that capital functions is of unequalled clarity, for he saw its power to melt all existing relationships in its unrelenting drive to increase capital which is called profit and call more.
A more which in the present stage of late capitalism has been gathered in fewer and fewer hands. A rising tide that carried a few boats higher and let the rest founder.
National socialism, in spite of a symbolic resonance that lives on in tons of books and thousands of movies, is gone. Communism, the hope of so much progressive thought, has left behind shattered hope and a reflexive cynicism and nihilism that is akin to an invisible undercurrent of dark energy/matter that is conclusive drag on human possibility.
Capitalism, the default setting, has created a society that cannot survive, for all sense of justice has evaporated in the relentless drive for more without rhyme or reason.
Greed has triumphed, its manipulative instruments have ruined the lives of millions of innocent people whose tax money has gone to rescue those whose actions destroyed their lives.
The response of these, mainly men, who buried due diligence and fiduciary responsibility and turned an economy into a casino has been simple: they have not said thank you, they have said fuck you.

The democratization process that took place, in America and Europe during the period from 1776-1850 was severely restricted by gender, color and class. Numerous intellectuals supported these restrictions for they feared mob rule and the emergence of leaders who would utilize ignorance to lead the mob in directions that both the wealthy and the educated feared.
These predictions became a large part of 20th century history as the names Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Mussolini make clear. Ideological alliances, national socialism and communism has lead to tens of millions of people dying.
It is not a problem that is of easy solution: where the uneducated might be prêt to simple factual understanding: Obama was not born in the U.S. or a panel will decide whether the aged live or die; many intellectuals happily embraced.
Having lived for eight years among the uneducated, I am amazed at what people can imagine or believe. The human mind seems to be a machine for producing continuous nonsense, fed by a popular media that an educated individual can only wonder at.
The trash that so many are eating can only make them ill. What our senses take in is food. We eat sensation and that sensation has more effect upon us than the food we eat.
The TV diet is loathsome. Its effect will eventually be more apparent than the effect of the bad diet that has produced a population of increasing obese people.
We are what we eat: we become what we perceive.

The energy generated by the enthusiasm of the 60s was dissipated in the futile life style and political battles that ruled the 70s and cancelled the warning red flags that the 60s generated.
Almost 40 years have been lost in battles that have produced heat rather than light.
If conservation ha taken hold in the 70s, if we had begun to design all non structures with energy savings in mind and pursued an accounting system that measured wealth more in tune with ecological flows and thought in terms of production that recycled everything, and structured our education system in resonance with such ideas, we would be prepared – possibly – to face biospheric deterioration that is coming with ever increasing swiftness.
An old order is dying and we are blindly acting as if it is going to continue into the life of our children.
It will not as the climatic destruction has passed the point of reversal and is now exponentiating into a future that we can barely imagine, though 114 inches of rain in Taiwan and extreme heat and drought have given us a small taste of what is to come.
Science can only take us so far. It can’t map the changes that are coming. They are not linear, but involve deformation, metamorphosis, transmutation and catastrophe.
To many it will seem biblical, apocalyptic, as radical transformations occur before our eyes. What it will be is a system – planetary in extent – collapsing. The collapse is our feedback, our mess, our failure.
It may take centuries for a new equilibrium to be achieved.
We take sunshine and rain for granted, until the suddenly disappear. By the end of August 2009, there had been no summer in Central Pennsylvania, no settled weather. In my French Moulin, the heat has been off the previous charts. In neither area have the crops done well.
Rapid change – catastrophic climate change, which so many have been denying in its weather form, is now upon us.
Even with great co-operation, the future will be very difficult.
Without it, we will be eating each other sooner than we think.

Most of those who end up incarcerated, whether guilty or innocent, suffer from an educational and cultural deficiency that is a major cause of the incarceration and will lead to a life of incarceration if the deficiency is not corrected.
The future belongs to those with education.
We live in a society in which the major part of the workforce has jobs that are classified under category of information.
It is brains not brawn that will enable you to have a future that does not contain incarceration.
There is only one way to break the continually reinforced habit of remaining ignorant.
Spend an hour each day alone, in silence, with a book.
An hour, each day, alone with a book.
No walkman, no radio, no television.
Multi-tasking is nonsense.
For that hour, build your brain muscle as you build your LATs and ABs.
Don’t miss a day. Be patient. Learning takes time.

A good place to start is with a word wealth book.
Get a notebook and a decent dictionary in addition to a word wealth book.
Use the notebook and the dictionary to write down the new words and use them in sentences.
Expand the practice when the daily habit becomes part of your life by going to the library and taking out a classic.
Read the classic slowly. New things take time.
Patience is the basis of all learning and success in life.
Read each day until you find 5 new words.
Copy those 5 new words out into your notebook and look them up in your dictionary and use them in a sentence.
A small practice that should teach you some patience and inculcate (look it up) in a you a first possible step out of the prison rut of TV, sleeping too much, and mindless block-out activities.
Discipline, patience, daily practice.
A way out of the rut of incarceration as a lifetime activity.

Written for young offenders re: a request

June 16, 2009

Dear Mr. Einhorn:

I was a friend of the late author William Styron. In helping Styron’s widow to gather his letters for publication, I’ve come across a remarkable letter you wrote to him in 1962 about his novel Set This House on Fire. I feel certain that Styron would have responded to your letter (especially considering the hostile treatment his book elicited from mainstream critics), so I’m writing to ask if you have any recollection of his reply or any notion of whether it still exists – and if so, where?
I’m somewhat familiar with your case and am aware of the confiscation of your private diaries (and other papers?) by the authorities, so I realize this is a shot in the ark and that it’s unlikely you either have Styron’s letter or can help me to obtain a copy. But there’s always a chance, and no harm trying. I’d be willing to sort through evidence files if that would be permitted.
Your letter to Styron is among his papers at Duke. I enclose a copy, restoring at least this tiny portion of your writings to you.

February 2, 1962

Dear Mr. Styron,

A short note of thanks for the beauty that you have created in Set This House on Fire! Rarely have I been so overwhelmed by any experience as that provided by your powerful novel. The time that you spent in writing is obvious on every page, for the precision which you obtain is rare in modern writing; but more important, to me, is the message – a message which only a man who has gone through the hell of self-discovery is agile to convey.
The tears which instantaneously flooded my eyes, along with the shock which traversed my entire body, as I read the words of Luigi describing this prison called life came from deep within as I realized that Cass would not be allowed to end his pilgrimage as the hero of Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano (a haunting novel which your book, especially the ramblings of Cass, brought to mind) in suicide (symbolical in the case of Cass); but would be forced to face the task of creating his own existence in full knowledge of the nothingness of anything but what he created as you so perfectly state through him at the end of the novel. He can’t fall back upon repentance (in an external sense) like Raskolnikoff but rather must impose his own restrictions on the freedom which being conveys upon us. No external means can provide us with satisfaction or salvation for the self is all we possess. To throw off the illusion of the necessary casual relation between his crime (so called) and his supposed external-imposed repentance is to throw off the fetters of conventions which prevents us from seeing the difference between morality and moral justice is fickle along with everything else that man has created. To know this is to advance in the game of life.
Your plight, to be misunderstood by all the reviewers who read with their eyes instead of their hearts, shared by William Gaddis who wrote The Recognitions (a man whom I feel, along with yourself, is capable of making a lasting contribution to the American novel) is not to be assuaged by my meagre word of thanks, but I hope your patience lasts, for six years is will worth the waiting for a work of such stature as Set This House on Fire.
The Long March which I also recently read is masterful, for as the French translator of your books has said: not a word can be left out. Incantation is the only word to describe your writing – please continue.

I constantly wrote letters to those whose books I read in a large number of disciplines, particularly to those that I thought were not adequately received by their peers.
It often led to a correspondence or a friendship: Thomas S. Kuhn, John Cage, Norman O. Brown, Stafford Beer, Andrija Puharich are five prominent examples among many.
I am now being contacted about those letters, see the recent letter from a friend of Bill Styron as example and my letter. His name is withheld for reasons of privacy and should serve only as an example.
All of my papers were taken in March of 1979 during an illegal search of my apartment. The DA refused to return them. They have no legal argument for keeping them, but the law in Pennsylvania is now so hypocritical, along with many other aspects of America life (what the bankers are getting away with for example) that people should be in the streets waving red, white and blue scarves rather than watching the Iranians waving green scarves on TV.
It is time to wake up to the growing irreality of American life, in spite of the election of a wonderful president.
A paradoxical statement, perhaps, but it is from paradox that we learn.

After years in Europe, Americans’ inability to live is so obvious that it constantly makes me sad to view the simulacrum that passes for life in the USA.
One pauses for nothing, and I will not be surprised to learn that toilet seats have replaced chairs at dinner tables so that one can multitask and see oneself the trouble of digesting one’s food.
In Europe one works to live and they live quite well with a much greater social concern for society as a whole. In the USA possessive individualism has gone mad and excessive wealth is a prime value for many and damned be thy unfortunate neighbour.
America has a group of top tier universities that are second to none, but a general educational or preparatory system that is second rate and growing worse yearly.
It has a health care system that is very expensive and serving mainly the wealthy and one sickness can destroy a family and the kicker, 50 million people, 1/6 of the population, are just not part of the system which has life expectancy, child mortality and other statistical figures that would shame European leadership.
Food quality, in terms of health and nutrition, can only bring tears to the eyes of the aware and the obesity figures speak directly to anyone conscious of the connection between obesity and health.
The soil is being destroyed.
Farms are now factories that don’t even feed farm families.

Behind this interconnected expanding disaster is the vale system of a country that has allowed large corporations and their total focus on profit to rule.
If death is profitable, then death is the rule. If food makes money, but is ruining the soil by the way that it is grown and literally killing the people who eat it, that is fine.

One would imagine that the present crisis, the economic mess caused by the abandonment among the economic class of all fiduciary responsibility and all due diligence in a headlong rush to securitize everything in sight (even grandma was in danger) would begin to wake up Americans, as it has awakened the world, to how dangerous torturing imperial fiscally irresponsible America has become.
The present economic team in Washington helped create the mess. Mr. Fox is not going to make the chicken house safe. He might be able to patch it up until the next outbreak occurs, but to expect a real critique of the system and a possibility of a radical change is ludicrous. It is impossible for those so imbued with an ideology to generate the perspective necessary to transform it.
A small group of people have been benefitting for 25 years in an economic system that has become a casino. A casino in which most of the bets have nothing to do with productivity or human well being.
Money has been making money not socially useful products. We do not need $680 trillion in derivatives or $38 trillion in credit default swaps to run the world economy.
The tail is wagging the dog and the dog is very ill due to the greed that financial instruments, irrelevant of productivity, have loosed within the system.
It’s time to end the experiment.
Individual selfishness does not sum to public good. The fable of the bees is wrong. The “invisible hand” is not functioning. Public good must be invoked again.
Production for the benefit of people must be the goal and private profit must be a factor in the equation not the ruling principle.
There is more to life than consumption and unless we see that quickly our behaviour will end life on earth as we know it.
For overriding all the above is a planetary biospheric crisis that if I were a grandchild to be, I would already be turning over in my grave to be, in anticipation of the destruction that this generation’s short-sighted behaviour is planning for me.
How many unusual weather events will it take before we wake up to the future we are creating for our progeny with each trip to the gas station.
What will it take to make us realise that our present consumptive lifestyle is more of a danger to our children than the Nazis were in 1941.
Who has the courage to mobilize the energy necessary to drive this awareness home?
We still have our eyes closed.
What will it take to open them or will we walk blindly into our own destruction?

The failure to learn from mistakes or the blind unwillingness to even consider them is the road that leads to decline that presently defines the path of the USA in spite of the “can do” sprit that is embodied in the Obamas.

Two critics have put it bluntly.
Craig Barrett, the chairman of Intel: “we are watching the decline and fall of the United States as an economic power – not hypothetically, but as we speak.”
And Les Gelb, president emeritus of the Council of Foreign Relations; the quotes are from Power Rules, a recent book of his:
1. “The result is diminished economic strength, a less vital democracy, and a mediocrity of spirit.” (p. 279);
2. “We are now the biggest debtor nation in history, and no nation with a massive debt has ever remained a great power.” (p. 281)
3. “Generations of Americans now, shockingly, read at the grade-school level, and know almost no history, not to mention geography. They are simply not being educated to become guardians of democracy.” (p. 281)
4. “In many areas of public endeavour we are now incompetent.” (p. 281)

The present ambitions of the country far surpass its ability to sustain and support the energy need to maintain its goals, as so many indicators, pre-recession/depression screamed. A population eating its way to an early death can’t sustain a far reaching series of goals.
The banks now saying wham/bang thank you ma’am to the government (of the people, by the people, for the people) and casually planning to pay bonuses that are oblivious to both popular anger and the mess they created for tens of millions of their fellow citizens. What they are now doing is indicative of their contempt for their fellow citizens. They must be brought under government control – strict and enforced government control for two reasons: much of what they do is unnecessary; it is not integral to the productive heart of the nation and more important the difference in basic capacity to manage between those paid hundreds of millions of dollars to manage these large unwieldy dinosaurs and a good 90 of their underlings is miniscule. We will not loose anything by restricting salaries except our fantasies about “freedom”. The so-called “best” are replaceable.
And the largest irony is that so many of these new instruments (dollars making dollars not products) were ostensibly created to reduce risk. A moment’s reflection on that fact should produce hysterical laughter.
And the kicker who but an ingrained blind class could cling to leaders who wrecked such havoc.
That is the largest irony in the entire system: men – it is mostly men – should be under charge of facing a firing squad not being placated by large bonuses, partly earned by cheap government money.
In addition all of this activity is predicated upon trillions of dollars of sunk infrastructure costs. For anyone in this extended class to begrudge, those less fortunate, future infrastructure costs, is indicative of a shortsightedness that seems to be a leitmotiv in American history.
Our productivity is directly correlated to the infrastructure that allows commerce to flourish. Money spent on infrastructure is integral to our wealth. Let it be degraded or do not build new infrastructure and we will be has-beens in this world of instant at your fingers currency flows.
We need roads, airports, broadband and wireless networks that are second to none and deal everyone into the game. Without the physical structure in place, entrepreneurial enabling will not occur, ideas will not produce new opportunities. Stagnation will occur.
Yet all of this will be empty without a healthy, well-educated thinner workforce.
I live surrounded by ignorance.
Ignorance not stupidity.
Ignorance is curable.
That ignorance is the basis of so much crime – a shortcut in lives deprived of opportunity.
Our basic educational system is crumbling.
Our healthcare, given the obesity epidemic is a costly shambles.
Education and health care are the basics of a strong workforce. A workforce that will determine the future of America.
Knowledge is our most important product, both as a commodity and as an enabler of our people – those who produce our products.
To grumble about spending on education and health care is to look backward, to guarantee the US of A, a continuing decline, for we are in decline, precipitated by eight years of the Bush no-nothing presidency.
With the grace and intelligence Obama possess, a new morning, in spite of our hangover, is possible.
It requires much courage.
Do we have it?

We are everywhere surrounded by the provocation of needs, tits everywhere, or the suggestion of tits leading the charge that evokes that “gotta have” need for so many of the things that clutter modern life.

Buy me and get a tit free seems to be the suggestion, and then we wonder why teens are sending nude pictures to each other via cell phone and camcorder with increasing frequency.
The hypocrisy is so tick that I’ll tip my hat to anyone who still can feel deeply guilty about a transgressive act.
It is all posturing.

A superficial play-acting that has nothing to do with the inwardness (innerlichkeit) of genuine guilt.
All of this must be swept clean if we are to avoid the increasingly psychological chaos that is emerging, adumbrated by the daily terrorist mass murders in the lands of Allah, mainly, and the mass murders that now seem to occur in clusters in the west.

Chemical, biological and nuclear terrorism loom just beyond the visible horizon and its perpetration will come from within society, not from some far distant land that we are spending trillions of dollars to stir up.
If the cleansing is frightening enough, say a reduction to less than a billion on the planet, two possibilities loom: a genuine charismatic re-invoking of discrete limits based on nos that have weight or resonance, or, a real transformation of consciousness based upon epigenetic mutation that is lurking somewhere deep in the genetic code.
No-one has enough data to choose between the emergence of the progressive or regressive outcome, but the data grows about the planetary shit storm that is coming and those with good ears can now hear the tolling of the midnight bell.

The wise, if choice is still available, will pick their partners for the apocalypse carefully.

Every time I hear Barack Obama referred to as America’ first black president, I wonder how people buy into such a myth, as I have seen pictures of his very white mother and recently deceased obviously white grandmother.
To call him black is to cast dishonour on half of his heritage. Something that I can’t imagine someone as sensitive as Obama doing.
Tiger is not black and he has made that clear. He is mixed racial origin. Obama shares the same mixed race origin yet he is looked upon as America’s First Black President, and I have never seen him referred to as being of mixed origin, though he obviously is.
If one looks at older American legal cases from the South, one will quickly run into definitions of blackness that correspond to the present illusion regarding Obama’s blackness.
A drop of black blood is enough to turn any individual, for legal purposes, into a black person. The other similar situation that comes to mind is the laws propagated by the Nazis which of course in that situation was a matter of life and death. In both of these historical examples, the amount of black or Jewish blood that allowed one to be categorised as “black” or “Jewish” was of a smaller percentage than the 50% white blood that Obama carries.
Yet no-one questioned Obama about his being white. The only early concern had to do with whether he was black enough – culturally, socially, politically – to represent the black community. He obviously PASSED.
Is the black community and tens of millions of whites so anxious to crown a black president that they will accept a definition of black that is both imposed by the enemy and cancels the main formative influence on his life: his white mother? He was the victim of what Bill Cosby has been campaigning about: the absent black father, yet it is the father’s identity he bears, not that of the white mother who raised him and imbued him with her values.
I find all this very strange and indicative of a large unresolved American relationship to its racial history. Coming from a religious background that is racially based: to the orthodox, only those born of a Jewish mother are Jews. It is a view I share as I do not recognize converts as Jews and Sammy Davis, Marilyn Monroe et al. are not Jewish in my eyes as they were not born, as I was, of a Jewish mother.

If Chicken Little is out there running around, please tell him to call: the sky is falling and we need him badly.

AIG just reported a $ 61.7 billion loss, the biggest quarterly loss ever posted by a company. AIG lost $99.3 billion for the year. They will be rewarded with another chunk of taxpayers money: $ 30 billion.
The government has now given AIG $180 billion. What did they do to deserve such benevolence from our staunchly capitalist government.
You may be surprised to learn that what the $180 billion is covering, is a gambling loss and I am sure that you will not be happy to learn that much more government (read taxpayer) money will follow as AIG’s black hole of gambling debts has only been 25% covered.
Keep in mind this in an insurance company skilled in risk management, replete with mathmavens who are experts in actuarial tables but they booked $400 billion in risky instruments without any concern for provision for the risk they took on.
I know things are moving fast, but just dwell on that for a moment: an insurance company whose major skill is risk management, took on $400 billion of unsecured risk.
The new chief executive had this to say about the future of his company which is carrying ca. $300 billion of these unsecured instruments on its books. I am quoting Edward Liddy from an NBC interview: AIG was “very much going to be influenced by what happens to the condition of the economy and the financial marketplace around the globe.”
Very forthcoming.
In other words: in a short time, AIG will be back from more money, as conditions are worsening daily and the honest human – there are a few left – is now talking depression.
Some other facts:
The economy lost 6.2% in the last quarter.
Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are basket cases (they incidentally are the housing market).
Fannie Mae lost $58.7 billion in 2008, more than all its net profits since 1992 (!). All those big bonuses are coming home to roost.
Freddie will announce record losses shortly.
GM is bankrupt. We (taxpayers) should not pay for the reorganization. The managers who drove the country off the cliff should resign: yesterday.

The health mess is even worse: I won’t bore you with any more stats, but it is clear that, again, the taxpayer is being robbed by doctors and drug companies and those who now manage our health system for $100s of billion a year.
It’s not Botswana, but considering the outlay regarding the return – it might as well be.

American capitalism is dead in the H2O. The people know it, but their hypocritical leaders refuse to face the reality that now surrounds them. Class warfare on the Q.T. has been the life blood of American history.
Screw the common man; screw the worker; protect and enrich those with money.
Anyone, as I have, who studies law, immediately sees this: the law favors those with property and money and the Roberts court has carried on this tradition. This must end NOW and could end now if all those tens of millions of middle class individuals who just lost their future to the greed of those who have betrayed every principle of fiduciary responsibility – AIG mentioned above as one example – begin to put aside their shock and dismay at their sudden change of state and begin to organize around basic principles of sharing, fairness and sustainability.
They must have the courage to displace work, profit and consumerism from the center of their lives. The family, people, care for the neighbourhood and others must replaced the GREED that has ruled American society of late. The farm with animals must come back. Corn and corn syrup must be displaced. The American waist must reappear as the obese downsize. And perhaps as important, we must pay heed to that old miscegenist: Tom Jefferson and think of blood as the water of liberty.