Only Money Matters

So apparently it is now true. The only thing that actually matters in America is money.  It used to be different. Some things used to matter more. Remember the anti-War protests in Washington? They brought out thousands to protest American government intervention in Vietnam. Eventually, under Nixon, America finally lost its first War, and our policy changed. We moved away from Vietnam.

It makes me wonder what the equivalent might be in the case of Mass shootings.  What’s a “mass shooting” you ask? Well, from Wiki:

“The Congressional Research Service defines it as "public mass shootings", defined by four or more victims killed, excluding any victims who survive.^[5][6] The Washington Post and Mother Jones use similar definitions, with the latter acknowledging that their definition "is a conservative measure of the problem", as many shootings with fewer fatalities occur.^[7][8] The crowdsourced Mass Shooting Tracker project has the most expansive definition of four or more shot in any incident, including the perpetrator in the victim inclusion criteria.^[9][10] A 2019 study of mass shootings published in the journal Injury Epidemiology recommended developing "a standard definition that considers both fatalities and nonfatalities to most appropriately convey the burden of mass shootings on gun violence."^[11] The authors of the study further suggested that "the definition of mass shooting should be four or more people, excluding the shooter, who are shot in a single event regardless of the motive, setting or number of deaths."^[12]

As of December 2021, 693 (of which 303 resulted in zero deaths) fit the Mass Shooting Tracker project criterion, leaving 703 people dead and 2,842 injured, for a total of 3,545 total victims, some including the shooter(s)”.

And this was only one year. We have similar losses every year, mainly because we refuse to deal with the gun lobby. And the gun lobby is all about money. The NRA and the gun manufacturers make a lot of money by making and selling guns of all types to citizens, regardless of the citizens’ actual needs.  Now, I understand the argument that asserts that, “Guns are not the problem, People are the problem.” But then I wonder, “well what might happen if all those gunmen had been armed with six-foot spears instead of semiautomatic rifles?”  Hmmm. That might have been more useful even than “Thoughts and Prayers”.

But instead, we continue to allow folks to give money to a domestic terrorist organization, the NRA, and for that organization, the NRA, to buy Congressmen who are willing to block any attempt to change laws regarding guns. Yeah, Thoughts and Prayers indeed.  I wonder what might have happened if Mitch McConnell’s grandkids had been shot and killed. Or maybe if any of the Trump kids had been shot and killed by a mass shooter. Hmmmm. Would real actions might then have occurred?

Oh, and then we have Climate Change—you know, that fake news event in which some silly folks keep yelling about cataclysmic changes to our globe, that threaten our very existence.  So, are there actual Facts about Climate?

Fiction: Climate Change is a Natural Phenomenon:

Fact: Well, NO, it’s not Earth, It’s US.  The climate has changed naturally in the past, but that’s not what’s happening today. Right now, the world is warming up to 50 times faster than it has previously. That’s because humans have burned billions of tons of coal, oil and natural gas, which release carbon pollution into the air that traps the sun’s heat. That pollution can remain in the air for thousands of years, making the planet hotter and hotter. Right now, there is already a thick blanket of carbon pollution surrounding the earth, dangerously warming the planet.

 Fiction: Climate change is way off in the future.

Fact: IT’S HAPPENING RIGHT NOW. We’re not talking about some far off threat. Heat-trapping pollution is already harming people right here, right now. Across the country, we’re experiencing record-breaking disasters. In the west, hot, dry conditions are fueling massive fires, with smoke that blocks out the sun and poisons the air. In the southwest, historic droughts threaten our food supply. And in the south, warmer oceans are fueling stronger, deadlier hurricanes that are destroying people’s homes and lives.

Fiction: There is nothing we can do about it.

Fact: THERE IS STILL TIME TO ADDRESS IT! (BUT NOT MUCH.)

It’s not too late to prevent the worst case scenarios. But to do so, we must stop polluting, and that means moving from fossil fuels to the clean, renewable energy sources of the 21st century. As a society, we already have the technology to build a clean economy that creates millions of jobs and a stable world. But we must act now.

And how is money involved here?? Well, for one thing, coal and oil production and usage, which contribute to climate change involve money, i.e., the companies and regions that produce have zero interest in switching to renewable energy sources, because it means they might lose money.  And what areas are most suggestive of real and dangerous climate change?

From NASA:

Global Temperature Rise: The planet's average surface temperature has risen about 2.0 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century. The planet's average surface temperature has risen about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century, a change driven largely by increased carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere and other human activities. Most of the warming occurred in the past 40 years, with the seven most recent years being the warmest. The years 2016 and 2020 are tied for the warmest year on record.

Warming Ocean: The ocean has absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 100 meters (about 328 feet) of ocean showing warming of more than 0.6 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969. The ocean has absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 100 meters (about 328 feet) of ocean showing warming of more than 0.6 degrees Fahrenheit (0.33 degrees Celsius) since 1969. Earth stores 90% of the extra energy in the ocean.

Shrinking Ice Sheets: The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have decreased in mass. The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have decreased in mass. Data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost an average of 279 billion tons of ice per year between 1993 and 2019, while Antarctica lost about 148 billion tons of ice per year.

Glacial Retreat: Glaciers are retreating almost everywhere around the world — including in the Alps, Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, Alaska, and Africa. Glaciers are retreating almost everywhere around the world — including in the Alps, Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, Alaska, and Africa.

Decreased Snow Cover: Satellite observations reveal that the amount of spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has decreased over the past five decades and the snow is melting earlier. Satellite observations reveal that the amount of spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has decreased over the past five decades and the snow is melting earlier.

Sea Level Rise: Global sea level rose about 8 inches (20 centimeters) in the last century. The rate in the last two decades, however, is nearly double that of the last century and accelerating slightly every year. Global sea level rose about 8 inches (20 centimeters) in the last century. The rate in the last two decades, however, is nearly double that of the last century and accelerating slightly every year.

Declining Arctic Sea Ice: Both the extent and thickness of Arctic sea ice has declined rapidly over the last several decades. Both the extent and thickness of Arctic sea ice has declined rapidly over the last several decades.

Ocean Acidification: Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the acidity of surface ocean waters has increased by about 30%. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the acidity of surface ocean waters has increased by about 30%. This increase is the result of humans emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and hence more being absorbed into the ocean. The ocean has absorbed between 20% and 30% of total anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions in recent decades (7.2 to 10.8 billion metric tons per year).

But these are just facts, and increasingly, Americans are not interested in facts. Americans want feel good stories that support their view that they personally do not have to do anything different.  They can just , “Keep on truck’n”.  And that’s the job of Tucker Carlson and his Fox News BFFs.  He and Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham are paid very large amounts of money to lie to us, with their lies reminding us that we do not have to do anything different. Just keep on watching them, buy their sponsors’ products and all will be good for the world.

Yep, this too is All About the Money.  And will voting matter? Well, it could but I would not bet your kids on it.  Remember, Pennsylvania just voted to nominate Doug Mastriano, who asserts: “ I am calling for additional funds in this year’s state budget to be utilized by school districts to improve mental health resources including increasing the number of guidance counselors and improving training for teachers and administrators to help them identify potential warning signs and proper referral and intervention techniques. Additionally, the funds could be used for armed resource officers, arming teachers, metal detectors, door fortifications, emergency response training, and other mitigation measures.” Yeah, gotta arm those teachers. That’s the solution.

So, will voting matter? Well, Take It Away, Pennsylvania voters.

Money is Everything

Do you remember in olden tymes, when we humans used to communicate in a wide variety of methods?  We used to talk of course, between and among ourselves. Yeah, if we were with other humans, we would actually speak with one another, without staring at a little handheld device.  And mail. Remember mail? You would take a piece of paper and a pen, well sometimes a pencil, but mainly a pen. More lasting image. And you would think of things to say to someone you know who was not sitting in the same room, or maybe even the same village. And you would compose a thing called a letter. A letter contained your thoughts about some subject or set of subjects, maybe even the weather. And you would place your “letter” in an envelope, write down the address to which you would like the letter to be delivered, and then place a thing called a stamp on the envelope as a way of paying for someone to hand deliver the letter.  Think of that. Isn’t that amazing? Your handwritten message would be hand carried and delivered personally to a person far away.

And then there was that system called the telephone. Remember telephones? They were devices that had kind of a base with a round thingie on it with numbers from 0 to 9 on it. And then it had another device that fit on top, and that device had a little speaker and a little microphone.  And you would dial a person’s “number” (everyone with a phone was assigned a multidigit number). And on their end, their device would sound a ringing noise repeatedly until they picked up the device with the speaker and microphone. Usually, they would talk into their device and say something like, “Hello”. And then you would say something on the other end, beginning another thing called a conversation.  Yeah, you would actually speak with someone, even though they were not in the same room.  Amazing, huh? And because there were not very many lines open, people would share their phone line, using something called a “party line”. Yeah, you might pick up your hand device and hear someone already talking to someone else. And you were expected to place your device down, or “hang up”, so they could finish their private talk.

Now typically, people only wrote these letters or called someone on a telephone if they actually knew them. Sometimes you might call a stranger, but not often.

So, humans actually used these methods to communicate thoughts from one person to another.

After some time, commercial companies caught onto these communication devices, and they might send you a thing called a “bill”, or a statement claiming that you owed them money for some reason. Now usually, companies did not call someone just to tell them about something they wished to sell them. That would have been stupid, huh?

And then, sometime in the middle of the 20^th century, some clever dudes invented things called “computers”.  Now, at the start, only a few people purchased these computer devices.  And the devices included a thing called a keyboard (sort of like a typewriter), a little visual screen that would show you what you were typing, and then a large box that had within it a bunch of electrical thingies that no one understood—well, almost no one.

And what would you do with that computer thing?  Well, for one thing, you could use it as a sort of typewriter. Yeah, you could actually press keys on the keyboard, and letters would appear on the screen. So, you could type a letter, instead of using a pen and paper. Now, when you were done, you still typically had to use a printing device to print your letter, and then use that envelope and stamp to send off your letter.  But then some clever dudes invented a ghostly thing called the World Wide Web. Yeah, the Web was this thing that you would never actually see or touch.  You would plug your computer into a device that somehow connected you into that ghostly thing called “The Web”. And then, they went even farther and invented a shadowy thing called “Compuserve”. And if you typed in some special address like thing on your screen, it would connect you to this Compuserve. Once there, you could actually send a message (not a letter) to someone you knew who was also connected to this Compuserve Web place.  And it would be almost like you had typed a letter and had it hand delivered, except you never left your room.

Now this really revolutionized communications around the world, yeah, even more than within your village.  Gradually, you gained the ability to communicate with people very far away, something you might do with those letters, but most people refrained.  In those olden tymes, my wife and I, before we were married, because we lived 3000 miles apart while I was in college, used to put pen to paper and write and send off actual letters daily—yeah, that’s every day.

But back to Compuserve. At the beginning, people used to communicate with other friends, or business colleagues only.  But then, slowly, companies got wind of this thing called the Web.  And they began placing themselves on this Web. Over time, this Web became itself a “place” you might visit.  And why would you visit, “The Web”? Well, slowly, as companies caught onto it, new places formed on this Web, places you could visit, maybe a newspaper, for example. Yeah, the New York Times placed itself on The Web. And then finally, many, many folks, humans, joined this Web thing.  And everyone began using it as a mode of communications, and as a mode for investigating new Web Places, and companies.  Folks began joining things called “E-Mail” services, where, instead of your home address, you could give friends your “E-Mail” address, and they could send you messages instead of letters.

So, then as the Web systems matured, and more entities joined, we had a pretty amazing ability to communicate with one another. We still had the mail system, where postmen hand delivered actual mail to your house, we still had the telephone, and then we had this Web. Then even more amazing, someone developed a device called a “bagphone”. What was that, you might ask? Well, it was actually a telephone, and it sort of looked like the old fashioned telephones, but you carried it around in a bag, and you could actually make a call while driving your car.  Think about that. A phone you could carry with you.

But did we stop there? No, of course not. Those bagphones were too big and too clumsy looking, so folks invented small things first called flip-phones, cuz they could be folded in half so as to fit into your pocket or your purse.  Not to be outdone, someone else invented portable computers that you could carry around with you. Think of that, a computer you could carry with you.

And then computers became big business, and a battle ranged between IBM (remember IBM?) and a place called “Apple”.  At first, IBM produced its computers aimed at business folks, with typing systems, called "Word Perfect”, and a host of other systems aimed at the business folks—math systems, called “spreadsheets”, and systems to build data bases developed.  And then Apple, not to be outdone, began developing their systems with cute games and pictures built in, so as to capture the Kid Vote.  Remember that first graphics system called “Lisa” (not to be confused with the Mona Lisa).

And then, finally, the worlds merged and telephones became computers, where you could still speak with someone, but you could also join that World Wide Web and communicate with the outer world.  

And then communications changed radically. First, most folks stopped writing things called letters. Oh we still had mail hand delivered, but it was now only rarely a communications between two humans. No, slowly, almost all “letters” became commercial transaction entities. Either a company sent you a bill for their services, or a company sent you a request that you join their services, and almost all “mail” became financially oriented—people trying to sell you something, or bill you.  Tell me, please, when was the last time you received an actual personal message from someone you know via the “Mail”?

But then you still had your “E-Mail” right? Well, no, not really. Soon, too soon for some of us, E-Mail transitioned much like the actual mail system. And instead of people sending messages to one another like in those olden tymes,  companies took over.  Now it was not all bad. At one time, I used to get “E-Mails” from news entities, like the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Guardian, The BBC, the (Australian)BC, the (Canadian)BC, something called the Thai-Indian News. And that was nice, cuz I could check in and read the news from all over.  Slowly but surely, most of these commercial news outlets have begun asking for money, so they could continue sending me their news.

And then, the companies wishing I would buy something from them, or somehow become a member began taking over.

Now, not only do I receive almost no actual “Mail”, I get almost no person-to-person “E-Mail”. Nope, it’s all about the money now.  The days of mail as direct communications seem nearly over.  And you might say, well you still have those telephone things right? Well, yeah, but increasingly folks, especially young folks don’t communicate by phone any longer either. They send “Text-Messages”, or they join “Social Media” things called Facebook, or WhatsApp, or Twitter, or TikTok, or any of a dozen others, and they communicate via those systems.  And we only rarely communicate directly any longer.  Now, communications systems are really all about the money, and that may be what has driven younger folks to abandon them and use these other esoteric systems. And that makes me sad, as I daily go through my direct mail, and toss most of it into the trash, because it is no longer from real people. How sad.

The big question is where do we go next, because commerce will surely engulf all of these social media sites, and they too will become useless as communication devices.  Maybe next is some new form of mental brain transmission systems, after Bill Gates finishes placing electronic chips in all of our brains? 

Won’t that be fun?

All About Money

I guess I should test this on other folks, but I have begun to think that almost all direct correspondence is now about money. So, I begin to wonder about the continued utility of these systems.

Let’s see, the US mail system, or maybe mail systems everywhere, operates as a public agency. Use of that service has been declining since about 2001, with about a 43% decline by 2017. Mail services globally have been operating for several thousands of years. By one account, by 3000 BC, Egypt was using homing pigeons for pigeon post, taking advantage of a singular quality of this bird, which when taken far from its nest is able to find its way home due to a particularly developed sense of orientation. Messages were then tied around the legs of the pigeon, which was freed and could reach its original nest.  So, maybe that’s what’s lacking today. Pigeon-mail. I wonder how Mark Zuckerberg would transform that. Or Donald Trump. Think of how he could corrupt Pigeon-mail.  Oh the ways of the wandering con-men.

But, looking at our incoming mail, I would guess that 80% of it is mail aimed at extracting money from us in some way, mostly for charitable purposes.  Whereas, the other 20% . . . oh that’s for extracting money from us also, but via an actual bill for services rendered. Now, most of our bills are paid on-line. Only a couple are paid by a check in exchange for a bill.  Note now, I have accounted for 100% of our direct mail, the stuff delivered by the US Postal Service via an actual mail carrier.  That leaves zero percent for personal mail, you know, things called letters, or even notecards.  Or postcards. Remember postcards? Those things folks used to use to jot down a few notes while traveling to exotic locations and then sending on to you, so as to make you jealous.  I once, not so very long ago, tried to buy some postcards. I had to drive 3-4 miles to a headquarters of our little town’s main office.  And there in their little supply store, they had a few postcards of our downtown. Now, to be fair, I make my own postcards, and my own notecards. I used to sell them when we had real Art Walks, but since we gave up the Art Walks a couple of years ago, I have had no outlet for them.  And mine were at least as good as the official supplier.  But that’s a tale for another day.

The point here is, even if you wanted to send a few postcards, you would have to look long and hard to find any to sell.  Now, for notecards, you need to await Christmas. There, people still go to the trouble to fill out and mail cards. But even here, we note that year after year, our incoming Christmas cards are falling short of the previous year.  And we adapt, of course. We used to send out about 125 Christmas cards to various places around the world each year, fairly steadily. Then, maybe 10 years ago, we began noting that the incoming cards were reducing in number.  Last year, I think we received perhaps 30 cards. Now to be fair, some of that is attributable to the fact that we are aging in place.  And a funny thing happens as you age. People begin dying around you.  So, fewer cards. But even beyond death, we note that people are getting tired of buying and sending cards, and so the number keeps shrinking year by year.

And note that I have not even mentioned letters.  Remember letters?  When I was engaged, in 1954, and away in college, my honey and I would write daily letters to each other.  That was several hundred letters during that year, just two folks in love.  But even later, letters were still common. Within families, siblings and parents and kids would write to one another, just to stay in touch and keep people up to date on what was happening in their lives.  Friends who lived too far away to see on a regular basis would write to one another.  So our mail boxes, if not full each day, at least contained some personal letters on a routine basis.  Your normal mailbox would have one or two personal letters, and several bills for services rendered. If you were of the right age at the right time, you even received an official notice from your friendly neighborhood government, that your services might be required for military service . . . unless you had bonespurs of course.

Now such personal correspondence continued until maybe the mid to late 1980s.  And then . . . personal computers entered our world.  Now computers had been within our world for quite some time. I still remember carrying out a study of engineering manpower within the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in about 1960. We collected data on workload in an attempt to determine what triggered the need for manpower increases or decreases, a classic industrial engineering study. And, having collected the data, we then entered the data onto punch cards, and then took the punch card stock into an office in downtown San Francisco, where we entered the data via the punch cards into an IBM 350 computer. That computer was the size of a large room. And we worked til the wee hours with that computer grinding away on the data we had supplied.

But that was then. Then, during the 1980s I worked for a time in Government, running an evaluation office in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. We also carried out large scale computer analyses using large mainframe computers of the IBM 350 ilk. We would send the data via phone circuitry to the mainframes at NIH, and then receive our analytic output back on paper stock.  But then, during the mid-1980s, we discovered the world of personal computers. Both IBM and Apple began producing personal computers. Apple produced a thing called the Apple II, and IBM began producing an IBM-PCXT. The Apple was a kind of cute toy, but the IBM was a more serious business model.  It had a hard drive, with, gasp, a ten megabyte capacity (can you imagine, ten megabytes??).  And the PC had an internal memory of 64K - 640 KB. Wow, huh?

But that’s an aside. Mainly, what I began seeing was other ways to communicate with people.  There was no Internet as we know it today, no Facebook, not even any formal e-mail. But there was something called CompuServe.  CompuServe operated something called “Chat Lines”, which were little systems you could call into and then chat via your PC with people you knew.  I used them initially to “chat” with other consultants with whom I worked.  But that was in the 1980s. Slowly, of course, the PC became ubiquitous, and became larger in capacity if not in physical size. And then the systems whereby we communicated using these PCs began to arrive and to grow in popularity.

I think initially, the PC had only a modest effect on the US mail system, perhaps into the 1990s, after which the world really did begin to change its paper practices.  I imagine one of the first things to go was the personal letter, replaced by the phone of course, but mainly by e-mail. Email actually was developed in the early 1970s, using something called ARPANET. But that quaint system changed when restrictions on carrying commercial traffic over the Internet were dropped, and e-mail began expanding rapidly during the mid-1990s.  Soon, virtually everyone was using e-mail, and paper systems began reducing.

It is interesting to me that as paper communications began diminishing, giving way to electronics, the latter, electronic systems took hold only for a brief period.  Considering that mankind had been writing and sending things called letters for a couple of centuries at least, I might have expected the electronic systems—E-Mail—to last a bit longer. Now, to be fair, E-Mail still exists, so we have maybe a 35-40 year history. But really, what has begun happening is that formal communications between people in that tradition of informing people we know what is happening in our lives seems to be diminishing and headed out the door.  I still receive E-Mails daily of course. But now I note that perhaps 95% of my E-Mail is from people who want money from me. That is, solicitations, mainly from charitable organizations, rarely arrive by regular mail, but instead arrive via E-Mail. And the occasional bill for some service also arrives via-E-Mail, instead of regular mail.  Now we continue to receive regular mail, mainly solicitations for donations, but now our E-Mail is a duplicate for those communications, sometimes from the same people.  We also get both by E-Mail and regular mail solicitations for services in which we have no interest—they may be scams but I prefer to call them unsolicited service inquiries.  The true scams seem to have moved permanently to the telephone system. Again, I receive maybe a half dozen telephone calls per day, of which ¾ are from some scam caller trying to sell me some service that might be real, or more likely a fake on the Donald Trump model.

So, now, virtually all communications directed at me or my wife seem to be about money, and some method of extracting our money for services we do not wish to receive and have not requested.  It’s now all about the money.  Virtually the only non-money communications we receive are either text messages, or commentaries of some sort on postings we introduce on social media.  And I note that even text messages are beginning to contain scams about money, i.e., trying to sell me a service I did not request.

And it all makes me wonder what happened to human communications. Do people simply no longer communicate with folks they do not see on a daily basis?  And are all formal communications now consigned to the waste bin because they are all about money—extracting money from me? And if so, when will those systems begin disappearing? I wonder especially about the US Postal Service.  It currently employs over 600,000 people. And Trump wants to disappear the Service and privatize it. Unless we succeed in Dumping the Trump, we may well have no postal service within a year at best.  And that would be sad. But, on the other hand, since no one writes any longer, and most financial transactions are now electronic, do we actually need a US Postal Service, public or private?

And are we then all about to retreat into a little world of our own making, in which we no longer communicate with the outside world? And what kind of world is that—a one-way communications system of radio and TV, in which we no longer participate except as a passive listener. I fear that will be an unhappy world at best.  But I fail to see in what way we could begin improving from that sorry state. But perhaps that's for another day. 

Money

So, is money really the root of all evil? I’ve been thinking for a long time that organized religion played at least an equal share of the evil-mongering in our old and battered world.  Still, money has to be high on anyone’s list.  Daily, I read about some ne’er-do-well, principally Donald Trump, but he shares the platform with many folks from our large financial community.  When he announced boldly to the world that he was scheduling the next G7 summit meeting at his Doral golf resort in Miami, I, like many, was aghast at the boldness of his gesture. He apparently thinks that emoluments ban does not apply to him.

But Trump really is emblematic of the world of finance, where moral principles seem lacking in their entirety.  Money really does seem to drive many if not most folks into the dark side.

So, what do I think about money? Well, I haven’t enough of it for starters. And that’s largely my fault.  Short of simply inheriting a lot of money (see Trump), you have to work away at it if you wish to wind up with a lot of money, or even enough of it to live comfortably.  I worked often, it would seem, at odds with the money acquisition thing for a good part of my working life.  I am even aware of specific mistakes I made that contributed to our current modest means.  But is money that important? Well, yes, it really is, even though many of us remain oblivious to that simple fact.

I grew up in Manhattan as a young kid, with a largely one wage-earning parent, my Mother. And Daisy, bless her heart, was not well equipped to that task. She had at best a modest education, high school, but she somehow acquired some talent in the bookkeeping field.  Because our father was missing in action most of the time, Daisy had to take over as the primary money overseer. Because of the War (WW II, the last “Good War”), she was able to acquire a job as a bookkeeper at a naval architect firm in New York. She earned enough money to keep us in food and a relatively decent apartment in midtown Manhattan. It wasn’t fancy, but it was ok for the three kids and Daisy.

But that life experience grounded me in the lifestyle of the low-income set.  Oddly, the near absence of money did not create a brain-marker about money. Instead, it caused me to almost never think about money. And, you might think, “Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it?” I suppose it might be, but if one wishes to live a life in which money is not an ever-present threat to your existence, then some thinking about money is useful.

So, growing up, even into my teen years, money was nearly always an issue, just out of sight. Because of the absence of money, I, like my buddies, began working at a relatively early age, outside of school. For example, I began babysitting for my nephew and nieces at about the age of 10. I earned 25 cents for an evening. When I started into high school, summer jobs began as a natural course of events. My first summer job was working on a neighborhood family farm, The Katt’s Farm in New City, NY. I worked 54 hours a week and earned 50 cents an hour, so $27/week. Not bad for a little kid.  That summer I earned a few hundred dollars, enough to carry me through the school year. Again, that was my only source of money. Daisy could not afford kid-allowances.  Other summer jobs, as my school years continued were the farm gig, working at the county schools with the maintenance staff, to get the schools ready for the next Fall term, working with a gas company, digging ditches, and working as a lifeguard at our community lake.

And then the college thing became an image in my head. Again, nobody in my family had gone beyond high school. But I had a really bright and aggressive brother. He decided on his own that he was, by God, headed for college. He couldn’t afford college, since, again, the family had no spare money. But it did not matter to Bill. He was going anyway.  And how did he pay for his college? Well, he was accepted at Long Island University, and he managed to get a job at a company near the school in Long Island. So, he worked full time and went to school full time.

And why was that important? Well, your ability to get a job earning a good income over your whole career, depended in part on your credentials. A college degree (in chemistry in Bill’s case) would go a long way to guaranteeing him access to a well-paying professional career position.  Now here is where we move into a complex arena of ideas.  How can one best prepare for a career that provides a measure of stability, reasonable earnings potential, and enough interest satisfaction to make working at least acceptable? Generally, there are two paths: 1) college; and, 2) the trades. But both paths require education/training, generally beyond high school.  Generally, a high school diploma does not provide an adequate foundation for a working career with a satisfactory income potential.  The various Trade Schools may not equip you to earn a Wall Street Gambler’s income, or a Doctor or Lawyer income, but it still provides a recognized skill set, and that mostly is enough to provide a decent living wage for a career. Finishing high school generally does not so provide.

And, following in my brother’s footsteps, I also decided on college. And I also could not afford college, but I went anyway, in my case to Stanford. In case you are interested, Stanford cost me, in 1952, $1300/year total for tuition and room and board, increasing to $1500 for the last two years. Not bad. I managed to acquire student loans, and got a couple of loans from my sister, such that I graduated with a BS in Industrial Engineering and a total student debt of $2500. My first job, as a flight test engineer on the Corporal Guided Missile program, was $5100/year. So, again, not bad.

I managed to get another job as an engineer on the Polaris Missile program at Lockheed in Sunnyvale, California (pre-Silicon Valley days). Then I got hired away as a consultant to work on aerospace planning and control systems. I made reasonable money, but still not enough to guarantee me a fancy retirement.  Then I was selected to go to India as a consultant to transfer those aerospace planning and control concepts to Indian public sector programs.  After four years, we had some savings and a hankering for more international work. When we moved back home, we wanted to go abroad again. I applied for and received an offer from The World bank. Then, as I let my company know about that offer, they invited me to come to New York City to talk with a partner about a new adventure with the firm. They were going to expand their international practice and wanted me to help them. Enter my first large mistake. I believed them and turned down the World Bank. We moved to Washington, I made a few trips to exotic locations –Saudi Arabia for example—but then I discovered that the firm was never really serious about the international thing. They had basically lied to me, and then forced me back into the domestic practice.  So, I found myself making ok money, but doing work in which I had little interest. Then another company offered me a job to work on their international practice.  I accepted immediately.

After about two years, it became clear that this small consulting company, however hard they were trying, were slowly going under from lack of business and a salary debt load too high. So, we disbanded. Again, the company had misled me, and I was simply too naïve to understand.

Then came a few interesting jobs, a stint in the government under St. Ronald of Reagan, and finally, in desperation –to avoid going braindead working for Reagan—I set up in my own consulting practice.

In that practice, I made a decent income, and even managed to establish a retirement portfolio, with the guidance of my accountant.  And then I retired.  And then almost immediately, we had a stock market crash (the year was 2000). That hit our retirement portfolio badly. So we struggled along, and then came the 2008 stock market crash. Totally, I estimate that we lost perhaps 35-40% of our retirement investments.

This is a long-winded explanation for why we wound up with less annual retirement income than Donald Trump. And most of the deficit is because I did not pay proper obeisance to the God of Money while I was working.  It turns out that money is important, evil perhaps, but important nonetheless.

The key issue is not how much you make annually during your working career. In my case, I had a decent income throughout my career. No, the key issue is how much you can salt away for your retirement years. It is as though the only reason you work is to put enough money in the bank to support your desired lifestyle when you no longer work.  And many, perhaps most of us pay insufficient attention to that little matter.  It is almost as though you are not supposed to worry your little head about that retirement thing. No, instead you must focus on working at your chosen career job. Keep your eyes on the prize, but without ever deciding that the prize is in fact a decent retirement.

And now, I look around me on a daily basis at the folks who are driven by money—not just Trump, but an entire world of people who engage themselves in the business of bilking the world out of its cash.  And I realize that actual evil is being done on a daily basis in the pursuit of money.  And that it really is true that money (and religion) are the twin roots of all evil. It is not even clear to me that there is anything seriously different about the two pursuits. Money causes people to commit unconscionable acts, but so does religion. They both involve mind control, and they both result in damaging other peoples’ lives.  It is not the case, obviously, that everyone involved in finance, or everyone involved in religion are evil, or operate so as to damage other people. It is true, however, that a very large number of people do fall into those categories, and do damage other peoples’ lives.

I look at companies that routinely hire people on less than a full-time basis, so that they do not have to pay benefits, including health care and retirement. And I think, those companies practice evil.

And I think about FDR moving into the world and getting legislation passed, called Social Security that at least paid some attention to this little retirement thingie.  Good thing for us.  But Republicans really hate this Social Security and this Medicare things, because, a) they are wildly successful, and b) they were passed into law by Democrats.  Republicans have always been about money . . . for themselves.   But they really hate it when democrats do something that benefits the public financially.

And so, we continue to need Social Security. It is a wall keeping the bankruptcy gods at bay. But it is not enough. And as the separation grows between the folks who have modest and sub-modest incomes, and the folks who, like The Donald, have increasingly extravagant, grotesque even,  incomes, it occurs to me that we need to do three things:

Thing 1: We need to return to a taxation system that heavily taxes the uber-rich. Remember the old days when tax rates of 92% for very high incomes were in place? We need to return to those days. And we need to use the funds from such a system to both reduce our national debt (republicans do so hate to pay off their public debts), and we need to increase our contributions to Social Security.

Thing 2: We need to focus the American people’s awareness of the need to begin at an early age to save and invest in their elder years. Part of this awareness must be a focus on education and training. Public education must be more heavily supported, and should include a focus on actually preparing people to earn enough money so that they can support themselves after they finish their working lives.  I know, I know. When you are 20, the end of your working life is so far away that it does not even seem to exist. But exist it does, and somehow, we need to make people aware of that fact.

And I am not suggesting here that we train everyone to work as stock brokers, or to engage as our president in Ponzi schemes, or other con jobs (think Trump University), but that they need to understand money better, its role in the world, and in their lives. It isn’t a good or bad thing. It is, more simply, an existential thing. The need for money is ever present. People need to be trained in its management.

Thing 3: As the world of high finance has expanded, creating mega-billionaires (does the world really need Billionaires?), another world has been created—new systems by which the super wealthy hide money. We need to begin focusing on new ways and systems to minimize or even eliminate the hiding places. The world of high finance now includes a focus on how to hide income, by moving it to hidden locations, or by falsely reporting income (see Donald Trump). We need a new focus on those systems, and perhaps even a global system to begin recapturing such hidden wealth. 

And so there, a new project for thinking adults to focus on, while they salt away their billions for a nice retirement.