He Used To Say Light Up The Oven

I used to know a guy who would throw his hands up in the air when provoked in a certain way and exclaim: “Light up the oven!” This habit deeply puzzled the people that met him for the first time because as you can imagine, they did not understand what he meant. They would ask why he who is a Jew was advocating the cremation of Jews in a manner that was reminiscent of the worst moments of the Holocaust. And he would explain that he was not advocating such a thing but was merely pointing out that the self appointed leaders of the Jews did something dumb. His aim was to warn that this sort of behavior will inevitably lead to the lighting up of the ovens and the holocausting of Jews like it used to happen in the bad old days.

A situation that would have irritated my Jewish acquaintance seriously enough to make him exclaim those words would be the reading of Tom Gross’s article in the December 3, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal. The article was published under the title: “Building Peace Without Obama’s Interference” and the subtitle: “A promising, Independent Palestine is quietly being developed, with Israeli assistance.” Had you been around my friend long enough to pick up his habit, and had you been reading the Tom Gross article, you too would have been provoked enough to throw your hands up in the air and exclaim: “Light up the oven!”

When you read this article you are hit in the face several times by statements that clearly show this man has reached a level of insanity equal only to the insanity of the editors who look for and run this sort of articles. But the hardest of the hits will have come because of an omission that was so glaring you could only despair at the inability of some people to cease doing the things that provoke violent responses from their fellow human beings. Let me explain. Like the title of the article indicates, the discussion is supposed to be about peace. And like the subtitle indicates, it is supposed to be about Palestine. Yet, the glaring thing is that not once in the article is there mention of how the Palestinian people want to see peace achieved. Instead, the article perpetuates the fantasy that the Palestinians feel good under Israeli occupation because they get “Israeli assistance” in one area of their existence or another. Tom Gross then warns, albeit in a subtle manner, that this newly developed relationship between the Palestinians and the Israelis may come to an end as a result of Obama’s interference.

Tom Gross begins the article this way: “It is difficult to turn on a TV … without finding some pundit … deploring the … dreadful living conditions of the Palestinians … Very little is changing for the Palestinian people on the ground, I heard [the] BBC … tell listeners three times in a 45 minute period the other evening …I had spent that day in the West Bank's largest city, Nablus … The city is bursting with energy, life and signs of prosperity, in a way I have not previously seen in many years of covering the region.” Further down the article, Tom Gross tells which day that was: “In Gaza too, the shops and markets are crammed with food and goods. But while photos from last Friday's Palestine Today newspaper, for example, depict sumptuous Eid celebrations, these are not the pictures you are ever likely to see on the BBC…”

So here it is, after many years of covering the region during which time he admits seeing what the BBC said the place looked like, Tom Gross now complains that the network has failed to mention that on one special day the Palestinians were determined to forget all their troubles so as to celebrate the festival of Eid, their most important religious holiday. Standing on this shaky ground, he then asserts that peace can come to Palestine if only Obama stopped interfering with a process that has the Israelis assist the Palestinians to plant strawberries. Of course as you would expect, Gross does not mention the fact that without the Palestinian farmer, the Jews of Israel would look like walking skeletons because they would be condemned to live on a mere 1000 calories a day which is all that their farmers manage to produce locally.

This is what the invaders who now call themselves Israelis did to the ancient Palestinian land of Milk and Honey which became the Palestinian portion of the Fertile Crescent which is now the land of Israeli desolation and toxic waste. And only when the Israelis were able to secure food assistance from Jordan, Egypt, Turkey and Lebanon (sometimes paid for by the Americans and sometimes by borrowed money guaranteed by America) did they begin to destroy what was left of the farms of Palestine which used to feed them almost free of charge. And to show the world how hideous they can be, they committed their wanton destruction by building an apartheid wall over and around the most fertile of those lands. Now this guy, Tom the grotesque, says that the Israelis are going to help the Palestinians do something that the latter have been doing better than anyone for thousands of years. Who is he kidding? Or must it again be: Light up the oven!

Anyone that has studied the modes of operation used by the Jewish leaders in Israel and in America will see right away that the Tom Gross article is but a continuation of the way that the Jewish organizations have been doing things for many decades now. Their aim is to get as much as they can from America so as to continue the occupation of Palestine, to ethnically cleanse the territory and to eventually annex it to Israel. In the meantime, they do everything they can to quash the possibility that what they receive may come with strings attached. Indeed, they want unlimited amounts of money, weapons, diplomatic backing and the exercise of the American veto in the Security Council to cover up the crimes they commit against humanity but they do not want the checks and balances that would temper their misuse of American largess.

Look how Gross ends the article: “Israelis and Palestinians may never agree on borders ... Not all Germans and French agree who should control Alsace Lorraine. Poles and Russians, Slovenes and Croats, Britons and Irish, and peoples all over the world, have border disputes. But that doesn't keep them from coexisting with one another...” Thus, when you read the entire article and you see this ending, you ask: How is it that the man reaches these conclusions? You then remember that he already answered the question so you back up a few paragraphs and reread this passage: “And perhaps most importantly of all, we had driven from Jerusalem to Nablus without going through any Israeli checkpoints …There was one border post on the return leg of the journey, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, but the young female guard just waved me and the two Palestinians I was traveling with, through.”

What he is saying here is that because on the day of the Eid festival the Israelis had relaxed the afflictions of the occupation, we must now believe that the Palestinians can be made to accept that their relationship with the Israelis is comparable to that which exists between the Germans and the French, the Britons and the Irish, and so on. It is clear from this that what Gross and those like him are incapable of grasping – perhaps because they are endowed with an inferior IQ -- is that such relationships exist between sovereign peoples where both sides accept the relationship because each side gets to be treated as the equal of the other. In drawing the moral equivalence between this relationship and the sort that exists between an occupying power and an occupied people such as it exists between Israel and Palestine, Tom Gross is saying something profoundly ugly. He is saying the thing that would make you throw your hands up in the air and exclaim: Light up the oven!

Indeed, on behalf of Israel and the Jewish organizations, Tom Gross and the Journal are saying that the Palestinians must accept the Israeli occupation as something normal because all that they can aspire to be is second class human beings. The border post on the outskirts of Jerusalem which was mentioned in the article was only manned at the Israeli side and not at both sides which would be the case if the two peoples were treated equally. But this is how Gross and the grotesque Journal that purports to cater to Wall Street want to keep things. Then, they turn around and urge the world to embrace this ugly reality and feel good about it because they claim that the Palestinians have so miraculously come to accept it. Did Obama’s interference cause this miracle? They don’t say so. And when you add to their sick delusion the empirical observation that when they begin something, it is always the first step on a slippery slope that ends with the oven being lit up to take in the Jews, you realize that a holocaust is quietly being fashioned that will consume not only the Jews but many others around the world.

What do Gross, Israel, the Jewish organizations and the Wall Street Journal recommend in the final analysis? In fact, they do more than recommend something; they assert the recommendation forcefully like this: “The truth is that an independent Palestine is now quietly being built, with Israeli assistance. So long as the Obama administration and European politicians don't clumsily meddle as they have in the past and make unrealistic demands for the process to be completed more quickly than it can be, I am confident the outcome will be a positive one.”

You can be certain that neither Tom Gross nor anyone believes a word of this. The history of the region and that of the world negate a positive outcome to a situation where one people occupy another. And no one, however challenged he or she may be, are ignorant of this fact. But this deception is designed to achieve the criminal outcome of ethnically cleansing Palestine and handing it to anyone who converts to what they fraudulently call the Jewish religion. Achieving their dream may be a positive outcome in the eyes of those who cannot live without provoking a holocaust but it is an ugly crime in the eyes of a world that is trying desperately to prevent the eruption of one. Please, do not provoke the lighting of the oven again; the human race cannot stomach another one of these episodes.

Merry Christmas and a happy new year to everyone. See you next year.

Moral Clarity To Stun George Orwell

The Brits are conducting an inquiry these days at the start of which a cat that was not well tucked into the sack was let out of the bag at long last. This was the great big secret that everyone knew existed even as those who were in charge of keeping it hidden were denying its existence. Here is the famous secret: Moments after Uncle Sam was kicked in the testicles by the kids he trained and equipped to chase the Soviets out of Afghanistan only to abandon them after they had accomplished their mission, that same uncle turned to the Jewish organizations in New York and Tel Aviv, and took orders from them as to what to do next.

Like masters, the Jewish leaders instructed the foolish uncle to stand for moral clarity in the style of the Talmud and to go kill Iraqis in their bedrooms and their underground shelters instead of dealing with the disgruntled kids he double-crossed in Afghanistan. And guess what happened next! You got it; the said uncle did exactly as instructed. And long before he was finished with the pathetic performance for which he took instructions, he stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier and congratulated himself as if he had accomplished some kind of a noble mission. Of course, he could not explain what exactly he had done because he had no clue what the mission was in the first place as he was totally confused about it. How confused was that? Well, there is an expression in twenty-first Century colloquial North-American English to describe such a situation. It goes like this: He did not know the difference between the mission and a hole in his anatomy. I let you imagine the rest.

George Orwell had a great deal to say about this sort of logic and that kind of behavior. For the readers who may be interested, the most telling of his addresses to humanity is contained in a novel he published in 1945 under the title “Animal Farm”. The novel was meant to serve as an allegory reflecting what Orwell surmised was going on inside the Soviet Union at the time with regard to the logic that animated the communist leaders in the Kremlin and their behavior on the world stage.

In the novel, the pigs overpower the drunken Mr. Jones. They kick him out of his farm, take control of it and put down 7 commandments to guide the other animals as to the principles of Animalism. These principles stand in contrast to Humanism which has come to symbolize human tyranny now considered to be the arch enemy of the animals. But when the exercise of power begins to corrupt the pigs who now rule the farm, and when they start to behave as badly as the humans did in their treatment of the other animals, the pigs find it convenient to amend the commandments so as to bring them in line with the tyranny they brought back to the farm and to justify it. The pigs continue to amend the commandments to keep up with the changing conditions on the farm but when they realize they cannot carry on with this charade much longer, they do away with the commandments altogether and replace them with the all encompassing dictum: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

The Jewish organizations too put down 7 commandments and handed them to Uncle Sam for enforcement. They are as follows:

Israel shall remain armed to the teeth at all time
No one in the region can be armed anywhere near adequate
Israel shall possess WMD and never declare them
No one in the region can posses WMD whether declared or not
Israel shall threaten to wipe out a neighbor or wipe them all out
No one can speak ill of Israel and stay in one piece
American suckers shall go broke and die enforcing these laws

But how does America translate such laws into policy?

Well, America is governed by a generation that was handed a country which was built into a lovable giant by the older generations. The nation used to be number one in agriculture, industry, commerce, technological innovation, scientific research and many other fields. The country had wealth and a high rate of savings that turned it into a creditor nation to the world. It was respected and consulted in every field of human endeavor by almost everyone on the planet. As a result, America had a military industrial complex that was second to none and a military that did not fight battles to win them because it could win without firing a shot.

Standing on this legacy, using the veto at the Security Council of the United Nations, exploiting its good standing to borrow from the Asians even as the country was going bankrupt and flexing its muscles to coerce the smaller nations, America managed to keep Israel afloat while suppressing every nation in the region that tried to raise its head above a level considered too high for Israel’s comfort.

And while this was going on, the Israelis used the most advanced of the American made smart bombs together with the planes and the helicopters that carried them, and they committed their usual crimes against humanity almost on a daily basis. They pinpointed the Palestinian women and children in their bedrooms, which the American weapons allowed them to do, and they blew them up in the middle of the night. This generated the material that fed the morning media in America which, in turn, recounted the gory stories to their audiences. And this type of stories made the Jewish leaders fantasize about an American population that danced in the streets before going to work and danced on its way there to celebrate the glory of Israel.

But the reality is that the ordinary people in America, like their counterparts everywhere, are never impressed with this Talmudic show of satanic horror. The only people that were impressed with Israel’s use of American weaponry were those in power and wished to hang on to it, and those who aspired to be in power and believed that the Jewish organizations will put them there if they kissed enough rear ends and did so with passion. Someone like the shameless Sarah Palin, for example, had the gall to go on television and congratulate the President for saying something good about Israel at one time but chided him for not saying it with enough passion. Make this woman commander-in-chief of the American armed forces -- which she wants to be -- and she will live and work for one purpose only: the pleasure of getting up in the morning to vacuum-kiss Jewish rear ends for breakfast. She might even invite the chiefs of staff of the American military to join her at the table and have their fill of koshered stuff before heading to the Pentagon and scheme to help destroy Israel’s neighbors or at least weaken them.

How did the Jewish organizations manage to fashion a soul that is as horribly disfigured as that of Sarah Palin? Well, to do this sort of thing, you must have a long term strategy and a bag of short term tactics. Let’s talk about the strategy. You accumulate four thousand years of experience with a litany of trial-and-error examples, some of which worked and some of which failed. When ready to start a new adventure, you take into account the fact that every epoch and every place have their peculiarities thus, you play the game with some flexibility as you keep adapting to the changing circumstances, and you emulate the examples that worked in the past. In the English speaking world, the best way to play the game is to do the sort of thing that would have stunned George Orwell, the thing that would make him turn in his grave.

For example, the Jewish organizations began their conquest of the English speaking world by “educating” the public and by “sensitizing” it to the effect that to criticize anything Jewish or Israeli was to be anti-Semitic. This meant that the culprit who would engage in such criticism would be calling for a holocaust that would do away with Jews in a final solution that would be truly final. At the same time, the organizations practiced the Yiddish discourse which consists of destroying by character assassination the people they want to see eliminated. This is easy to do when you are fluent in Yiddish because the language is not really a language but a dictionary of defaming invectives. Actually, you do not even have to speak Yiddish, you can only be familiar with the culture and you’ll do fine.

The leaders of the Jewish organizations practiced that discourse sometimes with humor, sometimes tongue-in-cheek and sometimes with deadly seriousness; all of which had the effect of confusing the public as to how it could push back against a situation that sickened it no end. Thus, at the end of the day, the net result of the drive to educate and to sensitize the public was that everyone who had the knowledge and the talent to criticize Israel was kept out of the English media while everyone who would kiss Jewish rear ends and support Israel was taken into the fold whether or not they had any talent.

And this was not all. While securing control of the media, the Jewish leaders accumulated the dirt on the Christian leaders of the televised church and a number of other personalities who were in the public eye. Letting all these people know they had the dirt on them, they blackmailed them into making it their preoccupation to go out and preach the Jewish narrative of boosting the splendors of Israel. To this end, they made them recite the talking points that flaunted the accomplishments of Israel however phony they were, and the worthiness of the Jewish causes however fraudulent they were. They got the church leaders to say that the Jews are gods who should be worshiped like Jesus. And they got the other personalities to sing the praises of Israel at the same time as they showered her enemies with demagogic fabrications that suited the moment. And to make it all look like it came from the heart -- or a foot below that -- they lit up a fire in the bellies of those characters before letting them go out and spread the new gospel; which they did with a passion that must have pleased the likes of Sarah Palin.

Let’s now talk about the tactics.

In every discussion they had, the Jewish leaders soft-pedaled the point that Jews must not be compared with someone else; and Israel must not be compared with another country. With this, they advanced the subtle point that Jews stand apart from everyone, and Israel stands apart from everything. When this is soaked in, which it always does by the force of incessant repetition, the audience is conditioned to accept the proposition that there is never a moral equivalence between what Israel does and what someone else does. Thus, Israel can commit any crime that someone else would commit but Israel can never be held accountable for the crime in the same way that someone else would be. In fact, one of the Jewish leaders made this assertion sometime ago and neither he nor they ever retracted it. “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” Now you know why George Orwell keeps turning in his grave.

Furthermore, because any possibility of a push back against this sort of atrocious logic was eliminated beforehand, the Jewish leaders could proceed to cement the notion that Israel has the right to defend itself on the mere suspicion that it may be attacked. It can do so by launching what it calls a pre-emptive strike against anyone with or without notice because the best defense is a good offense. And when Israel does it, the Jewish leaders fantasize about seeing the Americans dance in the street on their way to work to celebrate the glory of Israel.

Knowing all of this, it is now easy to understand how the Jewish leaders managed to get the American officials to judge the conduct of everyone on the planet and to ask for punitive action where they believe malfeasance was committed at the same time as they block the world from judging the conduct of Israel such as it happens all the time but more specifically as it happened with the Goldstone report which awaits being sent to the Security Council. Once again “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

Now, listen to me America; you are making a big mistake taking ownership of Israel’s criminal activities. And remember this; believing that your finances were limitless you went bankrupt backing Israel’s every political and economic whim for decades. Likewise, believing that your moral standing is unshakable, you will soon find yourself in league with the likes of Pol Pot and other mass murderers if you continue to interchange your values with those of Israel or you merge them with those of the Jewish organizations whose only objective is to ethnically cleanse all of Palestine and to colonize it.

I say to you, America: Back off; you don’t have much left that can be used to boost the fake glory of Israel or to support the fraudulent Jewish causes. It is time that Israel and the Jews do what everyone does which is to win the respect and the affection of their neighbors and all human beings by dealing with people the way that ordinary humans do, not the way that the fake gods or the true disciples of Satan do.

And this is the sort of moral clarity that will let George Orwell rest in peace at long last.

Taking The Plunge Into Renaissance

If, as a nation, you are already at the leading edge of knowledge, culture and industry, and if the right conditions come together and give you a sudden upward lift that is unprecedented in scope and intensity, you will most likely experience a renaissance that will prompt you to score spectacular advances in all fields of human development. For centuries after that, you will create and build signposts that will forever bear testimony to your accomplishments and speak of your contribution to world Civilization.

Your growth up to the time of the renaissance will have been a natural organic growth, and the construct of your culture will have been a solid one as a result. The renaissance itself will have happened as a consequence of the advances made up to the time that it appeared; and when it takes hold and solidifies, its effect will be felt throughout the culture of which it will soon become an integral part. In due course the renaissance will help the culture to crystallize into a construct that will come to be recognized as a full fledged civilization. In fact, this has been the historical record of the European nations in the cycle that began in the Middle Ages and culminated with the Renaissance that bloomed to become Western Civilization, a force that took on the dominant civilizations of the time and overwhelmed them.

If, on the other hand, time has passed you by and you find yourself to be underdeveloped compared to the other nations despite what you may have accomplished in the past, you have much work to do to rise again and take your place under the sun. For one thing, you can provoke a long march toward an artificial renaissance aimed at catching up with those ahead of you. And to succeed in this, you will have to implement a plan that will allow you to make advances in every field of human endeavor and thus rise to a great height one step at a time.

Indeed, if you were underdeveloped by the time the Twentieth Century had come around, it is likely that you have provoked an artificial renaissance already. But let it be known that the growth you may have simulated was by no means an organic one. Unless you succeeded in closely mimicking the organic growth of the developed nations, your own development will have been less than perfect and would have created mismatches that resonated throughout the culture and spilled over to the rest of the world. In fact, this has been the case with most of the developing nations in Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and South America where they experienced bouts of fits and starts as they ironed out their mismatches.

Despite all of that, however, the worldwide situation remained manageable till such time that the unintended consequence appeared out of nowhere to remind us that we cannot predict the march of history before things happen. And what happened was that the advanced nations, known collectively as the West, woke up one day to realize that by using a quirk of the economic system created by them, the developing nations were putting them out of business one trade at a time. And this is the situation in which we find ourselves today, a situation that has implications serious enough to cry out for attention. The predicament in which we are is real because the world has been flattened by modern technology and because everyone’s interest has become intertwined with everyone else’s interest. To paraphrase the metaphors and to mix them, we find ourselves in the same boat ready to sail together or drown separately.

And this interdependence is what exploded the economic crisis of the year 2008; an event that some people had predicted but no one had imagined would be this severe and this widespread. Luckily, the central bankers in the West had learned the lesson of eight decades previous to that and they succeeded in stabilizing their economies. They pulled away from the precipice that would have taken them down a second great depression while the other economies of the world managed to come back to life in record time.

So then, where do we go from here? The short answer is that the world economy needs to be overhauled and that everyone needs to get on with their moment of renaissance. The developing nations know what they must do and they are doing it. If anything, they tend to go overboard doing the right thing and they should be told politely but firmly that they need to restrain themselves when challenging the Western economies which are still fragile. As for the latter, the European part of those economies had begun a program of sustained growth before the crisis; and they may have to modify it in order to continue muddling through till the developing nations develop enough to stop throwing cheap goods at them.

The hard core problem that remains is the United States of America. This is a nation that has existed in a perpetual cycle of renaissance due to its history. First, the Natives were slaughtered and their wealth looted; a lucrative business by any measure except the moral one. Then, slave labor and capital were brought to America to fuel the agrarian economy. Then, immigration caused by famine elsewhere in the world brought skilled labor and new capital to build the infrastructure of the modern industrial economy. Then the great wars of Europe brought in more capital along with the entrepreneurs, scientists and thinkers of all kind that catapulted the country to the status of a superpower, rivaled for a period by the Soviet Union then by no one.

It was this history that sustained America’s uninterrupted growth throughout the centuries. However, the growth was a useful development in many ways but useless and dangerous in a few other ways; and this is what planted the seeds for America’s current woes. Indeed, no longer is there a native population to slaughter and to loot. What is left of these people is an impoverished group sitting on a land that hides very little in mineral resources. Also, no longer are slaves brought into the country to pick cotton or to man the sweat shops where the cotton and the other fibers are made into garments. And no longer are there skilled laborers or highly educated individuals desperate to go to America by the boat load as it used to be. If anything, there is a reverse brain drain which takes people back to their countries of origin where they see better opportunities to raise a family.

And while the population of those who do things in America is diminishing, the population of those who do little or nothing is increasing. These are the youngsters who live and loiter in the inner cities; those who have little or no education, no skill, no job history and no hope of ever joining the regular economy. Aside from this group, there are the people who already committed more than their share in the realm of crime. They sit in the jails of the nation looked after by the state at a very high cost to the taxpayers. It is therefore clear that America’s moment of renaissance will have to touch on all these areas simultaneously or there will be no renaissance in that country. And this would be a serious occurrence given that the rest of the world is moving toward a global arrangement where everyone will have a place under the sun.

What should America do?

It has been said that America’s political genius comes to the fore at election time because the people always choose the mix of candidates that suits the moment from among those who run for office. If this is true, then the election of Mr. Barack Obama as President must have had a purpose, and the message of the people must be that the biracial community organizer they have elected holds the key to America’s salvation.

If so, what this man should do for America is take the big risk and plunge into a multi-layered plan that will embrace renaissance in all its elements. The plan will have a long term objective requiring a mid term objective to be completed which, in turn, will require a short term objective to move forward. The work will proceed at all levels simultaneously and make visible progress on a weekly if not daily basis. It will be a massive project that will start immediately and take as much as a generation to complete. And it will be a project that the whole nation will be happy to rally around and be a part of.

The President will start the ball rolling with a prime time address to the nation in which he will make the following points:

1 - We shall build a society in which our wellbeing will no longer depend on the importation of geniuses, hard working or well motivated people from abroad to fuel our economy. Our own schools will produce such geniuses and our society will provide the reason to motivate them.

2 - We shall accomplish all this by repealing the government subsidies that build bridges to nowhere and factories that turn wholesome food into fuels that harm the environment and ruin the economy. We shall also refrain from getting involved in costly and deadly foreign adventures. And we shall use the money saved to implement the programs which will encourage the development of a local talent that can imagine a sustainable economy and can build it from scratch.

3 - Because the repeal of a subsidy always hurts the state and the district to which it was going, we will make sure that every state will gain as much as it loses. In fact, we shall ask the senators, the house representatives and the governor of every state to participate in the decisions that will determine how the old should be phased out and the new phase in.

4 - We shall continue to adhere to the principle of free trade with foreign nations, and to the principle of a minimum wage at home but we shall take another look at both so as to refine them and make them work better for everyone.

5 - With regard to free trade, we no longer subscribe to the winner-take-all quirk that some people worship as an economic philosophy. On the contrary, we consider it essential that every nation be given the right to protect certain sectors of its economy up to a negotiated level so as to safeguard national security or to maintain the cohesion of its people. We believe that the level ought to be 30% of the goods and services that the nation consumes in a given sector but this level is negotiable. We shall discuss these ideas with the rest of the world and see to it that they are adopted. And the good news is that this system will replace the practice of gaming the current set-up which everyone knows does not work and tries to get around.

6 - This done, we shall call on private enterprise to come up with concrete plans for every state of the union whereby the hard core unemployed among the young will be housed, educated, employed, supervised and paid the wage of an apprentice. This will be less than the minimum wage and will remain in effect until such time the candidate is ready to join the regular economy. These people will be making the cheap goods we now import from abroad such as textiles, leather goods, furniture, souvenirs, building material, toys, appliances, electronics and so on.

7 - Perhaps as many as ten million youngsters living in the inner cities will benefit from this plan. It will be a massive job to build the facilities that will house them, educate them and employ them; and it will be a massive job to recruit the professionals who will stand by them where they will be lodged, educated, trained and put to work.

8 - A similar program will be implemented in parallel so as to achieve the same result with the people who are incarcerated. These people will be paid a wage that ranges between the current prison pay and that of apprentice. Some of the money will be kept in trust so that when they leave jail, they will have money to start them in life. With this and with a basic education, a skill and a job history, they will be less prone to recidivate.

9 - Perhaps as many as two million people now incarcerated will benefit from the plan because it will steer them away from crime and shepherd them toward a wholesome life. And this too will be a massive undertaking to pull off.

10 - Both plans will begin immediately and may have to go on for a generation. They will stimulate the regular economy right away because private business will be called upon to realize them. Because the money to fund them will come from the elimination of the subsidies now wasted on useless projects, the material benefit to the economy will be enormous while the cost will be minimal. As for the moral benefit to society, it will be incalculable when you consider the effect that they will have on the current generation and future ones.

11 – In addition to that, the products that these people will be making will replace what we import from abroad, a fact that will help our balance of payment. And there is one more thing that should fire up your imagination. The labor force working in American manufacturing today barely reaches the 20 million mark; and it is on the shoulders of these people that our 14 trillion dollar economy rests. If we add 10 million more skilled and semi-skilled workers to this force, think of what the economy will look like.

12 - With these two plans, we launch our renaissance. The Chinese whose population is 4 times the size of ours have managed to pull 500 million people out of backwardness and push them into modernity. We should be able to do the same with 10 or 12 million of our people. And the result to the nation will be the complete transformation of our society. This was the mandate given to us by the last election as I understand it, and I urge every one of you to find a way to participate in this long term national project.

A Senate Of Jekylls And Of Hydes

The US House of Representatives has passed a bill that should extend health care coverage to most Americans, and the US Senate is about to debate its own version. If the Senate bill passes and if reconciled with the House version, America will have given itself the document by which to join the civilized world. Like their counterparts in the advanced nations, most Americans will at last be covered with a blanket of security. And this will happen not because there is an incentive to looking after one’s own people but because it is the right thing to do. However, despite the fact that this much is at stake, the battle in the Senate will not be an easy one because this is not a chamber of Saints but a chamber of Jekylls and of Hydes. What transpired during the debates that unfolded, first in the country at large then in the House of Representatives, says that we are in for quite a show.

If you followed those debates you could not have missed the arguments that were made by prominent people such as the multitude of current legislators, the handful of former officials and the swarm of talking heads that staked out some truly astonishing positions. In general, these people were not the least bit shy to say it suits them fine to let 15% of the population go without health coverage so that the money saved may be spent on research and development to make health care better for the remaining 85% who now enjoy what they said was the best health care system in the world. These people and their talking heads deliberately avoided saying that America has the best coverage because they knew this was demonstrably false, so they said America has the best system because they could point to a handful of medical centers of excellence that are among the best in the world. What the talking heads failed to mention, however, was that such centers are not the exclusive domain of America but that they exist everywhere in the developed world as well as in some emerging nations where Americans increasingly go to get treatment.

Be that as it may, the question to ask at this stage is this: Have some people in America decided there are a trade-off and a choice to be made here? If so, have they chosen what amounts to a Robin Hood in reverse? When pressed to answer these questions, the people who previously staked out astonishing positions now go round and round unable to say anything that makes sense. And when you dig deep into what came out their pen and out the generator of their sound bites, you find them to be saying that because the centers of excellence cater to the rich, a coverage that is universal will take away this privilege from the poor fellows. Someone will then ask in utter puzzlement: what poor fellows? And the brazen answer will come back: the poor rich fellows, you see. Amazed and flabbergasted, you will dig deeper into the matter only to discover that the brouhaha was instigated by the insurance companies because they stand to loose business by losing not a captive audience given that very few listen to them, but a captive population because the one thing from which no one can escape is an illness, especially a catastrophic one afflicting you or a member of your family. You are in the grip of the insurance companies and they want you there without a public option to set you free or give you the least bit of hope because they feed on your misery and that of your loved ones.

In essence then, what these people use as an excuse to further the interests of the insurance companies is the argument that the centers of medical excellence are financed with the money that would go to cover the people now living without coverage. And should the coverage be extended to everyone via something like a public option, money will be diverted away from the centers, an idea they oppose because it runs contrary to the dogma to which they adhere. This is the dogma that says some people must make do with less or do with nothing at all so that a handful of people may have more, and more of the best. This is the essence of the capitalist ideal as they see it, one that the rest of the world sees as peculiar only to America, one that was derided as being Cowboy Capitalism.

To an outside observer like myself living in Canada and truly enjoying one of the best universal coverage on the planet, I look at these arguments with amazement and wonder what happened to these Americans. Over the past half century, I saw America go into spasms of every kind but they all meant to separate the issues so as to look at each one of them in isolation and come to understand it better. But what seems to happen now is that every issue is melded into a nebulous master narrative that says: If you are against this or against that, you are against the whole. And since we are whole and nobody else is, if you are not with us half-heartedly you are against us wholeheartedly. Not only that, you are also at war against us which puts us at war against you. But if you want to switch sides and be with us, be advised that your marching order for the day is to oppose universal coverage and to fight it tooth and nail.

To me, this means America has gone back to the business of eating from the cake of its own Benign Neglect. But this time the country is doing it with a twist that is different from anything I have seen before and so I ask: What are these people up to now? To answer the question I first observe that benign neglect is not new to America. The term was borrowed from British history by the late Senator Patrick Moynihan who suggested to then President Richard Nixon that America adopt a policy of benign neglect toward the African American segment of the population. But after all these years, it became increasingly clear to me that the word benign was injected in the term for the sole purpose of making the neglect look like a misunderstanding. I make this judgment based on my assessment of Moynihan’s conduct and I conclude that the real intent of benign neglect was more malicious than it was innocent.

How malicious was that? Well, things get a bit complicated here because I can only explain a deliberate misunderstanding by discussing another misunderstanding that was not deliberate but were, in fact, innocent. Like I said, it is going to get complicated so please bear with me. Most people believe that the phrase “Let them eat cake” means “Let them go to hell” when in reality it was meant to convey the opposite. This is how the story goes: Long ago, France ran out of food, and famine was beginning to set in. When told that the people had no bread, the Princess in charge uttered what comes naturally to someone living in a palace. Normally, the discourse would go something like this: We’ll just have to eat cake till the servants are done baking the bread. And this was the spirit in which the Princess said “Let them eat cake”. Legend has it that Marie Antoinette was the Princess who uttered the phrase and if anything, that woman lived up to her reputation in that she demonstrated how little she understood the difficult times through which her country was passing.

Marie Antoinette did not commit a deliberate act of malice but was the victim of an innocent misunderstanding created by her inability to grasp the complexity of the situation. However, given her stature and her privilege, this is not how the utterance sounded at the time or how it survived to this day. In fact, the utterance is now taken to mean “Let them go to hell” which is exactly what Benign Neglect was meant to convey by the late Senator and by those who wore his mantle after his passing. But whether we have here a case of let them eat cake or a case of benign neglect, most people see it as a case of the mask dropping to reveal an aspect of American reality no one thought existed. Hence, let it be known that we are witnessing the unfolding of a twist in American history that is gradually revealing the uniqueness of our time. It is that the neglect is no longer directed against the African American segment of the population or against any one ethnic group but is directed against anyone that may be unfortunate enough to fall between the cracks of this imperfect system.

Beyond all of this, there is an aspect of culture and society that needs to be clarified. What is puzzling is that a situation such as the one described above should be associated with the American people who are thought to be among the most generous in the world. These people donate as much as a quarter of a trillion dollars every year to various causes in societies near and far yet they fight ferociously to deny life saving medical coverage to a good chunk of their own society. They say with a straight face that they lead this fight because it will cost too much to cover everyone when the reality is that the money required to cover the uninsured will amount to less than what they donate. So why are these people the way they are? Is it because charity is tax deductible while health coverage is not? Is this the only reason?

This may be one reason. After all, incentives dispersed by the government greatly influence the decisions that people make every day. But there could be another reason too. It could be that the Americans are ruled by the power of the same old dogma which also says it is a sin for government to distribute the wealth of a nation. As hard as it is to understand this self-contradictory argument, it gets harder still when we assess the oddity of a situation where the people who adhere to a dogma that is this harsh can also be this charitable.

When someone exhibits this kind of split personality, the stereotype that comes to mind is that of Robert Stevenson’s novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This is the story of a medicine man who produces a substance which allows him to switch back and forth from being a helpful doctor to being a hurtful drifter. The story serves as a metaphor reflecting an America that is a kind of Dr. Jekyll without borders who heals people around the globe. But the story also reflects an America that is a kind of Mr. Hyde who deliberately abandons his people to benign neglect as they hunger for a medical coverage they can depend on. What a modern horror story this is!

The double image of America does not reassure the nations of the world as to the trustworthiness of that country. Consequently, this image must be changed, and the US Senate has the opportunity to do just that. In fact, the Senate can bring back the image of an America that the world used to love and respect. It can do that by morphing the current image into that of a Dr. Jekyll minus the associated shadow of Mr. Hyde. While I have no illusions about a Senate that is made of individual Jekylls and individual Hydes, I am convinced that the upcoming debate on health care will tell the world whether the Senate as a whole is closer to being a Dr. Jekyll or a Mr. Hyde. And the way in which the world will come to view the Senate will be the way in which the world will eventually come to see America as a nation.

So go ahead, Senators, do your thing and show the world what you are made of -- what America is made of. Say yes to your people and the world will believe in your generosity. Say no to your people and the world will see you as the incestuous father who will do anything to look saintly in the eyes of his neighbors but then rapes his own children when no one is there to witness the horror.

The Joys Of Electro-Economics

Ideas an American President should mull over on his way to China.

A great deal of the knowledge I have acquired in economics happened because I decided one day to compare the flow of money inside an economic set-up of which I knew very little with the flow of electrons inside an electronic circuit of which I knew quite a bit. Thus began my passion to twin the set-up of one with the circuit of the other and decipher the mysteries of economics by analyzing the equations of electronics. And I must admit I still find the exercise to be pure joy every time I dip into it.

Interestingly enough, the comparison also helps to clarify the misconceptions that arise in both fields. For example, the misconception that students of electronics envisage most frequently before they get into the course concerns the concept of amplification. Likewise, the misconception that laymen envisage most frequently in economics concerns the multiplier effect. And when we compare amplification with the multiplier effect, we see how closely the two concepts parallel each other.

Most students begin the course believing that to amplify means to take a small bundle of energy and make it big. Because this is a false notion that has the potential to create serious trouble later on, the teacher must erase it from the mind of the students early on and thus eliminate the source of a big headache down the road. And the best way to do this is to replace the notion with the correct definition of amplification using a visual example.

Here is how I used to do it. I would ask the students to count the number of light bulbs in the classroom and multiply by the wattage of each bulb so as to find the total consumption of energy. Let us say they find it to be 1,500 watts which is the equivalent of 2 horsepower. I tell them that an athlete pedaling a stationary bicycle attached to an electric generator produces about 100 watts of electricity. This means it would take 15 athletes to generate enough electricity to light up this classroom. I then ask the students to guess how much energy a single finger can generate and they correctly guess 1 watt or less.

I now walk to the light switch and use my finger to flick it up and down a few times so as to flicker the lights on and off. I explain that with 1 watt of finger power, I was able to control 1,500 watts of light. And I underscore that this is a demonstration of the concept of amplification. I further explain that I was able to do this amplification not because my finger generated the energy of 15 people or 2 horses but because the hydroelectric company supplied this energy and that my finger only controlled or modulated the flickering of the light. The lesson to be learned here is that electronic gadgets need an outside source of power such as a battery or a wall socket to feed them and do the work they are expected to do. This supply is separate from the small power that modulates it inside the gadget. The two powers remain separate at all time; and even though we call the outcome of the operation amplification, the small power does not transform into the larger power. In more general terms, it also means that no small bundle of energy can ever be turned into a large bundle – so say the unbreakable laws of Thermodynamics.

This brings us to the Power Law. The power (W) in electricity is measured in watts, and it is made of two parts. There is the current (I) which is measured in amperes, and there is the potential (V) which is measured in volts. The product of the two yields the power as expressed by the equation:

W = I x V

We now draw a parallel between the power law of electricity and the GDP law of economics. We make the Money supply the analogue of the current and call it (M). We make the Velocity of money the analogue of the voltage and call it (V). It turns out that the GDP is the product of the Money supply and the Velocity of money as expressed by the equation:

GDP = M x V

Notice the resemblance between those two equations. The GDP being equal to the quantity of Money multiplied by its Velocity, we see that we can increase the GDP by increasing M or increasing V. However, the Central Bank and the Treasury of a country control the money supply and they are usually reluctant to increase it because the move can lead to inflation. This leaves the velocity of money as the only tool by which to grow the GDP safely. But the trouble here is that for some reason, the people sometimes prefer to maintain their economic activity at a low level or even decrease it. In doing this, they slow down the velocity of money; and there seems to be very little we can do to counter that. Or is there?

To study what motivates people to engage in economic activity at one level or another, we examine Ohm’s law in electricity and see if we can draw a parallel between it and Economics. Ohm’s Law is written like this:

V = I x R
Voltage = Current x Resistance
This is the Resistance of the circuit to conduct electrons.

Its analogue in economics would be this:

V = M x K
Velocity = Money supply x Keenness
This is the Keenness of the people to spend money.

Note that even though Resistance and Keenness are opposites in the vernacular of every day speech, they are interchangeable in mathematics depending on the value that is taken by the variable K. For example, K in this context can be one of three things. It can be (a) greater than 1 thus indicating that the people are keen to spend money or (b) equal to 1 thus indicating that the people are neutral about spending money or (c) less than 1 thus indicating that the people are not keen to spend money. This last part means that the people resist the idea of spending money which is analogous to a circuit that resists conducting electrons. As for the value of K, it can be determined by creating an index that tracks same store sales and other such indicators.

We see from the last equation that the velocity of money (V) can be made to increase by increasing the money supply (M) or increasing the keenness of the people to spend (K). However, having determined previously that increasing the money supply can cause inflation; we try to avoid doing that and we work on K alone. To put things succinctly, Keenness increases the Velocity of money which grows the GDP without increasing the Money supply that tends to create inflation. Neat, isn’t it! But how do we increase the keenness of the people to spend?

To do that, we make use of the amplifier/multiplier effect. In electronics, we use the vacuum tube or the transistor to amplify. These are sophisticated switches that do not need a finger to turn on and off but need a small signal at the input to do that. This signal modulates the large power that is taken from the wall socket or is supplied by a battery. Once modulated, the large power appears at the output as an amplified version of the small input signal. Now, every amplifier has a factor by which it amplifies, and we use the Greek letter Beta to represent this value. In the function of the amplifier, we find that the power at the output (Po) is equal to the power at the input (Pi) multiplied by Beta, and we express all this with the following equation:

Po = Pi x Beta

But where do you find the Beta of economics? Well, I define this Beta in two parts (1) having the ability to motivate people to engage in economic activities and (2) giving the people the financial means to engage in such activities. Indeed, a healthy level of economic activity is generated when the people are presented with a product or a service they want, and when they have the money to buy it with or at least have access to reasonable credit. Usually, the invention of a new product or the creation of a new service starts the ball rolling in this direction. Thus, innovation and the trust that creditors have in their borrowers are responsible for causing the increase in economic activity and they are what gives Beta a high value.

But we must be careful how we interpret what we see here by being aware of the following: The growth in GDP does not happen because we create something out of nothing; it happens when we produce what the buyers want at a price they can afford. The mistake that people make at times is that they rely on past accomplishments to splurge now in the belief that they are not paying a price for what they get. This leads to the formation of bubbles and to economic crises at which point the people realize they were not amplifying something small into something big but were living off the accomplishments of their ancestors and off the future toil of their descendants.

The second mistake that people make is that they neglect to take full advantage of the multiplier effect. They seem to forget that even though they cannot transform something small into something big, they can modulate what is already there and make it work better. To do this, they need to take stock of the material resources and the human capital they have, assess their own potential to innovate and get into the business of adding value to that which is valueless or has a small value. They can do this by gaining confidence in their own abilities and by restoring the trust they used to have in each other. This done, they will start taking risk again and gladly extend credit to each other. The result will be that every dollar anyone of them borrows from the bank will be matched by several dollars worth of credit they will extend to each other. And this is the multiplier effect that will cause the GDP to grow beyond the nominal value of the money borrowed from the bank, thus giving the economy a higher rate of growth without causing inflation.

But what exactly is the potential to innovate? To innovate does not necessarily mean to invent something that no one has seen before. It can be something that your economy never had or maybe had it once then lost to competition. When you bring this thing back to your consumers, you will have innovated because the result to your economy will be the same as inventing something completely new. In fact, what is urgently needed in America today is the availability of American-made goods that people are accustomed to buying at discount stores and the low end types. These would be the durable and non-durable goods that sell at a reasonable price. The American people spend a good part of their disposable income on such goods which are now imported from abroad. And what the people do not do is stay up at night to fantasize about innovations they wish their fellow Americans would produce when they cannot even imagine what these things would look like. What they fantasize about are jobs that the old industries might create to offer them one at a salary that will allow them to buy what they produce.

In conclusion, what the government spends to encourage the invention of futuristic products is a waste of public money. Instead, the government should encourage the revival of the old industries that will produce what the people want now. But if the government still wants to dabble in the business of innovation, it should bear in mind that only the loafers who know how to live off government handouts will get their hands on this money. As for the nerds who come up with real and useful innovations, they do not go after government money because they do not need it, and if they did, they would not know how to get it out of a government bureaucracy. Instead, the nerds rely on the venture capitalists who have the wherewithal to look for new ideas and the incentive to separate the worthy from the unworthy.

Given that productive nerds are who they are because they do not waste their time learning how to live off the government handouts or how to protect themselves against the scheming loafers, what they need from the government are rules with teeth that will protect them from the loafers who will get the subsidies from the government then whip up schemes to steal their ideas too. This practice is widespread, it is sickening and it must come to an end.

Do the right thing, America, and you’ll restore your old industrial glory; chase a useless dream and you’ll construct a fool’s paradise. So says Electro-Economics to which I say amen.

She Taught Me The Best Economics

There is talk in America these days about the wisdom of including a public option in a healthcare bill that is being considered for the nation. The concern centers on the impact that such option will have on the capitalist system. Well, the following example may shed some light on the subject and perhaps clarify a few points.

For a reason I cannot explain, I took interest in what is sometimes called the science of economics at an early age. I started formulating theories in my teens which I thought were big secrets that no one knew anything about. Then something happened that hit me in two contradictory ways at the same time. I discovered from reading books that my secrets were no secret at all because other people had discovered them before I was born. This had the effect of elating me and saddening at the same time. I was elated because the discovery told me I was on the right track, but I was saddened because I realized that I was not the first to entertain those ideas. No matter; I continued to think about the subject and to formulate new theories but now, I checked to see if someone had gone there before me. At times I hoped I would find that someone was there thus confirming that I was walking in the footsteps of some historical figure. At other times, however, I hoped to discover that no one had been there thus making me the holder of a great big secret. Like they say: Go figure! But remember, I was only a kid so don’t hold it against me whatever you figure.

All the while, I had an insatiable appetite to learn something new about everything, a habit I maintained throughout my life. Thus, even after I started working, I took formal courses in one subject or another or I learned from books on my own. My life was truly one of continuous learning but with all the passion I had for Economics, this was the one subject in which I never took a formal course. For a long time, I tried not to think about the reason why I stayed away from taking a course in Economics when it was so obvious I liked the subject very much. I then came up with the theory that I was afraid to meet a bad teacher who would make me hate the subject; and there may have been some truth to that. But there could also have been another reason; it could be that deep down, I thought I knew the subject so well I did not need a lesson. After all, I was taking lots of math courses, something that gave me tools to crunch the numbers and manipulate the equations, and I was taking lots of physics courses, something that gave me models of electronic circuitry by which to analogize the flow of money in what I came to visualize as economic circuits. Like they say, all you have to do to see the truth is to follow the money. And the money was flowing like electrons obeying the same sort of laws as Ohm’s Law, the Power Law and the laws of amplification.

Alas, this manifestation of self confidence was shaken one day when a woman taught me a lesson in economics I could not have learned in school, gathered from reading books or deduced by the power of reasoning because experience alone could do what she did. By now you must be guessing this is a long story that requires a flashback to the beginning, and you would be correct. So let me start from when I retired from teaching and launched a small newspaper in a town just outside the Canadian city of Toronto.

For most of its history this town had one newspaper dominating the market and tolerating no competition. Over the years, several people started a rival newspaper but were destroyed by the ruthless behavior of the family that owned the existing newspaper, and I was warned by those who enjoyed reading my column that I shall be forced out sooner or later. To understand this part, you must know that the town newspaper was affiliated with the biggest publishing corporation in the country, a relationship that gave it enormous clout. The family that owned the town newspaper used that clout to bend everyone to its will including the town council and the managers in charge of the local offices of the federal and provincial governments. But more importantly, the family had in its pocket the people who bought advertising space for the big companies whether they were local companies or out of town ones.

Because the money I earned came from selling advertising, I was at the mercy of that other newspaper. At times I managed to get big retailers such as the car dealerships to advertise with me but most of my income came from the small stores that did not bother to advertise anywhere before my coming to town. And the reason why they did not advertise was that they were never approached by a media salesperson. In fact, the owners of the dominant newspaper could not care less about the small stores until I launched my paper at which time they hired salespeople to counter what I was doing. These people traced my steps, going behind me and visiting the stores every time one of them placed an ad in my paper. And they made them deals “they could not refuse” in every mafia sense that this phrase connotes.

First, they offered the stores bigger ads for less money if they dropped me. When this did not work, they resorted to other activities, some of which were downright criminal such as making threats, engaging in blackmail, mounting conspiracies and so on. And all of this was known to the police and to the politicians at the municipal, provincial and federal levels but no one discussed it openly or did anything to put an end to it. In fact, these people who were the government and were responsible for the maintenance of law and order were afraid to even talk at length about the subject. They treated the matter as a reality we must all live with, and they tried to talk me into learning how to get along. They had a weird notion as to what journalism was about and I could not accept it.

Still, not everyone in town was frightened. One store that regularly advertised in my paper was situated in a strip mall and was owned by an attractive young woman. When things were quiet during certain hours of the day, the other store owners in the same mall would go to her store, stand there and have a chat. This was a good time for me to go see her as well because I could, in a single trip, sell her an ad and sell two or three more to the other store owners.

After running her ads, I would invoice her as I did everyone else and would receive her check almost immediately. The other advertisers in the mall would also pay me fairly quickly as opposed to most other clients who took at least a month to pay. One day I was greatly surprised when I received an envelop from her containing more than a check. In fact, the check itself was a surprise in that it was double the amount. And with it came my own invoice with a scribbled note at the bottom of it saying: “Please send another invoice with the right amount.”

My immediate reaction was to pick up the phone to call the woman but I froze before dialing. I thought for a moment what she was trying to say to me but my brain could not generate one sensible idea. I quickly dismissed the possibility that she may have a romantic interest in me because there are better ways to communicate such sentiment. Besides, she had more eligible candidates than me, including a husband that seemed better suited to her age. I put down the phone without dialing and went to see her instead.

When I got there she explained that she knew what was going on in this wretched town. She could see that some of the stores which used to advertise in my paper do so no more. She knew I lost them not because the ads failed to generate sales but because of the pressure that the other paper was putting on them. She got several visits herself from someone representing that other paper as did all the stores in the mall. To make a long story short, she wanted to keep me in business as long as possible because it pays her to do so. And she was going to put her money where her mouth was, hence the big check that she sent to me.

I thanked her for her confidence in my paper but she quickly snapped back that there was more to it than the sales I was generating for her. Surprised, I asked “like what?” She said that as long as she was advertising with me, the other paper will give her bigger and bigger ads at a lower and lower price. She was now getting half a page, four color ads for the price of a business card, two-color ads. Thus, she felt she owed me some of the money she was saving. And because she wanted this thing to go on for as long as possible, she was going to do her part to keep me in business. She could not promise that the other stores in the mall will do the same thing but at least, they will not cut me off despite the savage pressure that was heaped on them. She reflected for a moment then added they just don’t know how to take advantage of the situation like she does. With a smirk on her face, she leaned over the counter and pretended to whisper to me that no one will object if I raised my prices a little. She winked and nodded as if to say I must not tell anyone this was her idea.

The lesson I learned from this woman was that people will navigate between fear and greed using all the talent and the abilities they possess to take full advantage of a given situation. They will want their business to survive and will try to maximize their profit by playing one competitor against the other. If necessary, they will subsidize one competitor to keep the other honest, and will stop the subsidy when it ceases to deliver. And no book or classroom could have taught me this lesson which I regard as being in the best tradition of the capitalist system.

Applying this lesson to the question of including a public option in a healthcare plan, I expect to see the same sort of scenario play itself out. That is, the public option will stand as the competitor that will keep the insurance companies honest. But the moment the people will determine that holding the feet of the insurance companies to the fire is costing them more than it saves them, they will opt out of it and go with the insurance companies. This will be a decision for them to make and for the insurance companies to earn. And the conclusion I derive from this example is that to include a public option in a healthcare plan is to do things in the best tradition of the capitalist system. Any concern about this point should be seen as baseless.

Now, let me say a word about the attractive woman at the mall. She got pregnant and sold the store because she wanted to be free to raise a family. I am sure that she and her husband are now raising a wonderful family. As for my paper, I lasted in the business longer than anyone had anticipated, and folded when I reached the retirement age I had set for myself. The trek was brutal but was worth it.

The Chosen And The Exceptional

The decade of the Nineteen Sixties was one of war on many fronts for the American people. Parallel to the external war that was Vietnam, the various races were battling it internally as were the genders, the economic classes and the different ideological groups. Now that four decades have passed, we continue to see that the forces which have shaped history then shape it still today. So pivotal were those years, it is not surprising to see thousands of books and articles being written on the subject from a multitude of angles, and natural to think that thousands more will be written in the years to come from angles yet to be fathomed.

The interest I acquired regarding this part of history was shaped by what I had to endure living in Canada next door to the United States. Like everyone else I developed an angle from which I viewed the subject and the point of view through which I now express it. Also, Canada has served as the soft underbelly of the United States where, at times, ideas that were potentially controversial were discussed before being transferred to the American marketplace of ideas. Once there, they were adapted to the American condition, were tackled with energy and debated with vigor. For this reason, Canada was chosen by the Jewish Establishment to be the place where they perfected an art that has a most unique nature about it. Indeed, it was here in Canada that they perfected the art of making a country transform itself into the proverbial suicide bomber. To earn this distinction, a country had to develop the will to ruin itself in one form or another to advance the causes of Israel and the Jews. As strange as this may seem, the Jewish Establishment succeeded in psyching the Americans into a state where such a feat was made possible. It took years of spinning the daily events to make the Americans believe that their causes were those of Israel therefore their military was created to serve Israel. The tendency for jovial self immolation then followed naturally.

Those who missed the genesis of this drive at the dawn of the Nineteen Sixties when John Kennedy first proposed the transfer of warplanes to Israel could not have missed it when his brother, Robert Kennedy advocated the same thing less than a decade later. And this was the time when the force of the Jewish drive to transform America was beginning to make itself felt. The drive intensified in 1967 when Israel launched the 6 year war with a Pearl Harbor style blitz on the Egyptian defense installations. After the dust of this attack settled, it gradually became clearer by the day that Israel had dug a grave for itself in the Sinai and was getting buried deeper into it as the war of attrition was packing fury. Indeed, time was Israel’s enemy and the worldwide Jewish Establishment became convinced that absent a massive help from the outside, Israel will perish with a bang or a whimper or both as the rabbis used to warn it will happen. Six years later, the Egyptian counterpunch of 1973 showed how astute that observation was.

While the war of attrition was taking its toll on the Israelis in the Sinai so was the Vietnam War on the Americans in Asia. And the rabbis had no choice but to advocate the end of the Vietnam War, something they called for not to save American or Vietnamese lives but to free America’s military of the burden and to redeploy the boys and girls to serve the needs of Israel which the rabbis knew will only expand with time.

Fast forward to the current situation where America is embroiled in two wars in the Middle East and where voices are demanding that she be readied to move against Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Lebanon and a few more, all of which loom large in Israel’s fantasy. Here we see the extent to which the rabbis have succeeded in molding a suicidal America, one that is prepared to die a thousand deaths to serve the causes of Israel and to magnify her glory. If Usma Bin Laden could count on his boys as much as the Jewish Establishment can count on the American institutions, he could become king of the Universe in the blink of an eye. The sad fact is that the US Congress would cause America to commit suicide for the sake of Israel and the Jewish causes more readily than a naïve boy would die for a Bin Laden cause. If this is a sample of America’s exceptionalism then the people of America should stop singing God Bless America because even He could not save her now let alone bless her. Instead, the Americans would do themselves a favor to learn anew how to whistle Dixie.

Just think what it would take to make a diabolic scheme as substantial as that succeed. You would have to work on all levels at the same time because you must blur every distinction that may exist between America and Israel. To do this, you fashion the principle that the two entities stand as one but stand apart from the rest of the world. You argue that the resources of each one complement the resources of the other; and when the two get together, they fill the needs of each other so well they attain self sufficiency and need no one else. You speak passionately about them being above everyone and stress the point that they have the moral obligation to mend everyone else’s deficiency. To justify all of that and to explain it in a manner that cannot be challenged, the rabbis have come up with the idea that the Jews were chosen by God and the Americans were an exceptional lot to begin with. Now, given all of this, I ask if it is too far fetched to imagine that someday everyone will be asked to sing: God bless Israel and save America too but only to protect Israel. If and when things get this far, will there be someone left to push back with the refrain: Look Away! Sail Away! But No Way! Canaan Land.

There are literally millions of examples to choose from that would illustrate these notions but the Wall Street Journal has a knack for concentrating a number of them in each edition so I choose the October 18, 2009 edition from where I pick two examples. The first is an article written by John Bolton under the title: “Israel, the U.S. and the Goldstone Report” and the subtitle: “Joining the U.N. Human Rights Council was a mistake Obama should correct.” Now, when it comes to giving someone like me what I look for, John Bolton has no rival because he has a superior ability to lay platinum eggs studded with diamonds like you won’t believe. Look how the following jewel, taken from his article, blurs the distinction between America and Israel and blends their interests as if they were one and the same entity:

“The Goldstone Report has important implications for America. In the U.N., Israel frequently serves as a surrogate target in lieu of the U.S., particularly concerning the use of military force pre-emptively or in self-defense. Accordingly, U.N. decisions on ostensibly Israel-specific issues can lay a predicate for subsequent action against, or efforts to constrain, the U.S. Mr. Goldstone's recommendation to convoke the International Criminal Court is like putting a loaded pistol to Israel's head—or, in the future, to America's … the Goldstone Report will merely be the beginning, next time perhaps with Washington as its unmistakable target.”

Need I say more on this point? I don’t think so but there is more to the article because the subtitle comes next and it carries within it plenty of juice. Here, Bolton tells Obama to correct the mistake that America made when she joined the Human Rights Council. But this is not the first time that Bolton has labored to “correct” a mistake. He did it when the world saw fit to equate zionism with racism so he labored to have the decision reversed. The thing is that he did so because he believed that zionism was not as bad as racism when people of good will everywhere knew that zionism was worse than racism, worse even than Nazi-like racism.

And here is this argument: Zionism being the supremacy of a race called for by God, it is an absolute that cannot be challenged by another race whose claim to supremacy could only be derived from earthly accomplishments which, sooner or later, will be surpassed by the accomplishments of another race. Thus, if racial supremacy is considered to be evil then zionism must be the most absolute of all evils, and to call it racism is to whitewash it. In effect then, while not realizing the consequences of what he was doing, John Bolton was doing the world a favor as he labored to get the decision reversed. John Bolton did something good despite himself because the zionist ideology must be labeled what it is: the wellspring from which gushes every evil inflicted on mankind. It is a continuous crime against humanity that shows no sign of mellowing … and this is a far cry from the simple racism it was thought to be.

Time now for the second article in the Wall Street Journal. It was written by Emanuele Ottolehghi and titled: “Rename the Streets for Nada”. This was the name of a young woman shot during a demonstration in Iran. The writer is suggesting that the government of Teheran was responsible for her death and that the world should exploit the tragedy to embarrass Iran. And how does he propose to do that? He wants the streets on which there is an Iranian embassy to be renamed Nada.

But there is a problem with this idea because it is a moral hazard that even a child would find too childish to toy with. If implemented by one party, the idea will give everyone the right to use it to their own end, something that will reduce the civility in diplomatic relations. In fact, Israel has an embassy in several countries, among them Arab and Muslim ones that view Israel’s behavior in Palestine as being far worse than anything the Iranian regime has done. What if the people in these countries decided to call the streets on which stands an Israeli embassy by the name of a Palestinian “martyr” murdered by the Israelis? What if every country in the world began to use this game as an instrument of dialogue or use it as a tool with which to exert pressure on other countries? The list of unanswered questions goes on.

Furthermore, this is not an original idea. It was suggested during the years when Anatoli Sharansky was jailed in the former Soviet Union that the street in Washington where stood the Soviet embassy be renamed Sharansky. The man in question lives in Israel now and he is advocating a form of ethnic cleansing which he says will advance the cause of human rights. I do not know if the suggestion to rename the street was implemented in Washington or anywhere else but I know that several places in New York were renamed Sharansky this or Sharansky that. Now I ask what will happen if someone powerful in New York became so riled by Sharansky’s inferior grasp of the concept of Human Rights, he or she decides to reverse the situation and rename those places for Palestinian martyrs? Will the Jewish organizations then bellyache the anti-Semitism refrain and demand a reversal of the reversal?

Of course, no one but a Jew would think up a scheme like the one suggested by Emanuele Ottolehghi and there is a reason why. It is that no one else would come up with such an idea and stop there without reflecting on the possible consequences. And the consequences in this case are that the Golden Rule will be triggered because people will want to respond in kind. Everyone on Planet Earth knows that when you give yourself a right to do something, you give that same right to everyone else. Everyone knows it, that is, except the Jew who believes he has a special relationship with God, one that exempts him from the Golden Rule. And this is where the journey to the next holocaust begins as it has begun again and again and again. Four thousand years of this kind of nonsense and they are still at it. When will they learn to say never again and mean it for once?

The Murky Ruse That Keeps On Tricking

The talk these days centers on the question: Is President Barack Obama tough enough? And the answer is that it all depends what you mean. You can be resolutely tough and your stand may lead to a good outcome or you can fake a tough stand and you’ll probably get nowhere. Being a lawyer, Mr. Obama knows that when you have a good case, you tend to be resolutely tough wherein you’ll have a good chance at getting what is owed to you in a dignified way. But when you have a bad case you tend to bluff your way hoping to intimidate the opponent and perhaps confuse the judge but the gamble may not work. What follows is the tale of a real life situation which illustrates these points.

As per habit Israel has warned that if the world holds her accountable for the acts of terror she inflicts on the unarmed people of Palestine, such move will affect the peace process in the Middle East. Despite the fact that this is blackmail as glaring as blackmail can ever get, America fell for the ruse whose real intent is to prevent peace from happening not to speed up its advent. The occasion for pulling the ruse this time is the UN Report on Gaza which was prepared by Justice Richard Goldstone. The work clearly demonstrates that Israel’s behavior has set humanity back hundreds of years which is what Alan Dershowitz had promised us on a previous occasion.

Indeed, Dershowitz said that Israel reserves the right to commit every crime that anyone has ever committed, and Israel lived up to the promise once again as she has always done. This time Israel did it by killing Palestinian women, children and men indiscriminately then killing the animals on which they fed so as to starve the people she did not kill immediately. In doing this, the Israelis imitated the crimes committed by the early settlers in North America, those who wiped out the buffalo on which the natives fed to starve the ones they did not kill immediately.

And now Israel says that to question her actions by taking the Goldstone Report to the Security Council of the United Nations will make her torpedo the Middle East talks which aim at making peace with the Palestinians. Well, this too is a ruse that observers of the Middle East are familiar with. The fact is that the Israelis do not want a peace treaty with the Palestinians because it will legally and permanently define Israel’s borders. What they want instead is to continue living with the murky state of no-war-no-peace which allows them to nibble at Palestinian territory. They call this nibbling natural growth and they plan to keep on growing like a cancer till they chew up what is left of the Palestinian body. In the meantime, they will pretend to negotiate so as to see what concessions everyone is willing to make then work on the Americans to get them those concessions without giving anything in return. This is the Talmudic way of showing how smart you are; if smart enough to be called a rabbi even if you’re not one.

Incapable of understanding how the murky world of satanic talmudism works, the Americans fail to see that playing Israel’s game has the effect of turning the White House, the State Department, the Treasury and the Pentagon over to Alan Dershowitz and to all those like him. As for the US Congress, no one needs to worry about this one anymore as it has been chewed up by the Dershowitz Doctrine which metastasized in its bosom like a virulent cancer. If the Americans can be made to understand any of this, they may finally do what they ought to do. And to get an idea what that is, I relate an experience I once had to live through.

One Sunday morning long ago I received a phone call at home from a student I had while teaching at a “tough school” where the administration was more backward than the students were hopeless. I had left my job by mutual agreement having gotten ill and deciding it was time to do something less stressful than teach. The student that called me said he was speaking on behalf of the other students in my former two classes because they felt they were drowning without me teaching them, and they wanted me to help. Of all the ideas discussed, the caller suggested that I open a school and take in the 40 students or so in the two classes.

But that was a private school where students who did not make it in the regular system went to learn a trade. Their parents were paying as much as 7,000 dollars – now worth 12,000 -- to give their kids one last chance at making it in life. The amount of money involved was so big I was troubled by what the move will do to the parents who were paying and to the school that will lose the income if I took the students away. Besides, the students had a contract with the school and I was not sure how this will impact me legally. Thus, I needed the advice of a lawyer on that Sunday morning before deciding on anything. I told the student I’ll call him back as soon as I have something further to say on the subject.

I looked for a lawyer in the Yellow Pages and made a number of phone calls but only a handful answered. One who seemed to have what I was looking for in a lawyer took the time to put me at ease and I appreciated that. I went to see him in his office the next day as he was at a ten minutes walk from where I lived. Eventually this man became not only my lawyer but also my friend as he turned out to be a good human being. His name was Ralph Cohen, a well known figure in Montreal and apparently the friend of everyone. When he died, most radio and television stations in town mentioned his passing and many people missed him including me.

When I went to see Ralph the first time, I noticed how easily he could make things happen as he seemed to know everyone in town. He picked up the phone and started to work on the file in my presence. Two days later he had done all that was necessary to protect me and the students, had registered the corporation under which I could operate a private school and had found the space where to open the school. Thanks to him I was in business before the end of the week and everything went well. Things continued to go well for two more years till the time came to renew the covenant for the space I was leasing.

Unlike the first time when the lease was two pages long, this time it was made of something like 60 pages. There were a few things in it I did not like so I negotiated the changes whereby I made a few concessions to obtain a few from the landlord. The back-and-forth took a number of days while I was discussing the renewal of the license for the school with the Ministry of Education which, among other things, mandated a valid lease. The Ministry set a deadline for me to meet and the landlord came to know about it. His behavior began to change and I felt he was now dragging his feet. I got this feeling because every version he presented to me after each round of negotiations contained the concessions that I had made but none of what he made to obtain my concessions. I deduced that he wanted to take the negotiations up to the last minute then force his version of the covenant on me. It was a murky sort of game that rang bells with me.

To guard against the possibility of being cornered, I looked for another place to which I could move the school at a moment’s notice if worse came to worse. Luckily, a private school where I once taught had moved to another space and the old place was now vacant. I spoke with its landlord and explained that I may have to move at a moment’s notice. He said I could do anything I wanted because his nephew was once in my class when I was teaching in that very space. The boy had graduated, was now working and was making good money when the expectation was that he will lead a life of truancy, drugs and maybe jail. The landlord felt he owed me one and was eager to pay me back.

As I feared, things got steadily worse with the other landlord the more that we approached the Ministry’s deadline. I gathered the students who were a different batch from the one that started me off two years previous, and I told them what was happening. I expected them to protest the disruption but they surprised me by doing something nice. Some of them had parents who owned a business and they assured me they had the trucks and the manpower to move the school to the new place in two hours or less. All I had to do was give the word.

The day came and I had not signed the covenant so the students who were in their twenties and able bodied brought the trucks, their friends, some of their parents’ employees and they started to move the school. The landlord called the police and we had a three person conversation: the officer, the landlord and myself. The landlord wanted the officer to arrest me for moving out illegally. I said I was paid up to the end of the month which was days away, I had no lease to keep me beyond that date, I had a civil dispute with the landlord concerning the new lease and this was not a criminal matter. If something criminal was committed, it was the act of calling the police on a false pretense which is what the landlord did. If someone should be arrested, it will have to be the landlord. The officer gave the man a dirty look and the landlord walked away without saying another word.

A few days after I moved out, I started receiving letters from the old landlord asking me to pay for this or that, something I was inclined to do to put the matter behind me even though I did not owe the money. But knowing the character of the landlord, I decided not to respond right away so as not to get on a slippery slope with him early on and be surprised again and again with new demands. But the landlord precipitated the thing when he sent me a letter threatening legal action if I did not pay within 5 days. This is when I decided to go see my good friend Ralph Cohen.

Now picture this. The landlord was the son of a prominent Jewish businessman in Montreal who started small and built up an empire of stores, real estate and shopping centers. He was of the same age as Ralph Cohen and the two had lived in the same neighborhood while growing up. They went to the same schools, attended the same synagogues and were invited to the same Bar Mitzvahs. The son who was my landlord regarded Ralph as his uncle and Ralph reciprocated the sentiment. This reality alone gave me mixed feelings about the wisdom of taking the case to Ralph but I had no choice but to count on him diffusing the situation so I took the chance.

Walking into his office I wondered how this soft spoken, gentle human being will divide his loyalties and be fair to both sides. I soon got my answer when, upon hearing what happened, Ralph did something I never saw him do before; he expressed genuine anger. He became angry with the landlord especially that the latter called the police instead of asking him to intercede. Then, Ralph Cohen my lawyer instructed me not to pay this man one red cent and further told me to write back to him and say so. Now Ralph let me in on a little secret; he said I should end the letter by advising that if the landlord takes legal action, I shall oppose it vigorously. What this meant in the jargon of legalese, said my friend, is that I shall counter sue. After all, as he carefully explained to me, I sustained damages due to the landlord’s delaying tactics so much so that I was forced to move out just hours before the deadline set by the Ministry of Education. As instructed, I sent that letter to the old landlord and he never bothered me again.

There is a lesson here for the Americans: When you deal with characters like these, the mistake you must avoid making is to believe that you can get on a slippery slope with them, catch their hand in time and pull them up before they reach the level of the gutter. What will happen instead is that they will drag you down to the gutter which, you must understand, is their natural habitat. Thus, what you must do is act decisively against their maneuverings right from the start so as to maintain control of the situation throughout your engagement with them.

To this end, my advice is this: Let the Goldstone Report go to the Security Council and vote for it. Halt all cooperation with Israel until she stops the settlement activities and begins to dismantle some. But if Israel insists on building new settlements, treat her like the rogue state that she is and implement the sort of sanctions that will hurt. If this does not work, start bombing.

This is what it means to be tough the useful way. If and when America takes this stance, the winners will be the people of America, of Palestine and of Israel. And the whole world will be a better place for it.

Gross Domestic Production & Consumption

No two economies are the same because no two sets of circumstances in which an economy operates are identical. It is therefore pointless to measure all economies with the same yardstick without taking into account local peculiarities. To be specific, the index we call Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has proved inadequate when utilized to measure the absolute value of an economy; even less adequate when utilized to judge the different parts of an economy’s balance sheet. And what is unfortunate about the approach we now take when dealing with the subject of public finance is that the method by which we handle the data often leads the captains of the ship of state to make bad decisions.

So the question that comes to mind is this: Would a modification of the way we compile the information and assess the GDP of a jurisdiction help mitigate the consequences of the current approach? The answer is yes but only if we create a smarter system to replace the old one. This can be done by adopting the right perspective and by keeping it in mind as we collect the data. If we can do this, the captains of the ship of state will have the tools to properly assess the significance of things like the size of the deficit and the accumulated debt as compared to the size of the GDP; and the captains will make better decisions as a result.

To create a new system we must collect the data having a better understanding as to why we are collecting it. To this end, we shall have to recognize that despite the large number of factors influencing the shape and value of an economy, we will be classifying all economies in only one of two broad categories: the mostly producing economy or the mostly consuming economy. The reason for doing this is that there is now incongruity between the way we define GDP on the one hand and the way that the economy actually works on the other hand.

The incongruity begins with the definition which says that the GDP is the sum of all activities which take place in an economy but then include in the compilation not only the figures for production but also those for consumption. According to the definition, therefore, the name should be Gross Domestic Production and Consumption (GDP&C) not just Gross Domestic Production (GDP). Thus, if we classify the economies as being mostly one or mostly the other, we acknowledge the fact that an economy is a complex thing made of at least two parts. This acknowledgement alone should ease the confusion and help us diagnose the problems when they occur thus lead to better solutions.

With those two classifications in mind, we see that in some economic jurisdictions the P in GDP reflects the activities generated by the production of goods and services more than they do its consumption though the latter also generates some activities. And we see that in other economic jurisdictions the P in GDP reflects the activities generated by the consumption of goods and services more than they do its production though the latter also generates some activities.

The capital and the infrastructure of the mostly producing jurisdictions consist of installations where the workforce labors to maximize the output of the installations. In these places, the people use a minimum quantity of commodities which they turn into useful products by adding as much transformational value to them as possible. Thus, a small quantity of iron, copper, paint, plastics electricity and so on is transformed into a state-of-the-art refrigerator or some other product. When all such works are done, the sum total of the added values goes into the GDP of the jurisdiction.

By contrast, the capital and the infrastructure of the mostly consuming jurisdictions consist of retail outlets and a workforce that labors to maximize their profit by merchandizing the products and services they procure from the producing jurisdictions. They buy from the producers at a low price, sell to the customers at a higher price and consider the spread between the two prices to be the added value of their process. When all such processes are done, the sum total of the added values goes into the GDP of the jurisdiction.

Now look closely at what happened here: what used to be consumption has become part of the P in GDP which means it is now considered to be production. But really, if you consider both the production and the consumption to be production, it is like drawing up a balance sheet where the assets and the liabilities are called assets and where there are no liabilities. In such a system, the GDP looks big, the deficit and the debt look small by comparison and the approach encourages you to borrow more and more under false pretenses. Then one day it hits you that you are not producing enough of the real goods and services which will pay for what you consume. And you realize that you have been deceiving yourself so then what do you do?

Well, if the mostly producing jurisdiction and the mostly consuming one were part of the same economy like being of the same country, the difficulties that may arise will be overcome because the producers of the jurisdiction are also its consumers, and a rough balance between the two will eventually materialize. That is, the auto worker will shop for clothes; the textile worker that makes the clothes will shop for a vacation; the hospitality executive that provides the vacation will shop for a car which was made by the auto worker who went shopping for clothes in the first place. And each of these citizens, together with everyone else in the country, will keep the country at full employment which is the ultimate goal of a well run economy. Where the difficulties can turn into a serious problem is when the producing jurisdiction and the consuming one belong to different countries. In this case, the complications that start small will tend to grow large and will threaten the arrangement unless something is done to impose a balance.

Several lengthy scenarios can be written to illustrate how a relationship such as that can grow and become a big problem. What may be said in brief, however, is that the consuming country will feed on the products and services of the producing ones at its peril. And in the event that the consumers become so preoccupied with consumption that they neglect to save and lend to each other, the foreign producers will lend to them. If this situation goes on for too long and the producers lose the appetite to extend more credit to the consuming country, a nightmare scenario may develop whereby the producers will cannibalize on the capital, the assets and the resources of the consuming country thus hollow it of its industries.

And because there is no free lunch, future generations will be asked -- even compelled -- to pay the bill drawn up by the generation that took it all and then disappeared. This sort of scenario is not a far fetched one but has a good chance of developing because the likelihood is that the said generation will have neglected to clean up after itself before departing the cushy life it has led at the expense of its descendants.

And so we ask: How does a system look like that can prevent the nightmare scenario from developing? The answer is that in addition to making a clear distinction between the production side and the consumption side of an economy, the system will have to differentiate between three types of consumption. They are (a) the basic consumption (b) the required consumption and (c) the vain consumption. To see how this will help improve our understanding of the situation, we discuss each type in brief.

(a) Whether we are an individual, a business or a nation, basic consumption is what we normally do everyday. And when we say basic we do not exclude the luxurious. For example everybody needs a home to live in and a means of transportation to travel. Here the word basic does not mean that the home or the transport must always be modest. Indeed, living in an upscale house and driving an upscale car are considered basic as long as they are not absurdly or needlessly extravagant.

(b) The required consumption are the things you are forced to do just to lead a normal life, the things that other people do not have to do and you wish you did not have to do either. For example, if you live near the North Pole where the temperature goes down to 65 degrees below zero, you are forced to spend an enormous amount of money to keep warm, the reason for which you are paid a higher salary than usual. But contrary to what it looks like on paper, the size of your salary does not make you any wealthier because you are forced to spend the money in what may be called a “wasteful” manner. Yet, your high consumption goes into the GDP and inflates it thus make the situation look rosier than it really is.

(c) As for the vain consumption, it is what you do to keep up with the Joneses and to impress them. For example, you pay a grotesquely extravagant price to buy an antique car which you seldom drive or never drive at all but leave on display alongside the house to impress your neighbors or to have the tabloids write about you. Some people buy and sell such cars and other items like them, a habit that adds false value to the GDP of the nation and to the per capita income of its citizens. And all this happens as no one gets anything out of this wacky hobby of a nutty individual.

But if we modify the system and compile the data while keeping in mind the notions discussed above, we can create a smart method by which to assess the true value of the GDP and use that in more useful ways. And to always keep the correct perspective in mind, we need a more appropriate definition for GDP so here is one: GDP is the production of goods and services that satisfy both the basic consumption of a nation and the necessary part of the required consumption. The definition deliberately excludes what goes into the generation of the “wasteful” part of the required consumption as well as the entire vain consumption.

Faced with the realities of life but armed with better tools, the captains of the ship of state will have a more realistic view as to what they preside over, and a better understanding as to what they must do to keep the ship of state afloat and help it sail to the desired destination. In this vein, a back of the envelop calculation indicates that the GDP of the United States of America stands somewhere between 6 trillion and 7.5 trillion dollars. Compare this figure to the external debt of the country and someone should feel uneasy.