My mom is 87 years old. Yow! That scares me not just because it sounds so old... it does, though... but also because it sounds like it's not so old that it couldn't happen to me. In fact, I'm so old that there are times when 87 doesn't sound quite as old as it should. But even the chills I get contemplating my personal fate and how imminent it probably is are nothing compared to the roiling in my guts that ensues when I think about what's in store for me as Mom blossoms into "old old age." See, we live so long now that they have to divide old age up into segments. There's old age, old old age, and "super-centenarians" that I'm aware of. And even in an age in which when somebody keels over at 70 or 72 people bemoan the fact that he died "so young," the consensus is that 87 is solidly in the "old old age" category.
Anyway, apparently when you enter "old old age" it's time to think about things like "independent living," "assisted living," or "the booby hatch," depending on how much you want to scale back your activities. Many senior seniors lead active lives, as witnessed by the wide, well-lit "Continence" section in most major supermarkets and the fact that they're still showing those James Whitmore commercials on late-night TV. Plus, the elderly population is growing by leaps and bounds, and even The Fonz is advertising reverse-mortgages during the "news hour." Oh yeah, and the continued existence of the "news hour" on all three major "networks" (I don't count Fox) and in fact the continued existence of the "networks" themselves, is directly attributable to the avid interest of the "Long Goodbye" set.
But not all people feel like running for president when they're 80, much less when they're 87, and my Mom has decided that it's time to "scale back." In her case this means having somebody else worry about it when a light bulb burns out or the lawn needs to be mowed. In fact, forget about the lawn entirely. Let somebody else find a reliable cleaning lady and handyman and somebody to buy the groceries, let your kids swing by to drive you to church. She worked like a mule to raise a passle of kids and tend to her husband's needs, managed on her own for 15 years after those missions were fully accomplished, and now feels like... like what?
Well, "weary" is a word that might fit, although you can never tell for sure with Mom. (What's the song say? "She may be weary..." But maybe not.) Or maybe she wants to live closer to some of her kids. Well, maybe. Or maybe she just figures that "it's time."
Dangerous phrase, "it's time." I got married once because somebody decided that "it [was] time." Remember that old Carly Simon song? "You say it's time we moved in together/ and raised a family of our own, you and me/ Well, that's the way I've always heard it should be..." A recipe for disaster if I've ever heard one.
Of course, according to The Byrds and The Bible, there is a time for everything, and if there's a time to move to a "senior living facility" I guess that Mom would be the one to know it. And it looks like she's going to be having an awful lot of help making all her decisions, as at least some of my many siblings have plunged into the project with a will. I guess I can understand the motivation for that. Once the old lady is safely installed somewhere, we can all stop worrying about the Sword of Damocles that's been hanging over our heads in the form of all the crazy scenarios that might unfold if Mom suddenly became incapacitated while running around loose. This way, you just pay a monthly maintenance fee and everything's taken care of... sort of like having a property manager or something, I guess.
But here I sit, looking at a picture of Mom in her thirties, still young and strong even though there were bags under her eyes from chasing around the four-- count 'em, four-- kids she already had at that point, and then I look at another picture of her and Dad standing in the pretty little backyard that she designed and landscaped (they were my age, then), and another one of the two of them after his first heart attack and she's in her early sixties I think and they're in the pretty living room that she furnished and decorated... and I hope that she'll be cool ceding so much control over her day-to-day environment and that she'll look before she leaps.
As for me... well, 87 isn't that far away in geologic or historical terms, but it's pretty far away and as for Mom I guess maybe she's right that "it will all work out somehow." Well, that's for sure, I guess. Wisdom of the ages, that. Or should that be "wisdom of the aged?"
Friday, April 12, 2013
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
What's Wrong With This Picture?
The paper has articles today about the "disappointing" jobs report for the month of March. Turns out that employers only added a net of 88,000 jobs last month, not even enough to keep pace with the additions to the "labor force" as the result of people newly entering the job market, much less to reduce the vast legions of the unemployed. Of course, since the officially-acknowledged "unemployment" or "jobless" rate doesn't include people who've given up looking for a job because the economy (on "Main Street," not "Wall Street") is so bad, some economists estimate that the "true" unemployment rate is 9.8% or greater, not the still-dismal-but-lower-than-last-month 7.6% that the government is touting.
To put this into perspective, as of May, 2012 there were officially 12.6 million people "unemployed." But there were another 88 million working age adults who weren't working, but were not counted as "unemployed" because they had been defined out of the "workforce" entirely. As their unemployment runs out, and they give up their job search in frustration, additional persons are dropped from the "workforce" each day.
A more revealing statistic is that the "workforce" is shrinking. At this point in time, only about 63% percent of the working-age population of the U.S. is working or seeking work. The rest are either retired, rich, on public assistance or starving. As for the stock market, which too many people put too much stock in as an indicator of the health of the overall economy, an interesting statistic is that the number of publicly-traded stocks is apparently shrinking, too. Some of that (O.K., a lot of it) is due to mergers. Some of it is due to companies being taken private. Factoring in the flight from equities by the "ordinary" individual investor in the wake of the financial upheavals of the last couple of decades, plus the insanity created by huge banks of computers processing day-trades in nanoseconds, programmed to analyze and take advantage of "trends" in trading, as opposed to fundamentals, and what do you have? Fantasyland.
The people whose economic reality is closely tied to the vicissitudes of stock prices or can derive any information of practical import from poring over indexes of stock prices are becoming fewer and fewer in number. In fact, fewer than half of all American households own equities in any form, and fewer than half of those own stocks or mutual funds outside of an employer-sponsored plan. What most people want in order to feel prosperous is a house that is worth something and a job that pays them enough to pay for it, and frankly, my dear, they don't (and probably shouldn't) give a damn about the Dow, which is what most people are referring to when they say "the market is up... or down... or flat).
The Dow is an index of only 30 stocks, anyway. Big company stocks, it is true. But only 30 of them, and these companies in the aggregate only employ a small fraction of the American "workforce." In the aggregate, much of their own "workforce" is elsewhere in the world, and they generate a lot of their revenues overseas. While it used to be true that "what is good for General Motors is good for America," that was when GM was making and selling most of the cars here and its "workforce" was making a solid middle-class living that involved a lot of spending on other American goods and services. Now Detroit is pretty much an abandoned area, and the unemployed are driving their Toyotas and Hondas over to the unemployment office to wait for their checks (or they are until their unemployment benefits run out, anyway). And some companies that are still making lots of money here, like McDonalds or the big tobacco companies, are doing so at the expense of the health and well-being of everyone with whom they come in contact.
You have to read between the lines of these statistics a little bit, but if you do you will rapidly come to an understanding of how it is that there are zillions of unemployed people, zillions of underemployed people and a stock market that's through the roof, all at the same time. If you want to take the advanced course, you'll have to do some reading and thinking. Start with "The Power Elite" from the 1950's, then stir in a little Mitt Romney and Scrooge McDuck, then a lecture by Professor Richard Wolfe to explain it all. By the time you're done, you will realize that American workers are in big trouble, partly because they're not working anymore, partly because it is no longer necessary for the financial well-being of their overlords that they work... or even consume. "Multi-national" companies now make most of their money employing cheap foreign workers to make cheap goods to sell to other cheap foreign workers in far-away places that have lax environmental standards and poor industrial and financial regulation (well, okay, we've still got poor regulation here, too) and the only real domestic market they need to maintain for the comfort of their officers, directors and principal shareholders is the one for imported luxury goods.
Few of the luxury goods favored by the wealthy, and precious little of anything else, are made in the USA. They don't manufacture clothing in America anymore, for the most part (and what they do make is only T-shirts and socks), they don't make TV's or I-Phones, either. And wait a minute... what kind of a car do you drive?
We even import pet food... to the great misfortune of the legions of animals who have ingested the toxin-laced Chinese version, and their human companions who installed that asbestos-laden drywall. But let's get real. What alternatives to cheap, foreign-made goods do most people really have? If you want a bargain, shop at Wal-Mart-- it's cheaper than taking a slow boat to China for the same stuff. And while the stock broker whose bonus you bailed out a couple of years ago is drinking the fine wine that he purchased at the last wine auction advertised in the New York Times, and the plutocrats he serves are plotting their next two trillion dollar heist, you might want to check out the free samples at your local Costco. If you make a few laps around the store, you can ingest enough calories to make a complete meal, and you don't really want to read about the ingredients in all that stuff anyway.
To put this into perspective, as of May, 2012 there were officially 12.6 million people "unemployed." But there were another 88 million working age adults who weren't working, but were not counted as "unemployed" because they had been defined out of the "workforce" entirely. As their unemployment runs out, and they give up their job search in frustration, additional persons are dropped from the "workforce" each day.
A more revealing statistic is that the "workforce" is shrinking. At this point in time, only about 63% percent of the working-age population of the U.S. is working or seeking work. The rest are either retired, rich, on public assistance or starving. As for the stock market, which too many people put too much stock in as an indicator of the health of the overall economy, an interesting statistic is that the number of publicly-traded stocks is apparently shrinking, too. Some of that (O.K., a lot of it) is due to mergers. Some of it is due to companies being taken private. Factoring in the flight from equities by the "ordinary" individual investor in the wake of the financial upheavals of the last couple of decades, plus the insanity created by huge banks of computers processing day-trades in nanoseconds, programmed to analyze and take advantage of "trends" in trading, as opposed to fundamentals, and what do you have? Fantasyland.
The people whose economic reality is closely tied to the vicissitudes of stock prices or can derive any information of practical import from poring over indexes of stock prices are becoming fewer and fewer in number. In fact, fewer than half of all American households own equities in any form, and fewer than half of those own stocks or mutual funds outside of an employer-sponsored plan. What most people want in order to feel prosperous is a house that is worth something and a job that pays them enough to pay for it, and frankly, my dear, they don't (and probably shouldn't) give a damn about the Dow, which is what most people are referring to when they say "the market is up... or down... or flat).
The Dow is an index of only 30 stocks, anyway. Big company stocks, it is true. But only 30 of them, and these companies in the aggregate only employ a small fraction of the American "workforce." In the aggregate, much of their own "workforce" is elsewhere in the world, and they generate a lot of their revenues overseas. While it used to be true that "what is good for General Motors is good for America," that was when GM was making and selling most of the cars here and its "workforce" was making a solid middle-class living that involved a lot of spending on other American goods and services. Now Detroit is pretty much an abandoned area, and the unemployed are driving their Toyotas and Hondas over to the unemployment office to wait for their checks (or they are until their unemployment benefits run out, anyway). And some companies that are still making lots of money here, like McDonalds or the big tobacco companies, are doing so at the expense of the health and well-being of everyone with whom they come in contact.
You have to read between the lines of these statistics a little bit, but if you do you will rapidly come to an understanding of how it is that there are zillions of unemployed people, zillions of underemployed people and a stock market that's through the roof, all at the same time. If you want to take the advanced course, you'll have to do some reading and thinking. Start with "The Power Elite" from the 1950's, then stir in a little Mitt Romney and Scrooge McDuck, then a lecture by Professor Richard Wolfe to explain it all. By the time you're done, you will realize that American workers are in big trouble, partly because they're not working anymore, partly because it is no longer necessary for the financial well-being of their overlords that they work... or even consume. "Multi-national" companies now make most of their money employing cheap foreign workers to make cheap goods to sell to other cheap foreign workers in far-away places that have lax environmental standards and poor industrial and financial regulation (well, okay, we've still got poor regulation here, too) and the only real domestic market they need to maintain for the comfort of their officers, directors and principal shareholders is the one for imported luxury goods.
Few of the luxury goods favored by the wealthy, and precious little of anything else, are made in the USA. They don't manufacture clothing in America anymore, for the most part (and what they do make is only T-shirts and socks), they don't make TV's or I-Phones, either. And wait a minute... what kind of a car do you drive?
We even import pet food... to the great misfortune of the legions of animals who have ingested the toxin-laced Chinese version, and their human companions who installed that asbestos-laden drywall. But let's get real. What alternatives to cheap, foreign-made goods do most people really have? If you want a bargain, shop at Wal-Mart-- it's cheaper than taking a slow boat to China for the same stuff. And while the stock broker whose bonus you bailed out a couple of years ago is drinking the fine wine that he purchased at the last wine auction advertised in the New York Times, and the plutocrats he serves are plotting their next two trillion dollar heist, you might want to check out the free samples at your local Costco. If you make a few laps around the store, you can ingest enough calories to make a complete meal, and you don't really want to read about the ingredients in all that stuff anyway.
Monday, April 1, 2013
Infallible Popes and Other Old Poops
You know, just when you start thinking, "Hey, we're living in the future!" and get all worked up over all the fantastic technology and stuff (Ha! My computer froze for hours today after I foolishly agreed to download Internet Explorer 10) you wind up reading a story about how somebody was burned as a witch someplace or that we still have Kings, Queens and a Pope.
Interesting fact about the Pope: When he speaks ex cathedra on matters of faith or morals, he is infallible, according to the theologians of the Catholic Church. Well, according to them since the First Vatican Council in 1870 anyway. That's when they thought up (or "defined") the doctrine of Papal infallibility, although theologians have since "discovered" many instances of Popes being infallible before they told the people about the possibility. This, of course, involved a re-interpretation of history. I'm sure this ties in somehow to the whole child-molesting-coverup thing, but I'm not sure just how. In any event, it's nice to have a sure thing going for us, although here in Twenty-First Century America neither "faith" nor "morals" seems to be a real hot topic at the moment. Everybody in the public eye, from Jesse Jackson, Jr. to Cardinal Mahoney to Lance Armstrong to Silvio Berlusconi seems to have decided that moral relativism and expediency will do for just about any situation.
I was reading this morning that, according to the Catholic Church, the doctrine of papal infallibility didn't "just suddenly appear" in Church doctrine. It was there all along, and it's only the Church's understanding of the doctrine that's evolved to the point that it seemed like a change. Ditto with the Constitution of the United States of America. All those rights we used to discover lurking in there, like the "right to privacy," for example, really were in there all along, but we didn't know about them because we didn't know how to look for them. And all those governmental powers and taxes and things that we keep on discovering were in there all along, too.
It's the nature of the beast that our "understanding" of everything is continually evolving-- the versions of astrophysics, biology and American history now being taught in schools are very different from those taught a few decades ago. With history in particular, it's funny how we can keep refining our understanding no matter how far away from the actual events we get. Which makes you wonder: Why bother to amend the Constitution, ever? Why not just amend our understanding of it, instead? After all, it's been a long time since there were any amendments to the Bible, but there's never been any shortage of prophets and ministers and holy rollers around to tell everybody how they've discovered the hidden truth in there that blew by everybody else for the past two-plus thousand years. Also, when the Supreme Court does find a new little twist or turn in the Constitution, that's exactly what we have to do-- amend our understanding of the document. Because that's what the Supreme Court does, apart from deciding close political elections-- it finds those little nuggets in the Constitution that were there all along, but which will change everybody's lives once the Court tells us how wrong we've been.
Pope John Paul II only spoke infallibly once, in 1994, when he announced that women were never, ever going to be ordained as priests, and that, ergo, people should just stop talking about the possibility. And there you have it, his "legacy." No more Pope Joans. Oh, and I also heard that somebody in Latin America put out a comic book based on the premise that when John Paul II died he became a costumed superhero, fighting all kinds of bad guys from Hell. But he was only the second Pope to speak infallibly since they thought up the doctrine in 1870, so he'll be remembered.
(The other time was in 1950 when Pope Pius XI decided that the Virgin Mary was assumed "body and soul" into heaven when she died.)
People often talk about the Constitution as a "living" document-- i.e., one that still works more than two centuries after it was written because it was written in vague enough terms to permit its provisions to be applied in situations that the Framers (i.e., the landed gentry who wrote the document) could never have imagined. Other people are "strict constructionists," which means that you should look at the world through Eighteenth Century eyes when interpreting the law of the land. They say that if you want to enact laws dissimilar from any already in existence, you have to amend the Constitution, which is a lengthy and difficult process-- effectively impossible when the electorate and their representatives are split down the middle as they are today.
Now, nobody has ever said that the Supreme Court is infallible, but the thing is that if they do get something wrong, it's pretty hard (even for them) to fix. The Supreme Court's decisions can only be reversed by-- you guessed it, the Supreme Court. The Court's interpretation of the Constitution is the last word. Of course, you can get around that... by amending the Constitution, but as noted above, that's not practical in most situations. So, it's almost like they're infallible, because if they get it wrong, everybody then alive might very well be dead before they can fix it.
Like Popes, Supreme Court Justices never have to retire. But, unlike Popes, they speak "infallibly" on everything under the sun, from taxes to birth control to voting rights to war powers to advertising to privacy rights to porn. Because they are a separate, co-equal branch of government, they can look the President and the Congress right in the eye and say, "You're not the boss of me." As for the voters, they have as much input into the selection of the Supreme Court Justices as they have into the selection of a new Pope in Rome. Wow.
Interesting fact about the Pope: When he speaks ex cathedra on matters of faith or morals, he is infallible, according to the theologians of the Catholic Church. Well, according to them since the First Vatican Council in 1870 anyway. That's when they thought up (or "defined") the doctrine of Papal infallibility, although theologians have since "discovered" many instances of Popes being infallible before they told the people about the possibility. This, of course, involved a re-interpretation of history. I'm sure this ties in somehow to the whole child-molesting-coverup thing, but I'm not sure just how. In any event, it's nice to have a sure thing going for us, although here in Twenty-First Century America neither "faith" nor "morals" seems to be a real hot topic at the moment. Everybody in the public eye, from Jesse Jackson, Jr. to Cardinal Mahoney to Lance Armstrong to Silvio Berlusconi seems to have decided that moral relativism and expediency will do for just about any situation.
I was reading this morning that, according to the Catholic Church, the doctrine of papal infallibility didn't "just suddenly appear" in Church doctrine. It was there all along, and it's only the Church's understanding of the doctrine that's evolved to the point that it seemed like a change. Ditto with the Constitution of the United States of America. All those rights we used to discover lurking in there, like the "right to privacy," for example, really were in there all along, but we didn't know about them because we didn't know how to look for them. And all those governmental powers and taxes and things that we keep on discovering were in there all along, too.
It's the nature of the beast that our "understanding" of everything is continually evolving-- the versions of astrophysics, biology and American history now being taught in schools are very different from those taught a few decades ago. With history in particular, it's funny how we can keep refining our understanding no matter how far away from the actual events we get. Which makes you wonder: Why bother to amend the Constitution, ever? Why not just amend our understanding of it, instead? After all, it's been a long time since there were any amendments to the Bible, but there's never been any shortage of prophets and ministers and holy rollers around to tell everybody how they've discovered the hidden truth in there that blew by everybody else for the past two-plus thousand years. Also, when the Supreme Court does find a new little twist or turn in the Constitution, that's exactly what we have to do-- amend our understanding of the document. Because that's what the Supreme Court does, apart from deciding close political elections-- it finds those little nuggets in the Constitution that were there all along, but which will change everybody's lives once the Court tells us how wrong we've been.
Pope John Paul II only spoke infallibly once, in 1994, when he announced that women were never, ever going to be ordained as priests, and that, ergo, people should just stop talking about the possibility. And there you have it, his "legacy." No more Pope Joans. Oh, and I also heard that somebody in Latin America put out a comic book based on the premise that when John Paul II died he became a costumed superhero, fighting all kinds of bad guys from Hell. But he was only the second Pope to speak infallibly since they thought up the doctrine in 1870, so he'll be remembered.
(The other time was in 1950 when Pope Pius XI decided that the Virgin Mary was assumed "body and soul" into heaven when she died.)
People often talk about the Constitution as a "living" document-- i.e., one that still works more than two centuries after it was written because it was written in vague enough terms to permit its provisions to be applied in situations that the Framers (i.e., the landed gentry who wrote the document) could never have imagined. Other people are "strict constructionists," which means that you should look at the world through Eighteenth Century eyes when interpreting the law of the land. They say that if you want to enact laws dissimilar from any already in existence, you have to amend the Constitution, which is a lengthy and difficult process-- effectively impossible when the electorate and their representatives are split down the middle as they are today.
Now, nobody has ever said that the Supreme Court is infallible, but the thing is that if they do get something wrong, it's pretty hard (even for them) to fix. The Supreme Court's decisions can only be reversed by-- you guessed it, the Supreme Court. The Court's interpretation of the Constitution is the last word. Of course, you can get around that... by amending the Constitution, but as noted above, that's not practical in most situations. So, it's almost like they're infallible, because if they get it wrong, everybody then alive might very well be dead before they can fix it.
Like Popes, Supreme Court Justices never have to retire. But, unlike Popes, they speak "infallibly" on everything under the sun, from taxes to birth control to voting rights to war powers to advertising to privacy rights to porn. Because they are a separate, co-equal branch of government, they can look the President and the Congress right in the eye and say, "You're not the boss of me." As for the voters, they have as much input into the selection of the Supreme Court Justices as they have into the selection of a new Pope in Rome. Wow.
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