Does the USA need not more, but less productivity?

When robots steal almost everybody's

work, how will people find any?

A lot of people aren’t going to like what I’m about to say.

Most Republicans probably won’t like it. Quite a few Democrats won’t like it either. I’m going to describe an ugly, civilization-threatening life form that America and the world needs to come to terms with.

I'm talking about robots. Wait up, don’t run!  Listen to this. It could affect your income and your future, or even whether you will have a future.

The robot in my pants

Let me start by confessing that I have a robot in my pants pocket. You may, too. Its name is Siri, and I connect to it via my I-phone. 

Every night I say, “Hey Siri,” and follow that with a request to wake me at a certain time, usually 7 or 7:15 a.m. As I make my request, Siri types out the words that I’m speaking on my smart phone's screen. Then, in a woman’s voice it says to me, “Your alarm is set for 7 a.m."  

Cool, right? Except robots have also begun driving cars, evidently in a safer manner than humans. They’re doing enormous amounts of work building cars — work that used to be done by humans. They screen callers at enterprises ranging from credit card companies to medical labs, eventually directing the caller to an appropriate extension. You've likely dealt with a robot the last time you called for your credit card balance. They screen job applicants and widgets on production lines.

The day is likely not far off when robots will be able to interview people and then write news stories. Or evaluate employees for raises or termination.  They’re already fighting and killing for us in wars — those drones that supposedly save American lives. And the list of things they do, and can do, and are likely to do keeps growing.

They’re coming for your job.

All of the foregoing means that a generation or so down the road, or possibly less, Robots will be doing most of the work that humans now do.

So what should happen to the Americans who lose their jobs to robots? Retraining? Please! There are going to be fewer and fewer jobs to retrain for as everyone from the nasty clerk in the driver’s license bureau, to the charming hospital nurse who brings pills to your bed, to truck driver, to insurance actuaries, journalists and copywriters find machines doing jobs that they used to do.

In the end, the enemy is not cheap workers in foreign countries, or immigrants replacing Americans on the job. The enemy is a microchip driving a machine. And the microchip doesn't care if it replaces you.

We could take the attitude that the replaced people can all go starve. Trouble is, in the long run “they” is likely to include you, your spouse, your kids, your neighbors. With machines doing most of the work, should every suddenly-unproductive person starve? Or should you just be on the dole, collecting a lifetime unemployment income? Or is there another solution?

A solution with long, lovely weekends

It’s time to consider dividing up the remaining jobs a bit more equitably. Instead of one person doing a job for 40 hours a week, two equally capable people could each do half he same job, each of them for twenty hours. Yes, that cuts per-person productivity in half. But it also assures that employment will be spread around a great deal more. 

A shorter work week assures that people will have a place to go each day — perhaps each day of a four day work week instead of a five-day week. It spreads around self-esteem and lessens the opportunities for people who are made to feel worthless getting into mischief.

But where will the money for this lessened productivity come from? 

Make the robots pay

Take the money from the productivity of the tireless robots who are taking jobs from people. Robots earn no salary, require no food other than electricity, need no sleep. While they steal work from people, huge masses of people can steal the fruits of robot labor for themselves.

But that means rigidly controlling how the income that robots earn gets distributed. And it means, for example, that a CEO might have to scrape along on a paltry couple of million dollars a year while a greater share of income goes to an increased number of employees, all of whom are less productive than they used to be. And it means protection in the U.S. economy against imports from places where fewer people are being paid salaries because robots are doing most of the work.

Admittedly, this idea is revolutionary and markedly socialistic idea. But the alternative is a society with far greater extremes of wealth and poverty even than we have today — a society where the 99 percent become an impoverished and idle hatchery for crime and mass insurrection.

For more jobs, we will need people doing less work. Let's have a 20-hour work week.

Feel free to discuss.

Donald Trump turns out to be a lot more toxic than even I would have guessed

The State of California says that even his
mask is poisonous

So we all know that to most people, with the exception of a tranche of largely-white, largely-male voters, seeing or hearing Donald Trump is something like sitting in a room when a 500 pound gorilla infested with fleas, lice and bedbugs walks in and sits down on your couch.

He’s hard to ignore, he looks like trouble, his presence is not only scary but also repulsive, and there’s all kinds of obnoxious stuff buzzing around him. Consequently you have an urge to not only shoe him out, but also to fumigate the premises and then take a shower.

But did you know he was toxic? I don’t mean symbolically toxic, or metaphorically toxic, or even hyperbolically toxic. I mean that even his likeness is real-world, honest-to-lab results toxic.

How do I know this?

I just went shopping on the Internet for a Donald Trump Halloween mask. I found this “Tax Evasion Trump Mask.” With it, on the same web page, came this warning:

WARNING – Certain states require us to provide consumers with special warning for certain products if those products expose consumers to chemicals above threshold levels. We care about our customers’ safety and hope that the information below helps with your buying decision.
FOR CALIFORNIA RESIDENTS: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects and or other reproductive harm. Do not put in mouth or chew.

Chew that one over.

John Stumpf, Henry Miller, hapless Wells Fargo employees, and a filthy Cockney music hall song

More than 50 years ago, a ballad in

this book taught a lesson that the

John Stumpf scandal teaches us today.

In 1959, certain books were forbidden in the United States, among them Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. Little wonder. They contained graphic descriptions of S-you-know-what-X.

Given that the authorities took to jailing Lennie Bruce just a few years later for uttering language that Donald Trump uses regularly on television today, you can understand why you didn’t want to be caught selling a copy of either of Miller’s Tropic books.You could get busted by the same police squad that otherwise spent its time busting hookers and comedians, find yourself publicly shamed as a “pornographer” in the newspapers, and then get sent to prison.

Which is not to say that Americans couldn’t find and read Miller’s books. All you had to do was go to Paris, where, it was said, the booksellers at the stalls along the Seine, over on the left bank, would peddle you a copy, published locally by an outfit called the Olympia Press.

Unfortunately the word got around too quickly, and by the time I arrived in Paris, a college student in the summer of 1959, the bookstalls and some of the bookshops along the Boulevard St. Michel were flat sold out of Henry Miller, drained dry by eager and porn-starved American tourists.

But I did find a consolation prize. It was an English language volume called Count Palmiro Vicarion’s Book of Bawdy Ballads. Some of the ballads, I later learned at the University of Leeds, where I landed for the fall and winter, were reputed to have been written by some of Britain’s most honored poets in their student days.

I wouldn’t know about the veracity of that, one way or another. What attracted me most about the bawdy ballad book was a song that seems to have had its origin in English music halls, circa World War I. Originally a publicly-performable song, its verses had been altered over time by numerous mischief-makers who frittered away their time trying to figure out what rhymes best with various four-letter words.

I was enchanted by this particular ballad because it was a dirty song with a social conscience. I’ll share a few of the more printable lyrics a bit further on, but first a reminder about John Stumpf and Wells Fargo Employees.

By now you’ve likely heard scores of times about John Stumpf’s appearance before Congress, giving testimony concerning the huge scam that occured as employees struggled to satisfy Stumpf’s demands that they cross-sell the living crap out of the bank’s various products.

If you haven’t, and you have the time to spare, watch Stumpf try to verbally wiggle out from under from the righteous lash of Senator Elizabeth Warren before you resume reading:

Now, let us resume so that we can get to those 100-year old filthy lyrics.

In a desperate attempt to meet their quotas and keep the top echelons happy, more than 5,300 employees opened false accounts in the names of their customers and depositors, and charged them fees for the pleasure of being defrauded.

When the scandal finally came out, the 5,300 employees were fired. Even though they would have been fired if they hadn’t defrauded the customers and thus were unable to make their quotas.

And then it came out that scrupulously honest employees who either refused to defraud bank customers or who tried to blow the whistle in The Great Stumpf Swindle were also fired for doing so.

Wells Fargo employees claim they were retaliated against for reporting unethical demands to meet the company's sales goals. 

Wells Fargo paid $185 million in fines and fired 5,300 employees for creating millions of fake accounts, but a half dozen workers who spoke to CNN say they were fired for speaking up! 

One banker said he refused to open up phony accounts and was fired 8 days after calling an ethics line to report the requests. 

A former Wells Fargo Human Resources official said the bank conspired to fire employees for minimal offenses after they made calls to the ethics hotline. He said:"If this person was supposed to be at the branch at 8:30 a.m. and they showed up at 8:32 a.m, they would fire them,"

Most of these employees were making $12 an hour. Poor schlemiels. And what of John Stumpf, who demanded all the cross-selling? CNN money reports:

Stumpf will leave with about $200 million -- made up of cash, Wells Fargo stock and options, a CNNMoney analysis has found. 

Even if Stumpf is fired "for cause," such as violating company policy, he would have to forfeit only a portion of that sum.

Which brings me, finally, to a century-old, much filthified music hall song, which demonstrates that nothing, absolutely nothing has changed over the years.

For reasons pertaining to more-or-less sanitary language and brevity, I’ll only quote a couple of excerpted verses here, but they’ll give you the idea. And I think you'll quickly see how all the song relates, a century or so later, to Stumpf firing not only the $12-an-hour employees who knuckled under his demands and cheated bank customers, but also those who refused. 

She was poor but she was honest,though she came from 'umble stock,And her honest heart was beatingUnderneath her tattered frock.

But the rich man saw her beauty,She knew not his base design,And he took her to a hotelAnd bought her a small port wine.

Chorus: It's the same the whole world over,
It's the poor wot gets the blame,
It's the rich wot gets all the pleasure,
Isn't it a blooming shame? 

See him riding in a carriage 

Past the gutter where she stands.

He has made a stylish marriage,
While she wrings her ringless hand 

See him in the 'ouse of Commons
Making laws for all mankind
While the victim of his pleasure
Lives by selling her behind

Chorus: It's the same the whole world over,
It's the poor wot gets the blame,
It's the rich wot gets the pleasure,
Isn't it a blooming shame?

Thanks for nothing, Google

I opened this blog today only to discover that Google had, for reasons I'm not aware of, vanished my entire blogroll.

My apologies to you, Steve M, Earthbound Misfit, Yastreblyansky, Buce, and others. I'll attempt to restore the sidebar with your links on it as soon as possible.

Grrrr! Stuff like this makes me Cranky, cranky, cranky!!!!!

Pardon me while I say, "I told you so" about Donald Trump

A while ago in a post called, "Hillary, Donald, the first debate, and

When he's not drowning out everyone

else, he sulks

the Trump Noise Machine," I made a prediction.

Here’s the prediction: 

Since Donald Trump doesn’t have the smarts, the knowledge, or the temperament to debate Hillary effectively, he’ll try to make up for his lack of substance and skill by doing his best to drown out Hillary with an abundance of noise.  

His spokes-puppets do it all the time. In CNN and other network news interviews, they constantly interrupt people with different points-of-view, or talk over them, trying to shout down what they can’t beat with facts or logic. (A perfect cross-talker is Trump spokesperson Kelly Ann Conway.)

When the debate actually happened. Trump interrupted so many times that I lost count. Fortunately, Vox, didn't. They report: 

"Trump interrupted Clinton 51 times at the debate. She interrupted him just 17 times."

And part of Hillary's interruptions seemed aimed at trying to get a word in edgewise.

My own post went on to recommend:

Ideally, the moderator ought to be given a remote switch which would turn off the microphone of either debater if he or she runs over a time  limit, or interrupts the other.

That failing, we need a moderator who’s tough as nails, who will interrupt the interruptor and tell him or her in plain language that this kind of behavior is worthy of an unruly kindergarten child, not a presidential candidate.

I hate to say I told you so.Mr. Trump, you are an interruptive boor who tried to prevent millions of Americans from hearing what Ms. Clinton has to say. Speak only when it's your turn. Otherwise, shut the hell up.

Who will win the Clinton-Trump debate? I asked my favorite learned futurist.

Her guess is as good as yours. Maybe better.

If you’re new, or even relatively new to this space, you’ve probably never heard of Madame Galzogorist, the fortune teller to the shmateh trade.

She inhabited a shabby room in an old loft building, one flight up in New York’s Garment District. A victim of painted signs that were misspelled (“Readings: $5 Speical,”) and of electrical signs that malfunctioned (see above) she nevertheless provided deep insights into the political unknown. For a nine year old example (my God, have I been at this blog that long?) go here.

Recently, I decided to check in with her about the first Clinton-Trump debate. Here’s a transcript of the interview:

Crank: Good afternoon, Mme. Galzogorist. I wonder if you’d give me a reading? I'd like to know the outcome of the first debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Mme. G: Did you bring money? My prices have gone up. Ten bucks, minimum.

Crank: I happen to have a ten dollar bill here….

Mme. G: That’s all you brought me? Cheapskate! Well, you always were. Now, what was it you wanted again?

Crank: Results of the first Clinton-Trump debate?

Mme. G: Let me look into my crystal ball here. Ah yes, I see. Buy corn futures. Short term. Buy one day, sell the next. Fast in and out.

Crank: I wanted political results. You’re giving me investment advice.

Mme. G: All opinions stated are merely and exclusively opinions, and may not be construed as advice. Nothing said here is meant either as an inducement to buy or an inducement to sell. Your results may vary. Past performance is no indication of future results. If you have been to an area where certain fungal infection are common…

Crank: But what about the debate?

Mme G:  I’m trying to tell you. Buy corn futures. This debate is likely to generate the biggest televised event since the McCarthy-Army hearings of 1950-whatever. Huge audiences. All with their fat asses plunked down on a couch, munching away on empty calories. Many munching on microwave popcorn. Some on pre-popped bags full of the stuff. It’s going to drive corn prices through the roof a Trump tower.

Crank: Yes, but the debate results?

Mme. G: The results will be an increase in corn prices on the commodity market. Perhaps more of a blip than a bubble, but an opportunity for the agile investor willing and financially able to take a certain degree of carefully-considered risk. Also, potato chips and corn chips. Who’s big in chips? The Pepsi-Cola Company? They own Dorritos, right? And people will need to wash down all that salty stuff with something wet and sweet and bubbly. Buy Pepsi-Cola. Either the stock, or short-term calls.

Crank: But who will be ahead after the debate?

Mme. G: Chief Executive Officers of snack food and beverage companies. Watch for them to collect humongous end-of-year bonuses. They will fall on their knees, thanking God for Hillary and The Donald. Networks trying to build their audience bases will also benefit. The American people? Not so much. Anybody who has half a brain and who has wrung most of the alcohol out of it is already intimately familiar with the character, vision or lack thereof, and suitability or lack thereof of both the candidates. The rest is all a circus. Speaking of circuses, there may be an opportunity for appliance makers to sell home cotton candy machines here. Spun sugar, that’s what America yearns for. That, and a rich diet of intellectual treacle.

Crank: Okay, let’s get to the really big question. Who’s going to win the next Presidential election?

Mme. G: For that you’d need to cross my palm with many, many. many fifty dollar bills. Many, many, many.

Crank: I’m a little short on fifties right now.

Mme. G: So what’s new? Come back when you’ve got more money. 

Why isn’t Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf under Federal indictment for fraud?

                    CEO Stumpf: he pocketed  a $200 million 

                    profit from the misfortunes of Wells Fargo

                     customers that his bank engineered

Some time time ago, over 5,000 employees of Wells Fargo Bank began opening accounts in their customers’ names that the customers hadn’t asked for. There were two million — yes, two million — of these fraudulent accounts, it came out during hearings of the Senate Banking Committee.

The account holders were charged various fees for these accounts  — accounts that they hadn’t asked for. 

The 5,300 Wells Fargo employees who helped commit this fraud were fired, it came out during the Senate hearings. So the guilty were punished, right?

Not so fast. Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania noticed a slight, umm, flaw in the testimony of Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf.

As American Banker reports it, Toomey said, “When thousands of people conduct the same kind of fraudulent activity, it’s a stretch to believe that every one of them independently conjured up this idea to commit this fraud. Doesn’t it defy comon sense to think there wasn’t some orchestration of this?”

And who might be leading the orchestra? Senator Elizabeth Warren had a clue. She said to Stumpf:

“While this scam was going on, you personally held an average of 6.5 million shares, and the share price went up by $30, which translate into more than $200 million in gains [for you].”

And make no mistake. The people in whose names those accounts had been fraudulently opened got hurt. The American Banker story reports:

Stumpf also appeared unready for questions about how customers' credit scores would be affected by the scandal. Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., said the impact on customers went beyond fees and fines because account openings could harm credit scores."What about the folks that may have got a house through Chase and paid a higher interest rate because of that?" Tester asked. "The truth is there are real-world implications here on young families and old families that are going to be put in a poverty situation because of that."Stumpf did not respond how the bank would address the situation, saying "we have more work to do.”

Stumpf’s testimony waffled on and on, back and forth, while he seemed to be absolving himself from any obligation to repay the ripped off bank customers. He had found 5,300 little people to take the fall for him, which was no big deal, Stumpf appeared to be saying, because those 5,300 out of work suckers were only one percent of the bank’s employees.

Senator Warren at one point nearly went ballistic, and fired cannonballs of righteous rage at the evently crooked bank president.

“You should resign,” she said. “You should give back the money you took while this scam went on, and you should be invetigated by  the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission.”

I beg to differ, Senator Warren. He should be indicted by the Justice Department. And if he is found guilty — and I have little  doubt that if competently prosecuted he will be found guilty — he should do some time behind bars. How much time?

Well, I wouldn’t want to subject him to the harshness of drug laws that have put some casual pot smokers in prison for decades or more for a single act of possessing or selling a few ounces of marijuana. No, I would not.

Instead, I think he should be prosecuted for each specific act of fraud. For each count on which he is found guilty, he should be sentenced to, oh, let’s be very lenient here — say one measly month in prison, sentences for each act of fraud to be served consecutively, of course. Now let me just, umm, tally this up….

Two million  victims means two million months — those months divided by the 12 months in a year equals 166,666 years. (Not at all harsh considering that if you’d been tried for personally defrauding the bank that many times, not to mention that many drug sales, you’d be in prison for eternity plus a half million years.)

Heck, with time off for good behavior, betcha Stumpf could be out of the clink in less than 80,000 years. I know that may not sound like enough to people who’ve had their credit ruined, who didn’t get jobs or saw their careers wrecked because they had lousy credit,who couldn’t get a house because they had lousy credit, or who may be homeless today as a consequence of the scheme that put $200 million in Stumpf’s personal pocket.

But as I said, I believe in leniency.

P.S. You can find a passel of outrages from the mouth of Stumpf , as well as other outrages, here.

Hillary, Donald, the first debate, and the Trump Noise Machine

If you can't beat them with logic or facts, try to drown then out with noise.

 I predictthat's what Trump will try during the first Presidential Debate.

Here’s a prediction:

Since Donald Trump doesn’t have the smarts, the knowledge, or the temperament to debate Hillary effectively, he’ll try to make up for his lack of substance and skill by doing his best to drown out Hillary with an abundance of noise.

His spokes-puppets do it all the time. In CNN and other network news interviews, they constantly interrupt people with different points-of-view, or talk over them, trying to shout down what they can’t beat with facts or logic. (A perfect cross-talker is Trump spokesperson Kelly Ann Conway.)

The American people deserve better. They deserve to hear the facts and points-of-view of each of the opponents so that we can make up our minds.

Which means that it comes down to the moderator (Lester Holt at the first debate) to hold both speakers in check — to make sure that they speak only their allotted length of time, and that they do not interrupt the other speaker.

Ideally, the moderator ought to be given a remote switch which would turn off the microphone of either debater if he or she runs over a time  limit, or interrupts the other.

That failing, we need a moderator who’s tough as nails, who will interrupt the interruptor and tell him or her in plain language that this kind of behavior is worthy of an unruly kindergarten child, not a presidential candidate.

The question is, is each of the four moderators (After Holt there’s Martha Raddatz, Anderson Cooper, and Chris Wallace — or will they all act like Matt Lauer and compete for the World’s Most Incompetent Journalist Award?

Tune in Monday night. Pop up a couple of bags of popcorn first. But tune in. And prepare for teeth-jarring rounds of Trump trying to shot down Hillary.

Could Donald Trump’s tax returns indicate support for the Bin Ladin family?

Osama Bin Trump? Don’t laugh. Read the evidence.

There are a lot of theories about why Donald Trump won’t release his tax returns. The only one we can dismiss out of hand is Trump’s own explanation — that he can’t release them because he’s under audit.

That piece of claptrap has been debunked ad nauseam. There’s no law that prevents him from releasing the information while the IRS is pouring through it.

So alternative theories about his unwillingness to disclose have emerged: He’s not really making as much money as he claims. He’s not really the multi-billionaire he claims to be. He’s not a successful businessman; he’s a failed businessman. He’s teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. He lied when he said he gives to charity. He doesn’t pay any taxes, or if he pays taxes at all, not nearly as much tax as the average working stiff.

Any or all of these may or may not be true. But any such speculation is fair, since he is seeking the presidency of the United States, and since he is the only candidate since before Richard Nixon who has kept his taxes as buried as some felon's stolen stash from a bank robbery.

Trump’s financial dealings:

the 9-11 nightmare theory

On the anniversary week of the 9-11 attack on the United States let me offer the scariest and most ominous speculation of all. I’m speculating that Trump hasn’t release his tax returns because they will reveal that he has been doing business with, and thus helping to support, the family of Osama bin Laden, and that he has contributed to middle-eastern charities that front for Al Queda and that helped to fund the terrorism of 9-11.

Trump’s possible connection to Bin Laden? Well, just for openers, Trump’s Federal Election Commission filings indicate he has a large hotel construction project in the works in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia through a pair of companies called THC Jeddah Hotel Advisor and DT Jeddah Technical Services Advisor.

So?

Well, if you want to get a substantial building project moving in Saudi Arabia, what’s your go-to company? Why, it’s the Binladen Group, founded by the father of Osama Bin Laden, the terrorist who engineered the 9-11 attack. That company is populated to this day by the late master terrorist’s blood relatives.

In fact, various Bin Laden relatives and a Bin Laden-owned construction company were sued by more than three thousand 9-11 attack survivors, who claimed the terrorist attack was funded by charities set up by the bin Laden and its corporate machinery. 

“Among the defendants were Al Queda, its members and associates, along with charities, banks, front organizations, terrorist organizations and financiers.” CBS New York and the AP reported. 

Most of the cases were thrown out, not because they lacked merit but simply because the court felt it lacked jurisdiction.

Ivanka helps spill the beans

In May of last year, a trade journal called Hotelier Middle East reported “The Trump Hotel Collection is eying luxury properties in the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, The Trump Organization executive vice president of development & acquisitions, Ivanka Trump told Hotelier Middle East in an exclusive interview.”

Trump’s daughter also told the trade journal, “We are looking at multiple opportunities in Abu Dhabi, in Qatar, in Saudi Arabia, so those are the four areas where we are seeing the most interest. We haven’t made a final decision in any of the markets but we have many very compelling deals in each of them.”

Nor do you have to go to the middle-east to find the Saudi-Trump connection. The New York Daily News recently reported…

Trump sold the 45th floor of Trump World Tower to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for $4.5 million in June 2001, according to a city Finance Department spokeswoman. In 2008, the apartments became part of the Saudi Mission to the United Nations, records show.
The five apartments included 10 bedrooms and 13 bathrooms at the time of the sale, and had yearly common charges of $85,585 for building amenities, documents obtained by The News show. If those common charges remain the same, Trump was paid at least $5.7 million by the Saudi government since 2001.

Seeks access, stiffs broker

The real estate agent who set up the 45th floor purchase said that Trump was not only seeking the $5.7 million but also access via the deal to markets in the middle-east.

By the way, the broker, Rebecca Ocampo, claimed Trump stiffed her out of the broker’s fee although for some unknown reason that I don’t want to speculate about, she dropped a law suit. There’s probably a whole other story in there that some enterprising reporter might want to dig out..

Given that it was a Bin Laden who engineered the 9-11 terror attack, and that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi Citizens, Trump’s interest in Saudi construction projects and with various other Saudis makes me wonder.

Did Trump support the Bin Laden family?

Blood on Trump’s hands?

Did Trump, in a frenzy of greed, attempt to milk more wealth out of the Arabian desert by contributing to front “charities” that financed terror attacks on New York?

Does Donald Trump have the blood on his hands of thousands of innocent Americans who perished during the events of 9-11?

Trump might be able to clear his name of these suspicions just by disclosing his complete tax records. His ongoing refusal to do so cannot but help make many Americans wonder.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog