Democrats need to embrace good regulations and progressive taxations to lure the Republican vote.

by Glen Wallace

We need a strong central government imposing regulations to protect the common man from the tyranny of the wealthy.  While, as a leftie progressive, I'm willing to admit that some regulations are onerous and unnecessary, I never seem to hear from a right wingnut regressive admitting that some regulations are helpful and needed to protect the worker, the consumer and the environment from harm or exploitation at the hands of a ruthless businessman.  It seems like the free market set want to create a social political environment where we return to the days of company towns where the residents are considered to have freedom because they aren't physically restrained from leaving -- never mind that the company town is in the middle of nowhere and none of the residents own a car or have a dime to their name that could be used to move out.

Let's remove the income tax and put in its place a federal property tax on the wealthy that covers not just real estate but any and all assets held by the top one tenth of one percent.

Good regulations are proactive whereas, any competitive marketplace without any regulation, is, at best, reactive in dealing with problems.  I say 'at best' because some business can go on harming customers, the environment or workers for years or decades before, or if ever, they get punished in the marketplace for their actions.

The Democratic Party could gain their biggest strength by undermining or outright removing the biggest rallying points for the political right wing.  Democrats could start by eliminating income tax for most, if not all, the 99 percent.  The loss of revenue could be compensated for by increasing the income tax on the top one tenth of the top one percent.  Additionally, there are a great number of other sources of potential revenue the could, and should be tapped -- high frequency trading machine tax, VAT tax, where resource extraction on Federal lands is a given, the transaction should be designed with a fiduciary responsibility towards the owners of that land -- the citizens of the U.S.

Additionally, the power over the ability to create money needs to be returned entirely to the people and taken away from the private Federal Reserve Banking system.  I'm not saying "end the Fed".  If they want to continue as a industry association where banks can voluntarily join, that's fine.  But monetary policy should be set by the US Treasury.  While supporters and representatives may claim that the Fed is audited and nothing untoward has been found, I would counter that there still could be something untoward going on with the Fed and its relationship to the American people it is supposed to be looking out for.  While the Fed may have only one set of accounting books, it may have two sets of strategy books.  That is, it may have a public strategy that complies with the Congressional mandate it is supposed to follow, it may have a private strategy that it instead follows that is directed at aiding the Fed's shareholders at the expense of the American people.  For, instance, had Fed insiders known early in the 2000's where the housing crisis was heading they could have made some strategic shorts, thus benefiting from the Fed's strategy to blow up the housing bubble.  Then when the bubble burst, Fed insiders could have had inside knowledge of the QE program and how it would be used to boost commodities and the stock market for which the insiders could take a long position ahead of the rise.    

But regardless, Democrats need to look at what is motivating the populist base of the Republican party that leads them to vote the way they have.  And then have an answer that might just persuade them to switch sides.  Remember, most of those Republican voters are not rich.  Hired disinfo agents may try to fire up that middle to lower class Republican base by complaining about wealth redistribution.  But I find it hard to believe that base will get worked up into much of a lather when hearing about how some sherry swilling, tailored suit wearing, manicured men with soft hands that never have seen a callous in its life, with a sixty thousand dollar Patek Philippe watches sitting just above those soft hands, has to fork over more in taxes -- especially when that would mean those working class Republicans get to avoid paying income tax altogether.

Additionally, where regulations are concerned, show how good regulations protect the consumer, the environment and the worker from unscrupulous business owners and how a strong government acts as a measure against such businesses.  Without a strong government there is a power mismatch between the little guy and the tycoon.  But where there is unnecessary, onerous regulations, Democrats should be seen working hard to end such bad regulations while continuing to strengthen, tweak, enhance good existing regulations while enacting new good helpful regulations.

Too big to bail banks are still a problem

by Glen Wallace

 A decision needs to be made regarding financial institutions as to whether they are a capitalist private enterprise or a public utility -- they shouldn't try to be both at the same time. Well, a bank can be both at the same time but we saw the consequences of attempting those dual roles in 2008. I'm concerned though that the government regulators and politicians have not learned the valuable lessons of the great recession. Instead there seems to continue to be an intermingling of poorly regulated or completely unregulated speculation on risky derivatives by the same financial institutions providing both needed business and personal lending and insurance, and also wealth management of retirement and life savings of individual citizens.

 If, say, the speculations on derivatives were to fail spectacularly, as they did for the failed financial institutions in 2008, would any jeopardizing of large bank standing on the losing end of those bets, amount to a corresponding jeopardization of the flow of lending capital keeping the business world running and the funds of savers entrusting their savings and investments in those jeopardized banks? If so, then it seems that would be prudent to take measures to completely separate banks engaging in traditional lending and cautious, well regulated investing, from investment banks that are willing to take on the risks associated with derivative trading.

 A possible world needs to be envisioned where we imagine that a given bank fails, and decide whether letting it fail will jeopardize the entire economy of the country and therefore will need to be bailed out by the country or if it will be largely just a loss for the shareholders of the bank. If it is the former, then either a separation of the risky investment banking element from the conservative traditional banking element needs to be done, or the bank needs to be broken up into smaller pieces in a manner similar to the actions by Teddy Roosevelt on Standard Oil Corporation. We need to keep taking those measures until we wind up not having to bail out any financial institution, outside of insured deposits, regardless of the scenario.

Michael Hudson, how do we extricate the economic parasites from the main street host?

Comment I posted following the above youtube video speech by economist Michael Hudson.

by Glen Wallace

I still have some questions.  I guess my main question, from which all my other questions or concerns regarding Michel Hudson's philosophy, revolves around how to safely extricate the parasitic elements of FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) from the main street host.  I  say, the parasitic elements of FIRE, because I think it oversimplifies things to imply that all of FIRE is a parasitic malevolent force on society.  But reading and listening to Mr. Hudson, it isn't entirely clear to me whether he thinks all of FIRE is parasitic or for what aspects are so, how do we go about the extrication process safely.  It would seem to me that we living in a much more complicated situation insofar the parasite and the host are sharing the same 'blood supply', so to speak.  Therefore, just yanking off the parasite could be very hazardous to the health of the host.  While the top 5 percent may own the bulk of stock equities, I think a lot more than 5 percent of the population own a significant amount of stocks, usually through their 401k's or 403b's and IRA's.  So any actions that has knock-on effect of crashing the stock market and a lengthy trough could be financially devastating to much of the remaining middle class population.  While maybe the markets and the economy could have let Citibank fall, I'm not so sure about AIG.  While lending may be currently tight, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe there is still a great deal of small business lending going on with banks and credit unions providing loans for businesses very frequently.   However, if that lending were to really dry up completely as we were warned could have happened if not for the infusion of stimulus cash into the economy soon after the fall of Lehman Brothers, then wouldn't we be facing an economic crisis on a scale severe enough to lead to a civil emergency similar to a natural disaster?

Further complicating matters, isn't that there is a legitimate element to each area of FIRE.  How are we going to, in any parasite extraction process, separate any legitimate actors from the malevolent ones?  I'm not saying it can't be done, but we need to make sure we aren't throwing the baby out with the bath water, so to speak.  To take an analogy from the movies that I think has some realistic relevance to main street finance -- let's make sure we don't take measures that bring down the Bailey's Savings and Loan of the world while trying to go after the Potter's empire of the world, from the movie 'It's a Wonderful Life'.  And to take examples not from the movies but straight from today's economic realities -- in terms of a mass discharging of debt, that sounds nice for the students facing mounting student loans but it doesn't sound so nice for the current and future retirees expecting municipalities and corporations to meet their highly underfunded pension debt obligations.

I don't mean to be a naysayer but we need to come up with a plan where we have covered all the bases so that we can not only answer the tough questions, but also to get to where we are to trying to go.   Indeed, I'm concerned that if we were to implement a plan, for instance, that did crash the markets and dry up small business loans, then the parasitic malevolent elements would sweep in like the Potter character from the movie previously mentioned, and say to the effect "see, you were wrong all along, so from now on let me do the thinking and planning while I buy up all of your land and shares for pennies on the dollar."

I have all sorts of ideas myself for how to go about the parasite extraction process.  I think Bernie Sanders has some good ideas that are a good start, but I think we can safely be a lot more aggressive with progressive reforms than even he is suggesting.  For instance, I haven't heard Sanders even mention what I think we need to delve into and that is Federal asset taxes on corporations and the top one tenth of one percent of individuals.  That, and we need to access revenue from other novel sources as well such as a Wall Street high frequency trading machine transaction tax.  We can also get revenue from increased Tariffs and Excise taxes.  We should also be better leveraging revenue when natural resources are extracted from federal lands.  Personally I would rather Federal lands be preserved as much as possible in their natural state, but if it is already decided to sell some of the land's resources, we might as well do so in a financially responsible manner.  So, instead of selling off the rights to all the timber in a tract of Federal land in a no-reserve auction, sell the timber for the going rate per board foot just as a private landowner would.  Additionally, the US Treasury could bypass the private Federal Reserve, and increase the money supply by minting more coins in larger denominations.  Then all this new revenue and money could be used towards instituting an FDR type of civilian conservation corp like program to rebuild our nations infrastructure.  Additionally we will be needing a lot of revenue if we are to have any chance of making up for the looming pension shortfalls that, if not remedied, will be hard on not only the pensioners, but also the overall economy due to the resultant lowering of aggregate demand from retirees have much less dollars to spend in their pockets.  

Wealth Redistribution to Lift All Boats

The dwindling middle class indicates that the only boats rising are yachts sitting in the torpid pools of wealth amassed by the capitalist sharks. Meanwhile, the middle class tributaries are running bone dry, leaving the middle class row boats sitting on dust. Therefore, the only logical solution is to install pumps in the form of asset taxes into those stagnant wealth pools to insure that the wealth gets rerouted and redistributed back into those tributaries. Trickle down economics has been proven false time and again. However, getting money into the hands of those who will in turn put those funds back into circulation by spending it, the middle class, has been shown to have a tremendous positive knock-on effect throughout the overall economy. But to keep the economy booming you need to keep those tax pumps going to insure money doesn't start stagnating again and rotting in those torpid wealth pools.

Everything is pointing to Hayek being completely wrong -- in fact he had everything backwards. Instead of a free-market being the road to freedom, it turns out that the term 'free-markets' is just a rebranding of the term 'laissez faire'. And laissez faire has always been and always will be the direct route to serfdom -- and with the struggling middle class we are seeing that first hand in the form of the handywork of Hayek's intellectual descendants, the Chicago School of economics. And despite the clear evidence that the Chicago school's laissez faire or freemarket methods of hands-off through repeal of Glass-Steagall and lack of oversight and control of the derivatives market lead directly to the great recession, there has been little corresponding acknowledgment or recognition of the evident refutation of the Chicago School's economic paradigm.

We can get the middle class back on its feet again, but we need judicious government oversight and regulation along with a good amount of wealth redistribution. One excellent means of redistributing the wealth would be through programs similar to FDR's programs involving the Civilian Conservation Corp. A massive government program to repair, rebuild and reinforce our nations infrastructure would go a long ways towards getting money back into the economy and refresh and enhance the conduits of commerce. It would be a win win for everyone, including the much more heavily taxed very wealthy who didn't even know what to do with all that they had, but with such a program, could be proud that their tax dollars were put to such good use; rebuilding a great America.

The Need for a Reserve Fund to Fund Underfunded Pensions

by Glen Wallace


Here is another one of my responses to another essay by John Mauldin about the looming pension crisis:

This is something that the federal government should be building a lock box rainy day reserve fund for.  We should be looking under every revenue sofa cushion for every extra potential revenue source and raising corporate tax rates and taxes on the wealthy -- those best able to absorb the increased tax rates.  There are all sorts of taxes that could be imposed on Wall Street such as a high frequency trading tax and special capital gains tax that would only be applied to stock gains realized by the wealthy one percent.

While some may claim that the looming pension crisis is not their problem, it may well become everyone's problem insofar as we are all tied to the overall economy that will be negatively effected when the crisis hits.  Part of the problem is that, as John touched on in his piece, if all these retirees have their pensions reduced or eliminated altogether, all those retirees will have less money in their pockets to spend on purchases -- a reduction in aggregate demand.

Additionally, don't forget that the last economic crisis almost sunk the entire economy.  Maybe the pension crisis, when it hits, will not be something that, like the last crisis, that we can muddle through and dig ourselves out of.  The pensions may be too big to bail.  And an economic disaster that the economists warned could have happened in 2008, if it were too happen, could lead to a physical disaster on the scale of a natural disaster.  All the goods and services we take for granted in a developed economy could be in jeopardy in an economic crisis because all the providers of those goods and services, and in turn their vendors, depend on the ability raise funds through the ability to borrow money.  If a pension crisis, perhaps combined with another crisis such as mass student loan default, a complete stalling of the economy could lead to an inability of the chain of suppliers of those goods and services, including groceries, to reach the everyday consumer.  But instead of engaging in massive financial reform and the building of a massive rainy day bailout fund, we've only seen some mild patchwork repairs and bracing that everyone can only hope, perhaps unrealistically, will safeguard us from another crisis like we saw in 2008.  People don't seem to realize how disastrous an economic disaster could be and how it could lead to a civil emergency or how close we came to that happening in '08.  

   We should be seeing any potential economic disaster as something that we need to invest big dollars in too defend against just as we invest big dollars in the military for defense -- whether we need to spend so much for military for defense is an open debate, but my point is that the public generally agrees that spending large sums on defense is considered worth while and so they should be considering the possibility that investing in defense against economic calamity is worth while as well.  Maybe we should be shunting towards economic defense reserve funds some of that massive sum currently spent on the military.

Will the looming pension crisis lead to widespread municipal bankruptcies?

by Glen Wallace

The following is my response to John Mauldin's recent post Angst in America, Part 4: Disappearing Pensions:

Not mentioned in the article is the possibility of municipal bankruptcies as a means to avoid paying out on these government pensions. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe government debts to pensions can be discharged through bankruptcy (unlike student loan debt where the debt typically remains even if the debtor declares personal bankruptcy -- the student loan debt bubble, another storm cloud on the horizon that could potentially merge with the looming pension crisis cloud to perhaps form an economic 'perfect storm' situation).

I'm starting to wonder if maybe Meredith Whitney wasn't completely wrong about her prediction she made several years ago that widespread municipal bankruptcies would occur soon after she made her prediction. Instead of being all wrong, maybe she was merely premature in her predictions. Perhaps what threw her off was that she couldn't have predicted the Fed's rounds of QE and the profound stimulating effect QE would have on the stock market. I'm thinking she then couldn't have known that all those government pension funds would be able to cover those pensions for so long, drawing from such robust returns from the markets combined with being so much more heavily vested in the markets than in the past.

Maybe if the run up in the markets hadn't occurred soon after she made her prediction, Ms. Whitney would have been proven correct as all those government pensions and local governments wouldn't have been able to turn to the markets to keep pace with pension plans expecting such high rates of return? And rather than increasing property taxes exorbitantly to meet those pension debts, governments would declare bankruptcy in an effort to avoid servicing those debts. And now looking to the future, once the markets inevitably slow down and almost certainly decline for an extended period of time, will we be seeing widespread municipal bankruptcies on a scale similar to Meredith's earlier prediction?

Single payer government health care as an incentive to bold entrepreneurship

by Glen Wallace

From the perspective of what I like to call 'applied social political philosophy', I prefer to bypass the whole debate about whether health care is a privilege or a right that the state is obligated to provide.  Instead, I ask the question, is a society that provides universal health care coverage achieving an ideal compared to a society that doesn't?  Can that ideal be practically achieved using a reasonable level of human and material resources?  If the answer to those two questions is 'yes', then proceed with taking steps towards the state providing universal coverage.  If there isn't yet sufficient support from the constituents for such coverage, then proceed with arguments and facts to sway them otherwise.

Regarding any counter arguments about government coverage leading to complacency, I think the facts and reasons point in the opposite direction.  If memory serves me correctly, I believe I read a statistic that European nations are greatly outpacing the U.S. in rates of business startups.  And given that universal single payer coverage is much more common in Europe, it would stand to reason that that difference is a fundamental reason for Europe besting the U.S. in such bootstrapping.  That's because here in America, the worker is much too dependent on their employer for health care coverage and thus discouraged from even dipping their feet into the business startup waters.  

Compare the American worker with dreams of starting their own business but are wary of leaving their employer with its comfortable health insurance coverage with the Scandinavian worker who knows they and their family would be assured of health care coverage whether their business startup idea works or not.  Our system of private insurance, generally provided through employment, acts as a disincentive to bold entrepreneurship.  Conversely, a single payer universal coverage system, by limiting risk, would act as an incentive to the sorts of bold bootstrapping that built the United States business empire -- an empire that is now showing signs of flagging compared with the rest of the developed word that wisely provides universal healthcare coverage.

VA problems are no reason to abandon single payer idea

by Glen Wallace

While some may like to point out how the VA has supposedly done such a bad job, as a reason why the government shouldn't take over health care, they are ignoring some important counter arguments or reasons supporting government takeover.  For one, the negative accounts about the VA that people tend to refer to, are to a large extent brought to you by private, for profit, news media that gets a substantial portion of ad revenue from private insurers that have a vested interest in retaining the private health insurance system.  As a result I believe the private news programs are highlighting, focusing and magnifying the VA's problems, while largely ignoring similar issues and problems that plague the private health insurance system.  One need only look at the online reviews of private insurers to find a plethora of examples that make those insurer's look even worse than the VA.  And if a single payer system were implemented, then it would be more of an expansion of Medicare than an expansion of the the VA.

Before Obamacare was implemented, while listening to an NPR feature about individuals having problems with private insurers, if I remember correctly, I believe they quoted a statistic that two thirds of all individuals that declare medical bankruptcy, already had health insurance at the time of their bankruptcy.  And the reasons for such bankruptcies wasn't just due to high deductibles, many were the result of disagreements between insurers and providers about what procedures are, or should have been covered.  As a result, a patient ends up being responsible for for medical bills they thought were covered.  Sometimes the patients can end up getting such bills lowered or covered by the insurer, but getting to that point often turns into a full time job for the patient in the form of phone calls, and negotiations with a hospital and insurer.  Hearing such stories one has to wonder "There has to be a better way!"  Well there is a better way and there also is no need to reinvent the wheel -- that better way is already being used successfully in most of Europe in the form of a government run single payer health care system.

Venus Project oversimplifying scarcity and human behavior

by Glen Wallace

I think Jacque Fresco of the Venus Project is oversimplifying the principle of scarcity and how that relates to how humans value any given good or services.  People don't, wont and wouldn't act in a way that would fit in so neatly into his idea of how people respond to an abundance of any material good.  When some thing that is needed or wanted by the public becomes abundant, there is always some subset of the population that wants that abundant thing in an improved form that is not so abundant.  People often are not satisfied with some thing being merely adequate in a utilitarian sense.  It varies with the product as to how satisfied the general population of consumers tends to be with some product being merely adequate to getting a job done.

It is not difficult to find examples for demonstrating how the principle of dissatisfaction with adequate works and comes into play in everyday consumerist life.  In fact, the difficult part is in finding examples of products where satisfaction with adequate is nearly universal.  Instead, just look at any group of consumers in any category of shopping and you discover a plethora of varying desires and ideas for what they are looking for in a product beyond merely getting the job done.  

For a first example, think of any of the house shopping and house remodeling reality TV shows.  If you watch one of those shows, it wont take long to find either the potential buyer or seller or often both complaining about how a perfectly functional kitchen is outdated.  I watch such shows and I wonder to myself what are they complaining about as the kitchen usually looks perfectly fine to me.   And usually such kitchens are indeed perfectly functional but merely the style is no longer in vogue.  So in they come with all their drills, saws, pry bars and hammers and start ripping the thing apart, expending all sorts of human labor and money and time to get right back where they started from functional point of view.  

And even for a product where a large majority of the population is satisfied with merely getting the job done, there usually is going to be some subset of connoisseurs that are unsatisfied with adequate and still want something special in the product.  An example there would be the ordinary CD player that has become so ubiquitous that you can find them built into the cheapest boom box and still sound pretty good.  Nonetheless, audiophiles insist that the sound of CD players can be significantly improved through circuitry and better DAC chips.  As a result a demand quickly emerged in the audio market sufficient for a great number of manufacturers building and selling boutique CD players for prices ranging from hundreds of dollars for a single unit to many thousands of dollars.  The demand for a product and a scarcity of the higher end product emerged despite a dearth of scarcity of the adequate, lower end product.  

But from my understanding of Jacque Fresco, he seems to be claiming that people wouldn't do in his vision of the ideal Venus Project world what people are indeed already are doing time and time again here in today's everyday world.   Even if something is not scarce, people will continue to desire that same something in a deluxe form that some of those people believe is a better form, but is scarce in that deluxe form.  All this demonstrates two of my main concerns with the Venus Project and the Zeitgeist movement -- First, there seems to be disconnect with the reality of everyday world and how people behave in this world and how they would behave in the worlds envisioned by those movements.  The people behind those movements seems to have become so fanciful in their ideas that they never seem to come up with a starting point in today's world where the first 'baby steps' are taken that would move society towards their utopia and what those first steps would and should be.  The second concern is with the possibility that people might be told, by the powers that be in a Venus Project that has come to fruition, what they, the citizens, want or should want in terms of products.  Would the Venus Project political powers make it illegal to buy and sell scarce, hand crafted objects? 

 OK, now were delving into the area of where it might sound like I'm supporting the ideas of Hayek in his book 'The Road to Serfdom' -- but I'm not, at least I am not a universal supporter of the so-called free market system of economics.   Indeed, I think a great deal of government intervention is needed to create an environment where smaller entrepreneurs are on a more even competitive plane with the larger corporations.   It is these smaller crafts people that improve the merely adequate product, that have a more difficult time absorbing many of the costs of doing business compared with the giant corporation.   So with government intervening to redistribute the wealth of the big business towards the small business, the freedom of both the budding entrepreneurs ability to bootstrap and start a small business and the shopping consumers ability to choose from a greater variety of products, is increased.  With Hayek's brand of laissez faire economics, the economies of scale present inherent advantages to the large conglomerates that lead to monopolies and trusts that decrease the choices of the consumer, the worker and the budding entrepreneur.  

Net Neutrality, What is it, Why it's a good thing and why it' not likely in jeopardy

by Glen Wallace



Bear in mind, the following is my understanding of what net neutrality is, however, I could very well be wrong.

What it's not:  net neutrality does not effect your choice of internet service providers nor their ability to offer packages of varying speeds and data limit levels.  Nor does net neutrality effect your ability to choose web hosts if you want or need your own web page nor does net neutrality effect the hosts ability to offer various packages of hosting features involving things like server space, private or shared servers, monthly data levels, email accounts and so on.  We already have choices involving ISP's and Hosts and the vendors providing those services already have the ability to offer different packages involving different services.  And, we already have net neutrality. 

So, where's the neutrality?  The neutrality that we already have and we want to keep involves the physical backbone of the internet and the computerized 'switching stations' through which all internet traffic must flow for connections and communications to be made between web sites and web viewers.   I put 'switching stations' in single quotes because I don't think that is the correct technical term for the infrastructure part of the internet that I'm thinking of, but, regardless, I think the term gives a good picture of what that part does with the ones and zeros flowing through the internet. 

Net neutrality enforces rules requiring the owners of those switching stations not to charge a toll on the data through those stations.  Of course the switching station owners would love to charge a toll as that would provide a bountiful of revenue corresponding to the bountiful flow of traffic on the internet.  But with net neutrality, there is no such toll, and as a result we have a great deal of freedom and variety in terms of what we can post, upload, view and read on the internet.

Now, bear in mind, I don't think that an end to net neutrality would result in individual web site viewers paying a toll directly to the switching station owners.  I'm not certain, but I think the tolls would be paid by either the website owners or the hosting companies for those websites or a combination of both the sites and the hosts.  But of course, if one individual wants to create their own little website, the costs of doing so could become out of reach.  Similarly, Google, the owners of YouTube, might have to start being much more restrictive and selective for what they allow users to upload.  As it is now, YouTube makes it very easy to publish a video and anyone can do so as long as the video meets their reasonable community standards such as not being hate speech or harassing or copyright violating. 

But if Google has to pay a toll for each and every video that gets uploaded and then has to pay another toll each time that video is viewed, it may have to start filtering and selecting only those videos that are conducive to creating the best ad revenue.  Similarly, Amazon and Netflix would likely have to charge considerably more for streaming their movies and shows.  Facebook might have to start charging membership fees. 

As one might expect, charging tolls to websites could also have a quelling effect on freedom of speech across the whole political spectrum as video and written postings presence on the web may start to be based on the posters ability to pay or generate revenue for the website they're posting on and not on the value the poster is bringing to the world with their post. 

However, the reason I don't think Net Neutrality is in too much jeopardy is because there is a confluence of the needs and wants of the populace and the needs and wants of some very powerful corporate financial interests.  As a matter of fact, I suspect that the primary reason that net neutrality has survived some past challenges, is more the result of corporate power than citizen activism.  I wish I could be confident that net neutrality is still here because of popular uproar in its defense, but it doesn't seem like the interests of the plebs holds much sway in the halls and meeting places on capital hill. Just look at the corporate interests whose bottom lines would be squandered if net neutrality were to end and tolls would have to be paid: Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Netflix to name a few. 

Well, you may be wondering, just who owns those switching stations if not any of the previous corporations named.  Once again, I could be wrong on this, so I wont name any names, but I believe it is the traditional phone company giants that own most of the 'backbones' of the internet, including those 'switching stations' I keep talking about. 
One might wonder, how are the phone companies able to stay in business if they have to maintain and operate those switching stations if they don't get to charge any tolls?  That I'm not sure of, but they seem to be doing alright under the current system of net neutrality.  What I believe is the case is that the big phone companies have been able to stay in business and do so quite nicely for many decades under a system of economics involving a relationship between private enterprise and the government known as 'well regulated monopolies.' 

Under certain circumstances, usually involving utilities, competition to provide a particular service is impracticable.  As a result, either the government itself provides the service or it all allows one business to provide the service as a monopoly.  But if a business provides the service such as a utility to the public, the business must be specially regulated so that it can't take advantage of its advantageous position  as a monopoly and engage in such activities as price gouging.  As a result you have such government organizations as the FCC acting as an regulator and intermediary between the public and the private utility ensuring that both the public receives a reliable service at a reasonable cost while the provider is able to continue to pay the bills it needs to, to keep the service to the public running.

If the private service provider discovers that it needs more funds to pay for an essential part of that service -- such as, for instance, a switching station, it can petition the regulatory body, such as the FCC, to allow them to tack on an extra fee to the bill of the consumer.  If the FCC finds the request reasonable, then the utility will be allowed to charge that fee.  Those of you who still have land line telephones or who remember those bill recall seeing a charge called something like the "federal access charge" -- I think that is an example of one of those extra fees that the utility allowed the phone company to tack on to cover the costs of some of their physical infrastructure, whether it be the installation of telephone polls and lines out to remote parts of the country or some major upgrade of equipment. 

Regardless there is ways of making sure utilities are adequately compensated to ensure continued reliable delivery of some necessary service.  And I think that indeed, especially in this era, the internet is a necessary service that should be regarded as a utility.  If those switching station owners were able to start charging tolls, that would effectively result in a legalized form of racketeering, where websites would be required to pay for their data to pass through the switching stations and be viewed on the web.   

Let's Take Back the Democratic Party

by Glen Wallace

The recent election of Trump should be a clarion call and rallying cry not just to revive the Democratic Party but to bring it back to its original progressive values.  Too many progressive commentators act as apologists for the non progressive actions of Democratic Party members in and out of office.  A prime example is the time period soon after Obama took office when the Democrats had the brass ring of the Presidency and both houses of Congress but dropped the progressive ball of opportunity.  Instead of using that opportunity to enact a single payer program like Medicare for everyone, they enact a healthcare program, Obamacare, that, Thom Hartmann rightly pointed out, is nearly identical to the program proposed by President Nixon and enacted by then Governor Romney.  Let's call it like it is -- Obamacare is a Republican Party designed gift to health insurance companies and Big Pharma.  And don't try to tell me that during that 'brass ring' period any serious effort was made to institute a single payer program.  I remember that period when the Democrats could have 'run the tables' and I don't recall any speeches before congress or interviews on the Networks where members of congress and the President championed a single payer program.  That's because no effort was made -- no effort was made because the Democratic Party has been taken over by neoliberals  that value regressive laissez faire economic values over the progressive socialist values that the Democratic Party is supposed to be founded on.

Before the 2018 elections, coming up in two short years, we progressives need to make some decisions.  First, we need to boldly attempt to gain Democratic nominations for both local and national offices.  Second, we need to run for those nominations under a boldly socialist progressive platform that meets and even surpasses the progressive platform that nearly got Sanders the Democratic nominations for President.  Third, we need to decide, if, like in the 2016 Presidential Democratic nomination race, the neoliberal candidate still wins the nominations, will it be warranted for the progressive socialist candidate to turn around and run as a third party candidate.  The 2018 race will be coming before we know it and we shouldn't be delaying in at least thinking over what race will we be running for, what our platform will be and what to do if we don't get the nomination.

I'm already thinking about running for U.S. Congress in the District where I live and plan to be living in 2018.  I voted for the Democrat, Angie Craig, in the 2016 election, even though I consider her a neoliberal.  I think she has too close ties to the medical device industry being a former executive for a medical device manufacturer.  I'm not sure I'd have much better luck pitching my idea to her than the winner of the 2016 election, right wing regressive former talk radio host Jason Lewis, of the Government taking over the manufacture and distribution of drugs and medical devices in cases of price gouging such is the case with the Epipen.  Actually, I think the Government should take over the research, manufacture and distribution of medical devices and pharmaceuticals in any case where a need exists and the market is not meeting the need.  Such a plan is very socialist, some would say communist, but I say so be it, and I think the electorate would support the idea -- health is very important to the people.  Health is a value that transcends party politics and the electorate knows political labels are useless when facing a health crisis.  Even so, I don't see much hope for the government owning the means of production for medicine and medical devices so long as either Republicans or neoliberal Democrats are in charge of this country.    

Trump can't succeed in business even while trying, so how can we expect him to succeed as President?

By Glen Wallace

How can we expect Trump to solve America's wide ranging problems when he is so quick to say "I can't" when it comes to solving his own business problems?  After all, he is supposed to be a business specialist, and it turns out he is not so great even at that.  He has said "I can't" four times oven when asked if he can keep his failing business enterprises out of bankruptcy.  And contrary to his own claims, four bankruptcies is far in excess of a typical or average number of bankruptcies filed, if one is ever filed, by an entrepreneur like Trump.  And contrary to his claims that only large banks had to eat the losses from those bankruptcies, that is false as well.  Most, if not all of those bankruptcies involved bonds that the bondholders had to take a haircut on.  Very often, corporate bonds are held by a variety of ordinary citizens, including senior citizens that rely on the payments from those bonds for a very limited fixed income.

If he had to tell the truth under penalty of perjury and was asked "can you ever give a straight truthful statement about your weaknesses and failings when you're not under oath?" Trump would have to answer "I can't".  While still under oath, if he were asked if he were President, could he honestly put a plaque on his desk like President Truman did, that says "The Buck Stops Here", Trump would have to answer "I can't, because I 'm too much of a weasel, I like to weasel out of taking personal responsibility for what I say or do."

 Instead of trying to find ways to manufacture his shirts in the U.S., Trump just throws out more excuses for why he can't.  Did he even bother asking New Balance how they can manage to still manufacture shoes in the U.S.?  Did he try to figure out that if they can make shoes here, and Faribault Woolen Mills can make blankets here, and Red Wing can make boots here, then why can't I follow their successful models to make my shirts here?  I highly doubt it.  How can we expect him to explore ways to help the American worker as President when it doesn't seem like he is willing to lift a finger as a business man to avoid offshoring the jobs that make his shirts to foreign shores?  Trump couldn't be bothered by the unwashed masses other than finding the right buttons to push and strings to pull that get their emotions turned in his favor.

Bring back cellophane to save the environment

Whatever happened to the widespread use of cellophane for wrapping and for bagging products.   If cellophane had been used where plastic now is used in the past, then maybe we wouldn't have such a big problem with garbage on land and in the sea.   Maybe cellophane could also be made to construct more items that are now composed of plastic.  Keep in mind that cellophane is entirely biodegradable since it is made of the same substance that primarily provides the structural integrity of plants and trees -- cellulose.  I have to wonder if there is a conspiracy involving the oil industry to suppress the potential of cellophane to make a number of our products instead of plastic.  With a number of localities banning plastic grocery bags, I would like to start seeing the stores in those areas and other areas start replacing those plastic bags with cellophane ones.  Originally, when cellophane became widely used and popular, one of the primary uses was in the form of bags used to contain produce and other items at the grocery store instead of the brown paper opaque wrapping that had been used before.  Looking online, there are a number of vendors that still sell cellophane bags, so it is still being manufactured for that use.  Well, it looks like we should ramp up that production along with finding new and innovative other uses for this biodegradable versatile product. 

Trump's Disastrous Deportation Plan

A mass deportation of all the undocumented immigrants, as Trump has vowed to do if elected President, would likely be a humanitarian disaster.  Already, an estimated half of all undocumented aliens detained by ICE are housed in private prisons.  Additionally hundreds of those detainees were wrongly detained even though they were legal US citizens.  In one case, a US citizen named Hector Veloz was detained by ICE for over a year, all the while Veloz did everything he could, including presenting his birth certificate to the immigration courts.  Additionally, widespread reports of abuses of those detainees, regardless of their legal status, has also been reported.  If Trumps plans were implemented, I believe we would be seeing a modern day Trail of Tears for the undocumented and wrongfully deported US citizens.  But Trump's plan would be a huge windfall for the private prisons, who would no doubt milk such a deportation for all its worth -- including delaying the deportation process and hold inmates longer than necessary in order to keep our public dollars flowing that are tied to those inmates remaining in those private prisons.

The estimated total number of  illegal aliens that would be deported under Trump's plan is 11 million, coincidentally, 11 million is the estimated total number of human victims of Hitler's Holocaust.  Remember, to handle that volume people, the Nazis had to use freight trains to haul such a vast number of individuals.  But, unlike the Holocaust, we still would require a system of due process to determine  for each one of those 11 million whether or not they were indeed here illegally.  One wonders if the initial number of individuals rounded up might be much greater than 11 million.  That is, perhaps everyone with dark skin, speaking with a Latino accent would be rounded up as a suspected illegal alien to be sorted out at a later date.

Until all those individuals can be processed and their cases reviewed and heard before a magistrate, they would of course have to be held somewhere.  Since our prisons are already overcrowded, some sort of makeshift detention, or concentration camps would have to be set up across the country -- complete with barbed wire, armed guard towers, dogs and spotlights.  And, as it is currently, it is not as though our courts and judges and public defense lawyers have all sorts of time on their hands with everyone looking for something to do.  So, in order to process all those millions, many detainees would likely have to wait years if not decades to have their case heard.  A detainee could be a full U.S.Citizen, but not be able to see anyone for years to simply hear their case.  They would be trapped in one of the camps, knowing they are innocent but not be able to prove that to anyone who could get them out.  There is often no way of knowing right away who is here illegally and who isn't.  Those here illegally, perhaps by illegal means, are able to obtain many of the same documents that would appear on its face to prove citizenship, as legal citizens have.  It is not as though the undocumented aliens have a sign on their forehead flashing 'illegal alien' that ICE agents can use to sort them from those here legally.  As a result, some sort of manual judicial sorting process involving one on one meetings with lawyers and judges needs to be performed for each and every detainee in order to determine citizen status.        

Of further concern, given Trump's notorious thin skin, if he might utilize those deportee detention camps as de facto political prison camps.  Maybe Trump will wield his power to make his critics suffer from an administrative 'oops' that result in them being suspected of being here illegally and have to be sent to a camp for further processing.  Such a victim may cry that they suspect they are a political prisoner to the clerk processing them in the camp.  The clerk might then respond that the inmate will have their case heard before a judge in approximately 5 years if everything goes smoothly.  Meanwhile, here is your uniform, your number and a map to your tent.

I find it rather ironic that some of Trump's most fervent supporters are Internet and Radio conspiracy theory celebrities like Alex Jones that have warned us for years that we can't trust the federal government because they are bent on imprisoning us in mass Fema camps.  Who does Jones and company think will carry out Trump's deportation plan?  The Federal Government will, of course.  Why do they suddenly think the government can be trusted to fairly, and justly carry out such an enormous mass arrest, detention and processing of human beings?  But regardless of anyone's general trust or mistrust of the government,  there clearly is no means to fairly and justly carry out Trump's deportation plan.  And the history of ICE even under the normal circumstances of a relatively small number of deportations, has shown itself to be unreliable and prone to miscarriage of justice and abuse in the detention and processing of detainees.  The detention and processing of millions can only lead to a nightmare scenario as bad or worse than any warning ever painted by even the most imaginative conspiracy theorist.    

I'm questioning whether attack dogs should be allowed to act as police officers.  K-9 units suffer from the fundamental flaw of not being able to understand the concepts of the legal system that are required of every human officer to carry out their duties in a lawful and just manner.  Within police lore there is the concept of officers needing to walk the 'thin blue line' which is an unwritten rule that is based on written rules and laws.  The idea states that all officers must walk a conceptual 'balance beam' in their enforcement duties whereby they must avoid falling either towards the side of excessive force or towards the side of complacency.  And while it may be part of a police dogs training to demonstrate the ability to walk a physical balance beam, I'm not aware of any part of their training having to learn how to walk the conceptual balance beam that is the thin blue line.  Instead, K-9 attack dogs seem to just default to falling towards the excessive force side of the line and are wholly dependent on their handlers to keep out of that side.  However, anyone who has watched any amount of those reality cop shows knows that the ability of human officers to restrain and control their K-9 dogs is highly flawed.  If one were to look on a police dog as a robot, those robots would have been recalled a long time ago for having a highly defective off-switch that only works sporadically.  And local governments and politicians would never allow those robots back on the streets until that off-switch was properly repaired.  This problem is only compounded further when the human handlers let their K-9 units off their leash to seek and detain a suspect that is hiding out of site.  In that case, where the human officer cannot even see their dogs in action, how can the dogs possibly be restrained at all -- there effectively is no attempt to ensure minimum force is used to detain the suspect.  And yet there still remains the requirement that all human officers must follow, and that is to use the minimum amount of force necessary to detain a suspect.  In no way is an officer supposed to act in a punitive manner towards a suspect.  We must keep to the forefront of our minds that all suspects are presumed innocent.  Therefore, any police dog that continues to bite a citizen even after he has stopped moving away from the police or resisting arrest, that dog is mauling a citizen that must still be thought of as an innocent civilian.  But all K-9 officers act as though all civilians are presumed guilty.  Anyone who has peacefully and lawfully walked along the side of a squad car with a K-9 unit in the car will realize the intense animosity police attack dogs have towards all civilians.  Police K-9 dogs then act as a sort of loophole for the requirement that everyone is presumed innocent and minimum force to detain be used.  The police sort of wash their hands of their dogs actions, saying effectively "it's not my fault for the excessive force, it's the dogs."  Therefore, it is my recommendation that this loophole be closed and all police dogs acting in an attack role (as apposed to a purely investigative role using their sniffers) be removed from service until assurance can be provided that they will be able to use as minimal force to detain suspects as their human counterparts are able to.

Open Letter to Governor Dayton re. Medical Marijuana

Open Letter to Governor Dayton re. Medical Marijuana

by Glen Wallace

Governor Dayton, your decision to defer to law enforcement in deciding the medical marijuana issue demonstrates an abdication of your responsibility as governor to make decisions on public matters such as the medical marijuana issue. If you think it is acceptable for law enforcement to make the call on this issue, why stop there? Why not cede the governorship entirely over to a consortium of Minnesota law enforcement associations? After all, with medical marijuana, you are already allowing law enforcement to have authority over an area very dear to the citizens in how they treat their own bodies in regards to a field that law enforcement has absolutely no expertise -- medicine. It seems like you have already jumped into the slippery slope of creating a totalitarian police state. Why put the brakes on now?

A hallmark of a police state is that the state puts a priority on what law enforcement wants over the basic human rights of the citizens. With the medical marijuana issue, you, governor Dayton, has done just that -- you have put the wants and desires of law enforcement ahead of the basic inalienable right of Minnesota's citizens to treat their own bodies medically as they see fit. But a hallmark of a free country, that we are supposed to be living in, is to put the inalienable rights of its citizens ahead of the desires of law enforcement. Sure legalizing marijuana will make the job of cops more difficult and therefore they will oppose such legislation. But given that the ability to use medical marijuana is a basic human right, in a free country laws should allow it and law enforcement just has to find ways to work around such laws. That is just the way it is or is supposed to be in a free country that is not a police state and respects the inalienable rights of its citizens. But in a police state, it is the other way around where the citizens have to somehow find a way to navigate their way around police state laws in their quest for to live a life with some glimmer of freedom. And effectively, with the medical marijuana issue, we are already living in police state where otherwise law-abiding, upstanding, honest hard working citizens of the state of Minnesota have to delve into the underworld of the illegal drug trade in a quest to relieve the suffering of their loved ones through the use of medical marijuana.

Governor Dayton, while many people have focused their criticism over the resistance to the passage of the Compassionate Care Act on the unwillingness of law enforcement to consider approving the act, I have have not. You, by your threat to veto, are responsible for jeopardizing the possibility for thousands of Minnesotans to ease the anguish and agony of diseases that would be ameliorated or be completely removed by medical marijuana. Members of law enforcement are only doing what comes naturally to them -- they want to preserve or enact laws that make their job easier. But what you must remember is that there is often a conflict between laws that make law enforcement's job easier and laws that protect the basic human rights of the citizens of a state. I'm sure it would be easier for cops if they didn't have to Mirandize suspects upon arrest. It sure would be easier for cops if they could just search any premise without a warrant as well. It would be easier for law enforcement officers not to have to go to court and testify in a case but instead be able to act as a judge and jury right there in the street and declare guilt or innocence and hand out any punishment on the suspect right there in the street. But since we don't entirely live in a police state, cops just have to find a way to navigate through all the 'hoops and ladders' that make their job more difficult. And because we still live in a semi-free country we don't defer to law enforcement community to decide if warrantless searches should be allowed or if cops should be allowed to meter out punishment on the streets. And under the pretense that we are living in a free country and state, you shouldn't be deferring to law enforcement to decide if the citizens of Minnesota should continue allowing cops to throw in jail and swipe away medical marijuana from the hands of anyone desperately trying to ease their pain and suffering through the use of an herb that seems to have been put on this planet by the Creator as a gift to humanity for the purposes that the Compassionate Care Act would allow.

Google Censorship Test Using Nonsense Words aberabledoople afoblezoodeedolup cruxlveracitude duleefelangerhanz

by Glen Wallace

I am conducting an experiment to help determine if Google is censoring search results based on ideologies.  What I suspect is that Google is deliberately either blocking certain authors or written works that present a system of beliefs or ideology or paradigm that is contrary or critical of the modern system of market capitalism that the Google corporation absolutely depends on for its very existence.  Also, keep in mind that Google is a private for-profit business that is just allowing us members of the public use their website because the Google corporation believes we will help them make money.  I think we often make the assumption that Google is some sort of public utility or service like a public library whose existence is to serve the public in an unbiased manner so that we can freely pursue our intellectual growth in whatever direction we believe is right.  But that would be a false assumption.  Google is under no obligation to be unbiased and impartial.  Their website is their space and I am not aware of any criminal or civil laws that would prevent them from modifying search results in a manner that would steer the users towards an ideology that is supportive of the form of capitalism that has been so fruitful for them and away from a form of communism or socialism that, if adopted by the general public, would be detrimental to Google's bottom line.

 I think some analogies can be made between Google and an indoor shopping mall where even though it may feel like public space while walking down the halls, it is not public but rather private property we are on when in a mall.  And when on private property like a mall we do not have the protected right to assemble and freedom of speech.  If mall ownership does not like what we are saying or protesting while in a mall they can lawfully throw us out at any moment.  Likewise if Google does not like what someone has written, they, as far as I know, can lawfully remove or block the piece from showing up in any of their search results.  I think that people think of Google as being like a pubic library's online catalog and searchable databases.  But that is just not the case.  A public library belongs to the people and it has all sorts of oversight and accountability to insure that it is acting in the general public's interest by acting in an impartial matter towards the library patrons searches.  But, we, the general public do not have access to Google's search result algorithms nor do they have any of the public oversight the same way a public library does.  Instead, Google keeps those algorithms a tightly held secret so that we have no idea how our search results may be being steered in some direction.  


I suspect that I am one of those authors that Google is engaging in at least some degree of censorship.  To test my theory I am going to include some made-up nonsense words that as of my last search just before typing this piece, produced no returns from a google search, into both the text, title and labels or tags of this and other of my essays on my blog and on scribd.com.  Later, I will search in Google for these nonsense words again.  And if 'no matches' continue to occur, I will see that as confirmation of the sorts of censorship that I suspect from Google.  Here are a list of four such words:

aberabledoople

afoblezoodeedolup

cruxlveracitude

duleefelangerhanz

I have already done some informal tests of this nature and came up with more or less confirmations of my hypothesis.  But this so far is the most extensive and thorough examination and test of the subject of alleged Google censorship.  I will wait in eager anticipation of the results.  But even if confirmation is achieved, what recourse do I have?  Well I can spread the word of what is going on so that others may be made of aware of this concerning trend.  I don't think this is any small matter as software and media companies in 'the cloud' become more central and influential in their role as the medium for the exchange of ideas among the citizens around the world. 

Socialize the Social Network & End the Facebook Monopoly

by Glen Wallace

“Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes we can turn to another.”

- F.A. Hayek 'The Road To Serfdom'

Should social networking sites be considered monopolies? I contend that Facebook and similar sites effectively prevent competition not through deliberate monopolistic trust efforts but just by being successful. While there may be competition in the fight to become the dominant social networking site, once any site has achieved that status then the choices of the consumer become very limited. For instance if I want to announce something to my friends online at one website, then I have no other option, if I want them to see the message, other than posting it on Facebook. I mean, I suppose I could post something on MySpace or Google+ if I prefer either, but who is going to see the post? Where is the competition induced meritocracy that is supposed to exist in commerce when it comes to online social networking? The very nature of such sites prevents competition to exist much at all. A fundamental difference exists between a site like Facebook and other sites whether it be a search engine like Google or a news site such as nytimes.com. If I want to search for something on Google or read a news article on the New York Times online site, it doesn't matter if I'm the only one using the site, the quality of the content remains the same. But with a social networking site, the quality deteriorates according to how much less other people use the site.

While one might point out that with some products, the only way for a company to provide a product is if they have a large number of customers to provide the revenue to make the capital intensive product. The difference there, however, is that it is still practical to have more than one vendor for any given ordinary product. There may not be as many vendors to choose from as compared to a less capital intensive product, but still there should be at least a few vendors that are able to raise sufficient funds to run a business that provides any given product or service. But with social media, it is so inconvenient for multiple users to use multiple vendors that a certain degree of cooperation is necessary among all the consumers to use just one portal as a vendor. A similarity emerges between a general social media website like Facebook and a public utility that acts as a well regulated monopoly. The problem of course is that Facebook is not regulated like a public utility even though it still behaves and functions like one.

Personally I would rather such a de facto public commons website be either a non-profit like Craigslist, or a government, citizen owned public website or some sort of cooperative. People often complain about the changes that Facebook makes and their use of users information and posts. But really, the users have little to no control over what the behemoth Facebook corporation does, leaving users at their mercy.
I also don't like the fact that I am inundated with all the ads on Facebook that pay for the huge executive salaries and helped turn Mark 'Hoodie Boy' Zuckerberg into a billionaire, and many of his minion of employees into multimillionaires. Why should we the users be made to feel like ungrateful users when complaining about a free site that has so many ads, when in fact it is us users that are really the givers, providing the valuable content that drives the hundreds of millions of visitors to the site to see the ads that provide the fortune of revenue to Facebook?  Without the content that us 'users' provide, with all of our 'status updates,' without any expectation for remuneration from all those Facebook millionaires, the whole Facebook website would be completely worthless and all those young Facebook employees would all be just another worker bee struggling to make ends meet instead of being in the very comfortable financial position they are today. They should be on their knees thanking us 'users' for doing all the work that made them so rich. It is, after all, our content about our daily lives and thoughts that is unique and special and not the ordinary glorified cloud database software that is Facebook that the engineers there seem to be constantly busying themselves trying to fix what aint broke. Or to provide an another analogy, we the users are providing the goldmine of data and interesting personal stories and the Facebook corporation is providing an ordinary utilitarian mineshaft that has nothing special about it and any other mineshaft builder could have just as easily built and maintained just as well or better than Facebook has done. But in the field of social networking, I may want to use someone else's 'mineshaft', but if almost everyone else is using another mineshaft builders shaft (Facebook), it doesn't matter how much better the others mineshaft is to use, without the gold at the other end, it's of little use.

That's why I'd like some other choices, but know that effectively I do not due to their monopoly over social networking. In terms of commercial user input websites, I would prefer something like wordpress.com were the default social networking site due to their minimalist approach to placement of ads. While wordpress is more of a blogging site, because it already allows 'following' and user updates, it wouldn't take much modifications to turn it into a social website also. But despite the assurances provided by Hayek's quote at the opening of this essay, even though Facebook refuses to satisfy my wishes there is no other social networking website out there to turn to that both satisfy my wishes of minimalist ads and also a goldmine of online socializing. No freedom of choice exists because there is no competition due to the unique nature of online social networking.

So what is the solution? The situation is unique here compared to other monopolies such as the famous Standard oil which was simply broken up into smaller parts that could compete with each other. But how would one go about doing that with a social networking site? Would you have to have your friends list get broken up into separate parts with each part going to a new social networking site that could compete with Facebook? That wouldn't make much sense. The only viable solution that I see is to nationalize Facebook (and Twitter for the matter) I think I would then change the name of the site to something more appropriate, like 'The Public Commons.' The only problem I see with such a nationalization is that, even though we are supposed to be living in a democracy, the federal government and its programs, often has become too much of an ivory tower organization, distancing itself from public input as to how it operates. Therefore I would insist that new 'Public Commons' website be a truly of-the-people organization with a barrier of control separating itself from the rest of the federal government. Therefore the new website would be one run entirely by a combination of open source and referendum votes on implementation of various open source solutions to the websites problems and proposed improvements.
back to home page

The deliberate destruction of workers rights in the modern era

 By Glen Wallace

There was a famous labor conflict back in the 1800's between the workers of a steel mill and Andrew Carnegie, the owner of the mill.  The striking workers actually locked the gates to the plant preventing any scabs or management from entering the plant to keep it running.  Back then, no state or federal agency would come to the rescue of the ownership, sending in the national guard like they would today.  Instead the owner had to fend for himself.  In the case of this particular strike, Carnegie hired a gang of Pinkerton thugs to break up the strikers and get the gates open to clear the way for the scab replacement workers to come in and get the plant running again.  Now, while all this was going on Carnegie, not wanting to soil his delicate bourgeoisie 'civilized' hands with the mess, had left his henchman Andrew Frick to organize and direct all the dirty work, while Carnegie was off in Europe on a hunting trip.  Unfortunately the striking steelworkers were no match for the Pinkerton professional brutes.  That was fortunate for Carnegie because for him to both hire new scabs and the Pinkertons' was an extremely expensive endeavor that he could not have possibly sustained financially for very long even for a man as wealthy as himself.  Now looking back at those events of that strike I have to wonder if maybe the striking steel workers might have been successful had they employed a different strategy from what they employed of directly taking on the Pinkertons' when challenged.  Had I been there in that place in time I would have advised the strikers to retreat as soon as the Pinkertons arrived and allow them to open the mill for the replacement workers to come in and start the plant up again.   Then as soon as it appeared that Carnegie and the Pinkertons had succeeded and thus left, the strikers would come back to shut down the plant again.  Of course Carnegie and Frick could have just turned around and hired the thugs to come back, but that would have resulted in another big bill that Carnegie would have had to have eaten.  I suggest that it would have been much easier for the striking workers to maintain such a 'stick and move' pattern that would have slowly undermined Carnegie to the point were he would have been forced to capitulate and meet the strikers demands.  I find it remarkable that the strikers back then were allowed to do as much as they did without government intervention as would happen today under similar circumstances.  Today if a union tried anything similar, the National Guard would surely come out to break up the plant shut down.  What should be clear from this is that the government has taken on the very same role that the Pinkertons took on during the steel mill site.  The state, local and federal government has clearly become the protectors and advocates for the plutocrats at the expense of the proletarians interests.  I like to think that I'm pretty clever to think up such a strategy that I believe would have been successful in such a historically famous event where a different strategy had failed.   But here and now in the present day as I type this I try to think up strategies that might help advance the interests of today's prol's and 'I got nothing.'  And I don't think it's that I had just a 'one hit wonder' strategy, it is that the doors of opportunity for common man to, in general, advance,  have been strategically slammed shut by the plutocrats so that every possible move has already been thought up by them and has been blocked off to the proletariats.

The mysterious disappearance (censorship?) of Roger Swardson's book from Amazon

by Glen Wallace

Update: I recently discovered a listing for his book on the British Amazon website  http://www.amazon.co.uk/Down-Out-America-Roger-Swardson/dp/0465017002, so why not on the US website?

I've recently discovered that Roger Swardson's book 'Down and Out in America' has disappeared from any listing on Amazon's website.  It has just disappeared even though for a long time I remember that the book could still be found at least as an entry on the site even though the book has been out of print for a long time and no used copies were available.  I have to wonder if this omission by a mega corporation of a book that is so supportive of labor rights and does such a good job of highlighting the plight of the underclass in a very entertaining manner is accidental or deliberate.  I thought that Amazon would continue to list an entry for even the most obscure work that is out of print and without any available used copies.   It seems like an awfully big coincidence that a book like Swardson's stops being listed from a corporate site like Amazon. Here is a book that could be considered critical of the sort of general labor practices of low pay for workers that a corporation like Amazon has become dependent on for its product shipping distribution networks to maintain its already low profit margins that has allowed it to continue its dominance in online retail.   Any resurgence in the labor movement in this country I imagine could easily first hit Amazon, given that much of the shipping work, due to its nature, could not be outsourced and therefore give leverage to the workers in Amazons shipping warehouses to demand better pay and working conditions.  And even though his book was never a big seller, I think that his writing style could, given the chance, popularize a new labor movement. And therefore, I wonder if someone at Amazon saw that and decided to nip any chance of such a labor resurgence from happening in the bud by making Swardson's book disappear from Amazon's database.

The Illusion of Influence

By Glen Wallace

The illusion of influence by the populace has perpetuated the current flawed republican form of government.  Had our government been in the form of a constitutional republic with appointed rather than elected governing officials the citizenry would have likely revolted a long time ago.  But under a pseudo democracy as we have, the people tend to blame each other for the problems of the government.   Which is understandable given the illusion of democracy makes people think that the electorate are the ones  wielding the influence over the politicians that are deciding what laws are created that governs society.  Constituents think all that needs to be done is sway their fellow citizens to vote another way.  When that doesn't work, people get frustrated, but unfortunately they don't give up on the representative democracy system altogether.  For some reason, for the vast majority, the populace never even considers the option of completely altering their fundamental form of governance. If only they realized that we are living under an appointed republic and not a democratic one, then the people would declare our government unacceptable. Instead, they just keep tilting at windmills thinking 'this time will be different' and all will be well if only their candidate will get elected to office.

Unfortunately, the illusion serves as useful fiction for those that are in power.  It becomes much easier to manipulate the people when they think they are the ones in charge.  Once the illusion is in place many different forms of manipulation become available that would be much less potent tools if the populace lost their sense of importance in running the country.  I believe a certain degree of malaise and apathy would come over the constituents with respect to the day to day governance of the country if they didn't think they had a role to play in that regard.  However that apathy would quickly be replaced with a sense of outrage if their material condition or freedoms were severely compromised.  Such outrage could then easily evolve into a mob that could leverage its numbers and in a real act of influence, overthrow their dictator.  But once the illusion is present then among other techniques of manipulation, perhaps none works better than the old divide and conquer technique whereby parties of different political persuasions are pitted against each other, thus distracted from the pillaging of the resources and freedoms.  But the 'dance off' between the parties is as carefully orchestrated as a professional wrestling match.  When the ruling elite like things just the way they are, they order a continual partisan stalemate with both sides so evenly matched that no resolution occurs and therefore no change happens with the matter at hand.  However, if the powers decide they want something changed, like the enactment of a new free trade agreement, the powers order a bipartisan unity that insures that the agreement is passed.  Never mind that such free trade agreements hamstring the peoples ability to leverage, through tariffs, the trade deficits that the US is continually experiencing .  The interests of the masses, or the democratic majority, are not what matters in our so-called representative democracy.

Another case in point is the recent proposed legislation known as CISPA and SOPA.  While many may think that the first round attempt to pass those laws failed because of a grassroots movement came together in protest against those bills, I doubt the general public had anything to do with the failure of the two bills.  I believe those with influence, the large cap internet corporate behemoths such as Google, Amazon and Ebay protested and thus stopped the bills.  In our society, the only hope the proletariat has is if their interests and the interests of those with real influence are one and the same.   

In another case, back during the Clinton administration, I believe it was during his first term, all of a sudden there was this upswelling of a populist tax reform movement.  It seemed every day there was all this talk and pressure to reform both the tax code and especially revenue enforcement in favor of the common man.  It even got a great deal of national mainstream news coverage where the news would interview people who would give their horror stories of dealing with the IRS.  But from my recollection this sudden movement occurred when the Democrats held control of not only the presidency but also congress and given that the Dems tend to be less inclined to be for tax reform, they took on the role of being the resistors to these reforms that predominantly the Republicans were putting forward.  And so the true life narrative in this case played out that the Dems played the role of preventing any significant tax reforms to come out of this new tax movement.  Now, fast forward to the George W Bush administration where I believe at least at some point during his tenure the Republicans had a significant amount of control of both the presidency and congress.  So, wouldn't that have been a good time to revive the populist tax movement that sprung up during the Clinton administration?  Well if there ever was the goal to help the masses with their taxation then that would have been a good time but that was never the goal.  The brief tax reform movement during the Clinton administration was just a planned theater designed to reinforce the illusion of influence for the masses to think they started and brought to the public conscious the need to reform the system of tax collection for their fellow citizens.   By making the movement so public with the help of the mainstream media which is in collusion with the powers to reinforce the illusion, the public had their mistaken belief in their political potency nicely reinforced.   Look at all the power they seemed to have and look at how it was only because of those darn Democrats that nothing came of the movement.  Of course the powers that were actually behind the sudden movement were counting on and weren't disappointed in the public's short term memory insuring that almost everyone would have forgotten the brief tax movement once the occasion came to pass where what had been seemingly the only obstacle, the Democrats hold on power, to success in reaching the goal of the movement, no longer existed.   I didn't forget, but I think almost everyone else did.  

One more example of the lack of influence by the common man over public policy in our supposed democracy is the demise of the trolly car system back in the 1950's.  It was a perfectly good public transportation system that every one seemed to love to get around and also had recently been updated with new cars at the time of its dismantling.  If the people were really the ones in charge then it must have been at their behest, demanding that the trolly cars be removed that caused the system to be brought almost entirely to a halt around the country all at the same time.  One might think people despised those trolly cars because they were so quickly removed from service around the country.  But that wasn't the case at all, from what I have heard from people who actually used the trolly cars when they were in service, the trolly cars were heavily utilized and enjoyed by the public because the system did an excellent job with its intended purpose of getting  people to where they needed to go within the city.   The trolly cars did such an excellent job in fact that their use was replacing the use and consumption of oil, automobiles and the batteries that started those automobiles.  So, there is good evidence to indicate that those three industries: big oil, big auto and battery manufactures colluded and used their real influence over politics and government and in one of the worst ever acts of crony capitalism, pressured politicians in a successful attempt to trash the then perfectly good trolly car system.  That the people liked the trolly cars didn't matter because in the minds of career politicians, the people don't matter and as result the common mans opinion has no influential sway over the actions of those career politicians who make the public policies that we all live under. 

A popular technique to reinforce the illusion is to assign make-believe titles to the public such as 'taxpayer' as though being a taxpayer affords a citizen any special rights not available to a citizen that doesn't have to pay any taxes.  But still the citizen is humored into thinking that he is saying something significant when he cries "I'm a taxpayer!" People tend to equate being a citizen with paying taxes so much so that the term 'taxpayer' has become synonymous with the term 'citizen.'  But from a legal standpoint, such a synonym is inaccurate.  There is no quid pro quo contractual agreement between a citizen paying taxes and receiving some good or service.  There are many revenue sources and potential revenue sources that a government has at its disposal to cover its expenses.  The expenses, what the government spends money on, are typically determined by an elected so-called representative who is supposed to make their government paying decisions based on the wants and needs of their constituents.  The is no de jure reason for the representative to make an expense determination based on a monetary consideration provided by the citizen by way of payment of taxes.  Paying taxes does not necessarily provide you the citizen with any special privileges over and above the privileges afforded to the citizen that pays no taxes at all.  While there are laws that demand taxes be paid or the citizen may face certain penalties, those laws were created by the representatives to insure revenue but not as any civil intervention in a breach of contract matter.  So it is a mistake to think of the term 'taxpayer' as synonymous with the term 'citizen.'  From a rights, privileges and entitlements as a citizen standpoint it doesn't matter that you are a 'taxpayer.'  But it is so much easier to pilfer revenue from the citizen if they don't think of it as pilfering but rather as consideration in a binding business agreement between themselves and the government.  

Sometimes you will hear, on one occasion a politician urging Americans to support, with the help of military force if necessary, the spreading of democracy around the globe.  But then on another occasion the same politician, when faced with a question as to why some change hadn't been enacted that would have been in the general public's interest and that the majority of Americans want to come about that politician might respond with a "whoa whoa whoa this is not a true democracy where we go around willy-nilly doing whatever the whims are of the masses, allowing the tyranny of the mob to come about, we are instead living in a constitutional republic where we have these wise representatives to make the tough decisions about what is best for us and therefore we shouldn't be worrying our pretty little heads about such matters and should instead turn our attentions over to a sporting event or the latest celebrity gossip and stop meddling and interfering with the decision making process of the important people!"

We should have either, as much as is practicable, a pure democracy or a constitutional appointed republic that is revokable by the citizens.  It should be very clear by now the ineffective coupling between the desires of the populace and the government's response to those desires that exists in a so-called representative democracy.  

Why there is a need for a good non-profit internet search engine

By Glen Wallace

When one thinks of how nice it is for just about anyone with a an internet account to become a published  author, there are some assumptions involved that may not be entirely true.  If we think of the term 'publish' as being 'to make public' or 'to make publicly available' then in the strictest sense that is true but what one has in mind by the idea of 'publicly available' and the reality of the relationship between one's work that one thinks is now 'in the public' may be significantly different.  If some other member of the public does a search on the internet in a quest to find ideas about the subject that you wrote about and made public by publishing on the internet outside of any publishing house, then you might tend to think that that other person would not have too much difficulty coming across your work upon doing that search.  My contention, however, is that the difficulties encountered by that other person in finding your work, unless they already knew the exact title of your work, can be so considerable that in many cases the stranger doing the search will be highly unlikely to come across your work.  Now, compare such an internet search to someone doing a search at a public or university library using the libraries card catalog system of organization.  Such a library search would be many orders of times easier to search and would come across a variety of works that the searcher may be entirely unfamiliar with as compared to doing an a comparable search for the same ideas or information on the internet using an internet search engine.  And I don't think it is just a matter of the internet having a higher quantity of works, but rather I believe the libraries card catalog is so much more organized that doing a search in what would supposedly be a very antiquated system still provides a much higher quality search experience compared to doing an internet search using an internet search engine. 


 In my opinion the search results using google or any other for profit search engine yields very messy results.  What is returned is just one big hodge podge of different categories of websites from shopping sites to encyclopedias to newspapers to university professors' papers.  However, one trend that I did notice when searching for a subject like communism is that the search results seemed moreso skewed towards Wikipedia type descriptive entries rather than what some might classify as opinion piece like my essay on communism.  In my essay I tried to look at the subject of communism from a new, unique and inciteful angle that I think might open some minds to the possibility that maybe communism is not only not that bad after all but in some respects it is downright utopian in nature.  Which leads me to wonder if that is why it is so hard to find my
essay 'The freedom that communism brings' -- could it be that the giant corporate behemoth Google can see in my work a potential for a burgeoning meme that could eventually result in a complete overthrow of the capitalistic empire and all those behemoth corportate giants like Google?  But regardless, it is still my contention that Google search results are a disorganized mess where one looking at the results will have a hard time sifting through to find the sorts of sites that they have in mind.  Any search engine should have some basic operators as part of the search that through the searches selections, categorize ahead of time the kinds of results the searcher is looking for whether it be purely factual, opinion, do it yourself instructions, helpful hints, fiction, scientific, pop-science, or philosophical. I'm thinking also that maybe what the search engine itself searches could be categorized in a manner similar to or even identical with the old library standard, the Dewey Decimal System.


I was thinking how nice it would be to have a non-profit internet search engine available.  My impetus for that wish started by looking at the view numbers for this very blog.  This blogging website provides a nice feature called 'stats' where the blog's creator can view the number of views for each posting on one's blog.  Well, my stats in terms of the number of views is rather paltry.   While I've been blogging with some regularity for about one year now with a total of about 30 published posts, I've only received around 800 total visits to my blog over the course of that year.  But when looking at the number of views  for each published essay and add them all up the total number of view is much lower still -- maybe around 150.  And I think the views per post gives a more accurate picture of number of real people actually interested in what I've written and accessing my blog from a search on the topic I've written about in a published post here.  So that got me thinking and wondering how difficult it is to find my essays on this blog if I do a Google search for the keywords covered in my essays here.  Well, I found it rather difficult indeed.  Now keep in mind I wasn't looking for a confirmation of any conspiracy theory from the start.  I know how large the content of the internet is and how easy it is for that content to get 'lost' in the mass of internet 'noise.'  But even after doing some advanced searches where I entered all my keywords along with limiting the results to items published within the shorter time frame that my post I was searching for was published within, on at least one search I couldn't find a link to my essay anywhere in all the results that were returned from the google search.


 In supposedly helping make it easier for one's posts to be found by a search engine blogger.com offers something called 'labels' where the author of the blog post can write in some keywords the author thinks are relevant to what he or she has just written and someone who wants to find the relevant essay in a internet search can hopefully do so by typing in some of those label keywords into an internet search engine such as Google.com.  So I searched for those keywords that I had already entered and published in the 'labels' field some days before my search, presumably giving the search engines bots plenty of time to crawl to the post, note those keywords and make my essay available to be found based on someone searching for those keywords.  And yet I was entirely unsuccessful in finding my own post after searching using all of what should have been the right words to enter in that search to find my essay.  I didn't think that would happen, I wasn't looking for a conspiracy but I'm left to wonder if maybe I have found one.  You may have already guessed where I'm headed with this -- could it be that my posts are being deliberately hidden from search engines because of the nature of the content of my posts?  Perhaps you may be thinking that I am just flattering myself by thinking little old me with no prestigious titles or academic or literary reputation, could be considered important enough that the words I present need to be effectively censored from widespread public access. Well maybe I am flattering myself, but the power of the written word still is very great and reason itself is a great equalizer that doesn't recognize titles, prestige or awards.  Memes can be just as effectively infectious in a positive way coming from someone with no prestige as someone with a great deal of it.  That is because it is the idea itself that takes on a life of its own as a meme in a way that the intellectual milieu of the very culture with the propensity to forge a sea-change in the sociopolitical governance that guides the direction of society.  And a theme can be found through many of my essays here of what some might construe as anti-capitalist.  While whether or not those posts where anti-capitalism or not is a matter of question, but I certainly can see where someone who does not want to see the principles of capitalism and what they see as a 'free market' tarnished might want to take measures to prevent my essays from being viewed by anyone who might be influenced by my essays in manner where the ideas presented therein might be spread in an exponential manner on into the collective conscious and unconscious of the society at large.  One interesting tidbit is that the website I've been blogging on, blogger.com, is owned by the Google Corporation.  I believe blogger.com started as an independent organization that was subsequently bought by Google Corporation.  Which makes me wonder, why did they really buy Blogger.com?  Was it for the ad revenue or did they want an easy access to the idea generators out there like myself that they wanted to be able to keep a close eye on and easily block from search results if they so desire?  One must keep in mind that Google is a publicly traded corporation and as such must abide by certain rules and laws that all public traded businesses must follow.  One of the most important rules, I believe it is a law actually, is that a corporation must act in the best financial interest of the shareholders of that companies stock.  Just imagine what would happen to the value of Google stock if the ideas I have presented in the essays I've published here were to be implemented into the governance of the U.S.? I think it is safe to say that Google owns a great number of patents and thus enjoys the revenue from those patents.  If patents were to suddenly disappear, those revenues that Google currently enjoys from them will correspondingly also disappear.  In one of the essays I have written, I openly advocated for the abolishment of patent protection.  If my arguments in that essay convinced enough people, then maybe patent protection would finally end and with that, presumably so would go the gravy train Google currently receives from they patents it already owns. I have also written essays that have advocated for the expansion of a form of communism as a replacement for the current form of capitalistic tyranny we all suffer under.  Let's face it, Google has grown into a behemoth of a corporation with a market cap as of this writing at 262 billions dollars.  That's a lot of dollars riding on the success of a corporation that has grown to that size largely by tapping into a capitalistic system of commerce by matching up buyers and sellers of goods and services for the private enjoyment of the purchaser of those goods and services.   It is hard to tell what the effect of the implementation of my ideas could possibly have on their program of revenue if my ideas were implemented by law, but since I do advocate for less capitalism and more communism, I think there is reason to believe my ideas, if implemented, might have a detrimental effect on Google's ad revenue.  In a capitalistic system of commerce, the goal is to seek out profits, not benefit mankind.  In my essays I advocate for breaking down barriers that have been set up by capitalism for its benefit but have been disguised as being for societies benefit.  Those barriers include the patent monopoly protection and our entire system of mainstream medicine.  If those barriers were removed then a lot of industries would lose an enormous amount of revenue.  If I did a Google search for, for instance, patent lawyers, I'm sure I would find an abundant number of enhanced search results with ads to the top and to the right of the search results screen for patent lawyers hawking their services to those doing patent law searches.  If patent protection would entirely disappear, then presumably there would be no need for patent lawyers anymore and as a result there would no longer be any patent lawyers buying ads from google any longer either.  That revenue would completely disappear for Google if my recommendation for the elimination of patent protection was implemented. 

 While Google may have the motto "don't be evil" I don't find that motto any more reassuring than I am reassured by Asimov's '3 Laws of Robotics.'  The value of the motto and those laws are only as good as the fallible humans that run the corporation or build the robots.  In a way the corporation that Google now is, is similar in some ways to a robot -- a revenue seeking robot that the builders and maintainers of which are required by real laws of the land to look after the financial interests of the shareholders but I'm not aware of anything in those laws of the land about "not being evil" or following Asimov's robot laws. 

 Ok, I had put this essay on the 'back burner' for a while thinking that maybe I was exaggerating things.  Since I had written this piece (and saved it here but not published it) I did some more searches using Google and had a little more success.  And my stat numbers were looking ever so slightly better.  But after my most recent published post that to date is my longest one yet, and one of what I thought was one of my more important posts about the failings of the moonshot for cancer program I had only received a grand total of 2 hits to that essay. Usually I quickly get at least 3 visits within a day even if after that for a lot of my essays there is a plateau and may stay at just 3 visits.  But for the moonshot essay it took the full day to reach 2 views.  Before then there was just one view.  So I did a search for some of the keywords in that essay; both 'SU2C' and 'Moon Shot' and in separate searches on google that were narrowed down to searching for sites that had been updated within a week, I did not get a single search result linking to my moonshot essay!  Are the people at Google trying to mess with me?  Or am I just flattering myself to think that anyone at such a giant corporation as Google would go out of their way to keep people from finding my blog because of the anti-capitalism arguments that are often found on the essays on my blog?  Ok, I just did a word for word Google search without quotes of the title of one of my blog posts and I am to page 22 of the search results and I have yet to see my essay come up.  Instead I am seeing a great myriad of different combinations of those search terms scattered about in the tittles and content of the websites in the results.  The only way I can get my essay to come up is to put the title in quotes and then only my blog comes up and no other results for any other web sites.  Update: my 'moonshot' essay has now been up for 3 days and I have still only had 2 views for that essay.  Additionally I did a Google search using my title, verbatim, without quotes, of the moonshots essay restricting the search to web pages updated within a week and after looking at every single result I got to the end of my search and my essay was nowhere to be found.  I'm really finding more reasons to be suspicious here.  

While there is a popular non-profit browser called Firefox, and a popular non profit website that offers public domain items that can be streamed or downloaded called Archive.org,  why is there no non-profit internet search engines? (Well I just recently have been making some effort to find some non-profit open source search engines and have been largely unsuccessful at least in terms of finding anything like a non-profit equivalent of Google.com where someone could go to a web page and punch in a few terms and see a listing of other web pages that supposedly reflect or match your search.  While there does appear that some individuals have made an effort to start something similar to what I have in mind, I'm still not finding any working web site that is comes very close to what I have conceptualized.)   It seems like if ever there was a need for a non-profit in the world of the internet it would be in the form of a search engine.  After all, Chrome and Internet Explorer are not really any worse at opening a non-profit or communist website than Firefox.  It's not as though when one tries to go to Archive.org using Google's Chrome browser to legally download public domain movies or music, that some screen pops up saying something like "wouldn't you rather go to Amazon or Netflix to download the latest releases for nominal fee?"  Nothing like that happens at all if you use a browser built by a for-profit software company.  But it seems like to make the most out of the internet as a free exchange of ideas from across the world, an impartial search engine without a conflict of interest as a median of idea exploration would be preferable the current search engine choices.  As it is, you can decide between a variety of for-profit search engines, it is like if you had a radio station and you were told you had a selection because you could choose between one of the two stations -- either the country station or the western one.

It is rather hard to tell what the algorithm Google uses to determine which websites get top billing in any given search result such that the top billed site ends up at or near the top of any search result listing for any given search , or in my case whether my blog gets any billing whatsoever.  I think Google keeps there search algorithms as a very closely guarded secret.  That kind of secrecy just raises the suspicions of a conspiracy theorist like myself.  Now I wouldn't necessarily have problems with such secrecy if the algorithm was just for commerce searches where the determination was for what sites end up near the top of anyone's shopping search result.  But I do have a problem with Google as a de facto internet search engine that keeps secret the reasons why the search results come up as they do for all information and ideas on the internet whether or  those ideas or information are being put forth for commercial purposes or just because someone like me is trying to create a better world through their ideas.