Charlie Rose

JohnGelles  06/12/2011 06:48 AM Report

Thanks from one who knows how undeserved his own great debt to others is. The following link goes to a continuation of some thoughts --

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11723#comment_80525

if it connects. Its supposed to go to McCullough's page. I'm typing by flashlight and making more errors than usual.

doodah  06/12/2011 05:42 AM Report

Thanks for sharing that snippet of History with us, dumbed-down me-hippyfied generation, John. I truly admire those of the Greatest Generation (both my grand fathers and uncles and old fellas I've been privileged to know in one capacity or another over the years). You're a National Treasure

NeilMacCallister  06/11/2011 05:09 PM Report

Hey, John, ..

Do you remember when the "Night Life" was lived in a smoky dancehall?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mMIWL3ygLw&feature=player_detailpage

I mean, how blue can you get???

Nowadays we spend those evenings, well, ....on Charlie Rose???

..or listening to Tavis Smiley???

No wonder this country is ruled by the gd media.

***

The lady's door is fixed, ..

This is my payment.

God bless us all!

NeilMacCallister  06/11/2011 09:02 AM Report

You fly so fast and so far, John, ..it is often difficult to keep up.

I do agree that, "The promise of money in return for work will grow an economy".

But I live in a state with the highest business cost of any state within this nation, a nation which itself places the second highest business cost of any nation in the world.

Where is all that money going???

***

Sorry, I can't go to the pro-Keynesian quick-tempo in-step march today, ..I promised a lady I'd fix her sliding door.

JohnGelles  06/10/2011 04:29 PM Report

Neil~

Neither soup nor water is primarily a promise. They do promise necessary fluids for hungry and thirsty people -- rich or poor.

But soup and water cannot be grown like money. Money can grow itself by exciting people's appetite for hard but rewarding work.

Visit a gold miner's sluice operations by a potentially rewarding river. The promise of MORE and MORE money in return for work will, in fact, grow an economy over time if the promise is not so watered down as to lose its power to motivate work.

Debt-free, tax-free money, obtained as Lincoln and Washington obtained them -- from minting paper money -- is today done by Bernanke under the name of quantitative easing.

If we create too much liquidity, it will be worth too little. If we continue to create to little, we will find too few motivated workers to produce and consume products of work that we call essential commerce and economic growth.

Bernanke has studied this all his life. Now he is attacked by ignoramuses whose understanding of debt and money is zero.

When business waits for consumer demand to invite business investment -- and consumers wait for business growth and expansion before they lose their fear of pink slips that makes shopping fun again, BOTH WAIT for the nest Hitler to put us to war.

War adds to worker motivation -- patriotism and love of your native homeland, language and values, fills you with energy to win wars that you would rather die than lose. But, even in peace time, motivation to have to MORE money is extremely potent.

Such motivation in the right nation will create as much soup as is needed for every soul to have its fill. In the wrong nation, watered money like watered soup is a loser.

We are the right nation. But it may be that only Huntsman or Petraeus should be President NOW. Obama may be too timid and to bowled over by the Univ. of Chicago and Harvard and all the bozos who teach there.

The Center for Full Employment and Price Stability, at the Univ. of Missouri Kansas City, preaches functional finance at times when hated taxes would otherwise tie us in knots.

You may not accept the power of inflation protected savings accounts to hold demand in check to hold price, in turn, down to the level of sufficient affordability to allow limited watering of our soup for a limited amount of time.

I shall plead with David McCullough to write his next book about Canada, Australia, Jersey and Guernsey, and America's trials of money unburdened of debt and taxes. It is a story of success in ending tyranny in favor of true democracy.

..... ..... In a true democracy you are what you do -- AND YOU NEVER DO NOTHING because everyone is out of work.

At the moment, Neil, you are out of step with Keynes. Let's get back in step and raise the tempo. It's time for Huntsman's new industrial revolution PAINTED GREEN AS WELL.

NeilMacCallister  06/10/2011 12:59 PM Report

John, ..I honor your service, ..and your "long view" of current issues.

But you still insist on this thing called "debt free money", or "quantitative easing".

But I ask you, if Julia Child added a gallon of water to her gallon of soup, ..could she then nourish more people?

People who believe so, are confusing government with religion: They see our President and his Treasury Secretary as holders of a never-ending basket of loaves and fishes.

I believe that when government becomes our religion, both government and religion have ended.

And I believe that "Quantitative Easing" is simply a euphemism for an unwise, undemocratic, and probably un-Constitutional form of taxation, ..which, by the way, contains absolutely no guarantee of any "equitable redistribution" trickling down from the subsequently fatter Congressional coffers.

Please, ..do the people in your neighborhood now have brighter futures since we flooded the banks with QE-1 and QE-2??

Let's not further water down what little soup we have left, ..let's grow more vegetables instead, and produce more fully-nourishing soup!

JohnGelles  06/10/2011 07:49 AM Report

ADDENDUM:

Robert Oppenheimer is the only famous important person I ever met. For a full half hour we talked together on a train headed for Washington DC in about early 1952. I recognized him and initiated the conversation. We talked of mathematical gifts that may be substantial while you are under 25 (not me) -- and of British non-commercial TV that was being imported here. I liked it.

I thought at that time, and still do, that law should serve the values we profess -- and there should be evidence after it is expressed in writing to this effect. Of course much law is more for convenience -- and is arbitrary -- and law that is really effective in bringing desired changes in real world outcomes is far more rare than not.

The rule of law is not the same as rules of law that are guaranteed to be fair and just.

Years later I thought that I had met him during the time his enemies were crucifying him for lack of enthusiasm for the Hydrogen bomb and what later amounted to a doctrine of mutually assured destruction.

JohnGelles  06/10/2011 06:51 AM Report

NOTE BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION:

A few hours ago, at 1:20 am Pacific time, 10 June, I wrote this comment on both Jenett Conant's conversation in 2005 and David McCullough's conversation of tonight in 2011. This confusion requires me to copy the current remarks to this 2011 conversation.

-----------------------------------

JohnGelles 06/10/2011 04:25 AM

It's 1:20 am in Ventura California. I got out of bed and went to the dining room computer so as not to disturb Linda.

I wanted to write that the David McCullough conversation was Charlie's finest show ever. David offered the meat. But Charlie helped us to eat it -- he was a fine chef in assistance.

I knew I would have to write on someone else's page. Thank God I only had to delay ten minutes [to hear what I now know was a 2005 conversation] -- and that Jennet Conant is who she is and wrote what she did.

I am pleased to say her book and David's book are two of a kind: American history writ as large as can be -- especially for me.

[Her conversation in 2005 was of her book on Oppenheimer and her grandfather -- about the atom bomb]

The day we heard aboard the USS LST 1142, nearing an invasion fleet anchorage of what seemed like (and may have been) 10,000 American warships, troop carriers and freighters, after crossing the whole Pacific ocean alone at 10 Knots) -- heard that we had dropped an atom bomb on Japan, I told my ship mates the war would be over immediately.

I was an ensign and the most junior officer on board. I was the boat officer, with six 36 foot Higgins boats in quick-launch davits on both sides of the LST, and 24 enlisted men to man them. We had trained in Florida and come aboard the brand new LST at Mobile Alabama, and proceeded to the invasion fleet by way of Hawaii, where we picked up gasoline in 50 gallon drums to bring to the invasion of Japan as are first assignment.

When I heard of the bomb my first reaction was to remember Lawrence and the cyclotron at the University of California and of the bomb that uranium could make. I immediately realized that I had seen nothing of the bomb for three or four years -- whereas before I joined the Navy I had read much of it in the magazines of the day when I studied physics in high school. I followed th war closely in the papers from September 1939, when I turned 14 until I enlisted in 1943 when I was 17. I was commissioned at 18, after several years of college (and Army ROTC) and after 90 days at Midshipman's School, the latter at Cornell College in Ithaca, NY.

To my mind the absence of stories about the bomb, that had been frequent before it was known it could be built, meant that what was speculation in 1939 had become fact in 1945.

In all events my theory proved right and the war was over almost immediately. We left the invasion fleet, unloaded our gasoline, and proceeded in short order to bring the Seventh Marine Division Headquarters company to China and re-patriate Japanese civilians from Tsingtao and Shanghai.

Needless to say, the bomb was a blessing to us -- no invasion, just occupation. The cost of the war to Japanese civilians from fire bombing and from the two atom bombs was tragic. They were under the spell of a military dictatorship and an Emperor who was seen as a God.

Jennet Conant's grand father was a giant and hero to us. At Roosevelt's side he had helped to guide thousands of our most brilliant scientists into roles that won the logistical side of th war. Many of them also fought the bloody war their weapons and systems allowed us to win.

David McCullough told us why we had to win (if possible) and what civilization is good for. His is the voice of reason and remembrance of the best of America's contribution to humanity that we are privileged to enjoy.

He and Charlie Rose are not doom-sayers -- and need not be. Too many of those are heard today -- it is almost as though the world that Japan and Germany planned and fought for was the one they think we have given them. We have not.

The world that Jennet Conant's grandfather made possible, that has been less than perfect, defeated fascism black and red, and is now ready for the science he headed up that will usher in economic democracy -- if only Charlie Rose gets it together -- and brings us the voices of economists from the University of Missouri at Kansas City who remember how functional finance (as an embryo discipline) guided the Keynesian tools of WW II.

Conant's Harvard has now in 2011 deserted us -- and offers ancient economic models.

But America is ready for a new birth of freedom from wage slavery and debt burdened money.

Money and debt are first cousins. Both are promises. But money can promise full employment or less than that. When Conant ruled the world of science, Abba Lerner was teaching us how money can deliver full employment and must -- if the democracy we fought for in the last century is not to perish in this one.

Saultxyca  06/09/2011 10:57 PM Report

Jennet Conant looks remarkably like Virginia Woolf, does she not?

NeilMacCallister  06/09/2011 07:14 PM Report

Thank you, Ms. Conant. Wow! ..what names, ..what periods of history!

Thank you for being gracious to that lovely lady Julia Child.

I so admired her tossing "about this much salt" into her soups!

She had knowledge!!! ..She was a great flower of life!