by PAUL KRASSNER
In 1967, there was a concert in Pittsburgh, with the Grateful Dead, the Velvet Underground, the Fugs and me, playing the part of a stand-up satirist.
There were two shows, both completely sold out, and this was the first time anybody had realized how many hippies actually lived in Pittsburgh.
Backstage between shows, a man sidled up to me. "Call me ‘Bear,’" he said.
"Okay, you’re ‘Bear.’"
"Don’t you recognize me?"
"You look familiar, but–"
"I’m Owsley."
"Of course – Owsley acid!"
Fun fact: His nickname, "Bear," was originally inspired by his prematurely hairy chest.
Now he presented me with a tab of Monterey Purple LSD. Not wishing to carry around an illegal drug in my pocket, I swallowed it instead.
Soon I found myself in the front lobby, talking with Jerry Garcia. As people from the audience wandered past us, he whimsically stuck out his hand, palm up.
"Got any spare change?"
Somebody passing by gave him a dime, and Garcia said thanks.
"He didn’t recognize you," I said.
"See, we all look alike."
In the course of our conversation, I used the word "evil" to describe someone.
"There are no evil people," Garcia said, just as the LSD was settling into my psyche. "There are only victims."
"What does that mean? If a rapist is a victim, you should have compassion when you kick ‘im in the balls?"
I did the second show while the Dead were setting up behind me. Then they began to play, softly, and as they built up their riff, I faded out and left the stage.
Later, some local folks brought me to a restaurant which, they told me, catered to a Mafia clientele. They pointed out a woman sitting at a table. The legend was that her fingers had once been chopped off, and she’d go to a theater, walk straight up to the ticket-taker, hold up her hand and say, "I have my stubs."
With my long brown curly hair underneath my Mexican cowboy hat, I didn’t quite fit in. The manager came over and asked me to kindly remove my hat. I was still tripping. I hardly ate any of my spaghetti after I noticed how it was wiggling on my plate.
I glanced around at the various Mafia figures sitting at their tables, wondering if they had killed anybody. Then I remembered what Jerry Garcia had said about evil. So these guys might be executioners, but they were also victims.
The spaghetti was still wiggling on my plate, but then I realized it wasn’t really spaghetti, it was actually worms in tomato sauce. The other people at my table were all pretending not to notice.
It was, after all, the Summer of Love.
"Thanks for enhancing it, ‘Bear.’"
Excerpted from the expanded edition of PAUL KRASSNER’s autobiography, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture, available only atpaulkrassner.com and as a Kindle e-book.
PAUL KRASSNER is the editor of The Realist. His books include: Pot Stories for the Soul, One Hand Jerking and Murder at the Conspiracy Convention.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/03/21/my-encounter-with-augustus-owsley-stanley/
5 more principles for working with not-yet-believers
SIMPLY CHURCH – A HOUSE CHURCH PERSPECTIVE
http://www.simplychurch.com/2011/09/-5-more-principles-for-working-with-not-yet-believers.html
Starting here, several blog posts told the story of how we started a church with people who didn't yet know the Lord. Here are some more principles for working with people who don't yet know Jesus.
1. Open ended questions are great. We love to ask people, "Tell us where you are on your spiritual journey." Similarly, open discussion is great. As someone commented on the post where I told the story, if people employ the principles in the book, "How to Win Friends and Influence People," they get much further. No one likes to be told, "You're wrong." At the beginning, some of the comments people made were totally off the mark, but we didn't correct them. It works much better when the Word shows them what is right.
2. We once had a group of late teens and early 20s who were growing and excited about what God was doing in their midst. People were finding the Lord most weeks. We went on a mission trip for a month, and when we came back, the guy whose home it met in came to see us. "I had to close the church down!" The reason was that a local youth pastor heard about what was going on, visited, and when he found their was no teaching, took it upon himself to rectify the omission. Within three weeks people had stopped coming. Moral of the story? If you teach, new believers will quickly learn to be quiet and, in a small group context, often stop coming.
3. Use the Scriptures as a basis for discussion. If one person teaches, that person become the authority, but if everyone discusses the Scriptures, the Bible itself becomes the authority. Discussion is also a much better way for people to learn.
4. We had people praying for each other from the very first week. We didn't know who they were praying to, but our God delighted to answer their prayers. We used different patterns of praying--sometimes we would get people into pairs. Other times people would pray, for example, for the person on their right; other times we had them in small groups. We modeled sentence prayers rather than mini-sermons. The result of all this? No one was ever reticent to pray aloud.
5. Simple patterns can be easily copied. Complex is hard to duplicate. By teaching just four steps based on Acts 2:42, Lisa led from very early on in the process. Here were the four steps:
Start with a meal
Ask what God has been doing in people's lives that week
Spend time around the Word in an interactive way
Pray for each other
Faked Stats, No Jobs: Happy Corporation Day!
by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
It is Labor Day, 2011, but labor has nothing to celebrate. The jobs that once gave American workers a stake in capitalism have left and gone away. Corporations in pursuit of near-term profits have moved labor’s jobs to China, India, Indonesia, Taiwan, South Korea and Eastern Europe.
Labor arbitrage, that is, the substitution of foreign labor that is paid less than its productivity for American labor, has enriched Wall Street, shareholders and corporate CEOs, but it has devastated American employment, household incomes, tax base, and the outlook for the US economy.
This Labor Day week-end’s job report, announced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Friday, September 2, says zero net new jobs were created in August, a number 250,000 less than the amount of monthly job creation necessary to make progress in reducing America’s high rate of unemployment.
The zero figure is actually an optimistic number. As John Williams (shadowstats.com) has made clear, problems with the BLS’s seasonal adjustments and “birth-death” model
during the prolonged downturn that began in December 2007 result in the BLS over-estimating new jobs and underestimating lost jobs.
Seasonal adjustments and the “birth-death” model were designed with a growing economy in mind and result in miscounts during downturns. For example, the “birth-death” model estimates new jobs that are created from new start-up companies that are not yet reporting, and it estimates the job losses from companies that have gone out of business. In a growing economy, start-ups exceed jobs losses, but the situation reverses during downturns or during periods of sub-normal job growth. For the past forty-four months, the “birth-death” model has overestimated the number of new jobs created. When the annual revisions are made to the job reports, the excess jobs are taken out, but it is seldom headline news.
The reason that nearly four years of economic stimulus, consisting of large federal budget deficits and near zero interest rates, hasn’t revived the economy is that the jobs that Americans once had have been moved offshore. Stimulus cannot put Americans back to work in jobs that have been given to foreign countries.
Post-World War II Keynesian economists, such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich, think that if the federal government would add more stimulus by enlarging the already massive federal deficit, new jobs would somehow be created to take the place of those that have left. This is a delusion. Not only have the supply chains necessary to support US economic activity been disrupted and broken by offshoring, but also the same incentive–excess supplies of foreign labor that produces more value than it is paid–that sent jobs abroad is still operative.
In a word, the US economy has been de-industrializing, moving from a developed to an underdeveloped economy, for the past two decades. It has been the case for many years that when the US economy manages to eke out new jobs, they are in non-tradable domestic services, such as health care and social assistance, waitresses and bartenders, retail clerks. Non-tradable employment consists of jobs that do not produce goods and services that could be exported to reduce the large US trade deficit.
The long-term deterioration in the US economy has been covered up by “reforming” the official measures of unemployment and inflation. The U3 measure of unemployment, the current 9.1 per cent unemployment rate, only measures unemployment among those who are actively seeking a job. Those who have become discouraged by the inability to find a job and have ceased looking are not counted as being among the unemployed, and the U3 measure makes no adjustment for those who are forced into part-time jobs because there is no full-time employment.
The government knows that the U3 “headline” unemployment rate is seriously understated and provides a broader measure known as U6. This measure, which is seldom reported by the financial media, includes short-term discouraged workers (those who have not looked for jobs for six months or less) and an adjustment for those who wish full time employment but can only find part time work. Currently, this measure of unemployment stands at 16.2 per cent.
Add long-term discouraged workers. No official unemployment rate includes long-term (more than six months) discouraged workers as unemployed. John Williams estimates this number and adds it to the U6 measure to produce a current rate of US unemployment of 22.7 per cent, an unemployment rate 2.5 times higher than the official rate.
Similar understatement exists in the measure of inflation known as the Consumer Price Index. In order to reduce cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security checks and to hold down other inflation adjustments, the “progressive” Clinton administration accepted the Boskin Commission’s recommendation to introduce substitution into what had been a fixed, weighted, basket of goods used to measure the cost of a constant standard of living. In the new “reformed” measure, if the price of an item increases, say New York strip steak, the index assumes that consumers switch to a less expensive cut, such as round steak. Thus, the price increase doesn’t show up in the CPI.
Consumers, or a number of them, do tend to behave in this way. However, since the basket of goods comprising the CPI is no longer constant, but changes with price changes, the CPI has become a variable measure of the cost of living that reduces the inflation rate by measuring a lower standard of living.
John Williams estimates the CPI according to the previous official methodology that used a fixed basket of goods. He finds the rate of inflation to be much higher than is reported by the substitution-based methodology.
The understatement of inflation serves to boost real Gross Domestic Product growth. In order to compare how much larger (or smaller) the economy is this year compared to last year, the GDP figure has to be adjusted for inflation. If the economy grew 5 per cent in nominal terms and inflation was 3 per cent, then GDP grew 2 per cent in real terms, that is, real goods and services, as opposed to mere price rises, increased 2 per cent over the year.
When John Williams adjusts US GDP with the former or traditional measure of inflation, he finds that there has been no growth in real GDP for several years. In other words, during the period of “economic recovery” the economy has actually been declining.
American economic decline began with offshoring during the Clinton administration. Instead of addressing this threat, the Clinton administration launched the neoconservative program of American Empire with American and NATO aggression against Serbia, sending the Serbian leader off to be tried as a war criminal for resisting the dissolution of his country.
The Bush/Cheney regime elevated the pursuit of American Empire under cover of “the war on terror.” Based entirely on lies and falsified intelligence, Bush/Cheney launched wars against the Taliban, who were unifying Afghanistan, and against Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
In the 1980s Hussein was used by Washington to launch a war against the revolutionary government in Iran that had overthrown the American puppet government, headed by the Shah of Iran. Ever since Washington lost its puppet rule over the Iranians, Washington has refused diplomatic relations with Iran. In the place of diplomatic relations, Washington demonizes Iran in order to set the country up for another attack a la Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen. Syria is next.
Saddam Hussein’s service to Washington was overlooked when it became more important to eliminate support for Hamas and Hezbollah, two barriers to Israel’s expansion in the Middle East, than to maintain Washington’s gratitude to an Iraqi pawn.
Despite unequivocal reports from arms inspectors that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and most certainly had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11, top Bush/Cheney regime officials demonized Iraq as the greatest threat to America. The imagery of mushroom clouds from nuclear weapons was evoked, A war was launched entirely on false pretexts that destroyed a country and left over one million Iraqis dead and four million displaced. What Washington did to Iraq is what the Nazis were tried and executed for at the Nuremberg Trials.
Obama was elected in order to stop the illegal and senseless wars. Instead, Obama both continued the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and expanded the wars into Libya, Pakistan, and Yemen. Since the deregulation of the financial system under the Bush/Cheney regime and the “war on terror,” the entire economy of the US has been sacrificed for the benefit of the financial sector and the military/security complex.
Labor Day is an anachronism. It should be renamed Corporation Day or War Day to celebrate the success of Bush/Obama in eliminating labor unions as a countervailing power to corporate power and the elevation of War as the highest goal of the American state.
Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
By Scott Werdebaugh
The Gospel Coalition writes:
Grace will dash your hopes but never leave you hopeless. Grace will decimate your kingdom as it introduces you to a better King. Grace will expose your blindness as it gives you eyes to see. You simply cannot live a productive life or have a productive ministry in this broken-down world unless you have a practical grasp of the grace you have been given.thegospelcoalition.org
Operational Pause for the Cause: Happy End of Summer!
by Jeff Huber
I’m celebrating Labor Day this year by making it the first day of my summer vacation which, if I’m going to take one, I need to get cracking, don’t I?
Wake me when the next war is over.
Catch you after the equinox. Hopefully we won’t have started a fourth war by then. Well, a fifth war, if you count Yemen as being a war already. Which it is, when you get right down to it. Then again, we’re also at war in Somalia, the Philippines, Nigeria and Syria. So here’s hoping we’re don’t start a how ever many-eth war it would be if we start a new one before fall officially starts.
And what would the rush be? It’s not like we need new wars to replace the ones we already have. Out withdrawal “deadlines” for Iraq and the Bananastans are more fictional than Sergeant Fury and His Howling Commandos, though not nearly so well written, drawn or inked.
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CPI Year-to-Year Growth
by John Williams - http://www.shadowstats.com/
The CPI-U (consumer price index) is the broadest measure of consumer price inflation for goods and services published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Notes on Different Measures of the Consumer Price Index.
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is the broadest inflation measure published by U.S. Government, through the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Department of Labor:
The CPI-U (Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers) is the monthly headline inflation number (seasonally adjusted) and is the broadest in its coverage, representing the buying patterns of all urban consumers. Its standard measure is not seasonally adjusted, and it never is revised on that basis except for outright errors,
The CPI-W (CPI for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers) covers the more-narrow universe of urban wage earners and clerical workers and is used in determining cost of living adjustments in government programs such as Social Security. Otherwise its background is the same as the CPI-U.
The C-CPI-U (Chain-Weighted CPI-U) is an experimental measure, where the weighting of components is fully substitution based. It generally shows lower annual inflation rate than the CPI-U and CPI-W. The latter two measures once had fixed weightings — so as to measure the cost of living of maintaining a
Here is a graph of annual percent change (year-to-year) in both the CPI-U and the SGS-Alternate CPI for select periods:
Who coulda knowd? That the U.S. Federal govt. would have such good-hearted men, who care so veru much they don't even make a peep!
So, you might ask, how can THIS be good news? Well, it is HONEST news, numbers that you simply won't get anywhere else!
Or, how about, UNEMPLOYMENT – lucky U.S. - we got ours down to nine-somethin'! We're #1; We' #1; We're #1 and yet ...
Alternate Unemployment Charts
The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers.
The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline number. The U-6 unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment.
Editorial: Shrink wage gap by raising tax on rich
Chicago Sun Times Sep 5, 2011
On this Labor Day, let’s stop beating up on each other.Copyright © 2011 — Sun-Times Media, LLC
The wars between American workers, mostly between public and private sector workers, and also between the middle class and the poor, really miss the point.
Are state workers right to be frustrated that their pension benefits might be cut to levels common in the private sector? Of course.
Are Chicago Public Schools teachers right to be mad about the canceling of their promised 4 percent raise, matching trends in the private sector? Of course.
Are middle-class workers justified in feeling a touch of resentment toward low-income Americans who accept government-funded food stamps despite holding a job? Sure.
But if you put the anger aside, the real reason workers are turning against each other is clear: The vast majority of U.S. workers are fighting over an increasingly small shot at the American dream.
America’s gaping income gap —the gulf between top earners and the rest of us — hasn’t been this wide since just before the Great Depression. More than 20 percent of the nation’s income now goes to the richest 1 percent of Americans. This is up from 7 percent in 1980.
And the top 10 percent of earners pull in almost half the total income, a level higher than any year since 1917.
Meanwhile the middle class, the working class and the poor are treading water.
Between 1950 and 1970, Cornell University economist Robert H. Frank writes, incomes grew rapidly and at about the same level, 3 percent annually on average, for families of all incomes. That pattern changed dramatically from 1970 to 2000. Incomes of the top 1 percent grew more than threefold while median household income grew less than 15 percent.
This not only makes Americans bitter and mad, it has real consequences for the economy.
For middle- and lower-income workers, stagnating wages make it that much harder to afford a home, to live in an area with good schools and to save for retirement.
The gap, former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich argues, also deprives the middle class of the purchasing power needed to keep the economy going, a loss that cannot be made up by buying by the wealthiest Americans. Wide income gaps can also lead to political unrest, partisanship and ugly politics — all things we’re seeing in America and across Europe.
Government solutions for narrowing the wage gap are hard to come by — the shipping abroad of decent manufacturing jobs is the result of global forces that are often beyond a government’s control. We look forward to the Thursday unveiling of President Barack Obama’s job creation plan, though even his administration predicts that unemployment will remain at 9 percent next year.
At the moment, one of the only reliable routes Congress can take to help ease the wage gap is to advance a more fair and equitable tax policy. Not only are the richer getting richer, they’re also paying far less in taxes than they did 20 years ago.
As we’ve written before, Obama’s job between now and Thanksgiving, when a congressional committee must devise a plan to lower the deficit by at least $1.2 trillion, is to persuade the nation that more tax revenue — not just more spending cuts — is the answer. And this must include hitting those who can afford it most.
One proponent of increasing taxes on the wealthy is investor Warren Buffett, who laid out his case in a New York Times op-ed.
On this Labor Day, make time to chew on this: “We mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks,” Buffett wrote last month. “My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.”
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