Raise Taxes & Cut Spending-Pay Off Federal Debt and Eliminate Interest Payments

During the Ford administration unemployment ranged between 8 and 9%. The public wanted new policies to deal with the crisis. Unfortunately financial deregulation by Jimmy Carter and his multiple course reversing economic policy stimulated inflation and decades of financial deregulation undermining the job and political security of the people of the United States.

Paying off the federal debt quicker; eliminating the federal budget deficit creates a two’fer bonus of saving on interest payments on the Federal Debt of near ¾ trillion dollars annually.

Congressional Republicans should compromise and raise taxes on those earning more than $250,000 annually, while Democrats should allow spending to be cut on pork barrel projects. Qualitative easing of federal budget outlays would improve the quality and efficiency of services provided with tax dollars-if a smarter congress can be found.

Eliminating federal debt and simultaneous creation of jobs with federal priority policy adjustments toward ecological economics may discomfit Wall Street abstract financial plundering of corporate material product realism. Yet no one in Washington D.C. may be capable of empirically rational economic leadership and able to eliminate the market inefficiency of the financial and banking sectors draining public and private sector capital. The Congress ought not tolerate extension of economic malaise with public indebtedness.

It might recall Long Term Capital Management’s risk aggregator calculation error and VAR assumptions that let John Merriwether and LTCM take on $125 billion of debt with just $5 billion in capital in 1998 (ref. page 278 ‘Age of Greed’ by Jeff Madrick). Government intervention was again required to arrange a rescue of the deregulated financial sector to prevent a cascade of collapse.

The government life disdaining traditional financial regulation and taxation since the Carter administration in preference for financial deregulation to the advantage of a predatory financial class isn’t good, yet they seem to move farther along that road of concentrating wealth and failing to invest adequately in real material national infrastructure all the time.

Space.com Posts an Article Interpreting "Genesis' Spacecraft Findings

Space.com's article provides analysis of the findings of the N.A.S.A. mission. Evidently the Oxygen and Nitrogen isotope content of the sun and planets differ indicating an early change in the values of elements going into forming the sun & solar system planets.

http://genesismission.jpl.nasa.gov/gm2/images/gallery/landing/index.htm

http://www.space.com/12059-earth-formation-sun-building-blocks-nebula.html

State of the U.S. Economy/Federal Budget Factors Troubles/Jobs

The Present U.S. economic crisis was not a consequence of over-taxation. It is a result of Wall Street deregulation the past 40 years leading the nation through an increasing cascade of financial crashes and increasing public debt.

Inadequate political and economic philosophical competence in government has let a financial/arbitrage, LBO/CBO, derivative gaming of Wall Street promotes a corrupting new class of market predators. The financial predators have expanded the leverage power of abstract capital to exploit their prey of real, material product producing industry. Government never reigned in those predators. In fact Allan Greenspan and a host of other supporters of deregulating the financial sector defeated better philosophical management approaches to governing capitalism for the benefit of the citizens of the United States. My most recent book of reading on this topic ‘The Age of Greed’ by Madrick provided data for a few of the ideas of this post.

Since the Reagan administration U.S. tax rates have been at an historical low going back nearly to the depression era. The massive public debt of the 80’s and 90’s was largely caused by a perfidious deregulatory financial sector investment strategy of dumping debt wherever possible while cutting taxes. The public provided bail outs for numerous corporations and financial businesses the last 30 years and paid for much public infrastructure supporting corporate users such as Interstate highways and airports.

Elite hedge fund managers (George Soros earned 3 billion dollars in 2007) investing for wealthy packs of financial hyenas scouring the globe for vulnerable business and currency prey to kill and devour while real unemployment rate in the U.S.A. may be around 17%. Only 56% of working age Americans have jobs.

Some economists favoring a self-regulating economy without government intervention or governance also support the idea of a naturally high level of unemployment below which inflation occurs. Victimizing the working class is thus regarded as the natural right and duty of those with concentrated wealth benefiting the public by enriching themselves and wrecking the economy of the poor.

I enjoy reading philosophy yet never did get to Ayn Rand’s books. I enjoy more technical or classical works of philosophy and generally avoid books like; Thus Spake Zarthustra, The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, None Dare Call It Treason and so forth running a little too political or anecdotal for my philosophical interest. Still, since many ‘conservatives’ read Ayn Rand’s books with more enthusiasm than I had in reading Anna Karenina so in some future decade I may find a copy of ‘Atlas Shrugged’ to browse’.

As a Russian émigré’ I would guess Ayn Rand was naturally moved to be anti-statist emerging from a Soviet-Tsarist historical background of totalitarianism. Such ideological thesis-antithesis evolutions do not however allow much space for intelligent, adaptive social analysis in political-economy. Economic individualism in pursuit of abstract financial goals that manipulate real property in the wild kingdom can lead to chaos, anarchy, nihilism and general unhappiness on the happy planet; in fact the entire environment can go to pot. George Soros’ challenging environment of upbringing also obviously led him to develop a skill exploiting abstract industrial financial and economic transaction of the market rather than developing new industry.

The conservative investment strategy plundering and giving away U.S. national economic quality and quantity has destroyed labor unions and the progress of income for manufacturing workers. The nation transitions into service workers at lower pay and non-materially productive businesses plus medical care providers. Free enterprise has difficulty surviving hordes of banking and financial predators attacking the manufacturing ungulate herds like the hyena, wolf and cheetah.

The U.S. economy experienced a surge of financial deregulation from the Carter administration letting higher interest rate charges on credit cards to the securitization of mortgages and later Allan Greenspan’s support of collateralized debt obligations and derivatives. The Reagan administration allowed Standard oil to buy Gulf oil during his administration reducing competition in gasoline pricing, and in the Bush II years Wall Street’s major financial firms were allowed through lax regulation and a loose political philosophy of letting the financial market regulate itself to sell derivative and mortgage debt obligations in tranched repayment bond packages to more than 40 times their collateral. The nation had more than 17 trillion dollars in mortgage debt by 2006.

The over-production of house construction and trading of mortgages in a variety of obscure and risky packages to investors allowed Wall Street bankers and traders to collect huge fees-they were stimulated to sell sub-prime mortgages with gouging contract terms to poor buyers doomed to fail at repayment. The financial sector of the economy was soaking up profits and little was being invested in honest industrial and infrastructure growth.

In a way Wall Street invested only in jobs that cannot be outsourced abroad to cheaper production facilities in China. China of course did buy much of the mortgage securities from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Restarting the U.S. housing construction business cycle may be difficult with so much surplus housing the poor and unemployed cannot afford to buy-maybe the homes should be rented at half price rather than stand empty for a loss.

Honest lenders will be at a disadvantage in a securitized housing finance business environment. Deregulation of the recovered financial sector again may encourage a new housing bubble cycle to begin. Creating jobs in new, materially productive non-outsourcable industry would be a preferred direction in reducing the U.S. employment rate. Those jobs could be in building artificial, hollow mountain ranges for housing, business and hydroponic gardening and retail office space etc. The exteriors would resemble natural ecosystems yet collect solar and wind power. Integrated space for non-fragmented ecosystem continuity would exist along the base.

I have been reading ‘The Age of Greed’ by Madrick recently and become more informed of some of the structural problems of Wall Street and government the last 40 years in directing capital into a spaced out financial sector instead of into manufacturing and modernizing infrastructure in the U.S.A. That will be very challenging to correct.

I learned recently that the U.S. Government extended 12 trillion dollars in loan and debt guarantees during the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Merely returning to business as usual-to a deregulated Wall Street environment allowing the domination of investing in financial instruments for profit instead of businesses for themselves will continue to degrade the content of the U.S. economy as traders look with predatory gaze upon anything that can be leveraged for buy out or collateralized, packaged as debt obligation and resold as derivatives. Real manufacturing capital investment is given unnecessary risk and volatility by the corrupt financial market forces, and inventive material genius is degraded in favor of slick financial skimming genius in the deregulated business environment wherein irrational empirical investment priorities are regarded as collectively rational. If the invisible hand of CDOs and derivatives without regulation is regarded as rational, so might that of a robotic arm under the control of a random pickpocketing program.

Ai Weiwei Back on the Street

It is good that the Chinese Governmemnt has released one of their more creative artists, poets and architects from captivity-China can use creative thought as can the rest of the world to help redesign human socio-economic use of land and sea toward ecological renewability and restoration of biological diversity.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13878859

It is not that the Chinese Government is especially slow and the United States Government quick-witted on ecological economic leadership and biodiversity conservation and restoration. So far as I am aware few or no governments of the world today are constructing ecologically rational economic structures remotely adequately of meeting the challenges to human survival ahead.

Constructing artificial mountain ranges in which humanity can live with a zero displacement of ecological biota or fauna-even restoring quality habitat, while also creating new ways to grow food perhaps indoors and employ democratic principles to vote on private enterprise proposals submitted for development and approved or rated on low entropy and high social productivity criteria-this will require much development by creative individuals such as Ai Weiwei if human survival is to have a good chance in the centuries ahead on Earth.

A Comment on 'The Age of Greed' by Jeff Madrick and Ecological Economics

This book of review of the decline of the American economy 1970-2011 by Jeff Madrick covers the usual stories of the free market/deregulation overkill that allowed American real productivity to be subverted by wise guy money and finance trading schemes.

Having just read a book 'Where the Wild Things Went' on the decay of the world's biosphere through the elimination of large predators that let the proliferation of small critters occur that in turn over-use the available green resources, I could not help comparing the role of a runaway financial sector unregulated by the conservative belief that all trimming of honest souls is good and the decline of corporate industrial productivity when LBO's (leveraged buy outs) with junk bonds helped pile up U.S. debt. In a way the U.S. public debt is a kind of leveraged buyout of rational economic and political thought.

When successful corporations producing some particular goods with a special genius were undervalued it became even easier to borrow money to buy them up through junk bonds and then sell the parts; subsidiaries, firing employees and so forth after taking over the prey. Over-extended deregulation became a kind of equivalent of allowing the extermination of American wolves, coyotes and so forth that let the deer populations rise an order of magnitude, eat all the flowering plants and others, crash bee populations, deny birds nesting habitat and ruin the health of the forests with even saplings being eaten and only older stands remaining.

Because the Obama generation has been trained to be simultaneously irrational, compliant and greedy I am not optimistic that either the environment or economy will be corrected in a good direction. President Obama has turned his back upon the kinds of innovation that a Roosevelt by have brought to bear to large economic challenges and claims to pre-empt republican leadership on their own goals of creating an irrationally greed driven political and economic system.

It is easy to anticipate that the conservative bulls would be seeking new things to leverage abroad in China, India and elsewhere while concentrating wealth and degrading the quality of life for ordinary people that might formerly have had a reasonably good prospect for a good standard of living.

The conventional U.S. economic posture is light years away from meaningful reforms toward an ecologically rational and balanced physical infrastructure of course. Artificial mountain range housing with wildlife outside wandering upon the slopes, the return of large scale predators controlled by human intelligence and made to live in non-fragmented restored ecosystems. Business models voted upon by democratic processes for actualization through selection for low-entropy effects and improvement of quality of life. Limiting the size of corporations to 5000 employees and the number of corporations any one may invest in to 3. These sorts of things probably will not occur before the end of human life cycle challenges are upon the planet. Oh well.

Female Class Action Suit Against Wal-Mart Rejected

The Supreme Court has rejected Wal-mart's class action suit by female workers as too broad. One wonders if a class action suit by negro slaves would have been too broad as well.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2011/0620/Supreme-Court-dismisses-women-s-class-action-lawsuit-against-Wal-Mart

Illegal Alien Was Anchorage Alaska Police Office Six Years

During his six years as an Anchorage Police Officer the Mexican without legal immigration status managed to get 27,000 dollars of Alaska Permanent Fund checks as well.

Obviously his crime did pay for he probably bought a home in Mexico and invested wisely. If Mexican drug cartels are able to infiltrate citizens in to American police departments (this guy probably was just a free enterpriser helping himself and thus meeting the good graces of Wall Street types) as easily as this fellow from Mexico did that would explain why the 'war on drugs' is about as effective as the war on the Taliban.

http://www.adn.com/2011/06/14/v-printer/1915638/illegal-immigrant-ex-officer-faces.html

On Declining Sea Otter Populations in Alaska etc.

Sea Otter Populations in AlaskaThat news item on the decline of sea otter numbers in Alaska floated around in the news a few years ago. It was a peripheral item I wondered about and never got a conclusive answer for if such exists. In the 2008 book 'Where the Wild Things Went' there is a chapter at least partially explaining the phenomena.

I have had my own theories of course. Since the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and later collapse of the Prince William Sound herring fishery, and continuing, persistent oil below the gravel of the beaches and probably in piles in the deep waters I believed that the entire trophic food chain was adversely impacted. Stolzenburger's book provides better insight than just that. It has provided some material I can use in forming my new understanding of several issues in Alaska.

Long before the oil spill researchers and had studied predator-prey relationships in the oceans and the Aleutian islands. Sea otter eat sea urchins that decimate kelp beds.

Without sea otters sea urchins wipe out kelp beds that provide life support for a variety of sea life and fish. Sea otters are necessary for a good fisheries.

Killer whales eat sea otters in large numbers now because they are an intelligent, adaptive species, and also because their traditional foods such as stellar sea lion, whales and healthy fish populations have been decimated.

It isn't so bad that some sea otters are eaten by k. whales, yet too many dead otters let the sea urchin eat the kelp like goats eating grass down to the root. The entire food chain dislocation is theorized to have started with mechanical whaling in the early 20th century that killed a half million larger whales that k. whales preferred for the main course of their diet.

Large numbers of large whales let the entire food chain occupy a more balanced niche without domination by any one species. Sure humans killed the whales and radically overfish the available remaining fish, the salmon fishery in Alaska rivers like the Kuskokwim, Yukon and Susitna is a pale shadow of its former robust health. Russian promyshleniki exterminated the stellar sea cow and a vast prospective copper mine may leach heavy metals into Bristol Bay for hundreds or thousands of years-it is not just one particular element of the ocean ecology that is out of balance-human technical supremacy has devastated the ranks of normal marine trophic relationships that kept natural balances intact.

The long downward slope even through mariculture farming toward destruction of oceanic bio-diversity will be increasingly difficult to recover from in the decades and centuries ahead. Especially as presently Alaska State politics is corrupted by global extraction industry powers and natural resource management policy develop discognizant of biodiversity conservation methods required for recovering a vibrant marine ecosystem in Alaska.

Killer whales evidently are shot by boaters and others with no respect for life on Earth. A shoreline road from Juneau to a mine north of Juneau would let plinkers have new access for shooting whales of a few kinds.

Restoration of North Pacific whale numbers and an increasing resident fish population would let the entire food chain become a little healthier. For numbers of fish to increase overall it is probable that simultaneous management of all north Pacific species must occur as the balances amidst the species is as important to a particular species as vertical human predation quantitative harvest decisions on any particular specie.

Stop Wasting Billions of U.S. Tax Dollars Defending Alaska

The U.S. Government has thousands of armed forces in Alaska that could be discharged or relocated from service here in order to save billions each year of purposeless federal spending.

Fund a moon base for the future instead of Prussianesque military archaism of Alaska. Why spend billions of dollars each year-perhaps for the next decade, to keep a substanl force in a U.S. state without reasonable odds of invasion from Canada, Russia, China or Japan? It might be more reasonable to prep an effective attack counter-strike structure than to spend billions like drunken sailors each year for fear the Aleutians will have hordes of invaders in a few days.

A large military force in Alaska to defend against Moslem terrorists is not a reasonable paradigm, and they are perhaps the main military threat to the U.S.A. today besides congressional debtonomics. The expense of keeping a numerous standing army in Alaska is unnecessary. If we wait until Alaska is attacked before spending money, we probably can pocket the savings for decades and invest it in border security and national bicycle paths..

One wonders why the U.S. Army should have a significant presence in Alaska long after the end of the cold war?

Alaska could create jobs for Alaska residents by spending two billion dollars of its 50 billion dollar permanent fund each year on its National Guard troops instead of providing state workers an extra check from the oil royalty investment fund. The state could create jobs for people that need them instead of free money to some.

If the United States wants to effectively reduce its federal debt it should cut pork barrel military spending in Alaska. An invasion of the state of Alaska isn't likely, and a defense of Alaska with neutron bomb cruise missiles costing a few million each would be less costly over the long run compared to keeping concentrated military forces here that could be similarly depleted en mass by an opposition force nuclear device or two. Maybe Russian nuclear scientists could work with American bomb builders to create a peace through neutron bomb readiness defense arsenal for each nation.

Some are concerned with the moral aspect of military spending. Is it more morally correct to spend less on war phenomena than more if the less costly way comprises neutron bomb deterrence? Christian ethicists might select the same option as a pragmatist in choosing to reduce large present military costs and allow a less costly potential military method-I cannot say. Christian grace might provide opportunity to avoid making such Hobson's choices. Actualization of conflict parameters may not always be understood a priori. Sub-nuclear conflicts may bring more damage than neutron conflicts in some circumstances should the warlike select to activate war scenarios at some juncture.

The U.S. Government should lead its budgeting plans to modern force use criteria that would not break the bank while providing full coverage-at least as good as that the Congress has designed for health insurance coverage for the nation's poor.

Send 50 extra F.B.I. agents, border security and D.E.A. personnel with good field training to Alaska and reduce the cost of stationing thousands of soldiers in Alaska.

In the era of robotic aircraft ahead invading foreign forces can receive an appropriate condign response of neutron bombs reasonable soon after arrival.

Copy of Letter to Eligibility Tech I Bradley Johnson at the Alaska Permanent Fund

State of Alaska
Permanent Fund Eligibility Tech I

Mr. Bradley Johnson; to remove any possible confusion you may have about my Alaska residency I will reiterate here the main points of my home ownership at Wrangell 1990 through 2008 and at the Mat-Su Otter Lakes subdivision 2008 through 2010 and my effort to move to build a new home beyond the Susitna River at the Otter Lakes subdivision in 2010. I bought that subdivision lot in 2008 and hoped to move my things from Wrangell there after buying a skiff and motor and building a geodesic dome. Fate and the lack of state work presented destitution outside (not down south) as the future home instead.
I first arrived in Alaska in 1974 and worked several months in Juneau before returning south. I returned to Alaska in 1977, 1979 and 1983 thereafter remaining in the state continuously until 1994 (except for visiting Seattle, Hawaii, Europe and Mexico on vacations from the Alaska State Department of Labor and going active for military service on a few occasions).
I quit employment at Worker’s Comp and moved to Fairbanks in 1988 to attend U.A.F. I also transferred membership in the Alaska Army Guard to the U.S. Army Reserve. In 1988 the reserve sent me to Ft. McClellan Alabama for several months and I returned to U.A.F. in September. In 1989 went active for training at Ft. Bliss Texas and after discharge returned to live at Juneau.
In 1990 I completed two college degrees-one from U.A.S.E. (I lived at the dorm one semester after returning from a trip to Wrangell where I got lost in the forest in late winter doing some damage to my feet) and the other degree-a Bachelor’s, from Excelsior College at Albany (an external studies educational facility accredited by the middle states association of colleges).
I bought a lot at Wrangell in 1990 five miles south of the airport. It was in a roadless area. I was purchasing it with my permanent fund checks yet was going to let it go. An emergent situation in 1990 led me to decide to pay off the property and move material stored in Juneau to the Wrangell property. I moved a few hundred pounds of material south including taking a stationary bicycle via boat and a trail to an empty forested, roadless lot.
In 1991 I built a small home at the lot. I had never built anything before and it was an interesting effort constructing upon sloped muskeg with selections of minimal logs to cut to serve as foundation footings.
I first built an 8’ by 6’ hut with a steep roof where I spent the first winter. I added a small plywood porch for extra working space.
That hut only lasted until the year 2000. In 1992 however I built an 8 by 10 shed roofed building with a metal roof that never required snow shoveling as it faces south. I tore down the original hut and used the materials from that refinishing the outside of the newer building in 20O0. In 2000 the new hut thus had its first door.
The state gave the City of Wrangell waterfront development rights to that subdivision in 2000 and the city surveyor stopped at my home as I was removing the original hut. My home was on the back row of the subdivision up from the waterfront.
My idea was to construct a long-term temporary storage building that was also livable to keep my things in until the road to the subdivision was constructed. I rightly regarded my home as my home since I had no other.
By 2007 the road actually had made some progress when the drop in timber prices made the logging and road building operation unfeasible. With a road to the property I might have had a real home built on the lot if I had saved enough money from work elsewhere –perhaps in Juneau or Fairbanks. I was not unhappy without a road though, as wolves, bear and other wildlife still wandered across the property line and there was no noise from snow machines. I travelled the 14 miles r.t. to town for supplies by boat usually because a walk through the woods before the road extension required six hours one-way during dry weather.
I learned quite a few practical building concepts over the 20 years at Wrangell. I discovered that one can buy an Incinolet electric toilet for $1500 and not need a privy. It needs to be emptied just every 6 months and runs on propane or electricity. I learned about producing energy at home with wind generators, and researched making hydrogen for fuel cell power. I had hoped to use these concepts and more practical low-displacement building ideas at new Otter Lakes subdivision that I was compelled eventually to relinquish, along with any hope of vegetable gardening and northern pike fishing there.
Building at Wrangell was quite a bit of work as I transported supplies several miles by small boat from town with just one load delivered by commercial vessel and then I carried materials up a trail.
I first damaged my right shoulder carrying pieces of ¾ inch plywood cut in half on my shoulder with upraised arm in 1991 and 1992. The plywood set in the top of the shoulder pushed the arm out of the socket. I saw a chiropractor who temporarily put it in place and the ligaments did not pervasively rip out until about 2006.
It was about that time (1991) that the Alaska State radio network harassment began. Something I have regarded as a form of state terrorism. Consistently designating my home ‘the lem’ and sending rave death by a thousand cuts is costly to a single individual. By 2007 I realized that owning ‘the lem’ at Wrangell was adversely impacting my life socially and financially.
Stripping my home ownership of the usual social privacy and of my freedom to quietly go about my private interests in my home and work created social adversity. The state’s power to generate the big lie and to corrupt equal rights (as in the PFD fiction about my having no history of Alaska residency in 2009 or before 2010) and equal legal benefits (the PFD) generated socially by Alaska State APRN terrorism-and that of NPR as well, meant that I should relocate to another address and cut the coordinated tie-ins networked and leaning on my home (not in a legal sense). When enough preferred target location connections build up eliminating the target validity still presents the phenomena of continuing attacks on the no longer valid target for at least two or three years.
I did get much writing done at Wrangell and began copyrighting some science fiction stories written there as early as 1990-92. Yet by 1994 I was fairly well starved out and rowed an 8 foot inflatable boat to Juneau. It took 18 days in the month of April. I left Wrangell weighing 148 pounds more or less and gained a couple of pounds on the way eating fish and clams, kelp and four pounds of flour.
In Juneau I camped out and eventually got 6 weeks of work as an administrative clerk non-perm with the State. That was the only work I got with the State government since looking for a job with the state from 1987 to the 2011 putting in hundreds of applications over the years.
I should make the point here that I did travel to Houston in 1992 to try to continue graduate school after U.A.F. thrice denied admission to their M.A. program in Northern Studies. Including my one year of C.L.E.P. credit scores my g.p.a. as an undergraduate was 3.8.
It is true that I had attended one trimester at Chemeketa C.C. in Oregon from which I did not officially withdraw before receiving an unexpected grant of 200 dollars I used to hitchhike to Houston and look for work prospecting for oil again offshore, yet U.S.N.Y. where my B.A. is from only accepts passing grades, and the U.A.S.E Associates Degree is of no value-I wish they would consider taking it away because when I started it was named U.A.J. and I don’t like the name change.
That costly exclusion meant a waste of time and money searching for a quick replacement. Since student loan funding was cut off to the entire school (The Houston Graduate School of Theology) there because of the default rate I never completed the M.A. program and never became qualified to become a journeyman educator with a decent annual income. I had a 3.5 g.p.a. at H.G.S.T. when I left school.
I had planned to get two M.A.’s with the first being in Biblical Languages and the second from a different school in philosophy and history.
Thus I paint houses when I can find work. Just last month the Settlers Bay Lodge in the Wasilla area let me go after one day of washing dishes.
My home in Alaska at Wrangell slowly improved when I could afford to bring supplies in. I had initially planned to use my place as a storage facility and to keep it low-key until retirement, and hoped to get a job with the state or complete my graduate education and be an educator in a rural Alaska in the meantime. There never was work at Wrangell besides the Alaska Pulp Corporation predominantly which closed its doors in 1994 I believe after polluting the water and defaulting on contracts I seem to remember. The null income scenario changed that however.
With little work I spent more time at the hut and made a few more emergency rowing trips to Juneau eventually moving up from an 8 foot inflatable boat to a 14 foot monarch scow with a tarp for a square sail. I also made several trips outside to paint and buy sailboat and attempt to sail it to Alaska without success.
In 2008 I sold my home at Wrangell to some people from the lower 48 whom I had worked for painting and roofing two summers. I bought a new lot of 4.99 acres at Otter Lakes with the proceeds of the sale of my home at Wrangell and then needed to find some way to solve the logistics of the move. That was to be my new home when work occurred locally in Alaska to afford the transition.
A couple matters complicated the situation. There wasn’t that much money to work with though I sold the Wrangell place for a fair price. I found a cheap sailboat in Maryland on eBay and bought it yet it sank near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and it cost 2000 dollars to have it refloated and destroyed. Coincidently the seller was retired from Dutch Harbor. It was a good boat with new keel bolts that could have made it to Alaska. I planned to store it at a low cost place in the North Chesapeake Bay area near the cut to Delaware until some time when I might have tried the Northwest Passage with it-or maybe Cape Horn. Sailing can be very treacherous in socially crowded environments such as Chesapeake Bay if one is poor.
In 2009 I made an addition on to the hut at Wrangell to keep snow sheets from sliding off the roof down on to the front entrance. I experimented with making strong little gusseted tresses as in a storage shed sold at Home Depot.
I also wrote a novel in 30 days there named eventually ‘St. Novilistricka Dimensions’ (available at my online bookstore at http://www.lulu.com/garycgibson).
I took Russian and Alaska history courses at U.A.-Juneau and read Dostoyevsky in Fairbanks during a course on Siberian exploration. A Mrs. Bartlett at U.A.F. was my course instructor for a philosophy course of independent studies that I took while going through my second time through basic training at Ft. Bliss and an air defense school in 1989. I had sent a science fiction story to Moscow Russia from U.A.F. in 1989 seeking to earn money for publication. It was about rockets, seventh heaven and Coney Island. A drill sergeant at Ft. Bliss gave me the letter of rejection from Moscow at Ft. Bliss the day before issuance of security clearances-yet the Russians pulled out of Eastern Germany a week before in December 1989 anyway. My active duty ended early in 1990. At least I saw the space shuttle on the runway at El Paso.
During the three winters I lived in Fairbanks during the late 80s I usually walked around. One winter I had a Honda civic wagon with a rusted out floor that let 45 below zero wind flow in at 60 m.p.h. with the heater blower motor broke-I drove with the windows open to exhale out in order not to frost the windows. I moved from Fairbanks to Wrangell in 1990 via Juneau. Having completed the work for both of my college degrees I applied for admission to U.A.F.’s Northern Studies Program and had every reason to believe I would be admitted since I had good recommendations from Professors Olsen and Fitzpatrick at U.A.J. I was not admitted, an emergent situation developed and I ended up paying for the lot at Wrangell.
I left Wrangell to go to Juneau in October 2009 and camped out at Douglas. I had two inguinal hernias and an umbilical hernia and no idea of how to pay for it. I had torn my rotator cuff on the right shoulder three or four years before and had not had surgery. If I could get work with the state I would have medical insurance and get the repairs made.
Of course I did not get hired to work for the state or anyone else. The Hospital did write off the surgery costs (one time for most poor people) a priori so I was surprised when a bill arrived for an additional six thousand dollars eventually. The surgeon and the anesthesiologist are not on the Hospital Staff and did not write off their fees.
I had researched the cost of hernia surgery and thought it was 3000 dollars-so the 13,000 dollar charge was a little surprising. I gave the surgeon my Otter Lakes subdivision lot across the Susitna River where I had planned to move to, and move my things at Wrangell to via small boat from Deshka Landing at Willow and portage a half mile from a navigable tributary.
So after surgery post-op four five weeks I got a job at Taku Smokers in Juneau. Unfortunately there was an occasional heavy lift of a tub filled with fish and water that weighed more than 200 pounds. I had to quit as my groin was being damaged. A year later it is still stressed though it doesn’t need surgery.
I flew to Anchorage in April of last year with the hope of getting enough work to buy a replacement property in the Otter Lakes subdivision. That wasn’t good judgment for I could not find work and spent the winter except for a few weeks sleeping outside without even propane to heat coffee. The State Permanent Fund division informs me with the most galling and importunate timing possible that I never had the intention of being a resident before 2010 in Alaska, that I never had a home here. If I were a good brainwashed idiot I almost might believe you. If there was a need for state taxes or military conscription though I am fairly sure the state would determine that I have been a resident the last 25 years at the least.
I need the perm fund check this year in order to exit Anchorage and Mat-Su. I will not have luck finding work here and want to move toward Juneau and my sailboat on the beach near my former home at Wrangell. The bitterness I get from this galling experience is a reason why I do not apply generally in years when I am eligible for a PFD. One obeys the laws, follows the rules and has the government simply corrupt things and profit victimizing the poor-that’s the way of the world too often generally isn’t it?
So a sadistic state government might choose to decide that I have never intended to have a home in Alaska now that I am have lost my last real estate (in February 2010) and must sleep outside. I suppose the state will make the same determination next year and the year after if I am still here since things won’t get better. As a social philosopher I feel the inequitable allocation of resources is disturbing.