Speaking of capitalism–what is a founder’s share?

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Speaking of capitalism, what about the situation where someone founds a company? Doesn’t just make an investment, but rolls up his sleeves and dives in?

Who owns that company?

Is the founder by rights an absolute dictator, sole heir to all profit and benefit?

No, not quite.

Ownership is still measured by contribution.

Let’s say that after years of work, hard work by everyone including the founder, that everyone but the founder walks away. It’s a mess, but the founder can create another company, right? If he’s been in there swinging, he’s got the knowledge–most of it, anyway. He can hire new people, train them, get things rolling again–but at how much effort, at how much lost profit, production, and customers?

That extra, the part that disappears with the people, is the least of what the former “employees” owned. The “owner” only owns what is left. That may be more. It may be less. It depends on the real contribution, on the amount of creation. But ownership of this thing called a company is shared.

How do we know that?

Because it went away when those creating it left.

So, even a sole founder is not so sole.

Very quickly ownership spreads out.

And it’s easy to understand.

After all, the creation of a company is the sum of many, many individual acts of creation. Most, nearly all, of those acts must be replayed every day to keep the company created. When a company is rebuilt, it’s a new company, created newly by new actions and new efforts.

What a founder does is enlist the creation of others–but he can never own their ability to create. That is unless one subscribes to slavery. That’s what slaveholders try to do–own someone’s ability to create, own all that someone does create.

Even then, it doesn’t last. Eventually the system collapses–slaves have very little stake in success.

Neither do employees who are denied their rights to ownership, denied the recognition and exchange demanded by their individual acts of creation.

Such companies eventually die.

That’s because the life leaves them.

It simply walks out the door.

Jobs overseas and parasites at home

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IBM was in the news recently for laying off more Americans and hiring more electronic migrants. Some writer pontificated that the workers had no right to complain.

They were just employees.

Such drivel, this idea that IBM owes the workers nothing. What IBM executives think they own, what the shareholders think they own, and what they actually own are two very different things.

It is very easy to calculate. Consider, tomorrow morning, no one employed by IBM, no one more than a few levels below vice-presidents, shows up for work? What happens the next day? Or the days after that?

What’s left? Aside from computer rooms, network cables, empty factories and panicked clients? Whatever it is, it’s worth only a small fraction of the current share price.

That’s not what Wall Street wants to hear. It’s not what the IBM board wants to hear. And it’s not what the executives at IBM want to hear.

But there it is. Take away the “employees” and the company ceases to exist.

A company is not a thing like a kitchen chair or a lawn ornament. The greatest part of most enterprises is intangible. It is the skills, the knowledge, the drive, the production, the creation, and the work. That intangible wholly owned by those disdainfully known as employees.

That label hides a truth, for they are not employees nor even workers, but producers. Even better, creators. They create the company and do it each day by walking in the door and bringing the company to life.

So I ask again: What is left if the producers leave IBM? If the producers don’t producer? If the creators don’t create? If they walk away?

A corpse. That’s what you call a body when the life is gone. And then you bury the thing.

A century ago, Carnegie and his ilk fought a war to deprive those who create from the rewards of their creation. Unfortunately, Carnegie won. Modern capitalism was born. Carnegie’s minions wrote the history books. His cultural descendants keep the lie alive.

Perhaps it was inevitable. The monarchies had fallen. Slavery was out of fashion. And the world had room for only so many warlords. The inveterate parasites had to find another way to feed. The key for all of them is, and always has been, to find a way to take from those who create and give to those who, well, don’t create.

Does that seem harsh? Perhaps. But there remain these questions:

What is a company?

And if it disappears when the producers stop and the creators cease, then how can someone else possibly own it?

Outsourcing insanity

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When it comes to this outsourcing insanity, it doesn’t just stop with computer professionals. Any job using computers is at risk: Accounting. Order taking. Computerized factory floor. Even debt collection.

How appropriate–after a corporation electronically brings in a migrant to do your job, they’ll electronically bring in another to harass you as you go broke.

It is such a drain on our economy that any sane person has to ask: Why do we have to let those jobs go?

Of course, we don’t. But large corporations want it. It gives them an advantage over small companies. They can sell to Americans but not hire Americans. These corporations pay enough in campaign bribes to get their way–and the correct term is bribes. The campaign money comes with strings even if the Supreme Court can’t see it, yet any fool outside the Court’s ivory tower knows that what looks, works and stinks like a bribe, is a bribe. Those bribes grease the way for multinational conglomerates that prefer to ignore national boundaries.

Yet the jobs exist. The jobs are here. Americans could be doing them.

So there’s no law.

It’s our border. These are our jobs.

We can make a law.

Our politicians may think that they work for the multinationals ninety-nine percent of the time, but they still need our votes, even if it’s only once every few years. As a matter of fact, they need our votes this year.

Maybe our politicians have forgotten that?

Maybe we should remind them?

A footnote for 2020:  One might get the impression that I don’t like immigrants or foreigners. I hope not. Nothing could be further from the truth. They are people, just like you and me. I’ve trained and work with any number of people working in India, as well as worked and work with lots of immigrants.  Though I resented the company firing Americans to hire in a foreign country, I still found and do find I like my Indian compatriots. Today, of course, after driving so many Americans out of Information Systems, the mostly likely candidate for a job in America is an immigrant.  I have some Indian friends who have become citizens and now live with the threat of their job going overseas.  So at least the corporate hate for jobs in America applies to everyone in America.

It’s not the people in the jobs.  It’s the destruction of the American economy as a substitute for knowing how to run a business that gripes me.

This, I think, is the major reason for President Trump’s unpopularity with Big Tech. They are the worst offenders at building companies with Americans and our tech and then firing the Americans to make themselves even richer.

Where are the jobs?

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(A note for 2020:  This was published in 2010.  Donald Trump was elected by American voters 4 years ago to help put a stop to this.  For this, and for not being a career bribe taker, President Trump has been painted as a bastard every day since.  Joe Biden promises to send the work back overseas.  The media loves Joe.  Big surprise, all this, right?)

Fifteen months after passage of the jobs bill beyond belief, after massive expenditures on extended unemployment, after a monumental load of debt taken on to stimulate the economy in America, where are the jobs?

China.  India.  Egypt.  Pakistan.

Why?

Because it only takes one job taken by an electronic migrant to eliminate about a half-dozen American jobs.  What is an electronic migrant?  Someone who works here but sits across the border, entering this country over the phone and the network wires.  This the unmentioned part of our migrant workforce–unregulated, unwatched, utterly ignored by Washington, and yet taking many of our best jobs.

It used to be just the big companies played in this dirt.  But with years of practice, now the little companies are involved.  I know of a small outfit in Pennsylvania that traditionally operated with about a 10% annual profit.  Recently, they were purchased by an overseas firm (courtesy of our crashed economy, everything is cheap here).  Now the word is that only a 25% profit will do.

How is that to be accomplished?  Easy.  Lay off the Americans and bring in electronic migrants.  Outsourcing, they call it.  And for each American that goes, another five, six or more Americans up and down the street goes with them.

What happens is that the primary unemployed–the first laid off–are not buying furniture, going on vacation, spending on clothes, whatever.  At some point, one of the people doing those other jobs also gets a pink slip.  And then another and another.  It all adds up.  The tens and hundreds of thousands of jobs outsourced each year to electronic migrants mean millions of jobs lost in retail, food service, tax preparation, large and small industry, and on and on.

Do we have to let those jobs go?  Absolutely not.  The work is still here, and we could have those jobs without borrowing and spending another dollar of national debt, dollars we steal from our children and grandchildren.  It is very simple.  After all, it is our border and these are our jobs.  We regulate everything else that comes in and goes out, so we can make a law.  We can do it any time.

In a sad, twisted way, all the spending has worked.  No one, not even the federal government, can spend that much money without somebody getting hired.  But for every job we might make, we open our border to another electronic migrant.  The best jobs, the jobs the politicians yap endlessly about creating, are the ones we give away.  If you look for healthy economies, you’ll find them in China and India, growing on the payrolls of their electronic migrants.

The sad bottom line is that our government, and our money, subsidizes the economies in Asia–and does this even as we are unemployed, going broke, and dumping our debt on our children.

I can’t say that I am impressed.

Are you?

Offshored and outsourced — lies our corporations tell us

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What would you think if a manufacturing plant, one somewhere along our coast, parked a ship full of illegal immigrants twelve miles offshore and then ran a bundle of rods, cables and levers from that ship to their plant so that the foreigners could operate the machinery?

It would be obvious that the plant owner was breaking immigration laws.  Even if a loophole was found for the owner to slither through, the stink would be so great that the practice wouldn’t be practiced for long.

But with a little trickery, some smoke, mirrors and curtains, this operation is being run.  And the stink is kept so far offshore that you don’t catch the smell. You are most likely to notice when it is your job that is gone.

Last year, one “American company” unloaded the better part of 24,000 U.S. workers by exactly this means. That company was far from alone. Mind you, the work is not gone. The work is here, in this country, just as it always has been.  Though the foreigners are not sitting just offshore, the rods, cables and levers do run from plants and offices inside our border into the ocean but reach all the way to places like India, China and Egypt. The work still appears here and the products are directly used here, but the worker sits at an electronic console, and the rods, cables and levers run though wires on the internet and do it so smoothly that no one notices the remote control.

It is a clever scheme. The companies successfully avoid U.S. laws on immigration. They use our country’s resources, our infrastructure, and the wealth and order that our social systems have produced, but they manage to avoid most of the contribution we expect from companies that depend upon and use our society.  They avoid the local, state and federal taxes, the employee taxes, the social security taxes and the medicare taxes.  More than that, they avoid the contribution made by the payroll, and with that they cut off all the secondary jobs that a payroll would have supported.  There is no money for the local grocery, restaurant or gas stations.  No money for haircuts, none for lawn mowers, none for books nor for schools, and not any for new clothes or even old.

These corporations need Americans to buy their products but the fewer Americans they can employ, the happier they are. They need American money but not American expense. They take but do their best to not give back.

They want the use of our society, but they do not want to support our society.

A sane person calls this one-sided operation stealing. The companies call it outsourcing or offshoring, claiming that the work is done overseas. That argument is, at best, debatable, and in many ways, simply a lie.  Just consider for a moment: Where does the work result occur?  Here.  The computers being monitored are?  Here.  The systems being changed are?  Here.  The products appear?  Here.

Only the body of the worker sits offshore. If that internet goes down–the work will not be done. It cannot be done–because the work product is here. The production occurs here. The end result happens here.

Just the same as if the machine sat at the end of rods and levers.

What do you think the People’s Republic of China would say if multinational corporations proposed moving offshore millions of the best jobs in China?  Keep in mind that the machines and computers and end results would stay in China, but all the payrolls, all the taxes, all the knowledge and all the skills would be moved overseas.

Do you think the People’s Republic would approve?

Would any country concerned with its own destiny allow this?

Do you need any time to come up with that answer?

Me neither.

Yet in our country, our politicians, apparently for the sake of campaign contributions, have allowed the shipment of millions of our best jobs overseas and continue to allow the sending away of tens and hundreds of thousands of jobs each year.  And with them go hundreds of thousands and millions of secondary jobs that wither away when those primary payrolls no longer flow through the rest of our economy.

Corporations want this debate to center only on the issue of where the operator’s body sits.  Where the work product materializes is an issue they dismiss.  The multinational corporation’s concern is only in what allows them the most profit.

Yet societies that wish to survive must deal with the broader definition of profit–the definition that has to do with the health of their society.

Since these corporations and their businesses ultimately depend upon our society, and our society must determine and act for its own survival, it is our society’s right to decide how to deal with these offshoring operations.  This is not an abstract point.  It is our citizens, these are our jobs, it is our economy, and it is our future that are at stake.

Truly, it seems there is only question:  Why do such operations continue?

* * *

Too many companies too clearly envision a world with what they call a level playing field. But what they mean by that is a world where all the workers live in huts made of tin and scraps, where all the employees are terrified of the shop boss, where all the workers are less than slaves, just bodies to be used and discarded. Apparently, for them, there should be two classes of people:  the very, very rich and the very, very poor.  To them, the average American’s quality of life is an insult, speaking only of money wasted on pay to workers when that money should properly be in the coffers of the elite.

The effects of those who take but do not pay are apparent, and the quality of life for the average American has fallen.

Of course, this behavior could not exist had we not allowed it.  I am as guilty as any.  I once advocated free trade, back when I believed the lie that the goal was to improve the lives of our Mexican neighbors, to relieve the need for them to illegally cross our borders to find work.

Now I wonder how I could have been that stupid. It seems clear that the goal always was, and remains, the degradation and return to slavery of the working man, the average citizen, all of us who do not sit on the Board or speculate with billions on Wall Street.

This is the critical fact that almost everyone has missed: Every job that involves a computer is on the list to be setup for remote control from overseas. Whether you are an accountant, take orders in a store, or punch into a console on the manufacturing line. Look around a bit harder and you will find it happening. So far as the multinational corporations are concerned, your job belongs where it can be done cheapest and to hell with you, your loved ones, your community and your country.

These multinational corporations are, in fact, scavengers, and we, our society and our country, are the body upon which they feed.

As our economy limps through this recession, we need to remember that the last time the geniuses on Wall Street totally bunged up the works, there was at least the hope that the jobs would be revived. Today companies are setting up remote-control operations and sending work overseas as quickly as they can, quite clearly precipitating, accelerating, and maintaining the current decline. Tens of thousands have been laid off and are being laid off every month, even every week, not because there is no work, but because there is no work for Americans in America. There is only work for foreigners doing American work.

Indeed, Wall Street demands that the jobs be sent offshore. After all, how can American businesses thrive if Americans are working?

What?  Can Wall Street be that stupid?  If no American works, there is no American pay, no money, no products purchased, and all the companies die!  How can the imbecility of that logic not ping off a person’s head like a bowling ball from the fourth floor?

And why is it that our legislators do not feel that thud?  Are they cushioned by all those lovely, thick mounds of campaign dollars?

The people on Wall Street are not financial geniuses.  If the last few years are not proof enough, we have centuries of evidence.  Too many, apparently the majority, are either imbeciles or criminals.  Their financial and stock operations need to be viewed in that context.

These identical masterminds, those who gave us Black Tuesday, the dot-com crash and the sub-prime fiasco, are now engineering their greatest escapade ever–the reduction of the American worker to french-fry cooks, gatherers of lost shopping carts, and of course, to the unemployed. How far will the economy fall, and will there ever be a recovery, since the skilled and manufacturing jobs are going, gone, and promised to never, ever be here again?

I predict that the fall will be pretty damn far.

Here is a litmus test for your Federal representatives–your Senators, your Congressmen and your President: Do they support immediate action to  create laws and restrictions on work done remotely? If they don’t, then you know at once that they do not believe that they work for you. They believe that they work for their multinational, corporate paymasters.

You should ask the question of your representatives.

I’d like to know what you find out.

Wouldn’t you?

Education and the devaluation of competence

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I was in a conversation, actually another blog thread, the other day on the subject of job education requirements.

I think education is a fine thing. Everyone should have one as a child. They can learn how to keep it dusted and when to haul it out to impress the relatives.

At least that’s the case with education as it is practiced in the USA.

Now, if you want to talk about Education, as in learning a subject for competence, able to demonstrate skill, ability to produce a predictable result. Hell, I’m all for that too. I just wish we had such a thing.

In my earlier conversation, the one that started this ramble, we had as our subject the Information Technology industry, one I have been familiar with for the last twenty years. When I started, it had been possible for someone to walk in, demonstrate competence, and have a job. Especially when the personal computers exploded onto the market, many of the arbitraries got set aside and competence, willingness, skill and ability to learn could outweigh any lack of paper credentials.

Those days are done.

Today we drown in vast pools of paper experts. People whose qualification is that they managed to sit through four or six or eight years of college, people whose qualification is the diploma, the certificate, the paper–also known as the ticket. Their parent’s money didn’t run out. They were able to get enough loans. And the school looked the other way at drunken binges that had a good percentage of the student body barfing on street corners two or three or four nights out of seven.

Often the subjects taught and the degree obtained are in a field of complete uselessness, completely dreamed up, unproven, unworkable and not needed. Professions whose practitioners leave destruction and confusion in their wakes. Psychologists and MBA’s come to mind, but they are far from alone. Even the technical subjects require no demonstration of competence, no hard measure of skill. All that matters is getting the paper at the end, the ticket.

These paper tigers gravitate to positions where no hard product is seen, where failure is always due to the environment or business conditions or whatever. In those environments, all that matters is the ticket.

When the ticket is the only qualification one has, defense of the ticket’s value becomes a very, very serious thing. Allowing the merely competent, the ticketless, to work or advance demonstrates rather dramatically the real value of the ticket. For those in this age of ignorance, our new age of ignorance, whose only qualification is the ticket, requirements for competence or skill cannot be allowed to threaten the value of that piece of paper.

At times in my career, I have been in the position of interviewing applicants–and in the process turning away four year IT degree holders who were clueless. I remember taking one aside, telling him to buy a computer and learn how to use it.

Could he have learned this in school? Sure, if he had demanded of himself that he learn. But it was not required by the school. At the same time, I had applicants who had taught themselves. Being a practicing professional myself, I was in the position to judge whether the self-taught knew their stuff.

Very often they did.

I’m sure you can guess which I hired.

This, of course, could only go on for so long, especially in large companies. There is a group of people who should properly spend their time filing papers with the government and making sure paychecks are for the proper amounts. They used to be called the “Personnel Department.” It was an honest name for an honest function. However, there’s no ring to that, not much of a claim to power.

Today, as part of their move to the center stage, they are called Human Resources. Replete with a complete and dazzling set of pseudosciences, they now demand respect.

One of the primary functions of Human Resources is to ensure that the tickets are respected. It is not hard to understand why. Each of the HR mucky-mucks advances, if they advance, primarily on the value of their own ticket. It has to be so because the jobs they hold have almost no valid measure of performance. Worse, if the jobs were required to be validly measured, it would have to be done by HR personnel, who typically have no clue how to do such a task.

When it comes to technical fields, such as computer systems, HR people, being as intentionally ignorant of the Information Technology as they are of the details of any industry, are compelled to insist on the paper–this protects the value of their own tickets and gives them something with which to cover their behinds when a new hire fails.

When I wanted entrance into the industry, even twenty years ago, some kind of degree, even a minimal one, was already becoming part of the dues. Having by then been in that exact fight a few times, I swallowed my pride and spent the few years to get the piece of paper. Not that my time in school was a complete waste—I met my wife there. But my IT skills? Those I learned of desire and necessity. Though I picked up a few new skills while in college and the school (to their credit) made it easier to do, I would have acquired the skills anyway if needed–I already knew more than most grads when I started my classes.

Since then one of the saddest things I have seen is doors closing on bright, talented people because they are not in the club.

This reflects a continuing degradation in society, a calcification visible not just in the IT field. When it comes right down to it, we’re not very far from hereditary positions. How far? I don’t know. One generation? Probably not. Two? Three? Five? Maybe. The point is that once competence is thrown out as the key job requirement, the rest comes easy. Many parents want a sure thing for their drooling children. Virtually the entire cycle of royalty was, after the initial power grab, no more than that–seeing to it that junior did not have to compete and did not have to earn a place. We have the same motives in action today, buried under different guises and names, but with the exact same intent.

In every society there are parasites. The longer the society is in place, the more chances the parasites have to find a way to do their leaching. Our society is no different.

Historically, this is all very predictable. Yet is not a pleasant thing to watch.

The Mothers Act – OR – Have a little dope with your diapers.

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(A note for 2020:  This bill did not pass thanks to many who fought against the insanity.  However, with another Democrat reaching for the White House, I am not confident that a similar insanity is far away.)

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Mothers Act.  But its back.  It’s through the House and in what’s termed a fast track in the Senate.  It puts into law that every new mother will get psychiatric screening, which also means, when the doctor has the urge, psychiatric treatment.  Imagine, as a new mother, going in for a checkup and being ordered to take psychiatric drugs (or receive electroconvulsive shock or whatever) or face having your children taken away.  In other words, Eli Lilly and friends are not happy doping our school children and our spouses, now they want the mothers and the newborns.  Supporters of the bill claim there is no such screening requirement, even a few supporters on Senate staffs.

However, here’s where the document can be seen, and I’ll give you the excerpt. 

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s110-1375, Section 520K “Establishment of Program Grants”, Part (a).

`(1) provide education to women who have recently given birth, and their families, concerning postpartum depression, postpartum mood and anxiety disorders, and postpartum psychosis (referred to in this chapter as `postpartum conditions’) before such women leave their birthing centers and to screen new mothers for postpartum conditions during their first year of postnatal checkup visits, including the standard 6-week postnatal checkup visit …

This group has more information:  https://www.ablechild.org/

There is nothing I despise and oppose more strongly than the psychiatric state.  Here is a copy of a letter I am sending to every Senator on the HELP committee.   You can call the senators too.  I have.

April 7, 2009

Senator,

The Mothers Act just flew through an uninterested and ignorant House. We cannot let it do same through the Senate. This act, despite what may be said, implicitly requires that every new mother be given psychiatric screening.

I do not know if you support this bill.

If you do not support the act, perhaps my words will lend you courage to continue the fight.

If you do support this bill, are there any words that I can write, is there any information I can bring, that will allow you to change your mind?

I suppose those sound like silly questions. But I am no longer a young man, and I no longer believe that anything is a given. So, should I save my words?

If so, please stop reading now and simply let me know.

Yet, if I could persuade you, I would write that whatever limits you have been told exist, the real language of the bill describes screening for every mother in this country. This is personally horrifying, for I am all too familiar with the efficacy of psychiatric tests in “finding” what they deem illness.

If you were interested, I could tell you about a teenage girl, someone I know very well, someone very dear, about her trip to the local physician. She must have been sixteen and having trouble with her menstrual period. And being sixteen, life was not always so clear and easy. The physician administered a screening, the exact sort of screening as outlined in the Stokes bill. She came home from the doctor’s office with a paper bag full of psychiatric drugs. The doctor had told her she was, in layman’s terms, crazy, and would be for the rest of her life. His prescription to her was to sample the drugs he had given her and find one she liked. It took him no more than fifteen minutes. In fact, less time than that. They gave her a questionnaire, one conveniently supplied by a drug company, and walked away. A nurse spent a few seconds matching the young girl’s answers to the drug company’s requirements, and then the doctor came returned, told her she was disordered, and prescribed psychoactive drugs for the remainder of her life. She needed only to pick one.

The doctor was very convincing. He believed himself, certainly. When he was done, his patient was also convinced. When she came home, her father and her mother faced a child who had accepted her own doom, utterly distraught, convinced she was crazy, certain that she could not face life without psychiatric drugs.

Her parents threw the drugs away and spent a long night holding their daughter, persuading her that her life was not ended. I will not give you details, for they are not mine to divulge. I do know that only because they fought so hard, they succeeded. I know this. I was a witness. The next day their daughter was willing to believe that it was possible she was not insane and might be able to live a normal life. And she does. She was no more crazy than any other teenager. She only needed to grow up. That was simply a matter of enough years, enough mistakes, enough pain and enough joy. She has a full life, has gained an education, and is finding her way. Actually, one of the less confused among her generation. She has her own children, as bright and sane any you’ll ever find.

That doctor tried to steal that from her. Her parents did not let that happen.

Yes, I am familiar with these screenings. If it would do any good, I could tell you about my wife, how she started suffering a reaction that left her exhausted and unable to breath. We were terrified. I was terrified. I can bear many things, but the loss of my wife least. The worst occurred on a weekend. I insisted we stop at the local emergency room. The doctor there, after seeing my wife for a total of at least ninety seconds, diagnosed her as suffering from some sort of panic. The only question was, which psychiatric drug would she like?

We left that place, and left the physician sneering at out ignorance in not accepting his wisdom, and my wife began her own investigation. Eventually she determined she had developed reactions to a few common foods. She stopped eating those foods. The condition went away. Were that anyone but my wife, she would still be suffering from the reactions but now have that coupled with an addiction to psychiatric drugs. To heal herself, she would then need to cure both. How many do you think would find that cure?

If you were to read this and take the chance on accepting what I say, I could tell you about my mother. I could take you to her grave, and we could stand there for many, many hours while I told you about a life destroyed by psychiatric treatment and told you about eight children, long grown to adults, whose lives are still twisted by the long years of exposure to their mother’s degradation. I could tell you about long nights I spent helping her walk off her latest overdose. I could tell you how she stole to support her habit. I could tell you about lies told, blaming one child to another to cover her larceny. These and so much more. So many things. As I said, we could talk for a long, long time.

Some would say, “She was ill. Not the psychiatrist’s fault.” But that was not true, not when it started.

She was overweight and suffered from the condition of having an overbearing mother and a driven husband. At the worst, what she needed was a divorce and to face her mother down. Instead, the prescription was pills, lots of pills, pills that carried her to increasing desperation and addiction. As she destroyed her life seeking relief with her “medicine,” her only remedy was the unconsciousness she achieved with the pills. Later, her doctors were so pleased with the success of their medicines that they prescribed shock treatments. This was not to cure her addiction. It was not to cure her at all. It was just to make her quieter.

It worked. When they were done, what was left was a shell. No longer even a competent thief. Still addicted, still with only one desire, that of more unconsciousness, but no longer able to express any dissatisfaction. She knew better than to talk about anything like unhappiness. She knew what they would do if that subject came up.

Eventually she succeeded in killing herself. The doctor called it a heart attack, but that is not likely. If so, that heart gave out after more overdoses than I could ever count. And yet I remember her when I was very young. She was not a suicide, not an empty husk and not a criminal. Even in the end, there were times, brief moments when the little bit of her that was left would peek out from the shattered mind and the enveloping drug haze.

We used to live for those moments when we were younger, when the moments were more frequent.

The psychiatrists who say they fought a losing battle to save my mother simply lie. I was there. I watched and could not stop it. The doctors succeeded in everything they tried to do. Succeeded to the bitter end. Succeeded because men believe the lies and look the other way. Succeeded because the lies are smooth. Succeed because the truth is so dark, and the lies are so much easier to hear. Succeeded because there is money in it, so very, very much money, billions beyond billions and then billions of dollars more.

Yet these are but a few of the reasons I oppose the psychiatric state.

With this act, in a few short months, we will have children born addicted to psychiatric drugs. Not crack. Not cocaine. More likely Prozac–or whatever is the profit maker this year.   How can I say this?  Because already physicians are prescribing these drugs to pregnant women.  Does anyone believe a congressional mandate will decrease this madness?  These same drugs have known, well documented side-effects of paranoia, depression, suicide, even homicide.  This act will bring terror to mothers and children.

One last item.  It may be true in theory that a mother can decline the screening, but the words relayed to me from one nurse in New Jersey say it all, “But honey, declining is the same as failing.”

So, what would it take, Senator, should you require persuasion, what would you need to see or hear or experience that would allow you to change your mind? Please, tell me. If there is even the slightest crack in your certainty, what would you let slip in that might allow you to change your mind? Please, let me know. I will find it for you. I will march it to your door. I will beg you find the time to look.

You need only ask.

Sincerely,

John Richter

*****

Senators on the HELP committee:

Lisa Murkowski, R: 202-224-6665, AK

John McCain, R: 202-224-2235, AZ

Christopher Dodd, D: 202-224-2823, CT

Johnny Isakson, R: 202-224-3643, GA

Tom Harkin, D: 202-224-3254, IA

Pat Roberts, R: 202-224-4774, KS

Edward Kennedy D: 202-224-4543, MA

Barbara Mikulski D: 202-224-4654, MD

Richard Burr, R: 202-224-3154, NC

Kay Hagan, D: 202-224-6342, NC

Judd Gregg, R: 202-224-3324, NH

Jeff Bingaman, D: 202-224-5521, NM

Sherrod Brown, D 202-224-2315, OH

Tom Coburn, R 202-224-5754, OK

Jeff Merkley, D 202-224-3753, OR

Bob Casey, D 202-224-6324, PA

Jack Reed, D 202-224-4642, RI

Lamar Alexander R 202-224-4944, TN

Orrin Hatch R 202-224-5251, UT

Bernard Sanders, I: 202-224-5141, VT

Patty Murray, D, 202-224-2621, WA

Michael Enzi, R, 202-224-3424, WY