Today I want to talk about something that isn’t political, but it is something that many people won’t have heard about. Back in January 1970 my mother and I were sitting in Willi Unsoeld’s house. Willi was a member of the first American mountain expedition to summit Mount Everest. He and my brother Bill Humphreys had overseen the founding of Evergreen State College in Washingon.

My brothers’ two boys had just drowned in Puget Sound. I’d flown to Washington from the UW-Madison in campus in Wisconsin. My mother and I were the first to arrive. Our two families were there in mourning. We walked over to Willi’s house near by my brothers’ home.

Willi sat at his piano bench telling us a Tibetan story about an antlered buck that had become tangled in a tree on the mountain. Sherpa guides tried for days to free it. And then they had to let go of it. At the time my mother and I were both bewildered.

Willi’s daughter, Devi Unsoeld, my nephews babysitter age 16 walked in and joined the conversation along with her older brother. Devi had golden yellow hair and an amazing vitality. Devi announced to her father she wanted to hitchhhike across the state of Washington.

Her brother reacted and argued that would be a dangerous thing to do. Being older, I sided with him. I don’t know if Devi hitchhiked across Washington State.

But I was sent the story that when Devi died on the on the mountain in her fathers’ arms, she had been named after that highest mountain, Nanda Devi, in the Himalayas.

[For more about Willi and Devi Unsoeld’s stories LINK http://footlesscrow.blogspot.com/2013/04/darkness-at-noonthe-life-and-death-of.html]

LONG HAUL: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers.

Today I realize Willi’s story meant that if you can’t save or change someone you just must move on and don’t dwell on it.

But today I cannot not dwell on it, and I  have to tell you all about Frank  Figliuzzi’s book, LONG HAUL: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers.

Former FBI agent Frank Figliuzzi has just just revealed in his book that there a have been over 850 serial murders of women by Long Haul Truckers in this country over the last two decades. Two hundred of those murders have still not been solved.

Frank worked 25 years in the FBI. He was witness to many of those stories of the murderers. Frank even rode with long haul truckers to see how their world was working.

Frank’s book talks about how the (HSKI) (Highway Serial Killings Initiative)  came to became to be a database for law-enforcement officers to understand the actions of serial killers.

In 2004, the FBI was tipped off to a  pattern of unsolved murders along American roadways. The bodies of 40 women were found in Texas.

There was an interstate murderous long haul highway corridor between Oklahoma and Texas. [See link below]

Frank found that women and girls who fell victim to the murderers often lived nearby their trucker route, or were sex workers or children. Many of the serial killers were also lone wolves.

The Mirror Texas Interstate 45

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/killing-field-road-bodies-40-15055235 The Mirror Texas Interstate 45

You may think that the 850 ‘victims’ are women or girls who lived at the bottom of society, but you would be  wrong.  I’ve seen teenagers sitting on the sidewalk in Vancouver Canada, who like myself at age 17, were forced to move out of their parents’ toxic homes. They are  a vulnerable meal for serial killers.

SERIAL KILLERS

Later in my life in Philadelpia I encountered a serial killer near the University of Pennsylvania students, who chopped up his ‘victims’ and threw their bodies into the Schuylkill River.

At this point I was a student and he was still killing his victims. He owned a tobacco shop. I went into his store late at night after I finished my work as waitress at the the Penn faculty club to buy cigarettes.

The killer came out of from a beaded curtain, a short white man pleasantly balding a bit with a white shirt and the arms rolled up, and asked me nicely what I wanted. Just a regular chap.

But soon I could see he was trying to ingratiate himself with me. Panic growing, and asking myself why I was lying, I saved myself by lying to every question he asked me, and then ran out the door.

Days later I passed the gigantic type on the Philly newspaper headline as well as photo of him in a kiosk as I shivered down to the subway stairs. It was a horrible story for the students.

Devi Unsoeld was a privaleged young woman who died tragically, doing something she had chosen to do. I feel both my nephews Willy and Tom, and Devi could have had great opportunities if they all had lived.

But serial killers don’t give their victims, whether or not at the top or bottom, a choice.

Did you know that Economists have invented games to predict what an economy will do? Do you think game-playing can work to solve our money problems?

Here’s a story about Monopoly, America’s favorite game. I’ll bet you haven’t heard the stories about how it came to exist at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century.

The first story I heard about that the game was invented by a man.  Wrong! Nope, not true. It was a woman!

The second story I heard was that man was cheated out of his inheritance by the Parker Brothers, and he died broke.

Wrong again!  In my opinion it was clearly the woman who got cheated out of her inheritance by the Parker Brothers.

The old saying “Behind every man who is successful there was a woman” is true for oodles of inventions created in the 1800s and 1900s centuries.

There were draconian limitations put on creative women inventors and business owners, slapped on them during the 19th and 20th centuries in America. Not to mention their inability to vote or own a business.

Women (such as Catherine Greene and her African-American slaves) needed a man such as “Eli Whitney” to get their invention of the cotton gin obtain a patent from the government for Catherine.

Many creative American women have used their husbands or fathers to back up their genius. For example Georgia Okeefe, famous American painter married to Alfred Stiegliz, famous photographer.

The real story is this: The game Monopoly was invented by Elizabeth Magie in 1903 and patented in 1905.

When she got her patent she was less than one percentage of women to file patents that year. Her helper man was Henry George, a Political Economist and Journalist with whom she conversed about how the the land tax should be collected and distributed.

Elizabeth had first named her game, ‘The Landlord’s Game.” This game eventually evolved into Monopoly.

For decades no one knew that Elizabeth made two sets of rules for Monopoly.

One was the competitive one where people succeed by playing until one person is richer than all the rest. The second one she named ‘Prosperity’ was one where players would share what they gained.

According to Economist, Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think like a 21st Century Economist, the purpose of Elizabeth Magie’s two sets of game rules was to compare monopolist rules now in play today with a second way to win at Monopoly.

The results of Parker Brothers Monopoly today are bankruptcy and greater income inequality.

Those results of Monopoly are what Kate Raworth is writing in her book about the failures of 19th and 20th century award-winning economists who have mis-used both algebra and calculus to get results for economic principles that do not  don’t materialize over the long run. In particular Ecoonomists have missed the boat about achieving income inequality.

Magie’s second set of rules were that the players would share results by cooperating with each other.  This monopoly game didn’t merely rely on luck of the dice.

Magie’s second set of rules posited that the player starting with the least amount of money—and first doubled it was called the winner.

Clarence Darrow, the legendary twentieth century lawyer, sold the idea to the Parker Brothers. Elizabeth, an experienced game board maker, merely asked the brothers to pay her for two other games plus Monopoly —$500 dollars and no royalties.

Even more unfotunately for us, The Parker Brothers deleted the second set of rules when they sold her game. Thus, Elizabeth Magie’s name was buried until 1973 when an economist, Ralph Anspach researched his game of “Anti-Monopoly” before taking it to the Supreme Court.

Why is this important?  I write this as a warning to creative people to be careful what you do with your inventions or with your creative work, especially if you are a woman.

Today on International Womens’ Day 2023, I ask you, can we test for ourselves now to find out what will happen if we use the second rules that Elizabeth set for Monopoly? Will theses games predict for our economic futures?

Can economists start creating economic games as sharp as Elizabeth’s games showing there can be at least two different ways for winning Monopoly, a game that oozes with competition and income inequality.

Monopoly isn’t just a game! Henry George’s concerns about land (property) taxes have been discussed by Economists for centuries. As Paul Samuelson said, scarcity creates value, and big as this earth is, land is still scarce. Today water is the scarce issue of concern to many Economists.

Yesterday the Federal Reserve used only two variables from British Economist, early 20th century John Maynard Keynes antique linear algebraic equations full of variables to slap higher interest rates in Americans.

Fed head Jerome Powell said he would would get rid of millions of jobs for Americans in order to tame inflation.

This is ridiculous! The Fed is tying its own hands. And it is certainly going to hurt American women who have fought for centuries to get “good paying jobs”.

Along with the criminalized weaponized abortion laws—American women will go back to  “Keep them barefoot, pregnant and at home.

And like Texas governors’ Greg Abbots’ empty promises to catch rapists, it demands push back. Who is really is running the economy of the United States in this century?

Next:  I’ll be covering several women Economists who are greatly influenceing the future of the way the study of Economics is viewed in this century.

The Fed creates its own money. It won’t go bankrupt. But every year the Fed sends all the income it made to the Treasury Department.

The Fed made around $5.2 trillion from (REPOs (overnight loans to banks, credit unions, money makers, etc.) in 2022. At the end of 2022, the Fed had a net income of $58.4 billion.

The Fed’s problem is that interest rates on the REPOs (bank overnight loans) that the Fed charges now have begun to exceed the Fed’s interest rates on those securities (stocks & bonds, etc.) that it bought way back when Fed REPO interest rates were much lower than today.

Also lagging, because the Fed is using (QT) “Quantitative tightening” i.e. selling off its assets for income which it has to pay to the Treasury each year, this way of QT selling off of securities can take a long time to amass the income the Fed needs for paying off our Treasury Department spending on past U.S. debts.

At the end of year 2022 the Fed sent the Treasury Department $76 billion. However, interest expenses of the Fed exploded a factor of 19 to $102.4 billion in 2022, up from $5.7 billion in 2021.

So, the issue is that right now in 2023 the the Fed is losing income and running into the red, and the Treasury is not allowed to print money.

Once the debt limit is exceeded, our government will lose all trust in faith in it. And there will be little consensus possible to discuss future plans for spending. That’s just a waste of time. Ask anyone who has wound up dealing with a high interest rate money lender!

The Fed maybe could make a RRP promise ( reverse repurchase agreement) with (banks and money market-makers) offering to buy back its securities at a higher price in the future, but this seems to me to be “going from the pot into the fire or as they say “Kicks the can down the road”. And dangerous! As buybacks have just put the store, Bed, Bath and Beyond out of business.

I’m really sorry to say this, but the image I have in my head today is the serpent swallowing and eating its tail and insides. I sure hope I’m wrong!

And I hope everyone of you has been saving during our Covid era for a better economy, because I still believe that could be the case of what our bipartisan Congress has done for us in the past two years.

Source: Wolf Street Despite Losses since September, the Fed Still Made a Profit for the Whole Year 2022, Remitted $76 billion to US Treasury Dept.