Global Citizen Award 2014

Annual Award by the Dane County United Nations Association

Global Citizen Award Nominee Peace Economist Dr. Robert Reuschlein

For Submission by Nomination Deadline July 18, 2014

 

Salem Oregon United Nations Association 1960-1982

Dorothy Patch was the leader of the United Nations Association in Salem, Oregon and the State of Oregon for decades.   Dorothy got the City of Salem Oregon to fly the United Nations flag co equal with the American and Oregon flags.  Dorothy Patch got Mark Hatfield to create the US Peace Institute, a federally funded institution.  She was the moral force behind US Senator Mark Hatfield, the peace senator from Oregon elected in 1966 against the Vietnam War, junior Senator to Wayne Morse.  Wayne Morse came from Madison to be Dean of the Oregon Law School.  He was one of two Senators opposed to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that Lyndon Johnson used to start the Americanization of the Vietnam War in March 1965. She was a close associate of the peace Republican US Senator Mark Hatfield, who as chair of Senate Appropriations under Ronald Reagan was the only member of the Senate to vote against the recession causing biggest peacetime military budget increase in American history in 1981.

Salem Oregon United Nations Association 1983-1993

Dorothy Patch held a meeting of the Fellowship of Reconciliation in her house in Salem, Oregon, in March 1983.  At that meeting Ada Sanchez gave me a brochure with Ruth Leger Sivard’s bar chart showing that over a twenty year period the higher the military spending the lower the manufacturing productivity growth rate for the G7 countries plus Denmark and Sweden.  That was the start of the long road to Peace Economics with my first book published in 1986.  It was a direct result of my pursuing a career in politics, going to 400 meetings in 1979 and countless thousands since then.  That fateful meeting in Dorothy Patch’s house was my second of three Oregon legislative sessions as an intern first, then a public interest lobbyist and Democratic Party official second and third sessions.  That is where I became personally acquainted with every future Governor of Oregon from 1986 to 2006.

World Military and Social Expenditures 1981-1996

Ruth Leger Sivard was let go by the Reagan administration in 1981 and she promptly published her common library reference “World Military and Social Expenditures” taking her public sector experience and privately publishing her work through the next decade and a half ending with the 1996 volume of this mostly annual work.  I met her on her Georgetown front porch once in 1986 and shocked her with my book’s revelation that all Cold War presidential elections elected presidents only from high military spending states.

United Nations University for Peace in Costa Rica

Francis Richard Schneider founded Radio for Peace International in 1986 the same year as my first book Peace Economics.  He urged me to attend the opening conference of the United Nations University for Peace in June 1989 in Costa Rica.  He further urged me to attend his own conference on Radio for Peace International actually held on the University grounds the week before the UN conference.  That is where I saw the book “An Unending Story” about how International bodies had proliferated from about fifty in the fifties to over 6000 in the eighties and over 20,000 today.  I also saw the room where Radio for Peace International operated as a joint project with the UN University for Peace.  I presented my paper at the UN conference jointly with the author of the book “Planethood” Ken Keyes who became rich with his book “Handbook of Higher Consciousness” and famous with his peace book “The Hundredth Monkey”.  After hearing me I gave him a copy of my book “Peace Economics” and he later asked permission to include two and a half pages of material from my book in his book “Planethood”.  So in later editions I am in the index with five references, more than Paul Revere before me in the index or Ronald Reagan after me in the index.  I have more references that John F. Kennedy.  This helped make me an instant celebrity with World Federalists who considered “Planethood” somewhat like their bible.  I also met the Dalai Lama and Robert Mueller at the UN conference where the Tibetan leader and Oscar Arias keynoted as Nobel Peace Laureates.

United Nations Association in Eugene, Oregon 1986-1993

I joined the United Nations Association in Eugene, Oregon after publishing my book in 1986 and teaching my University of Oregon Innovative Education Department course in 1987 and making my first academic presentations at the Union of Radical Political Economists in August 1987.  One of my first students told me well after the first class ended that I should be in the Robert Heilbroner book “The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers” (1953).  At my first academic presentation, a Japanese professor bought two of both the book and the supplement and had his picture taken with me.  I met the Salem chapter head of the United Nations Association, Anita Owen, and she persuaded me to attend a national conference in Washington, DC, November 10, 1989.  At registration the first day the buzz was all about how the Berlin Wall had just fallen.  From 1991 to 1993 I was the main facilitator of monthly meetings of the Eugene chapter of  Oregon PeaceWorks.

Oregon PeaceWorker Columnist 1989-1997

After a Breitenbush Peace conference in the Oregon woods near Salem in 1989, Peter Bergel, the editor of the Oregon PeaceWorker, asked me to write an article about my international Peace Economics.  Then he asked me to become a regular monthly contributor to the 10,000 circulation magazine.  I did this about sixty times until limited time prevented me from continuing in 1997.

Madison 1993 to 2006

I moved back to Madison, Wisconsin in 1993 after being invited and attending the Clinton inauguration January 20, 1993.  In Wisconsin I renewed acquaintances with Midge Miller, who I had met on the floor of the Democratic National Convention where we were both Delegates in 1984.  I became a regular attendee at the Madison Institute’s Progressive Roundtable and made six presentations to that group over the years while Midge was still alive.  Midge loved my handouts and often asked for extra copies to give out to others.  I also became a member of the World Federalists when I moved back to Wisconsin and became their leader from 2001 to 2006, holding many a monthly Saturday noon conference call with Tom and Lee Brown in my condo on Stonecreek Drive.

Milwaukee World Federalists 1994 

In 1994 I made presentations to the Milwaukee World Federalists one morning and the Waukesha United Nations Association that evening.  Former Milwaukee Socialist Mayor Frank Ziedler was so impressed with the first talk he came out to Waukesha to hear the second talk.

Radio For Peace International          

In 1997 F. Richard Schneider prevailed upon me to offer a University of the Air course on Radio for Peace International.  By then he was even more impressed with my environmental theory of the global warming cycle (based on evaporation, not greenhouse effect), but agreed to let me put both the declining empire theory of military spending and the earth cycle theory of the Kondratiev Wave into the same class.  So the 26 classes were divided evenly between the two topics and the class was called “Weather, Wealth, and Wars”.  Working as a full time accountant prevented my doing both the column and the audio tapes for the first class in the April to June thirteen week broadcast period of 1997.  After the class, the realeconomy.com website and related companion book to the class came out in 1999, when I attended the second Radio for Peace International board meeting conference and became a board member until 2001.

World Federalists 1998-2002

Fall Conferences of national World Federalists 1998-2002:  I gave workshop presentations on various aspects of peace economics five times in these five years.

Hague Peace Conference 1999

Everett Refior, economics professor of UW Whitewater and chapter head of the Whitewater World Federalists, invited me to talk to their group.  I also met him while making a presentation at the 100^th Anniversary of the Hague Peace Conference in Holland in May 1999.  He later became Peacemaker of the Year for the Wisconsin Network of Peace and Justice, and nominated me for that same honor while he was still alive, where I was second choice in the voting October 8 2005 in Watertown. The winner, a La Crosse teacher, hosted the 2006 conference in La Crosse.  Everett died September 2006.

Wisconsin Interfaith Climate Change Campaign 2000-2003

Methodist pastor David Steffenson invited me to be a board member of the Wisconsin Interfaith Climate Change Campaign in 2000, where I remained until the Iraq War took up all my spare time in 2003

Madison Area Peace Coalition 1998-2005

In 1998 I became involved in US Out Now, opposed to the Desert Fox attack on Iraq under Clinton.  This evolved into the Madison Area Peace Coalition where I was elected to the first elected coordinating council in 2004 and served until 2006.  When Rae Vogeler was running the first meeting on September 25^th, 2001, I was behind her on stage writing down notes on the blackboard and poster paper.  When the Downing Street Memos came out in 2005 I drafted the original version of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin’s second in the nation call for impeachment of Bush Cheney and Rumsfeld.  Later I observed the third anniversary of the memos organizing and leading an Impeachment Parade on July 23, 2005, a Saturday, where we marched around the Farmers Market and ended up with a rally at James Madison park where the actor who played Billy Jack spoke to the crowd.

Doctor Peace 2006-2009

From 2006 to 2009 I earned my doctorate from Edgewood College with a dissertation on “Peace Economics in Peace Studies”.  I focused on the Midwest peace studies programs because this is where the military buildups negatively impact the region and the manufacturing heartland the most.  I became Dr. Peace when I graduated and changed my Wisconsin license plate to DR PEACE.

Current Publicity Campaign Real Economy Institute 2013-2014

Now I am a regular weekly commentator on WORT radio since August 2013 and have had 12,000 views of my national and international press releases on ExpertClick.com since October 2013.

https://www.academia.edu/4044456/SUMMARY most important discoveries

Dr. Peace, Dr. Bob Reuschlein,

best contact  bobreuschlein@gmail.com

to leave message    608-230-6640

for more info www.realeconomy.com

Preparation Meets Opportunity

Preparation Meets Opportunity in Peace Economics

When I took the Strong Vocational Interest Tests I found out several things about myself.  I am a strong summarizer, very strong analyst, and very egalitarian.  The summarizer is important as I stood on the shoulders of giants and put things together using the primary work of others such as Sivard, Kondratiev, the US Statistical Abstract, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Using the ideas of others, I then use my own mathematical engineering and accounting skills to carefully read the numbers looking for the patterns seen by others in new data sets to confirm what I find seems to make sense.  My intuition almost never fails once I’m on to a new pattern.  Then I seek to confirm three different ways, triangulating my findings and/or hunches.  If I cannot confirm three ways, I look for another solution.  Only on lesser aspects of the theory will I experiment with tentative material.  Fortunately for me in this research, high accuracy led to more high accuracy over and over again.  What amazed me at first, often became common place after a while.  Just use care, common sense, and good instincts.

Paraphrasing Nobel Laureate in Economics Leontiff, “97% of economic literature is articles written about other articles.  Only 2.5% is model building, and 0.5% is basic research.”  My work is almost exclusively with the numbers and model building, so I’m in the 3% category among economists.  I read others only to see big issues I might be missing.  The small stuff is for those who don’t recognize the limitations of the silo they are in.  History, Sociology, Politics, and Economics can be blended together if one is not overcommitted to the details that separate these disciplines and prevent a common interdisciplinary understanding.  For example, having tried five different religions in my life, I can see the commonalities and not get caught up in the misleading details.  For example, prayer, meditation and chanting all are similar with similar effects on the participant.  I once rented a room from a Catholic lady and ended up comparing her saying the rosary to my Buddhist chanting, only to conclude that the practices were remarkably similar in terms of feelings, thoughts, and after effects, both physical and mental.

A University of Oregon economics professor ran for congress.  After his loss, speaking to a group of moderate republicans, he said that people need a couple of economics courses, but after that the field gets over specialized.  I have taken about four economics courses, micro, macro, finance, and economic forecasting.  When I took production class I led the class in forecasting.  I’ve always had a knack for charts and graphs and reading between the lines for revealing quirks in the numbers.  I spent much of one summer figuring out the binomial expansion theorem before being taught it the next year.

I am always thinking and playing around with numbers in my head.  I love maps, charts, and graphs.

Based on my experience, together with that of my brother and dad, all three of us CPAs, here is the peck order:  those who drop out of engineering often go into accounting.  Those who drop out of accounting often go into economics.  As a graduate of the third ranked electrical engineering program in the country, University of Wisconsin Madison, inducted into four honor societies, I am a first stringer, an engineer, not a third stringer, an economist.

Interdisciplinary thinking lets you see the foibles in silo based academia.  I am deep in many different fields.  My degrees are in engineering, a degree that is 20 credits more than applied math and physics.  Then there’s business management, accounting, and education degrees.  My on the job learning is in wargaming and politics.  All of these fields played important roles in building peace economics, empire economics, and the evaporation theory global warming earth cycle.  Without a congressman’s mention of the Kondratiev Wave while congratulating me on being elected the vice chair of the Democratic Party in his district, none of this would have been possible.  Likewise with finding Ruth Leger Sivard’s bar chart at a meeting in Dorothy Patch’s house, the key woman behind the peace republican US Senator Mark Hatfield.  Without reading one key paragraph in Stephen Schneider’s “Climate and Life”, a 1000 page book, I never would have realized the significance of evaporation.  Without my award winning confidence in numbers and science, as a man of physics, I could easily have been discouraged by the social scientists who think a 99% correlation must be some kind of error.  I would hate to try and earn a doctorate under such narrow minded hammering.

Science, Education, Business, Government, these are the pillars of our society, how could anyone try to model the economy without deep knowledge in each of these areas.  And it’s best to come at economics from the outsiders view to avoid the confusion of half baked ideologies fighting for supremacy when clearly none are entitled to claim any such superiority.  So deep in these many fields, especially deep in using design and numbers as a wargamer, accountant, and engineer, it’s the politics that led me into the diversity to plug the holes in my otherwise narrow specialist thinking.  Always a generalized specialist, I got into wargaming to avoid the narrowness of, say, just chess, or any one kind of game one specializes in.  I did my studies well, then looked for diversity in my real life.  I trained myself to look for key facts.  In every diverse meeting I went into, I hoped to come away with one new fact of significance that I could remember for years to come, not let myself get tied up in short term memory and thinking that would fade with time.  Always and everywhere the scientist, I kept building my theories of life and the world.  The struggle continues.  Some relationships ended because I was thought to be too serious.  The truth was my holy grail.  Shakespeare: This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Here is the pamphlet enclosed with the Peace Economics 25^th anniversary video:

https://www.academia.edu/4108656/PEACE_ECONOMICS_booklet_11_charts_24p._2011

Dr. Peace, Dr. Bob Reuschlein,

best contact  bobreuschlein@gmail.com

to leave message    608-230-6640

for more info www.realeconomy.com

Hoover’s Great Depression

The roaring twenties were actually only five years long, 1922 to 1926, with an average rate of growth of 8.8% per year.  Henry Ford’s Model T had met Texas oil.  Before that from 1919 to 1921 the economy dropped 15% in the three year long post World War depression.  Because politics and economics travel together so well, no wonder Wilson had great difficulty trying to join the League of Nations he had thought up. Then there was a two year no growth economy from 1927 to 1928.  Hoover ran and won in 1928 on a platform of a new large tariff to protect Western timber and other goods from imports as a way to revive the stagnant economy.  Congressman Hawley was from the timber state Oregon and Senator Smoot was from Idaho, and together with Senator Borah of Utah they introduced Hoover’s platform as the Smoot Hawley bill in a Special Session of Congress in September 1929.  The economy recovered in 1929 growing at a 6.6% rate, but Hoover was determined to implement his campaign platform and called for the special session.

You see, the American Federal Government depended on tariffs for 85% of its revenue in the nineteenth century, so it seemed normal to tax that way.  But Hoover was playing with dynamite this time, because the American economy was now the undisputed number one in the world, twice the size of the British or German economies.  So depending on tariffs to protect the Northern manufacturing industry from the British Empire was one thing as a small power, but totally something else as a major power.  As a major power raising tariffs invited European retaliation.  The stock market shuddered twice in September 1929, and then collapsed four days after the bill was introduced October 24, 1929.  The stock market could see the coming trade war.  The economy was just fine continuing to grow for the first five months of 1930, and then collapsed after the June 11 signing of the bill against the protest of 1000 economists.  The math of the drop in trade times a multiplier of eight to ten for the import/export sector does explain the drop of 30.2% of the economy from 1929 to 1933.  So Smoot Hawley and the dry up of world trade are the principal causes of the Great Depression, and all the other reasons are secondary effects springing from this primary cause.  The timing of the stock market, looking ten months ahead, and the actual decline not starting until the bill is signed into law, and the size of the declines in trade and economic growth, tend to prove that Smoot Hawley was the main cause.  Another proof is the reaction after World War II when the economy was in a three year slump until the new postwar trade regime of the GATT went into effect on January 1, 1948 and the first post war growth year occurred in 1948 with over 4% growth in the reelection year boosting an unpopular Truman into reelection year success.

An editorial in the Eugene Register Guard in the early eighties reported a study of rural growth showed an eight percent drop each year in a community absent any new business to reverse the trend.  So economies tend to drop eight percent a year when in freefall downward.

Hoover appointed a Blue Ribbon commission of businesspeople, the Hump Commission to recommend what to do.  He ignored their advice to resort to more government spending in 1931 and doubled down on balancing the budget instead.  As a result the economy dropped 9.9% in 1930, 7.3% in 1931, and 14.8% in 1932, so the economy took a sharp double down in 1932 thanks to Hoover’s balanced budget strategy, then finally stabilized in the transition year to Roosevelt, 1933 with a drop of only 1.9%.  The agricultural nature of the tariffs lead to France, the largest agricultural economy in Europe, suffering the most in the thirties, while Britain and Germany suffered much less.  Then the weak French economy fell quickly to the German attack in 1940.

When John Maynard Keynes came out with his theory in 1936, he was just following the common sense advice of Hoover’s Hump Commission.  But he was advising Roosevelt, so he does deserve some credit for the recovery when Roosevelt pumped money into economy through various jobs programs.

Here are brief summaries of the US Presidents Economies 1910-2009

https://www.academia.edu/4044532/US_PRESIDENT

Here are the key statistics in the Depression analysis

https://www.academia.edu/4044531/Depression

Dr. Peace, Dr. Bob Reuschlein,

best contact  bobreuschlein@gmail.com

to leave message    608-230-6640

for more info www.realeconomy.com

Real Peace Economics or Not

It used to be commonly referred to as economic conversion until I came along with my book titled Peace Economics in April 1986 hardcover or August 1986 paperback.  The new terminology soared to the top of the charts as the SANE/Freeze Congress adopted Peace Economy as its number one priority in 1988.  I found out about this in February 1990 when I attended the Congress in Oakland.  Then the balloons at the luncheon all read “Strength Through Peace” the title of my second book used for my fall 1989 class in Peace Economics.  The peace community has been slow if not dense in adopting the real meaning of peace economics, that those crucial resources used in the military budget represent lost capital, lost manufactured goods available to the civilian economy, lost manufacturing productivity growth rate.  This is huge, far more important than merely the loss of money.

As a result, the phonies who use my term peace economics without the understandings I pioneered with my books, tend to diminish the importance of the lost resources by treating it as just lost money, not the much more crucial lost economic growth opportunity.  This all goes back to a basic flaw in Keynesian economics.  In Keynesian economics, if a bunch of people are paid to dig holes and another bunch of people are paid to fill those holes, both groups contribute to the economy.  This is utter nonsense.  Productivity matters, useful purpose matters, mere redistribution of money is not necessarily economic growth.

So the “it’s just money” crowd looks at things like the number of jobs produced for the same amount of money or the number of schools or hospitals that could be built with the money for an aircraft carrier.  This reduces the argument to guns versus butter, and gives a strange kind of economic equivalency to military spending it does not deserve.  Besides, large numbers of low paying jobs cannot be honestly compared to smaller numbers of high paying jobs.  Salary matters, family wage jobs matter, high wage jobs can carry an entire community including the lower paying service and retail sectors.  This is why Marian Anderson’s analysis by jobs per state of the Reagan military buildup is so in error and meaningless with a low statistical correlation with the military budget changes.  When I looked at the money transfers between and among states, I got a high statistical correlation of .975 and a strong explanation of how the military buildup rewarded the military states at the expense of the manufacturing states.  The Bi-Coastal Economy of the Atlantic coast states and California had 80% of the military buildup and triple the economic growth rate for five years of the 34 inland states.

The roles are completely reversed when the military budget reverses course after 1985 Through 1991.  Gorbachev, Gramm Ruddman Hollins, and the end of the Cold War produce a resurgence of inland states, especially the Great Lakes region, as the Bi-Coastal economy suffers.  This time I used the unemployment rate change as the dependent variable, still had a .97 correlation with 17 mini-regions. Yes, Virginia, the Clinton years were the low military Peace Dividend after the Cold War with the economic growth rate doubling over the high military Reagan years.  Nobel Economics Laureate Joseph Stiglitz attributes the difference in military spending for the difference in economic growth rate.  The Reagan buildup mirrors the Bush buildup of recent years.  Both were a similar percentage of the economy, both distorted the real estate market and lead to financial institution bailouts at the end of their respective buildups/decades.  The difference is that Reagan ran much bigger deficits due to much bigger tax cuts, and had better timing around the reelection date.  Bush had nearly zero oversight of the financial markets.

Military spending does add to the deficit and government spending creates a deficit and creates economic growth.  The difference is the lack of contribution to the economy from that spending.  When government spends on education, that clearly improves the economy, and when government spends on health care, that clearly benefits the population.  And most of the rest of government spending is mainly social transfer payments that are like normal insurance industry transfer payments.  That contributes to the stability of the society.  But military spending does nothing for the many years between wars it is not used, or it destroys things and people in wartime.  Nothing constructive about that, the double negative, “the destruction of my enemy is my good” rings hollow.  Destruction is not construction, is not goods making, is lost manufacturing opportunities.  Zero or negative is not positive.  So military spending is qualitatively different from all other government spending.  Would you rather have an MX missile in your backyard or a swimming pool?  Case closed, the military is useless to the civilian economy.  And that’s what the math says, too.

Here is a brief summary of the math:

https://www.academia.edu/4044456/SUMMARY_Military_DisEconomics

Dr. Peace, Dr. Bob Reuschlein,

best contact  bobreuschlein@gmail.com

to leave message    608-230-6640

for more info www.realeconomy.com