Summer Reading

Summer reading has been especially stimulating so far this year. The discovery of Rebecca West,   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_West  and plowing through most of her output was a source of constant amazement. This author is said to be the best "female" writer in western civ.  William Buckley referred to her in an interview as the best writer, period. For fifty years Ms West struggled with the tension of individual responsibility in community. Her work, be it novel, travel journal, essay, or reportage veers to the moral quandary of what am I to do, in the face of the Holocaust, the oppressive parent, the tradition of the tribe, the expectations of my culture. In her final, unfinished book of essays, "Survivors of Mexico", she revisits the indigenous peoples suffering at the swords of the conquistadors, and moves through the centuries of Mexican history culminating in the attempts of the muralists, in league with leftists, to dignify and edify their history.

And then I read, Things as they are, or The adventures of Caleb Williams, by William Godwin. This book is the first mystery novel in western lit {1794}and is available on line through Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11323. I read the novel without knowing much of Godwin and was so blown away by the book, {no spoilers here},  that I went on to read in his philosophy. He is an early Anarchist and a Utilitarian http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/godwin/ and to the extent that I can understand what he is about, concluded that his hope for mankind was that a people rid of government could reach a high order of civilization, if, and here is the leaven, they attain high levels of education. 

Colum McCann's newest novel, "Transatlantic", fictionalizes stories of historical characters who made the crossing from and to Ireland.  In 1845 Fredric Douglas, still a slave, made the crossing to lecture across the island. Upon arrival he is witness to the early stages of the famine, and poverty so severe that he is humbled by the degradation. What an irony. Standing before large crowds demanding suffrage, bread, and freedom,  he is caught in the dilemma of joining with the forces stirring to overcome their suppression while maintaining his personal objective of advancing the cause of emancipation of black slaves. He cops to his cause, raising the funds needed to advance abolition.  

Douglas was caught in the same bind we find ourselves in today. Are we members of an interest group, a position we take because we belong in a special minority membership,  say a feminist is, because she is a woman, or, am I committed to an issue, like gun control? Most organizers believe and act as if any alignment is dilutive and argue against forming alliances with groups with which you might have an affinity. In so doing they deny us the possibility of coalition building that is going to be required to rid of us the oppressors who, without having to announce their affiliations, act as a "community of like interests". The banker who is going to finance the corporation who builds the next intelligent drone doesn't need to announce his pro-war position. It is understood. It is not so easily understood that the Gay Rights lobby has an interest in the Voting Rights Amendment. Liberals don't act as if we are in coalition. There is no rainbow nor big tent that embraces us. We are not in a community of interests. What liberal organizers have failed to appreciate is that we have the potential to get beyond issue and make ethical judgements that transcend our narrow interests. 

I could make the case by example: Some may hate the Justice Department for its pursuit against medical marijuana, its failure to indict Wall Street criminals, the persecution of Edward Snowden, or the suppression of free speech. Many of these very same people are asking the Justice Department to pursue hate crime indictments against George Zimmerman? If they indict him do we forgive and forget the ongoing cluster of behaviors that we despise? These positions represent issues to which we may or may not agree. The narrowness of these positions obfuscate the larger issue of government over-reach. Anyone on the wrong side of a gas attack from militarized "police" doesn't need to be organized in opposition to government suppression. What he or she may need to be reminded of is that I support you in your cause today, for tomorrow it will be my turn.

A more glaring example may be our reaction to a court system that conspicuously denies All of us, justice. We love the Supreme Court reversal of DOMA while we hate their gutting of the Voting Rights Act?  It appears the pr machine that works for the court is aware of the increasing disaffection of the masses and is now trotting out members that appeal to special interests. So Justice Souter suddenly appears on talk shows discussing the process. He is our liberal go to guy. He still loses 5/4 or votes "wrong" when we least expect it. And why not? He is them. What we are learning is we can't pick and choose. We applaud Obama's retreat from the active theaters of war, but we hate his use of drones. We want the economy to expand, to create jobs and "opportunity". We can't live with the downstream consequences of pollution and global warming. 

Four years ago I considered the implications of the "Double Bind" http://mypinksalmon.blogspot.com/2009/06/double-bind.html and hinted at a life strategy that might help us negotiate it.  The thinking then was that I was able to go my own way in a world too big to care about the implications of persons who chose to opt out, form clusters of like minded souls and create practical communities of interest. It won't do. What's changed? Where do you want to start?  No-one cared about a bunch of drug toking hippies living in domes in New Mexico. Governments do care about millions of underemployed, indebted, connected youth who are starting to get the fact that there is no hope for their aspirations. They are a potential force, and policy and practice is to surveil them, thwart them, imprison them, and prepare to violently oppose them. The appropriate response to their repression is to throw the buggers out. We can't be conned by the fear of what might follow. The past is not prologue. We have the ways and means to construct effective alternatives to tyranny. Most importantly we begin by accepting the responsibility of being in this together. Your fight is my fight. I'll be Trayvon Martin, you be my labor union member. I'll be your gay partner, you be my social security advocate. I'll be the parent of Malala, you be my public school advocate.

Departures

Thirty days in the middle; on the road, sucking ribs, looking people in the eye, being on three shop floors, and being touched, no really touched, by southerners for whom the body is not a taboo, has had the effect of forcing me to consider what I think I know, and what I'm going to do about it.

Carrie took this pic from the car, on the road to Lockhart from Austin While the controversy rages in Texas the point missing from the conversation as I read it is, "Does anyone need this highway?" This from wiki: State Highway 130, also known as SH 130 and Pickle Parkway, is a tollway from Interstate 35 (I-35) in Georgetown to US 183 and SH 45 at Mustang Ridge in Central Texas. Portions south of Mustang Ridge are now under construction [As of 7/2010]. When completed, SH 130 will run in a 89-mile (143 km) corridor east and south of Austin, Texas. It parallels I-35 and is intended to relieve the Interstate's traffic volume through the San Antonio-Austin corridor by serving as an alternate route.... The highway was developed in response to the tremendous surge in truck traffic on the I-35 corridor brought on by the North American Free Trade Agreement during the late 1990s, especially truck traffic originating from Laredo, where the Texas Department of Transportation reported 150 trucks entering the United States every hour. A proponent of the highway's development, Capital Area Transportation Coalition, said that congestion along the I-35 corridor is costing businesses more than $194 million a year in higher operating costs and lost productivity.

State Highway 130 will initially be a four-lane highway, quickly expandable to six lanes.

Observe the pic again. No trucks, one car, no development, no nothing, but this sculptural fly-over to no-where.

What you don't see in the rear view mirror is the dually, 6 wheeled, 7 mpg pickup barreling up my butt, driven by a pony tailed blond on her way to her piece of no-where. She and 200 million others are taking to the road, to hell with 4 dollar gas. What I know: This way of life is not going to be rolled back. She and all those other millions who don't live in NYC or Boulder, or the other Portland, have no options. Any and all attempts by policy wonks inside Washington's or any other capitol beltway, have no idea what they are talking about when discussing moderating climate change by changing behavior.

As they said all Mardi Gras week in Louisiana, "laissez les bon temps rouler". This party, this worldly obsession with motion, (automotive, bodily, or emotional roller coasters) will rock on till it drops. And few give a second's thought to "what then". Those that do voice concerns are out of touch, derided as elite, and locked away in bastions of privilege. What hypocrite is going to haul Rick Santorum over the coals for his rant against the elite. Sure he gets it wrong. A true populist could, in one paragraph, blow his critics away. So you are going to tell me that all that coaching, pre-testing, c.v. inflating, application writing to "those elite colleges" which you are willing to mortgage your house for, are about having your child join the ranks of the hoi polloi. If you are not kidding, you're lying. He has got the issue and he doesn't know how to use it. The elite colleges produce elites who could build a road to nowhere, conceive of cap-trade, wage war on Iraq, and break all the banks.

The madness of bureaucrats begins with the reduction of people to numbers and the disregard for the fact that in the end, there are real names and faces and beating hearts who comprise their calculations. People are going to be impacted by the decisions of these technocrats. Obvious? Then why the millions of people hitting the streets as a reaction to austerity measures around the globe? Surely a government in touch with or truly representing their people would reflect their wants and needs. The disconnect between the elite and the governed has never been more obvious.

Applicants are standing outside a food processing plant in LA. The plant foreman tells me he can't get anyone to work full time anymore. He pays them minimum wage and the perk pack is full, but now they face having to contribute to their health care if they are full time and they can't afford it. Easier to work part time, deny the package, and find supplemental work. Only distant bureaucrats could conceive of a plan that could be so disruptive. Now workers across the country have to figure out how to "get over" yet more intrusion in their lives.

Lest you think that the bureaucracy is a big government based set of institutions you might find the following exemplary of something that you may have experienced. Ted and Lynn are hand building their own home. As they advance into their dotage they anticipate that one of them might be wheelchair bound. Ted designed and built a shower in their bathroom that was pitched in such a way as to allow proper drainage, and because it had no curb, will allow a person to wheel themselves into the area without assistance. Great idea. No says the local building inspector, "a shower must have a curb." His is a political appointment. He may well decide after luxuriating in his little fiefdom, to run for public office, expanding his empowerment. This is where it starts and where we should start to throw the bastards out.

I wasn't in Wendy's B&B in NOLA an hour when she said I was probably "over-educated." I don't remember what occasioned the crack but I'm sure I got the tone. I had said something that suggested I was out of touch with her and her kin up the river. She holds more degrees that I do, she is a nurse, but she is in touch with her roots and celebrates them. She never left for higher ground. She laughs with derision at the antics of the pols. She doesn't believe they can improve her lot. She will survive despite them. She has a support group of family. Family helped her improve her house, family gathers as often as they can, family is cooperating to care for mom. They didn't leave for the coast.

Four generations of family gathered on Fran and Major's lawn in Lafayette for Mardi Gras. Three generations ate "family style" in Monel's in Nashville. Sister Jane is there for Hedge as he negotiates his hospitalization (they live next door to each other). It is just these types of behaviors that are derided by the elite press that captions the return to family as "boomerang", the parents as "babygloomers" and the kids as suffering "delayed life transitions". Many are forced into these survival strategies. Others of us might consider mutual aid as a preferred way to live, even in better times.

I think the only smart move for those of us who want to survive a world managed by idiots is to reread Kafka from the perspective of the cockroach and appreciate that what he portrayed as a horror is a technique that will well serve those who adopt the metamorphous. Calamity is rarely total. Adaptive behavior is going to be the survival technique for the next gen. For the first time in 45 years we are rethinking the possibility of going it alone. I have no confidence that any official or his paid for service private sector replacement has our welfare at heart. Our families are either gone or scattered to the wind. We are going to seek out others who might have learned something from the prior failed attempts at communalism, and test the possibility that some intentional communities might have the wisdom to construct a viable alternative to madness.

Myth Busting

Myth Busting

For the first 6000 years of human organization armed forces were required to enslave or indenture a workforce to break their bodies doing something they didn't want to do; Build a pyramid, a temple, an edifice that ennobled the "king" who managed to employ those forces. Now we have evolved to the point that thousands line up for the privilege of enslaving themselves. We have instituted a set of fundamental myths that reinforce the process of self enslavement: There is a protestant work ethic that purports to demonstrate a person's grace through the observation of their hard work. Thank you Martin Luther.
We have instilled in the culture a corruption of Spencer's observation of natural selection and reduced "survival of the fittest" to a mano-a-mano fight for life.
We have embedded "what do you do for a living" so deep into our language that our job is now synonymous with our human value and the lack of job implies death.
Compensation for labor is said to be proportionate to the value of the earner and, as if you didn't have millions of examples of that myth, the new data by-product of OWS is proof enough, that those who have the most, do the least.

Of course 6000 years of this has made us insane and thus we contradict ourselves. We worship at the feet of the lucky; the heirs, the attractive, the criminal, those who have done nothing to deserve the inordinate wealth they possess. We devalue the uncompensated work of the people that perform our most critical tasks; rearing our young, or being companions for our aged. When we try to reform these behaviors we deflect from the personal to the general and get caught in the impossibility of revolution. There is nothing wrong with Marx's foundation logic. He nailed the issues all those years ago. What confounds his intellectual heirs is that portion of human activity that seems to bred in the bone, or worse, is excited by behavior en-masse, our fears and demons.

The myth of scarcity has forced us into a hoarding behavior. If there is not enough to go around, I must ensure mine.
The myth of the rugged individual is actually getting some juice from the Republican campaigns. Thank you Ayn Rand. We are not going to march 7 billion people across a prairie and settle them in single family homes. We are linked to each other from the womb to the grave and its time to acknowledge that mutuality.
The myth that people will not perform critical tasks necessary for our survival is belied by the fact the majority of us take out the trash, mow the lawn, read the bedtime story and make the coffee. The way we compensate for those tasks that require special talents or for which people will not volunteer is upside down. Why the basketball player, who would do his/her job for nothing makes more than the garbage man is absurd. We should compensate inversely to the degree the person doesn't want to do the job or perform the service. I love it when on a snow day the announcement goes out, "all non critical employees" need not show up for work today. They should never show up. They should be paid to stay home and save us the fortune it costs us in infrastructure to support them.

First Principles:
To fill the policy vacuum being created by OWS lets begin at the beginning and establish a set of first principles upon which we can build a workable society.
My first principle is that people have choice and the behavior of others is, (with few exceptions) none of my business. Intentional communities can come together to articulate common objectives, distribute responsibility, and achieve their objectives. Self selection happens everyday in the lunchroom, the disco, the neighborhood, the place of worship. So be it. The tribe, the club, the gang are viable forms of small scale groups that have the ability to unify around common cause. They don't delegate or elect representatives. They assume direct responsibility for the preservation of their lives.
Let's start here. We can determine how we get to the bigger issues later. For now small groups inventory our stuff, our capacity, our talent, and see what we have and how we can exploit it, in common. Enough of the madness of go it alone.

notes for a constitution in process:
We have to come to terms with stuff and when it matters a lot what other people do. Take for example the Atlanta man who in the midst of a drought consumed 60 times what the average person uses and got caught. The city can roll him back. What of the person flying the private jet, or driving the Escalade, or killing the tuna. The idea that affordability, one's ability to pay, is the sole criteria for a person's consumption is so disrespectful of the context in which we live, that the behavior is going to have to be checked. How? That's the beginning of the process. That's what OWS is starting to contemplate. It took us centuries of unbridled capitalism to get us where we are today. To unravel is going to take time and thought.
The idea that a person can behave in such a way as to suffer a medical consequence of their indulgence is a classic example of the effect of us all having to pay. The victim of smoking or alcoholism, or speeding, or drug abuse, drags us into his health care system. He may be "able to pay" but the fact is he syphons capacity away as cruelly as the water abuser in Atlanta. I should not be asked to pay for his abuse. We live in a world of limited capacity IF we extract resources at irreplaceable rates with no consideration of conservation. We have to muzzle the pigs at the various troughs and limit the excesses of unbridled capitalism. When we agree on limits, we can proceed.

And Now?

Occupy Wall Street reminds me of the occupation of the administration offices of Columbia U. and other universities across the globe in the late 60's. Net effect?; Nada. It seemed that what those protestors wanted 40 years ago was to change the occupants of the chairs, not fundamentally change the system. What was then, and is still required, is a fundamental change in the system. The system wherein Columbia U faculty is revealed to be co-conspirators in the financial collapse of 2008. See what the University intends to do about the problem here. For the forty ensuing years from the time of the protest and the revelations from the film "Inside Job", students were content to pay their money and earn the tickets they needed to be employed in the companies that perpetrated the greatest financial crisis in history. What they had protested for and won was greater inclusion in the system. They got it. Women and people of color now have equal opportunity to exploit and game a system in which they too can become members of the 1% club.

Many students from Columbia U are on the streets and participating in Occupy Wall Street. While celebrating the act up quality of these actions the fact is that they will come to naught unless protesters focus, and get very specific about who they are targeting. Wall Street is amorphous. It is at home in Greenwich, at work on K street, and their puppets are peppered all through Capitol Hill. Lap dogs are fighting any reform that might prevent the next collapse, any tax reform, and any remedial legislation. The extent of the spider web that is Wall Street extends to international banks, the IMF, and the World Bank, and the collusion of governments world wide. Nothing less than a world in evolution is going to change the foundations on which Wall Street thrives. Therefore protesters are going to have to get very strategic, If, and this is a big if, they really want to change any element of system that exploits them.

As long as the protesters understand the symbolic nature of their protest, and exploit the excessive police push back, they can gain the time they need, and the public forum in which some of them can specify what they demand in outcomes, and the policy changes that will correct the underlying problems they identify.

Maybe the single most horrible aspect of the collapse that has prompted this act-up is the foreclosure crisis.

Not only did Wall Street, (and here I use the terms to indicate the interlocking system of money men in allied agencies), create the systems that crashed on the backs of home owners, they continue to refuse to rectify the conspiracy they created, that is throwing people out of their homes. Let's demand that Fannie and Freddie reset the principle on the loans they control. We own them. We ought to demand they modify mortgages. The same energy that is being harnessed in protest on Wall Street should move to Washington in front of the responsible agencies. We can do this.

In terms of the pragmatics, what we can do to implement an outcome that will signal a change is gonna come, is the boycott. We vote with our pocketbooks. Let's see if there is any willingness to "sacrifice", do without the toys, that are manufactured by the companies represented on Wall Street. Let's begin with the hallowed. Don't like the fact that Apple off-shores the manufacture of all those devices that Steve Jobs created, Boycott Apple. That's what it is going to take. To get beyond the pettiness of personal gain we are going to have to accept our complicity in a system that while it is working to our advantage, is exploiting others. We've been here before. When it was revealed how and by whom, and at what wage rate our sport shoes were being made, we were asked to boycott in protest. We didn't. To protest is easy. To delay the purchase of an Iphone, or a pair of Nikes, that's an act of courage.

We are going to have to rethink what we mean by jobs. We are going to have to get beyond the myth of so called "free markets". We are going to have to stop adoring the rich, and being jealous of the less fortunate who get assistance in life support. We are going to have to fundamentally change a system that is extractive, that measures GDP in terms of the exploitation of nature, and that extends the worst aspects of capitalism to developing nations. We cannot count on politicians and organizers of any stripe that suggest what is needed is more inclusion, more of the same, more, so called, infrastructure development. Roads and bridges and cars got us here. They are not the way out.

Had Enough Yet?

The systems of empire, totalitarianism, institutional slavery, indentured servitude, and the divine right of kings are concepts that have slipped into the trash bin of history.

We are at the threshold of yet another momentous change. It is hard to get your mind around it. There are many vested interests that are in the business of distraction in order to allow them to extract the last vestiges of what they have wrought. This weekend's Iowa nonsense and the media attention to it have the effect of exciting people of all the political spectrum into frenzies of irrelevant mind numbing excitation. The call to prayer, or the return to some imagined time in history when all was well cannot halt the inevitability of the end of an era.

What has quickened the process this time has been the global expansion of an economic system, desired by all, and demonstratively doomed to failure. The evidence is constant; the corpus, be it person, or company, (which have now morphed into the same "being") grows, (capital is drawn to capital), greed engorges the beast and it dies. The neo-liberal expansion of the multi-national corporation, the insatiable desire of the world's population to drive a car, and the most pernicious of all the elements in the drama, the expansion of debt as a "growth" lever all converge and the system collapses of its own weight.

The Economist publishes this world debt clock: 46 trillion and counting. This number is in current dollars and counts debt that we can see, obligations that are actually transparent. It does not take into consideration the debt obligations of say the entitlement obligations of future Americans, estimated to be 65 trillion dollars, to site just one example. We cannot cover this debt. It will be cancelled.

This is but an excerpt. The entire interview is on the WSJ website.

Disbelievers will have all the visual cues they need to reject the premise of this clip. Roubini has an accent and probably hair on his back. He is not a true American. Another darkie bringing the communist manifesto to light. Ironically China, the last great satan state, is closer to collapse after adopting the tenants of unbridled capitalism then it has ever been. It will not be able to sate the demands of the billions to drive that car.

For those with a sharp pencil and a keener understanding than I have are directed to the BIS. This is the world settlement clearing house that monitors debt and to the extent they can, the non transparent OTC derivatives that none of us understand. If you cruise around this site you will see that the value of derivatives (the instruments that precipitated the collapse of 2008) has actually increased to over 600 Trillion dollars in the last two years. You will also read that this is but the notational amount and their true asset value is only 20 some trillion. I don't understand it either. Here is what I know. They will all be settled or else. In the same way bond obligations, no matter how long they are kept off the books, will also be settled or else, default. In a rational world derivitives allowed a commodity producer to stabilize a price, say for a steer. A rancher owned a steer, an option was written of the future price of the steer, he delivered the steer, the option was cleared. What the geniuses who destroyed the world as you knew it did, was create a system of "Open Interest" which meant that persons could place side bets on the steer's price without any underlying interest in the steer. This is the easiest tell on the subject so if you have a problem here skip away. The impact will still effect you. You just won't know what hit you. And some of these bets, the poison ones placed on housing stock, already blew up and we are still paying off the gamblers. The argument is that if they default the world collapses. They will default, the world financial system will collapse.

Had enough yet?

We have to add in the problem of the underlying basis of the entire system, extractive economics. At exactly the same time that we are in a fiscal crisis, which is just a counting game, we have the all too real set of facts that the growth limits models of commodities that we extract from the earth to support all of this economic activity, predict that they are getting scarcer.

The following were excerpted from the NYT this weekend:

Can Jeremy Grantham Profit From Ecological Mayhem?

When prices go up and stay up, it’s not a bubble. Prices may always revert to the mean, but the mean can change; that’s a paradigm shift. As Grantham tells it, oil went first. For a century it steadily returned to about $16 a barrel in today’s currency, then in 1974 the mean shifted to about $35, and Grantham believes it has recently doubled again. Metals and nearly everything else — coal, corn, palm oil, soybeans, sugar, cotton — appear to be following suit. “From now on, price pressure and shortages of resources will be a permanent feature of our lives,” he argues. “The world is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate, and this has caused a permanent shift in their value. We all need to adjust our behavior to this new environment. It would help if we did it quickly.”

here is his conclusion “But it’s never absolutely too late,” Grantham said. “It’s never too late to do what we can,” which includes making a lot of money you can use to try to protect whatever and whoever matters to you — biodiversity, family, nation, everybody.

He’s an impassioned environmentalist not only for the usual reasons but also because he believes humanity’s vexed relationship with the planet is the great economic story of our time. “This commodities thing may turn out to be the most interesting call of my career,” he told me. “I have no doubt we’re going to have a bad hundred years. We have the resources to gracefully handle the transition, but we won’t. We apparently can’t.”

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Grantham doesn’t dwell on the potential for disaster on an unimaginable scale, but it looms behind his measured language. The world’s population is seven billion and counting. “Whether the stable population will be 1.5 billion or 5 billion,” he said to me, “the question is: How do we get there?”

This is probably the darkest article I have read in my lifetime. Not the least because of the value free way it is reported. Within the article and this consultant's "letter" to his clients is the understanding that in a zero sum game, the world may collapse but you can profit from it, and, with the gains, put your money to work to secure yourself. But more insidious is his understanding that a stable earth will only support half of its anticipated population. How we eradicate the surplus is the issue. Implying, we can allow them to starve, or more likely, given our history, is we unleash the holy war on them and simply kill them off. This is the behavior of those "vested interests" I alluded to at the top of this post.

There are options to consider that you might want to contemplate. Nothing like world revolution. How about an adjustment of a few basic destructive behaviors that might take the pressure off the world. End the fiscal derivitives market immediately.

End the concept of "growth" and change it to sustainable regardless of how that term has been abused

End the practice of planned obsolescence, and redundancy

Constrict advertising and marketing

End the practice of inflation

Educate, educate, educate, to the realities of the world

End the auto-cracy

It appears Elizabeth Warren is going to run for the senate from Mass. Pity.

Elizabeth Warren for President

Under no circumstances am I going to support President Barack Obama for re-election. A short list of broken promises, failed policies, and outright lies iterate the reasons:
The escalation of war in Afghanistan, and Libya, while tolerating the horrors of Syria and Bahrain for expediency.
Guantanamo
Bank bailout while refusing to implement mortgage reform
Larry Summers, Rahm Emmanuel, William Daley
Cave in to health insurers and drug manufacturers
Support for ethanol
90 unfilled Judgeships, 50 of which haven't even been nominated
Re-up of the Patriot Act and extending FBI warrentless searches
Prosecution of medical marijuana
No support for same sex marriage
Little push back on Republican budget proposals
Acceptance of Bush Tax cuts
No push on Dream Act
Cave in on "for profit" college reform
No support for victims of Haiti, New Orleans, Joplin, Japan, Alabama, or recent flooding victims
Expansion of off-shore drilling
This is so depressing I'll stop here.

I will not be frightened by the prospect of whoever the Republican's nominate nor will I succumb to the argument that Obama is incrementally better than the alternative. In talking about this with others we always come up against the "who would you chose?" question coupled with the supposed impossibility of a third party movement. The last time we had this discussion the President was caving in on Elizabeth Warren and refusing to nominate her as his agency head for Financial Consumer Protection. Moveon.org has a fundraiser to support her while she fights for the implementation of the United States Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

I say let's go all the way and push her, and Moveon to create an independent party that nominates her for President of the United States. (Rumors fly that she might try a senate run.) Read her resume here and visit her website here.
Mrs. Warren is from Oklahoma, and a champion of the middle class. I won't accept the opinion that those in the middle so outraged by the behavior of their government that they are in rebellion, will allow themselves to be co-opted by the cynical exploiters of their frustration. If they had a choice, an alternative, they could rally behind, a woman of Warren's character, what a coalition we could form.

I would go further and ask her to name her cabinet nominees as she ramps up her campaign. Sheila Baer for Sec of Treasury, Brooksley Born for Department of Commerce, Ralph Nadar, Dept of Labor, Bring back Colin Powell for Defense, and keep Chu at Energy. The point being that we would know what we were getting and not have persons like Summers thrown at us.

Jon Stewart expressed his disappointment with Obama on Fox the other day. He need look no further for an option than his guest from the Daily Show.

The Daily Show - Elizabeth Warren
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

And in anticipation of the accusation that she lacks experience in foreign affairs; to the person, everyone on top of the subject knows that our most important foreign affair, is getting our economic house in order.

Commence

This June every student will participate in some form of graduation or more precisely gradation; to arrange in grades or gradations; establish gradation in. That's what our students have been doing for however many years they have joined in the process. They have allowed themselves to be gradated in carefully calibrated beakers. They have absorbed the most critical component of their respective curricula, they have come together and agreed to participate in the ranking game.
The curriculum itself has always been perceived as but a means to the end. The practice of the curriculum contained little of inherent value but was set up as a way and means of developing obedience and conformity. The fact that battles are fought over what constitutes a core curriculum reveals how arbitrary it really is. One side wins, gender studies or evolution theory is thrown out. Another side wins and Thackeray is exchanged for Naguib Mahfouz.
Students have moved through a nationally agreed upon process whereby it will be determined who amongst them will win the prizes that were held out as the values they have worked so hard for. Or not.

Some of those prizes are now being re-evaluated:
The next, more exclusive level of on-going formal education is being examined from a cost/benefit perspective.
At a post graduation, material level, a single family house for example, once considered to be the great storehouse of wealth (the estate) has lost its primacy in the hierarchy of "things". A broad portfolio of blue chip equities has taken a hit as has prospect of retirement in comfort. Some of the more mundane prizes, the gourmet meal, the high priced wine, the flashy car are like pins in the lane, about to be knocked off as their underlying value is challenged, or realized to be unsustainable, going the way of the lynx wrap.
At a corporate level (the employer of the winners), the ability to maintain advantage is being challenged by a whole new set of players. The prospects are not good that business as usual, the curriculum in practice, will sustain them.
At the governmental level, the power centers from which the corporation and the prize winning individuals are protected, the process of sustaining themselves seems to be cracking as the numbers of losers and their ability to coordinate swell.

Not surprisingly, given the ends are being questioned, the means are being scrutinized. It is being observed that students are being stressed out in the "Race To Nowhere" as the documentary film of that name points out. Don't expect too much from this effort. The "deal" that has been struck by the parents who screen and then discuss this film is that; I won't make the changes by myself. Only if we all agree to stop the resume inflation, cheating, achievement by any means possible, will I relent. I am not going to put my child at a competitive disadvantage by doing the right thing.

No one questions the lesson plans. More math, more science = better rocketry, more fire power, more stealth, better spying technology, these are the core elements we need to "win the future". No world language, no geo-political reality, no deep cultural studies of others, no family practice, no diet and nutrition. We can't afford art, and physical exercise is reserved for the combatants. No peace studies, no alternatives to violence, and no alternative to so-called free market economics.

Paul stopped by to check and tune up the furnace system he installed two years ago. He came up from the basement slightly ashen. "Have you been aware of a bang when the furnace cycled on?" he asked. Yes, we thought it was normal. "Well it isn't normal. What has happened is that there is a leak at the gas fitting and when the ignition comes on it burns off that excess gas. I have to replace the ignitor." What he didn't say and that I could surmise was left un-repaired the house and its contents were at risk. Paul doesn't have an advanced degree. Paul inherited the business from his dad. Paul's value to me and the society is immeasurable.

Bet, Call

You can bet the following paper, prepared by two military consultants to the Joint Chiefs, and published under the pseudonym "Y" was released with the chiefs' knowledge and permission. The forward was written by Anne-Marie Slaughter, former director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff. It is fair to conclude that this paper has broad administration support.

Foreign Policy did a piece on the paper and referred to it as "the Pentagon's secret plan to slash its own budget".

Don't believe it. There is nothing secret about this push. The Pentagon has been fighting congress for years, trying unsuccessfully to limit the expansion of their budget, being forced to acquire weapons that satisfy a congressperson's need to bring home the pork. This must read transcript from a 1992 show on "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" proves the point.

Another discussion of the Y paper is far more cynical and provides a context for understanding the military's internecine branch competition.

All of the above discussions are by wonks with a history of commenting on military affairs. What jumped off the page for me was the extent to which the military accepts as real threats; the global social unrest, climate and environmental issues, and problems of developing meaningful work for the youth of the world. These concepts are not what we think of when we imagine what is being discussed in the Pentagon. That the Pentagon is willing to run around congress and try to agitate for a more relevant peace agenda and a budget to support it, can not be ignored by the rest of us. The following is the preface to the paper.

By Anne-Marie Slaughter

Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs

Princeton University

Director of Policy Planning, U.S. Department of State, 2009-2011

The United States needs a national strategic narrative. We have a national security strategy, which sets forth four core national interests and outlines a number of dimensions of an overarching strategy to advance those interests in the 21st century world. But that is a document written by specialists for specialists. It does not answer a fundamental question that more and more Americans are asking. Where is the United States going in the world? How can we get there? What are the guiding stars that will illuminate the path along the way? We need a story with a beginning, middle, and projected happy ending that will transcend our political divisions,

orient us as a nation, and give us both a common direction and the confidence and commitment to get to our destination.

These questions require new answers because of the universal awareness that we are living through a time of rapid and universal change. The assumptions of the 20th century, of the U.S. as a bulwark first against fascism and then against communism, make little sense in a world in which World War II and its aftermath is as distant to young generations today as the War of 1870

was to the men who designed the United Nations and the international order in the late 1940s. Consider the description of the U.S. president as “the leader of the free world,” a phrase that encapsulated U.S. power and the structure of the global order for decades. Yet anyone under thirty today, a majority of the world’s population, likely has no idea what it means. Moreover, the U.S. is experiencing its latest round of “declinism,” the periodic certainty that we are losing all the things that have made us a great nation. In a National Journal poll conducted in 2010, 47% percent of Americans rated China’s economy as the world’s strongest economy, even though today the U.S. economy is still 2 ½ times larger than the Chinese economy with only 1/6 of the population. Our crumbling roads and bridges reflect a crumbling self-confidence. Our education reformers often seem to despair that we can ever educate new generations effectively for the 21st century economy. Our health care system lags increasingly behind that of other developed nations – even behind British National Health in terms of the respective overall health of the British and American populations.

Against this backdrop, Captain Porter’s and Colonel Mykleby’s “Y article” could not come at a more propitious time. In 1947 George Kennan published “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym X, so as not to reveal his identity as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer. The X article gave us an intellectual framework within which to understand the rise and eventual fall of the Soviet Union and a strategy to hasten that objective. Based on that foundation, the strategic narrative of the Cold War was that the United States was the leader of the free world against the communist world; that we would invest in containing the Soviet Union and limiting its expansion while building a dynamic economy and as just, and prosperous a society as possible. We often departed from that narrative in practice, as George Kennan was one of the first to recognize. But it was a narrative that fit the facts of the world we perceived well enough to create and maintain a loose bipartisan national consensus for forty years. Porter and Mykleby give us a non-partisan blueprint for understanding and reacting to the changes of the 21st century world. In one sentence, the strategic narrative of the United States in the 21st century is that we want to become the strongest competitor and most influential player in a deeply inter-connected global system, which requires that we invest less in defense and more in sustainable prosperity and the tools of effective global engagement.

At first reading, this sentence may not seem to mark much of a change. But look closer. The Y article narrative responds directly to five major transitions in the global system:

1) From control in a closed system to credible influence in an open system. The authors argue that Kennan’s strategy of containment was designed for a closed system, in which we assumed that we could control events through deterrence, defense, and dominance of the international system. The 21st century is an open system, in which unpredictable external events/phenomena are constantly disturbing and disrupting the system. In this world control is

impossible; the best we can do is to build credible influence – the ability to shape and guide global trends in the direction that serves our values and interests (prosperity and security) within an interdependent strategic ecosystem. In other words, the U.S. should stop trying to dominate and direct global events. The best we can do is to build our capital so that we can influence events as they arise.

2) From containment to sustainment. The move from control to credible influence as a fundamental strategic goal requires a shift from containment to sustainment (sustainability).

Instead of trying to contain others (the Soviet Union, terrorists, China, etc), we need to focus on sustaining ourselves in ways that build our strengths and underpin credible influence. That shift in turn means that the starting point for our strategy should be internal rather than external. The 2010 National Security Strategy did indeed focus on national renewal and global leadership, but this account makes an even stronger case for why we have to focus first and foremost on investing our resources domestically in those national resources that can be sustained, such as our youth and our natural resources (ranging from crops, livestock, and potable water to sources of energy and materials for industry). We can and must still engage internationally, of course, but only after a careful weighing of costs and benefits and with as many partners as possible. Credible influence also requires that we model the behavior we recommend for others, and that we pay close attention to the gap between our words and our deeds.

3) From deterrence and defense to civilian engagement and competition. Here in many ways is the hard nub of this narrative. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen has already said publicly that the U.S. deficit is our biggest national security threat. He and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates have also given speeches and written articles calling for “demilitarizing American foreign policy” and investing more in the tools of civilian engagements – diplomacy and defense. As we modernize our military and cut spending the tools of 20th century warfare, we must also invest in a security complex that includes all domestic and foreign policy assets.

Our credibility also requires a willingness to compete with others. Instead of defeatism and protectionism, we must embrace competition as a way to make ourselves stronger and better (e.g. Ford today, now competing with Toyota on electric cars). A willingness to compete means a new narrative on trade and a new willingness to invest in the skills, education, energy sources, and

infrastructure necessary to make our products competitive.

4) From zero sum to positive sum global politics/economics. An interdependent world creates many converging interests and opportunities for positive-sum rather than zero-sum competition. The threats that come from interdependence (economic instability, global pandemics, global terrorist and criminal networks) also create common interests in countering those threats domestically and internationally. President Obama has often emphasized the

significance of moving toward positive sum politics. To take only one example, the rise of China as a major economic power has been overall very positive for the U.S. economy and the prosperity and stability of East Asia. The United States must be careful to guard our interests and those of our allies, but we miss great opportunities if we assume that the rise of some necessarily means the decline of others.

5) From national security to national prosperity and security. The piece closes with a call for a National Prosperity and Security Act to replace the National Security Act of 1947. The term “national security” only entered the foreign policy lexicon after 1947 to reflect the merger of defense and foreign affairs. Today our security lies as much or more in our prosperity as in our military capabilities. Our vocabulary, our institutions, and our assumptions must reflect that shift. “National security” has become a trump card, justifying military spending even as the domestic foundations of our national strength are crumbling. “National prosperity and security” reminds us where our true security begins. Foreign policy pundits have long called for an overhaul of NSC 68, the blueprint for the national security state that accompanied the grand strategy of containment. If we are truly to become the strongest competitor and most influential player in the

deeply interconnected world of the 21st century, then we need a new blueprint.

A narrative is a story. A national strategic narrative must be a story that all Americans can understand and identify within their own lives. America’s national story has always see-sawed between exceptionalism and universalism. We think that we are an exceptional nation, but a core part of that exceptionalism is a commitment to universal values – to the equality of all human beings not just within the borders of the United States, but around the world. We should thus embrace the rise of other nations when that rise is powered by expanded prosperity, opportunity, and dignity for their peoples. In such a world we do not need to see ourselves as the automatic

leader of any bloc of nations. We should be prepared instead to earn our influence through our ability to compete with other nations, the evident prosperity and well being of our people, and our ability to engage not just with states but with societies in all their richness and complexity. We do not want to be the sole superpower that billions of people around the world have learned to hate from fear of our military might. We seek instead to be the nation other nations listen to, rely on and emulate out of respect and admiration.

The Y article is the first step down that new path. It is written by two military men who have put their lives on the line in the defense of their country and who are non-partisan by profession and conviction. Their insights and ideas should spark a national conversation. All it takes is for politicians, pundits, journalists, business people, civic leaders, and engaged citizens across the country to read and respond.

The paper continues here.

These ideas are far too important to be narrowly debated by the beltway crowd. The authors have upped the ante, made a bet, and I for one am going to call. I am going to share this document with everyone I know. I am going to alert my representatives of its presence and my support of it, and I am going to find ways and means to disseminate this paper as widely as I can. I hope you will do the same.

Hidden Agendas

The Baby Bomb with no BOOM.

If people are looking for parallels between what is happening in Wisconsin, soon coming to a state near you, and what is happening on the Arab street, they would be better served to look back 50 years, to the start of the Kennedy presidency. Then as now, the factor driving national events was demography, though that was not the official rationale for program development. Here's a quick official history from the History.com web site:
This Day In History
Mar 1, 1961:
Kennedy establishes Peace Corps

Newly elected President John F. Kennedy issues an executive order establishing the Peace Corps. It proved to be one of the most innovative and highly publicized Cold War programs set up by the United States.
During the course of his campaign for the presidency in 1960, Kennedy floated the idea that a new "army" should be created by the United States. This force would be made up of civilians who would volunteer their time and skills to travel to underdeveloped nations to assist them in any way they could.
To fulfill this plan, Kennedy issued an executive order on March 1, 1961 establishing the Peace Corps as a trial program. Kennedy sent a message to Congress asking for its support and made clear the significance of underdeveloped nations to the United States. The people of these nations were "struggling for economic and social progress." "Our own freedom," Kennedy continued, "and the future of freedom around the world, depend, in a very real sense, on their ability to build growing and independent nations where men can live in dignity, liberated from the bonds of hunger, ignorance, and poverty." Many in Congress, and the U.S. public, were skeptical about the program's costs and the effectiveness of American aid to what were perceived to be "backward" nations, but Kennedy's warning about the dangers in the underdeveloped world could not be ignored. Revolutions were breaking out around the globe and many of these conflicts—such as in Laos, the Congo, and elsewhere—were in danger of becoming Cold War battlefields. Several months later, Congress voted to make the Corps permanent.
During the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of Americans—especially young people—flocked to serve in dozens of nations, particularly in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Working side by side with the people of these nations, Peace Corps volunteers helped build sewer and water systems; constructed and taught in schools; assisted in developing new crops and agricultural methods to increase productivity; and participated in numerous other projects. Volunteers often faced privation and sometimes danger, and they were not always welcomed by foreign people suspicious of American motives. Overall, however, the program was judged a success in terms of helping to "win the hearts and minds" of people in the underdeveloped world. The program continues to function, and thousands of Americans each year are drawn to the humanitarian mission and sense of adventure that characterizes the Peace Corps.
A good synopsis of the official story, recently revisited in the eulogies for Sargent Shriver.

The truth of the matter is more complex. President Kennedy was shaken by his visits to Appalachia during the campaign. Poverty was becoming more visible and disheartening. The President and many others read Michael Harrington's, The Other America. Foundations were starting to fund programs to get at the problems, and the President's Committee of Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime had begun antipoverty initiatives.

Excerpts from an Oral History of the origins of the war on poverty are here.

But to appreciate the relevancy of then to now, I want to add to the context of what comes next. The War On Poverty, now so commonly maligned, was conceived of as a stabilizing force. You have to appreciate the fact that the civil rights movement was gaining a head of steam. Now here's the kicker. What the members of the Committee on JD told the President, was the prospect that millions of young Americans (the first time the baby boomers are perceived of as a problem) had been highly educated and there were few jobs for them. They projected an alliance of black and white youths coming together to channel their frustration in a revolutionary uprising. Sound familiar? The problem then became how to forge programs that might defuse this potential and the Peace Corp was the first of many. Job Corp, Vista, Head Start, Legal Aid, the list goes on, all were developed within this context. The primary objective might have been to bring solutions to the stated problem but always there was what developers of those programs referred to as "the hidden agenda". The Peace Corp was really an elite corp of highly educated persons that had to pass tests before they could join. The genius of the corp was that persons joined and accepted meager pay for the honor and self respect that came from doing good. As programs continued to come on stream there were intentional designs to employ persons from the "target" populations to staff them. When evaluations were conducted that questioned the
the effectiveness of any of these programs in achieving their stated objectives, the off the record analysis would include how many persons were employed in the service of the program. So a jobs program was itself a jobs program.

Here is Martin Wolf in the Financial Times seeing the Arab revolt in similar terms. He appreciates the underemployment of these young people as being the driver of current events.

My perspective is that there are never going to be enough "jobs" here or abroad to satisfy the wants of the unemployed. If we scaled up production of BMWs, to satisfy those so-called wants, the consequences would be to choke the world. At exactly the same moment anyone can see there is no shortage of work to be done. The cries for dignity and recognition coming from the Arab street are not going to be satisfied by low wage jobs or make work. What might have a chance of creating a sustainable future for these people is a work corp, whose mission is not the stabilization of horrific regimes, rather the alleviation of the meanness of the physical conditions that surround them. They might have an agenda that included land reform, water development, distributed health care, or social security for the aged. The indigenous workers would prioritize their societal needs, and could organize the corps to relieve them. Critical to any such development would be the world valuing this work in much the same way the Peace Corp is valued. Rather than trying to prop up the failed economics of labor intensity, the world needs to evolve a value system that places the good works of people before the crassness of material extraction and exploitation.


There was more than one "hidden agenda" in those heady days. The other great unsaid. That which drives most of the Republican push back against unions, the poor, and democrats in general, was the fact that those of us in community action "knew" that the overthrow of oligarchs was also on our agenda. The racist, the dispassionate, the exploiters, were all on the hit list of social activists who appreciated that moms who gathered in large numbers to enroll their children in Head Start for example, might also appreciate those numbers when election day rolled around. And so it was that in the vacuum left after white flight, the vast majority of cities in America were re-governed by Democrats, often of color. The persistence of their re-elections was attributable to the votes of the civil servants beholden to them for their jobs. So when Republicans fight job creation, or when John Boehner states that he doesn't care if federal jobs are lost as a result of his budget reforms, or Governors attempt to union bust, that is code for their not wanting voters added to the block that opposes them. The recruitment of middle class workers in their army of opposition is just madness. There is just too much evidence that the so-called tea-parties are being had. A recent addition to that observation comes from the hallowed business rag of the right. Forbes has a story here on the Koch brother s involvement in the Wisconsin battle.

It is still to be seen who will co-opt the change agents in the middle east. The true oligarchs have not left the oil fields, nor the armies that protect them.

All In

What a week it has been:
Democrats, pundits, and the gay community are all cheering the legislative successes of the Christmas season.
The celebration marking the end of DADT arrived right on time. Answered prayers, a Christmas present, timed to correspond to the birthday of the Prince of Peace, gays, lesbians, bi's and tranies, have won the right to fight along side their straight brothers and sisters. Now that Spartan lance can be used to advance the forces of US military might the world around. (In the name of historical accuracy remember that Sparta waged war on Athens because it feared the spread of Athenian democracy.)

I say let's seize the day. When the forces of egalitarianism are on a roll, and the honor of being a soldier in arms has never been higher, let's organize to extend to those repeatedly denied, the opportunity to join the fight. I have never understood the arbitrary age of 18 as being the minimum acceptable for admission into the armed forces. In this age when any 10 year old possesses the hand eye coordination to dominate "Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare" the video game, it is obvious that represents a transferable skill for modern warfare, say drone missions. Let's stage a competition for those younger men and women who want to compete and the prize will be enlistment.

As a senior with so little life left to lose I think that it is a fitting and proper that my, most selfish gen, give back service for the gifts we have enjoyed. The best of us are tactical, and in many cases the health services available to us on mission exceed those in our local community. I want to be able to join.
I don't want to overlook the most egregious of the sins of recruitment omission. Our physically challenged brothers and sisters have proven their metal in Special Olympics and everyday feats of overcoming barriers to access. This is a military that fights with its minds and as long as a citizen is in his right mind I believe we can accommodate their desire to be treated as whole citizens. Dismembered Vets who are heard every night expressing a desire to return to their units abroad should be allowed.
Maybe no person deserves the right to re-up more than the abused Vietnam veteran. No one thanked him for his deployment at the time. This is his chance for redemption. We will respect him for his service.

Ironically, the only peace protest this week was conducted by Veterans for Peace




This was the week in which Civil defense forces in Seoul, Korea ran drills shutting down the city and moving tens of thousands of citizens into bomb shelters. Their political leaders are heard to say they want to fight the complacency of the average citizen re the prospects for a confrontation with the North.
This was the week of the START treaty approval. I hope you got a chance to listen to a piece of the so-called debate. Naysayers were not going to allow Russians to limit our tactical nuclear war machine, our missiles on rails, or in any way inhibit the effectiveness and battle readiness of our nuclear warheads and their delivery systems. They won. Here is a summary of the treaty
The UK Guardian has an analysis of the numbers of nuclear weapons in the world and who has them.

While the START treaty was being debated Americans were told of the survivability of a nuclear war and, contrary to popular belief, we are instructed to stay home, hide in the basement and stay off the highways.

Wired Magazine published a piece ‘Regional’ Nuclear War Would Cause Worldwide Destruction that contains a realistic study of the consequences of a limited nuclear exchange.
Here is another conclusion from a study by the American Geophysical Union of the effects of a very limited nuclear exchange: Cooling from a limited nuclear exchange would create two to three consecutive "Years Without a Summer", and over a decade of significantly reduced crop yields. The authors anticipated that the smoke in the stratosphere would partially destroy Earth's protective stratospheric ozone layer as well, but did not model how large of an impact this would have. Clearly, even a limited nuclear exchange could trigger severe global climate change capable of causing economic chaos and widespread starvation.

We have something like a dry run in the aftermath of the "accident" at Chernobyl.

Nobody has a better take on this then Randy Newman