douglass carmichael: dougminiessay

Health as population growth is ill for some.

Thu, 20 Jan 2005 15:19:55 GMT

The previous item suggests that economic health means natioanl growth, through birth and immigration. But "health" means for the owners of capital, not those sqeezed at the lower end by increasing populations and lower wages. This is an important discussion to follow up.

Tue, 04 Jan 2005 19:44:54 GMT

From ABC news's The Note for today

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/TheNote/story?id=156238

In fact, the greater long-range consequence of the events in Asia gives the Leader of the Free World and the Commander in Chief another extended opportunity to sit astride the world look tough and compassionate at the same time.

It looks like Bush can do anything, and the rest of the country is powerless. Social security, environment, ..

And

"If anything, the history of the Bush presidency so far is that it isn't following historical trends. One reason Mr. Bush has 'beat' history is that the nation is in the midst of a realignment that has been a long time in the making. The war on terror and the end of the Cold War has already transformed foreign policy. Building liberal democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq is also giving the nation a fresh look at its own moral underpinnings. Meanwhile, voters are being confronted with changing the definition of marriage and saving Social Security — the bedrock of the New Deal — from bankruptcy."

That might not be exactly correct, but it is providing a winning mindset and formula for the party in power.

Krugman's "Medicare and Medicaid are bigger problems" mantra is one that the White House is just waiting to bash back.

Protecting social security would itself be part of a larger social policy that just doesn't exist in a quotable form. The President is untouchable and the country is going broke. The second gives him leverage to do what he wants because the democrats have no real alternative that deals with declining revenues, jobs, security and social well-being. the specter of socialism lays its shadows across any proposal for amelioration or social investment.

Tue, 04 Jan 2005 18:09:04 GMT

Time to return. What a few weeks! The start of a new year has not been under such a cloud for so many since ww2 or 1968.

The emerging question in the Indian Ocean tsunami aftereffects is whether the awareness of the conditions of real lives, so many, so fragile, will have any impact on the direction the leadership, the press, and economics will take. Governance and the media live ion a self serving narrow partial illusion. Can we expect this to get better? What can we do?

That is, is there an emerging alternative that has a chance of creating a coherent society we, humanity, could actually step into, out of our current ways, without capsizing in the attempt?

Sat, 04 Dec 2004 18:51:11 GMT

This is a sign. Ten years ago I raised the question, why doesn't China buy Sun Microsystems? I wasn't thinking big enough.

Dec. 3--NEW YORK -- International Business Machines Corp. is negotiating with Lenovo Group Ltd. to sell its personal computer business to China's largest PC maker, the New York Times reported Friday.

In Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano of 1950 (!!) the world is divided between managers, machines and unneeded prols. A Saudi prince keeps asking "who are those people?" and after answers like, "employees going in to their office building" he says, "slaves!". We need to de-link the good life from dependence on marketing and consumer identity. We need an economy but not by making slaves of most of the population (including the managers). That connection between life style and a cancerous economy to benefit a very few (who both have high incomes and understand the trap) and to give the appearance of benefiting many, has got to be decoupled - and replaced with a milder version that honors the people, the needs of governance, the need for an economy, and the environment.

As I wrote much earlier

“My own hope is that the full promise of technology can be seen as something which enhances the whole human community and its context rather than being a mechanism for the transfer of wealth to a few. A brilliant technological future that is entrepreneurial, diverse, geographically dispersed, with regional and local focus and ownership could emerge.”

Bono plans lifelong poverty fight. Rock singer Bono pledges to spend the rest of his life trying to eradicate extreme poverty around the world. [BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition]

Interesting things can happen. Now, if we all did this.

Spent the day reading Phil Agre papers (http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/). Mostly on technology and society, and the way computers are layered into existing institutions, affecting and affected by what is, making it more complex. Computational folks stick with the decartian view that the mind is a machine and so is the computer, but rel life practice keeps undermining this, and all real thought is both internal and embedded in a context.

Most important is his essay

The Practical Republic:

Social Skills and the Progress of Citizenship

Philip E. Agre

http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/republic.html

Where he argues that we live in a republican democracy and it requires skills to form relationships, analyze issues and participate, and there is no good theory of those skills.

I was very moved by a review of some Chekhov

This article can be found on the web at

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041213&;s=siegel

Imitation of Life by LEE SIEGEL

The Complete Short Novels

excerpts..

Chekhov's acheful, unsparing eye; his unforgiving yet gentle irony; his characters' dignified pathos and their pathetic attempts to dignify themselves with big theories of how to live in this world; and the writer's uncanny evocation of their self-delusion as simultaneously ludicrous and heartbreaking.

The honest core of Chekhov's art is the acknowledgment that even art is helpless in the face of life.

His own, private, untransmittable experience of life is, and will always be, the only truthful description of life that he will ever know. Somehow, Chekhov's art manages to transmit the untransmittable.

In other words, the only reality is fragile human life: meaningless except for the meanings we deluded and deluding people keep projecting onto it.

And yet it never stops being a parasol; it never becomes "literary." It carries meaning for the reader only because it has accrued the very same meaning for the characters. Unlike, say, D.H. Lawrence's famous rocking horse, the parasol is not a privileged communiqué over the characters' heads between the reader and the writer. It belongs to the characters.

It's as if these parentless children came into life already prepared for the fact that, as Laptev puts it, "there were no firm, lasting attachments." Their future lies in their beginning; they are pre-saddened.

If orphanhood is a pre-sadness, for Chekhov it is also a state of grace.

"Life is given only once," says Vladimir Ivanych, speaking for all of Chekhov's protagonists, "and one would like to live it cheerfully, meaningfully, beautifully." The best of Chekhov's people surrender their illusions and try to endure life's inherent limitations and disappointments. And for this sober honesty they are rewarded with a substitute for the cushioning mediations that they've given up. They learn to forgive themselves and to forgive other people; they learn to be kind. "Kindness" is a word that occurs over and over again in Chekhov. It is a mode of being rather than a big idea about how to live, a quality of experience rather than a mediation of experience. It is cheer, meaning and beauty self-created from within.

But the real struggle is between Laevsky and his lover, Nadezhda; and even more than that, between each one's perception of the other and the actual other. Laevsky has grown tired of Nadezhda. Stifled, bored, constantly irritated, he makes plans to leave her, but feelings of guilt and pity keep him stewing in misery by her side. What he doesn't know is that Nadezhda, vain and coquettish, has been slowly drifting away from him and impulsively, even innocently, conducting affairs with two other men. She also is mired in pity and guilt.

The boat is thrown back...it makes two steps forward and one step back, but the oarsmen are stubborn, they work the oars tirelessly and do not fear the high waves.... So it is in life.... In search of the truth, people make two steps forward and one step back. Sufferings, mistakes, and the tedium of life throws them back, but the thirst for truth and a stubborn will drive them on and on. And who knows? Maybe they'll row their way to the real truth...

Rather than issue a thunderous Tolstoyan judgment or proclamation or conclusion, which perhaps reminded him of a cruel father's tyranny, Chekhov finishes his tale with the stubborn facticity of the parasol. Its last sentence is: "It began to drizzle." What makes Chekhov so inestimably precious is that he is a writer who lets life have the last word. Which it does anyway.

It is this kind of reflection, tolerance, kindness, that is one of the gifts of our great writers.

Sat, 04 Dec 2004 06:22:16 GMT

Looks like Bush clears out the old cabinet, except Rumsfeld, and wants to move beyond that to take on Anan. When does "balance" come into play? Blowback? Resistance? Homeland Security seems like a terrible appointment. Then comes the Supreme Court.

On women and population : the reduction in fertility is based on choice to be a worker consumer (driven by the high cost of raising children), and not by free choice. I don't like coercive solutions.

On politics and the environment: i think the key leverage point will be food. Food currently is very subsidized. because of cheap energy to produce it (fertilizer from natural gas) and transport it. Food problems (and water) will drive security concerns and costs even in the US.

I know we are increasingly concerned that the US will fight for energy and dominance, against other regions and our own resistance citizens, rather than seek a harmonious world solution.

Bush's current attitude reminds me of a corporate take-over and the arbitrage that follows. I would feel worse except so many of us are in the same situation. After clearing out the Cabinet, now it is the UN to be dismantled.

Right wing view: its a tough world, we need to toughen our families and get people off welfare and government. War is inevitable. People are violent and have to chose sides. The need for religious belief is all that can help us through in an ethical way. People need religion to do it. The church should be the softener - civilizing influence. the government should be cheap and focus on national defense and commercial law. We need to cut back in order to compete and reward leaders who have the guts to make the tough decisions. That's why Bush should get rid of Education, Energy, Commerce, HHS and social security/Medicaid, and Endowment for the Arts. Get on with it. Time is short.

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 02:30:22 GMT

Some argue that war and reproduction are the two chief dynamics of human history. Make and destroy, in some kind of balance. Economics and technology shift where the balance point is, but the underlying dynamic remains the same.

Can it be otherwise? That is the real liberal hope.

I also just finished Michael Crichton's 1999 TimeLine, a novel about the ability to travel to the past, and the entrepreneur who funds the effort in order to create theme parks of the past as the only real entertainment in the future/present. The novel centers on his corporation in new Mexico and medieval town in the 1300's that he now wants to rebuild, but wants to go back there and find out what it was really like, in order to control the product, so to speak. Lots of good history and a fair story.

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 23:41:11 GMT

Thanksgiving was a time to think, to experience, to connect with nature and people. It seems like the Republicans now will turn to some serious infighting, and it may make monolithic governance even harder for them.

The Democrats don't seem to have a Central story: nearly winning the election, demographics moving in their favor (young voters more than any other group for Kerry), but the need to tell a story brings out how little of an agreed on story there is. The war? Globalization? Corporatism? There is no real agreement.

Makes one just thoughtful.

I read Vonnegut's 1950 Player Piano, a wonderful story about a dumb Texas governor, and the division of the world into managers, machines, and prols.

What most caught my attention was that the prol description fits much of the red voter profile, but that much of the managers (not admired in the story) fit the profile of many blue voters, and especially their spokespeople.

Suggests that the current red/ blue division is very thin, and the real division lines cut across all known identifiers.

Fri, 19 Nov 2004 02:39:48 GMT

More on yesterday's post (some repetition)

Is there an alternative? I think there is. To go out on a limb I call it “Garden world”. It is realistic about the current population, technology, governance, and violence. It seeks to find a world that can evoked in people, because it is close to human nature, historical symbols, and realizable.

Here is the idea: using high tech and entrepreneurial activity in the context of highly effective guidelines on environmental impact, to push for a high education, decentralized active world working to make everything beautiful, healthy, just, fair, and interesting.

There is a valley in India where the local culture measures economic development by the increase in song birds and biomass in the valley. Fredric Olmstead, who designed Central Park in New York, and much else besides, gives us a model of remediating the environment towards biological sustainability and beauty.

Further, I believe this in the only approach that finds advantage in facing the environmental, health, fairness and justice issues. Facing those issues are more attractive with garden world. The military or one world solutions have too great an incentive to mobilize around their expertise and to continue to aroid critical issues. .

Starting in 2003 I was part of a small group consulting to one of the campaigns on the use of language, and, noticing the difficulty the “progressives” had entering imaginatively and compassionately into the possible thought process of the right, I worked up a seminar called "What is on the minds of the Republicans?" There were two core ideas.

That both progressives and the right feared bigness, but projected it on to the other, and did not take responsibility for their own ties to bigness. The right feared big government and its bureaucracy, but supported big business with its government ties, as well as military which was related to both big government and big business, and the right supports large church organizations. And the left (using right and left as token words, filled with abstraction and error) feared big business and big military, but had its own ties to government programs and the use of courts to impose community standards that could not be achieved by legislation, and was tied to government and high tech business, and much of the left was supportive of a stronger military.

The right was afraid of a government bureaucracy that could undermine family responsibility with welfare, but was happy with farm subsidies and military pensions. and the left feared big business with its concentration of wealth and ties to a media which "determined" peoples' point of view.

Each side demonized the other in order to prevent the confusion, the cognitive dissonance, that came from seeing how close left and right values were. They all believe in education, justice, security, love of nature, healthy families, and a home with access to good food, health and hope.

The divergences, of which there are many and real, were not understood for what they meant - such as gun control and abortion, or Justice and Iraq and the nature of security, and the increasing marginalization in the economy of many - to the other side.

During the later stages of the campaign, George Lakoff's work on political Language ( see his book Moral Politics) became the buzz. He saw the left as favoring a spirit of government acting like a nurturing tolerant family with care and concern for losers. The right was drawn to the image of the paternalistic one right way family building strength of character to win in a tough world.

I could see the advantages of both views. It seems to me that the two together: fear of bigness and image of the family, combined, could "explain" lots of political behavior and the use of language to appeal to voters.

I think these can reduce to fear of change and technology, increasing alienation and the destruction of the ideas around human nature. The left stresses the need for support under change and the right favors retrenchment (and reaching out to religious community) to avoid the changes.

Fundamental issues, such as corporate charters, are not present in the larger debate, but polls I’ve seen and a few informal ones I’ve done suggest that the increase in corporate power, loss of environment, and threats to children are powerful issues.

What we on the progressive side need is to honor the fears on all sides, see our own side in an alliance with corporations and communications technology (for which a major customer is military), and tell a story that is attractive, not articulated in hate or slander.

A business climate that was regulated to protect the environment, maximizing hi-tech and even biotech, with an encouragement of entrepreneurial activity on a regional bases, new forms of more expressive and creative education, mortgage deductions only for houses under say 200,000, and an international policy of fairness and multilateral efforts, making the world safe for travel of people, not just money, protect social security, and rethink medical aid for the vast majority of non exotic illnesses…plus a clear denunciation of the war in Iraq, new efforts to rethink oil so that we don’t victimize the ME by either staying or leaving, new initiatives with Latin America and China (and an interesting plan for Cuba that is humane), and election reform that is clear and transparent. Boldness would have won this election.

What are Americans likely to do to support, to lend legitimacy to?

I think we can agree that increasing population, especially for the us which is currently predicted to grow from 290 million to 360 by 2050, will be continually destabilized by immigration and birth. By destabilized I don’t mean fall apart – only that the increase will be part of a dynamic that must be coped with – or it will fall apart.

And the US is increasingly un-insulated from much of the rest of the world, which means external destabilizations and internal destabilizations tend to get link and reinforce each other’s jolts.

There seem to me two likely paths for the world, and the choice is being made now and might be clear before the end of Bush’s second term.

The first is the one implicit in “Globalization” and American hegemony within that globalization – the integration of the world into a single market system, with interlocking corporate governance boards, unified standards, technologies, and regulations. The basic tendency here is t make the world into a single system. The rub is, that the biggest game in two is, who gets to control, own and benefit from, that system. This is a fairly peaceful world, with lots of controls and restraints. Think Microsoft, Citibank, WTO, UN, Davos.

The second is the division of the world into empires, highly militarized and full of wars in struggles for power to defend arrangements and to create new ones. Think China, US, Euro, Russia, India, a united Arab republic.

Many of us sense that Bush policy is pushing us to an unnecessary world of empires in conflict, rather than the internationally regulated path.

Unspoken so far is the question: is there another way? Clinton and Blair and others talked, in the mid 90’s, about a third way, a kind of democratic, safety net, regulated commercial environment that would be viable. I think they were on to something important,. And Europe and other parts of the world are in very active dialog about what that could be. The unemployment that arises from pitting countries against each other in a drive for low cost production keeps that dialog somewhat in the background, but those who travel to Europe, or have good behind the scenes contacts in China or Japan, and probably other places, know that the discussion is deep and intelligent and well informed. (see for example the book One China: many paths, issued last year). Within Islam there is a similar discussion that is very interesting. Within the Christian churches the issue is fully alive.

But, given the current mind set of the US population, you can see how these “alternatives’ draw out the anxiety, fear, and contempt that characterized the last election.

The press plays a key role because, in the need to sell advertising it needs an audience, and the audience is got by portraying conflict and personality, blood and sex. Us as audience are drawn in by the unconscious expectation that the media present us with images that provide us with very useful education as consumers (what kind of life style), and at the same time telling us what is the emotional atmosphere we live in. To do this the media must act like half a therapist, resonating with the unconscious forces that are active in people, without doing the second part of the work: making these forces conscious so we increase our range of freedom. Every reporter is trying to script what ties into the hopes and feras o the audience, and every editor is looking at what the reporters are giving her to decide which will get the biggest draw, the biggest emotional wow and fix, from the readers or audience.

So it is my view, so far, that Americans are full of images and expectations that are deeply historical and confusing, and that each person, embedded as they are in local culture and available media, in strained economic circumstances, and are vulnerable to emotional appeals that make them less thinkers than scouts. Rove said he looked at a political commercial for how it looks with the sound off (approximating the way he thought people actually take in the ads with peripheral vision more than focused critical awareness). This means people are looking for clues as to how to move through the jungle, what to make of the person ahead of them, to the side, behind and the lay of the land and its shadows, more than they are thinking policy and systems. Our intelligence is engaged at the survivor who is with who level, the kind of intelligence that apparently gave us the edge in the ice age, rather than with the kind of thinking that characterizes the professional office or the university, and requires some focused detachment. (see for example Don Schone’s TheReflective Practitioner)

Seeing it this way, many of us (I actually think very many) are not drawn to either party and its policies. We will fight hard because the “other” party looks so bad, and we need to find an alternative that can work, and hence we identify with one party to fight the other – and forget to work out what our party really will work for.

As it is, “our party”, and I mean republicans and democrats, are working to support both the one world (globalization) and empires at war scenarios. Clinton said at the opening of the Library that he thought war was right, just he timing was wrong. Kerry said the same. Both represent open expansionist markets that have made the rich richer and marginalized much of the world’s population (details here count).

Garden world, a reach, looks to me like the alternative two a managed or a militarized world. And of course, to be successful, it will borrow from the managed and the military solutions.

I was part of a project in 1995- 1999, rethinking military health for 2025. Our final statement was "As national security moves from winning wars to preventing chaos, military health moves from supporting the front line to being the front line."

Thu, 18 Nov 2004 01:18:07 GMT

We are also confused about the meanings of key words, especially liberal and conservative. Favoring private property, concern for fellow human beings, desire for an ethical society, preserving what is good, avoiding war, or tending to side with tradition? Which goes with which?

Starting in 2003 I was part of a small group consulting to one of the campaigns on the use of language, and, noticing the difficulty the “progressives” had entering imaginatively and compassionately into the possible thought process of the right, I worked up a seminar called "what is on the minds of the Republicans." There were two core ideas.

That both progressives and the right feared bigness, but projected it on to the other, and did not take responsibility for their own ties to bigness. The right feared big government and its bureaucracy, and the left (using these as token words, filled with abstraction and error) feared big business and big military. The left was tied to government and high tech business, and the right to business (especially large old style: energy, agriculture, pharmacy and energy) and the military, and to some degree church.

Each side demonized the other in order to prevent the confusion that came from seeing how close their values were. They all believe in education, justice, security, love of nature, healthy families, and a home with access to good food, health and hope.

At the same time, George Lakoff's work on political Language ( see his book Moral Politics) became the buzz. He saw the left as favoring a kind of government acting like a nurturing tolerant family with care and concern for losers. The right was drawn to the image of the paternalistic one right way family building strength of character to win in a tough world.

Sat, 06 Nov 2004 14:48:12 GMT

There are two problems

Iraq and economy.

The cure in Iraq is a multinational policing of terror

The cure for the economy is to recognize that too many are in jail, widely weak education, too few good jobs, and skewed income and wealth are all intertwined, and a goal of better distribution is essential., and a new business model that is small scale, regional, hi-tech, entrepreneurial and environmentally rigorous.

Politics now is a power game with spoils to the winner: no incentive for a really good social solution.

The democrats had no answer to Bush's "everyone wants freedom and democracy." Kerry did not offer any actual alternative on Iraq, nor on the economy. He avoided all the real issues, mirroring rather than countering Bush.

Kerry did offer a more reasoned style, but it appeared weak and inconsequential. It did not appear to be gentle,warm, humane and related.

Kerry offered nothing that appealed to the red counties. These are mostly people who are traumatized by change, and losers in it, left behind. They are motivated by fear and resentment and their need is primarily to make their failing families work. They cling to the only "community" offering them anything: the church. Outside are drugs, pregnancies, job threat, seductive media, which shows them a world of danger not of promise.

A straightforward proposal for policing terror (and corporate crime), and for vigorous environmentally friendly economy, with the education to get everyone there, would have appealed, and won if it were presented with tolerance, even affection, for regional differences.

Sat, 23 Oct 2004 17:05:48 GMT

With lots of young people assisting (?) at the polls but representing both sides in registration challenges and protecting voters ability to vote, the tendency or over vigorous action is accumulating. I am choosing words carefully.

Why is the country split? With modern polling everyone knows what are the hot issues, and move stand on issues to attract from the other side. Since both sides are doing this, with the exception of the personality of the candidates (which can still be spun), and since both sides have heavy professionals managing the pr stuff, the tendency is to have each side move toward the other in a struggle down to the last voter (Florida and Ohio). The result is a tendency, short of mal-practice by the advisers, to divide the electorate equally. Any apparent shift in one direction or the other by voter preference forces the other campaign to adjust its story until the emerging plurality is gone. Hence we get the 50-50 split.

Only dynamic issues, such as the American tendency to throw the bastards out, or under counting issues such as cell phone and younger voters, make for a decisive victory.

If we add together the two thoughts -violence at the polls and a fifty fifty split, you can see the emergence of a nightmare scenario.

My guess is there is no back channel discussion between the two candidates' staff on how to prevent this, nor of what to do if trouble emerges on election day or the day after.

Sat, 16 Oct 2004 19:25:41 GMT

OK, yes I agree we need a larger vision. But what is it? The move away from dogmatic structures to open thinking? A more aesthetic world? A world of more justice?

Let me propose two alternative views of the future.

1. garden world: the effective entrepreneurial environmentally sensitive (through rigorous standards) use of the best technologies, much broader distribution of income and wealth, much higher education levels balancing science, humanities and art, to build a world modeled more on Olmsted (central park and many others) than wall street and the twin towers, a world where the entire landscape is gardened, for human living and the production of wildlife, flowers, food, orchards, design sensitive, and with prizes and magazines and web sites and government priority.

vs.

security world, with army police and surveillance, the use of wealth to hide behind gated enclaves and abandon those on the outside to the residual employment, other than being as soldier, they can get. The use of tech to hold the together the infrastructure and provide the coordination and surveillance managed by elites for the benefit of elites.

I put it this way to highlight that we need a real image of a better future, something concrete to move towards. Imagine if each of us made sure that our own business was moving towards garden world and away from security world. Hard. Take a company like Hewlett Packard: what is the balance? I recall in 1972 interviewing John Young when he was President. - what percentage of HP business is military? 17%. By mid afternoon (I had lots of access) I had already gotten to 45%. H left out things like the Israeli and Japanese defense departments, and the stuff sold to AT&T used on tanks.

I see democracy emerging easily from #1 but submerged to mere manipulation in #2.

Sat, 16 Oct 2004 18:29:13 GMT

The core problem for me with Bush et al is what they are drawn towards: bully power rather than concern for the fate of people. Permanent war is really attractive to president. He is not drawn to justice, art, compassion, ordinary lives, nor peace. Taking a stand attracts him, building something real he does not have the patiene not sensibility for. A failure of education, family influence, life experience.

Fri, 15 Oct 2004 16:39:50 GMT

The reason the Cheney episode is so powerful in the psyche is because it touches on the power of government to humilate the individual. No matter that the case doesn't fit well, the fact that there is such a reaction (stirred by Republican PR folks who need an issue desperately) tells us lots about the psyche and politics. Everyone does feel humiliated by the political scene, the economy, Iraq, Islam, Christianity, environment. It is all a more than bearable dose of humiliation.

Fri, 08 Oct 2004 15:18:01 GMT

This morning, sitting here, a rainy slow start with dark clouds, I took the time to imagine, pretent, that I was in the debate and had to say what i thought. What is the presidency, what makes a good president, what is the rlation to the rest of government, to the population, the world, the issues?

Highly recommended, do it out loud, listen to yourself with real interest, seee how hard it is, how logic goes astray and phrases that would be mocked in the talk shows. Realize you can't stop to think, you must keep talking...

Tue, 21 Sep 2004 18:35:10 GMT

Another way of looking at the previous: the progressives and conservatives both believe in economic production, but split between openness and control on social issues. But this split is not the key that people feel in their gut.

The problem is, much of the country (and all of to some degree) are not happy with the model of continually expanding production. But to stop economic growth would be to create crisis in the whole system because there is not a flow of income to support much of the population.

We are on the edge of negotiating our way through this edge where more will lead to collapse, but stopping will lead to chaos. What to do?

A major question seems to me to be how politics and technology intersect. And can new tech, nano for example, offer a way toward more economics with less stuff?

What can of governance can make these decisions? Is one dollar one vote the model? Or does it just lead to the tech that aids centralized control?

Tue, 21 Sep 2004 17:54:25 GMT

I continually am puzzled by the depth of confusion about "liberal". To many it means the expectation that markets and production will create a better world and that the tensions between ownership and employment can be managed. In its modern form it leads to neo-liberalism, which is the belief in markets and individual property uber alles. (and then we have the neo-cons, who really are neo-liberals in many ways). Yet another tradition of "liberal" means generosity, tolerance, and the belief that if people are given education and hope the can do well without coercion. The problem is that the American liberal is seen as being in favor of big world forces by the American small world folks. (who paradoxically it seems, seems, would use military to impose restraints on change).

A challenge to the liberals is

Christopher Lasch's (from the preface to The Only True Heaven, a critique of the critiques of the concept of progress, 1991)

The political economists of progress hoped to unleash wealth creating desire; Emerson and Carlyle reaffirmed the ancient folk wisdom to which overweening desire invites retribution, the corrective, compensatory force of nemesis. …It is most simply described, perhaps, as the sensibility of the petty bourgeoisie…I have no intention of minimizing the narrowness and provincialism of nor do I deny that it has produced racism, nativism, anti-intellectualism, and all the other evils so often cited by liberal critics. But liberals have lost sight of what is valuable in lower middle class culture in their eagerness to condemn what is objectionable. Their attack on "Middle America," which eventually gave rise to a a counter attack against liberalism—the main ingredient in the rise of the new right - have blinded them to the positive features of petty-bourgeois culture: its moral realism, its understanding that everything has its price, its skepticism about progress. Whatever can be said against them, small proprietors, artisans, tradesmen, and farmers—more often victims of "'improvement" than beneficiaries—are unlikely to mistake the promised land of progress for the true and only heaven.

In the back of my mind is comparing why George Lakoff is so popular in his analysis of political language of the republicans and democrats when Lasch's seems the more powerful - and usable. I think the answer is that Lasch forces us all to reconsider who progress and our own social position is being resisted by the red states, the country conservatives, the religious resistors. Lasch assumes that our own position is OK.

Tue, 21 Sep 2004 00:40:41 GMT

How do you take six billion people who are not so smart, and their leaders who are not so smart, and put them together in a system which by its nature attracts some to want to own it and control it? The founding fathers opted for checks and balances, a government that actually doesn't work well, on the idea that if it did, it would be a tyranny.

What would a future equivalent of the founders' vision, deep in tolerance and curiosity, look like?

Mon, 20 Sep 2004 17:00:31 GMT

Difficult times. The mess in Iraq has no obvious solution. leaving, not leaving, elections, or not. If we put it as Bin Laden or the US gets to win, we see the difficulty. And then connections to Israel, and Iran, the near certainty of a deeper war based on those alone. And Palestinian civil war, and an Israeli civil war.

Then we have the economy, with diminishing resources for the US to do anything, including repairing its own society.

Lets look at the longer term, the phases of a large society going from hope to despair. Ten ears, twenty years. We know that, at the worst, there will be a recovery, probably not to something completely familiar, but also not completely unknown.

Building toward the new emerging decency, belief in people and institutions, in art and education, children and private time - these should be a major part of our concern, being ready to breathe along with the emergence of a better sense...

Wed, 01 Sep 2004 16:00:04 GMT

The near absence of democrats on the responses on the main TV channels last night compares with the near absence of democrats commenting after the democratic evenings a few weeks ago. That ther can be this depth of unfairness, media control, bully tactics, leaves me feeling very nervous this morning.

There is the possibility that it was democratic strategy, to lay low, let the republicans self immolate. But that requires a degree of coordination I think is impossible on the democratic side. But Kerry's strategy could be to lay low, as Bush did during the democratic convention, and to do other wise would be to be open to charges of uncivility. The next week, after the conventon closes, will be important. Kerry today speaks to the VFW.

If we combine that with the "message," that the repubicans can say anything, like "we have captured or killed off 2/3 of al queda." and many others, just repeating, with no regard for the truth, and the press mostly goes along, then we are in deep.

Is there a democratic response, and where really is Kerry on the issues of Iraq, the economy, and justice?

Americans seem to want security, malls, and heavy food. The german conservatives of the 20's l;et the thugs do thier work into the 30's. Are we doing the same?

Tue, 31 Aug 2004 17:46:45 GMT

Michael Moore in USA Today. excerpt

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/2004-08-30-moore-gopamerica_x.htm

I've often found that if I go down the list of "liberal" issues with people who say they're Republican, they are quite liberal and not in sync with the Republicans who run the country. Most don't want America to be the world's police officer and prefer peace to war. They applaud civil rights, believe all Americans should have health insurance and think assault weapons should be banned. Though they may personally oppose abortion, they usually don't think the government has the right to tell a women what to do with her body.

There's a name for these Republicans: RINOs or Republican In Name Only. They possess a liberal, open mind and don't believe in creating a worse life for anyone else.

So why do they use the same label as those who back a status quo of women earning 75 cents to every dollar a man earns, 45 million people without health coverage and a president who has two more countries left on his axis-of-evil-regime-change list?

I asked my friend on the street. He said what I hear from all RINOs: "I don't want the government taking my hard-earned money and taxing me to death. That's what the Democrats do."

Money. That's what it comes down to for the RINOs. They do work hard and have been squeezed even harder to make ends meet. They blame Democrats for wanting to take their money. Never mind that it's Republican tax cuts for the rich and billions spent on the Iraq war that have created the largest deficits in history and will put all of us in hock for years to come.

The Republican Party's leadership knows America is not only filled with RINOs, but most Americans are much more liberal than the delegates gathered in New York.

The Republicans know it. That's why this week we're seeing gay-loving Rudy Giuliani, gun-hating Michael Bloomberg and abortion-rights advocate Arnold Schwarzenegger.

As tough of a pill as it is to swallow, Republicans know that the only way to hold onto power is to pass themselves off as, well, as most Americans. It's a good show.

So have a good time, Republicans. It could be your last happy party for awhile if all the RINOs and liberal majority figure it out on Nov. 2.

I think this is quite right. RINO's are skeptical about democratic capacity to control costs. Gore's Reinventing Government was the best approach to this I know. and it was killed internally by the political handlers for Clinton, and by Gore's domestic policy advisors.

Tue, 31 Aug 2004 06:19:37 GMT

The republican convention is 9/11 and terrorism and the need for a war.. and the whole is a cover for business intersts (not all but a handful of old industries, oil, banking, armaments, ..) and a complex support for Israel.. all because of fear of change, fear of culture, fear of science..

But bureucracy is real, and not very functional. The dems and progressives have not take on the challenge of making sure that more money for health, education, aznd military really pay off rather than just sink money. Lots of work to do. Will Kerry take it on, or keep the empire going in a Clinton style neo-liberalism (economic globalization)?

Mon, 23 Aug 2004 01:16:04 GMT

The appeal of Islam

The Middle East was, an ancient times, say from 4500 BC until the time of Christ, a world in conflict of great empires. In coping with this mess religious salvation played a large role.

For the great empires, including Egypt, the city and its people were seen as a microcosm of the universe and the leaders took the view that to upset the city, say by revolution, was to destroy the harmony of the universe.

The Hebrews walked out of Egypt, left of the empire, and declared that the contract was not between the cosmos and the empire, but between god and the tribe. In the evolution in the last 500 years before Christ the Hebrews sought their own power in the flux of empires. But the prophets protested the loss of humanity in this pursuit.

In the alienation of especially country people from this move of the tribe toward power, Jesus rewrote the contract as being between god and the individual, not god and the tribe. This appeal to being a good person and finding salvation amongst the nasty flux of empires had broad appeal and Christianity spread widely in the Middle East.

While this was happening the Roman empire fell apart and in its last years, looking for a new legitimacy, embraced Christianity as the official state religion. The result was that many of the followers found themselves once again on the outside of the empire and abandoned to economic and military necessities of others. Islam arose in this context, giving a spiritual vision and hope for community justice to those marginalized by the large forces of the time.

The rising power of Islam was met by the crusades with the result being a dividing line between Europe and the Middle East. These two societies, both basically decent, developed hatred towards each other and borrowed each other's negative views of the other.

A new wave of islamic success led to the ottoman empire, once again organizing the Islamic world uncomfortably under the control of Turkey. This did not fall apart till world war one and the Middle East was carved up for the benefit of colonial powers which hired local strongman to maintain control and get oil.

For the remainder of the twentieth century Islam has continued to be attractive to those marginalized by colonialism, or that new variant called globalization. But globalization is really a new way of hiring local elites to run economies that benefit the old powers.

What is important to see is that that the democracy and free markets that America is claiming to represent are not either democracy nore free markets n the ideal sense. They are ways of organizing people to get them to return existing elites to power through voting and to organize local markets that benefit local elites and their customers in the developed world.

Islam continues to hold out an ethical promise for those who, through marginalization, have neither economic power nor a viable culture. Saudi Arabia shows this clearly, where money in the extreme was combined with a shallow market culture of servants from the Philippines and a Mercedes-Benz.

So the crux is that what the U.S. seems to be offering at this moment in history is in fact quite different from what Islam is offering. Islam can be corrupt and the west could be more democratic with more justice. But we will miss the essence of the struggle if we think that the oppressed people of the Middle East We'll be attracted to the current American form of democracy and markets.

In all humility, we must also recognize two key facts.

First, that the problems in the Middle East are very much the result of western policies, Such as the support of dictators, and our willingness to use them, such as we did in Afghanistan, for our own Cold War interests. The details of this history are much better known in the Middle East than they are to almost all westerners and we seem to them very ignorant by comparison.

Second, that overall American policy Is bankrupting the country and we are headed for a painful correction. The world sees this and does not trust us. Moreover, We no longer have the resources to continue on our current economic and military paths.

We need to be much smarter about who we are, about who the middle east is, and how human beings think. The ability to kill does not make a winner but creating hope and building a culture Does. And, recall that folks like Fukuyama are wrong to think that america represents democracy and viable markets. It represents a form of democracy and markets, and one without full approval or appeal, even to our own citizens.

Thu, 29 Jul 2004 22:42:02 GMT

Before tonight's speech, one of the downsides of Bush's approach to 9/11 and terrorism has been a general militarization of the whole atmosphere. Instead of a precision incision orchestrated among the many friends after 9/11 we got blustery i can do it myself mega war (the promise of the big blow in Baghdad fizzled in the first hours of the war) and grade-school bullying. Kerry's war posturing now is a direct result of Bush's escalation into that zone. It might take a long time, given the mounting world pressures (china, economy, migrations) to get past this defining moment.

Just as the body can overreact to a bee sting, so we are killing ourselves by our reation to being stung.

Thu, 29 Jul 2004 16:51:43 GMT

And, the raw fact is quite shocking. I had no idea it was such a decrease. Note, during this time the wealth of the Forbes 400 went up. But the rich genrally were hurt, below the very top teir. (this article talks of income, not wealth). The details are worth a serious look. In many ways this is an xray of the country, and like an xray, it shows the infrastructure but not the spirit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/29/business/29tax.html?hp

The overall income Americans reported to the government shrank for two consecutive years after the Internet stock market bubble burst in 2000, the first time that has effectively happened since the modern tax system was introduced during World War II, newly disclosed information from the Internal Revenue Service shows.

The total adjusted gross income on tax returns fell 5.1 percent, to just over $6 trillion in 2002, the most recent year for which data is available, from $6.35 trillion in 2000. Because of population growth, average incomes declined even more, by 5.7 percent.

Adjusted for inflation, the income of all Americans fell 9.2 percent from 2000 to 2002, according to the new I.R.S. data.

It is clear that the high spending on tech in 98 99 led to a reduction in IT budgets in 2000 after y2k. The resulting break in the bobble is not Bush's fault, and would also have happened to Gore. The problem with Bush is his instinct on how to handle a problem, not the underlying economic or security realities. 9/11 was planned long before the election.

I happen to think Kerry looks pretty good. Flexible, lots of freinds, knowledgeable, cagey, slightly detached and observant. That seems to me to have more to do with the election than issues that would have been difficult for anyone.

The remaining issue for many is, can Kerry do anything about the corporate takeover of the country, the power of concentrtaed media, and issues like China. He has a chance, whereas Bush cannot handle these issues.