Dave Pollard: Politics & Economics

Dilemmas for Progressives

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 05:56:55 GMT

BLOG Dilemmas for Progressives

Image of homelessness from the now-defunct Italian blog Moving & Learning

If you're a progressive and/or environmentalist you know it's not always easy to be good. Sometimes you have to make really tough choices, where you feel uneasy no matter what you do. Here are ten that I find troubling. If you've faced them and have found a way to deal with them, I'd love to hear from you.

Choosing Your Charities: There are a hundred good causes always asking for money, and hundreds of people on the streets asking for change, busking, washing your windshield, selling those 50 cent newspapers etc. How do you choose? Who do you give to, and when? Local or global? Health or social service? People you know raising money for luxuries or organized fundraisers supporting the really desperate? Cash or a good meal?
Local vs Organic/Humane/Fair Trade Foods: It's so hard to find stuff that's both. Between fresh local stuff that could well be tainted with melamine and other toxins, and long-distance, shipped-by-diesel ethical foods that might have no nutrition left, which do you choose?
Government-Assisted & Centralized, or Community-Based: On the big-ticket issues where inequality is at critical levels, like education and health, most progressives like the idea of universal, free-for-all programs. But at the same time community-based unschooling programs, and community-run clinics that use volunteers to stretch dollars, have a lot of appeal and they're the antithesis of massive, state-run programs. And what is your position on voucher programs, that basically give people the money (or equivalent) and leave it up to them how to spend it (on food, on their choice of schools etc.)?
City Versus Country: Country is healthier, and better for the soul, but (unless you telecommute and are very self-sufficient) city is more ecologically sustainable, more land-economical. The suburbs are no compromise -- they're the worst of both worlds. So where do you choose to live?
Immigration Policy: At current rates ofimmigration, the US population will soar to 300 million by 2100, and the Canadian population to 35 million. Many people believe we have no right to keep people out just because of where they had the misfortune to be born. But such populations will wipe out our last remaining wilderness, increase pollution proportionally to their numbers, and devastate our forests and farmlands. So do you opt for human kindness or ecological sustainability?
Stopping at Zero: Those who don'tcare about our environment, or don't know any better, have no compunction about having large families. Whatshould we do about such people? Compensate by having none, or just one, of our own? Make it clear that we find their conduct irresponsible and reprehensible? Even if they're good in other ways, or the loved ones of our loved ones?
Watch or Turn it Off: The news ismostly bad, and mostly unactionable, so there's a tendency to shut it off and not subject yourself to more grief -- you know what's happening, and don't need to be reminded. Or do you? Is there something in that news that is your undiscovered cause, something that you can do something about, something that you really need to know?
Make & DIY, versus Buy: There is much to be said for self-sufficiency, both because it's ecologically sustainable and because it's pleasurable to learn to do things for yourself. But the trade-off is the time it takes you to learn and practice, and the factthat someone else may have this as their only skill, their only way to make a living, and if everyone does it themselves, they're out of a job.
Made in China or Doing Without:There are many things, from clothes to computers, that are almost impossible to buy from local or even domestic suppliers. So the alternative to buying something shoddily (and environmentally irresponsibly) made by slave labour in China for some giant multinational corporation, overpackaged and shipped thousands of miles, that will end up in the landfill in six months, is not to buy that item at all (unless you have the time and skill to make it yourself -- see #8 above). What are we willing to live without?
Choosing How to Spend Your Time: This is probably the toughest dilemma of all. So much needs to bedone. But we need to focus on where we can make a real difference, and on causes that we not only care about, but enjoy working on. Life is too short to do work you don't love. And you need time for yourself and those you love, too.

Thoughts? Other ethical dilemmas? Let me know your take on all this.

Category: Frames, Left & Right

PS: Help me pick a new subscribe-by-email tool: R-mail, the tool I have been using to allow users to subscribe to How to Save the World by e-mail, has been down for awhile. It may be time for me to switch. If any of you have used RssFwd, Zookoda, or FeedBurner for this purpose, please let me know.

Links for the Week: Saturday, November 15, 2008

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 04:33:37 GMT

We Have Seen the Lolcats, and They Are Us: Jay Dixit and New Yorker cartoonist Bob Mankoff ruminate on the appeal of animal cartoons in a wonderful article on Salon. "The animals aren't animals at all, they're stand-ins," explains Mankoff. "They're hybrids we use as devices to talk about the feelings we can't name in other ways." Focus of their attention is a hugely popular collaborative website about "lolcats" (funny animal photos with clever captions) called icanhascheezburger. Many of these dwell on feelings of sorrow, grief, fear, stress, anxiety and pathos that we don't dare relate directly. Some of them develop whole series of follow-up cartoons, such as the walrus series depicted above (the initial cartoon, top, and then a follow-up weeks later). Because it's collaborative, and because it allows us to speak to each other about things that are important but too intense to just blurt out, this is a vital form of art, and connection, a universal leveler to convey the things that matter to us all. And anyone can play.

Bringing Art to Bear on the Challenges of our Time: My friend Andrew Campbell has been co-operating retreats in France that are open to change champions from all backgrounds, and which draw on a natural setting, the use of local herbs, and self-expression and discovery through art study and practice, to help participants become more truly present and hence better able to help themselves and others prepare for the changes that will occur and be needed in the future. "This capacity to see from the heart lies at the core of what it means to sense the emerging future. And seeing from the heart means sensing the patterns of our emergent future in the grains of sand that are our present, right now, right here." The more I learn and observe facilitation, the more convinced I am that the work of competent facilitators is perhaps the most important work going on in the world today, and the most important for our future.

What Makes an Innovation Useful and Successful: The 2007 book Made to Stick by Chip & Dan Heath is a worthy successor to The Tipping Point. It argues that six qualities differentiate memorable "sticky" ideas and hence successful, useful innovations built on such ideas from the rest: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness (show don't tell, and provide examples), inherent Credibility, appeal to Emotions, and conveyance through Story. Tell a simple, unexpected, concrete, credentialized, emotional story, the authors say, and people will listen and respond positively. Thanks to Tree for the link.

What Happens When We Stop Buying?: Consumer spending drives the whole economy. Governments everywhere are pouring new money into the banking industry in the hopes that bankers will be able to start loaning money cheap to consumers again, notwithstanding their inability to repay it, and the fact that their collateral assets (their homes and investments) are now worth less than the debts taken out against them. Then, it is hoped, consumers will start borrowing again, and then they can start spending recklessly again, as if the whole implosion of the real estate and stock market were just a bad dream. But what happens if consumers decide they've had enough? If consumers start buying only what they need, and living within their means, will that spell the end of the Growth Economy?

Is CitiGroup Next to Fall?: Shortly after I correctly predicted the collapse of Lehman Brothers, I more boldly predicted that CitiGroup would be the first giant to fall. Citi is one of those companies that is (like AIG, and unlike Lehman) too big to be allowed to fail. But while AIG was horrifically expensive to rescue (and despite the billions doled out to it, might, through sheer mismanagement, still fail), Citi could simply be too expensive to rescue. So far this year it has lost 68% of its share value and shed 40,000 jobs, but it is still in trouble. Ironically, its survival now seems to depend on its ability to buy up smaller rivals and hang on in the hopes their value rises again. Meanwhile, its executives are reinvesting their massive salaries and bonuses in company stock, to demonstrate confidence in their own company. If they fail to improve solvency and liquidity, this will present a huge challenge to Obama: This could be the corporate bailout that breaks the bank, and sends the US dollar, and the global economy, into the worst tailspin since the Great Depression.

Even in a Recession, the Rich Get Richer: And, speaking of AIG, Naomi Klein explains why the bailout as currently devised is just another massive, no-strings-attached wealth transfer from the taxpayer to wealthy corporatists.

The Climate for Change: In case you missed it, here is Al Gore's prescription for immediate action in the US to combat climate change:

Large investment in solar, wind and geothermal plants
National "smart grid" of new efficient electrical transmission lines
Full conversion of all US-made vehicles to plug-in hybrids
Massive investment to retrofit buildings for greater energy efficiency, along with current mortgage relief plans
Pricing carbon, reducing deforestation, and helping create Kyoto II to go far beyond the Kyoto accord

Ngamoko Hut: If you haven't yet discovered Pohangina Pete's breathtaking photography (and the lovely lyrical prose that accompanies it) now's a good time.

Just for Fun: For all who have asked, no, I'm not the British Second Life denizen named Dave Pollard whose online affairs have landed him in divorce court.

Thoughts for the Week: (1) From PS Pirro: "When you want something, don't assume people can read your mind. Ask."

(2) Thanks to Tree (and to Dave Smith) for putting me on to the poetry of Marge Piercy, and specifically this poem:

To Be of Use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Links for the Week: Saturday November 8, 2008

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 21:54:21 GMT

Putangitangi chick. Photo by Pohangina Pete McGregor. Wonder what this little guy is thinking and feeling and intending?

This is the Big Show. This: Colleen Wainwright realizes why she's been blogging, and what she's meant to do -- "Externalizing my process. And, with a little continued good fortune in the right direction, helping other people to discover and disseminate their own fabulosity." This is what writers and facilitators do (as William said, I do...this.) The sweet spot. Find what it is for you, and you'll know what to do for the rest of your life.

Forty Excuses for Not Doing What's Important: Jen Lemen has a wonderful list of how not to get things done. If you're a procrastinator, you'll be familiar with these.

If You Can't Get a Goat, Get a Scythe: Kevin Cameron reminds us there were effective ways to mow before the age of oil.

Rushkoff Calls Us to Action: "The opportunity is not to create the next great website for modeling bottom-up community activity, but to go and actually do the stuff. It is to participate the public school, work towards alternative energy possibilities, design and install bicycle lanes, argue at work for equal pay for women, assist local agriculture projects, develop complementary currencies and non-profit credit unions." Obama can't do any of these things for us. It's up to us to roll up our sleeves and get to work. This is not to negate what Colleen says above -- for some of us, the work is facilitating and inspiring (but not planning, directing or leading) the work of others. Thanks to David Parkinson for the link.

Where McCain-Palin Won, and What It Means: Several months ago, after reading Deer Hunting With Jesus, I predicted a McCain win. I was wrong, fortunately, but my logic (and that of Joe Bageant) was exactly right. The Scots-Irish core of America went even more for the Republicans this election than they did under Bush, as this NYT map discussed by Paul Rosenberg shows. The rest of the country did not follow suit, or we would all be in big trouble today. Thanks to Dave Smith for the link. Meanwhile Joe's anonymous political pundit "Joe Brown" presents a very troubling picture of the future: "Centrist" Obama capitulating to the powerful corporatists while Palin forges a new, radical, fearful and desperate (non-neo) conservatism.

A Crisis of Management not Economics: The always-entertaining Henry Mintzberg explains why the financial crisis is a result of incompetent management throughout the US and global economy. We should have known, and done, better. Thanks to David Creelman for the link.

All He Could Manage Was a Fly-By: Simon Schama deconstructs the record and legacy of the worst president in American history.

Second Life Isn't the Future of Education, It's the Future of the Web: Chris Lott documents a debate on the role of virtual worlds in education, and like me, comes up in the middle -- the technology is still amateur and unreliable, and mostly education in the future will be as it always has been -- learning by watching and doing, in real life, not the time-waste that goes on in classrooms, virtual and media, but as the technology improves it is inevitable that we will interact on the web through avatars, and assume a virtual 'presence' that mimics much more closely our real-life 'presence'. Virtual worlds are the ultimate social networking tool, nothing more.

But Oh My Desert Yours Is the Only Death I Cannot Bear: Cheryl's tour around the outside of Australia by caravan recently took her through the desolate Nallabor Plain, and her story, as always, is insightful and riveting. This is what blogs were meant for.

November 28-29 is Buy Nothing Day: This year it makes sense for all kinds of reasons. Mark it on your calendar. Thanks to Graham Clark for the reminder.

Just for Fun: Visualization of the tastes of different wines. Thanks to my colleague Greg Turko for the link.

Thought For the Week: Five poets write about the US election.

Obama's Top Ten Tasks

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 01:04:22 GMT

Cartoon from the New Yorker by the late Charles Elmer Martin

I'm sure there will be many lists like this rolled out over the coming months, but here's my take on the most important things Obama needs to do over the next four years:

Unwrecking the Economy: We've had three decades of corporatism and cronyism run amok. Obama needs to:

Restore the progressive (graduated) tax system by rolling back all the tax cuts for the wealthy that have been unleashed since the Reagan years. There is absolutely nothing wrong with people earning a million dollars a year paying 40% of that in taxes.
Restore all the regulations on business that Bush has undone, especially anti-combines (anti-monopoly) regulations, pro-labour and pro-environment regulations. And he needs to put resources into enforcing those regulations and jailing offenders, not letting them settle out of court for minor fines.
Expel and prosecute (to at least retrieve exorbitant salaries and bonuses) the executives of incompetently-run corporations that the taxpayers are bailing out, and nationalize these companies, not give them what amounts to interest-free loans. If and when they can be restored to health, then the government can sell them back, at full fair values, to private sector investors.
Cancel all 'free' trade agreements and replace them with fair trade agreements, that protect workers and the environment everywhere, including full costing of social and environmental costs at the border, so that there is no motivation to export jobs or pollution.
Cancel all the subsidies and pork paid out to big corporations, starting with the $150B/year of taxpayer money doled out to big agribusiness, none of which reaches either the farmers or the food consumer.
Greatly strengthen consumer protections, and enact a consumer bill of rights.
Slash military spending, prohibit 'outsourcing' and 'privatization' of any military or security activity, and require all military sourcing to be open-tendered and open to small producers.
Remove the "personhood rights" of corporations. They don't have the same obligations and shouldn't have the same rights as real people.
Reduce the interest rates on all mortgages to two points over prime, under a national 'amnesty' program, that would not change unless there was a default. Reduce the maximum interest rate that can be charged on any debt to four points over prime. If a lender needs to charge more than that, it's not a loan, it's a gamble. End the tax deductibility of interest.
Tax capital gains at the same tax rate as other income, and charge a speculation tax on quick flip trades (those held for less than a month) especially on commodities and currencies. Charging a higher rate of tax on earned income than on speculative investments is just wrong.
Create a 10-year program to eliminate the annual deficit and a 50-year program (it will take that long) to eliminate the $14T national debt. No more stealing from future generations to pay for our lifestyle today.

Restoring Civil Freedoms: In the interests of security, the US has become an arbitrary police state. Obama needs to:

Restore judicial integrity by purging the courts of ideological zealots who do not have the competence to do their jobs.
Restore the balance of powers by ceding, and prohibiting forever, the rights to ignore and violate the law Bush has seized in the interest of "national security". No one is above the law.
Restore transparency to government and the judicial system.
Restore the separation of church & state, by prohibiting the use of government money for 'faith-based' programs and removing the tax-exempt status from religious groups that use their funds and pulpits for political purposes.
Dismantle the inept brownshirt Homeland Security bureaucracy, which, next to the bailout, has been the biggest waste of money in US history, and a massive intrusion on the civil liberties of innocent citizens.
Close Guantanamo, the University of the Americas, and all the covert CIA and CIA-sponsored training facilities and torture prisons.
Restore freedom of information laws.
Ban capital punishment.

Restoring Environmental Protections: Hard to know where to start with this one, it's such a massive job. Obama needs to:

Reinstate all environmental regulations canceled or weakened by Bush, and dramatically increase resources to monitor and prosecute violations of these regulations.
Make intervention of the administration into law enforcement and regulation a criminal offense.
Institute mandatory jail sentences for serious environmental crimes.
Protect huge areas of wilderness, forests, mountains, and water from all human activity.

Seriously Tackling Global Warming: The US needs to lead the way far beyond Kyoto. Obama needs to:

Commit to a 90% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, with 2% reduction a year the minimum and 350ppm the maximum tolerable. This will require a huge amount of innovation and conservation, both of which will be good for all of us.
Lead by reducing government and public entity emissions by 4% a year.
Introduce a progressive tax on non-renewable energy and resources that will effectively increase their cost by 10% per year until consumption has dropped by 90%
Use the proceeds to fund research into, and subsidize, legitimate (i.e. not corn ethanol, not nukes) renewable energy and resources

Reducing Economic, Social and Political Inequality: The soaring inequality between rich and poor lies behind much of the malaise in the economy and the social fabric. It's been disguised by the massive borrowing of the poor, but that disguise is now coming off. Obama needs to:

Redistribute wealth on a huge and consistent scale from rich to poor. Tax hikes for the rich mentioned above are a start. Tax shelters should be eliminated through use of a simple and substantial graduated minimum tax. Substantial gift and estate taxes should be instituted to redistribute wealth when it is least painful to do so -- when the rich person dies. A negative income tax should be used to get the proceeds from that into the hands of the poor.
Replace institutionalized services with community-based services (and fix the health 'care' and education crises in the process). Instead of paying huge institutions money to "serve" the poor, give that money to the poor and let them choose how to spend it. Encourage the creation of small, locally-run schools, clinics and other essential service facilities, staffed in part by volunteers, to leverage the value of this investment and de-institutionalize services.

Ending the Wars: This one is simple. Obama needs to:

Call together all its allies and all the countries in the MidEast, and announce his intention to withdraw US military presence entirely from Iraq and Afghanistan within 90 days.
Ask other countries to help with the withdrawal, by taking in refugees and helping get them out of the country, and by committing humanitarian aid (people and supplies) to deal with the power vacuum as much as possible. Both countries will dissolve into civil war, unfortunately, but that is inevitable in any case. We all need to work together to make the best of a miserable situation, and learn once and for all that you cannot impose democracy and civil liberalism on another country.
Start demilitarizing the world, by working through the UN to halt all sales of munitions, end the use of land mines and other especially inhumane weapons, and destroy the world's nuclear stockpiles. Our money is much better spent on solving the massive problems this century is bringing us.

Abandoning Colonialism: Colonialists believe that they have a better answer, politically, socially, economically, or religiously, than the people who live in another country, and should be able to impose that answer on them. It has never worked and never will. Obama needs to:

State that the US will cease all political, economic and military intervention in other countries immediately -- its only intervention in future will be humanitarian.
Forgive foreign debts incurred by ruinous dictators, give back the land and resources we have essentially stolen from the people of the third world, and let these struggling nations start fresh to solve their own problems. They will make plenty of mistakes -- we all have. But the only way they will learn to make their states viable and sustainable, on their own terms, is by doing it themselves.

Election and Campaign Reform: Obama needs to:

Make elections publicly funded, prohibit corporate and private donations, cap advertising, and make public disclosure of all lobbying activity mandatory.
Outlaw gerrymandering, through the use of non-partisan electoral commissions.
Go back to paper ballots with scrutineers. They're cheaper, just as fast, and can't be rigged.
Limit what taxpayers' money can be spent on.

Engaging the Citizens: Learned helplessness, fear and blind obedience have been the means by which Bush kept the people in line and off guard, while he robbed them blind and destroyed their reputation. Obama needs to:

Recruit all of the American people to rebuild the nation's shattered social fabric, community by community, collaboratively, reaching across differences, being generous, really caring about other people, learning to do things for themselves, learning how the world works and how it can work better.
Get people to volunteer, especially those who can really afford it, and have been on the sidelines far too long.
Remove the real obstacles to rebuilding the civil state and the economy. The obstacles aren't regulations or taxes, they're monopolies and oligopolies, intellectual property lawyers, brokers and agents and self-aggrandizing executives and financial 'service' people who do nothing of value and get paid exorbitantly for it, speculators, money-hoarders, usurers, bullies, buck-passers, and bureaucrats. Get them out of our way and let us, enable us, to get to work.

Picking the Right Team: BHO can't do it alone. He needs to pull together a team of bright, imaginative, courageous people. Maybe you're one of them. If so, make sure he knows.

There are two things that are conspicuously missing from this list:

Health and Education Reform: As I noted in point 5 above, I'm not in favour of top-down systems for managing public health and education. I think each community knows (or can quickly learn) what it needs, and if given the resources can use them to create viable health and education systems much better than any distant government can. So perhaps surprisingly I'm no longer in favour of universal health care or free education, unless that is achieved at the community level. I think it's more achievable at that level, and without the prohibitive cost of top-down national and state-directed programs.
Energy Strategy: The global warming measures in point 4 above essential determine the only viable energy strategy for the future: Use less, and pull out all the stops to find renewable sources.

So now it begins. As Garrison Keillor said this morning: Keep Seat Belt Buckled. Here we go.

Category: US Politics

Links for the Week -- Saturday/Sunday November 1-2, 2008

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 02:53:17 GMT

New Yorker cartoon by Mick Stevens

This Is the Part Where You're Supposed to Save Me: In Life is a Verb, Patti Digh relates the story of her surprising conversation with her airplane seatmate, named Yaron. She was asked to read this story during a book tour visit to Madison WI, and broke into tears partway through, asking her host, improv guru Jodi Cohen, to "save her". Jodi wrote to Patti later about the incident, and part of her reply was:

What I really want to say is, There are these moments when we are revealed. There are these moments where our face powder and our deodorant and our hip red glasses and our clean counters and our eating salad one bite at a time all go flying out the window. What I really want to say is that when people break, it happens by surprise... There are moments when love beams like a laser from my heart into another human being's heart and it stops me in my tracks. There really isn't a way to love too much. There is no quota for loving people and being loved back. There is always room for more, like jello... We reveal ourselves in so many ways. When we are least prepared. When we are not looking. When we least expect it...

[Perhaps I am imagining it, but I sense there are more of these moments occurring these days. Is there something inside us realizing that the life we have been living, this illusion of success and wealth and invincibility, is a lie, that's cracking, and exposing nobody-but-ourselves?] ... And then, in addition to writing the remarkable passage above, Jodi attached to her letter to Patti the poem at the end of this post, below.

A Practice in Belonging in This World: I've resubscribed to the digital edition of Orion Magazine because they're really on a roll these days. In the latest edition, Erik Reece, in Notes from a Very Small Island, rows, contemplates the writings of Heraclitus and Nietzsche, and asks "How do we accomplish being in this world, and How do you become who you are?"

Just One Line Fitting Into Another: Also in Orion, Brian Doyle's The Greatest Nature Essay Ever is a lovely bit of sleight-of-hand writing that also teaches you some important things about the art of writing:

The next three paragraphs then walk inexorably toward a line of explosive Conclusions on the horizon like inky alps. Probably the sentences get shorter, more staccato. Terser. Blunter. Shards of sentences. But there's no opinion or commentary, just one line fitting into another, each one making plain inarguable sense, a goat or even a senator could easily understand the sentences and their implications, and there's no shouting, no persuasion, no eloquent pirouetting, no pronouncements and accusations, no sermons or homilies, just calm clean clear statements one after another, fitting together like people holding hands.

How Our Economy Is Killing the Earth: A special edition of The New Scientist explains why the excesses of the industrial growth economy are utterly unsustainable, and why politicians are afraid to admit it, and (subscription only) envisions what a steady-state Natural Economy might look like, twenty years from now. Thanks to Andrew Campbell for the link.

Wow: My friend Pohangina Pete has a Photoblog.

The Role of Co-operatives in the Natural Economy: The University of Saskatchewan has started a program to explain and encourage the co-operative (non-hierarchical, well-being-not-profit-oriented, community-based) form of enterprise. Some very useful links here. More on this subject in upcoming posts. Now if only we could get the majority of people to establish their new enterprises as co-operatives instead of as corporations.

What's Next on the Economic Collapse Front: Well, I've already reported on the dangers of the unregulated $60T credit default swaps market. Almost as dangerous is what is looming for those holding investments in credit card receivables, once consumers start defaulting on those reckless debts in vast numbers -- these debts carry 20-30% interest rates for a reason, which is that the cards should never have been offered in the first place. And what will happen when pension plans, which have suffered 30%+ drops in their value, need such massive infusions of cash from their operating companies to cover the deficit that they use up all the capital the companies planned to use for maintenance, operations, and dividends? If anyone tells you the economic problems have now "bottomed out", hold on to your wallet tightly and move away from them.

Talk to Me Like I'm 5: A simple explanation from investment counselor Ilyce Glink of what to do with your money now, kinda what I've been saying, about paying off your debts and investing in learning and buying less stuff.

Like, Socialism: Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker describes how public discourse has become so degraded and dumbed down that some people can perceive the equitable sharing of wealth as ideological extremism.

Bush Attempts to Further Deregulate US Business: This is unbelievable: Bush is trying to ram through new 'guidelines' that make it much harder for regulators to rein in corporatist monopolies and oligopolies.

The Perfect Site for a Bioweapons Research Facility: Where do you put a lab that contains strains of the world's most dangerous diseases, like Ebola and Marburg? Why, Galveston Island, in a hurricane zone of course.

Learn About Learning: There's an excellent line-up for the free upcoming (Nov. 17-19) Corporate Learning Trends online conference. Hear from and chat with Jay Cross, Robin Good, George Siemens, David Weinberger, Nancy White, Harold Jarche, me and others about work literacy and social networks. I'm on tap Nov. 18 11:30 PT (14:30 ET) talking about (more like telling stories about) Working Smarter.

Just for Fun: With the economy collapsing all around us, what is a poor citizen to do for a little entertainment to escape from his/her life of wage slavery and struggle? Well, She-Bop of course! Thanks to my flonking friends (you know who you are) for the link..

Thought for the Week: Courtesy of Jodi Cohen, as noted above:

Photo: Seal on rock by Jerry

Pride

Even rocks crack, I tell you,
and not because of age.
For years they lie on their backs
in the heat and the cold,
so many years,
it almost seems peaceful.
They donít move, so the cracks stay hidden.
A kind of pride.
Years pass over them, waiting.
Whoever is going to shatter them
hasnít come yet.
And so the moss flourishes, the seaweed swirls,
the seaweed pushes through and rolls back,
and it seems they are motionless.
Till a little seal comes to rub against the rocks,
comes and goes away.
And suddenly the stone is split.
I told you, when people break, it happens by surprise.

-- Dahlia Ravikovitch

CCK08 Week 6-7: Complexity, Connection and Learning

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 20:25:00 GMT

I'm a week behind in my weekly Friday writing about the connectivism MOOC, but last week's subject was complexity, which is interesting, so I'll post about it now and then skip a week.

I've written a lot about complexity here, so just to recap for the uninitiated:

systems/processes/networks tend to be simple, complicated, complex, chaotic, or some combination thereof
simple and complicated systems/processes/networks are 'ordered'; it is possible (and in simple systems/processes/networks, easy) to identify all the variables, do cause and effect analysis, and predict outcomes in such environments -- the process for making toast is simple, while the process for making a toaster is complicated
complex and chaotic systems/processes/networks are 'unordered'; it is not possible to identify all the variables, or determine cause and effect between them, or predict outcomes -- the process by which all people in your community decide what to have for breakfast (including perhaps toast) is complex
while most human management methodologies (the way we parent, the way we teach/learn, the way we communicate information, the way we run organizations, etc.) are designed for simple or complicated 'problems', most social and ecological systems/processes/networks are complex; as a result, most of these methodologies are highly dysfunctional, and become more so as the number of people they try to 'manage' increases

This dysfunction, in an increasingly globalized world, has reached catastrophic proportions. Our health, education, security, social 'service' and justice systems now mostly make things worse for their 'customers' (hence 9/11 and the 'response' to Katrina). Most businesses have become unmanageable (hence Enron and the recent market meltdown caused by the fact no one understands what is going on in financial markets). We are incapable of responding to new complex crises (like global warming, and the global nihilism that leads to arbitrary acts of desperation).

We keep trying to treat all these complex problems as is they were merely complicated, so we have Sarbanes-Oxley, a massively complicated checklist methodology that is useless to deal with the complexity that led to Enron. We have the monstrous and completely inept bureaucracy of 'Homeland Security' with its millions of arbitrary and staggeringly complicated 'measures' that cannot begin to address the complexity of human rage against oppression and suffering. I could go on and talk about our health 'care' systems, our criminal justice systems, our emergency preparedness systems, our anti-poverty systems, our regulatory systems, and more, but you get the idea: Complicated 'solution' applied to complex problem = dysfunction, worse than no solution at all.

If you want another example of this, take a look what happens when traffic signals go out. If you have police on 'point duty' they will make the resulting traffic problem much worse. But if you leave it up to the drivers to self-organize, you will probably have minimal disruption, and may even have less congestion than the 'complicated' traffic signals produce normally. And if you leave the signals out of order long enough, people will 'learn' to self-manage the intersections better and better over time. Here's how well an uncontrolled intersection works in India. People are actually pretty good at handling complexity if you don't force them to use complicated solutions. What looks like chaos is merely complexity.

So how does this apply to learning, which is what this course is all about?

Well, for a start, our education system attempts to impose order (in a very complicated way) on a complex system (a large number of young learners). Instead of allowing them to learn, it attempts to 'teach' them in a highly controlled and inflexible way. It also prescribes 'curricula' which attempt to tell people in what order, and using what tools, processes and media, they should 'learn'. The result is that learners are brainwashed to believe there is only one correct 'order' to learn things in, and that they need to be 'taught' in order to learn. As a result (from lack of self-confidence and lack of practice), they lose the innate capacity to learn, the ability to decide what to learn, and the ability to decide how best to learn things. The complicated system makes the situation much worse.

A complex approach to education would provide only the minimal amount of structure to encourage the recapture of these lost capacities. Eventually every learner would decide what was important to learn, and self-direct the way and pace they learned it. More importantly, they would learn by being shown, by observing, by exploring, by enquiry, by discovering, and by doing/practicing, not by being told. That means the whole community would have to become partners in the learning experience. The benefit would be that the learner would acquire much deeper capacities much faster, and be more able and more willing to give back much more to the community from which she learned. This is the essence of 'unschooling' (as contrasted to 'home schooling', which often merely moves the same dysfunctional processes from the school environment to the home environment).

The challenge with doing this is the disconnectivity of our current society. We may be electronically connected, but these connections are no substitute for face-to-face, patient connection to allow the learner to observe, practice, and ask questions. Our modern society is highly fragmented into frenetic 'families' and 'organizations' that are restricted (insofar as learning is concerned) to 'members', and whose organizations value and restrict work to that which is immediately and measurably 'profitable' and 'productive'. The natural, ideal learning environment consists of small, open enterprises within open communities, that embrace and respond to the learning needs of everyone in those communities.

Online 'communities' I think realize this, which is why they attempt, with varying and usually limited success, to replicate the tribal, open community environment. But until our civilization collapses (which is likely, from the sheer weight of all these dysfunctional systems and their unintended consequences) such 'relocalization' of education is unlikely.

Perhaps we could do some experiments, though. What if we got some (open-minded) schools to partner with their communities and with local libraries, museums, business associations, unschoolers and universities to allow pilot groups of students to direct their own education for one year, with the 'guarantee' of a passing 'grade' so they could return to the regular school program if they chose to after that time. What do you think would happen?

I was part of such an experiment, with a group from my high school nearly 40 years ago. We won all the scholarships, even though we wne to no classes. It was a smash success. Why wasn't it continued? Perhaps it threatened the existing system too much. Perhaps it produced, in us, liberated self-learners who could never be forced back into any of the systems that our civilization now depends on.

Category: The Education System

Thoughts on Yesterday's Canadian Election: Harper Still Doesn't Speak for Canada

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 20:41:30 GMT

Tuesday's election -- prompted by the ambition of the right-wing Conservative party leader Harper to split the progressive vote sufficiently to convert his minority support into a majority government under Canada's antiquated first-past-the-post electoral system -- was bound to disappoint everyone. The Canadian electorate remains ornery and angry at the war-mongering Bush-adoring Harper, at the bumbling, scandal-tainted Liberal opposition, at our helplessness in the face of our Southern neighbour's government's arrogance, stupidity, self-loathing and thirst for blood, about our dependence on our natural resources and the environmental devastation their extraction wreaks, and about our failure to be the nation of the 21st century that many thought we might be.

But so far we are not angry enough to vote into power a truly progressive government -- the three "third parties" (New Democrats, Greens and Bloc QuÈbecois) are all well left-of-centre socially and economically but remain perpetually on the fringes of power, and so enamoured of their parochial interests that they are unable to get together and present a unified and unambiguous progressive voice.

So we got treated to a virtual replay of the election of two years ago -- the Conservatives got the same 37% of the vote, but nearly won a majority of seats because of a shift in the votes among the two thirds of Canadians who loathe the Conservatives (surveys suggest that in a single-transferable vote system they would get almost no second-place votes). What should be happening is that the Liberal leader should be pulling together a coalition of the four opposition parties to create a government that reflects the interests of the 63% of Canadians who support progressive, not reactionary, government.

If we had proportional representation, such as a STV system, the Conservatives would have only 113 seats (they got 143), the Liberals 83 (they got 76) , the NDP 58 (they got 37), the Bloc 31 (they got 50), and the Greens 22 (they got none; in fact, because a lot of Greens voted strategically instead of "wasting" their Green votes, the Greens under a PST system would probably have more than 40 seats today). If that were the case, the idea of an out-of-touch 37% running the government and bragging that they had a "renewed and increased mandate to govern" would be seen as as preposterous as it really is.

Such a colossal waste of energy, time and money ($300 million, just to run the election). The fact that the turnout was a record low really says it all. It really shows how dysfunctional our electoral system is. And the fact that Canadians fell for Harper's Bush-inspired character assassination of the Liberal leader, and Harper's falsely smearing the idea of a carbon tax as an "additional tax burden" (the scheme is revenue neutral and would only punish polluters and gas gulpers) was really disappointing -- it demonstrated how depressingly effective negative, dumbed-down campaign advertising can be.

Ugh. Here we are, again, in the same place.

Category: Canadian Politics

Not Ready Yet to End Our Addiction to Growth

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 02:35:04 GMT

The value of public companies listed on stock markets has dropped by about a third in the past year. This means that shareholders believe that this group of companies, which are an important but not dominant factor in the global economy (the public sector, notably health and education, and privately-owned enterprises, are collectively much larger, both in what they contributed to productive output and in the number of people they employ) will generate 1/3 less future total profits than had previously been forecast.

The response of governments to this assessment has been immediate and unanimous -- such a reassessment is unacceptable, so unacceptable that trillions of dollars of taxpayer money (money that governments cannot afford to spend) need to be spent immediately to "increase liquidity". By increasing liquidity they mean creating enough new cash for investors to need to park somewhere (i.e. in the stock market, pushing prices back up again) and for consumers to buy the stuff these companies are producing.

In short, governments and corporations are working furiously together to ensure that all of us -- governments, corporations and consumers -- remain addicted to growth, which means addicted to ever-increasing consumption and ever-increasing debt. This is the fragile foundation on which this portion of our economy (the publicly-listed private sector) utterly depends.

It should be noted that most unlisted (privately-held) private-sector enterprises, companies that do not have outside shareholders with insatiable demands for double-digit annual profit growth, and public sector enterprises (government, education, health and other public services) are not addicted to growth. They can do just fine in a steady-state economy. They are vulnerable to a collapse in the stock market, however, because (a) if the publicly-listed companies lay off millions of workers (which they tend to do in a recession) that affects consumers' ability to buy from anyone, and (b) most consumers' wealth and pensions are tied up in publicly-listed company investments, and in housing whose value tends to move in lockstep with stock market values (because they vie for investors' cash).

I recently (before the stock market collapse) wrote a two-part article (part one; part two) about the advantages of moving from a growth economy to a steady-state economy, in part because it is better for our environment, and in part because the growth economy is simply not sustainable and will soon have to end anyway. Does the current stock market collapse provide an opportunity to move there now, instead of waiting until the last possible moment?

As I noted in the earlier articles, such a transition would require a major redistribution of wealth from rich to poor, a large investment in entrepreneurial education and infrastructure, fair trade laws and a collective commitment to collaboration instead of competition for resources and jobs. I'm not sure if that's possible, but perhaps the current free-fall of markets might make the prospect more palatable.

What we should not be doing is giving trillions of dollars away to large public corporations. As economist Paul Krugman has noted, if we must invest this money (money, remember, we have no way of knowing how we're going to collect or repay) to prevent a collapse that will plunge us into the next Great Depression, that investment should be in equity in these companies -- we the taxpayers should be buying up these companies so we can own them and determine their future direction, and prevent recurrence of the ignorance- and greed-driven errors they made that has led to this crisis of confidence. In effect, we are nationalizing most of the financial services industry, which in the US accounts for a third of GDP and millions of jobs. For conservatives and libertarians, this is a ghastly process.

What drives the entire economy is consumer spending. Since the 1970s, levels of consumer spending, in real terms, have more than doubled, despite the fact that, for 90% of the population, income in real terms has not changed. The doubling has all been financed by increases in personal debt. Much of that debt has been secured by home ownership (which has recently lost much of its collateral value), and much of it has been unsecured. Most of it, arguably, should never have been advanced because the consumers' ability to repay it depends of endless increases in future income and increases in the value of homes and investments. We have been banking for nearly forty years on the continuance of growth that we knew full well was unsustainable. These loans were simply reckless and speculative. They were gambling on perpetual growth. Now we are seeing the economy unravel because of this.

By lowering interest rates and throwing cash at insolvent financial corporations, governments are trying to get consumers to start buying again, to addict them to even more spending and more debt. This is just crazy. What we really need is to rein in our spending to what we can reasonably afford to repay (and that applies to governments and corporations, not just consumers), and then restructure the economy to be able to thrive with zero growth.

This will be very difficult (and painful) but not impossible. For a start, what we need to do is increase interest rates to reflect the risk of non-repayment and to provide a sufficient return (especially for those on fixed incomes) to enable pensions and other long-term investments to cover the real inflation in our economy (which is already much higher than the "official" rates, and likely to grow much higher as Peak Oil, water shortages and other resource scarcities come due). We also need responsible limits to credit and spending by consumers, corporations and governments. That means a reintroduction of usury laws. The "deregulation" that eliminated these laws has allowed lenders to charge obscene (20%+) interest rates, and hence has encouraged them to offer credit to people who have no capacity to repay their debts. Lenders need to accept responsibility, and to encourage this, capping interest rates at a few points over prime, and reversing recent laws that restrict individuals' ability to declare bankruptcy, are necessary.

The consequence of all this would be a drastic reduction in consumer spending and consumption. Publicly-listed companies (which are most dependent on ever-accelerating consumer spending) would be most hurt by this, though all companies and most investment and pension portfolios would suffer too. It's really a matter of whether this can and should happen now, or whether we stall it off a few years and have it hit even harder then (with a disproportionate and unfair impact on future generations that did not incur these reckless debts and did not steal more than their share of the Earth's resources). The recent drop in share values would already cover part of this shrinkage, but in a zero growth economy shares would really only be worth the present value of future dividends, a steady and no longer perpetually-increasing stream. So these shares will likely have to drop a lot further.

The drop in share values would mostly affect high-income earners, which would actually help in the necessary redistribution of wealth and income for a steady-state economy, but it would also hurt line employees and pension plans. A sharp increase in taxes on the rich, and on speculative investments and capital gains, could help fund a "negative income tax" to protect those who do not have enough income to live comfortably after this retrenchment.

An end to subsidies to big corporations, and replacing 'free' trade laws with fair trade laws would also encourage healthy economic relocalization (moving quality jobs back close to where the goods and services are consumed), enable higher standards of environmental protection and resource conservation, and reduce exposure to spikes in energy prices.

The biggest challenge of the shift to a zero-growth economy will be the massive re-learning that is needed by every citizen -- re-learning of entrepreneurial skills (since most big multinationals will collapse to make way for many more small, locally-based companies) and of self-sufficiency skills (growing our own food, making our own clothes, maintaining and fixing our homes, appliances and tools instead of relying on others to do this for us).

It will require us to live more modestly, and within our means. It will be a much different world.

The economists from across the political and philosophical spectrum who are urging the government to step in and either bail out (the conservatives) or nationalize (the progressives) the overextended financial institutions of the world are trying to stave off a panic that could plunge us unnecessarily into another Great Depression.

The problem is that the US in particular simply has no money to pay for this. Conservatives have bankrupted the US treasury with tax cuts for the rich and trillions in spending on unwinnable, endless wars and utterly useless, staggeringly expensive "homeland security" programs. So the risk now is that the US dollar, which is really fundamentally worthless, will collapse and plunge us into that global Great Depression anyway.

The second risk is that, if the US can persuade or bully its global co-dependent trading partners to keep taking its worthless currency, even after it prints another trillion or two dollars of it with nothing of value to support it, the US and the world will go back to believing in the magical thinking of its publicly-listed companies and capital markets -- that double-digit growth can resume and continue forever.

My guess is that this is exactly what will happen. This is why my prediction is that the next real Great Depression is still some twenty years ahead, when the whole house of cards will collapse. The problem is that then, the economy will be leveraged and over-extended even more than it is now, and that compounding all this will be the reality of the End of Oil, the End of Water, the first serious climate change catastrophes, massive and global civil strife (fueled with newer and ever-more dangerous weapons available to any desperate individual with a science degree and a good imagination) that the horrific inequity of wealth and income on our planet will inevitable provoke, and ghastly overpopulation and environmental desolation with another two billion humans on the planet fighting for their share of plunging natural resources and exhausted land.

The relatively modest setback to wealth and income that the recent greed- and ignorance-induced stock market collapse has wrought is perhaps our final chance to wake up to what we are doing and realize that "business as usual" simply cannot go on.

But if this is our wake-up call, we are not heeding it. Instead, the alarms are ringing and we're just pulling the pillows and blankets up over our heads and refusing to admit that we must act. We want the governments to lull us back to sleep with their trillion-dollar bailout lullabies. We have this terrible hangover from too much growth, too much consumption, too much debt. And we're hooked bad, unable to break the addiction.

Call us when we're feeling better. Just another few minutes, a couple more decades, then, we promise, we'll get up, we'll act, we'll do the responsible thing.

But not now. Not today. Not this year.

Category: Understanding Economics