COMMENT ON: Will The Unemployment Disaster Be Obama’s Katrina?

November 24, 2009 at 9:18 am (politics)
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UPDATE: I have taken to this comment format because Huffington Post has consistently posted my blogs there so as to get no notice, since notices are tied to dates of the original posts.  In addition my status there is clearly in the cellar. Authorship if 15 books and achievements over the years are apparently insufficient to place me among the bloggers they care to feature. I have vacillated between polite rejoinders and borderline protests, but today I am moving to protest period, though it will do little to change things. The comment below was, as far as I can determine, NOT posted at Huffington Post. That is an obvious and to me unpardonable instance of censorship. I shall continue commenting there and testing their biases. I wish I could say I take satisfaction in any of this. I do not. It lowers Huffington Post in my estimation and that is too bad, because it now joins other progressive media which have shown themselves to be unsupportive of the President, immature in judgment and with little or no longterm view.   If Huffington Post poses the comment below I will happily withdraw this update.

Read the Article this comment is addressed to at HuffingtonPost

The carpathon continues.

Not a day a day goes by without another (gnat) arrow at the heart of the President. There is a basic misunderstanding at work. Things were never going to happen overnight and the order of deeds was and is utterly necessary.

The order goes this way. ONE: Solve the free fall economy. DONE if three and four occur.

TWO: Set up the health care process — en train de faire.

THREE: Redo the War on Terror — in progress, Huffleaks and all.

FOUR Jostle the business community into an aha moment when it begins to get serious about what products and services will be needed for a new and sustainable way of living.

This order of events is what the spoiled, we-want-it-all-now folk who trash the President ignore. We are facing an entrepreneurial necessity — “connect the dots”. The final result will a post-oil economy with a recalibration of the elements of settlement and community. Little of this is taken seriously in these precincts.

So — the daily knife continues. The carpathon goes on. Meanwhile the President stays the course and brushes it off.

http://stephencrose.wordpress.com

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Comment On: Memo to Warren Buffett: Put Down the Pom-Poms and Tell Us the Truth About the Economy

November 17, 2009 at 9:24 am (pattern language, politics)
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Read the article this comment refers to at HuffingtonPost

The permalink to this comment at Huffington Post

One constructive option would be to stop talking about the market working as if the market was what worked in the past.. It is because confidence in the stability and direction of that market was shaken that we got where we are.

The behavior of the greedy kicked in but who said the continued creation of metrosprawl, single family homes and our ad driven macho automobile economy was still a viable market concept?

It isn’t.

Viable would be a revolution in design and planning and architecture around a future worth investing in. There is little featured in HuffPo about celebrating real change. I see a good deal of populism lite wed to an obsession with who’s being trashed and who is first. The first is distraction. The second is old economy narcissism.

We need constructive effort to create a more democratic economy and more ordinary people involved in the solutions that will create the jobs and institutions and environments of the future.

For more on this please check out http://stephencrose.wordpress.com/pattern-language/

At least Warren Buffett knows that to get where we need to go we need new businesses.

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Prospects of The Reset

August 29, 2009 at 9:29 am (pattern language, politics, theology)
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A Reluctance to Spend May Be a Legacy of the Recession (NYT) http://ow.ly/nfGB

Yes, I take the current “crisis” to be a massive reset. A fifty year thing, at least.

Why so?

First, the notion of a recovery is noxious. If anything, the excesses of the last decades will suffer more slings and arrows. Maybe the feared double-dip recession.

Which gets us to Second.

That would be the minds of millions and millions who think beyond all sloganeering on all sides. I believe a process of decision-making is underway by those of us who are not spending as the economists might desire.

For we suspect the reset means a complete change in the basic economics of living.

For example:

Education might morph into something more customized and distance-learning oriented. This would make the notion of making a living in an endowed university more chancy, rather like deciding to be a journalist.

The digital grid that our President wisely mandated could mean a total reorientation of everything. Urbanization could be replaced by resettlement with the trappings of what is good about urban everywhere.

People do not invest in non-essentials — that would be the products of an economy of abundance — when we are in a reset mode.

Does the President know we are in a reset? Yes. Does he say so? Not in so many words, but he will as he realizes that it is no longer a secret.

The prospects of a reset are mixed.

We may need a reset because we screw up globally as we seem always to be doing, relying on military solutions when war itself is not the economic engine it once was. We could tilt everything so to security considerations that new settlements would be necessary just to keep communities shut up at night in the face of wandering spores.

A reset requires intelligent consideration of just how costly it is to build the world on militarism. It would be cheaper to follow the advice of William Burroughs and find out what people want (respect, food, education) and give it to them.

The reset also has to do with religion.

We are moving happily to a disconnect between superstition and cogent realization of how immanent life is. And that the human mind is truly (potentially) holy, hallowed and amazing. Moral evolution is the most important reset of all. Anyone who has thought deeply after Nietzsche and the holocaust knows this viscerally.

Reluctance to spend is awareness that we cannot go back and a combination of fear and hope about the future.

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Jane Jacobs Saw It All

August 19, 2009 at 7:55 am (pattern language, politics)
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READ THE ENTIRE JANE JACOBS INTERVIEW ON THE NEW ECONOMY

Here’s a salient quote:

A lot of the production work, design work, economic work that is being done now has a much higher proportion of what we call human capital in it and a much lower proportion of natural resources and other materials in it than in the past. And that is an important change that is very promising for sustainable economies because, after all, human capital – the experience, the skills, the inspiration, the imagination that goes into these things – is not a resource that is subject to the laws of diminishing returns. The more human capital is used, the more it grows.

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Change We Can Believe In: Feelings Toward the Administration by Those Who Elected It

August 13, 2009 at 1:01 pm (politics)
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I’ve been waiting for an article like this. Let disillusion reign!

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

But see if you can get your mind around this. The recovery we are wishing for is not going to happen and Obama knows it even if we don’t.

We are in a reset that will take fifty years to bring to fruition, unless a spoiled nation — what Galbraith called an affluent society — is not up to the challenge and gives in to the retros of the GOP.

The reset will change the way we live and many will not like it. Prosperity will be measured in the degree to which it is shared rather than in the ascent of a small group of incomes and the diminution of everyone else’s.

We are moving to a post-oil, sustainable economy, not because we choose to but because we must..

President Obama knows all this and he also knows how ill-prepared even his own constituency is to hear the truth about the economy and the future. Sure other leaders have uttered similar things about sustainability and moving beyond oil. But the President means it. And the problem is that most do not welcome it.

Hence the grousing. Grouse on. Then listen again to the President.

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