Friedman argues America’s power on the world stage will actually increase in the 21st Century for three major reason:
- The immense size of the U.S. economy: The current crisis is painful and America’s deficits are shocking on an absolute basis but are “trivial” relative to the country’s net worth, which Friedman estimates is about $340 trillion.
- The unrivaled dominance of the U.S. Navy: Even in the digital age, control of the high seas is paramount in geopolitics.
- The ability of the U.S. to absorb immigrants, both culturally and in terms of the nation’s relatively low population density.
read more . . .
Looks like Friedman doesn’t believe in peak oil.
This relates to what I posted earlier; it points to the specific piece of Catherine’s work that fits into my proposal to meet the challenge and take advantage of the opportunity, harnessing the hundreds of billions of dollars of the Recovery Act in the most efficient way possible to achieve it.
http://solari.com/archive/economic_101/
Economics 101 – A Curriculum
by Catherine Austin Fitts
In this set of guidelines for an economics class, Catherine includes, in simplest terms, the basics of her plan for evaluating the assets of a community in order to make better decisions for its economy. I would like to incorporate her methodology (which was computerized until government agents seized and destroyed her prototype), along with Peter Burgess’ Community Accountancy, which measures how well actions turn out, in the training given to the low-income people who are turned into green technicians who can earn a decent living — and also give it to the people whose homes they weatherize, and the social justice and environmental organizers who bring them together.
Regards,
Mark
Hello Catherine,
We met years ago at the Fillmore Solari; I was staying there with oneVillage Foundation. You had described the software you developed, which was destroyed by the government. There are people around now who may be willing and able to reconstitute it. One of them was the person in IBM’s APL skunk works who reversed engineered and documented orphaned software.
I have been listening to some of your segments on Flashpoints with pleasure and admiration, when I can catch them on KPFA.
I have written you into the proposal pasted in below, which I wrote today. There have been several earlier attempts. It is a conceptual framework, and I invite you to consider the role your asset-based measuring and planning, and your current community education efforts, could have, both in the proposal and in the program I am proposing.
Please let me know what you think of this, and whether you would like copies of the information I have gathered while developing the thoughts below, to explore the possibilities further.
Regards,
Mark Roest
The Nature of Culture; the Path Ahead
Introduction
The profound difference between “let the Devil take the hindmost”, and “the least of them shall sit at the right hand of the Lord,” has been laid before us in the last twelve to thirty years, in the national and international struggles between the neo-liberal right-wing ideologues, led strategically by Carl Rove and Dick Cheney, believing and propagandizing that Greed (aka ‘unrestrained market forces’) is the Highest Good, and the social justice movement, other progressives and moderates. Now is the time to collectively remember (put the members back together as a whole) the thrill of unity, the reassurance of working and singing together, the healing of ministering to each other, and the connection with the Ground of Being that we gain from contemplative stewardship in the natural world, with all our relations, as well as in the human community.
Now is a good time to experience, and to remember, what music, and musicians, can teach us about working together in our various capacities, and listening and tuning in to each other, to unfold a miracle, whether they form a Balinesian Gamilan, a western symphony orchestra, or an African drumming ensemble.
Each culture is an organism
Each culture is an organism, which functions both as a whole, and as whatever size group is located in a place in which they are able to communicate with each other. Humanity is a meta-organism, doing the same thing as a mosaic of cultures, each of which went through a social and biological evolution to adapt to the particular ecosystem in which it found itself (to which it had originally migrated and settled).
These ‘organisms’ (cultures) gather information about the natural world, and about its opportunities and pitfalls, and share it internally, just as a person or a wolf or a deer gathers information about its environment through its senses. The consciousness of the individual, which processes and integrates this information to develop strategies to survive and to stay healthy and alert, is parallel to the collective consciousness, which is a function of many people mapping out their ‘parts of the elephant’ or ‘facets of the diamond’, sharing their maps, and calibrating their maps and their communication with each other until there is a shared experience of “it all coming together” in the part of the awareness that does that work. This experience is closely parallel with the experience of a sense of completion when a project has been done well — it “feels right” as a component of a way of being, or as a well-crafted part of a house being built by a close-knit team.
Every culture in the world, all the way back to the first humans, has created an economy. At first, it was a personal and social economy of the small group, with leaders, healers, and members working as a team to survive, and then to thrive. As populations grew to the carrying capacity of their local environments, there was often conflict between groups who became rivals for resources. In these cases, those left might move out and find a new place to live, or establish territories and a balance of power, or form trading alliances where their adaptation to ecological niches gave them local surpluses of some items, while leaving them with a scarcity of some others. These trading alliances became larger societies, and developed all the characteristics of common ways, values and stories that define cultures.
The United States is a mosaic of people from different cultures who moved out to find another place to live. Such people are called diasporae in Greek, and now in English; the story of the Prodigal Son can be our story too, even across generations and oceans. The United States provides a stage on which one version of the human meta-organism can discover itself and learn both common and complementary perspectives and sets of skills, which can then be shared with the many cultures of origin which are represented here.
The United States is also a ‘melting pot’ of people from different cultures who have adapted, and increasingly, intermarried, forming a new ‘cosmopolitan’ culture, which is largely urban, very commercial, and whose middle and upper classes have emphasized breaking processes down to make them efficient at the ‘ nuts and bolts level’, and then assembling those processes into systems, with standards that ensure an accepted level of performance in the workplace. This overall (‘meta-‘) process has been applied to virtually all areas of life. Because of the commercial context in which it was done, there has been an emphasis on refining earlier methods, rather than replacing them with fundamentally sustainable methods of achieving the same core benefits, even when it became evident that the earlier methods could not scale to the society as a whole without exhausting resources and damaging natural and cultural environments.
Because of the dominance of competitive processes between cultures and social classes, we also have populations of people who have been left out of the learning curve of industrial and commercial expertise, even though they are just as intelligent as those who found a place for themselves and achieved prosperity. These people are the ones whom those portions of the Recovery Act which were influenced by Van Jones and other social justice activists are designed to give a new chance to succeed, while helping to save our collapsing natural environment.
The Preface to the Proposition
As in the great Civil Rights Movement, there are leaders, healers and members, many waiting to make themselves known, many more waiting to discover their true nature, both inside and outside these populations, who would like to lend a hand. What is missing at this point is a common strategy that is the equal in its effectiveness of the principles of non-violence that empowered the Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. The strategy exists, however; the only things missing are its recognition, integration, communication, and adoption by the half or two thirds of the overall population who would agree that it is a good thing, if it were presented to them in an attractive way.
Green for All has identified and campaigned on the opportunity to bring tremendous benefits to low-income communities by both training and employing workers, and making consumers’ homes efficiently comfortable in both summer and winter. It has formed a bridge between the social justice and environmental movements by doing so. It has adopted a communication strategy to encourage activists to call on their local governments to create plans which can be combined into State-level plans, which are due May 12, 2009. It has assembled lots of guidance, including the outstanding example of Kansas City (which will weatherize all homes that need it in a 105-city-block area, using up to $200 million of Recovery Act funding), to assist the activists in their mission.
Green for All also organized the California Green Stimulus Coalition , promoting Principles for a Green and Equitable Economic Recovery that make great sense, and providing a model for other states to begin to organize their pro-green-jobs stakeholder groups.
We propose that the next step is to identify and organize around a coherent, national strategy that draws on and scales up the example of Kansas City, maximizing both the benefits and the efficiency with which they are attained. By doing so, we can take the measure of the opportunity, and respond to it as effectively as the mobilization of factories for the war effort during World War II. That is the standard we need to meet, and it is absolutely feasible, if we understand the implications of the introductory discussions above, and are familiar with the positive processes that have empowered small contractors and large corporations.
The Proposition
We propose that the solution rests in a unique combination of strategies and resources which can optimize the organization and mobilization, and the work performance, of the low-income populations that the weatherization and economic development aspects of the Recovery Act are designed to empower, on a national scale.
The basic strategy is to create a balanced system of the following work categories, to be deployed on a block-by-block basis within neighborhoods (in urban and suburban areas):
– Energy auditors who can also specify solutions, write orders, arrange financing for the portion not covered by subsidies (including putting payments into the utility bill in many cases), and prepare the clients for the process to come.
– They would be augmented by qualified technicians, engineers and architects as needed to design solutions, both for unique home or business situations, and for clusters of buildings with similar design and problems.
– Construction managers who, in most cases, are general contractors, or HVAC contractors, who can no longer find enough business to support them, due to the construction industry collapse brought on by the financial crisis.
– Skilled tradesmen and women, who carry out the most demanding parts of the work to be done, as part of teams that include newly-trained residents of the communities being served, who rapidly acquire experience and knowledge in one or more trades.
– Local equipment and parts suppliers, who deliver what cannot be efficiently picked up, on a just-in-time basis, to the buildings being worked on each day.
This system would be managed by local community development and / or advocacy organizations, organized as cooperatives with consulting support from Green America (formerly Co-op America), who should be provided tools, systems, and human and financial resources to enable them to work efficiently, in partnership with groups doing the actual weatherizing work. Their roles would include communicating the program, organizing stakeholders, mobilizing participation, overseeing the distribution of funds and the reporting mechanisms that assure transparency, and identifying mutual interests and bridging cultural gaps among stake-holders, so they can work together effectively.
The community organizations would also coordinate identifying and documenting needs and opportunities in the community, during all phases of the process. When these needs cannot be met within the program as structured, the community organizations would escalate the discussion of how to resolve them to the regional, State and / or Federal level, as needed. Some needs would be met through the weatherizing program, some could be addressed in the community economic development programs, and some would require other approaches, or a combination.
To realize the potential that this represents, we propose a new alignment of stake-holders and under-served communities coming together around the opportunity of the Recovery Act, and crafting a permanent realignment of the political and economic landscape:
– orchestrated by greenforall.org, Van Jones, and Green America (formerly Co-op America) at the policy level, by unions and progressive organizations who provide initial large-scale organizational and financial muscle to complement the Recovery Act, and by small contractors and community activists who organize, manage and implement at the local level, within a supportive system,
– supported by a network of Skunk Works and sustainable business incubators, who weave the new technologies and the new work force into kairetsu-cooperative-social enterprise hybrids as potential advantages and organizational structures become clear.
– empowered to act by the political alliance and funding that has been made available
– technically empowered by the business and government management tools developed by the global Open Source community, particularly those available in ERP5 and / or TioLive from Nexedi (check out ERP5.org), and those developed for the Italian professionals’ union by Andersen Consulting.
– monitored and reported using the principles of Community Accountancy developed by Peter Burgess, enforcing the transparency that the Recovery Act calls for, and providing early warning as needs for course correction develop. The best approach would be to integrate Peter’s methods into the Enterprise Resource Planning system.
– designed around the framework of the Recovery Act, weaving its components together to fund the complementary parts of economic development in each community.
– augmenting the basic weatherizing initiative by using the tools of urban and rural planning, charrettes (see The NCI Charrette System™ ), and the Solari Community Business asset-based planning and financial management systems developed by Catherine Austin Fitts (former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Housing—Federal Housing Commissioner), to identify actions that provide the highest level of benefit to each community
– launching a new, far more efficient, carbon-free, nature-based technology paradigm fully capable of creating sufficient profits to repay not only all the investments required to establish it, but also society’s investments under the Recovery Act and other sustainability initiatives; designed for wholesale use of renewable energy resources, strategies for resource efficiency, and conservation of the natural environment and its services. As a side benefit, this can eliminate the entire United States balance of payments deficit, which is approximately equal to the cost of our petroleum imports.
The people learning new trades should also have the opportunity to learn job-holding and healthy living skills, and get support for raising their basic educational skill levels — along with learning community organizing and economic development strategies. The project to create new, digital curricula that empower learners, being organized by Ed Cherlin of Earth Treasury in collaboration with One Laptop Per Child, as well as with pioneers in the use of computers for education, can enhance this process.
Next Steps
I ask Nexedi to work with Peter Burgess to integrate his ideas into ERP5, and to dedicate, or nominate partners who will dedicate the necessary resources to create a system of information management that is specifically designed to manage new cooperatives and construction management processes to implement the Recovery Act on a national, systematic basis (with local variation). The information architecture and workflows would have close parallels with franchise systems, and with other large-scale but geographically distributed government programs. The benefit to Nexedi is parallel to that realized by Apple in subsidizing computers for schools, in addition to achieving a very rapid national deployment of TioLive, ERP5, and / or some hybrid of the two. These benefits can potentially lead to ERP5 / TioLive becoming a global standard for sustainable economic development. This work is one part of the overall program that may require union funding in order to be completed rapidly and to the necessary standard.
The trade unions are needed to provide significant backing for the move to implement the Recovery Act and make Federal funds flow. Using Buckminster Fuller’s trim tab metaphor, they can be the rudder, and Green For All and Van Jones can be the trim tab that directs the rudder. Doing so can create a dynamic shift in the political and economic power of a newly expanded and empowered working class, which will empower the unions to the extent that they empower workers and those who depend on them.
If Nexedi joins Peter Burgess and possibly a few other uniquely qualified individuals in preparing a proposal to Green For All and Van Jones (Green For All founder, now in the White House), I believe we could get Green for All to propose it to the Obama administration as a powerful strategy that will pay off for him and the Democratic Party, politically and on a personal, human level, while enabling all of us to realize our potentials.
Please comment and discuss how you see the potential for collaboration with me. I can re-send some email packages on this general topic if you need me to, in order to review them. There are several other ideas that can be combined with this one, too.
The Bigger Picture
If we successfully introduce the strategy outlined above, we can and ought to simultaneously foster training and preparation of substantial numbers of the diasporae to organize and deliver comparable support for sustainability to their cultures of origin. This will directly impact the levels of economic stress that drive out-migration to the industrial powers, and to the cities, of the world. It will also provide the most direct route to reducing carbon emissions and halting the destruction of natural environments. Thus it is the most efficient foreign policy available to the Obama administration, to the European Union, to other, more recently industrialized economies, and to economies that are dependent on petroleum, narcotics, strategic minerals, or cotton for their survival (and the prosperity of the few).
Energetically, it is still a democracy. That is the challenge and the opportunity.
“What it does not deal with is the question of where is the “mandate of heaven” — this is not an empire that will be respected or loved. ”
I’m beginning to wonder if the 5 nations (US,UK,China, Russia, France) of the UN Security Council formed after WWII are controlling the biggest confidence game in the history of humankind. Maybe that’s the “correct” nation-state analysis?
Chomsky’s most outspoken theme seems to be concentrated media control. Orwell wrote “those who control the present control the past, and those who control the past control the future.” If you control media – especially in a quasi-military war time that never ends, than you control history.
Chomsky also once mentioned that the agreements that ended WWII were never made public.
This is not much of a democracy.
“An empire with fantastic reserves, a strong agricultural base and natural resources”
Africa has fantastic reserves too…but most of those reserves have been spoken for by probably the same elite classes for the last 100 years. Perhaps Africa’s ag base is not developed enough, and biased trade agreements and poor infrastructure will keep it that way. Are hippies right when they mention that hemp could radically change demand for chemical fertilizers? Could practically ANY nation be an agricultural superpower (i don’t know) if not full of deserts or mountains?
“could continue as an Empire if it was willing to liquidate/reengineer much of its middle class and replace them with immigrants”…”I am just saying that it is a feasible scenario.”
I guess this is what happened in the 1970s because the protest movements in the ’60s – while not widespread throughout mainstream America -were too much of an ideological threat. So the decision makers eliminated the draft to get rid of the protesters, and then began globalization and commodity price fixing to control the middle classes and lower native population growth; the drug and crime problems escalated rapidly afterwards As long as technological superiority could be either maintained or imported, mercenaries from poorer countries could always be hired in exchange for American citizenship or dollars to perform the dirtiest fighting.
[James Q. Wilson, perhaps the most famous American criminologist, in his book Thinking About Crime said outright that America’s crime problem was because of the loss of community instigated by the 1960s protest movement. I didn’t understand his point of view when I read the book years ago, but he was pretty much right. Vietnam and protest divided the middle class just enough where the gangsters took advantage and destroyed the idea of continuous progress for over the next two generations. Middle America did what they could to secure “theirs” (understandably)in the suburbs, away from crime and drugs for the time being.And so much moving has led to further loss of community and a “completely neurotic population” as George Carlin once said.]
“So big risk of too many gangsters competing for too few spaces. I suspect that is part of what we may be seeing with 747’s flying around the Goldman Sachs – NJ building. ”
Yeah, I interpreted that incident as someone’s “message” too. The stock markets can be made to crash on purpose with just a few more serious incidents….incidents, which even if they never occur, can always be used as threats against people threatening the status quo. What’s a politician to do?
Crac:
My interpretation of this analysis is essentially the slow burn scenario. An empire with fantastic reserves, a strong agricultural base and natural resources (which is true and would fit with the $340 trillion figure) could continue as an Empire if it was willing to liquidate/reengineer much of its middle class and replace them with immigrants and maintain supremacy in the sky and seas.
Yes, we have a lot of debt. However, now that we have gotten everyone else in debt, we can simply participate in a global write down or revaluation. Whatever happens, the value of our land, natural resources and reserves should go up, particularly if we bring technology out of the closet and the lab.
I am not saying that this is an attractive scenario. I am just saying that it is a feasible scenario. What it does not deal with is the question of where is the “mandate of heaven” — this is not an empire that will be respected or loved. So big risk of too many gangsters competing for too few spaces and the squabbles at the top pulling things apart. (I sometimes refer to this as “the Midianite thing.”) I suspect that is part of what we may be seeing with 747’s flying around the Goldman Sachs – NJ building.
You are right about the nation state model — it does not fit with what is happening. Part old model; part cover.
Catherine
I highly value Stratfor for mainstream “geopolitical” analysis (much better analysis than newspapers).
However, the flaw in Stratfor’s point of view is viewing the world as competition between nation-states. It’s not. What matters is quality of life for people, much of which cannot be measured in dollars as far as crime, anxiety, health, time, and freedom. And as far as newspaper headlines of a nation-state’s “strength,” this is mostly the ability to manipulate its own population for good or ill. Nation-states are a figment of our imagination, and what passes as history or news is just Shakespearean actors playing their roles; by that I mean that the publicized reasons for nation-state causality are fake. I swear, each time I see a news article about Kim Jong-Il, I sense a glitch in the Matrix. Deja Vu. I used to watch a LOT of sitcoms growing up…until I started seeing the same plots over and over again on different series; that, and laugh tracks are truly Orwellian.
340 Trillion divided by the US population comes to over $1 Million Per Capita. I seriously doubt that most of the service sector economy will end up with more than 20% of that average.
And as far as jobs, the Manufacturing and the service sector will continue to mechanize…not to mention outsourcing.
Quality of life could theoretically could improve with increased productivity…but it depends on how profits are distributed. Right now, the power is in the hands of the gangsters.