spilling the wine...,

Video - Rolling Stones - Beast of Burden

songfacts | Eric Burdon sang lead on this track. Before Burdon joined, the group was known as Nite Shift and was playing backup for Deacon Jones, a former US football player who was trying to become a Soul singer. The group was re-named War and played with Burdon for 2 albums, both credited to "Eric Burdon and War."

Harold Brown, who was drummer and founding member of War, told us that record executive Steve Gold arranged for War and Eric Burdon to record together. Says Brown: "Steve wanted first to see what we could do. So for about a year we just kept going in and out of studios. And then one day we were up in San Francisco, just playing and stuff. Lonnie (Jordan, War keyboard player) came in acting all drunk and stuff and out. They had a bottle of wine, and some of that wine got spilled in the console. Lee (Oskar, War harmonica player) says he felt that the song didn't have anything to do with the wine going into the console, but all I know is after that they moved out of the A studio, they moved us into the B studio, and then we were playing a Latin thing, and even if Eric had been writing 'Spill The Wine' all along, and writing the concepts, that's when it all came together. I think that Eric was already working on an idea about leaking gnomes waking up in a grassy field, and then when the wine inadvertently got knocked over, whether it was part of the song or not, it all just came together right at that moment."

This is widely believed to be about, or at least heavily influenced by drugs. According to Brown, this song celebrates women: "All ladies are beautiful. You've got to look at them. God, I believe, put all of us here and made us all different so we could be like the flowers, you know. Like women. I look at them as beautiful flowers. Even when they get older, the flowers and so on, and that's what it really boils down to, they can be skinny, big, fat, I've seen some fine voluptuous women. And then I've seen some that are skinny, and if you look at them, they could be beautiful, depending on personality and stuff."

The lady speaking Spanish in the background was Eric Burdon's girlfriend. Says Brown: "We went back there and we put up a little tent, candlelight, and some wine back there. They were behind there, and Eric was doing things to her and making her talk."

The chorus is often misheard, but the proper lyrics are "Spill the wine, take that girl, spill the wine, take that pearl." The "Pearl" is a sexual reference, meaning the clitoris.

Due to contractual intricacies, Burdon was not credited as a songwriter on this or any of the other songs he worked on with War.

Jimi Hendrix' former girlfriend sang backup. Hendrix was managed by Animal's bass player Chas Chandler.

This song features a harmonica, flute, and conga drums.

War went on to a long and successful career after Burdon left the band. The death of Jimi Hendrix, who played with War the night he died, weighed heavily on Burdon, as did other personal problems. Says Brown: "We got back in the studio, we started recording with Eric. We came up with a couple of more songs, couple of albums. Love Is All Around, Black Man's Burden, which was on MGM. Now, Black Man's Burden, Mike Curb was the president at the time, and he wanted to be a lieutenant governor for California at one point. But he had it in for Eric and Steve Gold and different companies, because he thought he was getting us, too. And by some kind of hook or crook, Black Man's Burden never really got distributed in the United States. It was put up on the shelf to get back at some of the guys against the business deal. We go forward, and finally we were in Europe touring with Eric. Now see, Eric and I know exactly what happened, why he left the group. He and I had an unusual kind of relationship. Years before that we were out somewhere, and I'm walking around and I come back in and Eric is all mad at the band, I guess because of a bad show or something. He started poking me in my chest and I pushed him back and I said, 'No. I don't work for you, I work with you.' After that he started giving me Porsches and stuff. He'd come by New Orleans and see me. So he came to the room, he was burned out. He'd been traveling all that time, he'd just gotten married... he was just burned out. I looked at him and I said, 'Eric, you know what? We can handle the show. If you want to go back, I say go back.' So that's when he left us there in Northern England. That's when we became our own. We started playing songs that we had on our first album War that went vinyl. That's our joke - it never made platinum or gold, it went vinyl. We had enough of our own new material, and old songs that we'd been playing before we met Eric, so we just started playing them." (Thanks to Harold Brown for speaking with us about this song. Along with original members B.B. Dickerson, Lee Oskar and Howard Scott, he plays in the Lowrider Band.)

cisco kid low riding...,

Video - War The Cisco Kid 1973 Live on The Midnight Special


Video - War - The Original Low Riders

war - slipping into darkness

Video - War All Day Music - Slipping Into Darkness


Video - 1972 Performance of Slipping Into Darkness on Soul Train

black man's burdon

Video - War - Black Man's Burdon Medley

spilled wine...,

Video - Eric Burdon and War - Spill the Wine

jimi's last stand

Video - Jimi Jamming One Last Time With War

what happened at monterey?

Video - Eric Burdon and War 1969 on the Della Reese Show

painting black...,

Video - Eric Burdon and the Animals at Monterey Pop - Paint it Black


Video - The Rollling Stones - Paint it Black

slipping into the night

Video - Eric Burdon and the Animals - San Franciscan Night

slipping deeper...,

Video - Eric Burdon and the Animals - When I Was Young

slipping deep

Video - The Animals - The House of the Rising Sun

slipping...,

Video - The Animals - Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood

acupuncture and the heart-mind split

Video - Superb and world-rocking drive-in teaser trailer for a true classic

Medicalacupuncture | ABSTRACT - The Oriental medical concept of a Heart-Mind split has no obvious counterpart in Western medicine. Patients with such a split are often labelled as anxious or depressed and treated pharmacologically. The author contends that the omission occurs because the split is a fundamental feature of collective consciousness, and an expression of both medicine and scientific rationalism. Conventional treatment regimens may inadvertently exacerbate the split while, in contrast, acupuncture's holistic philosophy may offer a way to successful reintegration.

KEY WORDS
Acupuncture, Heart-Mind Split, Existential Split, Mind-Body Split, Depression, Anxiety

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing:
We know this in countless ways.
— Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

INTRODUCTION
I discussed the primary energetic splits in Western consciousness in a previous article in Medical Acupuncture.2 To summarize, they have been classified as (1) Existential (primary dualism), (2) Life-Death (secondary dualism), (3) Mind-Body (tertiary dualism), and (4) Persona-Shadow (quaternary dualism).3 This article will explore one specific split, the Heart-Mind split, that has particular relevance to acupuncture because energetically, the Heart is said to carry the "Shen" or spirit. In terms of the primary splits, the Heart-Mind schism relates most closely to the tertiary dualism, in which the ego dissociates from the body, disregards the Heart, and continues as if it were an autonomous entity. The process of reawakening the Shen, and of reintegrating the Heart and Mind, is a task uniquely suited to the practice of acupuncture.

In his book Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, Carl Jung discusses how he acquired an insight into Western man's denial of the Heart when he recounts a conversation he had in 1932 with the Native American Chief Ochwiay Biano (meaning "Mountain Lake") of the Tao Pueblos Indians of New Mexico.4 The chief was quite candid in his perception of the white man's Heart-Mind split:

"See.... how cruel the whites look. Their lips are thin, their noses sharp, their faces furrowed and distorted by folds. Their eyes have a staring expression; they are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something; they are always uneasy and restless. We do not know what they want. We do not understand them. We think they are mad."
When Jung asks why he thinks they are all mad, the Chief replies, "They say they think with their heads."
Jung answers, "Why, of course. What do you think with?"
The Chief, indicating his heart, said, "We think here."

Jung's experience speaks directly to an imbalance in the psyche of Western man, which might be called the Heart-Mind split. In that short but remarkable encounter, Jung had a flash of insight, a realization that the split had fallen so far into the unconscious that even he was taken by surprise when someone pointed it out.

Definitions of Mind/Mind and Heart/Heart
The English language is peculiarly bereft of terms to describe various inner states. Thus, in an attempt to avoid inevitable confusion, I will differentiate between "mind" with a lowercase "m," "Mind" with a capital "M," heart with a lowercase "h," and Heart with a capital "H." In defining these terms, I ask for acceptance of these definitions for the purposes of this article.

The term "mind" refers to the ego-mind, the thinking personal mind located in the head and separated from the body by a Mind-Body split; "Mind" refers to a larger subjective embrace that transcends the Mind-Body split. This differentiation is useful because it allows us to envision personal mind as it now exists in the collective, separated from the body, and a more integrated Mind as it might be experienced without such a split. The word "heart" is a reference to the physical heart, while "Heart" refers to the metaphysical or energetic Heart. The term "Heart-Mind" is used in reference to an integrated Heart-Mind, and roughly corresponds to the Oriental term "Xin."

The term Xin is particularly confusing. This integrated concept is translated variously as Heart, Mind, and/or Heart-Mind, any one of which is misleading. The difficulty lies in there being no English word accurately translating the concept of Xin, given that the Heart-Mind split is structured in the language itself. I use the word Xin and the concepts Heart Yin and Heart Yang in a similar way to that suggested by Leon Hammer:5

* Xin and Heart-Mind will be used interchangeably
* The Heart of Heart-Mind will be used interchangeably with Heart Yin
* The Mind of Heart-Mind will be used interchangeably with Heart Yang
* The "mind" with a lowercase "m" will be used interchangeably with ego-mind
* The "head" will be assumed to be the location of ego-mind

german military peak oil analysis ignored by msm

EnergyBulletin | Last week the Bundeswehr posted an English version (112 pgs) of their extraordinary analysis of peak oil. The original German document (125 pgs) was approved for public release last November, yet neither the complete German version nor the partial English translation has attracted interest from mainstream media.

Now that a complete translation is available, it is hoped that media throughout the English-speaking world will see the Bundeswehr study for what it is: a comprehensive, realistic analysis of one of the most formidable challenges of this century, the (potentially imminent) peaking of global oil production.

The tone of the Bundeswehr document is consistent with written warnings issued by other military analysts and stands in stark contrast to the disinterest of elected officials, bureaucrats and industry officials. The latter sectors have routinely dismissed the concerns of peak oil analysts, but this thoroughly sourced examination (which was conducted by a team of highly credible military analysts from a leading Western nation and approved by their top brass) gives credence to the view that the peaking of global oil production constitutes a threat which appears to be as serious as it is inevitable.

It is hoped that mainstream media, government officials and civic leaders will now examine this unique study, noting especially the credibility of its authors and the gravity of their warnings. The fact that the Bundeswehr has made the effort to provide an English translation is the latest indication that rather than concealing this worrisome information, the German military continues to make every effort to provide it to a world which urgently needs to consider it.

As the Bundeswehr analysts politely point out, there seems to be an instinctive refusal to acknowledge our unprecedented dilemma (which perhaps explains why their study remains so ignored):

Gaining an illustrative picture of a subject is very much a matter of habit. When considering the consequences of peak oil, no everyday experiences and only few historical parallels are at hand. It is therefore difficult to imagine how significant the effects of being gradually deprived of one of our civilisation’s most important energy sources will be. Psychological barriers cause indisputable facts to be blanked out and lead to almost instinctively refusing to look into this difficult subject in detail.

Peak oil, however, is unavoidable (p. 91).

Thanks to the Bundeswehr Future Analysis team for their thorough & insightful study. Credit also to their superior officers for releasing such a potentially controversial document and for now providing a complete translation.

Finally, thanks to researcher Johan Landgren in Sweden for alerting us to the new translation of this unprecedented document.

Download the English version of the report here.

fast and furious arming of narcotrafficantes...,

LATimes | In the fall of 2009, ATF agents installed a secret phone line and hidden cameras in a ceiling panel and wall at Andre Howard's Lone Wolf gun store. They gave him one basic instruction: Sell guns to every illegal purchaser who walks through the door.

For 15 months, Howard did as he was told. To customers with phony IDs or wads of cash he normally would have turned away, he sold pistols, rifles and semiautomatics. He was assured by the ATF that they would follow the guns, and that the surveillance would lead the agents to the violent Mexican drug cartels on the Southwest border.

When Howard heard nothing about any arrests, he questioned the agents. Keep selling, they told him. So hundreds of thousands of dollars more in weapons, including .50-caliber sniper rifles, walked out of the front door of his store in a Glendale, Ariz., strip mall.

He was making a lot of money. But he also feared somebody was going to get hurt.

"Every passing week, I worried about something like that," he said. "I felt horrible and sick."

Late in the night on Dec. 14, in a canyon west of Rio Rico, Ariz., Border Patrol agents came across Mexican bandits preying on illegal immigrants.

According to a Border Patrol "Shooting Incident" report, the agents fired two rounds of bean bags from a shotgun. The Mexicans returned fire. One agent fired from his sidearm, another with his M-4 rifle.

One of the alleged bandits, Manuel Osorio-Arellanes, a 33-year-old Mexican from Sinaloa, was wounded in the abdomen and legs. Agent Brian Terry — 40, single, a former Marine — also went down. "I'm hit!" he cried.

A fellow agent cradled his friend. "I can't feel my legs," Terry said. "I think I'm paralyzed." A bullet had pierced his aorta. Tall and nearly 240 pounds, Terry was too heavy to carry. They radioed for a helicopter. But Terry was bleeding badly, and he died in his colleague's arms.

The bandits left Osorio-Arellanes behind and escaped across the desert, tossing away two AK-47 semiautomatics from Howard's store.

Some 2,000 firearms from the Lone Wolf Trading Company store and others in southern Arizona were illegally sold under an ATF program called Fast and Furious that allowed "straw purchasers" to walk away with the weapons and turn them over to criminal traffickers. But the agency's plan to trace the guns to the cartels never worked. As the case of the two Lone Wolf AK-47s tragically illustrates, the ATF, with a limited force of agents, did not keep track of them.

The Department of Justice in Washington said last week that one other Fast and Furious firearm turned up at a violent crime scene in this country. They have yet to provide any more details. They said another 28 Fast and Furious weapons were recovered at violent crimes in Mexico. They have not identified those cases either. The Mexican government maintains that an undisclosed number of Fast and Furious weapons have been found at some 170 crime scenes in their country.

addiction is not a disease of the brain?

NPR | Addiction has been moralized, medicalized, politicized, and criminalized. And, of course, many of us are addicts, have been addicts or have been close to addicts. Addiction runs very hot as a theme.

Part of what makes addiction so compelling is that it forms a kind of conceptual/political crossroads for thinking about human nature. After all, to make sense of addiction we need to make sense of what it is to be an agent who acts, with values, in the face of consequences, under pressure, with compulsion, out of need and desire. One needs a whole philosophy to understand addiction.

Today I want to respond to readers who were outraged by my willingness even to question whether addiction is a disease of the brain.

Let us first ask: what makes something — a substance or an activity — addictive? Is there a property shared by all the things to which we can get addicted?

Unlikely. Addictive substances such as alcohol, heroin and nicotine are chemically distinct. Moreover, activities such as gambling, eating, sex — activities that are widely believed to be addictive — have no ingredients.

And yet it is remarkable — as Gene Heyman notes in his excellent book on addiction — that there are only 20 or so distinct activities and substances that produce addiction. There must be something in virtue of which these things, and these things alone, give rise to the distinctive pattern of use and abuse in the face of the medical, personal and legal perils that we know can stem from addiction.

What do gambling, sex, heroin and cocaine — and the other things that can addict us — have in common?

One strategy is to look not to the substances and activities themselves, but to the effects that they produce in addicts. And here neuroscience has delivered important insights.

If you feed an electrical wire through a rat's skull and onto to a short dopamine release circuit that connects the VTA (ventral tegmental area) and the nucleus accumbens, and if you attach that wire to a lever-press, the rat will self-stimulate — press the lever to produce the increase in dopamine — and it will do so basically foreover, forgoing food, sex, water and exercise. Addiction, it would seem, is produced by direct action on the brain!

(See here for a useful Wikipedia review of this literature.)

And indeed, there is now a substantial body of evidence supporting the claim that all drugs or activities of abuse (as we can call them), have precisely this kind of effect on this dopamine neurochemical circuit.

When the American Society of Addiction Medicine recently declared addiction to be a brain disease their conclusion was based on findings like this. Addiction is an effect brought about in a neurochemical circuit in the brain. If true, this is important, for it means that if you want to treat addiction, you need to find ways to act on this neural substrate.

september 11, ten years later....,

american identity

1/3rd of u.s. middle-class slips into poverty

Video - War - Slippin into Darkness - Live 1972 Chicago version

WHT | Nearly one in three Americans who grew up in the middle class has slipped down the income ladder as an adult, according to a new report by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Downward mobility is most common among middle-class people who are divorced or separated from their spouses, did not attend college, scored poorly on standardized tests, or used hard drugs, the report says.

"A middle-class upbringing does not guarantee the same status over the course of a lifetime," the report says.

The study focused on people who were middle-class teenagers in 1979 and who were between 39 and 44 years old in 2004 and 2006. It defines people as middle-class if they fall between the 30th and 70th percentiles in income distribution, which for a family of four is between $32,900 and $64,000 a year in 2010 dollars.

People were deemed downwardly mobile if they fell below the 30th percentile in income, if their income rank was 20 or more percentiles below their parents' or if, in absolute terms, they earn at least 20 percent less than their parents. The findings do not cover the difficult times that the nation has endured since 2007.

Pew researchers said the study's structure did not permit an analysis of whether upward mobility has become more difficult through the years. Nonetheless, some economists point to growing income inequality and widely stagnating wages as evidence that the American Dream is slipping out of reach for many people.

restaurants want a slice of that food stamp pie

USAToday | The number of businesses approved to accept food stamps grew by a third from 2005 to 2010, U.S. Department of Agriculture records show, as vendors from convenience and dollar discount stores to gas stations and pharmacies increasingly joined the growing entitlement program.

Now, restaurants, which typically have not participated in the program, are lobbying for a piece of the action.

Louisville-based Yum! Brands, whose restaurants include Taco Bell, KFC, Long John Silver's and Pizza Hut, is trying to get restaurants more involved, federal lobbying records show.

That's a prospect that anti-hunger advocates welcome, but one that worries some current food stamp vendors and public health advocates.

Federal rules generally prohibit food stamp benefits, which are distributed under the USDA's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), from being exchanged for prepared foods. Yet a provision dating to the 1970s allows states to allow restaurants to serve disabled, elderly and homeless people, USDA spokeswoman Jean Daniel said.

Between 2005 and 2010, the number of businesses certified in the SNAP program went from about 156,000 to nearly 209,000, according to USDA data.

There is big money at stake. USDA records show food stamp benefits swelled from $28.5 billion to $64.7billion in that period.

Four states accept restaurants, with Florida the most recent to begin a program.

"It makes perfect sense to expand a program that's working well in California, Arizona and Michigan, enabling the homeless, elderly and disabled to purchase prepared meals with SNAP benefits in a restaurant environment," Yum! spokesman Jonathan Blum said.

The National Restaurant Association supports Yum!, said spokeswoman Katie Laning Niebaum, but the National Association of Convenience Stores does not.

the shock doctrine comes to your neighborhood classroom

Salon | "Let's hope the fiscal crisis doesn't get better too soon. It'll slow down reform." -- Tom Watkins, a consultant, summarizes the corporate education reform movement's current strategy to the Sunday New York Times.

The Shock Doctrine, as articulated by journalist Naomi Klein, describes the process by which corporate interests use catastrophes as instruments to maximize their profit. Sometimes the events they use are natural (earthquakes), sometimes they are human-created (the 9/11 attacks) and sometimes they are a bit of both (hurricanes made stronger by human-intensified global climate change). Regardless of the particular cataclysm, though, the Shock Doctrine suggests that in the aftermath of a calamity, there is always corporate method in the smoldering madness - a method based in Disaster Capitalism.

Though Klein's book provides much evidence of the Shock Doctrine, the Disaster Capitalists rarely come out and acknowledge their strategy. That's why Watkins' outburst of candor, buried in this front-page New York Times article yesterday, is so important: It shows that the recession and its corresponding shock to school budgets is being used by corporations to maximize revenues, all under the gauzy banner of "reform."

Some background: The Times piece follows a recent Education Week report showing that as U.S. school systems are laying off teachers, letting schoolhouses crumble, and increasing class sizes, high-tech firms are hitting the public-subsidy jackpot thanks to corporate "reformers'" successful push for more "data-driven" standardized tests (more on that in a second) and more technology in the classrooms. Essentially, as the overall spending pie for public schools is shrinking, the piece of the pie for high-tech companies -- who make big campaign contributions to education policymakers -- is getting much bigger, while the piece of the pie for traditional education (teachers, school infrastructure, text books, etc.) is getting smaller.

The Times on Sunday added some key -- and somehow, largely overlooked -- context to this reportage: namely, that the spending shift isn't producing better achievement results on the very standardized tests the high-tech industry celebrates and makes money off of. "In a nutshell," reports the Times, "schools are spending billions on technology, even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning."

The paper adds that the successful "pressure to push technology into the classroom without proof of its value has deep roots" going back more than a decade, which raises the fundamental question: Why? Why would this push be so successful in changing education policy if there is little hard evidence that it is the right move to improve student achievement?

The answer goes back -- as it so often does -- to corporate power and the Shock Doctrine.

Tech companies give the politicians who set education policy lots of campaign contributions, and in exchange, those politicians have returned the favor by citing tough economic times over the last decade as a rationale to wage an aggressive attack on traditional public education. That attack has included everything from demonizing teachers; to siphoning public money to privately administered schools; to funneling more of the money still left in public schools to private high-tech companies.

This trend is no accidental convergence of economic disaster and high-minded policy. On the contrary, it is a deliberate strategy by corporate executives and their political puppets, a strategy that uses the disaster of recession-era budget cuts as a means of justifying radical policies, knowing that the disaster will have shellshocked observers asking far fewer questions about data and actual results. As the Times sums it up, the recession's "resource squeeze presents an opportunity" for corporate interests.

Or as Watkins explains, social pain is an opportunity: "Let's hope the fiscal crisis doesn't get better too soon. It'll slow down reform."

For sheer weapons-grade assholishness, Watkins' publicly wishing for a crushing recession to continue ranks up there with such gems as "bring them on" and "let them eat cake."

However, the real news here is that a Disaster Capitalist has spoken the unspoken and clearly articulated the Shock Doctrine in all its hideous glory. In this case, he has told us what the "reform" movement to demonize teachers, undermine public education, and generate private profits from public schools is really all about: It is about using the shock of a fiscal crisis to enact a radical, unproven but highly profitable agenda that corporate forces fully know they cannot pass under non-emergency circumstances, when objective scrutiny would be much more intense. Indeed, corporate "reformers"are so reliant on the Shock Doctrine to glaze over uncomfortable questions about their agenda, that they are now praying that the shock of recession continues.

technology in schools faces questions on value?

NYTimes | Amy Furman, a seventh-grade English teacher here, roams among 31 students sitting at their desks or in clumps on the floor. They’re studying Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” — but not in any traditional way.

In this technology-centric classroom, students are bent over laptops, some blogging or building Facebook pages from the perspective of Shakespeare’s characters. One student compiles a song list from the Internet, picking a tune by the rapper Kanye West to express the emotions of Shakespeare’s lovelorn Silvius.

The class, and the Kyrene School District as a whole, offer what some see as a utopian vision of education’s future. Classrooms are decked out with laptops, big interactive screens and software that drills students on every basic subject. Under a ballot initiative approved in 2005, the district has invested roughly $33 million in such technologies.

The digital push here aims to go far beyond gadgets to transform the very nature of the classroom, turning the teacher into a guide instead of a lecturer, wandering among students who learn at their own pace on Internet-connected devices.

“This is such a dynamic class,” Ms. Furman says of her 21st-century classroom. “I really hope it works.”

Hope and enthusiasm are soaring here. But not test scores.

Since 2005, scores in reading and math have stagnated in Kyrene, even as statewide scores have risen.

To be sure, test scores can go up or down for many reasons. But to many education experts, something is not adding up — here and across the country. In a nutshell: schools are spending billions on technology, even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning.

This conundrum calls into question one of the most significant contemporary educational movements. Advocates for giving schools a major technological upgrade — which include powerful educators, Silicon Valley titans and White House appointees — say digital devices let students learn at their own pace, teach skills needed in a modern economy and hold the attention of a generation weaned on gadgets.

Some backers of this idea say standardized tests, the most widely used measure of student performance, don’t capture the breadth of skills that computers can help develop. But they also concede that for now there is no better way to gauge the educational value of expensive technology investments.

“The data is pretty weak. It’s very difficult when we’re pressed to come up with convincing data,” said Tom Vander Ark, the former executive director for education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and an investor in educational technology companies. When it comes to showing results, he said, “We better put up or shut up.”

And yet, in virtually the same breath, he said change of a historic magnitude is inevitably coming to classrooms this decade: “It’s one of the three or four biggest things happening in the world today.”

Critics counter that, absent clear proof, schools are being motivated by a blind faith in technology and an overemphasis on digital skills — like using PowerPoint and multimedia tools — at the expense of math, reading and writing fundamentals. They say the technology advocates have it backward when they press to upgrade first and ask questions later.

The spending push comes as schools face tough financial choices. In Kyrene, for example, even as technology spending has grown, the rest of the district’s budget has shrunk, leading to bigger classes and fewer periods of music, art and physical education.

At the same time, the district’s use of technology has earned it widespread praise. It is upheld as a model of success by the National School Boards Association, which in 2008 organized a visit by 100 educators from 17 states who came to see how the district was innovating.

And the district has banked its future and reputation on technology. Kyrene, which serves 18,000 kindergarten to eighth-grade students, mostly from the cities of Tempe, Phoenix and Chandler, uses its computer-centric classes as a way to attract children from around the region, shoring up enrollment as its local student population shrinks. More students mean more state dollars.

The issue of tech investment will reach a critical point in November. The district plans to go back to local voters for approval of $46.3 million more in taxes over seven years to allow it to keep investing in technology. That represents around 3.5 percent of the district’s annual spending, five times what it spends on textbooks.

The district leaders’ position is that technology has inspired students and helped them grow, but that there is no good way to quantify those achievements — putting them in a tough spot with voters deciding whether to bankroll this approach again.

“My gut is telling me we’ve had growth,” said David K. Schauer, the superintendent here. “But we have to have some measure that is valid, and we don’t have that.”

It gives him pause.

“We’ve jumped on bandwagons for different eras without knowing fully what we’re doing. This might just be the new bandwagon,” he said. “I hope not.”

ATL education gap hurts employment prospects...,

AJC | Employment in metro Atlanta has been hurt in recent years by the area's dependence on troubled job sectors, including administrative and support services, and specialty trade contracting. One thing that's helped the employment rate has been a relatively strong supply of educated workers.

But a new report from the Brookings Institution says the area's "education gap" is growing and could become a problem if the trend is not reversed. The education gap refers to the difference between local employer demand for educated workers and a community's ability to provide enough of them.

Metro Atlanta had the nation's fifth-largest increase in education gap from 2005-2009, the study found. No market of comparable size was in the top 10.

"People aren't getting educated fast enough to keep up with what industries are requiring. If that gap continues to grow, Atlanta could really be hurt by it," said Jonathan Rothwell, a Brookings senior research analyst and one of the authors of the report.

Rothwell said Atlanta has benefited from the presence of top-quality major universities and that its education gap "currently is not a huge problem. The average worker still has more education than is required for the average job. That's a good thing. It's helped Atlanta's unemployment rate stay lower than it otherwise would be."

Metro areas with larger education gaps had consistently higher unemployment rates than those with smaller gaps, the report said.

Atlanta ranked 41st among 100 metro areas in education gap in 2009. It ranked 74th in industry composition, the other factor Brookings used in examining unemployment rates in individual metro markets.

campus is one big commercial

NYTimes | IT’S move-in day here at the University of North Carolina, and Leila Ismail, stuffed animals in tow, is feeling some freshman angst.

A few friendly upperclassmen spring into action.

But wait: there is something odd, or at least oddly corporate, about this welcome wagon. These U.N.C. students are all wearing identical T-shirts from American Eagle Outfitters.

Turns out three of them are working for that youth clothing chain on this late August morning, as what are known in the trade as “brand ambassadors” or “campus evangelists” — and they have recruited several dozen friends as a volunteer move-in crew. Even before Ms. Ismail can find her dorm or meet her roommate, they cheerily unload her family’s car. Then they lug her belongings to her dorm. Along the way, they dole out American Eagle coupons, American Eagle water canisters and American Eagle pens.

Ms. Ismail, 18, of Charlotte, welcomes the help. “I’ll probably always remember it,” she says.

American Eagle Outfitters certainly hopes so, as do a growing number of companies that are hiring college students to represent brands on campuses across the nation.

This fall, an estimated 10,000 American college students will be working on hundreds of campuses — for cash, swag, job experience or all three — marketing everything from Red Bull to Hewlett-Packard PCs. For the companies hiring them, the motivation is clear: college students spent about $36 billion on things like clothing, computers and cellphones during the 2010-11 school year alone, according to projections from Re:Fuel, a media and promotions firm specializing in the youth market. And who knows the students at, say, U.N.C., better than the students at U.N.C.?

Corporations have been pitching college students for decades on products from cars to credit cards. But what is happening on campuses today is without rival, in terms of commercializing everyday college life.

Companies from Microsoft on down are increasingly seeking out the big men and women on campus to influence their peers. The students most in demand are those who are popular — ones involved in athletics, music, fraternities or sororities. Thousands of Facebook friends help, too. What companies want are students with inside knowledge of school traditions and campus hotspots. In short, they want students with the cred to make brands seem cool, in ways that a TV or magazine ad never could.

oil and gas under the clash...,

Video - Sundry pretexts for tension between the mediterranean powers

debka | Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan this week coolly moved his country step by provocative step towards an armed clash with Israel – not just over the Palestinian issue, but because he covets the gas and oil resources of the eastern Mediterranean opposite Israel's shores.

Thursday night, Sept. 8, he announced that Turkish warships will escort any Turkish aid vessels for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. In his remarks to Al Jazeera television, the Turkish prime minister also said he had taken steps "to stop Israel from unilaterally exploiting natural resources from the eastern Mediterranean."

He did not say what steps he had taken. However, for some time now, he has moved mountains to isolate Israel by drawing a double diplomatic noose around it.
If Turkish ships breach the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza, which a UN report last week pronounced legitimate under international law, Erdogan will become the first Muslim leader to embark on military action in the Palestinian cause. The Arab nations which fought Israel time after time in the past will be made to look ineffectual and the Turkish leader the regional big shot. Even Iran would be put in the shade for never daring to provoke Israel the way Turkey has.

The Turkish prime minister clings to the belief that the foremost Arab powers, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which have been watching his maneuvers with deep suspicion, will have no choice but to play ball with him now that he has confronted Israel. The first crack in the Arab ice came about Thursday, Sept. 8, in the form of Egyptian consent to join the Turkish Navy in sea maneuvers in the eastern Mediterranean.

Erdogan plans to send his warships into this water for two missions:

1. To split the Israel's small Navy into two heads – one for sustaining the blockade against Gaza and one for safeguarding the gas and oil rigs opposite its shores.

2. To scare Israel into the full or partial stoppage of its offshore oil and gas operations, thereby robbing it of energy power status and substantial economic gains. Erdogan is determined never to let Israel overshadow Turkey in the regional stakes and will put a stop to the Jewish state's progress – even if military aggression is called for.

better think twice

Gilad | I will make myself as simple, short and clear just to make sure that the Israelis and their allies around the world understand how futile their agenda is.

Islam is unbeatable and indestructible. The Israelis should remember their latest military blunders. In 2006 its army was humiliated by the Hezbula, a small Lebanese paramilitary organisation. In just a few weeks the heroic Hezbollah managed to bring Israel to its knees. In 2008-9 Israeli Army mounted a massive attack on Gaza, the initial objective was to dismantle the democratically elected Hamas. Israel murdered more than 1400 Palestinians but it achieved none of its military objectives. Hamas and Hezbollah won these battles without air force, navy or tanks. In fact resilience was enough to defeat the IDF.

But Israel is not alone, The English speaking Empire is also heavily beaten in Iraq and Afghanistan. Similarily, Iraqi insurgency and Taliban do not posses tanks, F 16s or submarines. In the age of Islamic resistance, tables of contents with numbers of tanks, vessels, and airplanes are obsolete. It is the spirit and the will rather than the tank that wins the battle. This spirit better be called The Islam Spring, and it is unbeatable indeed.

The message for Israelis is plainly clear. Israel and its supporting lobbies had better learn how to contain their inherent violent tendencies. Israel cannot win this battle. The sooner the Israelis encompass this obvious fact, the better it is for Israel and for world peace.

freedoms I wish the military was defending,,,

LewRockwell | "Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended." ~ George W. Bush, September 11, 2001

We have heard it repeated loudly and continuously since 9/11 – the troops are defending our freedoms. This claim is made so often and by so many different segments of society that it has become another meaningless national dictum – like "God Bless America" or "In God We Trust."

This cliché is actually quite insidious. It is used as a mantra to justify or excuse anything the U.S. military does.

U.S. troops are engaged in unconstitutional, undeclared wars – but the troops are defending our freedoms. U.S. drone strikes killed civilians in Pakistan – but the troops are defending our freedoms. U.S. bombs landed on a wedding party in Afghanistan – but the troops are defending our freedoms. U.S. soldiers murdered Afghan civilians and kept some of their body parts – but the troops are defending our freedoms. U.S. helicopter pilots gunned down Iraqi civilians – but the troops are defending our freedoms. U.S. soldiers killed civilians for sport – but the troops are defending our freedoms. U.S. troops carelessly killed civilians and then covered it up – but the troops are defending our freedoms.

But as I have pointed out many times in my articles on the military, and others like Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation have been arguing for years (see here and here), the troops are doing everything but defending our freedoms. In fact, the more the troops defend our freedoms by bombing, invading, and occupying other countries, the more enemies they make of the United States and the more our freedoms get taken away in the name of "fighting terrorism" or "national security."

Not in any particular order, and in varying degrees of significance, here are some freedoms I wish the military were defending:

are jobs obsolete?

CNN | Jobs, as such, are a relatively new concept. People may have always worked, but until the advent of the corporation in the early Renaissance, most people just worked for themselves. They made shoes, plucked chickens, or created value in some way for other people, who then traded or paid for those goods and services. By the late Middle Ages, most of Europe was thriving under this arrangement.

The only ones losing wealth were the aristocracy, who depended on their titles to extract money from those who worked. And so they invented the chartered monopoly. By law, small businesses in most major industries were shut down and people had to work for officially sanctioned corporations instead. From then on, for most of us, working came to mean getting a "job."

The Industrial Age was largely about making those jobs as menial and unskilled as possible. Technologies such as the assembly line were less important for making production faster than for making it cheaper, and laborers more replaceable. Now that we're in the digital age, we're using technology the same way: to increase efficiency, lay off more people, and increase corporate profits.

While this is certainly bad for workers and unions, I have to wonder just how truly bad is it for people. Isn't this what all this technology was for in the first place? The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with "career" be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?

Instead, we are attempting to use the logic of a scarce marketplace to negotiate things that are actually in abundance. What we lack is not employment, but a way of fairly distributing the bounty we have generated through our technologies, and a way of creating meaning in a world that has already produced far too much stuff.

The communist answer to this question was just to distribute everything evenly. But that sapped motivation and never quite worked as advertised. The opposite, libertarian answer (and the way we seem to be going right now) would be to let those who can't capitalize on the bounty simply suffer. Cut social services along with their jobs, and hope they fade into the distance.

But there might still be another possibility -- something we couldn't really imagine for ourselves until the digital era. As a pioneer of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier, recently pointed out, we no longer need to make stuff in order to make money. We can instead exchange information-based products.

We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do -- the value we create -- is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful.

This sort of work isn't so much employment as it is creative activity. Unlike Industrial Age employment, digital production can be done from the home, independently, and even in a peer-to-peer fashion without going through big corporations. We can make games for each other, write books, solve problems, educate and inspire one another -- all through bits instead of stuff. And we can pay one another using the same money we use to buy real stuff.

For the time being, as we contend with what appears to be a global economic slowdown by destroying food and demolishing homes, we might want to stop thinking about jobs as the main aspect of our lives that we want to save. They may be a means, but they are not the ends.

privatizing profit and socializing externalities will be our doom...,

NYTimes | Why bother recycling or riding your bike to the store? Because we all want to do something, anything. Call it “action bias.” But, sadly, individual action does not work. It distracts us from the need for collective action, and it doesn’t add up to enough. Self-interest, not self-sacrifice, is what induces noticeable change. Only the right economic policies will enable us as individuals to be guided by self-interest and still do the right thing for the planet.

Every ton of carbon dioxide pollution causes around $20 of damage to economies, ecosystems and human health. That sum times 20 implies $400 worth of damage per American per year. That’s not damage you’re going to do in the distant future; that’s damage each of us is doing right now. Who pays for it?

We pay as a society. My cross-country flight adds fractions of a penny to everyone else’s cost. That knowledge leads some of us to voluntarily chip in a few bucks to “offset” our emissions. But none of these payments motivate anyone to fly less. It doesn’t lead airlines to switch to more fuel-efficient planes or routes. If anything, airlines by now use voluntary offsets as a marketing ploy to make green-conscious passengers feel better. The result is planetary socialism at its worst: we all pay the price because individuals don’t.

It won’t change until a regulatory system compels us to pay our fair share to limit pollution accordingly. Limit, of course, is code for “cap and trade,” the system that helped phase out lead in gasoline in the 1980s, slashed acid rain pollution in the 1990s and is now bringing entire fisheries back from the brink. “Cap and trade” for carbon is beginning to decrease carbon pollution in Europe, and similar models are slated to do the same from California to China.

Alas, this approach has been declared dead in Washington, ironically by self-styled free-marketers. Another solution, a carbon tax, is also off the table because, well, it’s a tax.

Never mind that markets are truly free only when everyone pays the full price for his or her actions. Anything else is socialism. The reality is that we cannot overcome the global threats posed by greenhouse gases without speaking the ultimate inconvenient truth: getting people excited about making individual environmental sacrifices is doomed to fail.

High school science tells us that global warming is real. And economics teaches us that humanity must have the right incentives if it is to stop this terrible trend.

Don’t stop recycling. Don’t stop buying local. But add mastering some basic economics to your to-do list. Our future will be largely determined by our ability to admit the need to end planetary socialism. That’s the most fundamental of economics lessons and one any serious environmentalist ought to heed.

bout to take that second dip into the greatest depression...,

NYTimes | If history is a guide, the odds that the American economy is falling into a double-dip recession have risen sharply in recent weeks and may even have reached 50 percent.

Economies have a strong self-reinforcing nature. When people are optimistic, they spend, which begets hiring and then more spending. When people are anxious, they pull back, which leads to a cycle of hiring freezes and further anxiety that often lasts for months.

The United States appears to have entered some version of the vicious cycle. Most ominously, job growth has slowed to a pace that typically signals the start of a recession.

Over the last 50 years, every time that job growth has been as meager as it has been over the last four months, the economy has been headed toward recession, in a recession or in the immediate aftermath of one. From early 2010 through this spring, by contrast, employment was growing fast enough to make the economy look as if it were in a recovery, albeit a modest one.

“The chances that we are in something that is going to feel like a recession are close to 100 percent,” said Joshua Shapiro of MFR Inc. in New York, who has diagnosed the economy more accurately than many other forecasters lately. “Whether we reach the technical definition” — which is determined by a committee of academic economists and based on gross domestic product, employment and other factors — “I think is probably close to 50-50.”

A double dip would present obvious political problems for President Obama, whose approval ratings have already fallen below 50 percent and who is scheduled to give a speech to Congress on Thursday outlining a new jobs plan. A weak economy also could threaten incumbents of both parties in Congress, whose approval rating has hovered around 15 percent in recent polls.

More immediately, the main significance of the recent slowdown is that the economy may not merely be going through a weak phase that will soon pass, as many policy makers hope. Instead, history seems to suggest that the situation will probably get worse before it gets better.

In a recent research paper, Jeremy J. Nalewaik, a Federal Reserve economist, described this concept as “stall speed”: once the economy slows markedly, it often continues to do so. (He did not make a forecast.) In the other two severe downturns of the last 80 years — in the 1930s and the early 1980s — the economy suffered just such a stall and fell into a second recession not long after the first.

Today, Europe’s troubles continue to weigh on banks and financial markets. Consumers remain indebted, and the housing market remains depressed. State and local governments continue to cut jobs, aggravating the problems in the private sector. Congress is unlikely to pass a major jobs bill.

The economy could, of course, defy history and turn around soon. Eventually, consumers will begin spending more on houses, cars, appliances and services, and employers will begin hiring in large numbers. A further decline in gas prices, which have generally been falling, would particularly help households.

But the latest indicators suggest that even if the economy does not continue to worsen, it appears to be too weak to add enough jobs each month — roughly 125,000 — even to keep pace with population growth. Anything less, and the share of the population that is employed will continue to fall.

families feel the sharp edge of state budget cuts

NYTimes | Stretched beyond their limits and searching for new corners of their budgets to find spending cuts, states are now trimming benefits for residents who are in grim financial shape themselves.

Some states, including Florida and Missouri, have decided to shrink the duration of state unemployment benefits paid to laid-off workers, while others, including Arizona and California, are creating new restrictions on cash aid for low-income residents.

Here in Michigan, more than 11,000 families received letters last week notifying them that in October they will lose the cash assistance they have been provided for years. Next year, people who lose their jobs here will receive fewer weeks of state unemployment benefits, and those making little enough to qualify for the state’s earned income tax credit will see a far smaller benefit from it.

Some political leaders see these sorts of cuts as unfortunate necessities to help bridge their state’s financial gaps. Others see them as overdue limits on out-of-control government handouts — some lawmakers here fumed, for example, that 30,000 college students, newly dropped from the state’s food stamp rolls, should never have been allowed to collect such benefits in the first place.

Whatever the motive, such policy changes come as the downturn has left a growing number of low-income families in worse financial trouble.

The percentage of children living in poverty rose during the last decade, particularly once the recession hit and unemployment soared.

By 2009, about 2.4 million more children’s families lived below the poverty line than in 2000, an increase of 18 percent, according to a recent analysis of Census Bureau data by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a child advocacy group. In states like this, where Republicans took control of the capital this year, the new cuts have helped resolve Michigan’s expected budget gap, once estimated at $1.4 billion.

“Michigan can no longer afford to provide lifetime assistance,” said Sheryl Thompson, an official with the state Department of Human Services, which reported that of those being dropped from the state’s cash-assistance rolls, some 1,200 families had been receiving payments for 10 years, more than 700 others for a dozen years, and an additional 400 families had been getting payments for 14 years.

The pattern of new cuts around the nation leads some advocates to fear that the number of low-income families will only grow in the next few years if programs they can lean on shrink or vanish.

“We’re O.K. unless something — anything at all — goes wrong,” said Rachel Haifley, who lives here in Lansing and said she works part-time making a little less than $9 an hour and receives child support for her two young sons, 1 and 3.

Ms. Haifley said she has become an expert at seeking out giveaways, thrift shops and bargains — for clothes, portable cribs, toys for the boys. “All I want is for them to feel like everyone else,” she said. “I don’t want them to grow up and ask me why they’re poor.”

In Dearborn Heights, Celia Kane-Fecay, another mother of two, said she has given up on the job hunt for now and returned to college — with help from $597 a month in cash assistance, Medicaid and any other aid she can track down with what she has come to describe unhappily as her daily list of begging phone calls. “You don’t ever want to be here,” she said.

Signs of new poverty are already evident. A project by the Annie E. Casey Foundation Kids Count Data Book found that by 2010, nearly 11 percent of the nation’s children, or 7.8 million children, had at least one parent who was unemployed, when only about half as many were in such circumstances in 2007. And since four years ago, the study found, at least 5.3 million children have been affected by home foreclosures.

texas cut fire department funding by 75 percent this year

Video - Rick Perry ducking questions about shortsighted dumb-assery on his watch.

rawstory | Under Gov. Rick Perry (R) this year, Texas slashed state funding for the volunteer fire departments that protect most of the state from wildfires like the ones that have recently destroyed more than 700 homes.

Volunteer departments that were already facing financial strain were slated to have their funding cut from $30 million to $7 million, according to KVUE.

The majority of Texas is protected by volunteer fire departments. There are 879 volunteer fire departments in Texas and only 114 paid fire departments. Another 187 departments are a combination of volunteer and paid.

For that reason, aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) could be more important than ever to the state where wildfires have recently been raging.

At a press conference Monday, Perry promised to seek federal disaster relief and said that FEMA would be in the state by Wednesday.

While the Texas governor has been highly critical of FEMA in the past, he told CBS’ Erica Hill Tuesday that now was not the time to worry about reforming the agency.

“The issue is taking care of these people right now,” Perry insisted. “We can work our way through any conversations about how to make agencies more efficient, how to make Department of Defense equipment, for instance, more available. There are a lot of issues we can talk about, but the fact of the matter is now is not the time to be trying to work out the details of how to make these agencies more efficient. Let’s get people out of harm’s way.”

do the kochs want to end public education?

Video - Why do the Kochs want to end public education.

audio - inside the koch bros. secret seminar

MotherJones | "We have Saddam Hussein," declared billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, apparently referring to President Barack Obama as he welcomed hundreds of wealthy guests to the latest of the secret fundraising and strategy seminars he and his brother host twice a year. The 2012 elections, he warned, will be "the mother of all wars."

Charles Koch would probably not publicly compare the president of the United States to a murderous dictator. (As a general rule, he and his brother don't do much politicking or speechifying in public at all.) But Mother Jones has obtained exclusive audio recordings from the Koch seminar, a private event that took place in June at a resort near Vail, Colorado.

These unprecedented recordings provide a behind-the-scenes look at how the Koch brothers and their comrades talk when they gather. They include a pair of keynote speeches and remarks by brothers Charles and David Koch, who spell out their political aims and name some of the "great partners" who have contributed millions of dollars to their causes. (The audio was provided by a source who approached the author after the event was over and was not seeking compensation.)

the real unemployment rate is ~22%

Shadowstats | The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers.

The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline number. The U-6 unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment.

the radical implications of a zero growth economy

Video - Maurice Strong Interview (BBC, 1972)

RWER | For 50 years literature has been accumulating pointing out the contradiction between the pursuit of economic growth and ecological sustainability, although this has had negligible impact on economic theory or practice. A few, notably Herman Daly (2008), have continued to attempt to get the notion of a steady-state economy onto the agenda but it has only been in the last few years that discussion has begun to gain momentum. Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth(200) has been widely recognised, there is now a substantial European ”De-growth” movement (Latouche, 2007), and CASSE (2010) has emerged.

The argument in this paper is that the implications of a steady-state economy have not been understood at all well, especially by its advocates. Most proceed as if we can and should eliminate the growth element of the present economy while leaving the rest more or less as it is. It will be argued firstly that this is not possible, because this is not an economy which has growth; it is a growth-economy, a system in which most of the core structures and processes involve growth. If growth is eliminated then radically different ways of carrying out many fundamental processes will have to be found. Secondly, the critics of growth typically proceed as if it is the only or the primary or the sufficient thing that has to be fixed, but it will be argued that the major global problems facing us cannot be solved unless several fundamental systems and structures within consumer-capitalist society are radically remade. What is required is much greater social change than Western society has undergone in several hundred years.

Before offering support for these claims it is important to sketch the general “limits to growth” situation confronting us. The magnitude and seriousness of the global resource and environmental problem is not generally appreciated. Only when this is grasped is it possible to understand that the social changes required must be huge, radical and far reaching. The initial claim being argued here (and detailed in Trainer 2010b) is that consumer-capitalist society cannot be reformed or fixed; it has to be largely scrapped and remade along quite different lines.

The “limits to growth” case: An outline

The planet is now racing into many massive problems, any one of which could bring about the collapse of civilization before long. The most serious are the destruction of the environment, the deprivation of the Third World, resource depletion, conflict and war, and the breakdown of social cohesion. The main cause of all these problems is over-production and over-consumption – people are trying to live at levels of affluence that are far too high to be sustained or for all to share.

Our society is grossly unsustainable – the levels of consumption, resource use and ecological impact we have in rich countries like Australia are far beyond levels that could be kept up for long or extended to all people. Yet almost everyone’s supreme goal is to increase material living standards and the GDP and production and consumption, investment, trade, etc., as fast as possible and without any limit in sight. There is no element in our suicidal condition that is more important than this mindless obsession with accelerating the main factor causing the condition.

The following points drive home the magnitude of the overshoot.

how economic theory came to ignore the role of debt

Video - Economist Michael Hudson Explains Bank and Bankers Are Parasites And Not Part Of The Real Economy

RWER | Starting from David Ricardo in 1817, the historian of economic thought searches in vain through the theorizing of financial-sector spokesmen for an acknowledgement of how debt charges (1) add a non-production cost to prices, (2) deflate markets of purchasing power that otherwise would be spent on goods and services, (3) discourage capital investment and employment to supply these markets, and hence (4) put downward pressure on wages.

What needs to be explained is why government, academia, industry and labor have not taken the lead in analyzing these problems. Why have the corrosive dynamics of debt been all but ignored?

I suppose one would not expect the tobacco industry to promote studies of the unhealthy consequences of smoking, any more than the oil and automobile industries would encourage research into environmental pollution or the linkage between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. So it should come as little surprise that the adverse effects of debt are sidestepped by advocates of the idea that financial institutions rather than government planners should manage society’s development. Claiming that good public planning and effective regulation of markets is impossible, monetarists have been silent with regard to how financial interests shape the economy to favor debt proliferation.

The problem is that governments throughout the world leave monetary policy to the Central Bank and Treasury, whose administrators are drawn from the ranks of bankers and money managers. Backed by the IMF with its doctrinaireChicagoSchooladvocacy of financial austerity, these planners oppose full-employment policies and rising living standards as being inflationary. The fear is that rising wages will increase prices, reducing the volume of labor and output that a given flow of debt service is able to command.

Inasmuch as monetary and credit policy is made by the central bank rather than by the Dept. of Labor, governments chose to squeeze out more debt service rather than to promote employment and direct investment. The public domain is sold off to pay bondholders, even as governments cut taxes that cause budget deficits financed by running up yet more debt. Most of this new debt is bought by the financial sector (including global institutions) with money from the tax cuts they receive from governments ever more beholden to them. As finance, real estate and other interest-paying sectors are un-taxed, the fiscal burden is shifted onto labor.

The more economically powerful theFIREsector (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) becomes, the more it is able to translate this power into political influence. The most direct way has been for its members and industry lobbies to become major campaign contributors, especially in theUnited States, which dominates the IMF and World Bank to set the rules of globalization and debt proliferation in today’s world. Influence over the government bureaucracies provides a mantel of prestige in the world’s leading business schools, which are endowed largely byFIRE-sector institutions, as are the most influential policy think tanks. This academic lobbying steers students, corporate managers and policy makers to see the world from a financial vantage point.

Finance and banking courses are taught from the perspective of how to obtain interest and asset-price gains through credit creation or by using other peoples’ money, not how an economy may best steer savings and credit to achieve the best long-term development. Existing rules and practices are taken for granted as “givens” rather than asking whether economies benefit or suffer as a whole from a rising proportion of income being paid to carry the debt overhead (including mortgage debt for housing being bid up by the supply of such credit). It is not debated, for instance, whether it really is desirable to finance Social Security by holding back wages as forced savings, as opposed to the government monetizing its social-spending deficits by free credit creation.

The finance and real estate sectors have taken the lead in funding policy institutes to advocate tax laws and other public policies that benefit themselves. After an introductory rhetorical flourish about how these policies are in the public interest, most such policy studies turn to the theme of how to channel the economy’s resources into the hands of their own constituencies.

One would think that the perspective from which debt and credit creation are viewed would be determined not merely by the topic itself but whether one is a creditor or a debtor, an investor, government bureaucrat or economic planner writing from the vantage point of labor or industry. But despite the variety of interest groups affected by debt and financial structures, one point of view has emerged almost uniquely, as if it were objective technocratic expertise rather than the financial sector’s own self-interested spin. Increasingly, the discussion of finance and debt has been limited to monetarists with an anti-government ax to grind and vested interests to defend and indeed, promote with regard to financial deregulation.

This monetarist perspective has become more pronounced as industrial firms have been turned into essentially financial entities since the 1980s. Their objective is less and less to produce goods and services, except as a way to generate revenue that can be pledged as interest to obtain more credit from bankers and bond investors. These borrowings can be used to take over companies (“mergers and acquisitions”), or to defend against such raids by loading themselves down with debt (taking “poison pills”). Other firms indulge in “wealth creation” simply by buying back their own shares on the stock exchange rather than undertaking new direct investment, research or development. (IBMhas spent about $10 billion annually in recent years to support its stock price in this way.) As these kinds of financial maneuvering take precedence over industrial engineering, the idea of “wealth creation” has come to refer to raising the price of stocks and bonds that represent claims on wealth (“indirect investment”) rather than investment in capital spending, research and development to increase production.

Labor for its part no longer voices an independent perspective on such issues. Early reformers shared the impression that money and finance simply mirror economic activity rather than acting as an independent and autonomous force. Even Marx believed that the financial system was evolving in a way that reflected the needs of industrial capital formation.

Today’s popular press writes as if production and business conditions take the lead, not finance. It is as if stock and bond prices, and interest rates, reflect the economy rather than influencing it. There is no hint that financial interests may intrude into the “real” economy in ways that are systematically antithetical to nationwide prosperity. Yet it is well known that central bank officials claim that full employment and new investment may be inflationary and hence bad for the stock and bond markets. This policy is why governments raise interest rates to dampen the rise in employment and wages. This holds back the advance of living standards and markets for consumer goods, reducing new investment and putting downward pressure on wages and commodity prices. As tax revenue falls, government debt increases. Businesses and consumers also are driven more deeply into debt.

The antagonism between finance and labor is globalized as workers in debtor countries are paid in currencies whose exchange rate is chronically depressed. Debt service paid to global creditors and capital flight lead more local currency to be converted into creditor-nation currency. The terms of trade shift against debtor countries, throwing their labor into competition with that in the creditor nations.

If today’s economy were the first in history to be distorted by such strains, economists would have some excuse for not being prepared to analyze how the debt burden increases the cost of doing business and diverts income to pay interest to creditors. What is remarkable is how much more clearly the dynamics of debt were recognized some centuries ago, before financial special-interest lobbying gained momentum. Already in Adam Smith’s day it had become a common perception that public debts had to be funded by tax levies that increased labor’s living costs, impairing the economy’s competitive position by raising the price of doing business. The logical inference was that private-sector debt had a similar effect.

the financial sector and the real economy

RWER | The uncertainty precipitated by the lingering fallout from the financial, economic, and debt crises increases daily. Meanwhile, leading mainstream economists are being criticized for their divided positions on the correct diagnosis of and viable solutions for these crises. Classical economic growth theories were unable to predict these dilemmas, as they did not adequately take into account factors such as the macroeconomic impact of outsized financial sector developments. Classical economic models are still considered by many economists to be the correct tools for dealing with the consequences of the 2008-2011 credit crisis (“crisis”). Meanwhile, others view crisis as stemming from the global imbalances precipitated by the application of these classic macro models. This contradiction seems irreconcilable. A new approach is therefore necessary. In this review, we present an alternative growth model. Specifically, one which helps to analyze the interdependence between the financial and the real economy and which also yields analytical statements about the causes of crises.

Introduction
Sufficient capital is the basic prerequisite for enabling economic processes. Innovation is impossible without the availability of adequate capital. Mainstream economic growth models assume that categorical positive relationship exists between the two. However, as the recent financial and economic crises revealed, there is a fundamental interaction between the financial sector and the gross domestic product (GDP) of an economy. The relationship between the two is, however far away from being linear. This is demonstrated in chart 1 forGermany.

In the case ofGermany, financial assets – measured by total bank assets – grew significantly faster than the gross domestic product (see chart 1). Interestingly, a tendency for stagnating and (in 2009) even falling growth rates forGDPcan be ascertained. Allow us a brief historic synopsis. At the end of the 80s there was a surge inGDPdue to the integration of the East German economy. At the same time, nominal assets increased due to the conversion of Ost-Marks into Deutsch-Marks. Afterwards,GDPgrew only linearly, while financial assets experienced massive exponential growth. As of the 90s, growth rates in the real economy fell by such a degree that capital could no longer earn the high returns of the past. As a result, capital increasingly gravitated to the higher return potential of the financial markets (equities, private equities, hedge funds etc.). This caused the so-called “savings glut,” a situation wherein too much capital is chasing too few investment opportunities. It is in this context that the term “financialization” is often used by economists. Financialization describes the process by which increasingly more corporate earnings and personal income result from financial transactions and not from real economic growth, i.e., increased production and related growth in employment.

mathematics and real-world knowledge

RWER | Several articles on the misuse of mathematics in economics have already appeared in this journal. They all denounce this excess and list numerous weaknesses of liberal economics and theoretical economics that are due to, or at least related to, too much math.

This subject is worthy of further comment because it seems to me that these articles have mostly described symptoms, albeit a great many symptoms, but have barely begun to diagnose the causes and have given no hint of the kind of knowledge that would enable us to escape this no-man’s-land of using a little math but not too much.

The most recent contribution, by Michael Hudson (RWER No. 54), focuses on the important issues that escape mathematical models, such as the structural and historical evolution of societies, prevention of crises, psychological phenomena, long-term thinking. It emphasizes the normative nature of marginal analysis and equilibrium models, and denounces rough quantifications such as GNP and the staggering increase in debt. He acknowledges Marx’s openness to the big issues in society that are currently excluded from political debate by an economic philosophy that tries to impress its opponents with sophisticated mathematics. These questions are analyzed thoroughly. On several occasions, however, one feels that the criticism is that the math is being misused and should be developed in some other direction (e.g. a statistical analysis of the financial tendencies that polarize wealth and income, or a study of the positive feedback mechanisms, etc.). This leaves a certain dissatisfaction — on a philosophical level — a feeling that the problem of excess math has not been addressed in all its aspects.

My thesis is that economics adds its own particular difficulties to these issues (because of its status as “conseiller du prince”, and because through teaching it gives useful professional skills, etc.) and that things become clearer when we step back and frame the question in terms of knowledge in general. As the reader will see, this enables us to trace, with great epistemological force, the direction of a different type of knowledge. This allows us to escape from the addiction of mathematization while building a better quality knowledge.

We will take in a number of examples in economics and finance, but the fact remains that economics has many distinctive characteristics, as several authors have noted, which tend to prevent a reasoned consideration of its social function. Consequently there remain several points that will need to be developed further.

u.s. solar company bankruptcies a boon for china

NYTimes | The bankruptcies of three American solar power companies in the last month, including Solyndra of California on Wednesday, have left China’s industry with a dominant sales position — almost three-fifths of the world’s production capacity — and rapidly declining costs.

Some American, Japanese and European solar companies still have a technological edge over Chinese rivals, but seldom a cost advantage, according to industry analysts.

Loans at very low rates from state-owned banks in Beijing, cheap or free land from local and provincial governments across China, huge economies of scale and other cost advantages have transformed China from a minor player in the solar power industry just a few years ago into the main producer of an increasingly competitive source of electricity.

“The top-tier Chinese firms are kind of the benchmark now,” said Shayle Kann, a managing director of solar power studies at GTM Research, a renewable energy market analysis firm based in Boston. Pricing of solar equipment is determined by the Chinese industry, he said, “and everyone else prices at a premium or discount to them.”

Besides Solyndra, the other two American manufacturers that filed for bankruptcy in August were Evergreen Solar, of Massachusetts, and SpectraWatt, a New York company. Another company, BP Solar, halted manufacturing at its complex in Frederick, Md., last spring.

Those bankruptcies and closings represent almost one-fifth of the solar panel manufacturing capacity in the United States, according to GTM Research.

Solyndra and Evergreen in particular suffered because they pursued unusual technologies whose competitiveness depended on their using less polysilicon, the main material for solar panels. That has become less important because polysilicon prices have tumbled more than 80 percent in the last three years as output has caught up with demand.

Analysts say that two American companies remain strongly placed. One is First Solar, the largest American manufacturer, which uses a different technology but has its biggest factory in Malaysia. The other, SunPower, is much smaller but is an industry leader in the efficiency with which its panels convert sunlight into electricity, so that they sell at a premium to Chinese panels.

um..., I don't use'em for a dayyum thing anymore

Video - USPS fails and shuts down this winter.

FoxNews | The head of the U.S. Postal Service said in an interview that the organization will default -- perhaps as early as this winter -- unless Congress intervenes.

Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe's comments reflect a well-known reality that the Postal Service is in dire financial straits. The rise of email and online bill-paying has steadily eroded its profits over the years while labor costs soar. Donahoe is calling for a host of changes, including the elimination of Saturday delivery, to close a deficit projected to top $9 billion this year.

But he said Congress needs to step in to help keep the service alive.

"Our situation is extremely serious," he told The New York Times. "If Congress doesn't act, we will default."

According to The New York Times, the service will be unable to make a $5.5 billion retiree health care payment later this month and is expected to run out of money to pay workers and other expenses early next year. This could force a shutdown in delivery.

Averting that outcome doesn't necessarily mean a bailout. One thing the service wants from Congress is a law to effectively nullify a contract prohibition on layoffs -- part of Donahoe's plan involves laying off 120,000 workers, but he needs Congress' help.

Some in Congress are also looking at letting the organization recover billions in supposedly overpaid pension payments.