complexity and collapse

Foreign Affairs | More recently, it is Jared Diamond, an anthropologist, who has captured the public imagination with a grand theory of rise and fall. His 2005 book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, is cyclical history for the so-called Green Age: tales of past societies, from seventeenth-century Easter Island to twenty-first-century China, that risked, or now risk, destroying themselves by abusing their natural environments. Diamond quotes John Lloyd Stevens, the American explorer and amateur archaeologist who discovered the eerily dead Mayan cities of Mexico: "Here were the remains of a cultivated, polished, and peculiar people, who had passed through all the stages incident to the rise and fall of nations, reached their golden age, and perished." According to Diamond, the Maya fell into a classic Malthusian trap as their population grew larger than their fragile and inefficient agricultural system could support. More people meant more cultivation, but more cultivation meant deforestation, erosion, drought, and soil exhaustion. The result was civil war over dwindling resources and, finally, collapse.

Diamond's warning is that today's world could go the way of the Maya. This is an important message, no doubt. But in reviving the cyclical theory of history, Collapse reproduces an old conceptual defect. Diamond makes the mistake of focusing on what historians of the French Annales school called la longue durée, the long term. No matter whether civilizations commit suicide culturally, economically, or ecologically, the downfall is very protracted. Just as it takes centuries for imperial overstretch to undermine a great power, so, too, does it take centuries to wreck an ecosystem. As Diamond points out, political leaders in almost any society -- primitive or sophisticated -- have little incentive to address problems that are unlikely to manifest themselves for a hundred years or more.

Did the proconsuls in Cole's The Consummation of Empire really care if the fate of their great-great-grandchildren was destruction? No. Would they have accepted a tax increase that would have financed a preemptive strike against the next millennium's barbarian horde? Again, no. As the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen last December made clear, rhetorical pleas to save the planet for future generations are insufficient to overcome the conflicts over economic distribution between rich and poor countries that exist in the here and now.

The current economic challenges facing the United States are also often represented as long-term threats. It is the slow march of demographics -- which is driving up the ratio of retirees to workers -- and not current policy, that condemns the public finances of the United States to sink deeper into the red. According to the Congressional Budget Office's "alternative fiscal scenario," which takes into account likely changes in government policy, public debt could rise from 44 percent before the financial crisis to a staggering 716 percent by 2080. In its "extended-baseline scenario," which assumes current policies will remain the same, the figure is closer to 280 percent. It hardly seems to matter which number is correct. Is there a single member of Congress who is willing to cut entitlements or increase taxes in order to avert a crisis that will culminate only when today's babies are retirees?

Similarly, when it comes to the global economy, the wheel of history seems to revolve slowly, like an old water mill in high summer. Some projections suggest that China's GDP will overtake the United States' GDP in 2027; others say that this will not happen until 2040. By 2050, India's economy will supposedly catch up with that of the United States, too. But to many, these great changes in the balance of economic power seem very remote compared with the timeframe for the deployment of U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan and then their withdrawal, for which the unit of account is months, not years, much less decades.

Yet it is possible that this whole conceptual framework is, in fact, flawed. Perhaps Cole's artistic representation of imperial birth, growth, and eventual death is a misrepresentation of the historical process. What if history is not cyclical and slow moving but arrhythmic -- at times almost stationary, but also capable of accelerating suddenly, like a sports car? What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly, like a thief in the night?

maine town passes ordinance stripping corporate personhood

ADS | Today the citizens of Shapleigh, Maine voted at a special town meeting to pass a groundbreaking Rights-Based Ordinance, 114 for and 66 against. This revolutionary ordinance give its citizens the right to local self-governance and gives rights to ecosystems but denies the rights of personhood to corporations. This ordinance allows the citizens to protect their groundwater resources, putting it in a common trust to be used for the benefit of its residents.

Shapleigh is the first community in Maine to pass such an ordinance, which extends rights to nature, however, the Ordinance Review Committee in Wells, Maine is considering passing one in their town. These communities have been under attack by Nestle Waters, N.A., a multi-national water miner that sells bottled water under such labels as Poland Springs.

Communities have opposed the expansion by Nestle Waters, but the corporation will not take no for an answer. The town of Fryeburg, Maine has been in litigation with Nestle for six years. Nestle wants to expand and the town's people say no to the tanker trunk traffic which has disrupted their quiet scenic beauty, so Nestle's tactic is to wear them down, and break their bank.

Nestle is the world's largest food and beverage company and has very deep pockets. However, we won't back down, we are the stewards of this most precious resource water, and we want to protect it for future generations.

Activists in Maine are well aware that the Nestle Corporation is not just interested in expanding for the purpose of filling their Poland Springs bottles today, they are interested in the control of Maine's abundant water resources for the future. They are expanding in many parts of this country from McCloud, California to Maine. Nestle is positioning themselves to capitalize on the emerging crisis of global water scarcity.

The right to water is a social justice issue and we believe that it should not be sold to those who can afford it, leaving the world's poorest citizens thirsty. Citizens will do a much better job of protecting this resource than a for-profit corporation.

ultimate civics

Ultimate Civics | Yet again the U.S. Supreme Court has sided with the ruling elite against the interests of the American people. On January 21, 2010, in Citizens United vs. FEC they overturned the flimsy federal campaign finance reform laws afforded by the McCain-Feingold law. Corporations can now spend unlimited money to buy our elections. The Court has legalized corporate bribery of our elected officials.

The Court relied on the illegitimate legal doctrine of "Corporate Personhood" in order to justify this profoundly undemocratic decision. Corporate personhood is the notion that a corporation can claim to be a person, and therefore entitled to basic human rights—also described as political and civil rights—and have courts overturn laws.

Opposition to this decision crosses all political boundaries. Senator John McCain said, "I was disappointed but [it was] not unexpected... You're going to see a dramatic increase in corporate and union independent expenditures." Representative Alan Grayson, (D-FL) issued a strong response, "The Supreme Court in essence has ruled that corporations can buy elections. If that happens, democracy in America is over. We cannot put the law up for sale and award government to the highest bidder."

In addressing the issue of corporate personhood, TeaParty.org found Dale Grayson hit the nail on the head, saying, "Corporations are not like people. Corporations exist forever, people don't. Our founding fathers never wanted them, these behemoth organizations that never die so they can collect an insurmountable amount of profit. It puts the people at a tremendous disadvantage."

Join Us in Opposing This Decision
Ultimate Civics put out a call to action, and working together with Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County, brought together key groups last fall to address the need for reform. Out of this meeting, a coalition formed, creating the Campaign to Legalize Democracy. The coalition established a goal to AMEND THE US CONSTITUTION TO ABOLISH CORPORATE PERSONHOOD.

the axis of the obsessed and deranged

NYTimes | No one knows what history will make of the present — least of all journalists, who can at best write history’s sloppy first draft. But if I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn’t choose the kabuki health care summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I’d put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen.

What made that kamikaze mission eventful was less the deranged act itself than the curious reaction of politicians on the right who gave it a pass — or, worse, flirted with condoning it. Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.” But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner. That rant inspired like-minded Americans to create instant Facebook shrines to his martyrdom. Soon enough, some cowed politicians, including the newly minted Tea Party hero Scott Brown, were publicly empathizing with Stack’s credo — rather than risk crossing the most unforgiving brigade in their base.

Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, even rationalized Stack’s crime. “It’s sad the incident in Texas happened,” he said, “but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary. And when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the I.R.S., it’s going to be a happy day for America.” No one in King’s caucus condemned these remarks. Then again, what King euphemized as “the incident” took out just 1 of the 200 workers in the Austin building: Vernon Hunter, a 68-year-old Vietnam veteran nearing his I.R.S. retirement. Had Stack the devastating weaponry and timing to match the death toll of 168 inflicted by Timothy McVeigh on a federal building in Oklahoma in 1995, maybe a few of the congressman’s peers would have cried foul.

It is not glib or inaccurate to invoke Oklahoma City in this context, because the acrid stench of 1995 is back in the air. Two days before Stack’s suicide mission, The Times published David Barstow’s chilling, months-long investigation of the Tea Party movement. Anyone who was cognizant during the McVeigh firestorm would recognize the old warning signs re-emerging from the mists of history. The Patriot movement. “The New World Order,” with its shadowy conspiracies hatched by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. Sandpoint, Idaho. White supremacists. Militias.

public vs. private lending (100% vs 90% liability)

Condition of Small Business and Commercial Real Estate Lending in Local Markets

$1.4Trillion CRE loan crisis

Guardian | America's fragile high street banks are bracing themselves for a fresh financial crunch as a wave of commercial property mortgages go sour on offices, shops and factories, causing losses of up to $300bn (£192bn) hitting nearly 3,000 small- and medium-sized financial institutions.

A congressional oversight panel charged with scrutinising the Obama administration's bailout efforts has warned that $1.4tn of loans covering commercial premises will reach maturity between 2011 and 2014. After a plunge in property prices, nearly half of these loans are underwater, with borrowers owing more than their underlying property is worth.

An analysis by the panel found that 2,988 of America's 8,100 banks have potentially dangerous exposure to commercial property loans. The impact could damage hopes of a US economic recovery and could cause a further squeeze in the availability of credit to consumers and businesses.

"Are we arguing that this is a serious problem that we need to get in front of? The answer is yes," said Elizabeth Warren, chairman of the oversight panel. "It's like throwing a handful of sand into the economic recovery."

She said that if banks see that their commercial property liabilities are mounting, they will hold back on lending elsewhere: "They'll tend to husband their money so that it's not available for small business loans."

Although Wall Street banks have made a swift recovery as shares and bond markets look ahead to a long-term economic recovery, prospects remain cloudy for small-town institutions in the US heartland, hit by ongoing credit card defaults and unemployment among customers. Last year, 140 US banks failed and had to be rescued by federal regulators. Already this year, 16 have been seized by the authorities, a rate that points to a similarly high total in 2010.

Defaults on residential mortgages played a key role in sparking the original global financial crisis as hundreds of thousands of US homes went into foreclosure and Wall Street panicked over the diminishing value of complex mortgage-backed securities. Commercial property loans have taken longer to go sour but are emerging as a slow-burning problem.

the real culprit

Ron Paul at last week's House Financial Oversight Committee Mtg.

chomsky on "peasants with pitchforks" politics

People with real grievances.

Right-wing media delivering a message of paranoia and economic populism comparable to Nazis during the Weimar Republic.

bad brand manager - buh-bye....,

WaPo | According to one person with whom Rogers shared her grievances and who would only speak anonymously to divulge details of a sensitive topic, Rogers complained that the White House's effort not to antagonize the Secret Service led to the White House making an example of her. (The Secret Service director publicly took the blame and the White House declined to make Rogers available to the House committee.) According to the friend, Rogers said she felt the knives in the White House were out for her.

There are conflicting accounts of how long Rogers's departure has been in the works and whose idea it was for her to leave. According to one administration official, who was granted anonymity to talk about private deliberations, the decision to remove Rogers had been made by Christmastime, as a direct result of the disastrous state dinner, which Tareq and Michaele Salahi and another fame-seeking uninvited guest attended.

The official expressed admiration for Rogers's work ethic, but said her eagerness for media exposure and taste for haute couture did not sit well with some administration officials who were mindful of appearances during dire economic times. (Trading in her Mercedes for a made-in-the-U.S.A. Buick, apparently, wasn't enough.) During the holiday season, Rogers assumed a lower profile by personally greeting guests at parties in a demure black suit.

"Once the state dinner deal went down," the administration official said, "people who had other political agendas started micromanaging every part of her business."

According to other administration sources, Valerie Jarrett, the president's trusted special adviser and Rogers's old friend from Chicago, had noticeably put some distance between her and the woman she helped bring to Washington, even though the two lived in the same Georgetown building and worked in the White House.

In a telephone interview Friday evening, Jarrett dismissed that characterization, calling Rogers "one of her oldest" and "very dear" friends. Jarrett said she chatted with Rogers daily, including Friday, and that Rogers first spoke to her about returning to the private sector in "early November," before the state dinner.

city repair project

CityRepair | City Repair is an organized group action that educates and inspires communities and individuals to creatively transform the places where they live. City Repair facilitates artistic and ecologically-oriented placemaking through projects that honor the interconnection of human communities and the natural world. The many projects of City Repair have been accomplished by a mostly volunteer staff and thousands of volunteer citizen activists.

City Repair began in Portland, Oregon with the idea that localization - of culture, of economy, of decision-making - is a necessary foundation of sustainability. By reclaiming urban spaces to create community-oriented places, we plant the seeds for greater neighborhood communication, empower our communities and nurture our local culture.

Our projects include the annual Village Building Convergence, where people gather at neighborhood sites throughout Portland to engage in intersection repair, natural building, and other forms of placemaking. We also host Earth Day, the Village Planting Convergence (also known as City Riparian), and operate a mobile tea house called the T-Horse.

Throughout the year we educate the community with workshops on all forms of sustainability and offer the invaluable placemaking guidebook and one-on-one consulting for those who want to repair their own neighborhood. If you are interested in helping our efforts please visit our volunteer page.

As an almost entirely volunteer-driven nonprofit organization, we rely solely on the support of our community. Please consider donating to help ensure our vision becomes a reality.

most important profession in america to teens

sliceofMIT | If you had to choose, which profession would you say contributes most to society’s well-being? According to the recent Lemelson-MIT Invention Index, an annual survey that gauges kids’ perceptions about invention and innovation, teens rate teachers highest, followed by doctors (see graphic). Less than one-fifth of respondents viewed scientists as having the highest impact on society and only 5 percent chose engineers.

One reason might be because students simply aren’t aware what professionals in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) do and don’t have suitable role models. But the good news is that teens are excited to learn. Indeed, 77 percent were interested in pursuing a STEM career, and 85 percent wish they knew more about STEM in order to create or invent something. The most effective way to engage them is through hands-on activities with enthusiastic mentors and teachers. Passion seems to be essential. More than half of respondents (55 percent) would be more interested in STEM simply by having teachers who enjoy the subjects they teach.

The most inspiring training grounds, teens indicated, were field trips to view STEM in action and places outside the classroom where they can build things and conduct experiments (53 percent).

Learn more about the Invention Index’s findings and how you can mentor students in STEM subjects.

mit on intelligence at davos

MITNews | At the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, MIT professors discussed their efforts to better understand the human mind, the nature of intelligence and the ways in which human and artificial intelligence can be brought together.

Tim Berners-Lee, Tom Malone, Rebecca Saxe, Sebastian Seung and Josh Tenenbaum were among the speakers at the forum’s IdeasLab, in which some of the world’s leading intellectuals and entrepreneurs discussed trends in business, technology and society. MIT President Susan Hockfield introduced the speakers.

digital nation roundtable

Frontline | Get ready for the second Digital Nation roundtable - which will look beyond the original Frontline documentary to some of the many ideas and issues this inquiry has spawned and suggested.

For the month of March, we'll be discussing "the crowd" - particularly the way group activity, creativity, and awareness are both enhanced and exacerbated by our digital networks. Open Source, Crowd-sourcing, The Mob, The fate of the Individual, and the rise of the Folk.

more on the post job world

robert paterson | From replaceable human resources to dynamic social groups

The manner in which we prepare people for work is based on the Taylorist perspective that there is only one way to do a job and that the person doing the work needs to conform to job requirements [F.W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911]. Individual training, the core of corporate learning and development, is based on the premise that jobs are constant and those who fill them are interchangeable.

However, when you look at the modern organization, it is moving to a model of constant change, whether through mergers and acquisitions or as quick-start web-enabled networks. For the human resources department, the question becomes one of preparing people for jobs that don’t even exist. For example, the role of online community manager, a fast-growing field today, barely existed five years ago. Individual training for job preparation requires a stable work environment, a luxury no one has any more.

A collective, social learning approach, on the other hand, takes the perspective that learning and work happen as groups and how the group is connected (the network) is more important than any individual node within it. Here ends Dale's subrealist trifecta for the day.

time for the lies to be exposed and for "it" to die

robert paterson | We all worry about getting or losing a job. When we meet people, they ask us what we do and we give them a job description. When we apply for jobs, we get all fussed about the “skills” we need. When we have a job, we have to be managed and so have bosses. Politicians all talk about getting more jobs. School is all about getting jobs.

But the “Job” as we know it is a 19th century idea. In America very few people as a percentage of the population had job before 1905.

Here is a core idea, especially as we all fuss about skills etc. The whole purpose of a Job is to DESKILL people. What do I mean?

This picture is the key. Before Henry Ford, making a car was an artisanal activity. Really skilled people created each car. With the production line, tools and algorithms were used to enable the owner to use unskilled people. Yes each person could get good at assembly but that is like saying that, because I am good at putting Ikea furniture together, I am a cabinet maker. The men who made the Stanley Steamer could make anything. They had the metal working and engineering skills to be artisans.

This process of DESKILLING has taken place in all parts of our lives. Fist tap Dale Numero Dos.

round midnight: tortillas and the corporate state

joebageant | Near midnight and I am making tortillas on an iron skillet over a gas flame. Some three thousand miles to the north, my wife and dog nestle in sleep in the wake of a 34-inch snowstorm, while the dogs of Ajijic are barking at the witching hour and roosters crow all too early for the dawn. While my good Mexican neighbors along Zaragoza Street sleep.

Yet here I am awake and patting out tortillas, haunted by the empire that I have called home most of my life.

I like to think that, for the most part, I no longer live up there in the U.S., but southward of its ticking social, political and economic bombs. Because the US debt bomb has not yet gone off, Social Security still exists, and the occasional royalty check or book advance still comes in, allowing me to remain here. And so long as America's perverse commodities economy keeps stumbling along and making lifelike noises, so long as the American people accept permanent debt subjugation -- I can drink, think and burn tortillas. Believe me, I take no smugness in this irony.

There is a terrible science fiction-like awe in the autonomous American economic monolith, in the way that it provides for us, feeds on us and keeps us as its both its lavish pets and slaves. The commodity economy long ago enslaved Americans and other "developed" capitalist societies. But Americans in particular. The most profound slavery must be that in which the slaves can conceive of no other possible or better world than their bondage. Inescapable, global, all permeating, the commodities economy rules so thoroughly most cannot imagine any other possible kind of economy. Fist tap Dale Numero Uno.

becky phi becky got robbed!!!

Sprite | After the competition, we conducted a post-competition review and discovered a scoring discrepancy. There is no conclusive interpretation, nor definitive resolution for the discrepancy.

Sprite is committed to upholding the honesty and integrity of the competition. Because the scoring discrepancy cannot be resolved and due to the extremely narrow margin between the first and second place winning sororities, we believe that the appropriate course of action is to name both Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., Tau Chapter and Zeta Tau Alpha, Epsilon Chapter, co-first place winners of the Sprite Step Off. Accordingly, we will increase Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., Tau Chapter's scholarship prize to $100,000, consistent with first prize winnings.

Sprite Step Off was created for the primary purpose of awarding scholarships and supporting talented college students in their quest for higher education.

casino royale

NYTimes | Bets by some of the same banks that helped Greece shroud its mounting debts may actually now be pushing the nation closer to the brink of financial ruin.

Echoing the kind of trades that nearly toppled the American International Group, the increasingly popular insurance against the risk of a Greek default is making it harder for Athens to raise the money it needs to pay its bills, according to traders and money managers.

These contracts, known as credit-default swaps, effectively let banks and hedge funds wager on the financial equivalent of a four-alarm fire: a default by a company or, in the case of Greece, an entire country. If Greece reneges on its debts, traders who own these swaps stand to profit.

“It’s like buying fire insurance on your neighbor’s house — you create an incentive to burn down the house,” said Philip Gisdakis, head of credit strategy at UniCredit in Munich.

As Greece’s financial condition has worsened, undermining the euro, the role of Goldman Sachs and other major banks in masking the true extent of the country’s problems has drawn criticism from European leaders. But even before that issue became apparent, a little-known company backed by Goldman, JP Morgan Chase and about a dozen other banks had created an index that enabled market players to bet on whether Greece and other European nations would go bust.

Last September, the company, the Markit Group of London, introduced the iTraxx SovX Western Europe index, which is based on such swaps and let traders gamble on Greece shortly before the crisis. Such derivatives have assumed an outsize role in Europe’s debt crisis, as traders focus on their daily gyrations.

A result, some traders say, is a vicious circle. As banks and others rush into these swaps, the cost of insuring Greece’s debt rises. Alarmed by that bearish signal, bond investors then shun Greek bonds, making it harder for the country to borrow. That, in turn, adds to the anxiety — and the whole thing starts over again.

testicular fortitude wanes...,

WaPo | The Obama administration is no longer insisting on the creation of a stand-alone consumer protection agency as a central element of the plan to remake regulation of the financial system.

In hopes of quick congressional approval of a reform bill, White House officials are opening the door to compromise with lawmakers concerned about creating a new bureaucracy, according to congressional and some administration sources.

President Obama's economic team is now open to housing the consumer regulator inside another agency, such as the Treasury Department, though they still prefer a stand-alone agency. In either case, they are insisting on a regulator with political autonomy and real teeth so it can effectively enforce rules designed to protect consumers of mortgages, credit cards and other financial products.

The administration may also have to compromise on Obama's recent proposal for a rule to limit risky activities at banks by prohibiting them from engaging in many kinds of speculative investments.

Treasury officials are preparing to send Capitol Hill a toughly worded measure that would bar banks from making certain investments that benefit only the firms' bottom line rather than their customers. But there is little support among either Democratic or Republican lawmakers for this proposal, known as the "Volcker rule," and Senate leaders are now closing ranks around legislation that would leave it to banking regulators, rather than the law, to decide which activities to ban.

From the start of the Obama presidency, administration officials have made far-reaching financial reform one of their highest priorities, along with overhauling the nation's health-care system. Officials have vowed to put in place new rules and regulators to prevent a repeat of the abuses that precipitated the financial crisis.