Amid the mounting fiscal and economic crisis that is threatening to undermine the project of European integration, the Group of Lecce has issued a new statement on the need to reform European economic governance. The Group of Lecce aims to develop policies “to strengthen economic and financial multilateralism”, strengthening the democratic underpinnings of the Union, along with the dynamism of the European economy, through advanced ongoing cooperation.

According to this report: “we do not see any alternative to reinforcing cooperation and to achieving stronger unity across and within the EU, with the very same spirit that has animated in the past all major reforms of the European institutions. Indeed, a major step forward to greater cooperation and unity would make Europe the strong international player that all its national economies need to face the challenges of todayrsquo;s globalised world.”

As today’s more-than-ever integrated Europe faces a crisis of unprecedented proportions, and some in government speak openly of dismantling, at least in part, the common currency or other mechanisms for long-term cooperative integration, the Group of Lecce argues that major structural reforms are needed, to move the Union closer to real, viable, and more agile, policy integration.

The report also concludes that: “We strongly believe that the apparent trade offs between democracy and efficiency, and between solidarity and rigor in managing EU economic policies can be resolved by establishing an adequate system of checks and balances, and by limiting to the extent possible emergency and transitory intergovernmental measures and actions. Severe difficulties seem to lie in the different degrees of integration characterizing the Euro area and the other EU members. A higher economic and fiscal integration is necessary for the European Monetary Union to work effectively…”

• To read the full report, visit ProjectQuipu.net

The city of Oakland is experiencing a deep crisis of conscience, amid what appears to be the moral confusion of its administration. The mayor, who had marched with the Occupy Oakland demonstrators, has now ordered not one but two paramilitary strikes against nonviolent protesters, in which tear gas, “flash-bang” grenades, rubber bullets and powerful sonic pulses were fired directly at unarmed civilians.

An ex-Marine is now in the hospital, reported in critical condition, and authorities say the paramilitary tactics were justified. New video has emerged clearly showing a policeman firing directly at a group of unthreatening unarmed civilians simply attempting to assist a man injured by the attacks. To many, the crisis seems incomprehensible, even moreso because the mayor herself previously marched among them.

There are calls for attempted murder prosecutions against some of the officers. Thousands are now demonstrating against clear violations of constitutional civil liberties, caught on video. The reaction has spread across the country, and some have questioned whether the mayor should resign.

The most vital question, however, is how can the people of Oakland rally to the Occupy cause, without further inflaming tensions in a city where the elected government openly violates basic civil liberties? What strategy should the demonstrators adopt in order to maintain and defend their rights to peaceable assembly, free expression and to seek redress for grievances, that will allow them to show how steadfast nonviolence wins the struggle against brutal aggression?

Join the discussion here

The European Union has reached an agreement to relieve Greece of half of its sovereign debt, and to boost the Eurozone bailout fund to €1 trillion. The agreement may well be funded, in part, by non-European governments, even private investors, but it shows a new commitment to the Union as such, even amid a surge of anti-Union feeling in several key democracies. For years, the leading obstacle to true integration of the European economies has been seen to be cultural and political reluctance to fully embrace political union.

Will this new commitment to shared responsibility and the future of the Euro currency mean the European Union itself will begin to commit more fully to long-term political union? - Join the discussion here

We need a system of cooperative public-private infrastructure financing, a national infrastructure bank. But we also need to use that fabric of cooperative investment and output to foster specific areas of major improvement to our national economy. The model could be replicated across the world, but the US is uniquely positioned to deploy this solution and to vastly improve its chances of restoring vibrancy to the wider middle class by doing so.

Two parallel projects are necessary to make the infrastructure redevelopment and economic recovery strategy a success:

• a renewable energy infrastructure bank – to help target some of the wider funding options to the project of building a sustainable, smart energy economy, free of the massive externalized costs of carbon-based fuels
• an economic opportunity bank – to aggressively, specifically and persistently direct funds to businesses that are hiring, building capacity at the community level, and restoring real wage gains to the middle class

The first is our topic here: a national renewable energy infrastructure bank. To build such a bank, we would need to first establish how a cooperative public-private infrastructure financing scheme would work. Ideally, it needs to work much like an investment bank, where individual investors see visible gains, but money is kept in the pot for a long enough period of time to produce gain across the full spectrum of investor contributions.

In other words, there has to be commitment to the project, and that shared commitment of resources will yield shared substantial gains to all parties. In the area of clean energy investment, this is possibly much easier than with other types of infrastructure investment, because the industry is entering into a period of massive, and necessary, prolonged expansion. Big investors understand that big investment will help to secure that prolonged expansion.

If Congress acts to incentivize this investment, massive amounts of private-sector capital will flow to clean energy resources. There are three reasons why this will happen:

1. Fossil fuels carry with them massive production costs that have long been externalized; the economy can no longer afford to continue such a strategy.
2. Clean energy technologies offer a major opportunity for prolonged expansion of business value, as information technologies have shown over the last 30 years.
3. There are literally hundreds of billions of dollars of private capital sitting on the sidelines, waiting for directional certainty that fossil fuels cannot provide.

So, how to structure such an operation? The renewable energy infrastructure bank would need the following to reach its full potential:

1. A national price signal or clear set of incentives to direct investment to clean energy
2. An investment strategy that looks at best practices, value to community, prospects for building aggregate demand, and structural resiliency
3. A focus on job-creation, skilled retraining, and positive value feedback loops that favor consumers
4. A legislative charter that sets forth priorities favorable to public-sector, private-sector and start-up investors alike
5. A model for redirecting funding when key elements of a project require support or restructuring
6. A focus on rewarding institutions, individuals and investors who do cutting-edge R&D that is practicable, 100% carbon-emissions-free and scalable
7. Short-, medium- and long-term investment strategies for building, optimizing and utilizing the smart grid

Suggestions for deployment:

1. Implement a national carbon fee and dividend policy, to correct market failures in the pricing of carbon, return control of the energy economy to households and incentivize major private capital investment in the rapidly expanding clean tech sector
2. Identify, build or support and expand, focus facilities in cities and regions across the country, to operate as cooperative laboratories of R&D, start-up incubators, and investment engines (examples might be Brooklyn Navy Yard or Philadelphia Navy Yard, or the Fab Labs project)
3. Motivate scalability planning for distributed clean energy production projects, to ensure sustained investment opportunities, and optimized overlap between community-building, job-creation and investment strategies, for higher overall cost efficiency
4. Ensure legal support for avoiding corrosive business models, favoring generative ones, to ensure Investment flows to the new technologies and collaborative strategies that build future prosperity, not to extraction-oriented investments
5. Reward rapid ramping up of high-efficiency clean energy tech, because this will build structural resiliency, favor the highest-value market-healing technologies, and help to revive the middle class

We can begin doing this nationally tomorrow, if:

• We focus first on wind and solar, due to their naturally occurring US domestic supply far outstripping total demand and all possible demand growth
• We commit to decentralizing innovation, influence and income-growth in the energy sector, so community and regional economies are empowered by the transition
• We recognize the need to fully develop leading-edge infrastructure at all levels
• We identify and elevate the pioneers who already know how to motivate and execute this transition
• We charter public-private partnerships to manage investment flows to stakeholder-defined initiatives

The clean energy economy is coming, and to fully enable its expansion, the US needs to flex the muscle necessry to turn the ship of state, to wrest from entrenched industries and financial investment patterns rooted more in extraction than in generative payoff the ability to decide what comes next. There is nothing beyond clean and renewable in terms of energy production and distribution, except the work of achieving the most advanced efficiency gains and making robust power generation an ever more ephemeral affair, at an ever faster rate.

To lead in that new economy, we need to be the first to build its value.

 - – -

Originally published October 12, 2011, at ProjectQuipu.net

The Occupy Wall Street movement—now being called “the American Autumn”, after the Arab Spring, or the September 17th movement, after the day it got started in lower Manhattan—is now completing four weeks on the scene. Yet we can still be astounded to hear so many incredulous “experts” unable to understand how a grassroots movement, infused with the zeitgeist of very problematic times, is working toward anything constructive. What is the meaning of this? Why don’t they have a ready-to-go list of demands? What are they asking us to think?

It’s actually very simple. It’s self-evident, but if you’re at a loss, you can also go to Zuccotti Park, or to any of the Occupy Together protest sites, and just talk to people, and what did not seem evident will rapidly become so. The meaning of the Occupy Wall Street movement that is spreading across the United States like wildfire is: democracy. The unifying sentiment, which is actively put into practice every day at Occupy encampments, is that citizens have a right to participate. They are building a participatory process to restore the principle of informed citizen participation to our political system and our economy.

Listen to the protesters: “Show me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!” This is not pretend protest; this is the message. The message is that people have a right to free assembly, have a right to free expression, have a right to govern their own destiny, have a right to earn a living, to expect that as citizens of a free society, as implicit signatories to the social contract that gives legitimacy to our democracy, they have a right to be treated with dignity.

Above all, they believe it is necessary to restore to prominence the idea that we all have a right to expect that the powers that decide the shape of our everyday existence 1) represent us, and 2) be accountable directly to us, to the people. Participation and transparency are antidotes to the temptations of unfettered power, elite negotiating environments, and deals that ignore the interest of most people and structure outcomes to favor insider interests. Participation and transparency are democracy; their absence is not.

The non-violent citizen-action uprisings that ousted dictators in Tunisia and Egypt early this year inspired a wave of protest across Spain, in which people calling themselves Los Indignados—the indignant—occupied central squares in Madrid, Barcelona and cities across the country, with semipermanent encampments: acampadas. They formed asambleas by topic or task and held asambleas generales to decide the direction of the national movement through direct democracy.

OccupyWallStreet.org describes the American movement as follows:

#OCCUPYWALLSTREET is a people powered movement for democracy that began in America on September 17 with an encampment in the financial district of New York City. Inspired by the Egyptian Tahrir Square uprising and the Spanish acampadas, we vow to end the monied corruption of our democracy … join us!

There is now a nationwide OccupyTogether movement that seeks to coordinate the actions, debates and proposals of protesters across the United States, and across the world. As of today, they have rallies planned for 1,539 cities, large and small.

The global movement inspired by the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings has spawned not only the Spanish acampadas and the American Occupy protests, but also the Chilean student uprising, which has shut down much of Chile throughout the southern winter, as students demand wider access to high quality public education.

Some participants have been very vocal that the message should consistently be anti-corruption. And it clearly is. In every sense, the non-violent, sleep-on-the-street, do-for-others, collaborative enterprise that is the Occupy Wall Street movement, has persistently demanded transparency, integrity, corporate social responsibility and accountability. It is very much about transcending what is corrupt in the current system. But it is also about something deeper than that.

Last week, with a large crowd echoing her words in chorus—a practice called “the people’s mic”, done to amplify spontaneously, at the human scale, without electrified amplification—Naomi Klein said the movement was attempting one of the most arduous, improbable and time-consuming tasks: that of “changing the underlying values of our culture”.

There have been crazily tone-deaf responses from some in the political establishment, calling citizens engaging in constitutionally protected non-violent assembly “mobs” and referring to calls for justice, fairness and the restoration of middle class opportunity “class warfare”. What motivates such comment is hard to fathom, though pundits, activists and foreign observers alike seem to think it is simply an unwillingness to see the obvious truth: that the powers that be have forged a dysfunctional and distorted economy that does not benefit most people and does not foster real democratic freedom at the human scale.

The movement has consistently made reference to “the 99 percent“, the vast majority of people not earning 7-figure annual income. The movement seeks to represent the right of that 99 percent of all people to be heard, to have a direct role in helping to fashion the policies that determine what kind of society they and their children and families will inhabit. Messages describing the complaints and motivations of those who want better treatment of the 99 percent are posted at We are the 99 percent.

And they have won support from many of the 1 percent that do benefit from the policies that disadvantage so many. A Tumblr page called We stand with the 99 percent is recording their messages of support for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The Occupy Wall Street movement seems only to be spreading, gaining support and becoming more organized, because it is focused on restoring a sense of reason and justice to a nation too long forced to accept widening inequality, rigged markets and pervasive corporate tax dodging. The cause is as close to universal as one can get. It is about calling on those with responsibilities to hundreds of millions of people, whose decisions affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people, to behave as if that responsibility carried some weight in the calculus of their decisions.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is about people willing to give voice to those without a voice. In the assembly process, people don’t just debate ideas, or choose leaders. They aren’t caucusing for positions, or jockeying for influence. The assemblies allow anyone to speak, and aim for consensus. The consensus building process entails hearing all voices, considering competing ideas, then building coalitions of support in order to achieve real consensus among those in attendance. The plan is direct democracy, plain and simple, but specifically a kind of direct democracy in which no one is marginalized.

- – -

Originally published October 14, 2011, at ProjectQuipu.net

With gasoline prices at record highs in 2008, 2009 and 2010, 2011 has looked like a microcosm of the longer oil-market trend: consistent increases in pricing, fuel costs hurting small business and the middle class, slowing the pace of economic growth in the US, and—maybe most strangely of all—no national policy to motivate a rapid, comprehensive transition away from fossil fuels and the volatility and cost inefficiency of their products to the wider marketplace. Instead, we have seen a recommitment to ramping up production, expanding drilling and exploration, and prioritizing local importation (from Canada and Mexico), instead of real coordinated policy planning to end dependency on foreign-sourced fuels.

With the oil strain on an already precarious American economy at an historic extreme, Pres. Bush in 2008 pushed Congress to hold an “up-or-down vote” on renewed exploration of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) before its August recess. Opponents protested vocally that none of any oil found there would be available for production for 10 to 15 years, the total amount would do little to ease the overall dependency on foreign-sourced fuels, and that the OCS plan was little more than an aggressive attempt to deliver to hugely profitable oil firms an unjustifiable gift, taking advantage of the pressurized situation of exorbitant prices.

The Energy Information Agency (EIA), evaluating the OCS strategy, found that opening offshore sites in the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico would still not produce enough oil and natural gas to have a significant effect on domestic reserves, even as far out as the year 2030. In July 2008, as the debate raged over drilling, CNN reported that Democratic members of Congress were saying a preliminary investigation was attributing more than 50% of the soaring oil prices to speculation, while traders were saying OPEC had deliberately held production low in order to drive prices up. Dependency on speculation-susceptible foreign-sourced fuels was building unaffordability into the US economy.

So, after three years of prolonged economic malaise, with the energy and fuel sectors continuing to extract massive amounts of wealth from our local and regional economies, transferring economic leverage away from the middle class and spontaneous job creation, we must face the underlying truth: that fossil fuels work on the marketplace in ways that are corrosive to the long-term health and stability of democratic societies conducive to a vibrant middle class. And given the massive negative externalities, which all of us are funding all of the time, and the unaffordability of so much of the stagnant, status-quo industrial economy, we must also face the increasingly clear economic reality that carbon emissions are not just destructive to the health of our natural environment, but that they have real economic costs not directly related to ecosystem resilience, such as human health, and the cost of industrial activity related to clean-up and to the obsolescence of devices running on combustible fuels.

Devoting increasing amounts of our energy economy to combustible fuels at a time when prices are soaring—a periodic reverse trend of a few months of gradually easing prices is not a reversal of the long-term trend—has a multiple-negative economic effect. The key to understanding what is happening, and which looks likely to make recourse to nuclear and carbon-based fuels counterproductive, is to understand that we are no longer living in a traditional industrial energy economy. We are now dealing with the consequences of that economy’s exploration and combustion burden. The “carbon footprint” is not merely an environmental ethics concern, but a serious economic factor potentially mitigating future productivity, or added long-term costs on a scale never before seen.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), the 2008 Republican nominee for president, proposed building 45 new nuclear plants across the country in order to bring down energy prices overall. The idea was borrowed, to a large extent, from then Vice President Dick Cheney, who had long been close to the nuclear lobby and who included nuclear energy as part of his initial proposals for a new national energy policy. Yet the economic reasoning behind such proposals is dubious: no plants have been built in the US in three decades, and environmental and cost concerns, including pending court rulings, make the strategy unlikely to be implemented.

The state of California—the world’s 5th largest economy—has only two nuclear plants, so the amount of energy sought in producing 45 plants is more than ambitious, especially when compared to the promise of new alternative fuel and energy-production options. That each plant could ulimately cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars in construction, maintenance, security, decomissioning, insurance, health and environmental costs, makes the proposition seem like an ill-informed proposed detour into fiscal collapse.

The entire nation has only 104 nuclear reactors, so the commitment to 45 new nuclear power plants—under McCain’s 2008 plan—would be serious, even as new options become available. What’s more, the history of accidents and near accidents is widely unknown among the public. We know the word “Chernobyl”, but most people don’t know that the V.I. Lenin Memorial Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station had four reactors, only one of which exploded in the cataclismic disaster of 1986. The other three reactors were finally shut down only years afterward, in 1991, 1996 and 2000, respectively. And, the Ukraine’s largest nuclear plant, also Europe’s largest, at Zaporizhzhia, has six pressurized light-water reactors.

We saw this spring what kind of unrelenting social, economic and biological catastrophe can result from the failure of multiple reactor cores, containment strategies and engineering and regulatory mechanisms, when Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi complex went into meltdown, after being struck by a tsunami. That crisis has yet to be fully contained, and no government agency in Japan or elsewhere, seems willing to publish definitive statistics detailing the full scale of the radiation released into the air and water. We know that contaminated rain has fallen on the other side of the Pacific Ocean—which covers half the globe—and so the US is living with fallout from the ongoing Fukushima Daiichi disaster.

We have heard of the serious nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, in March 1979, in which partial core meltdown in one reactor led to the release of 43,000 curies of radioactive krypton (1.59 PBq), and 20 curies (740 GBq), considered a relatively small amount of the especially dangerous iodine-131 isotope, into the surrounding environment. But few people are aware of the major explosion, following core meltdown, in January 1961, at the National Reactor Testing Station in the Idaho desert. All three people working the plant during the explosion were killed and the radioactivity levels were so intense, they were required to be buried in lead coffins.

A massive 890 square-mile complex, now known as the Idaho National Laboratory, was the site of the first success in producing electricity from nuclear reactions, and is in part a national historic landmark. But among its 52 reactors, only three are currently operational, and there are reported to be plans to use at least one to produce plutonium-238 for classified national security purposes.

Now, given the intense security concerns related to nuclear power, rapid construction is literally impossible. Federal public health and environmental laws also require fastidious attention to detail, which has intensified since the last plant was constructed 3 decades ago. Failure to meet with absolute precision all the security requirements can result in catastrophic accidents and/or major cost-overruns in relation to federal regulatory fines and/or takeovers. This means that entirely new systems for construction need to be designed and tested before even the first construction of any new plant can begin.

There is, simply put, no way that new nuclear plants can affect current gas prices.The timeline here has also been pushed back as far as 2030 for any significant shift on percentage of national energy production derived from nuclear power, if the massive new construction project were undertaken.

With both offshore drilling and new nuclear construction likely to delay the infusion of new supply into the domestic energy economy, the real economic result of committing to these strategies for expanding domestic energy production may actually be the increase in prices for oil and automotive gasoline, as it becomes clear that overall supply depends heavily on these resources for the foreseeable future. Over the last few years, as carbon pricing legislation has stalled, discussion about future economic development has shifted to the need for funding the broad expansion of national infrastructure for renewable resources, like wind and solar power.

It is fair to say that given the revolutionary advances in cost-effective construction and comparable end-user cost for renewable resources—we now know existing wind and solar technologies can power the entire US economy—, there has not been enough attention given to the potential for rapid infrastructure development that could bring new sources of energy production online within 2 to 3 years.

We face a stark choice, at this moment of economic division, confusion and peril: we can continue to heavily invest in the old, dirty, costly energy paradigm, or we can deploy smart policies to price carbon accurately, in a way that is designed to return economic influence to the middle class, to innovators and communities, and build a local, user-centered smart energy economy.

- – -

A version of this report was originally published July 31, 2008, at CafeSentido.com

Saturation means more of a given ingredient cannot be added to a given volume or fabric of activity, without spilling over, and being wasted. The fossil fuels market is saturated, in the sense that it cannot effectively capitalize on major new production investment without major new construction of productive facilities. The industry has effectively pushed prices higher and cannot reduce them without seeing a dropoff in profits. Most people can no longer afford the fuel they used to consume.

This raises the question of scalability. Scalability refers to the notion that as activity of a given kind expands, as the benefits and efficiencies of size, reinforced by growing market share, which means a greater ability to determine outcomes, an economy of scale arises: a thing begins to cost less per unit or per usage, because a scalable activity has made the unit or the usage cost less without reducing overall revenues.

Scalability depends on many other features of the marketplace, however. One of these is the value of investment. Another is the availability of that investment. When a market has already gone global, and is controlled by a handful of megaconglomerates and governments, and is saturated, and is pricing reliant consumers out, investment slows down. In a credit-scarce economy where no one is as rich as the oil interests, even moreso.

The ability to rapidly scale up production, and to create a potent and escalating visible return on investment for consumers, is hampered by justifiable skepticism about where this globalized, saturated and entrenched market sector can hope to go. Add to that this problem of a business model whereby one consumes a finite fossil resource that cannot be reproduced, burning one’s assets as one goes, and you have a model that does not shape up favorably for the 21st century.

The S&P 500 are now sitting on over $1 trillion in accumulated cash reserves. This money could, and normally would, be invested in future economic development. But sclerosis in the top-heavy oil sector, a serious lack of capital in the hands of consumers, and the real vulnerability of banks and even governments, are all conspiring to hold that money back. Wise investors understand that when the marketplace for risk and investment fails, a rainy-day fund is the best option.

In stark contrast to the fossil fuels sector, the clean renewables sector:

• is far from saturated,
• produces an ever-increasing rate of return for investors,
• is primed to produce economies of scale,
• can offer more jobs at better wages over a longer term,
• and lends itself to accelerating efficiency gains.

So, why are so many smart people still saying they favor the economics of oil? Two reasons:

1. They are invested in the fossil-burning-for-profits model and so don’t accurately perceive the saturation problem;
2. They don’t understand the paradigm shift and so view clean energy not as a rapidly expanding market but as a feeble one.

It’s not presumptuous to make these assertions about the anti-clean-energy crowd; it’s giving the benefit of the doubt to people who are not seeing the lay of the land as it is, but rather as they are accustomed to hoping it is. It is wishful thinking to hold that oil will always be king and no better option will replace it, wishful, that is, if you profit from oil’s dominance. The same with coal.

We are running out of ways to extract coal cheaply without literally blowing mountains apart, wiping them off them map, which carries very significant costs. Coal is an 18th-century technology not optimized for our 21st century needs. While employment from coal steadily declines, the risks and costs of its production mount, and coal-rich communities continue to experience chronic endemic poverty which the industry has been unable to solve.

We are running out of easy access to oil; the remaining reserves are trapped in undeveloped remote wilderness, behind high-risk, low-yield extraction processes that require major new dirty energy infrastructure to be built. Their development will impede investment in and development of better, cleaner, more efficient alternatives. We can do much better.

The fossil fuel saturation problem, known to states like Texas as an ongoing “energy emergency”, means we need to be actively searching not only for alternative fuels, but also for investment opportunities where we can build in drivers of more generalized prosperity, i.e. a restored and strengthened middle class, and accelerating returns in productive capacity.

The only way to achieve that is by building a smart-grid-based distributed clean renewable-energy market.

- – -

Cross-posted from TheHotSpring.net

Futurismo Verde :: Desde el comienzo de la civilización humana, el proceso de montar sociedades organizadas, formular historias compartidas y diseñar visiones del futuro humano, el ser humano ha buscado maneras de profetizar y de pronosticar. La ciencia moderna ha descubierto indicios fiables que ayudan a describir el mundo, pero para saber qué vendrá después del momento actual, tenemos que aprender a medir la salud de los sistemas naturales que deciden cómo vivimos.

El hecho es que la Tierra es un complejo de sistemas naturales, separados de los ecosistemas terrestres más remotos sólo por la intervención de otros ecosistemas. De alguna forma, todo el material del planeta, orgánico y no orgánico, está en constante comunicación a través de esta red de interacciones. El mundo viviente prospera debido a la interacción sana y sustentable de distintos sistemas naturales, alternando entre competencia y colaboración, y ganando por esa relación sana más flexibilidad de adaptación, más elasticidad.

La crisis vital viene a un ecosistema cuando deja de ser lo bastante elástico como para enfrentar el desafío sistémico del momento. Esa rigidez puede nacer de muchas causas distintas, pero suele arraigarse en una tendencia a la uniformidad y a la reducción de contacto dinámico con otros sistemas contra los que tendrá que competir, en un momento u otro.

La intervención humana, entonces, ¿qué significa para un ecosistema? Eso depende del tamaño y de la intensidad de la huella que deja esa intervención humana. Si se trata de construir una ciudad, es posible que la inmensa mayoría de los ecosistemas naturales desaparecerán o se desplazarán de forma integral y posiblemente fatal. Si se trata de eregir por dos días una tienda de campaña, y comer sólo lo que existe en el ambiente, sin dejar rastros de química sintética o productos industriales, la intervención será mínima, y todos los ecosistemas ambientales seguirán su curso, casi sin interrupción alguna.

Para la mayoría de los seres humanos del planeta, la decisión de intervenir o no en un ecosistema ha vuelto una decisión pasiva: las ciudades ya existen, los pueblos ya tienen su huella física y ambiental, y las decisiones de aumentar el terreno ocupado por un asentamiento humano suelen ser decisiones organizadas y municipales, no de un sólo individuo.

Por lo tanto, es fácil distanciarnos del problema sin darnos cuenta del serio y duradero papel que nuestras actividades tendrán en los sistemas naturales de los que dependemos y de los que depende el medio ambiente más extenso. Esta distancia conceptual influye no sólo en nuestro imaginario cultural y económico, sino además en el futuro tratamiento mutuo entre la economía humana y la naturaleza.

Los servicios naturales más valiosas—producción de oxígeno, agua limpia, ritmos y corredores fiables de lluvia, la corriente global del océano profundo—exceden por mucho todo el valor económico de la actividad humana en conjunto. Privilegiar y promover elasticidad y resistencia en los sistemas naturales es la única manera de prevenir los efectos corrosivos a largo plazo de una industria inconsciente de sus efectos.

Un nivel adecuado de elasticidad y resistencia ecosistémicas es necesario para asegurar el suministro alimenticio global y el suministro de agua limpia. Es necesario para asegurar un promedio de estabilidad climático: la diversidad de influencias promueve la estabilidad sistémica a largo plazo; la reducción de influencias promueve precariedad sistémica.

Una referencia útil sería la inversión financiera: un rango mínimo y más uniforme de inversiones expone a uno a mayor probabilidad de fracaso y pérdida de valor total; un rango más diverso y variado de inversiones protege a uno de la inestabilidad de valores y proporciona mayor estabilidad y mayor probabilidad de aumento de valores.

El futuro económico, a escala global y local, depende definitivamente del nivel de elasticidad y resistencia en los sistemas naturales de los que toda la actividad humana depende. La economía humana se funda en la biología, el organismo humano, y las necesidades vitales del conjunto de todos los seres humanos. El medio ambiente es un sistema en el que participamos, y la elasticidad de ese sistema decide nuestra resistencia ante los cambios emergentes o sorprendentes que pueden presentarse en un momento dado.

Futurismo Verde :: En servicio al proyecto del Foro sobre Política y Crisis, la Red Hot Spring de innovación y debate plantea una conversación global sobre la seguridad alimenticia y la escasez crónica de agua y comida en África. Las lecciones de este experimento en investigación y brainstorming colaborativos se podrá aplicar a otras situaciones de crisis y escasez alrededor del planeta.

Los temas principales de debate serán:

1. Problemas relacionados con el abastecimiento alimenticio global, sobretodo en aplicación a las poblaciones más necesitadas;
2. La degradación medioambiental: o sea, servicios ecológicos y medidas de bienestar ambiental;
3. Deficiencies en las políticas de uso terrenal: cómo mejorarlas;
4. Caza furtiva de animales y cosecha furtiva de leño;
5. Tendencias corrosivas económicas;
6. La corrupción y la deficiencia urgente de presupuestos;
7. Medidas cooperativas para extender el suministro alimenticio a las zonas de conflicto;
8. Cómo superar los límites de la infraestructura de transporte;
9. Las enfermedades comunicables: tratamiento, educación, efectos socio-económicos;
10. Fallos comunicativos: cómo hacer llegar los datos tanto investigados como anecdóticos a los servicios relevantes.

La meta será idear y modelar soluciones calibradas a los desafíos al parecer imposibles de resolver, en relación a la seguridad alimenticia en diversas regiones del continente africano. Esperamos poder proporcionar ideas nuevas y factibles, prácticas y económicamente virtuosas, para que las poblaciones locales interesadas puedan comenzar a desplegarlas en su entorno.

Click aquí para agregar sus comentarios al foro…

El ser humano se ha vuelto tan influyente en los proceso naturales que los científicos ahora temen que la naturaleza ha perdido capacidades vitales de resistencia

Futurismo Verde :: En una reunión de científicos europeos, en Estocolmo, el hombre que inventó el término ‘antropoceno’ para describir una nueva época geológica—en la que la influencia humana domina los proceso naturales—ha anunciado que el término ahora se está aplicando desde múltiples campos de estudio. La importancia real del término es que la información ecológica es cada vez más imprescindible para poder llevar a cabo las ambiciones humanas de una forma responsable y sostenible.

The Financial Times, de Londres, ahora informa que “The EuroScience forum in Stockholm heard on Thursday that climate change was the most obvious of a complex range of man-made effects that is rapidly changing the physics, chemistry and biology of the planet.” [En el foro EuroScience, en Estocolmo, el jueves pasado, escucharon que el cambio climático era el más obvio de un complejo tejido de efectos de la actividad humana, que están cambiando rápidamente la física, la química y la biología del planeta."] Otros efectos tendrán que ver con la resistencia de la cosecha, fertilidad de la tierra, elasticidad de habitat vital para especies de sustento.

El alba de la época Antropocena, en la historia geológica, conlleva una cantidad importante de desafíos y oportunidades. En sentido de llevar a cabo una transición rápida de ubicuos modelos económicos a una metodología sostenible, hay una gran oportunidad de aumentar la producción económica potencial de la economía global. Hacerlo, sin embargo, exigirá cantidades masivas de inversión y de innovación acelerada.

Un grupo de 21 de los científicos e investigadores más respetados ha publicado su estudio de la cronología geológica en GSA Journal, y han confirmado que ocurrió un cambio fundamental a una época geológica definida por el efecto humano en el medio ambiente, a principios del siglo XIX. Lo que ocurre ahora, más allá de eso, es que se está desarrollando una conciencia del impacto severo de 200 años de expansión industrial agresiva, incluyendo explotación de recursos, construcción urbana y remodelación terrenal sin precedentes.

Estamos llegando a un punto de inflexión, después del que la ciencia no podrá evitar la necesidad de reconocer y manejar los impactos de la actividad humana en los sistemas naturales. Se ve ahora alteraciones fundamentales en la sedimentación, calidad de tierra, patrones geológicos y habitat biológico, hasta en la misma flora y fauna que habita los sistemas naturales afectados, y en la atmósfera respirable.

Específicamente:

From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to the present day, global human population has climbed rapidly from under a billion to its current 6.5 billion (Fig. 1), and it continues to rise. The exploitation of coal, oil, and gas in particular has enabled planet-wide industrialization, construction, and mass transport, the ensuing changes encompassing a wide variety of phenomena, summarized as follows. [...]

Humans have caused a dramatic increase in erosion and the denudation of the continents, both directly, through agriculture and construction, and indirectly, by damming most major rivers, that now exceeds natural sediment production by an order of magnitude [...]

Carbon dioxide levels (379 ppm in 2005) are over a third higher than in pre-industrial times and at any time in the past 0.9 million years [...]

The projected temperature rise will certainly cause changes in habitat beyond environmental tolerance for many taxa (Thomas et al., 2004). The effects will be more severe than in past glacial-interglacial transitions because, with the anthropogenic fragmentation of natural ecosystems, ‘escape’ routes are fewer.

Los mecanismos principales de resistencia ecológica se ven erosionados, y el medio ambiente natural se encuentra menos capaz de adaptarse a los cambios en los sistemas naturales y su manera de competir dentro de y entre sí. El estudio también cita evidencia de un nivel acelerado de extinción de especies y de la creciente probabilidad de una ola masiva de extinciones, resultado directo de la actividad humana.

La comunidad científica ha comenzado a elaborar modelos informáticos del sistema natural integral, un complejo de ecosistemas e interacciones a nivel planetario. Esos modelos servirán para averiguar hasta qué punto la actividad humana influye en el medio ambiente y cómo se puede actuar para mitigar esos impactos y lograr un futuro más sostenible, y más capaz de seguir proporcionando los beneficios naturales necesarios como base de la civilización humana.

La idea del periodo Antropoceno es más que una clasificación cronológica del momento en el que nos encontramos. Se trata de una conciencia cada vez más desarrollada de la necesidad de modificar nuestras tendencias para colaborar con los sistemas naturales de los que dependemos tanto para la supervivencia. Es un despertar al efecto que tiene nuestro nivel de vida, nuestra producción y consumo industriales, y a lo que significa la integración de las sociedades alrededor del planeta, en una red global de comunicación y un mercado global de intercambio material y cultural.

Es posible ahora hablar de una creciente conciencia global de la necesidad de cambiar las motivaciones básicas de la política estatal, el negocio privado, el consumo y los mercados en general. Es posible ahora hablar de un momento en el que la evidencia existe para darnos cuenta del poder que tiene la industria de una civilización globalizada sobre el medio ambiente.

La época Antropocena existe porque el impacto medioambiental ya no se trata de un impacto local, en un ambiente limitado, sino de un impacto a nivel global, con secuelas en ecosistemas que no parecen tener contacto directo con la causa de su malestar. El cambio de pensamiento que ahora viene tiene que coincidir con una creciente capacidad de imaginación y colaboración, para dejar atrás la dependencia peligrosa que nos ata a los combustibles fósil.

• Geological Society of America: “Are we now living in the Anthropocene”
• Financial Times / MSNBC: “Scientists warn of a new Anthropocene age”
• About.com Geology: “Introducing the Anthropocene”
• Max-Planck-Institut für Chemie: “Anthropocene” [article that coined the term]
• Resilience 2008: “Resilience, Adaptation & Transformation in Turbulent Times” [Conf., Stockholm 14-17 April]
• Albaeco, Sustainability School: “Masking Environmental Feedbacks”

TheHotSpring.net :: The debt crisis is attributable to “structural” causes, meaning the way the nation’s financing is structured over the next several decades, but also to political and economic causes, meaning both the way we make policy and the way we live and experience the marketplace for trade, credit and consumer purchases. So, we need to implement policies that make serious, sustainable corrections on all three fronts.

Most of the Republican candidates for their party’s presidential nomination debated last night in Iowa, two days ahead of the crucial Ames Straw Poll, thought to be a leading indicator of which candidates are credible and which are less likely to win in January. Rick Perry, who has not yet announced his candidacy, was not in attendance, and Fred Karger—who met all the criteria for attendance—was not allowed to participate, some say because he is openly gay.

The questions were direct, tough and probing. Challenged on her claim that she could turn the US economy around in just three months, Michelle Bachmann fielded the first of many tough questions. She backtracked somewhat, claiming that she could not fix the economy in three months, but that she could enact policies that could eventually have a positive impact. She then trailed off into a “one term president” rant against Obama, which opened her to the critique that her policy plans lack substance.

Mitt Romney attempted to deliver an economic-policy stump speech. He launched into a Republican talking point, calling for a steep reduction in “corporate tax rates”, which are either the lowest in the industrialized world or the highest, depending how they are defined. He called for energy independence, suggesting new drilling, but not openly saying so, and vaguely said we need “the rule of law” to shore up our economy.

Romney’s reference to “rule of law” struck many as odd and off-topic, in part because the Obama record has been one of trying to force major corporate interests to follow existing law and end the regulatory non-action of the Bush years. But Romney’s meaning was far more likely to be about taxes: he has been facing criticism for having “raised taxes” while governor of Massachusetts, but has said he was able to bring in “new revenues” by “closing loopholes”, i.e. enforcing the law.

Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty got off to a very rocky start, showing either plain ignorance of active government policy and recent political history or a willingness to tell very big fibs in order to make difficult rhetorical points—alleging that Barack Obama has never presented a plan to reform Medicare. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—which Pawlenty likes to call “Obamneycare”—included Medicare reform specifically designed to cut $500 billion of “waste, fraud and abuse” from Medicare, without reducing benefits or access to care.

In fact, while it achieves those cost savings, it also establishes that no insurance managers, public or private sector, can interfere with doctor-patient decisions on appropriate course of treatment. So Pawlenty missed the mark dramatically, while saying little about his own plan, getting the facts wrong and leading research-minded voters to look up Obama’s already in place and very specific Medicare reform plan. The president has called for an expansion of that reform plan, again without cutting benefits.

Rick Santorum announced his plan to “cut the corporate tax rate to zero, for manufacturers”, and he did so with a smile, as if anticipating major new corporate financing for his campaign. Santorum seemed eager, throughout the night, to glisten with new ideas of this kind which he hoped would capture new support and new momentum, going into Saturday’s straw poll.

Chris Wallace—who consistently asked aggressive, difficult questions—asked Pawlenty if Bachmann was really unqualified, as he had claimed, and had no achievements, but he added the quip that Pawlenty might be attacking her simply because “she’s beating you in the polls”. Pawlenty repeated that her record is simply lacking, that she has no accomplishments at all as a legislator.

Referring to the Bachmann’s catch-line that she has a “titanium spine” and will never relent on her ideological demands, Pawlenty said “It’s not her spine we’re interested in; it’s her record of achievement.” He then addressed her directly, saying “If that’s your view of leadership with effective results, please stop, because you’re killing us,” implying that by sabotaging deals that get much of what Republicans seek, she is losing the wider policy war for the party.

Romney faced his toughest question when he was challenged on his record at Bain Capital, which acquired American Paper, closed two plants, and imposed 2,000 layoffs. Romney says not all of the companies Bain invested in while he was there worked, and so some had to fail. He sought to paint this record of experience as an education in what works to allow businesses to grow and create jobs, but he offered no specifics on how that education would play out in presidential policy.

Wallace asked Gingrich if his record on the campaign trail—top advisers resigning en masse—shows he is not fit for the presidency. Gingrich bristled and decried what he called “gotcha questions”. He criticized the press corps generally, for focusing on “campaign minutia” and ignoring the basic ideas that distinguish Republicans from Pres. Obama.

He made the most specific policy suggestion of the evening, saying the government should make “Lean Six Sigma”—a combination of Toyota’s Lean manufacturing model and Motorola’s Six Sigma production process—the national manufacturing standard.

He asked Huntsman if his record of service as Barack Obama’s representative to China means he is not a true Republican. He said he is proud to serve and that when your country calls, you step up and serve. Huntsman repeated throughout the night that he is proud of his record of public service and that he believes that experience is the best sign that he is prepared to be president.

Herman Cain was asked if his extreme statements—like calling on communities to ban mosques—and saying he knew little about the war in Afghanistan made him too ignorant to be president. Cain seemed to agree with Gingrich’s critique of unfair questions, and said he has learned, that as a businessman he knows the ability to learn and to develop more complex understanding of such complex issues makes a good leader.

On immigration, Cain said legal immigration is the already existing and appropriate “path to citizenship”. In what might be his most memorable remark of the campaign, he artfully threaded the needle of ethnic and ideological tensions relating to immigration, saying “America can be a nation with high fences and wide open doors.”

Gingrich took an extreme tack to the hard right, calling for moving millions of people to the southern states to police the borders, the establishment of English as “the official language of government”—a radical position that ignores the First Amendment and holds that we will not inform anyone who does not understand English of their rights, or what they may need to do in an emergency.

Gingrich also added that he would “distinguish between people who have been here a very long time and people who have come more recently”. This last comment seemed to some to mean he would allow for something like amnesty for those who have been here longer, while others were chilled by what seemed to be a nativist rejection of immigrants’ rights.

Romney was asked about how he used new revenues to fix the Massachusetts state budget, and whether he would raise taxes to balance the budget. By simple arithmetic, it looks nearly impossible to balance the federal budget any time soon without raising taxes, but Romney defended his record in Massachusetts, explaining that he balanced the budget every year, and that he only needed to close loopholes, not to raise taxes, while imposing sharp cuts.

Pawlenty was asked about his having increased the cigarette tax in his state, in order to balance the budget. He made reference to whether it was a “fee” or a “tax” and to court rulings on the subject, and said he would later regret having done it, but it seemed clear that this was instrumental to his budget policy and a sticking point that could be to his favor or to his disadvantage, depending on whether GOP primary voters include the majority of Republicans who favor raising revenues to balance the budget.

Bachmann said she had opposed the cigarette tax hike, when she was in the state legislature, and that she was determined not to support it. But she did in fact vote to increase the cigarette tax. She claimed Pawlenty forced her to do so, by attaching a rider that would “protect the rights of the unborn”, so that she was forced to choose between voting against rights for the unborn and voting to raise taxes.

Bachmann said her view was that you can get things wrong when it comes to money but not when it comes to life. The exchange, however, seemed to play into Pawlenty’s argument, that he is better at getting results than Bachmann, who is a hapless prisoner to her own ideological priorities, and who—despite this, and contrary to what she says—will vote against her principles.

Rick Santorum, former senator from Pennsylvania, appeared to agree with Pawlenty’s critique of Bachmann, saying that a leader needs to know how to get a good deal and get results. Santorum sought to tout his record of “leadership” at the state and federal level, and argued that he was better able to serve the conservative ideals than Bachmann, because he knows how to negotiate.

When the question was posed if the candidates felt so strongly about opposing any increase of any kind in tax rates, would they oppose even a deficit reduction deal that made $10 in cuts for every $1 in new revenues, every member of the debate panel raised their hands. After-debate analysis suggested this moment may become “iconic”, indicating that the Republican party is only interested in tax cuts, not in deficit reduction, fiscal responsibility or protecting Medicare and Social Security.

The image of the Republican candidates dutifully—some with reluctance—raising their hands to support Grover Norquist’s radical anti-tax pledge could become the signal moment of the primary campaign, when Republican candidates announced their intention to enforce the tea party radical position of obstructing deficit reduction in order to prioritize tax breaks, at a time of historically low tax rates, perilously low revenues and escalating debt.

Santorum took issue with Ron Paul and Michelle Bachmann’s reference to the 10th Amendment, and the question of states’ rights, saying their theories were “the 10th Amendment run amok”, and that “Our country is based on moral laws, ladies and gentlemen. Abraham Lincoln said the states don’t have the right to do wrong.” It was a moment of passion and principle that stood out, but which will require Santorum to make clear how he would deal with issues like same-sex marriage or abortion, where prevailing law conflicts with his views.

Asked about the entrance of Rick Perry into the race, Ron Paul said Perry “represents the status quo” and that he will make Paul’s own unique views stand out more. Herman Cain agreed, saying Perry would dilute the vote for “politicians” and make his business record stand out. Bachmann said there is room for another conservative in the race, though many strategists believe Perry will cut into her vote-getting ability.

Newt Gingrich was asked if he has a clear vision of what should be done in Libya, after taking two diametrically opposing views within a few days, at the start of the conflict. He said he recently spoke to Gen. Abizaid, who speaks Arabic, is one of the foremost security policy experts on the region, and who said we have a “strategic deficit” that needs to be closed through intelligent, persistent diplomatic engagement.

In what is perhaps an interesting angle, politically, Abizaid has been a supporter of the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts in the region, which taken with Gingrich’s characterization of the state of affairs, suggests the Obama administration’s policies are potentially closing that deficit.

Gingrich did not offer a clear policy position on the current situation in Libya, but complained that the press were criticizing him for Pres. Obama’s having coordinated a humanitarian crisis response in Libya.

Huntsman was asked what it meant that China has been hacking into US corporations and US government servers. He said he has long experience with China, and believes the United States needs to have a robust, informed, collaborative and secure relationship with the rising world power. He also said it would be naïve to expect China not to behave like a rival, and that we nee a president who understands the relationship.

Ron Paul decried sanctions against Iran, saying that military threats and sanctions are precursors to real military conflict, costly policy mistakes and would only worsen the security situation worldwide. Paul believes that foreign wars that are not of absolute defensive necessity are contrary to democratic values, undermine the principles of liberty and create enmities that would continue to threaten US interests far into the future.

Cain was asked by Wallace about his comment that US energy independence would be the best way to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. The suggestion was that it might be irrational to claim that drilling for oil in North America would persuade Iran’s hardline regime not to develop nuclear weapons. Cain explained that he views economic policy as one element of a complex foreign policy, where economic pressures can be brought to bear to incentivize the behavior of even extreme governments.

When Ron Paul was asked why he disagreed with Michelle Bachmann’s view that accused terrorists should not have due process rights, he said “she turns our rule of law on its head.” Paul explained that for individuals accused of terrorist activity to be treated as terrorists, “They have to be ruled a terrorist. Who rules them a terrorist?” He said the Constitution requires due process and a court ruling based on evidence. Bachmann, he said, is rejecting the rule of law and the traditions of American democracy, instead proposing “mob rule”.

Santorum said that under the regime of the Shah, the Iranian people were “free”—disregarding the police state, disappearances and torture used by that regime. He then complained that the “mullocracy” in Tehran “tramples the rights of gays”—a remark that surprised many, given his relentless pursuit of a national ban on same-sex marriage.

Gingrich was asked why he proposed a “loyalty test” for any Muslim that might serve in his administration. He said he would impose a loyalty test on every person who would serve in government, but gave no specifics as to how that test would be carried out. He cited incidents of Cold War espionage, where people that seemed above suspicion turned out to be foreign spies, and one case where an alleged terrorist conspirator said he “lied” when asked how he could take an oath of loyalty and then behave as America’s enemy.

Herman Cain was asked what it was he believes southerners “find objectionable about Mormonism”? He said that he, personally, has no problem with it, but that he believes many southerners simply don’t understand how Mormonism fits into the culture of protestant Christianity that they are familiar with.

Asked about her having said she hated her husband’s idea that she should study tax law, “But the Lord said, be submissive. Wives, you are to be submissive to your husbands,” Rep. Bachmann seemed genuinely embarrassed and stunned. She paused for an uncomfortable length of time, then offered the explanation that she meant by this term “respect” and that her husband respects her as well.

Romney may have waded into waters that will hurt him in the general election, when he shed the moderate tone of his campaign, saying “our marriage status relationship should be consistent at the national level” and he supported a national law to define marriage as between a man and a woman. He justified this by expressing concern that some same sex couples might have a hard time divorcing if they are in states that have different marriage laws from those where they married.

Huntsman supports civil unions, and spoke of “reciprocal beneficiary rights”. He said “I believe in traditional marriage, but subordinate to that, I believe that we haven’t done a good enough job at equality.” This helped to define Huntsman’s position as the true moderate conservative in the field, and a pragmatist. Many critics have been wary of the conservative candidates’ unwillingness to admit that any injustice could be in need of correction that does not need conservative ideological solutions.

Paul took a position that many find hard to grasp, given his arch-libertarian tendencies. He said “just so long as they don’t impose their vision of marriage on you”, that his priority was to ensure that no one had their private life defined by the government. This was in line with his libertarian principles, but he also specified that he believes marriage should be between one man and one woman, a concession to the conservative ideology he is known for criticizing.

Bachmann offered the awkward statement that “I have an absolutely unblemished record when it comes to this issue of man-woman marriage”. She has not supported same-sex marriage, certainly, but there have been questions about “blemishes” to her record, including alleged support for the extreme and discredited “treatment” option of prayer to cure homosexuality. Questions have also been raised about whether she and her husband have been spokespeople for this policy.

Romney may have made his most significant slip-up of the night—in line with his statement the previous day that “corporations are people”—when he said that “We’ve got to find a way to reduce our spending on a lot of anti-poverty programs”. He said this in responding to a question about whether he would extend unemployment benefits.

Romney has sought to blame both general economic pathologies and the president’s policy response for prolonged unemployment, which would suggest those who are suffering the impact are not in any way responsible for their predicament, so his admonition that in times of economic hardship the government should roll back its anti-poverty efforts seemed more than a bit awkward.

He said he would “go to Congress with a new plan for unemployment benefits”, but that he would not extend the current program of unemployment benefits. He was not pressed on what he would do should Congress fail to give him the option he prefers.

Huntsman took issue with the regulatory system and made what might be his most immoderate policy assertion of the night, saying that “If you want to build a facility in this country, you can’t, because of the EPA’s regulatory reign of terror“. He was defending the Huntsman company’s chemical operations, and by implication was suggesting chemical plants need more leeway to release dangerous toxins into the environment.

The use of the phrase “reign of terror”—a reference to the French revolutionary period and a campaign of torture and mass execution of “enemies of the revolution”—echoed the much maligned rhetoric of bloodshed and exaggeration increasingly used by Republicans since the summer of 2008, and through the 2010 elections. Huntsman did not backtrack, but repeated his allegation of a “reign of terror”, without giving any specifics about how that “terror” was imposed.

Newt Gingrich was asked to explain why he does not favor Ron Paul’s demand that the Federal Reserve Bank be “abolished”. “Having some sort of central bank”, he said, is necessary for dealing with the money supply “in the modern world”. He added, “I think the fact that the Fed is secret is a scandal” and repeated his demand that the Federal Reserve Bank be audited, that its books be open to public scrutiny.

Ron Paul celebrated what he called an awakening of the mainstream to the need to audit the Fed, but said we need to phase out the Fed, and that it is important to “understand the business cycle” in order to prevent recessions.

On education, Huntsman was firm, saying “No Child Left Behind hasn’t worked for this country; it ought to be done away with.” He called for a greater emphasis on governance at the local level, and said there is no one so interested in schools succeeding as the communities they serve. Herman Cain seconded this response, saying he would abandon NCLB and focus on local control of schools.

Huntsman added that he stood against letting the nation default, because the United States is 25% of the world’s GDP and by far the largest financial services industry in the world. This was a critique of the radical factions in his party, including Bachmann, who have said that they believe default could be beneficial for long-term fiscal solvency, acting as a kind of spur to activate serious budget reform.

The debate showed new rifts between and among the candidates and allowed them to stake out certain clear positions: Gingrich emerged as the “ideas” candidate, demanding that everyone focus more on ideas and less on rhetoric, style and the “minutia” of what goes on along the campaign trail. Romney sought to remain largely above the fray, and managed to do so, but gave few specifics. Ron Paul staked out a position of radical reform, in language many voters support.

Herman Cain talked up his business record, but mostly offered what he considered common-sense ideas. Rick Santorum promised bold leadership, offered some radical positions on taxation, and confounded some of the most problematic critiques of his ideas. Huntsman stood as the principled moderate, and a conservative problem solver.

Bachmann was on the defensive, but was poised; she moderated some of her most hardline views, but gave few specifics. Pawlenty became something of an attacker, and began what could be the most effective argument for his campaign: getting things done. It was not clear if anyone “won” the debate, though Romney, Bachmann and Gingrich were all given praise for their demeanor, for different reasons. Pawlenty may have made a dent in Bachmann’s armor, however, and some now expect him to be a tougher campaigner.

- – -

Report and analysis from Independents of Principle

TheHotSpring.net :: With the objectivity and commitment to fact of S&P now seriously in question, and allegations now revived that it and other rating agencies were paid to give AAA ratings to junk securities derivatives, it is clear that we need a 100% not-for-profit (NFP) cooperative bond rating agency. The independent NFP agency could be one of several, staffed by top economists, stakeholders and public servants, and standing somewhere between the public and the private sectors.

The role of such a new cooperative agency would be to take the profit motive and the complication of day to day financial dealings out of the rating agency portfolio. While Standard and Poors is owned by the publishing conglomerate McGraw Hill, its analysts have been accused of incestuous relationships with the entities they are tasked with rating, sometimes taking huge profits in financial services fees while evaluating risky products put out by their patrons.

A not-for-profit rating agency would allow for greater transparency, a more aggressive process of analysis, and more unbiased foundation for that analysis. It would allow for a wider-ranging and more flexible input of data to ensure that evaluations correspond in some clear way to genuine long-term value. It would, in short, ensure that private interests don’t interfere with the straightforward process of factual analysis.

It would also, maybe more than any other single factor, help to contribute to a virtuous cycle of transitioning back toward separation of interests, diversification of markets, and decentralization of financial sector influence and wealth creation. How would this benefit society at large? It would allow for a more democratic, more evidentiary, more pragmatic reading of bonds and other financial services products.

The first step is to remove the profit motive from the evaluation process. The reason for this is that the assumption that narrow profit motives somehow spark virtuous behavior, “efficiency” and “performance” loses relevance when the incentive to produce a given rating—like AAA on high-risk subprime mortgage-backed derivatives—conflicts with the evidence-based analysis, which indicates that there is no way that product can be a safe bet for most investors.

- – - A brief aside: The same can be true in reverse: a bond rating agency that made such catastrophically bad misjudgments when there was a conflicting interest in play could seek to be more aggressive, in a highly visible way, to restore its reputation for seriousness of purpose, when—by coincidence—there is no direct accounts receivable windfall in play.

There is enough room for doubt that on the first day of trading since S&P’s downgrade of US Treasury bonds, those same bonds have hit an all-time record for demand, as investors seek shelter in the very product that was just downgraded. That suggests the S&P evaluation was flawed, or was issued for mathematically inconsistent reasons, or simply that—as one analyst suggested today—their poor performance during the mortgage bubble has left them less relevant and less well regarded generally. 

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, wrote today that “they may be a prestigious organization for some reason, but their track record is ludicrously bad.” In fact, he is not the only prominent economist expressing concern that the Wall Street firms and the financial services sector more broadly are becoming perilously divorced from the wider economy. – - -

The American economic system has artfully grappled for generations with the problematic tension between narrow, well-funded interests, and the wider landscape of stakeholder interests. A strong regulatory system and vibrant democratic marketplace have been able, periodically, to rein in abusive behavior and make it visibly profitable for powerful interests driving economic behavior to line up their interests with those of the wider economy.

Some now believe that time may have passed. A generation’s worth of deregulation and financial experimentation have led to the widest wealth gap since before the Great Depression, and credible economic analysis suggests the stagnant economic trendlines are the result of having a post-Depression system, with meaningful checks and balances, and a Depression-era economic dynamism. In other words, we should be experiencing a depression, but we have deployed failsafe measures to make it less likely.

The stakeholder problem is a very real bone of economic contention, and very much worthy of close scrutiny. Where financial instruments are based on bad investments, then pitched as good investments, and tens of trillions of dollars in private wealth evaporate, even the most minute activities within the financial services sector have high-stakes consequences for people and institutions throughout the economy.

A genuinely useful, wholly relevant and economically optimally constructive rating system requires real independence. It requires a commitment to fact, and a commitment to economic balance and generalized prosperity. It requires a substantive, transparent measure of the major economic drivers that induce periods of “irrational exuberance” for bad investments, which by extension bring widespread economic hardship in their wake, when banks shut down many of their financial support services to the middle class and small businesses.

The proposed NFP cooperative bond rating agency would be:

• fully independent of ties to Wall Street firms;
• required to publish source material and white-paper reports detailing internal discussions;
• required to publish information regarding all meetings with any interested parties;
• focused on stakeholder interests across the economy;
• responsible for public comment fora, at least one per month, to gather anecdotal guidance;
• staffed with independent economists, former financial services professionals, public service veterans—each without active ties to interested parties;
• required to pay only base stipends, with no bonuses except for consistent accuracy over the long term;
• a model for similar NFP financial analysis projects.

The four central ideas motivating this new model, and which should then be emulated by competing institutions are:

1. eliminating professional conflict of interest;
2. comprehensive transparency of process, sourcing and aims;
3. focus on overall stakeholder interest;
4. reliable precision, based on health modeling, not profit forecasting.

The simplest way to institute a project on this scale, with this level of responsibility and in a visible enough way to give it active influence and long-term viability is, of course, a public-private partnership. It should be funded in part by the federal government, and in part by the financial services sector, and top schools of economics should hold competitions to bring on board some of the world’s most visionary, flexible and precise economic minds.

The process should begin this fall and winter, with the goal of holding public hearings for the creation of the first independent NFP cooperative rating agency in the spring and fall of 2012. The fully functional institution could be active by the end of 2012, in time to play a constructive role in the landscape of analysis surrounding the 2013 negotiations on the 2014 federal budget, and the financial planning of major banks, insurers, governments and industry.

creative prosperity is sustainable prosperity

To build a future of vibrant open democracy and robust and sustainable economic prosperity, it is necessary to privilege creative activities and constructive solutions to the challenges we face. Addressing major challenges in constructive, innovative ways, is the single most significant driver, historically, of sustained economic booms. In short, we need to move deliberately and swiftly toward a creative prosperity agenda.

The first consideration, then, is to examine how the creative prosperity agenda would differ from what we are doing now. At present, we are wrestling with the complex fabric of consequence related to long-running economic distortions, most of which we have not yet corrected. Healthcare reform and financial regulatory reform were comprehensive in scope, but moderate in impact, cautious and rooted in the prevailing model; energy reform needs to move forward rapidly and do more to prioritize innovation.

We are facing a major, civilization-wide transition from one way of conceptualizing political and economic power to another. We stand at the dawn of what should be the global solidification of open democracy as the standard for elevating and defending human dignity and freedom of thought. But we need to build creative prosperity into that future, and this will require a fundamental shift in the dominant view which holds that power is more effective when concentrated in fewer hands.

That view comes from ancient times—from prehistoric times, in fact—when the governing principle of human life was the need to survive in competition with forces far more powerful than any one individual, family or band. Power, then, was a combination of accumulated resources and raw force. In that light, power is a destructive force, requiring intense concentration of resources and the ability to draw a line between the inside and the outside of the power circle.

the feudal (concentration) model

Economically, the fact of human society was that there was not enough technology, enough resources, enough liberty, to deliver real comfort to most or all people. In fact, there was only the material wealth to deliver substantial comfort to about 1 in every 100 people. The model of concentration allowed those in that 1 percent to cling to comfort and fight off would-be attackers.

The only way into the circle in which power, means and comfort were concentrated was to pay the toll for access. That might be done by force of arms, or by handing over significant sums of wealth. Paying the toll perpetuated the model, and won significant privileges for those who helped to make sure that system remained viable.

This developed eventually into authoritarian empires and the medieval elevation of aristocracy. The logic of the model of concentration held: those inside the circle must remain there, and the society must be organized to keep them there. They were, it was presumed, worth more than other people, and so they were able to treat their privilege as if it were part of a life of service—maintaining law and order—to those with less.

the democracy (decentralization) model

Modern democracy posits an entirely different model: the model of decentralization. Modern democracy, according to the ideals of the American revolution and the French revolution, requires a comprehensive departure from the status quo of feudal dominance. It requires the engineering of a model for economic and political activity whereby power cannot be concentrated, and where excessive concentration of power brings disadvantage.

A creative prosperity agenda for public policy and economic renewal would put aside the bias of the old model, once and for all, asking enterprises large and small to join together in a fabric of imaginative competition, prioritizing localization, innovation and service value to the marketplace. It would help to recapture the energy of modern democracy, wherein monopolies and juggernauts sputter and trudge, slowed by their weight, and individuals and small businesses are better able to take the field, to effect positive change, to feed a generalized economic expansion.

The key to that model is the vibrancy of an expanding and upwardly mobile middle class. Achieving that means doing what the United States did so effectively in the 1950s and 1960s, decentralizing the levers for creating wealth, allowing more free people to participate not only as citizens but as leaders and entrepreneurs.

losing our former focus on creative (decentralized) prosperity

A period of intensive deregulation in key industries has led the United States’ economy into a period of prolonged slow growth, because it has led to the hyper-concentration of wealth and of access to the levers of wealth-creation generally. Average household income has dropped by about $2,500 since 2000, even as the gap between average pay and the earnings of the wealthiest has expanded to historic highs.

There is a problematic knock-on effect of this, which is that innovation is no longer a priority, as major conglomerates seek first of all to secure their position. Upstarts like Apple are not emerging at the rate they were during previous periods of economic expansion, and the most powerful, most concentrated interests—Apple now among them—are controlling the field of play.

recapturing momentum: how to build a creative prosperity agenda

There are a couple of key changes that need to take place to move toward a creative prosperity agenda:

1. Move from a bias favoring large conglomerates to one against them;
2. Move away from subsidies for high-polluting, low-yield fossil fuels;
3. Move toward clean energy technologies that favor rapid innovation, brainy startups, more robust job creation, and local economies;
4. Revive national commitment, public and private, to infrastructure redevelopment;
5. Provide direct tax credits for real job creation (payable on a per-job basis);
6. Establish sustainability incentives for municipalities (ref: Sustainable Jersey), states and businesses;
7. Establish an aggressive Renewable Portfolio Standard;
8. Prioritize higher education spending, including post-graduate studies incentives for businesses looking to sponsor their employees;
9. Introduce critical thinking, macroeconomic studies, engineering basics and public policy debate, to public high schools—judge these as more valuable than test scores;
10. Make sure tax reforms are not regressive; make sure they prioritize family and community-level “thriving”, i.e. asset-building, quality of life and spending power;
11. Tax derivative financial instruments at a higher rate than direct capital investments in enterprise, innovation and hiring;
12. Apply national policy to correct market distortions relating to fossil fuel costs.

The outcome of this process of reform would be:

• accelerated, more widespread innovation;
• entree for creative small business models;
• unprecedented opportunities for sustained hiring;
• more vibrant, resilient local economies;
• a consumer-centered smart electricity grid;
• cleaner air and water;
• a sustainable economy where growth is not tied to the promotion of vast negative externalities;
• more robust civic engagement from citizens, communities and creative thinkers…

The United States is perfectly capable of achieving this kind of virtuous cycle between democratization, decentralization, creative thinking, entrepreneurship and the expansion of the middle class. But substantive policy changes need to be made—to remove the incentive for corrosive activities that favor the unhealthy concentration of wealth and productive capacity and motivate the revival of generative activities that favor the healthy decentralization of assets and productive capacity.

A vibrant middle class—where the best ideas can come to the fore and be implemented and the dignity and worth of citizens and communities takes priority over the naked pursuit of profit—is better suited to fostering creative, sustainable prosperity. The first step is to recognize where we favor profit over people, and then work to change the prevailing model and free human creative talent to achieve that goal.

IndependentsOfPrinciple.com :: What’s wrong with the stock market, particularly the New York Stock Exchange and the Dow Jones Industrial Average? The most significant problem facing the stock market is really a confluence of two problems: 1) we have too little middle class wealth, and so too little consumer demand, and 2) we face an urgent need to accelerate the transition to a new economy, but we are focused on trying to revive an old economy.

On Thursday, August 4, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped almost 513 points, losing 4.3% of its total value, the worst one-day decline since December 2008, and an effective reversal of 8 months’ worth of gains. It happened two days after the United States avoided a default by raising the debt ceiling and cutting government spending by about $250 billion per year over the next 10 years.

Analysts differ over whether the massive stock sell-off is attributable to concerns about an impending default by Italy, or whether it indicates some sort of deep weakness suddenly revealed in the dealings of American banks. What is evident, however, is that with massive cuts in government spending planned, the nation’s leading industrial corporations may lose needed funding and/or incentives for new investment.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average measures the collective value of 30 leading publicly traded industrial corporations. It is rooted in a 19th-century industrial economic model, in which the value of these firms grows as the wider economy is developed. In a fully developed post-industrial economy, connected at countless points of contact to a global marketplace, and driven by consumer behavior, there are obstacles to modeling economic health in this way.

But beyond the power and relevance of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, stock indices in general are prone to certain inherent flaws that can incentivize the slowing or even reversal of trends that would be healthy for the overall economy. This is because they favor already powerful entities, and are often ill equipped to measure or reward activities that substantially disperse wealth creation.

Stock indices are at best an indirect measure of capital decentralization, because they measure its centralization, albeit in a way that could, if all other conditions are right, result in more people gaining access to the levers of capitalization and wealth creation. In other words, the best-case scenario is: if everyone gets in, and makes the same bets, and most people keep up, then maybe most people get richer. But that is not the point, and the indices don’t even attempt to tell that story.

When banks come to depend on the commonly held belief that they control wealth that does not in fact exist, the possibility of wealth being decentralized in a way that drives consumer spending is greatly reduced. It has to be, because to meet the demands of their own fictional wealth claims, banks must persuade others, i.e. many or most people, to take on unsustainable debt.

Ultimately, this practice drives the deployment of still more unsustainable debt, and deprives consumers of too great a portion of their wealth, cutting into economic output, slowing economic growth and impeding hiring. This is where we find ourselves, and the banks, investment firms and major industrial corporations, are sitting on massive real wealth, waiting for government to somehow force consumer spending higher.

But the summer of 2011 has seen two worrying trends that make it less likely government can motivate new growth: the United States has committed to removing $2.5 trillion in government spending from the economy, over ten years, and multiple eurozone countries appear closer to default than before the US debt ceiling debacle.

Austerity plans in the US and the EU now threaten to destabilize major western commercial markets, even as investors grapple with the shift toward more volatile consumer markets in Brazil, Russia, India and China, sometimes grouped together as the “BRIC” bloc. Much conventional industry is still heavily invested in mineral fuels, a dependency which could lead to cost swings so severe as to limit investment of even huge pools of cash in reserve.

So, what is wrong with the stock market? It is viscerally linked to trends that no longer support sustained unlimited expansion. The fabric of our global economy, and the technologies and innovations that make it work, have evolved so far as to work, in many ways, against the continued expansion of the specific values counted by the various stock indices, given the way they are counted.

We need a more astute, more precise, more direct and versatile way to read the economic landscape that offers up the best opportunities for investment. We need to consider and then to integrate into our planning and our value judgments real measures of generalized quality of life, corresponding to household autonomy, individual career choice, and opportunities for asset building and middle-class entrepreneurship. And then we need to find ways of measuring these indicators that actually drive the underlying economic reality to improve.

We need to remember that not everyone trades stocks and bonds for a living, not everyone is hoping banks and insurers can continue to reap major profits without providing consumer-centered service, real wealth expansion and a more resilient foundation for sustained prosperity, and not everyone is served by a system that focuses on concentrations of wealth near the top of the income ladder.

We need to stay global in our thinking, and make sure we are inspired by the aim of building a robust, democratic society; the middle class will thrive if we do.

The composition of the national debt is a complex history of policy decisions, governmental priorities and Congressional authorizations. Republican opponents of Pres. Obama have suggested that debt and deficits have “exploded” since he took office. They have sought to paint the president as a “tax and spend liberal”, because that accusation fits their standard campaign model.

But economists and budget analysts, including a top budget aide to Republican presidents Reagan and Bush, the elder, say Obama’s actual performance as president puts his budget policy in the “moderate conservative” segment of the fiscal policy spectrum. He has routinely demanded from Congress that major legislation be “paid for” or “deficit neutral”, and he has struggled mightily—putting aside his own policy priorities—to slow the expansion of deficits that stems from policies enacted by the previous administration.

Among these major policy drivers are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Bush administration simply never included either war in official budget projections, requiring Congress to fund both through “supplemental” spending agreements. The result was that two massive unfunded wars, each adding trillions to government spending, over a decade, were kept “off the books”.

Barack Obama—who voted to oppose raising the debt ceiling when he was a senator, in part because he believed the “off the books” accounting was going to bankrupt the government and pose a threat to the nation’s long term health and prosperity—viewed this as unethical and pledged to put the wars on the books, so the public, and the Congress, could more directly judge the costs and benefits of the wars and plan for the long term.

What is vitally important for all independent voters to understand is that while the debt debate has been laced-through with intense partisan rhetoric and vitriolic attacks, is that there are real drivers of the national debt, and they have little to do with socialism. The national debt is a product of patterns of borrowing that have soared over the last three decades, largely from one particular problem: the coincidence of relentless tax cutting with the need to fund existing programs and address real-world challenges.

In 1981, when Pres. Jimmy Carter left office, the national debt was under $1 trillion. By the time Pres. Ronald Reagan left office, in 1989, the national debt was close to $3 trillion. During Pres. George H.W. Bush’s first year in office, when the budget was Reagan’s last budget, the national debt broke $3 trillion.

The first Pres. Bush was a better debt manager than his immediate predecessor or his son; debt grew by roughly $1.4 trillion, during his 4 years in office. Pres. Clinton did a little better, adding about the same amount over 8 years. But Clinton achieved an important result: he left the government with projected budget surpluses exceeding the total national debt, over the coming decade.

Pres. George W. Bush took office in 2001 with those surpluses in place. His 2001 tax cut, however, reversed the entire surplus, and by the time of his reelection in 2004, he added to the (once again) growing debt another $1.7 trillion. By the time he left office in 2009, the national debt had escalated to over $10 trillion, and the debt ceiling was already primed for another $2 trillion in borrowing.

That extra $2 trillion in borrowing was necessary, to pay for spending already “in the pipeline”, already passed into law and on the federal books, either as part of the official budget or supplemental spending. By the end of 2009, with George W. Bush’s last annual budget playing out, the national debt was at $12 trillion. It would be mid 2010, before the active federal budget was “owned” by Obama.

As of this writing, the policies of George W. Bush have added fully $7 trillion to the national debt. Since then, Pres. Obama’s policies have added another $1.4 trillion, and already planned spending policy, historically low government tax revenues and the economic reality of tight credit, slow growth and lagging job creation, makes it very difficult for him for him to cut spending to a level where he would be able to match Pres. Bush, the elder and Pres. Clinton, in managing the national debt.

His record on budgets has been one of reformer: he has consistently favored institutional reforms that impose real cuts, and bend cost growth down to match or fall below inflation. But reducing spending can reduce national economic growth as well, further straining the national debt trend lines.

What Pres. George H.W. Bush and Pres. Clinton were able to manage was a cooperative Congressional environment, in which tough bargains were made with rivals in Congress. Pres. Obama has not had that luxury, and it may be he will not have it. There are growing tensions in the Republican party, resulting from real disagreement about whether budget and debt should be used for partisan strategy or whether they should be non-partisan policy items, with all voting in favor of the national interest.

Independent voters are looking for sanity. We are looking for reason and clarity. We are looking for long-term policy decisions that help steer the nation toward prosperity and sustainable, generalized economic wellbeing. We need a balanced standard for budget policy, where revenues increase to meet costs, so the United States remains the world’s leading fiscal policy driver and the dollar remains the world’s reserve currency.

There is opportunity in the budget policy negotiations, but the opportunity will be missed, if one or both sides refuse to use the negotiations to reach a constructive, well-designed, well-funded, rational policy on national community reinvestment, infrastructure upgrades, education and new revenues capable of meeting our needs and our aims.

TheHotSpring.net :: Yemen may be where the Arab spring, this sweeping current of democratic upheaval in the Arabic-speaking world, takes a turn definitively toward violence or toward civic solutions. The regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh, a tribal dictatorship using feudal power tactics, based in the capital Sanaa, is now waging one war against extremist Islamists and another against non-violent pro-democracy protesters.

Yemen is an intensely poor country, likely to see its dwindling fresh water resources 100% depleted before any nation in the world, and could be the global home-base for jihadist extremists. Yemen could also, however, be a sparkling example of how peaceful democratic change can bring sustainable prosperity and security to an otherwise impoverished society ruled by feudal warlords and kleptocratic dictators.

The gap between the democracy movement and the regime is stark: while protesters are lawyers and doctors, university professors and economists, the dictator Saleh has only a high-school-level education. Saleh’s former allies have tired of his brutality, and are demanding that he immediately cease all violence against civilians, and honor his multiple pledges to leave power, allowing for a peaceful democratic transition.

Much of the country is illiterate, and tribal politics continue to be an easy way to sow division, to justify cold-blooded killing, and to undermine the progress promised by peaceful protesters. Even the government seems unable to comprehensively put down the Islamist militia vying for power in the deep south. And neither the protesters nor Saleh have been able to fashion a secure plan for bringing prosperity back to Yemeni ports on the Gulf of Aden.

The Yemeni democracy movement is well read, well educated and rooted in a commitment to nonviolence. Yet there are grave concerns that if the regime succeeds in applying the tactics of Col. Muammar Qadhafi—the once and possibly former Libyan dictator of four decades—Yemen could descend into a failed state status reminiscent of its neighbor across the water, Somalia.

Heavily armed Somali pirates—linked to a vast black-market criminal network which feeds the ongoing Somali civil war—have become a menace to global shipping through the Gulf of Aden, the main southern route of entry into the Suez Canal. That vast criminal network has expanded the power of Islamist militia in southern Somalia, and has contributed to the intensification of drought, famine and social collapse.

Yemen may be more at risk than Somalia in many ways, should collapse follow the atrocities committed by Saleh against the Yemeni people. The pro-democracy movement needs to maintain its non-violent approach, but plan for significant innovations and improvements in the process of governing and of economic development and planning.

Yemen is strategic enough to warrant major foreign investment, debt forgiveness and development aid, and its ports might be able to benefit from a secure, reliable, democratic challenge to the armed chaos in Somalia and throughout the Gulf of Aden. Mokha (on the Red Sea), Aden and Ta’izz could form a powerful new economic hub for regional trade, facilitating passage from the Gulf of Aden into the Red Sea.

Ta’izz, the intellectual capital of Yemen, could develop into the administrative center of power governing the new port industry. Such an outcome would be very much in the interests of the international community, as Ta’izz is the virtual home base of the surprising, liberal and modern pro-democracy movement.

Al Mukallah, in the remote east of the country, could be a first-stop along the coast of safe passage, if such a situation could be cultivated and secured. Mokha could be a Red Sea trading post, bridging the African and Asian continents in ways strategically designed to sow stability, mutual interest and prosperity.

The United Nations would likely need to be involved in helping to secure a fledgling Yemeni democracy against the chaos and sabotage sought by militant groups on the one hand and by regime loyalists on the other. But the development strategy makes sense for the region and for the wider world: instability anywhere inflates risk everywhere, and long-term planning for the Gulf of Aden trading zone is more than worth any time, effort and resources required to lay the groundwork.

An added benefit would come to Yemen, which as a safe harbor state with revitalized, modernized port cities, would be able to more easily gain access to an affordable imported flow of fresh water, and to afford state of the art desalinization facilities. We know that fresh water resource is urgently needed to prevent the total collapse of civil society in Yemen, and brining that resource value to Yemen could raise its profile among Arabian states, building into the fabric of economic cooperation which as of now, eludes it almost entirely.

The road from Mokha to Sanaa, like the road from Aden to Sanaa, should run through Ta’izz, allowing for what could become a virtuous feedback between the ideals of democratic government and the ideals of a vibrant trading culture in which not all wealth flows to or through the hands of the individuals who hold political power. It could create a more balanced and decentralized relationship between the people of Yemen and the power of those who govern them.

In short, the storied and problematic history of Yemen, along with the vast and surging need for new economic development, creates a real opportunity for massive coordinated international assistance to the nonviolent political activists who are seeking to build a modern, democratic civil society, and to build unprecedented cooperative links between Yemeni society and the outside world.

IndependentsOfPrinciple :: House Speaker John Boehner appears to be under attack from an intransigent House Republican caucus that will not allow him to retain any credible leadership if he agrees to a debt and deficit reduction plan that includes any tax increases of any kind. While select Republicans in the Senate agree with the deficit commission recommendations and the Gang of Six proposal—which recognizes the need to increase revenues to deal with escalating deficits—, radicals refuse to agree to any compromise.

It seems Speaker Boehner is being held hostage by a radical Tea Party revolt in his party, whom he is not prepared to anger. Part of the problem is rhetorical. On issues of debt, deficit, entitlements and security, routine use of hyperbole has so distorted debate, that much political discourse now distorts what is actually happening in policy. Republican Sen. Tom Coburn (OK) told Meet the Press, falsely, that “the government is twice as big as it was ten years ago; it’s thirty percent bigger than it was when Pres. Obama took office.”

What Coburn is speaking about is the federal budget, and nearly the entire amount of the increases he cites are security related—specifically the costs of funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with increases in Pentagon spending. Pres. Obama added massive new numbers to the federal budget, without adding any new spending, simply by reporting, for the first time, the spending for Iraq and Afghanistan as part of the budget.

Such distorted rhetoric, treating cost as “the size of government”, leads many conservatives to the mistaken view that tax dollars are being foolishly wasted on unnecessary programs, new hires, and intrusions into personal freedom. In fact, there are fewer government employees now than when Pres. Obama took office; in fact, Democrats are proposing sweeping reforms designed to reduce long-term debt and deficits; in fact, it is failure to fund the government that is causing the deficit to expand.

Sen. Coburn also repeated on Meet the Press the right-wing myth that Pres. Obama has been “unwilling to deal with entitlements”. When Pres. Obama’s healthcare reform process called for saving $500 billion in Medicare fraud, waste and abuse,  over 10 years, Republicans ran vicious and false ads against him, claiming he was trying to “gut Medicare” and “cut benefits” for the elderly. In fact, it has been Pres. Obama who has repeatedly proposed targeted Medicare reform, designed to roll back costs without cutting benefits.

“Entitlements” is another keyword in the rhetorical distortion of Washington politics: entitlements are programs which some citizens are “entitled to” because they have funded them. By paying into Social Security and Medicare, or by virtue of one’s military service, one accumulates benefits that come later in life. There are many benefits to society of such a system, and the “entitlement” factor in the equation is really, and should be thought of as earned benefits.

Medicaid, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and SCHIP—which provides health insurance to underprivileged children—operate on a different logic. But, there is no way to eliminate spending on these without causing real and measurable harm to the overall economy. Even these “entitlement” programs are really designed to optimize the public cost of certain failures of the marketplace to optimize costs. Our public discourse on “entitlements” is almost entirely driven by a narrow ideological view that anyone receiving entitlements is a parasite.

In this climate, Speaker Boehner is trapped between the reason of the vast majority of people, who believe we cannot solve the mounting deficit crisis without addressing revenue shortfalls and the unreason of a radical Tea Party faction, a minority even of his own party, that will not support any increase in taxes, no matter the potentially virtuous impact on the nation’s economic fabric.

Last week, Boehner tried to move his position closer to a “grand bargain”, with Pres. Obama, who has sought to meet the demand of that reasoned majority; since Friday, he appears trapped behind a wall of intransigence, not of his own construction. Much of this may stem from the hardcore ideologically wishful mythologies that prevail in the use of rhetoric to deal with debt and deficit issues.

Doris Kearns Goodwin said, today, that people in the political center are often neglected by the heated political rhetoric that prevails in ideological debate. She noted that some have called for “raging centrists” who can represent the true voice of independents. Boehner has sought to be the skilled negotiator and the leader wise enough to recognize a good deal when he sees one, but it now appears his party will not allow him to lead in that way.

There are questions about whether the Boehner speakership is in jeopardy, whether his party will challenge his leadership, if he strays from their 2012 election strategy, which involves a programmatic refusal to cooperate with Pres. Obama. More radical Tea Partyists have adopted the irresponsible “blow it up” view, which holds that forcing default will ruin the government and allow them to rebuild it, according to their ideological preferences.

For the record, Tim Pawlenty proudly says he “did blow it up” when he was governor of Minnesota, leading to a debilitating government shutdown, the furlough of thousands of workers, negative impact to his state’s economy, and higher borrowing costs that could weigh on the state’s budget for years. Economists agree that default would be catastrophic, and would lead to higher borrowing costs, exacerbating the problem and doing serious long-term harm to the wider economy.

Andrea Mitchell said it is hard for her to understand how over 200 members of the House of Representatives swear an oath to refuse to raise taxes, before even evaluating the wisdom of specific policies on which negotiation will be necessary. Historically, being a good legislator means being able to make the deal that moves official policy in the direction of your agenda. Many, including Republicans, are now urging Speaker Boehner to abandon the Tea Party radicals and work with moderate Republicans and Democrats to stave off catastrophic default.

Meet the Press moderator David Gregory quoted Winston Churchill, who said “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else.” Many political analysts believe we could do better, if there were more consideration given to non-ideological positions, which may actually represent the views of most Americans, regardless of their partisan voting habits.

Independent voters are often credited with leading the debate from the political center, but have been boxed out of all talk on debt and deficit, with ideological distortions applied to polling numbers to obscure their views. The debt-ceiling negotiations have thrown into high contrast the implied obligation that House Speaker Boeher join Pres. Obama and Senate Leader Reid as three principled centrists negotiating, as Boehner today told Chris Wallace, to do “what’s right for the country,” regardless of party preferences.

ABC News political correspondent Jonathan Karl today tweeted: “Boehner will face a revolt of his own leadership for grand bargain that increases revenue by 800B. Am told Cantor&McCarthy are opposed.” Mr. Boehner finds himself pressed by history to be a principled centrist, but standing alone between reason and unreason, and under attack from his own party. He may even be facing the threat of a challenge from Eric Cantor (R-VA), who has used the debt debate to reposition himself as an ally of the Tea Party.

Speaker Boehner did, however, say today that he did not come to Washington to “be a Congressman”, but to “do what is right for the country.” And he may now have to choose between the two. The question is, ultimately, whether the American people can find a way to expand the space for the voice of reason, and reward principled moderates who make political sacrifices in service to “what is good for the country”.

IndependentsOfPrinciple.com :: The Bipartisan Policy Center has found that if there is no agreement to raise the debt limit by August 2, the Treasury Department would fail to pay 44 percent of its obligations. That 44 percent of government spending, over a year, is equivalent to a real decline in GDP of 10 percent.

The number is that high because the Treasury Department has been making fiscal adjustments since March, in order to stave off default. Those adjustment have been pushed as far as possible and cannot continue to push back the deadline, beyond August 2.

Some analysts suggest the Treasury Department’s efforts since March mean the United States government is already, in some sense, in default, and that only with a rapid increase in new borrowing and new tax revenues, can the nation actually avoid that default coming fully to the fore.

The complexity of the budget crisis becomes somewhat simpler, when one looks at the direct impact of default on GDP. Even before we look at the indirect, ripple-effect impact on GDP, we know that a 44% decline in spending will constitute a 10% decline in GDP. That immediate impact on economic growth will plunge the nation into recession.

That new recession will be made far more severe by the financial industry ripple effect, as borrowing costs rapidly escalate, and homeowners, consumers and businesses, even major banks and investment banks, find it more expensive to borrow money to fund their lives and/or operations.

Job creation is sluggish already because banks are still not lending as readily as they did before the financial industry collapse of 2007-2008. And critics warn the banking industry has still not covered the gap between the wealth it claimed to hold—and so the obligations it took on—and the wealth actually available to the marketplace.

That imbalance slows the flow of capital to borrowers, meaning that only record-low interest rates make it possible for banks to keep lending. If interest rates begin to rapidly escalate, due to a combination of government default, a downgraded credit rating, and reduced demand for government bonds, the flow of capital to borrowers will be staunched.

With a dramatic drop in GDP, a dramatic reduction in lending, a dramatic increase in government borrowing costs, and the consequent decline in value-for-dollar spending ROI, the United States would find itself in a far deeper economic “ditch” than the Great Recession, with no clear path for getting out of the ditch.

Tax rates are as low as they have been since Harry Truman was president. Ronald Reagan raised the debt ceiling 17 times in 8 years, and raised taxes in order to offset the deficits created by his historic tax cuts. The cause of long-term debt and deficit reduction requires that the massive costs of default not come due.

For the first time in living memory, a Democratic president is offering major concessions on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, in exchange for relatively modest upward adjustments in the tax burden on the wealthiest Americans. A number of Senate Republicans agree this is the more responsible way to actually reduce the debt and annual budget deficits.

There is bipartisan support for the Gang of Six plan, which requires $2 trillion in new revenues. Some now argue that Tea Party Republicans in the House of Representatives should be ignored by Speaker John Boehner, because they continue to vow to oppose any increase in the debt ceiling, no matter the agreement reached.

Two analysts on CNN’s Your Money report today said the debt ceiling negotiations are in fact a “constitutional crisis”—a view supported by the 14th Amendment’s requirement that no public debt be called into question. It is now clear that without some serious plan to actually reduce deficits and the need for borrowing, any debt ceiling—or “cap”—will have to continue to rise, even if Congress and the White House begin to grapple over who has the authority to raise it.

What is certain is that no politician can gain anything by forcing the federal government to fail to make payments on 44% of its entire spectrum of obligations. Just one month of a 10% decline in economic output could thrust the nation almost immediately into a severe recession, causing the costs of default to fall to the shoulders of ordinary Americans, leading to a downward spiral.

This is not alarmism. It is simple arithmetic.

It is time for Congress to find common ground with the president, for both sides to make concessions, and for a serious, constructive, viable, long-term plan to emerge, in connection with a debt-ceiling increase substantial enough to last through the 2012 elections.

The nation cannot afford to face this same crisis three or six or nine months from now, with every member of the House up for re-election, along with one third of the senate and a billion-dollar-plus campaign for the White House.

TheHotSpring.net :: It is a virtual mantra in the universe of political analysis that “business doesn’t like uncertainty”, and it is true that declining consumer spending, increasing fuel costs, squeeze profits and that in some cases, businesses worry about changes to the regulations they must follow. But uncertainty is the nature of an evolving global economy, and with the accelerating pace of innovation, doing any business well is going to require dealing intelligently with uncertainty.

“Uncertainty” is also, in many cases, a code-word for an aversion to paying taxes. And there are implications there, in that contest of ideas, that are more real and far-reaching than the metaphorical back-and-forth of the rhetoric involved. An out-of-balance system of taxation puts pressure on ordinary people, and breeds uncertainty. Yet some of the world’s largest enterprises continue to push for ever-expanding tax reductions, calling those guaranteed revenues “certainty”.

This is not a healthy marketplace. This is not a democratic marketplace. This is not conducive to fostering the kind of innovation and creative thinking that allows an enterprise to deal with uncertainty. Access to information is the most important tool for anyone who has a significant challenge involving questions of certainty or uncertainty. Yet markets are slowed and restrained by blockages in the flow of relevant information.

During the 1998-2008 period, in which subprime mortgages, and eventually the toxic and inviable derivative investment funds built on bundled subprime mortgages, clear information about what kind of real financial products (the particular mortgages) were being used to underpin and fill out the derivatives, which ultimately had much higher professed market value, was often not available to investors. Meaningful facts were obscured, which created irrational investments, and widespread toxicity in financial markets.

This had a direct impact on the way government money, including bonds and borrowing, was used in relation to private investment, and ultimately cost taxpayers trillions of dollars in emergency investment, much of it still being paid back. Efforts to make it easier to extract profits where they are not always justifiable, given real value to the market, can give certainty to some, but breed massive uncertainty elsewhere.

So, transparency must be a key value in a healthy 21st century economy. Constructive transparency, that allows entrepreneurs and investors to recognize, plan for and deal intelligently with uncertainty that might penetrate into their domain.

In order to build a healthy, cutting-edge, competitive, intelligent economy for the 21st century, we need to privilege the kind of thinking that will achieve those ends. Aversion to innovation, change, competition and evolutionary planning, will not achieve that. In order to achieve a balance of resources that lends itself to dealing ably with uncertainty, businesses need to have the flexibility and creativity to adjust, to renew their market position, to fund intangible values that shore up the human intelligence that drives their enterprise.

A few examples:

From Coal to Clean: Coal companies, for instance, may find “uncertainty” in the 21st century energy economy, as their main resource falls out of favor and the efficiency of clean resources catches up and rushes past their business model. They can start planning to use the efficiencies currently inherent in their business model to plan the transition they will need to fund in order to diversify their portfolio and be relevant in the post-coal era.

Print and Pixels: The press have done extremely well, for over two centuries, in North America, driving the democratization of society throughout, and informing people about their world. But print publications are struggling to harmonize their operations with online technology. That harmony may come from bold new experiments in crafting virtuous feedback loops between print and pixels, so that the use-value of each to readers expands the publication’s readership, building in a community to the publication’s business model.

Transparency ROI: The release of information that might normally be considered proprietary, or which commercial enterprises might prefer not to reveal, can pay significant dividends. Doing business with a forthright and trustworthy partner is worth a lot more to most people than an off-chance at getting a bargain. Building trust in the age of globalized online spin and the mischief some associate with impersonal, remotely managed services, can be the basis for a booming business, offering consumers shelter from uncertainty.

Adversity is Opportunity: There are times when sudden cost shifts threaten to impact the bottom line. If there has been insufficient planning, or revenues are too scarce, that can be an existential threat to a business. But an existential challenge can also be an opportunity to rapidly turn a slow, weighty ship of method, using the turbulence of the surrounding seas to nudge the bow in the right direction.

In the 1990s, Starbucks responded to a South American frost and tripling of wholesale coffee prices by agreeing to contract with producers for double the prior market price, knowing the market price would fall below their contract. They built into their contract requirements for quality and for quality checks that allowed them to get far more value out of their higher payments than the increase itself. They came out ahead and were better equipped to build a reputation for consistently high quality coffee.

Uncertainty is important, because it is not always what it seems. The instability it seems to suggest can also be an opportunity for growth, evolution, innovation. And a shifting landscape of influence and competition can allow for concurrent evolutions and innovations that support and sustain one’s own new models and methods.

Learning to thrive in this more interconnected, more challenging environment is integral to planning a viable business in the 21st century, whether large or small. Diversity of resources and of opportunity must be one of the assets built into any successful enterprise, along with the intellectual and strategic agility necessary for keeping afloat in periodically rough seas. Technology facilitates such adaptation, but the ability to invent new responses to problems one could not foresee must also be part of one’s tool kit.

80% of Americans want tax increases to form part of a responsible, viable, comprehensive debt and deficit-reduction plan. Only 20% of Americans agree with the radical Tea Party position that there should be zero new revenues to help fund a comprehensive plan for debt and deficit-reduction. Even among Republicans, only 26% believe a serious debt and deficit-reduction plan should be done entirely with spending cuts.

The news has anti-tax ideologues rapt with dismay and outrage, because they cannot believe 80% of people would want to see their own tax burden increased, especially during a slow economic recovery, but the figures are not Obama’s; they come from Gallup. The Gallup poll does not indicate that 80% of people want their own taxes increased, only that they want tax increases of some kind to be part of the overall deal. And there is good reason for this.

Anti-tax ideologues make constant reference to ordinary people’s standard response for a household budget crunch as a guide for how to respond to the budget deficit. This is why they are constantly shouting: “We’re broke! We have to cut spending!”. The problem with this analogy is that most people understand very well that their household budget crunch would not be a budget crunch at all, if they only had more revenues.

Most household budget crunches result from revenue hardship, not from personal irresponsibility, and people tend to stop spending when they run out of money, mainly because they have run out of money, not because they like the politics of Grover Norquist. What’s more, deep cuts to spending will put even more pressure on slim household budgets, making what crunch there is potentially far worse.

To cut spending that helps working and middle-class families to fund basic needs means to transfer that cost to their household budget, reducing the revenues available to them for other things. And the government has the ability to increase its revenues. 80% of all Americans, and fully 74% of Republicans, want tax increases to be part of the debt deal, because they recognize how the cost-burden of not including them will fall on their household budgets, now and into the future.

When massive tax reductions for the wealthy, and for multinational corporations, are passed into law with no plan to cover the resulting budget gap, the cost of those tax cuts must be paid for in one of two ways: either with resulting cost increases for everyone else, imposed directly or indirectly, or with massive, unfunded government borrowing.

It is the irresponsible “cut, cap and balance” plan, with no strategy for funding debt repayment or deficit reduction, that will result in higher debt repayment costs and a longer period of repayment and elevated government borrowing. Without new revenue to help accelerate repayment of outstanding government debt, we will have to continue funding our debt repayment with more cuts and new borrowing.

80% of Americans, and 74% of Republicans, believe we need to include at least some targeted, moderate tax increases, in any responsible debt and deficit-reduction plan, because they do not want to be subsidizing historically low tax rates for the über-wealthy and for multinational corporations earning record profits. The fact is, household budgets are not in a state to be so generous to those who feel no crunch and no need to generate new wealth by hiring.

It would be very foolish politics for Pres. Obama to sign off on a debt deal that doesn’t include a moderate increase in taxes on the wealthy and on multinational corporations. To rely solely on spending cuts will harm working Americans and middle-class families, reduce the income available for consumer spending—which constitutes 70% of the American economy—and further slow job creation.

Republicans who have earned their place in politics by occupying the conservative side of the political center need to pay attention to these polling numbers. Only a very narrow segment of even their own party’s supporters agree with the radical spending-cuts-only approach to debt and deficit-reduction. The immense majority of the American people seem to feel that in order to “trust but verify” that elected officials will lower their future debt burden, revenues would give peace of mind, and a way to move toward balance.

TheHotSpring.net :: Borders Books and Music was a place of pilgrimage for book lovers, music lovers and people who loved to sit with coffee and read, chat or peruse magazines they might or might not buy. It has played a vital role in the distribution of books of both wide and narrow market interest, and has driven the cathedral-warehouse paradigm of big bookstore chains. Its failure, however, opens the field for more innovative, more reader-friendly experiments in book selling.

Some have argued that Barnes and Noble was changed by its competition with Borders. Barnes and Noble has long been a leader in the big bookstore sector. But Borders, in many places, went bigger. It stocked everything that might fit into the mainstream book, magazine and music market, and was aggressive in putting full-size cafes in its bookstores, where patrons could sit and read books, whether they bought them or not.

But Barnes and Noble made two crucial decisions whose value Borders seemed not to understand. First, it built its own site for online sales, and built the BN.com brand to sustain it. Second, it saw the power of the Kindle reader and made sure not to cede mass-market e-book distribution to its online rival. By making its Nook and Nook Color readers available in its stores, Barnes and Noble successfully merged electronic and print media in a way that appealed to bricks-and-mortar bookstore browsers.

Borders could have done the same, but instead of building its own website early on, it made a deal with Amazon, and avoided—or so it seems to outside observers—learning too much about how to sustain its overall business through online sales and marketing. When it made the switch, serious book readers had already figured out it was better to just use BN or Amazon.

They forfeited their leadership position and radically increased the costs of getting to parity, when they finally decided to make a run for it.

Borders also lagged in the e-book revolution. Though in 2001, small publishers—like the publisher of this publication, Casavaria—were experimenting with independent e-books and early global distribution formats, Borders treated e-books as a question of stocking electronics that might be of interest to readers. They did not—again, as it would seem to outside observers—understand that e-books were about the direct text-to-eyeball relationship publishers, and booksellers, could develop with readers.

They did not understand—though in fairness, few major industry players did—what Amazon figured out early on: an optimal e-book platform required a screen that would feel more like print on paper than a screen. Though Joseph Epstein, and many other publishing luminaries, had said the book was a technology that was almost impossible to improve upon, Amazon and e-Ink figured out that the convenience of digital technology with the feel of a book, would be the next step.

Borders did not see this crucial moment coming. Its Kobo e-book reader is not actually a Borders product. Kobo is its own enterprise, and Borders’ plan was to piggyback on Kobo’s innovation. Like its Amazon deal, Borders’ Kobo deal clearly showed that Borders did not understand that the Kindle and the Nook are not books; they are bookstores and libraries, personalized for the convenience of the reader.

Kobo is now having to defend its reputation and advertise its independence and its survival. This may be good for Kobo, because it will no longer be linked with the big bookstore chain, and that may give it some cachet among bibliophiles. But it will have to compete for quality, and Borders may not have done Kobo a great service by channeling its development through a failing chain bookstore.

Kobo, to its credit, figured out that e-Ink was the right way to make electronic text enjoyable.

While a very cogent, and legitimate, analysis suggests print publishers may now commit to lower print runs for many, if not most, of their titles, the collapse of Borders may be, for writers, readers and publishers, something more of an opportunity than a calamity. A massive economy of scale is not always best for quality innovation. In Borders’ case, it appears to have been an obstacle. The size of the giant enterprise blinded its directors to the most meaningful developments swirling around them.

Small bookstores survive not because of the scalability of a global business plan. They survive when their bottom line, and their ability to fund their operations, reflect three things: discipline, sensitivity and good fortune. This last comes from clients, location and other hard-to-manage variables that cannot easily be planned for.

What is most important about small bookstores is that they cannot survive by just hawking gold-print embossed bestsellers and books that have been made into movies. They cannot even survive just by stocking the headier titles on the New York Times bestseller list or which have been reviewed in the major publications. They have to know their readers, and treat their clients as readers, not as cash machines.

It is this knowledge element that may now gain more traction. Knowledge… sensitivity to the lay of the land, and to reader interest… and innovation.

What might some innovations be?

The true cafe/bookstore: A more balanced relationship between the bookstore and cafe sections of a retail space, with high quality coffee, with events and music, gatherings and opportunities to sit down with authors, and a bookstore that echoes this quality with content.

The information oasis: Bookstores can reposition themselves as trusted sources of information, a more robust 21st century newsstand, stocking quality publications, some new to newcomers, and unique titles with real depth and scope, understood by intelligent, engaged buyers and salespeople. Mainstream media may be an echo-chamber, but bookstores can be places where the individual is free to think for herself.

The genius bar: One of the reasons Apple’s stores are popular with Mac lovers is that they provide information and knowledge that is useful; customers can learn from staff. Bookstores could make sure to be a source of guidance to the reading public, taking back that role from distributors and advertisers and being more pro-active about deciding what they stock.

The cyber-paper crossover: Barnes and Noble, BN.com and the Nook, have made for an impressive collaboration. Small bookstores can take Borders’ market share, collectively, if they learn the lesson Borders missed: assist your readers in all media, and they will stand by you. Wifi is useful, but dedicated new-fangle web access, whatever that looks like, could help bricks-and-mortar independents sell print books.

These are just a few ideas, but there is no mistaking the fact that as we enter the age of hyper-convergence, oversized enterprises won’t make it if they don’t innovate, and independent bookstores can do what microbreweries and coffee houses have done: become creative micro-distributors invested in the knowledge and emotion that naturally flow from, and to, the products they love.

IndependentsOfPrinciple :: The road to economic recovery must run through major new infrastructure upgrades, innovation and development. The American infrastructure was once the envy of the world, a valiant testament to the ingenuity and collaborative muscle of a free people; now, it is crumbling [pdf] from malignant neglect, and the cynicism of our political system’s dealings with money.

Infrastructure spending was once part of the central mission of building a great nation, open to trade and competition, where free people would migrate, ship, travel and explore, according to their own free will, imagination, and opportunity. Now, that embarrassment of riches is little more than embarrassment, and the resulting confusion over how we let such a vibrant landscape slide so far.

The Political Money Problem

When money in politics makes even the smallest public works project a trophy for a candidate, and individual senators can hold the entire nation hostage, demanding kickbacks for one state, the nation suffers. The people suffer, the quality of enterprise suffers, opportunities are lost and the infrastructure we depend on falters. We become less than we were.

But money in politics is not the only problem. It is also critically important to look at how money in politics has altered the political discourse regarding projects that benefit the people of the United States directly—that vibrant middle class we used to be so proud to encourage, to serve and to see expanding. Now, the big money interests deliberately back politicians not interested in projects for the public good, but rather in transferring wealth from middle class families and small businesses directly into the credit lines and financing schemes that fund multinational megacorporations and the wealthiest of 100% private holdings.

This is an open secret. We know it is the status quo, but we (the people of the United States, even the politicians, it would seem) feel helpless to reverse the trend. There is too much power in the hands of interests that are too cynical and too ready to undo any good that is done, at the stroke of a pen, signing a check that will steer critically important policy by choosing who wins elections.

That’s the popular mood, and the facile commentary. But there is something more to be taken note of: this is a democracy, and the people of the United States can change their government. We can change the way its elected leaders arrive at their posts, and we can divert funding away from low-value spending (like corporate tax breaks), toward high-value spending (like trains, bridges, levees, and public education).

In the midst of this brutal rhetorical battle over the nation’s priorities, which is masquerading as a debate about the so-called “debt ceiling”, the American people can demand reason, pragmatism, democracy and principled public service. We can make it clear to newspapers and to television networks that posturing, voodoo economic visions and sabotage will not win the day.

Priorities: Values & the Budget

There is no reason the United States of America must live with outdated and underperforming infrastructure, much less with infrastructure that is vulnerable to decay and collapse. There is no reason the people of the United States must see their future limited and constrained by the massive opportunity costs associated with misallocating resources by way of unfunded tax giveaways and unfunded wars.

Budget policy is not about politics; it is about priorities. It is imperative that if we want the most flexibility to build optimum benefits into our economic and political future, we don’t undertake campaigns of wealth-transfer or warfare, for which there is no exit strategy and no projected funding pool.

It is not true that a blanket policy requiring annual balancing of the federal budget will give us the sound underpinning required for a vibrant economic future. What is required is spending that intelligently takes in the long-term value added of investment and outcomes. Spending that sparks reinvestment produces better long-term returns and is better at stimulating job-creation and economic recovery.

When it comes to infrastructure, we have a $2 trillion problem debt of maintenance never performed, and an urgent need to steer infrastructure redevelopment funds to achieving two parallel goals simultaneously: bringing existing infrastructure up to code, while making the entire landscape of infrastructure fit for real performance in the 21st century economic climate.

A generative approach to valuing infrastructure budgeting is required: we must learn to evaluate the degree to which our overall economic resource base is expanded by the spending we do to promote redevelopment of crucial infrastructure.

The Road to Recovery

The nation’s infrastructure needs a major overhaul. It needs to be reinvented: not just upgraded to at long last meet existing code, but transitioned into a new technological era, in which smart grids, smart highways, and bullet trains will liberate the people of the United States, at the individual and community levels, like never before.

A few proposals:

• Consult the National Strategic Narrative [pdf], penned by Capt. Wayne Porter and Col. Mark Mykleby, for Adm. Mullen and the Joint Chiefs — sustainability (reliability of resources) is security
• Devote an existing segment of the Pentagon budget to infrastructural integrity
• Establish a new Infrastructure Improvement Bank
• Establish a new Engineering Corps for Economic Prosperity and Infrastructure Development
• Devote a segment of higher education funding to programs that foster advanced innovative thinking and technologies that free us from out-dated paradigms
• Calculate as part of our debt- and deficit-reduction strategy the long-term costs of failing infrastructure; build ROI from timely upkeep into long-term calculations
• Give the American people more options for transportation, privileging zero-emissions technologies
• Incentivize manufacturers and builders to abandon planned obsolescence, establish long-term resilience standards

And one more thing: tie all corporate tax credits to job-creation (in the US) and/or innovation. This will help to generate not only opportunity, household income, consumer spending, and revenue; it will also build into the recovering economy a pattern of compounded prosperity and new investment. Tax-spending (known to proponents as “cuts”) will build more value for the economy, and the middle class will have more influence, thereby setting the stage for policies that result in better quality shared infrastructure.

We have an opportunity to work together, as a free people, to rebuild our civic discourse, and to rebuild our nation’s infrastructure, to suit the advanced technological and economic demands of the 21st century. It is beneath us to avoid the task, and we will face real and degrading consequences, as a nation, if we do nothing to counter the crisis.

We will not fall magically into a rising tide of job creation, just by depriving ourselves of services and privileges we have built into our way of life and on which our prosperity depends. And we will not create jobs by privileging those industries that are doing the least to innovate. Innovation is the American way; it is what the nation has always struggled to accomplish, and it must be the cornerstone of a new job-creation boom.

It may be that moments of grave economic pressure put grave strain on a culture’s ability to give voice to and to share a common understanding of core values. It may be that after the financial collapse that struck in 2007 and 2008, the US is facing a crisis of conscience and a struggle to regain its identity. We need to remember that we can take the reins of the 21st century economic landscape, and build the economy of tomorrow.

We could look at the crisis and its aftermath and say, ‘we need some tough love to get us back on track’, and we would probably be right. But we can’t use that sentiment, that truism, to justify bad policy choices or to seek comfort in the idea of a swift break with good social services being better than a slow recovery. The stakes are too high, and the work of building a 21st century world-leading economy requires more vision than that.

It’s not always healthy to divide the world into then and now, before and after, but we can say that many of the old comforts of boundless American resources and economic prosperity are no more; we need to make a future from what we have, and the best resource we have is the ability to invent new paradigms and erect the infrastructure to put them into practice.

One very important clarification must first be made, however, before we can examine with any degree of seriousness how innovation will help to restore our economy to vigorous and viable health: narrowly focused innovations carried out by cartels of privilege to maximize their hold on the marketplace are not true innovations, but mere reiterations of the primitive practice of concentrating wealth to build feudal spheres of influence.

In a 21st century democracy, innovation has to work to the genuine benefit of the democratic landscape of ideas and interests, to the benefit of free individuals seeking to optimize their experience of democratic freedom. Economic innovation that liberates capital flows and actually expands opportunity for ordinary people is of paramount importance in this recovery.

Another way to say this would be to specify that we cannot accept simply “more of the same”, along with the vague promise that eventually it will benefit the hundreds of millions of citizens who are not millionaires or billionaires. We need to demand genuine improvements, in policy and in practice, that restore decentralized economic vigor to our society.

And we have genuine technological innovations that bring with them this very important combination of decentralized capital flows and innovation of business models and economic assumptions. We stand now at the brink of a new industrial revolution, for the information age: the building of a green economy sustainable in terms of its relationship with the natural environment, but also in its use of resources, and its generation of prosperity.

The transition to a smart-grid, clean-energy-based economy entails decentralizing the control of powerful energy cartels over the resources that give life to our society and to its markets. It entails the vital correction of distorted price signals, which presently conceal costs and burden us with wasteful spending. Clean energy will be free of the vast negative externalities that plague our economic system, invite volatility and hamper recovery.

In a society that seeks to be truly democratic, the marketplace for enterprise must continue to innovate in ways that improve the circumstance and opportunity of all members of the society. To stagnate in terms of how intelligently we do things is to withdraw from the mission of a democracy, which is to continually expand the degree of human dignity each citizen can demand and experience without peril.

At the present time, in the United States, we face a choice between major forces that favor the economic status quo, with its massive and accelerating wealth divide, and the power of a new paradigm, which will require the participation of more people, at a higher level of responsibility and education, justly rewarded by a higher standard of living.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the President’s long-term budget reform, aimed at “winning the future” are sound beginnings, but cautious in comparison to what could be accomplished with a more explicit and committed push for building a green economy.

We need deep reforms to our economic and public policy landscape, but that does not mean we need to gut basic social services in favor of still more unaffordable tax cuts for the superrich. There is no economic theory that can support that policy, and there is no historical evidence of any kind that it would work or has worked, to create jobs.

Instead, we need to evaluate the actual social and economic value of spending (including tax cuts). What we have seen comprehensively, since the Bush tax cuts of 2001, is that when the “supply side”, the superrich and the business sector, are given massive tax cuts for no particular reason, they are not motivated to invest that money in job creation, but rather to hide it away in high-end investment strategies that avoid the volatility of enterprise altogether.

When the ARRA was passed, this began to change, because new tax breaks were targeted toward productive entrepreneurial activities, and there was no guarantee the Bush tax breaks would be extended. Job creation boomed and continued until 2011. But in December 2010, the Bush tax cuts were extended, even for the wealthiest of the wealthy, and the clear outcome has been a month-by-month slowing of overall job creation.

Once again, the history, and the economic logic, is clear: when you give would-be investors in job creation free cash, so that they don’t need enterprise to make them their extra cash, they slow down their job-creation activity. We need policies that will motivate wealth to flow toward new jobs, sustainable jobs, the kind of employment that doesn’t evaporate when investors suddenly find what they consider a sure thing.

So, we need to build a green economy:

• we need to build the infrastructure that will carry clean, renewable energy to all points of consumption;
• we need to retrain industrial workers to produce the technology that will produce clean, renewable energy;
• we need to employ millions of people to maintain and upgrade the infrastructure, install the production capacity and manage our rapid advance toward comprehensive energy efficiency;
• we need to liberate major capital flows to foster this level of technological and commercial innovation…

Some relatively subtle policy shifts can achieve this, but first of all is the standard that we will not continue to prop up, through subsidies, negative externalities or unfair pricing, industries and entities that refuse to be part of this innovation dynamic, this transition to a sustainable economy. Putting a price on carbon emissions will allow us to then motivate the flow of capital away from dirty, risky, expensive fossil fuels, reduce the negative externalities that plague our energy economy, and build the world-first true clean energy economy.

Doing so is a national imperative, because getting beyond combustible fuels is the destination for large-scale energy production. Whoever gets there first will be the world leader in the global economy of the 21st century. To create jobs, we need to innovate, not reward the least imaginative and least cooperative of our entrenched powers-that-be.

IndependentsOfPrinciple.com :: The House majority leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) recently published an op-ed, in which he argued that “If Washington actually had the discipline to live within its means over the long term, every American citizen would not owe $46,000 toward the national debt.” The rhetoric is effective, but the logic is flawed; not every American “owes” an equal share of the national debt.

The national debt is what the federal government owes in long-term interest on government-backed bonds, Treasury bonds. Long-term Treasury bonds pay out over several decades, and have (thanks to the high credit rating of the United States government) a very low rate of interest. The bonds are used to finance spending in the short term for which there are no sufficient tax revenues in reserve.

Over the life of a given Treasury bond, the interest accruing behaves, in a sense, as government debt. It requires that future budgets cover the cost of putting sufficient funds into a pool of revenues that will eventually be paid out as interest on those bonds. The rate of interest is often not as high as the rate of inflation, making it easy to “finance” the bonds without actually spending extra cash.

At the present time, the rate of interest is actually negative on some Treasury bonds. That means investors are paying more than they expect to get back, in order to have the security of investing in US Treasury bonds, the most secure investment product in the world. The national debt is what it will cost, over time, as all interest is paid out, to finance all bond payments.

The total is not necessarily more than all the revenue that can be expected to be taken in, over the life of the securities in question, and is not necessarily unsustainable, even when it reaches such high levels as 50%, or 80% or 100% of GDP. The comparison is something of a red herring, because GDP is annual (and more than 20% of it is government spending anyway), and long-term Treasury bonds pay out over several decades. More than the percentage of current-year GDP, it is the combination of inflation, GDP growth and tax policy that will determine the viability of such debt.

There are short-term T-bills as well, which “mature” in as few as three to six months, but the full scope of the “national debt” is more about long-term borrowing than short. Deficits are not healthy, unless the level of borrowing stays within the range that credit analysts and credit issuers (bond investors) view as likely to yield a reliable return.

But the key to understanding who actually “owes” money to pay down the national debt is understanding two key components of how it is financed: first, who owes what share of the tax burden, and second, who is actually benefitting from the debt itself, or rather, who is being financed by the government’s borrowing.

In the United States, at present, there is a tragic wealth divide that has, for decades, been eroding the middle class. The wealthy hold most of the wealth and take in most of the income. The top 20% own as much as 90% of all the investment income in the country (this includes Treasury bonds), as well as 84% or more of all the wealth.

It is the wealthy who invest in stocks which benefit directly from government spending (the bottom 50% of the “income ladder” hold virtually no investments of any kind). This could be the record Defense and war spending, or record subsidies to the most profitable corporations in history, the big oil companies. Or, it could be investments that benefit from the massive direct and indirect subsidies that flow to nuclear energy generation, coal production and natural gas drilling. It could be Medicare and Medicaid spending that helps to make the private health insurance model profitable, by covering the most costly segments of the population.

The wealthy enjoy many collateral benefits of government borrowing, not least of which is the direct financing of their own investments, whether through government spending, subsidies or bond payments. Many high-end private-sector investments simply would not be viable as a secure investment, without the government’s activities doing something to support that sector or that type of financial activity.

The fact is, the national debt is made up of a cycle of borrowing and of investment income, which benefits the wealthy far more than it benefits the poor. They benefit from every one of the public services the poor struggle to benefit from, and they do so not only on the personal level, but also as an indirect subsidy to the entire scope of their private investment portfolio, which depends on the stability of the American economy and of its government’s ability to borrow and to finance borrowing.

A scientific calculation of the overall cost-to-benefit ratio of national debt financing for the wealthy or for the poor, specifically, may be too complex to flesh out without a dedicated study. But when you consider that the working poor, and much of the middle class, enjoy relatively little investment income related to government borrowing, yet must pay a significant portion of their taxes each year to finance it, the national debt is actually a system of transfer of wealth from the middle class and working poor to the wealthy.

What motivates such hostile and vitriolic rhetoric on the tax-cuts-for-the-rich side of the political spectrum, in the United States, when discussing the national debt, is the very clear fact that it is their preferred constituency that in fact owes the majority share of the national debt. The populist rhetoric of the Tea Party is often driven by the misconception that everyone in the country will be working off tens of thousands of dollars in irresponsible government borrowing, which is simply not the case.

It is a fundamentally unfair and misleading calculation to say that the national debt should be divided equally among every man, woman and child in the United States, because the equation does not balance out. Indirect beneficiaries of government borrowing cannot owe more, relative to income, than direct beneficiaries. And those who pay more in pre-tax cash to finance government borrowing than they receive in after-tax cash returns on investment, cannot owe more than those who receive more in return than they pay in.

This is not a question of class warfare or of a socialist-minded redistribution of wealth. It is just simple arithmetic: if you are reaping complex financial rewards from the system of government borrowing, you cannot ask those who are paying out of pocket to help you, but getting nothing concrete in returns, to share your burden equally.

In other words, you cannot ask a military enlisted family of four, with one low-ranking military salary and one part-time private-sector salary, and two children, to pay $46,000 to help billionaires and hedge funds manage their profits. That every single American owes $46,000 to finance the national debt is a distortion: each owes his or her own share, and those shares depend on how the pie was divided up to begin with.

TheHotSpring.net :: As the Pentagon issues its official cyber-security posture, it is imperative that we move into the era of strategic cyber-security with one paramount aim: that cyberspace not be militarized in any substantive way by any nation. Cyberspace should operate much the way our space exploration has worked: aiming for technological superiority and peaceful, international cooperation.

The Pentagon’s publicly released policy report suggests that were a military-type cyber attack to lead to damage and casualties comparable to a conventional military attack, it might be treated as an act of war and warrant a military or cyber-military response. But wisely, at least as is publicly known, there is no existing plan to organize a “cyber force” to militarize cyberspace as already exist with land, sea and air.

The Internet was developed in large part by Pentagon advanced research as a communications tool, to help improve the chances of ably protecting against an intercontinental or sea-borne attack during the Cold War. But as a tool of civilian communication it has far outstripped the projected value and productivity of its original design.

So much so, there is a growing legal movement, across the world, to treat Internet access as a basic human right, on a par with access to clean air and clean water. Knowledge, of course, has nearly the same value, in terms of determining whether an individual or a population will have the ability to compete and to stave off oppression, in a technologically organized global civilization.

Cyber-security is an issue of human rights and democracy. If governments, foreign or domestic, are able to use the Internet to impose their will on otherwise free people, real freedoms can be infringed and democratic societies can become vulnerable to the whims of tyrants. But cyber-security is in many ways like environmental security: just as we have a right to clean drinking water, we have a right to unobstructed access to information.

This should be the aim of any regime of national cyber-security, not the application, or projection, of centuries old military force doctrine to the world of digital information and communication. In the atmosphere of true hyper-convergence, the web beyond Facebook and gMail, the integrated freedom of the individual depends on the integrated civil liberty of the world wide web.

Just as we expect to go about our days without tanks rolling down our streets, we must demand we have the liberty to use the Internet as we choose, and safely, without military intervention or monitoring.

The investigative news magazine Vanguard reports from Indonesia on the tobacco industry’s massive, coordinated effort to get as many young people across the developing world, hooked on deadly cigarettes, in order to profit from their addiction. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg says 1 billion people will be killed by smoking this century, unless something is done to curb big tobacco’s efforts to profit from destroying the health of its customers.

This is more than a major public health crisis; this is a humanitarian disaster being planned, being deliberately built into developing economies around the world, and which hinges on luring young children into a life of addiction, disease and early death. It is the single largest campaign of planned toxic contamination of the human population, and, given what the tobacco industry knows about its product, could be considered to be the most widespread coordinated effort to wipe out millions of human lives.

In the United States more than anywhere else, and now in Europe, significant government attention has been given to the urgent need to counteract the long history of false advertising and impunity. Tobacco companies are being forced to advertise not in favor of their products, but to alert the public to the extreme health risk posed by their products. It is increasingly routine to see bold written warnings and even gruesome photographs on cigarette packs themselves.

In New York City, public health is winning out over profits, as the city has successfully barred smoking in all places of business, in any indoor setting where non-smokers or children might be affected, and in 1,700 public parks. While on the streets of Spain, it may still be almost impossible to walk for 30 seconds without getting a whiff of tobacco smoke, in New York City, one can go for days without seeing one lit cigarette.

We know that public health campaigns, bans on smoking, and high sin taxes, work. And we know that places like New York City, or Dublin, Ireland, where smoking bans have taken effect, are not harmed by the legislation, but in fact have seen a boom in the public’s use of restaurants and bars. The center of New York City is now being remade as a pedestrian-friendly open-air city center, organized around people, and tourism is booming.

But a global public health campaign is needed to bar big tobacco’s entry into these new markets. Policies that make it extremely expensive, or extremely difficult, for tobacco producers to advertise their product, to sell their product, and which penalize any and all entities connected in any way with the sale of tobacco to minors, must be developed and adopted, across borders.

The desperate situation in Indonesia, where it is expected well more than half the juvenile population will begin smoking by adolescence, along with the tobacco industry’s plans to move aggressively into India, China and to target poor areas of Asia as a boom market, may necessitate a global anti-tobacco treaty, with real legal penalties and sanctions for public officials, businesses and nations, which seek to use the young and vulnerable for profit which will take their lives.

Please join our discussion on how to stop the spread of deadly tobacco products to the developing world.

TheHotSpring.net :: The United States of America has been, since its birth 235 years ago, a world leader in promoting universal public education. It has also been a world leader in promoting universal access to higher education and to advanced degrees. That history has made the US a leader in technological innovation and advanced problem solving for two centuries. That legacy is under threat, and national educational aims demand immediate attention.

In the current budgetary and economic climate, cuts to public education, the rolling back of teachers’ salary opportunities, job security and benefits, and the underfunding of financial aid for higher education, are threatening to stunt the quality of education available to millions of Americans. But education is the key to strong, resilient democracy.

The new report describing a National Strategic Narrative for the United States, for the 21st century, from two top Pentagon analysts, finds that the United States must put top-quality education above all other priorities, privilege the virtues of sustainability in economic and security policy, and leverage mutually beneficial relationships with foreign powers.

The value of top quality education for the future of any society is almost incalculable: it affects the relative value of all other elements of the economy, and the efficacy of all areas of public policy, governance and democratic process, including security policy and conflict resolution. There is substantial evidence that lack of universalized top-quality education imposes major costs on entire societies.

Those added cost burdens, from economic and policy inefficiency, to counterproductive security actions, degraded infrastructure and sluggish entrepreneurial activity, can degrade the quality of life for most people in a society, degrade the quality of public discourse and public policy action, and undermine national security and economic prosperity, generally.

Lower quality educational resources build into a society patterns of unnecessary waste and degradation. Top quality educational resources build into a society the capacity for vibrant, rapid, innovative adaptation to changes in an evolving landscape. With the 21st century more likely to be defined by an evolving global political and economic landscape, nothing is of more paramount concern than the quality of education available to every last person living within a given geographical area.

Nothing will define a nation’s ability to compete in international markets more directly or comprehensively than the level of educational opportunity enjoyed by its people.

We are entering an age that is no longer about building industrial capacity or penetrating beyond new frontiers in terms of geographical or spatial exploration. Technology is advanced enough that many new technologies can be mapped out intelligently long before they are within the realm of the practical.

We are entering an age in which the ability of an individual, a company, a region or a nation, to solve problems rapidly, efficiently and with little resulting negative feedback, will be the decisive quality in determining success or failure, prosperity or ruin. Borrowing problem-solving capacity from another society is not like borrowing industrial capacity; there is no way to export the cost while importing the benefit.

If the United States is to prosper in the 21st century as it did during the 2oth, if it is to lead on the global stage in a credible way, it has to maintain its ability to be the most credible, open and constructive resource for problem-solving, and that means it must have the best quality human capital, the most talent, the most informed, creative and forward-thinking population.

While Europe and China are weathering the global economic slowdown with a renewed focus on higher education, the United States Congress has been seeking to roll back funding for public education generally and for access to higher education, already prohibitively expensive for most Americans.

Pres. Obama instituted one of his boldest and least well-known reforms in 2009, when he replaced the expensive, slow and bank-run system of student financial aid with a more direct system of loans from the government to students, with incentives for repayment, lower interest rates, better access to top-flight institutions, and long-term incentives to make use of one’s talents in ways that benefit the wider economy and the nation.

That student financial aid reform must be a building block, with new initiatives at the state and national levels both to foster not test-score improvements, but genuine improvements in educational quality, critical thinking, creative reasoning and intellectual skills that infuse the landscape of scientific and commercial innovation with real potential for designing and riding the wave of the new economy of this century.

TheHotSpring.net :: Generative economics is rooted in a simple insight: that economic activities can have corrosive or generative impacts on future available resources. The dynamics of an economic environment can add another layer of corrosive or generative potential to the activities in question. Analysis can be subtle, however, because generative qualities are often not the focus of conventional thinking or play out over the long term.

New trends in corporate benefits offerings show evidence of the substantial generative potential of health and fitness benefits for employees. Even as major corporations have cut jobs and reduced pension offerings, major employers have increased funding for employee access to fitness facilities. And there appears to be substantial value added, over time, from doing so.

The clear motivation is the increased productivity of healthier employees and the resulting reduction in long-term health spending. The human resources of these corporations are enhanced and magnified by fitness. The benefits of individual health and fitness translate into company-wide benefits.

Even as the recession and its prolonged legacy of sparse and hard-to-access credit, elevated joblessness and slumping investment in housing, continue to slow many businesses, health benefits that include fitness facilities, have remained in place or been expanded.

According to the Washington Post:

The number of companies with 20,000 or more employees that provided fitness centers, subsidies or discounts grew by 11 percent from a year earlier, according to a 2010 national survey by Mercer, a benefits consulting firm. Another survey, by the Society for Human Resource Management, shows that the proportion of companies offering gym benefits has held steady since 2007. During the same period, many employers were paring retirement and other financial benefits because of the recession.

The reason, according to many studies, is that wellness benefits provided in the workplace yield more productive employees who require less health care. That translates into savings on health insurance for companies and workers.

According to a 2010 article in the Harvard Business Review:

Doctors Richard Milani and Carl Lavie demonstrated that point by studying, at a single employer, a random sample of 185 workers and their spouses. The participants were not heart patients, but they received cardiac rehabilitation and exercise training from an expert team. Of those classified as high risk when the study started (according to body fat, blood pressure, anxiety, and other measures), 57% were converted to low-risk status by the end of the six-month program. Furthermore, medical claim costs had declined by $1,421 per participant, compared with those from the previous year. A control group showed no such improvements. The bottom line: Every dollar invested in the intervention yielded $6 in health care savings. [Emphasis added.]

There is controversy over how this value translates on a smaller scale. There is not a lot of evidence about how such programs affect smaller enterprises, in part because smaller enterprises often cannot afford benefits programs that include fitness, and tend not to have on-site fitness facilities.

The Congressional Budget Office has also expressed a need to find more data relating to this kind of health benefit spending. But for CBO, the calculation may be different, in the short term, as much government health spending deals with more vulnerable individuals and more long-term care, undermining somewhat the ease with which the 1:6 cost-to-benefit ratio can be reached.

TheHotSpring.net :: The rupture of a pipeline in Montana has caused at least several tens of thousands of barrels of oil to spill into the pristine Yellowstone River, raising concerns about the tar sands pipeline planned to pass through the most important fossil aquifer in North America. The spill is precisely the kind of irreversible and unnecessary environmental disaster conservationists, farmers, energy reformers and local activists across the Great Plains seek to prevent.

The initial reports cited Exxon-Mobil spokespeople explaining that only a few hundred barrels of oil had been released into the river, and that the multinational was bringing in top cleanup experts from across the nation to do the most advanced cleanup work possible. But yesterday the news came that the spill had in fact released at least several tens of thousands of barrels of oil into the Yellowstone River, threatening pristine wilderness, delicate ecosystems, and human health, across several states.

Exxon-Mobil now says its expert cleanup effort is being hampered by Mother Nature. The takeaway seems to be that, more than twenty years after the catastrophic Exxon-Valdez spill, the oil giant has used its routine megaprofits to produce no viable cleanup strategy. It also appears there was insufficient maintenance to an insufficiently constructed pipeline, and a near total disregard for the potential impact on the natural and human environment.

The scale of the disaster was revealed when the multinational’s false reports were shown to be false by huge amounts of oil washing up on farmed land and spilling over the banks of the rising river. Critics say Exxon-Mobil’s complaints that rising waters are responsible for hampering the cleanup effort reflect the company’s frustration with how that same phenomenon revealed it had lied to the press and, presumably, to authorities, about the scale of the spill.

The material composition of the nation’s energy markets has a lot to do with this kind of crisis. Unreasoned overreliance on carbon-based combustible fuels continues even now, in the second decade of the 21st century, to incentivize irresponsible practices that threaten other natural resources, as well as animal life, arable land, aquifers and human health.

Hydrocarbon fuels currently comprise such a significant segment of the overall energy landscape, they are clearly built into our energy future, to some extent, but their current dominance does not reflect their viability as resources that produce optimum benefit to our society or our economy. The Yellowstone spill is just the latest in a seemingly unending chain of events that demonstrate the very serious dangers inherent in depending on fossil fuels as the baseload (or “go to”) energy resource.

The combustion-based energy extraction model goes back to the days when fire was first discovered and harnessed. It has served to help human civilization achieve great advances and humanize the planet, both in terms of resource-use and the expression of ideas. But that does not mean it does not bring with it the drawbacks of a primitive technological paradigm.

The amount of waste built into the combustible fuels model of energy extraction is startling. Only 2% of the energy from burning coal reaches the lightbulb in your home. The other 98% is lost, mostly in the form of uncontained heat. But the risk of uncontrolled spills, into pristine wilderness, delicate ecosystems, groundwater and the food production process, is worst with oil.

The BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, over several months in 2010, showed that across the entire oil industry, there is still a glaring lack of advanced strategy for doing immediate, effective and total cleanup. The Yellowstone spill appears to show that even on a much smaller scale, that lack of understanding and know-how plagues the industry and threatens the natural and human environment.

We don’t, in fact, have to rely on combustible fuels anymore, as the state of the art in clean renewable resources, like wind and solar, is now sufficient to extract enough energy to power the US economy. All that we are lacking is the state of the art energy infrastructure required to harness clean renewable energy on that scale.

That the nation is undergoing a prolonged job-creation slowdown is just one hint that the time is right for a major investment in new state of the art energy infrastructure. The emerging race with China for the global clean energy future (China is now investing an estimated $600 billion in developing, producing and acquiring advanced clean energy technology) is another.

But it is the massive externalized costs (costs passed on by industry to taxpayers and consumers) that pose an immediate and continuing threat to the economic wellbeing of the nation. The externalized costs of oil include not only the massive costs of even small spills, which are far more frequent and numerous than is widely reported, but also the impact of pollution on human health, the impact of heat-trapping emissions on the stability of climate bands on which all human civilization depends.

Wind and solar energy have no cleanup costs, no hidden human health costs, no climate-band dislocation costs, no long-term costs associated with burning and wasting the resource itself, no world-record military spending costs, and need pose no risk whatsoever to groundwater or the human food supply.

The Yellowstone spill has to be a signal to the American people, the United States Congress and to markets, that the time has come to phase out our reliance on fossil fuels. The way to phase out that reliance is to incentivize a shift to the construction of state of the art smart grid infrastructure and the proliferation of technologies to harness clean, renewable energy from the environment.

As of this writing, Exxon-Mobil now says the scale of the spill could be worse than has so far been reported, but has not yet released new numbers, beyond the latest estimate of 42,000. It appears the pattern of reporting is following the customary pattern for such spills, where the company involved starts with severe underreporting and little by little increases the estimates until an eventual admission of massive, catastrophic levels of contamination of the environment.