August 7, 2011 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
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.
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November 2, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The United States of America is the “wealthiest country in the history of the world”. We hear this repeated so often, it’s almost as if it has become the national slogan. Economists tend to agree that it’s the truth, but that wealth is relative: tens of millions of Americans live in abject poverty, unable to obtain basic sustenance, medical care, adequate education or even basic public safety. One in five children in the United States now live in poverty. Among African American and Hispanic children, the rate is 30 percent.
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June 9, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
The Gulf of Mexico coastline of the southeastern United States has been hard hit by the ongoing BP oil disaster, with catastrophic environmental damage, the collapse of the local fishing and shrimping industry, and tourism bottoming out in some places near zero, just as summer gets going. There is a moratorium on deepwater exploration and drilling, which is putting a strain on the job market across several states. A serious investment in renewable energy resources would build a more vibrant, more reliable jobs market into the regional economy and help prevent the environmental fallout of offshore drilling.
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September 13, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
As the “perfect storm” gathers from inchoate, deceptively non-threatening winds, we can look ahead, backward and into the mirror and ask how crisis comes, or why, if it is inevitable, if we might just fall right out of it, as we fell into it. But the answer is simple: human crisis comes from excess, from inordinate ambition, from misplaced aggression, from over-exploitation of resources, each of which generates real and problematic tension across the landscape of human experience.
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July 11, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Pres. Barack Obama praised African community values and called Africans to transcend conflict and promote government from the ground up and peaceful transfers of power, democratic values and international cooperation, in his first presidential visit to subsaharan Africa. Addressing Ghana’s parliament in Accra, Obama outlined US policy toward Africa and said endemic conflict was holding back African development.
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July 10, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
US president Barack Obama convened a G8-parallel Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, comprised of 17 nations representing over 80% of the world’s industrial and consumer greenhouse gas emissions. The goal was to push governments to move their emissions and energy strategies closer to consensus for meeting bold targets for carbon emissions reductions, in anticipation of the September G20 summit in Pittsburgh and the UN climate summit at Copenhagen in December.
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July 3, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner have a few things in common, among them that they know the rigors of market economics, the ups and the downs, the arguments for and against regulation. They have both seen duty at high levels during good times and bad. But neither of them has a strong record of pushing to include real ecological math in the standard approach to judging value or resource availability across the economy broadly.
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June 20, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Taking the ability to reason as the basis for a civilization’s deep resilience, we should emphasize reasoning and knowledge as wealth, as the bases for wealth in the life of every individual. Our education policy needs to work toward methods that do the most to stir the creative process of learning in the widest number of young people possible.
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May 11, 2009 :: staff :: 4 Comments
The wind-power generation paradigm is wind turbines turning due to the pressure of oncoming winds. The standard is a single fan with three blades that turns at a relatively slow and constant rate to maximize energy extraction from wind currents passing over the blades and turning the turbine. The ‘WindCube’, however, fits a wind-amplification paradigm, a possible first-step to a new era in wind-turbine technology.
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April 28, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
We are witnessing the systematic implosion of the American auto industry. The situation is so grave that instead of seeking to reinvent, or spin off or sell off its Pontiac division, GM is simply closing it down and laying people off. No attempt to fix problems or to take advantage of the opportunity to comprehensively reinvent a company already fitted with major industrial manufacturing capacity, just the unilateral shuttering of major plants and an entire company.
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March 3, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
Pres. Barack Obama today visited the Interior Dept., noting it was once called in jest “the Department of Everything Else”, a government agency with responsibility for nearly 1/5 of the entire land area of the United States. He professed his intention to task the Interior Dept. with taking major steps to help build green infrastructure for an energy economy based on solar-voltaic and wind-turbine-generated energy.
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February 28, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
Transcript of President Barack Obama’s Weekly Address Saturday, February 28th, 2009, as released by the White House Two years ago, we set out on a journey to change the way that Washington works. We sought a government that served not the interests of powerful lobbyists or the wealthiest few, but the middle-class Americans I met [...]
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February 27, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
In keeping with my commitment to make our government more open and transparent, this budget is an honest accounting of where we are and where we intend to go. For too long, our budget has not told the whole truth about how precious tax dollars are spent. Large sums have been left off the books, including the true cost of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that kind of dishonest accounting is not how you run your family budgets at home; it’s not how your government should run its budgets, either. We need to be honest with ourselves about what costs are being racked up — because that’s how we’ll come to grips with the hard choices that lie ahead. And there are some hard choices that lie ahead.
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February 25, 2009 :: Severino Villalonso :: Comments Off
Last night, Pres. Barack Obama made his first address on the state of the nation to a joint session of Congress, though not officially classed as a ‘State of the Union’ address. Obama sought to reassure the public that economic recovery was in its beginning stages and the future was full of hope and possibility, proclaiming: “We will rebuild, we will recover and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before.”
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February 20, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
A few years back, an ambitious youngish president staged an impressive event, in which he landed a fighter-jet on an aircraft carrier, then declared “Mission Accomplished”, in the midst of what would turn out to be only the first baby steps of a very complicated war. The $780 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is a victory for the president in terms of his organizing Congressional support, but it is just the beginning of a very long, high-stakes journey, for his nascent administration, and for the nation.
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February 17, 2009 :: staff :: One Comment
What makes this recovery plan so important is not just that it will create or save 3½ million jobs over the next two years, including nearly 60,000 in Colorado. It’s that we are putting Americans to work doing the work that America needs done in critical areas that have been neglected for too long, work that will bring real and lasting change for generations to come.
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February 13, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
There is talk of a major overhaul of the US banking system, with some analysts and economists saying the situation is so dire that widespread “nationalization” —or government takeover— will be necessary, and others saying there needs to be a bad-debt takeover bank, that takes on the huge financial risk of major banks’ “toxic assets”, so that the banks can “clear their books” and begin to lend. But another possibility looms as the likely more appealing option: the creation of a Federal Competitive-Lending Bank (FCLB)…
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January 10, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
We start this new year in the midst of an economic crisis unlike any we have seen in our lifetime. We learned yesterday that in the past month alone, we lost more than half a million jobs – a total of nearly 2.6 million in the year 2008. Another 3.4 million Americans who want and need full-time work have had to settle for part-time jobs. And families across America are feeling the pinch as they watch debts mount, bills pile up and savings disappear.
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January 8, 2009 :: staff :: One Comment
Obama decries “imprudent and dangerous decisions” as mistakes that led to current economic crisis, calls for end to “culture of anything goes” in business and in economic policy: “We start 2009 in the midst of a crisis unlike any we have seen in our lifetime – a crisis that has only deepened over the last few weeks. Nearly two million jobs have now been lost, and on Friday we are likely to learn that we lost more jobs last year than at any time since World War II. Just in the past year, another 2.8 million Americans who want and need full-time work have had to settle for part-time jobs. Manufacturing has hit a twenty-eight year low. Many businesses cannot borrow or make payroll. Many families cannot pay their bills or their mortgage. Many workers are watching their life savings disappear. And many, many Americans are both anxious and uncertain of what the future will hold.”
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January 4, 2009 :: Denver Lessing :: Comments Off
As the economic downturn deepens, and job losses continue, with the Treasury moving tens of billions of dollars in “bridge loans” into Chrysler, GM and GMAC, in hopes of preventing the collapse of American manufacturing and the loss of millions more jobs, with banks desperate enough to “deal over debt” that credit-card holders can no longer pay, President-elect Barack Obama is reported to be planning an expansion of unemployment assistance.
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December 11, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
The climate change conference currently underway in Poznan, Poland, seeks to build on the Bali agreement, adopted by 180 countries in 2007, in hopes of achieving a global emissions regime. A sweeping economic downturn overtaking North America and Europe, and now hitting China’s manufacturing and export base, it is feared, will hamper efforts to implement comprehensive green industrial and economic reforms.
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December 10, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
It may be that “a few bad apples” got the ball rolling on what has turned into a massive international financial disaster. Or, it may be that a few bad apples got their names in lights, while the entire system conspired unwittingly in a spectacular collapse. Either way, the best expression of the problem might be to say that markets have stopped working, in part, because they have been comprehensively modified to stop working like markets. An open banking transparency network would reduce the motivation for wrongdoing and privilege more reliable sources of information, creating confidence and motivating sound market dynamics.
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December 7, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
US president-elect Barack Obama pledged on Saturday, in his weekly radio and web address, to initiate a massive public works program to help create jobs, build a greener economy, restore US industrial relevance and spur economic growth. The plan announced by Obama would also require that states who participate in the massive investment in new and upgraded infrastructure use the money quickly or lose the funding.
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December 7, 2008 :: staff :: Comments Off
[W]e need action — and action now. That is why I have asked my economic team to develop an economic recovery plan for both Wall Street and Main Street that will help save or create at least two and a half million jobs, while rebuilding our infrastructure, improving our schools, reducing our dependence on oil, and saving billions of dollars. We won’t do it the old Washington way. We won’t just throw money at the problem. We’ll measure progress by the reforms we make and the results we achieve — by the jobs we create, by the energy we save, by whether America is more competitive in the world.
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November 28, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
Faultlines are lifegivers, places where deep primordial energy comes up to the surface of the living world and makes more world; flaws in the perfectly smooth terrain are landmarks and give meaning to the surrounding landscape, become nameable places and so exist at the root of language… we are wrong to want to ‘get beyond’ or even ’smooth over’ the imperfect, because that separation between one thing and another, even between ideal and actual, is what gives the constellation of difference in which we all come to be, in which all human relations situate both the core and the outer limits of their reason for being…
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November 25, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
As the “perfect storm” gathers from inchoate, deceptively non-threatening winds, we can look ahead, backward and into the mirror and ask how crisis comes, or why, if it is inevitable, if we might just fall right out of it, as we fell into it. But the answer is simple: human crisis comes from excess, from inordinate ambition, from misplaced aggression, from over-exploitation of resources, each of which generates real and problematic tension across the landscape of human experience.
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November 24, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
TheHotSpring.com is forming an ongoing research community project to develop zero-combustion energy sourcing technologies. The first phase of the project entails filling in the conceptual space of the zero-combustion paradigm for energy generation. Next, we propose thinking toward the “jump generation” technologies, which emerge from advances still not in practical application, but which will enable us to vastly expand the energy-productivity of our resource base.
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November 17, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Just a couple of years ago, the conventional wisdom dictated that financial minds must view “green technology” as pie in the sky, an unaffordable idealistic quest for something beyond the “easy” solution of endless oil. Then, almost overnight, the financial markets discovered that oil was not infinite, that the entire US economy was beholden to the pricing whims of an international cartel —this was long known, but tolerated—, and failure to go green could cripple the world’s most powerful democracy.
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November 16, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
A “wave election”, with public sentiment clearly moving in a new direction, calling for principled governance, with a new focus on progressive aims… economic crisis, having built up over a decade, hidden in the esoteric workings of financial instruments reliant on advanced physics for mathematical proof of viability, worsened by unprincipled exaggerations and manipulations… the potential for a major swing in global opinions about the meaning of political systems… the climate is ripe for change, and we now face the problem of conceptualizing change, in order to see and understand its implementation.
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November 14, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
President-elect Barack Obama’s healthcare proposal, as laid out, aims to expand availability of safe generic prescriptions drugs, in order to bring down costs across the system and help secure full treatment for all Americans. High prescription-drug costs inflate insurance premiums and often determine whether patients will receive adequate treatment for sometimes serious health conditions. A prescription-drug plan, passed by George W. Bush, in concert with a bipartisan coalition in the then Republican-controlled Congress, aimed to help increase availability, but was not aggressive in reducing costs.
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November 14, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
Critics have sought to characterize President-elect Obama’s healthcare proposal as “socialized medicine”, despite its relying almost entirely on market dynamics and the private sector. Government spending is considered to be one area where Obama’s plan could be unacceptable to fiscal conservatives, though Obama’s fiscal policy is largely in line with conservative fiscal policy and aims to cover new spending with spending cuts elsewhere. New analysis suggests there is already money to cover his plan and to reach near universal coverage with a few workable adjustments in current legislation.
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November 13, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Complexity is not an outlandish tendency of troubled souls and pretentious intellects; it is the basic state of nature as we know it. The more we discover, the more certain we can be of this: even elemental particles are less solid than they seem, behaving like tightly bound arrangements of spherical bodies —irreducible monads—, they apparently achieve this physics by behaving like something they are not (now widely accepted in particle physics, “string theory” proposes that elemental particles are actually 2-dimensional vibrating “strings” whose vibration causes them to interact as if they were not strings at all).
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November 10, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
To understand the relevance and virtues of Barack Obama’s economic vision, we have to look at the long history of struggle between American laissez-faire capitalism and American middle-class capitalism. We are on the verge of what is likely to be a comprehensive philosophical shift in economic policy toward generative investment, which means counting as economic imperatives the resilience and productive expansion of the positive bases of economic growth, i.e. human and environmental health and well-being, resource-density and cyclical models of resource use and reproduction.
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October 21, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 5 Comments
Barack Obama, the senator from Illinois, is the candidate that is best positioned to offer the solutions our nation requires, in these troubled and challenging times. His positive vision of a dynamic American society, capable of innovating to combat a global energy crisis, principled in defending Constitutional law and human rights, combines the open and dynamic nature of American democratic culture with an energetic commitment to tackling new challenges, motivating a resurgence of the kind of major projects that will help rebuild and spur our economy.
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July 18, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 4 Comments
The former vice president of the United States, Al Gore, yesterday announced an ambitious goal, which he says the nation can meet, of transitioning its entire domestic energy production to clean resources by 2018. The speech marks a major moment in the process of transition to the green technology boom, which will be the next step in the ongoing economic development of the United States and the world. Gore, however, warned that failing to meet the challenge to date means “the United States of America as we know it is at risk”.
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July 3, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
TheHotSpring.com :: Every participant in any system, is dependent upon the quality of information behind the major forces at play, just as any player in any system is beholden to the quality or jeopardy posed by the system’s prevailing methods. Free flow of information is the best hope of achieving the optimum level of functionality [...]
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May 26, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
According to the Financial Times, the United States is, however gingerly, beginning to break its dangerous reliance on foreign-sourced petroleum-based fuels. Foreign oil has been a major driving force in US economic and political trends for the better part of a century, and many in the US, both in politics and in private life, are increasing their calls for the country to move away from the resource that’s sown so much instability and propped up undemocratic regimes.
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March 28, 2008 :: The Editors :: Comments Off
EXCERPT FROM PLAN B 3.0, CH. 9: “FEEDING 8 BILLION WELL” Lester Brown, EPI :: One of the questions I am most often asked is, “How many peo-ple can the earth support?” I answer with another question: “Atwhat level of food consumption?” Using round numbers, at theU.S. level of 800 kilograms of grain per person [...]
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March 13, 2008 :: The Editors :: Comments Off
TheHotSpring.com :: The emergence of ecological economic trends, methods and industries, means that a wave of job creation could be the stabilizing factor which helps American industry recover both momentum and public appeal, potentially helping to ease pricing pressures and banks’ concerns about lending to individuals and small and medium-sized businesses. An industry-environmentalist joint conference [...]
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March 13, 2008 :: The Editors :: Comments Off
TheHotSpring.com :: The ongoing transition to an environmentally sustainable economy, focusing on energy and agricultural resources, is already opening the door to a range of new industrial and engineering services related to resource and ecosystem resilience (now understood to be vital to the stability of the natural environment whose own services underpin every element of [...]
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February 11, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
At a meeting of European scientists, in Stockholm, Sweden, the man who coined the term ‘anthropocene’ to describe the new geological epoch in which human influence dominates natural processes, announced that the term has gained acceptance in a growing number of fields. The real import of the term, and of its increasing relevance to what science is showing about the effects of human civilization on the environment, globally, is that ecological information is increasingly vital to implementing human ambitions in a responsible and sustainable way.
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