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, 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.

Cafe Sentido is still a small, independent publication, with a vision to grow, over time, and establish a new kind of online news source, integrating culture, commentary, science, economics, political analysis and straight news reporting. We look forward to continued growth and thank our readers for their participation, their interest and their attention, respect for which we hold as a sacred commitment. We believe a free and vigorous press is the frame on which a democracy is built.

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.

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.

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Please join our discussion on Top Education Priorities, and share yours…

This past week, the organization took its campaign to Capitol Hill, bringing 85 volunteers to 140 office visits in the United States Congress —both houses, both parties— along with the State Department, the Department of Energy and the World Bank. The project is more than a response to fallout from excess atmospheric carbon dioxide; the CCL project involves connecting citizens with decision-makers on Capitol Hill, to take ideology out of the energy debate, and fashion policy more democratically.

CCL proposes addressing the carbon crisis in a new and different way, which in fact avoids the pitfalls of more complex and unwieldy past attempts at reducing overall emissions: the proposed Carbon Fee and Dividend Act of 2011 would put a fee on carbon-emitting fuels at the source, then deliver 100% of that money directly to American families and households.

The plan avoids the need to create burdensome new regulatory infrastructure, does not deliver any new revenue to the federal government, and turns the power to forge a brighter, more economically efficient energy future back over to the American people, the marketplace. By unmasking the massive externalized costs (not paid by industry) of fossil fuel dependency, but covering consumers so the transition is not traumatic, the fee and dividend proposal allows the virtues of a genuine market to operate.

The CCL mission is guided by the principle that when people remain open to one another, to differences of opinion and to opposing views, they can fashion a dialogue based on common vocabulary and put aside ideological biases. This, then, should allow for intelligent people, working to serve their nation in the most forthright and meaningful way possible, to work together to craft practical solutions to practical problems.

Climate destabilization has been turned into an intensely partisan issue, in which ideological assumptions and partisan strategy trump cooperative civics and negotiated problem solving. This is bad for democracy and bad for the human environment, in which impacts from inaction are mounting, and the economic fallout looks to be accelerating, certainly beyond the current window of opportunity to act.

The challenge of the political moment is to find a way around the intense partisan divide, and that is no small task.

On Capitol Hill, there is frustration on both sides of the aisle with the inability of Congress to work together in a responsible way on practical issues, and much of the gridlock is due to ideological bias interfering with sound policy judgment. But the United States now faces another moment of urgency regarding climate and energy: China is racing ahead with massive investment in clean energy resources, even as it expands at record pace its use of the dirtiest form of fuel, coal.

The Chinese agenda, to take control of the global marketplace for new technologies, not by manufacturing alone, but by developing the newest, most cutting-edge technologies that will build the future economy of the world, means the United States now sees its dominance in technological innovation and research and development threatened. If we, as a nation, do not succeed in building the foundations for the global clean energy economy of the 1st century, our ability to compete internationally, and to thrive domestically, will face constant pressure.

The most advanced intelligence work of Pentagon analysts has found that sustainability and security are now intertwined and cannot be disentangled: economic sustainability, environmental sustainability, the sustainability of alliances, of political borders, of nation states, of an economic model that allows us to thrive in relative peace and security, are all linked, and the emerging national strategic narrative [pdf], capable of addressing the complexity of the global environment, needs to rethink the paradigm of threat and risk, and view such challenges as opportunities to shape and influence the landscape of human civilization, for the better.

The great success of this week of CCL lobbying on Capitol Hill was that individual volunteers, the citizen-based movement as a whole, and some of those who sat in meetings with the organization, experienced breakthroughs in terms of openness and interest in dealing with this issue as one of practical problems demanding practical solutions.

It is CCL’s mission to work with members of Congress of all variety of ideological inclinations, many of whom have never been able to share a constructive conversation about climate or energy, with one another, to build a coalition based on citizen interest and a shared vocabulary for building a vibrant and resilient, cutting-edge clean energy economy, through which sustainable American prosperity and quality of life can be secured in this century.

It will be citizens who build, manifest and deliver the political will to achieve these vital goals, and success will mean the strengthening of our democracy and our economic future.

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Originally published June 25, 2011 at www.TheHotSpring.net

At our roundtable discussion on “Utopia or Oblivion“, where we discussed a number of issues which demonstrate that only our best is good enough to solve the mounting global crisis involving climate pattern destabilization, resource depletion, food insecurity and chronic pervasive water scarcity, a graduate student asked why we don’t talk about what lies beyond sustainability, in a genuinely environmentally responsible future.

Her meaning was very useful to the whole discussion of sustainability: are we, surreptitiously, but consciously, trying to figure out a way to sustain economic, industrial and political paradigms, that are not conducive to having a constructive, generative relationship with natural systems? Can sustainability be interfered with, due to lexical vulnerabilities, in a way that privileges the maintaining of corrosive practices over the invention of a new human way of being in nature?

There are some vital questions at work here:

• Are there entrenched interests that can misuse the logic of sustainability to undermine the aims of sustainability?
• Is it wrong to think of sustainability as the destination, when it should be the starting point of a journey to something more pervasive, more attuned to a comprehensive, long-view approach?
• Can we get into trouble, as a civilization, if we don’t first focus on sustainability as a question of awareness?
• If sustainability is a question of elevated and expanded awareness, what lies beyond that threshold after which something far healthier than the status quo is truly possible?
• Do cities, states, the intertwining of major political trends across the globe, serve as obstacles to improving our relationship with nature?

For some time, I’ve been thinking about what will make a “deep green” future happen sooner rather than later, and what it would be like. This student’s idea that we need to think beyond sustainability helps give context to those meditations. Sustaining the paradigm of energy from destruction (combustion/fission) also sustains the risk of non-sustainable perils. Or rather, that vision of sustainability, in which we find ways to “offset” destructive practices, means we are continuing down the path toward a moment when shared thriving stops, and natural systems come apart.

So it is worth looking at some key principles of the deep green future:

• Sustainable practices are the baseline, not the goal… the landscape, not the destination.
• Energy should be derived from non-destructive processes, harvested without promoting depletion.
• The human role in the complex universe of natural systems must become collaborative, and cease to be adversarial.
• The value of natural landscapes, watersheds, glaciers, biodiverse webs of metabolic activity, must be presumed to exceed the calculus of human economic activity.
• Economic activity should be measured not by total consumption —where more consumption is reflexively viewed as better—, but by generative value.
• Stakeholders —those invested involuntarily— must be given a voice.

This is a start, but it’s not the whole story. We will be building a clean-energy economy, in which the human “footprint”, or impact, on the natural environment, is less a matter of trampling and undoing what is there and more a matter of cultivating more vibrant mutually beneficial output from what is there, from natural systems and the genius of their diverse complexity.

A practical question which anyone must ask, then, is: how do we get started on something so pervasive, so global in scale, and so much linked to human consciousness?

The first step has to be to make sure the metrics of our economy tell the truth, and to begin that transition, we need to start moving subsidies to where they ought to go, to the technologies, the priorities, the best practices and the collective and individual wellbeing, we claim to seek.

In an unexpected way, record oil profits are potentially a very good thing for the clean energy economy: not only is it absurd that such long-running, such seasoned and influential enterprises continue to claim they are not mature enough to survive without tens of billions of dollars in subsidies (from multiple governments simultaneously), and the right to manipulate prices to fatten their bottom line… it is now self-evident how unnecessary those subsidies are.

When the world’s most profitable corporations are all oil companies, and they are all securing more profits than any enterprise at any previous moment in the history of civilization, they are mature enough to stand on their own, to do without subsidies, and, indeed, to pay taxes to sustain the civilization that sustains them, like the rest of humanity.

So we can phase out, or even eliminate without delay, subsidies for fossil fuel enterprises. We can also move to establish a global treaty outlawing tax breaks for fossil fuel producers, so they have to pay their fair share everywhere, and are no longer free to pollute without remorse or penalty, so that governments are returned to the electorate, and powerful interests no longer buy and sell influence with impunity.

Next, we need to attach fees to harmful activities like fossil fuel production, which not only contaminate the environment and undermine our long-term economic solvency and the prosperity of a hard-working middle class, but also emit massive amounts of greenhouse gases, contributing to the destabilization of our global climate.

Those fees can be applied at the source —the mine, the well, the port of entry—, with 100% of revenues returned directly, and evenly, to households. This fee and dividend approach will allow consumers to cover the rising cost of fossil fuels, which in turn allows both fossil fuel producers and the wider consumer economy to weather the transition away from dirty energy to clean energy resources.

This is the fastest, most responsible, most scalable and consumer-friendly way to speed the transition to clean renewables, and that is the first step to entering a future where sustainability is not a prompt for raising awareness or a far-off ideal destination, but the groundwork on which we build a “deep green” way of being, a state of economic vibrancy and innovation, defined by our ability to understand, to work with, and to honor the high-value —often incalculable— contribution of natural systems to the health and dynamism of our civilization.

“Hay mucha gente a la que le gusta decir que lo que quiere de Obama no son palabras, sino cifras. Si quisiéramos cifras y no palabras, no eligiríamos a ningún gobernante ni a ningún abogado, sino a un contable o un jefe de empresa incapaz de imaginar un valor que no fuera aritmético” — afirma Robertson.

Joseph Robertson podría presentarse como la pluma encantada de la poesía, sin embargo, su perfil no acepta el trazo único de esa virtud. El retrato de este intelectual americano brilla con sus propias luces en el mundo de las letras y de la politica. Sus revistas Casavaria y CafeSentido.com, son dos creaciones literarias que navegan en la era digital, como tribuna de foros, como una propuesta de arte, como una actitud filosófica y como el demócrata de pura cepa que es él. En 2004, cuando millones de norteamericanos se dieron cita en la Conferencia Nacional Democratica, Robertson descubrió que un político casi desconocido, Barack Obama, era el hombre sincero e intelectualmente dinámico que necesitaba su país. Cuando sus contemporáneos, tanto en Europa como en Estados Unidos, le decían que era imposible que ganara un hombre como él, el poeta insistía en que por tantos fallos que tuviera el ser humano, y de hecho la cultura de su país, el pueblo estaba listo para dar el paso. Ese viaje intelectual y espiritual por la severidad de la duda ajena, le valió el aprendizaje de no depender del escepticismo y de fortalecer lo que ya nadie tiene, la fe en el potencial de una política justa.

—Los discursos de Obama trascienden en Europa y en muchos lugares del mundo por su elocuencia. pero los americanos manifiestan que no quieren escuchar palabras, sino cifras, hechos reales, resultados…

Joseph Robertson: A veces estas ideas surgen de percepciones generalizadas, pero falsas, por eso sigo citando tales tendencias como ingrediente de respuesta. Hay mucha gente a la que le gusta decir que lo que quiere no son palabras, sino cifras. Si quisiéramos cifras y no palabras, no eligiríamos a ningún gobernante ni ningún abogado, sino a un contable o un jefe de empresa incapaz de imaginar un valor que no fuera aritmético.

—Mucha gente siente que Obama quiere quedar bien con todos. Tomemos como ejemplo el primer discurso de este 2011, ante el Congreso.

Joseph Robertson: Mucha gente cree que cuando Obama habla, debería decir palabra por palabra, lo que desea escuchar y ése no es su trabajo. Cuando no lo hace, esa gente dice que él sólo es un político, o sólo quiere “quedar bien”. El arte de ser presidente es el de representar de veras a todos los ciudadanos, mientras uno hace una política basada en ciertos principios que uno defiende sinceramente y con todas las virtudes que uno tiene.

—¿No crees que en política hay que ser un poco más intransigente?

Joseph Robertson: Yo creo que hay mucha gente que nunca presta atención seria a la política, que cree que comportándose como un burro, como Bush o como Castro, se logra algo, mostrándose “fuerte” contra los enemigos. Para ser digno del privilegio del puesto, un jefe de estado tiene que ser más humano, y más inteligente.

—¿Cuáles son los logros de Obama en esta primera parte de su mandato?

Joseph Robertson: Los liberales se enojan porque Obama no logró la llamada “public option”, pero sin embargo logró la reforma sanitaria más extensa de toda la historia—algo que no había podido hacer en 100 años ninguno de los Roosevelt, ni Kennedy, ni Johnson. En sus primeros dos años, ha logrado más reformas serias y comprensivas que ningún otro presidente desde FDR, o sea, desde hace siete décadas. El ha logrado prohibir que las aseguradoras cancelen la cobertura sanitaria por enfermedades existentes y los lobby con fines de lucro buscan lo que buscan, pero habrá siempre un límite.

—Justamente, el lobbismo con los seguros no se terminó con esta reforma… ¿Cuál es realmente la batalla ganada?

Joseph Robertson: Es verdad que el lobbismo subsiste. Siguen gastando mucho dinero y mucha energía para combatir las reformas que harán del sistema un Mercado más justo. Obama dijo que el Congreso tendría que publicar todos sus encuentros con cualquier lobbyist pagado, que los lobbys y los Congresistas tendrán que ser más trasparentes y que no firmará ninguna propuesta legislativa con “earmarks”, que suelen ser los regalos para los lobby profesionales. Incluso fue más allá diciendo que la reforma tributaria debería incluir la cancelación de todos los “loopholes”, huecos en la ley y provisiones especiales, para las multinacionales, a cambio de una obligación tributaria menor.

—Ademas de demostrar que sabe dar un discurso, ¿qué augura de bueno el presidente Obama para la gran nacion americana?

Joseph Robertson: La verdad es que Obama mostró no sólo que sabe dar un discurso —eso ya lo sabíamos—, no que quiere complacer a todos —eso simplemente no estaba en su discurso, sino que sabe lo que hace, y actúa con estrategia. Es más inteligente que sus enemigos y no va a abandonar su programa político sólo porque ahora el proceso de negociación será más difícil. En términos específicos: el 80% de la electricidad del país, será de fuentes limpias para el 2035, el 80% de los ciudadanos del país tendrá ferrocarriles de alta velocidad para el 2037, por lo menos un millón de coches 100% eléctricos, para el 2015 e Internet de alta velocidad para el 98% de la población en el 2017.

—Pero algo tan simple como bajar el precio del petróleo, ¿no es posible?

Joseph Robertson: Una de las mentiras más graves y más extremas es que el petróleo es barato. No lo es. Lo subvencionamos para esconder del ojo del mercado los gastos extremos que induce. La industria petrolera no puede bajar los precios por tanto tiempo como para hacer que nadie cambia. No hay bastante petróleo en reserva. Y tampoco van a poder bajar los precios más, si Obama logra quitarles todas las subvenciones que ahora reciben. Es un plan basado en la lógica del mercado, pero con la inteligencia de no tirarnos al vacío por una tonta fidelidad a las petroleras. Además, necesitamos el petróleo para otras cosas, para muchas tecnologías médicas, por ejemplo, o para productos químicos y herramientas plásticas que usamos en todos los rincones de la vida cotidiana.

—¿EEUU no tiene la posibilidad de aumentar su producción de petróleo domestico en gran cantidad?

Joseph Robertson: Estados Unidos no es el primer país en cuanto a reservas de petróleo, ni entra en los primeros 10. Es el número 12, entre Kazakhstan y China. China ya importa la inmensa mayoría de su petróleo y eso reduce la oferta de la que podemos sostenernos en este país. Las reservas de EEUU no llegan ni cerca de su demanda. Los lobby de las petroleras entienden esto, e intentan juntar para los suyos toda la riqueza posible. Pero el mercado del petróleo tampoco se interesa por el petróleo, sino por el dinero. Y el mercado del petróleo no manda.

—La realidad es que las barrigas no se llenan con discursos y la pobreza no da marcha atrás. El desempleo es de 9,4%, el barril de petróleo se dispara todos los días, el interés por desarrollar el transporte está postergado para dentro de veinte años, y el filibusterismo continúa.

Joseph Robertson: Es verdad, siguen con el filibusterismo, o sea la piratería legislativa. Pero todo forma parte de un tejido de intereses. Las barrigas no se llenan de argumentos morales, pero el hombre tampoco vive sólo del pan. La industria petrolera ha pasado su cénit y estamos al borde de un boom global en la energía alternativa; esa industria sí podrá rescatar a gran cantidad de gente de la pobreza y llenar las barrigas, sin provocar más daño a los sistemas naturales de los que depende toda la economía global.

—Desde tu punto de vista, ¿cómo ha reaccionado el Presidente Obama ante la crisis de Egipto?

Joseph Robertson: Creo que se ha portado con máxima diplomacia y democracia a la vez, buscando un equilibrio entre la necesidad de apoyar a la gente de Egipto en su reclamación contra los abusos del régimen y la falta de liderazgo democrático. En ningún momento se puso del lado de los abusos dictatoriales, y ha sido constante en su atención al detalle y en promover la aproximación intelectual de todos los interesados a la verdad y la justicia de este momento histórico, que es que el régimen tiene una obligación moral básica de permitir una transición democrático lo antes posible.

—Las relaciones con el mundo árabe hay que cuidarlas.

Joseph Robertson: Creo que las últimas semanas han mostrado que las relaciones con el mundo árabe no tienen que basarse en escoger entre dos corrupciones del proceso cívico: el autoritarismo o el fundamentalismo. Hay una mayoría de gente decente que busca convivir con sus conciudadanos en una sociedad que respeta la dignidad del ser humano y la eleva sobre los excesos y los lujos del poder arbitrario.

—No por gusto salió un millón de gente a la calle.

Joseph Robertson: Sí, tienes razón, no fue por gusto. Fue porque estas cosas son necesarias. Después de mucho tiempo viviendo con mentiras y con abusos, sobreviviéndolos, hay que decir abiertamente la verdad. Y hacerlo juntos vale más, sana más, prepara mejor el camino hacia un futuro más justo. Tampoco fue “por gusto” que el 20 de enero del 2009, me encontré entre 2,5 millones de mis paisanos en la National Mall en el centro de Washington, DC, celebrando la verdad evidente de que un pueblo puede elegir su futuro y cambiar de rumbo.

—Con esta revolución egipcia, ¿qué forma tomara la democracia?

Joseph Robertson: No soy un experto en la dinámica política de Egipto, pero creo que ciertas cosas se ven venir. Este movimiento es un momento clave en la historia de la región, y tiene la posibilidad de lograr que por primera vez en miles de años de historia de una gran cultura, el pueblo egipcio podrá negociar y elegir la forma de su espacio político, las prioridades de su gobierno, y quién accede al poder y por cuánto tiempo. Se ve que es diferente de otros movimientos “anti-gobierno” de los últimos años: en el caso egipcio, esta idea —que la autodeterminación y la priorización de los derechos civiles son mútuamente necesarios, para construir una sociedad justa— seguirá teniendo más poder que ningún extremismo ni ningún elemento partidista.

—Ciertos politólogos consideran que la democracia no es un árbol de navidad, al pie del cuál cada uno encuentra lo que quiere. ¿Qué dices sobre esto?

Joseph Robertson: En términos puramente abstractos, claro que no lo es. Pero creo que la crítica parte del punto equivocado: ningún sistema de gobierno tiene como función darle a cada uno lo que más desee. Los gobiernos representan un contrato social, dentro del cual se ofrecen —se reconocen, se respaldan, se defienden— ciertos derechos y privilegios de los integrantes del sistema político. La democracia, en su forma más desarrollada, le ofrece a cada ciudadano una consideración igual en asuntos de dignidad básica y libertad personal. Los detalles, las políticas específicas, y si podemos conseguir siempre lo que buscamos, eso depende del dinamismo del sistema, y es precisamente para lo que sirve una democracia, para que haya ese conflicto en un ambiente civil y legítimo.

—Una ultima pregunta, ¿qué hace la poesía metida en la política?

Joseph Robertson: Bueno, Percy Shelley dijo que “los poetas son los legisladores no reconocidos de este mundo”. Lo dijo con cierta ironía, creo, pero también con la intención muy clara de señalar que el trabajo de poeta es el de ampliar el lenguaje, de crear un nuevo terreno que servirá para juntar la expresión espontánea con la verdad trascendente. La poesía no es un pasatiempo ni un arte por el amor al arte, o si lo puede ser, nunca es exclusivamente eso; es una exploración, íntima y amplia a la vez, que busca aumentar la comprensión entre seres humanos.

[Lea más entrevistas hechas por Katiuska Rodríguez-Lesur en La Entrevista del Domingo...]

Testimonio. Diario. Fábula. Memorias. Pensamiento. Una niña postfranquista es un texto repleto de observaciones íntimas y relevantes, que ayudan a comprender una época, un mundo nuevo, el nacimiento de una cultura que antes no tenía la libertad de vivirse y expresarse del todo. Ilumina un mundo que tantas veces se ha contado o como inmerso en el pasado o totalmente desconexo, pero que aquí vive y respira como el ambiente humano que es de veras.

Cristina Sánchez-Conejero presta a este volumen elegante el ojo del cineasta, el corazón y el arte del poeta, la inteligencia insistente de la profesora universitaria. Aprender de su narración no es sólo aprender de su vida; es aprender de la nuestra.

Cristina Sánchez-Conejero es profesora asociada de narrativa y cine español de los siglos XX y XXI en la University of North Texas. Recibió su doctorado de la University of California, Santa Barbara (2003) y su Masters de Villanova University (2000). Es autora de los libros académicos ¿Identidades españolas? Literatura y cine de la globalización (1980-2000) (2006), Spanishness in the Spanish Novel and Cinema of the 20th-21st Century (2007), y Novela y cine de ciencia ficción española contemporánea (2009), además de más de una docena de artículos publicados en revistas como Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Hispanófila, Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature y Crítica Hispánica. Es directora de la película Hispanosophy (2010), que también escribió y produjo.

Una niña postfranquista es su primera novela. [Leer más...]

Siempre preocupado por la exactitud del lenguaje, envuelve sus poemas en un contexto sugerente pero a la vez humano y palpable. Su manera de acercarse al verso demuestra una gran comprensión del sutil y aplastante dilema con el que se enfrenta todo escritor: el que plantea la decisión entre la palabra resplandeciente y la palabra precisa sin adorno. Como dice en uno de sus poemas, la poesía es “vocación de alquimia”, aunque el poeta no pueda evitar verse en ocasiones como un simple funcionario “buscando cuerpos entre los escombros”. Sugiere al lector que para crear no hay sólo que (re)inventar el lenguaje sino además un terreno que lo haga comprensible y así, nos muestra que en lo cotidiano habita también lo trascendente.

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