The US president said he had called for $63 billion in US spending for health initiatives across the continent, including money to fight malaria, polio, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. Disease and conflict have devastated the population of Africa, reducing life-expectancy in many countries to under 40 years. Of the 27 nations with life-expectancy under 50 years, 26 of them are in Africa (Afghanistan is the other). Life-expectancy in Ghana is just under 60, a fact which underscores the positive quality-of-life gains that can emerge from peace and rule of law.

Many observers, including across Africa, have questioned why Pres. Obama chose Ghana for his first presidential visit to subsaharan Africa, especially given his close family ties to Kenya. Ghana’s record of multiple consecutive peaceful transfers of power has been cited as the most likely explanation for the choice: Ghana is seen by Obama and by other leaders as an example of good governance, the rule of law and democracy, in a region troubled by bloody sectarian conflict, ethnic cleansing and relentless threats of coups and armed takeovers.

Obama will also visit one of the final points of embarkation used by ships engaged in the centuries’ long atrocity of the transatlantic slave trade, which brought millions of Africans to the Americas. That visit promises to be somber and bracing, as the US president confronts the most shameful aspect of his nation’s heritage, and seeks to highlight the need to establish the universal moral basis for human rights and democratic freedoms.

As reported by VOA:

Mr. Obama and his wife, Michelle, will visit former slave trading center Cape Coast Castle where African slaves were shipped across the Atlantic for almost 300 years. Mrs. Obama is a descendant of African slaves.

Pres. Obama is using new media to reach out to people across Africa, to ask for their input and to hear their concerns and questions. Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites, as well as online media with continental reach, like AllAfrica.com, are being used to interact with and voice concerns to the president of the United States, in what could be called the first continent-wide online town-hall meeting in Africa.

Macon Phillips, Obama’s director of new media operations, told the Voice of America that “I think that it’s less about trying to market the President in a positive way, but it’s more about having a conversation and real engagement with people that hasn’t happened before”. Phillips also explained that in Africa, the focus of new media outreach involves mobile phones, due to their widespread usage and the relatively cheap cost of text messaging.

Phillips explained that Africans can contact the president directly via sms, to expand the scope of the conversation on Africa policy: “If you’re in Africa and you want to send a message to the president, you want to ask him a question, welcome him to Africa, or just comment on things in general, you can use the following short codes… If you’re in Ghana the short code is 1731?.

The short codes for other African nations include: Nigeria (32969), South Africa (31958) and Kenya (5683). For messages from across Africa, the following numbers can be used: 614-186-01934 or 456-099-10343. The AFP reported today that over 5,000 Africans had sent text messages to Obama, taking advantage of the opportunity to communicate their concerns and observations to the president of the United States.

Observers, including African politicians, historians and political scientists, say the selection of Ghana, seen as one of the few “established” democracies in Africa, is meant to send a message to powerful politicians in other states, like Kenya, where despite a tradition of democratic processes, violence continues to spring up after elections and corruption is a threat to long-term stability and openness.

The president stressed community-building efforts, civics and volunteerism. He sought to offer a message of hope and possibility, but warned that Africans’ own actions would be the key to achieving success:

To realize that promise, we must first recognize a fundamental truth that you have given life to in Ghana: development depends upon good governance. That is the ingredient which has been missing in far too many places, for far too long. That is the change that can unlock Africa’s potential. And that is a responsibility that can only be met by Africans.

Obama sought to highlight ways in which a lack of reliable government or rule of law, and the marginalization of the views of the public in public policy, were hampering development and leading to large territories having to survive without sustainable infrastructure or even healthcare facilities. Women, in particular, have been hard hit by a lack of reliable distribution of medical training, facilities and supplies.

As this publication reported in May:

The World Health Organization has found that 1,500 women are dying every day across Africa from pregnancy-related complications or during childbirth. The figure has not improved over the last decade, largely due to the lack of adequate medical facilities. An extremely high rate of maternal mortality, as many as 1,000 per 100,000 live births (fully 1% of women giving birth), makes the situation an extreme threat to women’s health.

Speaking of the crisis of global climate destabilization, and fresh from a Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, which he had convened, Obama noted that though Africa was less responsible for greenhouse gas emissions than any other part of the world, it would be most severely affected by the ravages of climate change.

He highlighted the risks to African nations from dwindling food supplies and the depletion of already scarce fresh water resources. He also said that the need to cooperate internationally to confront the climate crisis and reform energy-producing practices the world over could lead to an unprecedented opportunity for growth and innovation in Africa, including new developments that would slow climate destabilization and protect Africa’s food supply.

Obama told Ghana’s parliamentarians:

One area that holds out both undeniable peril and extraordinary promise is energy. Africa gives off less greenhouse gas than any other part of the world, but it is the most threatened by climate change. A warming planet will spread disease, shrink water resources, and deplete crops, creating conditions that produce more famine and conflict. All of us – particularly the developed world – have a responsibility to slow these trends – through mitigation, and by changing the way that we use energy. But we can also work with Africans to turn this crisis into opportunity.

Obama cited specific examples from Ghana’s history that make the west African nation an example of commitment to good governance:

Time and again, Ghanaians have chosen Constitutional rule over autocracy, and shown a democratic spirit that allows the energy of your people to break through. We see that in leaders who accept defeat graciously, and victors who resist calls to wield power against the opposition. We see that spirit in courageous journalists like Anas Aremeyaw Anas, who risked his life to report the truth. We see it in police like Patience Quaye, who helped prosecute the first human trafficker in Ghana. We see it in the young people who are speaking up against patronage, and participating in the political process.

Across Africa, we have seen countless examples of people taking control of their destiny, and making change from the bottom up. We saw it in Kenya, where civil society and business came together to help stop post-election violence. We saw it in South Africa, where over three quarters of the country voted in the recent election – the fourth since the end of Apartheid. We saw it in Zimbabwe, where the Election Support Network braved brutal repression to stand up for the principle that a person’s vote is their sacred right.

He said that “history is on the side” of those people who stand up in the face of dark forces and seek to establish and defend democratic systems and sideline autocrats and put aside violent repression in favor of open government and participatory democracy. He also praised Ghana’s last president, who turned over power peacefully to a rival party and its new president, John Atta Mills, whom he said is “serious about reducing corruption”.

More Africa news and comment:

• Niger Unrest Could Be Attempt to Control Uranium Supply
• Obama Interview with AllAfrica, in Anticipation of Ghana Visit (video + transcript)
• Diversify Wheat Crops to Prevent Fungus-induced Global Harvest Collapse (discussion)
• Kenya Massing Troops for Intervention in Somalia
• Ug99 Stem Rust Fungus Could Wipe Out 80% of World Wheat Crop
• 400 Billion € Solar Project Makes Sahara into Key EU Energy Partner
• Bongo, Leader of Gabon for 42 Years, Dies
• Shell Agrees $15.5 Million Settlement in 1995 Killing of 9 Activists
• NOW Examines UN Peacekeeping: Record Deployments to 20 Countries
• Explaining Away Violence Against Women in Darfur, Sudan Gov’t at UN
• ICC Issues Arrest Warrant for Bashir, Charged with War Crimes
• Zimbabwe power-sharing talks collapse over allocation of ministries…
• African Nations & Movements Have Tools to Effect Change, when International Pressure Aims to Help

“We’ve gone from a lunar world, where we measured everything in terms of days, weeks and months, to a transactional world, where every single transaction has to be part of your decision-making process.” — Colin Powell, 14 December 2008

TheHotSpring.com :: Each information transaction, sometimes as exemplary, sometimes as single element added to a sweeping aggregate of historical sway, is a precedent, which can motivate, influence or redirect the push of future happenstance. And, we must take note, every transaction involving matter or energy contains information, traces of a history of its coming into being, and generates a “footprint”, a trace of its appearance and its transition into something beyond the transactional moment.

The information age gives us a vast wealth of knowledge, or of a kind of knowledge, what we take to be knowledge, about the world, hints which are also indicators, though not predictors, indicators because they play a role in expressing current interest, embedded in human activity, and so in framing future expressions of human interest.

A transactional cosmology sees an interplay of resources, overlapping vectors of sometimes disparate knowledge-sets and creed-assertions, a vital climate of investment, of beings into beings, of cultures into cultures, of histories into histories, of methods into methods, willpower into willpower, communicty into community, potential into potential, outcome into outcome.

Such a cosmology allows us to see occurrence, progression, insistence, persistence, even entropy and erosion, as non-linear, making possible a fuller, more precise understanding of how things come to be and what we can do to urge better results into being. The resilience of vital life-supporting webs of persistent transaction, for instance, can be seen to underpin all transactions across the web of incident, recombination and dissolution, we claim as our own, as the human world.

“Transaction” is not merely a reference to commercial exchange, to the monetary fabric of traditional economics, to guesses about what people intend or demand from an interactive world of community and human moral regulation and creative expresssion: it is, more deeply, more comprehensively, a way of approaching the dynamics of ecological interchange, of web-dynamics, of the immensity of competing and overlapping social fabrics that promote or diminish the strengths of the individual in her environment.

Time —as we have measured it traditionally— is dictatorial, linear, categorized and categorizing in the extreme. Yesterday cannot be today. The 19th century cannot be the 21st. It is impossible for 31 December 1999 to fall on a Thursday, because it fell on a Friday. Saturday was the year 2000.

The idea of time, our preconceptions about how it feels, how it moves, what it intends, what it is helpless to do to be different, our customary way of talking about time, could have caused global calamity, if certain precautions were not taken to avoid the glitches that should have accompanied the inevitable arrival of Y2K. Some potential remedies explored included infecting computers on a massive scale with “virus” codes that would turn back their clocks, possibly doing it while presenting to the end-user a proper date.

Time is, ultimately, illusion. It is real, but it is about perspective, not about plunging along a straight line down, down, down into the dark, unknowable future. It is an impression, it is a representation of our senses, and their combined experience of the process of receiving one impression after another, in sequence, which in our awareness says time is passing.

A better way to look at the question of time is by way of synthesis and entropy, or entropy and what R. Buckminster fuller called anti-entropy. There are ways of applying knowledge to the reality surrounding us, so that we prevent, or put off a given instance of entropy, and conserve or remake something of the order of things that gives us our experience.

Entropy is the breakdown of systems. Organs are systems made up of cells, which are made up of molecular and chemical phenomena working together to create a more or less harmonious whole. At the organic scale, those systems collaborate to provide for the metabolic integrity of an organism, a being whose combined functions are provided for by the component organs, at an unconscious level, beyond our will or control.

But we know enough about the systems of the body to push back the onset of catastrophic entropy. We can prevent the heart from breaking down permanently. Within a narrow window of opportunity, a few minutes usually. We can “restore” brain function, if we do the right thing, quickly enough, to prevent its structure from being disassembled by lack of inter-organic activity and chemical impulse.

The body is a transactional phenomenon. The mind is transactional, its speed and health rooted, we think, in the efficiency with which its neural structure can produce “connections” across synapses, making patterns that appear to us as conscious awareness of specific realities. The metabolic functions of the body, processing energy inputs and expending energy, are transactional, infusing the body’s tissues with shares of energy corresponding to factors too numerous and variable to count.

So, there is a direct impact on our way of contemplating human health and related issues, from adopting a transactional cosmology. But beyond human health, human interaction, obviously, and our interactions with the natural environment, which includes —as a massive assemblage of those interactions— the built environment as medium, the expansion of our economic examinations to an ecological level, must be a major component of our work to fashion a world more balanced, more resilient in the face of the pressures we exert.

• For more on the Hyper-convergence media paradigm
• For more on Generative economics

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.

With capital vanishing, nearly $7 trillion in stock losses in just a few months, and banks refusing to lend even the tens of billions they were given precisely to lubricate the lending process, we are facing a crisis of confidence and an inability to conceptualize shared interest. The idea that self-interest motivates markets somehow developed, irresponsibly, into the idea that self-interest is more important than the functionality of market dynamics.

With ever-larger banking interests concentrating power in fewer and fewer hands, they also began to rely on mystical assumptions about the wealth-generating power of certain financial risks. The obscurity of those financial gambles, the need to believe in their power of wealth-expansion, allowed financial institutions to use questionable deals, with even more questionable projected rates of return, to paper-over already measurable under-performance, both in their own businesses and in the markets generally.

The underlying problem in the system —which allowed banking institutions to hide bad debt in bundled assets, and resell it to trading partners who may not have been given full disclosure on the unsustainable nature of much of the underlying debt— is transparency. A fierce individualist ideology led to a convenient clouding over of the reporting mechanisms intended to make financial institutions more ethical, more stable, and more useful to those outside their walls.

One of the major innovations that could take place —either by collaborative effort now in a time of crisis, or over time, as everyday operators within markets work to adopt the most intelligent organizational tools— would be a vast network of open information, regarding the management of investment funds, securitized loan holdings, and lending practices at a given institution.

This system need not reveal any personal private information about individual investors or bank customers, but would be made available to the public so that the maximum possible amount of information be searchable for anyone wishing to vet the claims of in-house analysts. Part of the goal would be to facilitate the proliferation of new smart-reporting economic databases, and to allow competing points of view on the most complex investment-backup schemes to have an open hearing, as based on credible information.

One of the side-effects of this sort of banking transparency network would be to reduce the motivation for wrongdoing, be it small manipulations or distortions on a grand scale, because by its nature, the system would privilege the more reliable sources of information. Banks with better reporting would be considered superior institutions, in terms of viability and therefore smart investment choices. Grandiose claims would be far less relevant, because they would be measured by their truthfulness, not their dimension.

For many reasons, this may seem like pie in the sky; for one: we don’t know what sort of computing technology could do the work necessary to parse such large volumes of information in a timely fashion. But computer speeds are accelerating rapidly, with the Roadrunner super-computer at Los Alamos achieving petaflop speeds —one thousand trillion calculations per second— and nano-chemical computing on the horizon, potentially magnifying the processing power of traditional microprocessors by thousands or even millions of times.

And, that’s still without touching on the controversial topic of quantum computing, in which everyday substances —like 12 ounces of coffee— can be turned into massive computational neural nets capable of working out problems that require trillions of calculations instantly. The complications there are too many to go into at present, and there is no reliable quantum computer that can be applied to something with so many legal implications as a banking system, at the moment, but the work is ongoing.

Cloud computing may be the first major speed-related improvement that can allow the beginnings of a true banking transparency network. This is a major undertaking, and will require a daunting philosophical shift for many in the financial industry, but armed with computers working at thousands of times today’s computers’ top speeds, spread out over a dispersed cloud-computing network, it would be possible to optimize processing speed, memory allocation, memory recall, informational back-up, time-keeping and matrix cross-referencing.

Bringing all those functions into a central reporting scheme, to make the transparency network a staple of financial regulation, that requires little aggressive intervention but provides significant meat for economists and analysts to chew on, and incentivizes the truth-telling component of in-house reports, could yield a major revolution in financial services and in the stability of banking institutions.

A secondary benefit from this system would be the ability of journalists to judge what sort of projects are getting traction at what institutions — for instance, is hypothetical Bank Q investing heavily in renewable resources, while volatility in the oil sector is hurting some of its competitors? The openness of the information would be a way of allowing the private sector to actually police private banks, without that “voluntary due diligence” being a joke compared to blood-and-guts regulation.

Stability, innovation, long-term thinking, would all be elevated by such a process, as markets begin to organize themselves around more reliable information and more complex, but verifiable, calculations of actual worth, investment strategy and wealth-creation. No longer would major banks complain that they cannot get behind needed investments —like green infrastructure— because key analysts or their rivals won’t understand it and will portray them as dubious actors.

Their financial credentials will be on display and verifiable, and they will not be tempted to or required by circumstance to concoct grossly irresponsible fictions to substantiate their claims about messianic speculation schemes. Such frauds will not only be hard to hide, they will be obviously counter-productive from the outset. Hard work on projects worth completing will be a better measure of financial wisdom, and the mystique of markets might again be found in their functionality, not in their metaphysics.

• Originally published as part of The Hot Spring’s Quipu Economic Forum

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s resulted from a misguided atomized over-exploitation of arable land. Ancient Sumerian civilization collapsed entirely because excesses of irrigation coupled with poor planning raised soil salinity to levels toxic to agriculture. At the end of the 20th century, global industrial activity had come to far outstrip the available resources feeding into it, and our global economy had come to depend on increasing demand and increasing output to feed unsustainable rates of increasing growth, across the planet.

Something had to give. The mathematics of the whole big picture had come to rest on the assumption that already over-stressed basic resources could expand along with economic expansion. They could not. We may now be seeing just the beginning of this realignment of economic expectations, forced by circumstance.

As major resource scarcity spreads, with China losing ever more arable land to encroaching northwestern deserts and road building in the industrial east, as China’s exploding demand for petroleum, steel, copper, water, meat and grains, put pressure on world markets and pushes the cost of basic goods like food staples ever higher across the world, as the unsustainable demand for fuel moves the US corn belt to shift to cropping for ethanol —as much as 40% of world corn exports are from Iowa, which now devotes 18% of harvest to bio-ethanol—, we are experiencing the natural results of an economy that hinges on hyper-exploitation of resources. The correction, when fully upon us, may yet be far more severe than the 2008 credit-freeze crisis.

Hyper-exploitation is a doctrine: it underpins public policy, government spending, security policy and the philosophical arguments for and against deregulation and the trickle-down theory of economic growth as related to tax policy. It requires that we believe in unstated, unproven modes of natural replenishment; it is a proposition that all things can be tapped, moved, transformed and spent, infinitely, because somehow, the market will set all the right limits and excesses will never be so severe as to ignore the laws of nature.

It is, for this reason, dangerous, because it not only is a doctrine that requires us to use more of the vital resources we require than can be replaced at sustainable levels, it moves us deeper into the vice of living on borrowed time. The result is that we must periodically learn the lesson that borrowed time cannot be financed, that we must pay the full price when it comes due, and our unprecedented resource depletion will leave us, quite simply, without the level of supply required to sustain our standard of living.

Already, wealthy governments are moving to take over cropland in poor countries in order to shore up their own food supplies, as the food security crisis spreads throughout the world, affecting even the wealthiest economies. The fear is that this over-consumption now extending to land use in poor foreign states may lead to a wave of mass starvation throughout the developing world, sparking conflicts and threatening the integrity of the international system as such.

According to the Guardian’s Julian Borger:

“In the context of arable land sales, this is unprecedented,” Atkin said. “We’re used to seeing 100,000-hectare sales. This is more than 10 times as much.”

At a food security summit in Rome, in June, there was agreement to channel more investment and development aid to African farmers to help them respond to higher prices by producing more. But governments and corporations in some cash-rich but land-poor states, mostly in the Middle East, have opted not to wait for world markets to respond and are trying to guarantee their own long-term access to food by buying up land in poorer countries.

India and Bangladesh are constantly disputing river water resources that both countries depend on for basic sustenance for tens of millions of people. Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt are gripped by a struggle over control of the Nile’s water, with the river running dry at the Nile delta on the Mediterranean during some seasons. The Colorado River in the US has failed to reach the sea and is seeing its flow through the Grand Canyon significantly reduced, as states in the Colorado River Basin dispute claims on the river’s water.

Hyper-exploitation even extends to the use of natural resources like water as dumping grounds. The level of toxic chemicals and plastic polymer byproducts now found in ocean water the world over has reached alarming levels, threatening vast ecosystems and undermining the health of human beings and wildlife in most of the world. Drinking water across the US was found to be contaminated by high levels of pharmaceuticals earlier this year, raising the specter of as yet unknown potential harm to public health, over the long term.

High levels of contaminant emissions or toxic dumping are an abusive use of natural resources we often overlook —like air, land, water and forest cover— in our quest for combustible fuels, industrial-scale production and economies of scale we hope will reduce costs, even if they also increase the risk to our long-term economic and physical health and wellbeing. We are now facing a structural economic crisis, which requires us to reformulate and rebuild our economic model, at the most basic levels, a process which will be more or less painful, depending on how seriously we commit to getting it done and done right.

Seasonal photography, by Café Sentido editor J.E. Robertson, a visual essay about a season of historic, urgent & uneasy change

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.

We are emerging from a period of over-accustomed abundance, in which there was never supposed to be any doubt in the popular consciousness that generalized prosperity had reached a mythic level of sustainable undeniability; circumstance could not turn it back. That there was little real structural planning for sustainability was ignored. Economists, politicians, accounting firms, major banking institutions, and governments across the world, ignored the clear signs that flaws in the flow of matter and energy through an increasingly globalized economy were being obscured by convenient assumptions and poorly underpinned strategies.

Moments of exquisite beauty, of reverence for the mystery of the natural marketplace, became pervasive: the worship of plenty was so far-reaching, it seemed to be assumed that fashion icons could hold a philosophical stable center by waxing poetic about baroque ostentation. The bawdy glitz of Las Vegas, the all-at-once beaming-up of skyscrapers in Dubai, a quixotic-hubristic race to colonize the Moon, were hallmarks of the ’98-’08 balloon economy.

Meanwhile, the land of abundance was yellowing at the edges, the rich foliage of its temperate heartland was fading: the state of Ohio reached beyond 25% of the entire population officially on food stamps. Bankruptcies hit their highest level since laws were tightened in 2005. The fading of excess into a tired dream from an era of blind ambition meant we began to see that vast treasures could be diminished to a faint reserve of solace, scattered like guarded oases across the economic landscape.

Property values dropped. Oil prices soared. Banks pushed to cover unsustainable debt by 1) adding more unsustainable debt to their portfolios, and 2) using Congress to legislate against individual consumer bankruptcies. In August, home foreclosure filings again hit an all-time high —not the first record-setting month of 2008—, revealing a shocking level of underlying economic malaise. The dawn of an era of scaled-back expectations, of limited budgets, of belt-tightening and solemn fireside chats, had arrived.

As if every flaw and pitfall built into our way of functioning were invisible to even the most well-trained eyes, we basked in the golden distractions of a notion of manifest destiny, as if history were paying us its due for having imagined prosperity, suffered for it, and brought it into being. We thought nothing of the responsibility that comes with using with such endless hunger the resources available to us.

But the signs of a new “gilded age” were visible and were seeping into the consciousness of concerned observers. The problem was, however, what to do to forestall the onset of institutional chaos, an economic quagmire, the emotional unraveling of markets which had become the backbone of our projected fortunes. The political climate was calling for good news, not for good ideas, and so we collaborated in putting off awareness of what was in store.

Now, words like “depression” are on the winds of mass culture. John Steinbeck’s dustbowl epic The Grapes of Wrath is again a popular seller, not just for high-school required-reading lists. As a nation, we now face the problem of wanting to find warmth and solace, economically and spiritually, in a time of silver-cold rushing waters and a gathering storm of painful, forced change. In times of unwanted struggle, at the root of our basic humanity, we ask how much light and warmth we can derive from a bankside campfire, around which we tell the hopeful stories of a better day to come.

A thread running through those stories was the epic struggle of the 2008 election season, which began in earnest in the fall of 2006, officially during the first months of 2007, and led to an entire year of neverending dialogue about all things political, legislative, presidential and economic. The election was like a campfire culture that sprung up in cities and towns across North America and the world, in which people at the individual level, disenchanted by years, or decades, of political disappointments, began to think something new might be in the offing… an example of community-based leadership.

Yet the singular truth of the moment, related to that adage that “all politics is local” —what we learned from the need of so many to interact on a high plane of social discourse, of civic involvement— was that the individual will, the nature of one’s ability to grasp and to face difficulty, would be the root of recovery. If left on the open sands of desolation, the individual will could be strong, could be noble and definite, and yet falter; but coming together, negotiating around a campfire mentality of solemn devotion to a shared vision of liberty and prosperity, that individual will could be something more, something both brilliant and effective, part of a vibrant declaration of intent.

Admittedly, we could ask ourselves: can we direct our best efforts by way of “tried and true” mechanisms for steering the ship of state? Are the old ideas now out of touch, out of date, aged, brittle, risky? The ancient dichotomy between central planning and laissez-faire had been rusted over and abandoned; the split between social conservatives and economic progressives had withered; the logic of political confrontation was wearing thin. Something new was bursting on the scene.

As if to illustrate that a free people freely reinvents itself, and charts a new course, at will, with special vigor in the hardest of times, political strategy became a liability and complex examination of the facts and the future course of a people at last became the fashion. Clarity of thought before prejudice; hope and determination before fear and division; a sea change coming over the political culture of a deeply divided nation, struggling to find its way.

With the logic of edges, of the far edge of aspirational capitalism, the far-edge of binary politics, the far-edge of belief in ideals, combining to threaten the capacity of individuals, communities and political entities to envision a future of possibility, a logic of horizons grew up in the midst of concern and even panic. We saw that there could be a root structure deep enough to keep us from falling over the edge, into the deep of unsettled failings. We could reach the horizon and beyond.

The white of clear light, the blue of nourishing waters, the red of whole forest-scapes clamoring for a few last waves of warmth before winter: a dizzying but reassuring landscape of old growth entities, ideals and genuine concerns, informed our rudderless drift. Somehow, there might be another way, aside from sliding with the momentum of unstable ground, down into the waiting abyss; there might be the root-structure necessary for a fertile regrowth of economic and spiritual fortunes.

What may come next, what policies are precisely appropriate, what the existential value of competing political philosophies might be, if inclusion or exclusion are wise or perilous, became topics for discussion. Political discourse became a kind of heating oil to warm the spaces between living, working and fretting about impending upheavals, despite the persistent injection of wisps of hysterical fear-mongering. The space of political debate expanded into vastly divergent realms of life and culture, became a warmer, more habitable space.

As a nation, the United States of America has swelled from a band of small colonial villages to a continent-wide solid-state political union. Its history of democracy and humanist values has been fraught with dangerous threads of injustice, bias, hardship, combat and hypocrisy, yet its cultural thrust has been continually to move toward more openness, more inclusiveness, more equality and shared opportunity. The fall of 2008 was a season in which it became reasonable to most people to express concern that in fundamental ways, the nation had veered from that steady course, and needed new direction.

Like a pointilist composite of brushstrokes, the concept of new direction, together with the heat and light of economic distress, the urgency of concern about the security of one’s family’s wellbeing, the genuine worry that communities could spin apart or basic economic structures be allowed to decay, we found humanity seeking stalwart examples, straight arrows, a view of the land beyond the woody time of doubting.

Letting the old assumptions fall to earth, we seek a path to the other side. It could fairly be said there is a new atomization of the structure of society, a new decentralization of the tools of governance, in that politically, the vast center of American politics has summoned forth a style of campaign and a style of leadership that speaks to small entities across a vast narrative of history.

Local organizers moved thousands to volunteer, and the process of a general awakening about the difference between media-fomented cognitive dissonance and fact-based examination of safe passage to the spot beyond the horizon, refit the mechanisms of political discourse, and put control together with principle, in the hearts and minds of voters, citizens, actual people out across the landscape. The “conditions on the ground” became apparent, because a composite sketch of the emotional landscape, the moral and political priorities of a people, was better able to be drawn, from a debate about quality of ideas, as ideas and as practiced.

The old-model social-spending paradigm, as a way of competing with the “supply-side” fund-the-investors paradigm, shifted, and has been replaced by a complex ecosystemic mindset, which conceives of economic processes not as simple ‘expansion’, but part of a fabric of growth processes, a cultivation of longer-term potential for sustained abundance. A generative economics coalesced out of a host of strategies competing for absolute dominance of the political center.

If we could make something real and fecund out of the bewildering tangle of disappointments and excesses, if we could apply that reality like a ritual medicine to the workings of the collective mind, we could perhaps discover that amid the fallen visions and the dying embers of collapse, there is an already-existing road out of the wilderness, back to the heart of what we are as human beings. Generative economics is part of that renewed aspirational style, that desire to defy difficulty and the encroaching gloom, and seed the sustainable future, with what we have at our disposal now, in the present.

The startling array of concerns, perils, styles, ideas, crises, and best efforts, flowing together, could seem at times an unwieldy array of competing claims on our attention or our faith. But somehow, maybe because there is no other way, the future as seen from the real danger of extreme crisis comes to include illuminated approaches, that bridge gaps, heal fractures, draw from pools of shared awareness and reorient the mind to craft a more intelligent way forward.

There is a basic parallel between the growth of the individual mind, the salvage of a desolate spirit, and the process to which democracy, as a way of life and on the plane of ideals, of necessity, tends. The ability to reinvent a problem, so it can be better dealt with, to reinvent a social environment, so it can better adapt, to reinvent the meaning of government or principle or hope or failure, the ability to redefine crisis, is stitched into the process of changing a government, casting a vote for a philosophy about the future.

So, asking your forgiveness for the indulgent streak running through this essay, I return to the original question: what will this turning bring? We can see a new boldness, a feeling that somehow, it is necessary to filter the foreground from the background noise, to make a sincere effort at renewal, to put faith in actual human beings to do right by their fellow citizens.

We should see, coming into being, in coming months and years, new political coalitions, new social organizations, visions that seed the cultural landscape for improvement, working to ensure that the lessons for democracy that we now have at hand can actually be remembered, examined, and practiced. This is a time in which the aspirational and the factual can actually be seen coming together, in which we have given ourselves room to breathe, because we have trusted in the possibility of working to bring the real substance of a better day into being.

TheHotSpring.com :: 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.

We must also eschew, to avoid distraction, filter terms like “socialism” or “big government”, which are for many reasons, useless in the current realities of American economic policy. The government is bigger than it has ever been, and ideologically speaking, the issue is totally incoherent: the most supply-side administration in recent decades has produced the largest expansion of both spending and government power, while the social-services minded administration of the 1990s presided over the largest reductions.

The key is to understand that if the majority of consumers find cash scarce, even those businesses funded by the investor class will also find it scarce, as spending falls away. We have seen concrete proof of this fact in the recent mortgage-related credit crisis. The failure, on a massive scale, of home loans designed to help deliver equity and bargaining power to consumers unable to meet the profit-demands of lending institutions, has drained the middle class broadly of easy credit and disposable income.

Current Trends

Prices have gone up, credit has frozen, banks have closed, and ultimately, the economy sunk into “negative growth”, because the 70% of GDP representing consumer spending could not draw from those now depleted capital resources. The current climate provides us with a kind of acid-test of basic economic theories, including the assumption that “pro-business” market policy could not have a constricting effect on capital. We now see that abundance can produce economic pathologies that lead to widespread scarcity, and prolonged contraction.

The “free market” is really a market-wide conceptualization of economics that has tended to be applied always as a policy that permits the most powerful actors in a given market the maximum freedom to operate without responsible oversight or constraint. It is the misapplication of the market-wide factor —totalizing market policy and imposing harsh realities on those who can ill afford to face them, instead of recognizing the need to generate health across the entire pool of market resources— that has led to this opportunity-choking strategy.

By enhancing the “competitiveness” of the most powerful, the focus of market competition is removed to the realm of the most powerful operators; smaller economic entities cannot compete. Small family farms give way to large corporate agribusiness compounds; small “mom and pop” shops in small towns and big cities alike, are outmaneuvered by conglomerates with efficiency protocols, massive marketing budgets and economies of scale, to help them undercut sustainable local prices and reinforce their dominance.

The result tends to be a process of consolidation and the effective closing of the market under the influence of ever-fewer powerful actors. A true open market is one in which not only those who have most successfully concentrated power in their hands are free to compete, but the lone individual can find capital, establish an enterprise of just one or a handful of people, and compete for local market share in a fair and viable way.

This keeps capital moving more freely and generates a broader base of prosperity, upon which a market for goods and services can be optimized to suit the needs and interests of consumers. In such a scenario, a business achieves vast success not by exerting influence over the levers of power —usually artificially made available to them via selective deregulation—, but by best meeting the needs and interests of consumers.

That has to include doing so within a policy framework that privileges those needs and interests — for instance, protecting public health and environmental sustainability, while preventing criminal activity: three performative urgencies which when neglected serve as a serious drag on the sustainability of dynamic growth. There is nothing “socialist” in these regulatory aims, but rather the principle that a free market is a market in which all actors are enabled.

Both President-elect Obama and Sen. McCain have consistently claimed their economic policies, rooted in reforms to the tax code, put general prosperity ahead of ideology, and aim to achieve economic growth that benefits all. The question all along was how they planned to do so, and how their vastly divergent visions fit into this moment in American economic history.

A Brief Political History

Ronald Reagan and George H. Bush gave us 12 years of laissez-faire supply-side economic policy, aimed at feeding the investor class —not a permanent social “class” per se, but the group of people and institutions whose wealth is tied up in private investments— as much capital as possible, to spur investment and eventually achieve a “trickle-down” effect, where that capital reaches the average consumer. The result of that redistributive program, coupled with aggressive deregulation was a stock-market crash, banking corruption and a recession that ended the first Bush’s tenure in office.

Pres. Clinton redirected tax policy to give more breaks to working families, shift the tax burden back toward the wealthy and reduce education costs, making opportunity more broadly available. This coincided with a technology investment boom that revolutionized global society and the US economy, helping to create 22 million new jobs and swell government revenues without massive tax increases, leaving unprecedented budget surplus projections for his successor.

“Irrational exuberance” about dot-com stocks and excessive deregulation led to a dot-com correction, but the overall long-term outlook was sound. The main task of the moment was to reinvigorate the ailing “rust belt”, the industrial heartland of Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and Michigan, which was suffering serious decline in well-paid manufacturing jobs. This problem was ignored in Washington, DC, and Pres. Bush —motivated in part by ideological assumptions— implemented a $1.7 trillion tax cut, directed mostly at the wealthiest of Americans.

Blue-collar and middle class jobs, generally, have suffered major setbacks in recent years, to the extent that the average American household income has dropped $2,000 since 2001, and a common complaint of laid-off factory workers is that it would now be impossible to find any work that pays more than half what they used to earn. Fully one-quarter of the population of the state of Ohio is now on food-stamps, a very dire measure of the times, from the nation’s industrial heartland.

Overseas outsourcing, generalized deregulation and logically incoherent accounting practices, abetted by predatory financial practices, have severely damaged the spending power of the consumer class —those whose biggest contribution to GDP is consumer spending—, undermining the ability of consumer-sector businesses to continue creating new jobs. The fundamental societal ill of predatory lending has been misunderstood, because no one seemed to be paying attention to how such practices target the capital that makes a business relationship viable, extruding it and undermining long-term value.

The result is a record high in bankruptcies and home foreclosures. Over 1 million homes will be in active foreclosure by the end of 2008. In September, foreclosures were 70% more than one year earlier, and speculation continues to range between 6 to 20 million likely to be in jeopardy, depending on the viability of financial institutions, their ability or willingness to renegotiate, and other economic pressures, like mounting job losses.

Supply-side Distortions

One of the fundamental assumptions of the supply-side strategy is that the average consumer is actually and problematically “invisible”: there is no way to directly encourage or track their investments specifically and so no way to attribute growth to their behavior. This is also partly rooted in the false assumption that the average consumer is erratic, emotional and inconsistent, that his or her motivations are mysterious and impossible to predict.

This whole line of thought is absurd, of course, first of all because consumer spending is measured in excruciating detail and accounts for most of our GDP, therefore it is not at all invisible or unaccounted for, and second, because the average consumer spends what he or she can, not according to random emotion but according to the survival instinct. Here it becomes necessary to understand the constrictive nature of a supply-side vision, as opposed to the generative economics of empowering a dominant middle class, emboldened with real long-term opportunity.

We need to begin re-learning that the survival instinct plays a role in decision making, and that “demand”, as an economic force, is intimately linked to the information that instinct provides the consumer: if you have enough, spend more on unnecessary add-ons, luxury vacations or expensive schools; if you have less, make sure you can eat and have shelter first, then look at new spending. Demand may be staple demand, for life-sustaining goods and services, or it may be luxury demand, for those goods and services sought as a matter of choice or taste, because there is enough disposable income to warrant such “demand”.

The supply-side style of the current US administration has been dangerously narrow-minded and still less useful than the theories at its base: incentivizing the supply side somehow morphed into an almost paranoid notion that incentives would not be enough, the economy had to be newly engineered to virtually guarantee higher short-term revenues for certain industries, or somehow they would stubbornly refuse to follow what the supply-side theory assumes to be their own self-interest.

This distortion can be attributed to the over-active influence of lobbyists on government, but also to a fundamental lack of understanding of economics and of markets. Markets are not designed to create a permanent wealth pyramid; their nature is to make and unmake wealth, according to shifts in consumer behavior. Consistent non-volatile upheaval is the desired state of health, i.e. balance, sustainable generalized prosperity, multi-directional wealth creation, fairness and competition-based turnover in market leadership, with room for new entrants.

The Generative Response

A generative economics seeks to tap into the more democratic nature of markets, not for the concentration of wealth, but for the dissemination of prosperity. It aims to establish mechanisms for protecting genuine manifestations of conumser-oriented innovation and systems serving the public good —the status of which is itself a major economic driver—, keeping market leaders honest, preventing collusion, corruption, distorted accounting practices and non-generative (i.e. predatory or parasitic) commecial behavior.

While we are constantly warned by strict supply-siders that “this is not the time” to work on fixing problems as grave as healthcare, that we need to make sure as much government investment as possible —including tax breaks— goes to the “private sector” —read: corporate sector—, the generative approach examines in uncomfortable detail the degree to which unsustainable costs in healthcare —or energy, food or education— might be building dangerous pathologies into an increasingly inviable economic model.

That information allows us to then look seriously at what restoring economic prosperity means, and a big part of what it means is that we must in the present moment, starting from where we actually find ourselves, address the problems that are holding us back and threatening our future wellbeing. To continue building into the future of the American economic system the most basic and pervasive failures of that system is not only ill-advised and fraught with danger, it’s logically incoherent.

You cannot say the patient is in good health, if you leave his heart on the verge of cardiac arrest. There needs to be a certain amount of volatility, in order for profits to be workable, for investments to be able to find new terrain, for dynamic shifts to occur and for real individual freedom to exist alongside the freedom of capital to support a non-authoritarian structure in civil society. But the freedom of capitalist juggernauts to do as they please, without helping to bring any of the other necessary benefits of a market system, will not reinforce democracy or build a stronger economic future.

Burning finite resources in order to power expensive luxury vehicles or do long-term harm to the natural environment, within which all human activities must occur, by default, is not a generative process and requires heavy-handed protective measures to allow it to compete in a market where better ideas exist. Powering our entire economy without burning anything is possible, but lacking a generative approach that privileges wise resource use over the lust for hyper-exploitation of existing methods, we will not get there.

American infrastructure will need around $1.6 trillion in public works in order to be brought up to date and secured against collapse or failure. Global climate change is now too far along to further put off a swift transition to a clean energy economy —this must be done across borders with deliberate haste—, and is already building steep collateral costs into nearly every aspect of the standard industrial economy. And healthcare and education are reaching prohibitive levels of expense, beyond which not only will services be dangerously scarce, but what services there are will drain our economy of both health and know-how.

Building the opportunity to exploit each of these resources in a sustainable way, into our overall economic outlook, is a necessary step for bringing American democracy —and humanity generally— into the 21st century. The quality of action engaged by governments will determine not only whether such ideas are workable, but to what degree individual human beings are really free to choose their destiny in a world increasingly driven by mass crises and resources scarcity.

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Café Sentido’s first official editorial endorsement of a candidate for public office

Renewal is the keyword for this election. Change is the bridge that will take us to the place of renewal, but the intent behind the change message, must be renewal. It is vital to examine the candidates’ proposals for the direction of our nation, in this light. Who can best harness what is best in the American system of laws and in the landscape of American values, to effect an historic renewal of faith in our institutions and of commitment to civic responsibility and prosperity and dynamism in our society, generally?

Barack Obama, the senator from Illinois, is the candidate that is best positioned to offer this solution to our nation, 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.

The distinction between the two candidates’ visions, in this respect, has become even more evident due to the destructive and hollow campaign tactics adopted by Sen. McCain and his party. In a vicious attempt to smear Sen. Obama with some vague responsibility for the actions of individuals over whom he holds no actual responsibility and whose views he has denounced, the campaign of Sen. John McCain has sought to poison the electoral process, distract the minds of voters, and obscure what appears to be an inability to compete in the realm of ideas.

That sort of campaign of distraction is destructive to the healthy functioning of democracy and ignores the basic right of the electorate to govern its elected officials with the advantage of reliable information, firmly in hand. Fudging the truth for political gain can lead to ill-conceived policies that undermine the wellbeing of the nation (the 2003 WMD policy debacle, and ensuing war, are just one example).

Sen. Obama’s approach to domestic and foreign policy is consistently principled and pragmatist, rooted in an understanding of our system of laws, its founding ideals and the nature of our liberties. His policies hint at an underlying philosophy that seeks to do what is necessary to achieve the highest goals of our practical ambition, yet always uphold that essential allegiance to the “better angels of our nature”, work together with those whose collaboration we need and be firm about the rule of law and the fundamentals that give us a moral high-ground in dealing with the broader world.

The Supreme Court

Perhaps the single most important outcome of the next president’s tenure will be his effect on the make-up of the Supreme Court. It is estimated that 3 of the 9 justices may retire in coming years. Those 3 justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter, and John Paul Stevens, are considered firmly “liberal”, while the Court already leans toward the conservative Republican side of American political ideology. What’s more, 7 of the 9 justices were named by Republican presidents.

Sen. Obama has said he would not use ideology as a test for nominating justices. While considered liberal by many on the conservative side of the American political spectrum, Sen. Obama has been seen as a pragmatist moderate by many who have worked with him (the “most liberal senator” label comes mainly from one conservative group’s analysis of his positions on Iraq and Roe v. Wade). And, he was actually a Constitutional law professor. He has said his standard for nominating judges would be to place judges on the Court who have devoted their careers to upholding the Constitutional rights of individual Americans, and who consistently apply the legal protections afforded by the Constitution, respecting and upholding the balance of power between the three independent branches of government.

But whether he would nominate overtly liberal judges is almost unimportant —this point will be of interest to any conservatives who believe there should be balance on the Court—, because the fact that the 3 justices likely to retire are considered liberal means that an Obama presidency would essentially leave the Court as it is now, with 3 liberals and 6 conservatives, and 4 of those far to the right of most mainstream conservative viewpoints (more on this below).

Though he also says he rejects an ideological litmus test as “wrong”, Sen. McCain has suggested he would consider ideology, saying he would nominate judges with a notable conservative record and that opposition to Roe v. Wade was a “qualification” in his mind. He referred to Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito as “recent favorites”. Both espouse a radical legal philosophy known as the “unitary executive”, which baselessly interprets the Constitution as granting the president near absolute power, based solely on the notion of perpetual war and the president’s right to disregard written law.

Philosophically, the unitary executive is a tautological pure-power doctrine, rooted in the use of power as the legitimizing factor in power’s use, an idea against which the whole of American law is constructed. The Constitution provides citizens with specific rights and grants them any not named, while it provides the government with limited powers and denies it any not named. The unitary executive, as interpreted to grant the president permanent commander-in-chief status, and with it permanent near-emergency powers, ignores the role of the courts and the Congress in limiting executive power, their principle responsibility.

In this respect, Roberts and Alito are far to the right of nearly all justices to sit on the Court in recent decades, and some Constitutional law scholars have suggested their views are a wholesale rejection of representative democracy as a form of government, let alone as the law of the land. They have taken the principle of a president having “authority” over all areas where federal money is spent or federal laws enforced.

The Constitution grants Congress both the “power of the purse”, the ability to dictate to the Executive what money can be spent to what end, and formal oversight powers, the ability to investigate, judge and punish the Executive, where violations of law occur. Courts can adjudicate specific details of specific instances, but cannot strip Congress of these powers, nor can the Executive.

A McCain presidency would likely push the Supreme Court far to the right for a generation to come. If Ginsburg, Souter and Stevens all retire, and McCain nominates 3 “conservative” justices, there will be 9 “right of center” judges out of 9, on the Court, 8 of whom were named by Republican presidents, with possibly a majority young enough to stay on the court for another 20 to 30 years.

Justice Clarence Thomas is 60 years old, while Alito and Roberts are 58 and 55, respectively. They are, by far, the 3 most conservative judges to sit on the Court in a generation or more. Adding only 2 more relatively young justices could easily create a “hard-right” majority that will rule more or less uniformly for 20 years or more. The lack of balance on the Court could radically limit the individual liberties of American citizens, and reverse decades of civil rights legislation.

If Sen. McCain were to become president, he would likely —if his campaign promises are sincere— have a radical and one-sided impact on the Supreme Court. His guidelines for naming justices could eliminate any left-of-center dissent on the Court, and even minimize the voices of moderates. His penchant for Alito and Roberts could mean the unitary executive doctrine would gain force, reducing the checks and balances that allow Congress and the Courts to rein in executive power, a fundamental requirement of American constitutional democracy.

Economic Issues & Environment

On economics, the two candidates differ in somewhat traditional, if unique and interesting ways. McCain wants expensive tax cuts for higher-income earners, while Obama focuses his cuts on driving a resurgence of the embattled middle class and reversing the widening of the wealth-poverty gap. 100 million Americans, on the lower end of the income ladder, would likely see no expansion in net income, due to Sen. McCain’s tax plan, while 95% of “working families” would benefit from cuts or credits under Obama’s plan.

Sen. Obama’s proposed plan is fiscally conservative and disciplined. Sen. McCain calls it a “socialist” redistribution of wealth, which it is not. All changes to the tax code are technically a “redistribution of wealth”, as are taxes as such, but so is all spending, all market activity, all trade of any kind. It is inappropriate and inaccurate to compare Sen. Obama’s tax policy to “socialism”, because it does not seek to centralize economic power in the apparatus of the state.

Obama’s plan is generative, aiming to stimulate economic growth by letting consumers and small businesses animate the market by spending according to their needs and priorities. McCain’s plan is constrictive, in that it does transfer wealth to the wealthy, away from public services and away from those who need them: it narrows the scope of opportunity by focusing not on most businesses or households, but on the largest businesses and wealthiest households.

Obama’s generative economics redirects spending to vital social programs that help build the fabric of community and afford a wider range of opportunity to all, treats education and infrastructure as the high-return investments they are and offsets new costs with money already in the budget, so the deficit doesn’t explode, as it did after both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush’s supply-side tax-cut plans were implemented.

Sen. Obama’s plan wisely treats assistance to encourage the coming revolution in clean energy and related infrastructure as a way to unravel the financial burden of sending $700 billion per year to foreign nations for oil, an economic and security imperative. Energy independence is vital, and Sen. Obama’s plan gets us to a sustainable clean-energy future more quickly and more deliberately than Sen. McCain’s plan.

His vision is dynamic, comprehensive, workable, and deadly serious about getting the optimum results for the good of the nation. That combination is the rarest thing in modern politics, and having crafted such a vision —ripe with all the specifics needed to make it viable— demonstrates an unusual talent from which our civilization and our democratic experiment can benefit greatly.

His leadership throughout the financial crisis has been deferential and steady: he is committed to responsible, sustainable action to prevent the collapse of major financial institutions and restore prosperity to the middle class, and appears ready to hear the best suggestions, pool the most able minds, and navigate among them to craft the best policy for the nation. There is a stark contrast in Obama’s responsible, generative approach and Sen. McCain’s at times haphazard, self-conscious attempts to intervene.

That we need a “green tech revolution” is now more than self-evident. To combat global warming, by reducing carbon emissions to natural background levels, and protect vital ecosystems, weather patterns, and water resources, we must aggressively pursue the building of a vibrant, clean energy economy. Sen. Obama is more comprehensive and more environmentally-minded, focusing on achieving each of these goals, without further putting our environment at risk from dirty technologies or over-dependence on high-contaminant energy sources —in case of seepage or massive release— like nuclear.

Education Policy

We have heard often not only in this election cycle but over the last 8 years that “people are blind”, or they “hear only what they want to hear”. A big part of this is that our educational system has provided both too little information and to little training to seek, judge, place and relate information, in other words: to think.

My grandfather —a conservative Republican politician, who taught me that citizenship was about being a thinking actor in society, an intellect with a civic conscience— was fond of the proverb: “There are none so blind as those who will not see”. A timeless truth, no doubt, but all the more true of those who have too little information about realities other than their own to choose a better way. We need to reinvigorate our test-score-obsessed education system with real intellectual curiosity.

Sen. Obama’s proposals for education reform draw from successful programs and aim to help build community, get parents involved and get us back to that mentality wherein a citizen must be a thinking person. A brief summary:

• For children aged 0 to 5 years: universal opportunity for preschool —if desired—, quality child-care for working families, expansion of Head Start and Early Head Start
• Reform No Child Left Behind, so that 1) it is funded; 2) it helps students acquire knowledge, develop intellectual curiosity; 3) its standards help struggling schools instead of punishing them
• Double charter-school funding, reward states that do the most to improve charter schools, close charter schools that fail “chronically” to perform as intended
• Prioritize math and science, recruit Masters-level academics in these fields to teach, provide for strong science curriculum “at all grade levels”
• Combat chronic absenteeism, provide for enriching after-school activities, motivate students to work for eventual entry into colleges and universities
• College funding: provide expanded grants and credit options so that every student can pay for college, simplify the financial aid application process
• Recruit, train, reward and retain teachers, all with concrete programs aimed at improving the quality of teaching broadly and recognizing the great efforts the best teachers put in
• Mentoring programs that help new teachers learn from experienced ones, with pay increases for qualified teaching mentors, so the program is more effective

Today’s minds must be imaginative and adaptive, because global society and information technology advance so quickly one must constantly be able to learn and adapt. This is, as Sen. Obama has said, a matter of national security, because a lag in adaptive intellectual capacity translates into a lag in economic dynamism, and no military power can maintain primacy if its economy falls into a cycle of endemic decline.

Diplomacy & Security

The most fundamental characteristic we need in a commander-in-chief, in the fluid and extreme security environment of the 21st century, is judgment. This means not just a military mindset, not just awareness of what occurred during the years of the Cold War and its denouement, but the ability to distinguish between good choices and perilous diplomatic pitfalls. It also means the judgment to know how our system of laws fits into the international legal arena, including the defense of human rights, and a respect for the strengths and virtues of international law.

Article VI of the Constitution of the United States of America states that “all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land”. It further states that judges shall be bound by those treaties, except where the Constitution specifically provides the contrary. This means that laws like the Geneva Conventions —in large part crafted to fit the values of American democracy and the principle of the rule of law— are in essence part of our Constitutional law.

To uphold the oath of office, a president must understand this, and serve the Constitution and our democratic system, by respecting our treaty obligations under international law. John McCain has been inconsistent at best in adhering to principle in the face of radical positions taken on war and peace and the rule of law, by the current administration.

One example, after vowing to oppose any form of prisoner abuse, and doing so for a year, Sen. McCain voted to give the president the authority to order the fake drowning of detainees, along with other —some undisclosed— “enhanced interrogation” methods. This violates the Geneva Conventions, and ignores several American laws on prisoner treatment, but beyond that, the apparent political calculation is morally incomprehensible.

He has, to a great extent, limited his foreign policy discourse to warning of Cold-War type future threats and attacking his opponent’s judgment. In fact, Obama has shown insight and judgment, and not just on the question of Iraq war WMD intelligence. His call for engagement and diplomacy with countries like North Korea and Iran has been followed by the example that North Korea has again reversed its course toward nuclearization, due to successful negotiations, and the Bush administration, at the urging of several former secretaries of State, has engaged Tehran diplomatically in an effort to find a path toward denuclearization.

Sen. Obama’s proposals for Defense would rebuild the American military to operate effectively in the 21st century, whose threats are categorically different from the 20th century’s. They would also seek to guarantee the freedom of space, so that no military power is exerted there or becomes a threat to the US from Earth’s orbit. They would cut wasteful and ineffective weapons programs, focus on much needed armor, UAVs, cost-effective and technically viable missile defense, and provide better funding for veterans, so they get the best possible medical care, long-term, and have the opportunity to study and advance after service.

Obama’s diplomatic worldview is one in which the United States projects its will and serves vital national security interests through aggressive diplomacy, actively working to provide a path toward political solutions in otherwise intractable problems, with the knowledge that an agile and overwhelming military force underlies all negotiations. Proof of strength is not the resort to military force, but the ongoing demonstration that success can be achieved without it.

He understands that threats to third parties —Iran, Syria— will not fix the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, but worsen it, and that a sustained prioritized diplomatic effort to build a peaceful two-state solution will allow Israel to live in peace and security, always with the US guarding its security, but not provoking its less friendly neighbors to paranoid or aggressive action.

Using diplomacy as a tool for broadening and improving the view of the US around the world, Obama plans to re-open “shuttered” consulates in the “tough and hopeless corners of the world”, so that much needed aid and services provided by American aid workers, can be seen to originate directly from the US political system, as an expression of the basic values of American democracy, which have been so poorly communicated over the last 8 years. This is a vital part of any strategy to make us all safer from random threats of terrorist or rogue-state activity.

Campaign Tactics

The executive leadership of a national political campaign is an essential read of an individual’s character, and mettle as a democratic political leader. John McCain used to ride a bus called the “Straight Talk Express”, and it was a media phenomenon. On that campaign bus, he used to give very candid interviews to reporters, in which he expressed his genuine opinions and talked a big game about reform to fight corruption in Washington. That was 2000.

His candidacy was derailed by some of the most inhuman, racist smears seen in modern politics. He was embittered, and nearly left his party as a result. Now, to defeat Barack Obama, who simply does not use such tactics, he has hired the same Machiavellian hacks that killed his campaign for honesty and reform and gave us 8 years of George W. Bush, in which we’ve seen unprecedented extralegal domestic spying, suspension of habeas corpus, a trillion-dollar war, and economic mayhem.

John McCain likes to say he’d rather lose an election than lose a war, that he puts his “country first”. But in fact, his campaign tactics seem to demonstrate that he sees himself as exempt from the principles of ethics and honesty that he has always proclaimed to be his guiding vision. Somehow, it would be better for the nation to lose out on those values, than for John McCain to lose an election. The unsavory tone and the sometimes hateful rhetoric that has emanated from his campaign has elicited mild protests from the candidate, but ultimately, he has refused to stop the smears.

He has done this against an opponent that has never once engaged in such tactics against him, and even some of the most aggressive political operatives in his party have said what is taking place is possibly the ugliest smear campaign in recent decades. He has failed utterly to take responsibility for “robocalls” seeking to imply Sen. Obama “worked closely” with terrorists, which even sitting senators in his own party have said are unethical and must be stopped, and has even defended them as accurate and principled.

Sen. Obama’s vision of leadership is very different from that sort of gutter politics, and it is a major national asset to have a leader who can campaign in the midst of such vitriol and contempt, who can face such smears with aplomb, and say that “I can take three more weeks of John McCain’s attacks, but what this country can’t afford is four more years of failed economic policies.”

He has his finger on the pulse of the nation’s needs and values, and his campaign is about that. His campaign has persuaded millions of small donors to give what they can, and in the month of September, he raised $150 million, campaigning ethically, laying out his vision, and traveling to even remote areas of supposedly hopeless “red states”. That speaks volumes about the quality of leadership we can expect of such a candidate.

So, with all this in mind, having weighed the real options, having searched for the old John McCain, at least as a counterweight to what seems the spirit of the times, a period of reform and renewal under Obama’s leadership, I have come to the conclusion that Sen. Obama’s vision is the one we need to embrace as a nation. He will be a transformative president in a time of transformation, and he provides the opportunity for citizens to collaborate in the shaping of the future of this nation, a democratic leader to restore democracy to our process and prosperity to our communities.

• Originally published 21 October 2008, at CafeSentido.com

TheHotSpring.com :: We are living in a time of unprecedented global integration, where economies, security interests, legal systems, and languages and systems of learning have been dispersed and interwoven across the globe. There are obvious positive effects to this integration, along with certain overarching and seemingly intractable problems that cause real worry for even the most hopeful or studied observers.

Languages and cultures intermingle, yet seek to remain distinct and continuous, and individuals seek to enhance their own possibilities (requiring freedom of information, and freedom of movement), while seeking to prevent the corrosion of already structured social fabrics. The obvious problem is that some of our most vital human interests come into conflict more readily with those of others, when massive numbers of people mix and intermingle, individuals and cultures competing with one another for the spoils of a new global system.

But there is no reason this has to be a source of friction, suspicion or violence. It is also true that a more open system is more dynamic, more able to adapt to otherwise ‘trivial’ personal interests, and better able to establish truly just rules for negotiating tense competitive situations where decisions need to be made about whose interests are best served by what result. What is needed is devotion to that open system, and real pragmatic tools for helping that system recognize and address genuine situations of friction or crisis.

There are some 6,800 languages spoken in the world today, and more than half are expected to die off within the next 100 years, possibly much sooner, and possibly well over one-half. This rapid evacuation of global language culture —though some will say it brings the benefits of increased uniformity— robs us all of potential bridges across cultures where understanding can take place. As words disappear, so do ideas, comparisons, metaphors, symbols and the human element of perception.

And the degradation of the global culture, in this fashion, while it may be part of a process of integration which will deliver some much needed benefits for long-term peace and human wellbeing, is a stress on the sense of security or identity of those cultures which survive. A key focus at all times, in the new globalized civilization, must be to ensure that identities are not threatened by the mass expansion of media, rights, capital and movement.

The conflict of the Tower of Babel —a place where we presume too many distinct cultures and interests combined, and an empire collapsed— is a conflict of (abstract/thought-pattern) border tensions provoking animosity and rivalry. Actual border conflicts derive fuel and momentum from abstract border conflicts —visions of the world, racial prejudice, linguistic rivalry, competition for resources—, a tendency 21st century technologies, politics and societal developments must counteract.

Openness is part of the new era of information and communication, which has helped to make the world “smaller” or “flatter” or “come together”, if we think more optimistically. As interests and opportunities coincide across nations and cultures, limiting the degree to which geography determines the life choices of a given individual, we face the need to embrace or to fear and oppose the increased openness that offers the resources and the opportunities to meet our interests.

Similar to the way in which cloudscape-computing allows for much more resilient, secure, and super-fast computation, so a broad, integrated global society, if informed by and served by norms that protect the human individual as a creative and information-gathering entity, can achieve new dynamism and vastly more potent and timely means of problem solving, where needed. The new integrated web, the dawn of hyper-convergence, and the global hunger for digital technologies means human society itself is becoming a sort of universal library or information-store.

Technology can help us not only to communicate, but to share the work of solving basic human problems, and to transcend the nature of oppositional conflict. Productive adversarial systems can be woven into a broad social fabric that helps us to debate, confront and work through the challenges of our times without resort to armed confrontation: the ugliest and ultimately least productive of human talents.

The 21st century need not be the new fall of the Tower of Babel, but could be the agile and well-thought construction of an abstract ziggurat —a fortress, a temple, an storehouse of ideas and guidance— shared by the broad continuum of human societies and attuned to our need to communicate and co-create. If we understand the problem of our times is one of forging cooperative bonds that serve the individual and protect human rights, we will be best armed to persevere in the face of challenges to cultural and individual identity, and reap the rewards —as a species— of the information age.

• Originally published 17 May 2008 for The Hot Spring’s Crisis Policy Forum
• Republished 25 May 2008 for Café Sentido’s project The Written Wor(l)d

The global economy in its present form is not only full of and forced to deal with problematic distortions; it has come to depend a great deal on the “bubble” effect of certain miscalculations and manipulations. Assumptions built into weak threads in the economic web mean that markets are not able to set prices or distribute wealth at sustainable levels.

It must here be noted that the situation is such that —assuming this is what they key decision-makers seek— the “pure market” does not and cannot exist in the current economic and informative climate. In fact, taken together, the fundamental distortions embedded in the present global economic system are fueling the expansion of a complex bubble phenomenon, pressing against many natural limits, where in many key markets, the underlying resources are not sufficient to support the presumed direction or expansion of trade.

Even as we hear about phenomenal advances of market principles and global wealth, key indicators show that the gap between rich and poor is widening, middle classes are either stagnant or declining, and the ability of the global economy to produce and deliver enough fuel, food, water, and basic services, is coming into question.

Economists are projecting that petroleum, a finite, non-renewable resource for which demand increases sharply every year, will soon reach its production peak, and then decline into scarcity. Many populous nations are building up dangerous and unsustainable “water deficits” and China, which needs to feed 1.3 billion people, and formerly a leading exporter of grain to the world market, has suddenly become the world’s biggest grain importer.

Food, water, fossil fuels and arable land are all becoming more scarce on a per-capita basis already, and the coming peak in world oil production —whether or not the peak is imminent this year or next, it must come as a side-effect of petroleum reserves being finite— threatens to disrupt the ability of markets everywhere to forestall further declines in agricultural, extraction, industrial and transport productivity.

The US food economy uses as much energy as France’s total annual consumption for all purposes, with 20% going to growing and harvesting. The other 80% goes to transport, processing, packaging and storing food items during their journey to sale and consumption. The US is heavily dependent on petroleum for its food production, and increases in efficiency and production per acre have been helped along historically by increased use of petroleum, be it in pumps for extracting ground water or in heavy machinery.

Dependence on petroleum for agricultural production and distribution has led to a serious economic distortion across world markets, in which prices are kept artificially low and food appears to be available at levels which are simply not sustainable. The distortion is problematic because it leads to a false sense of security and undermines the drive of the public and of government officials to push for research and development of new technologies and farming techniques.

The Earth Policy Institute, whose director accurately predicted in the mid nineties that China would move from holding huge grain surpluses to a position of serious deficit which would drive it into the world import market for grainstocks, reported in 2003 that the world economy had produced a “food bubble”, in which the availability and price of food was hiding likely shortages. The EPI report noted that water use is the problem factor in the food-production formula.

EPI observes: “Aquifers are being depleted in scores of countries, including China, India, and the United States, which collectively account for half of the world grain harvest.” In northwestern China, entire regions are falling prey to desertification, after which agriculture becomes virtually nonexistent, further diminishing foodstocks. Falling water tables mean, despite prospective advances in technology and efficiency, the planet is increasingly stressed in efforts to meet the nutrition needs of an extra 70 million inhabitants every year.

That analysis can be applied to a number of key economic areas: unsustainability in resource use and waste release is generating —quite logically— an unsustainable economic picture. World markets are increasingly taxed as costs of shipping are escalating and major oil-exporting nations appear unable to provide adequate scientific evidence that reserves can match demand in coming years.

At the base of all these channels of observation and analysis, we find the most problematic is the failure of traditional economics to take into account the value of goods and services provided by nature, and upon which the human commercial economy is entirely dependent. China has begun trying to remedy this miscalculation by evaluating the cost of providing flood protection services already carried out by nature in the form of forested mountainside and inland precipitation cycles. It turned out the value of a standing tree was far higher than that of one cut for timber.

The cost of “privatized” well water in Cochabamba province, Bolivia, demonstrates the very problematic link between corporate profit expectations and local resource availability, usage requirements and income. Residents who used to share water according to centuries’ old Quechua practices of “common usage” are suddenly faced with metered water supplies, entirely controlled by a foreign firm which charges rates equal to 1/3 of local per capita income.

Such rates do not suggest healthy market conditions. Quite the contrary, the stresses placed on the local market to adequately meet basic needs are such that violence has repeatedly erupted in recent years in the face of failure to deliver affordable food and water resources to otherwise green, rural communities.

Economies that depend on immigration to fill manual labor and entry-level service jobs, or which have done so, are faced with the crisis of “peripheries”, also known as “inner cities” in the US, districts where concentrations of dissatisfied, underpriveleged minorities find the benefits of economic growth hard to come by. Britain saw citizens from such communities bombing London transport this summer after apparently being swayed to extremist perspectives, and France has seen nationwide incidents of arson and rioting, spreading even to neighboring countries, largely based on such economic marginalization.

This crisis of peripheries requires that open societies, where personal freedom is valued in law and in practice, must address the challenge of integrating disparate communities into one coherent, functioning, tolerant community in which opportunity is not denied to anyone based on birth or origin. The failure of political leaders to seriously address this challenge during recent decades has led to the deep wounds that are now showing in France, as they did this past summer in New Orleans, and as they so often do in poorer countries.

Sadly, disease is another area where economic markets are suffering and are likely to suffer increasing distortions. HIV/AIDS, Sleeping Sickness, Tuberculosis and Malaria, are killing millions in Africa, which is suffering grave population collapse amid its adult population. 36.8% of Botswana’s population now carries the HIV infection, and most are expected to die. Only Swaziland has higher prevalence of the virus. Life expectancy has fallen to an unthinkable 39 years in the region.

Investment in the manufacture and distribution of affordable AIDS drugs to poor, highly vulnerable subsaharan African nations, where the disease is killing millions and where efforts to stop its spread are faltering or inconsistent, could help stabilize these nations, their economies and their governments. In the absence of that aid, disease will lead to mass deprivation, increasing hunger and a likely spiral of disease, and ultimately to political instability.

Corruption permits governments, or individuals within them, that actively steal from local enterprise and from foreign investors and aid agencies to remain in power and to manipulate regional markets, creating stagnant or non-existent real-world growth and political pitfalls where neither education nor investment is adequate to overcome the obstacles erected against the general welfare. Even today, with the abundance of analytic and financial information, major institutions continue to do “business as usual” with institutions whose remedies are either absent or utterly ineffective to curb and reverse the intense market distortions stemming from those erroneous calculations mentioned here, among others.

The question is: how will governments, in concert with the advice and consent of their populations, and input from leading analysts, address the increasing scarcity of arable land and harvest yields, the pressures created by swiftly climbing world population, stresses on the productivity of oil, falling water tables, escalating climate change, and political instability posed by pandemic diseases, all simultaneously and in sustainable fashion?

• Why Wind is Smarter [Sentido]
• The Last Drop: the Coming Oil Peak [Sentido]
• Oil and Food: A Rising Security Challenge [EPI]
• World Creating Food Bubble Economy Based on Unsustainable Use of Water [EPI]
• Population Coalition: reporting estimated population growth, total productive land available to feed world
• Sustainable Development Update, Issue 5, Vol. 5: Environmental investment to fight poverty [Albaeco]
• Development and Peace: report on negative impact of loan conditions on water supply
• Too much of the world is getting poorer [Newsweek]
• Historic Opportunity (to fight malaria) [LA Times]