Shortly before he was assassinated, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. began what was known as the "Poor People's Campaign." The goal was simple, but the reality daunting: Create jobs for every able-bodied person. That was in 1967.
It's still a noble goal for this century. Provided that we can offer affordable, accessible health care to every American, the next step is jobs. The statistics are not encouraging -- more than 10 percent unemployment, more than 20 percent in inner cities.
Why is getting a decent job a human right? Because it's about dignity and productivity. You can't subscribe to the "pursuit of happiness" without gainful employment. I don't think any of the founding fathers would disagree with that. Working people pay taxes, support schools, build a solid social fabric. It's the American Dream.
How did we get sidetracked from the promise of Dr. King's dream? How did we get stuck in two wars and land on the precipice of economic ruin? Was it cultural hubris or a form of social madness? I would argue that we got drunk on the punchbowl of false prosperity, but it was a hallucinating elixir. The rabbit hole was deep, but we're still climbing out.
Did we genuinely believe that bigger cars, houses and perks would make us better people or give us longer lives?
We believed Wall Street when it told us that they had our best interests at heart. We believed charlatans like Phil Gramm and Robert Rubin when they told us that financial de-regulation would actually liberate markets to create more jobs without adding catastrophic risk. We were listening to the wrong people.
While I'm not going to jump on that dais that says that God is punishing us for our affluenza, it's clear that not sharing prosperity with all walks of life has hurt us. If you want to get a laser-focus on how much the financial sector has damaged our economy, read Kevin Phillip's Bad Money or my Cul-de-Sac Syndrome.
Despite all of that wealth creation on Wall Street (up until the crash at least), it only created a handful of jobs and concentrated capital in only one sector of the economy. How much of the money that traders made on complex derivatives and mortgage securities went to building affordable housing, lightweight/long-term vehicle batteries, fixing infrastructure or just creating jobs where they were most needed? Just take a walk through downtown Detroit, Chicago's West Side, or South Central LA and you have your answer.
And where were the great institutions of our republic when the looting of our economy occurred?
The Federal Reserve, which is mandated by the Humphrey-Hawkins Act to create full employment, was enabling Wall Street, which eventually led to high unemployment. Not one, but three crashes ensued due to the Fed's bargain-basement funding of financial manipulators (dot.com, housing and credit). No matter what the business headlines say now, the $13 trillion bailout will be hurting us for decades.
Yet here we are, with the poverty rate hovering near 13 percent -- about where it was in 1967. Now, due to the recession, the middle class is backsliding into the economic doldrums. Due to inflation, middle-income families made no progress in the first decade of this century. Their retirement funds and home equity were battered.
Despite the economic gloom, I think we need to return to Dr. King for inspiration and guidance. There are some ways to actively turn around our malaise and make a stab at full employment:
• Social Capitalism Holds the Key. This is not giving a handout to anyone. It has nothing to do with welfare and everything to do with entrepreneurism. President Obama's "Green Deal" (see my "Audacity of Help") is the single-best first step. His Department of Energy is now the biggest venture capital entity in the country. Provide the money to researchers and the private sector and let them create the jobs and build social and intellectual capital!
• Reform the Federal Reserve. You can't have a central bank that is constantly making the wrong decisions, is a pathetic watchdog and is the bailout king for errant bankers. Open up and audit the Fed's books. If they're going to be the source of cheap money, make sure it flows to people creating jobs and not speculators.
• Tax Speculation. President Obama has a proposal to tax banks. I think it's unfair and it reeks of some kind of punishment. Believe me, you can dole out plenty of lashes for what the banks did to this economy and it will never be sufficient. You can tax them all you want and it still won't replace the jobs that were lost. Tax speculation instead. Any transaction that closes in less than a year should be penalized.
• Bring Back New Deal Protections. The trading operations and mainstream banking backed by federal insurance should not be in one company. Split up the banks so that speculative trading and investment banking desks are completely separate entities from the lending/credit arms.
• Make The Green Deal Bigger and Permanent. The mother of all stimulus plans is money flowing from the government into the private sector for decades -- not a year or two. We need a new energy, telecom, transportation and building infrastructure. Let's tax pollution, gambling, drugs (non-medicinal) and alcohol to build what we need to provide jobs everywhere.
• Kill the Filibuster. The archaic Senate rule that kills any legislation not garnering 60 votes has to go. It's the death knell for any progressive reforms and is championed by a scant 10 percent of the US population. The filibuster is not in the constitution. Let's get rid of it and move on.
So let's revisit Dr. King's prophetic and pragmatic words:
"America is at a crossroads of history, and it is critically important for us, as a nation and a society, to chose a new path and move upon it with resolution and courage. It is impossible to underestimate the crisis we face in America. The stability of civilization, the potential of free government, and the simple honor of men are at stake."
It's time to reinvent ourselves. Instead of the me-centered Jeffersonian concept of individual prosperity, it's time for a collective prosperity. The time has never been more right for Dr. King's admonition and moving ahead.
John F. Wasik is an activist and author of The Audacity of Help: Obama's Economic Plan and the Remaking of America).
Monday, January 18, 2010
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Jim Sulski, RIP
Jim Sulski and His Beautiful History of the Future
My friend and former colleague Jim Sulski passed away at the young age of 52 after a long, valiant struggle with cancer. My sympathies to his family, friends, students and colleagues. He fought bravely against cancer for years, a disease that took my mother’s life and afflicts my wife. I’m hoping that this humble remembrance will serve as a celebration of his life, one that touched so many and will continue to endure in our hearts and memories.
Jim and our little cadre of ink-stained wretches worked and hung out in the early 1980s on the South Side of Chicago. At the time, South Chicago was still home to The Daily Calumet, a down-on-it-luck 100-year-old paper that served the moribund community of acrid, hulking steel mills. Jim served as the education reporter while I had the business-labor beat.
Our world headquarters leaned precariously in one direction over the decrepit vaulted sidewalks that raised humanity above the mud flats of the Calumet River basin. The first floor was a reception area, manned by Louise, a tough yet accommodating Polish-speaking woman who also served as our walk-in circulation clerk. The second floor had long been abandoned and the third floor should have been condemned, along with the rest of the building. One day our publisher had this brilliant idea to save money on replacing the 100-year-old windows by bolting Plexiglas panels over the window wells. This effectively sealed us in; had there been a fire our choice of departing this world would have been immolation or asphyxiation. In the rear of the floor was a darkroom and morgue of unbound newspapers.
As the desks were nearly as old as the building, they barely supported paper and typewriters. In those days we hammered away on IBM selectrics. Copy was then fed into scanners at the printing plant in Lansing. There wasn’t a computer terminal in sight. Our publisher’s second flash of intellectual ecstasy was to buy desks from the defunct Wisconsin Steel. They were sturdy, gray Steelcase desks. You could’ve dropped I-beams on them and they would’ve held up. To add a little color to the rapidly composting building, he decided to have them painted in cartoon colors.
Jim’s desk was the color of the Beatle’s Yellow Submarine, which suited him fine, since he adored the Beatles and usually ended up belting out Fab Four songs in a circle with his fellow imbibers at the end of a long day of deadlines, beer and chasing the local wildlife in Cal City. I had no idea what color my desk was. Like little boys in third grade, our editor had to separate us, since we couldn’t be in close proximity due to the heavy traffic of paper airplanes, spitballs or other projectiles. We both suffered from serious cases of arrested development, yet it was the prison-like nature of the Daily Cal newsroom – a dying paper in an enfeebled community -- that compelled us to seek distractions.
With Jim, there was always this sense of the unexpected. He was constantly throwing curveballs at you and was a great prankster. Since he didn't have an unkind word about anyone, he was always a joy to be around.
One endless evening 30 years ago, when we were closing some bar in Calumet City, he introduced me to a young lady who claimed to be a belly dancer who worked in the infamous Golden Shell restaurant on the East Side (infamous for being a hang-out of the mass murderer Richard Speck). What he didn't tell me at that late hour was that he told the damsel that I had promised to write a story about her for our paper, The Daily Calumet. Come Monday morning, she was ready for the interview. Fortunately, Bob Bong, my editor at the time, didn't sense any overt compromise and thought it would be a good story, so we did it -- with pictures. After the story ran, that was the end of my relationship with supple Rita.
“She was just 17, and you knooow what I mean,” was how we bridged night and day before we headed off for breakfast or the purgative penance of The White Castle. We were like comrades in a DH Lawrence novel; there was much brotherly love.
If there was a time between the moment I left home after college and the day of my marriage when I felt most alive --pulsating with possibility and the nearly self-destructive exuberance for experience -- this was it. I didn’t seem to fear anything. None of us did. We just sallied forth into the world of decay, adventure and bottomless pitchers of beer. If the world was falling apart around us or we were really in some kind of purgatory, we were oblivious to it in a decade of dashed expectations.
While his personality seemed to be like Teflon as far as trouble was concerned, I had a knack for pissing people off (still do). I was kicked out of offices, threatened by ward bosses and labor leaders. I was constantly watching my back and looking under my car. I was genuinely concerned for my health and well being after being told many times I was "going to get my lunch."
Not so with Jim. He grew up in South Chicago and had more friends than there were sidewalks. He knew everyone and everyone knew him. I came from the South Suburbs; this was his home and he always felt good about being a Bowen High School graduate who transcended the working’s man’s dilemma. He genuinely enjoyed people who came into his circle and was always challenging those who weren’t. After he came out of the hospital following a serious car accident that left his face scarred, he grew a beard and finished his bachelor’s degree. He later picked up his master’s in communication at the University of Illinois-Chicago, the same place I got my two diplomas (and same master’s).
We briefly parted ways after the Daily Cal, which was acquired and shut down not too long after he left. (The last great journalist the Cal incubated was John Kass, who eventually inherited Mike Royko’s slot at the Tribune). Although I was at the Daily Cal scarcely two years, there was so much compressed into that time that it has taken me 30 years to decompress from it. I saw thousands of millworkers become unemployed, fall into despair and fight losing battles to get their jobs back. I rode in the back of a bus as they lobbied Washington. I snuck into a meeting with then-mayor Jane Byrne, who like so many other politicians, had lied to them with promises of reopening their ramshackle mill, Wisconsin Steel. I was variously accepted and rejected by local steelworker union and political bosses, sworn at, threatened and stressed out to the point of exhaustion. I seriously doubted whether I would make it to 30; my doctor told me I had an ulcer and couldn’t subsist on pizza and beer. My hair started turning gray.
Jim, of course, was affected by the economic violence around him yet didn’t look fazed by any of it. I knew he genuinely cared for people – these were his neighbors and buddies after all – yet I sensed that he would move on in a profound way. He wasn’t going to stay in South Chicago and rot. I’m not quite sure what kind of relationship he had with his estranged father, although I’m reasonably sure he didn’t want to end up like him. He never talked about him. I sensed this immense void in his life that he attempted to fill with his intense friendships, marriages and vocation -- none of which he was ever ambivalent about.
After seeing the cops shoot some unemployed guy on a commuter train who had taken a woman hostage, in 1981, I had enough. I was off to pursue a quiet career in business writing and ended up at American Metal Market, a staid trade paper covering the steel and metalworking industries. I lasted six months. It was a bad fit and I was indifferent about being a trade journalist.
Jim and I reconnected shortly thereafter and he talked me into coming to a new venture called Keycom Electronic Publishing. At the time, personal computers were the sole province of guys with pocket protectors. They were hard to find. Cellphones were the size of bricks. Fax machines still ruled and the Internet was still the captive domain of researchers and the defense department. Nobody had any inkling of what the Worldwide Web would become.
At the time, newspapers and the print media had this well-defined paranoia of AT&T. They thought the phone companies would take over the world of telecommunications and be able to deliver information to everyone’s home for practically nothing. They heard the jeremiads of the consultants and business gurus who prophesized the end of media as we knew it. TV and radio news would go away under this scenario.
Ma Bell would rule with an iron scepter! That mantra catapulted every newspaper group to enter into the online realm. Everyone from Knight-Ridder to the Chicago Sun-Times was in survival mode with this odd new technology that they hoped would deliver them from the telephonic-induced Armageddon. The punishing inflationary years of the late 1970s forced major industrial restructurings well into the next decade as recession devastated manufacturing jobs, which continued to migrate overseas or to Mexico. Nearly every large old-line business would never be the same. The media business, however, was going electronic, a transition that is still underway.
Jim was on top of this trend and riding the Malibu-like wave of electronic publishing. He beckoned me to join this pioneering company that had imported an English system called teletext that could be broadcast on television or delivered on a computer. At some point in the future, this primitive ASCII-type system could morph into videotext, a truly interactive information medium. Imagine typing in a request for information and getting exactly what you asked for! That was a big deal in the early 80s, long before the Googles and Yahoos. Seeded by a management team from The Sun-Times and Centel Telephone, we were a mutt of company. The newspaper guys were hard-drinking, carousing and people-focused while the phone guys were into suits and bureaucracy.
We had a loose newsroom consisting of young journalists led by Mort Smith, an ex-BBC and Channel 4 editor and Peter Winter, a gregarious New Zealander. The chemistry was always volatile since we were producing a product for which the market hadn’t yet been established. Almost no one at the time got their news by computer and only a relative handful even owned personal computers, which certainly weren’t the modern telecommunications appliances they are today. Keycom marketed a clunky keyboard with mint-sized keys and microwave-sized converter that hooked up to your television set. The pong-like graphics improved over time, yet they were arguably worse than the most primitive handheld video game today.
The challenge was all in those pioneering days, which typically ended at the local watering hole “El Torito” with swaggering manager Ben Smylie plunking down his corporate Amex card on the bar and the rest of the staff enjoying the company’s generosity and endless flow of margaritas.
For Jim, I and the rest of the staff, this was an extension of our rambling newspaper days. We were now producing a news product that changed almost every minute. It seems archaic now, but we would rewrite news wires – often from paper feeds – feed it through a technically demanding Atex system originally designed for newspapers – then through another computer interface to be “broadcast.” The whole process was cumbersome, labor-intensive and prone to breakdowns, such as when a string of my solicitous emails to other staffers started backing up. Sensing my immediate and profound embarrassment, Jim quickly applied his technical expertise to fix the problem before I became a laughing stock of the newsroom. Email in those days was a fairly closed system among a handful of people, but more like instant messaging than the massive network system we have today.
At least some of those emails led to more than romance. A beautiful, blue-eyed graphic artist by the name of Kathleen Rose Conlon caught my eye when she joined the company to do an online narrative cartoon entitled “Escape from Titan.” Having just come over with her family from the civil-war-torn streets of West Belfast, this was a breakthrough job for Kathleen, whose family had known Smylie (and had offered her a job at a party). I was smitten by the (then) 18-year-old and five years later we married. Both of our daughters, Sarah, 13, and Julia, 9, have Kathleen’s blue eyes and her indomitable temperament. Had Jim not talked me into joining Keycom, I doubt if I would have ever met the love of my life, whom is still the center of my universe after more than a quarter century. Jim married his first wife Sheila, just before we got married, moved to Beverly and had three great children.
Toward the end of our Keycom tenure, Jim managed to talk me into disciplining our unfettered comedic talents (more his than mine). We enrolled in the Player’s Workshop of Second City, a training camp for improvisational actors, many of whom went onto the big Second City company and beyond. For me, Jim helped me attain what I later found to be an essential life skill – talking in front of a crowd of people. I’ve always been pretty much an introvert; Jim managed to pull out of me a more creative approach to the world. I know he had this effect on others as well.
We relished our year-long training and both graduated. Our “ceremony” consisted of performing skits on the famed Second City stage in Old Town. While I’ve used my improvisational training in nearly every speech I’ve given from coast to coast, Jim took his far-more advanced skills to a different stage.
A few years after Keycom, Jim started teaching (while also doing freelance writing) at Columbia College, eventually ending up as a great newspaper advisor to the Chronicle, the award-winning student paper. I know he influenced a lot of young journalists there and was loved by his colleagues. Jim and I became estranged after his first marriage broke up and he remarried, but I kept following his career and his health crises. Without reservation, I mourned the loss of his company during his last years. He was a lighthearted fellow traveler in an insane world. I truly missed him and loved him for what he was.
I know that this all-too-brief summary fails utterly at capturing the essence of a life that covered a half century. I can only surmise that the impact he had on me was as powerful on other people. He leaves much behind, and all of it screams frenetically to live every day, shout a Beatles song at the top of your lungs, don’t ever think that your day ends when you leave work. Keep on drinking that elixir of mortality.
My friend and former colleague Jim Sulski passed away at the young age of 52 after a long, valiant struggle with cancer. My sympathies to his family, friends, students and colleagues. He fought bravely against cancer for years, a disease that took my mother’s life and afflicts my wife. I’m hoping that this humble remembrance will serve as a celebration of his life, one that touched so many and will continue to endure in our hearts and memories.
Jim and our little cadre of ink-stained wretches worked and hung out in the early 1980s on the South Side of Chicago. At the time, South Chicago was still home to The Daily Calumet, a down-on-it-luck 100-year-old paper that served the moribund community of acrid, hulking steel mills. Jim served as the education reporter while I had the business-labor beat.
Our world headquarters leaned precariously in one direction over the decrepit vaulted sidewalks that raised humanity above the mud flats of the Calumet River basin. The first floor was a reception area, manned by Louise, a tough yet accommodating Polish-speaking woman who also served as our walk-in circulation clerk. The second floor had long been abandoned and the third floor should have been condemned, along with the rest of the building. One day our publisher had this brilliant idea to save money on replacing the 100-year-old windows by bolting Plexiglas panels over the window wells. This effectively sealed us in; had there been a fire our choice of departing this world would have been immolation or asphyxiation. In the rear of the floor was a darkroom and morgue of unbound newspapers.
As the desks were nearly as old as the building, they barely supported paper and typewriters. In those days we hammered away on IBM selectrics. Copy was then fed into scanners at the printing plant in Lansing. There wasn’t a computer terminal in sight. Our publisher’s second flash of intellectual ecstasy was to buy desks from the defunct Wisconsin Steel. They were sturdy, gray Steelcase desks. You could’ve dropped I-beams on them and they would’ve held up. To add a little color to the rapidly composting building, he decided to have them painted in cartoon colors.
Jim’s desk was the color of the Beatle’s Yellow Submarine, which suited him fine, since he adored the Beatles and usually ended up belting out Fab Four songs in a circle with his fellow imbibers at the end of a long day of deadlines, beer and chasing the local wildlife in Cal City. I had no idea what color my desk was. Like little boys in third grade, our editor had to separate us, since we couldn’t be in close proximity due to the heavy traffic of paper airplanes, spitballs or other projectiles. We both suffered from serious cases of arrested development, yet it was the prison-like nature of the Daily Cal newsroom – a dying paper in an enfeebled community -- that compelled us to seek distractions.
With Jim, there was always this sense of the unexpected. He was constantly throwing curveballs at you and was a great prankster. Since he didn't have an unkind word about anyone, he was always a joy to be around.
One endless evening 30 years ago, when we were closing some bar in Calumet City, he introduced me to a young lady who claimed to be a belly dancer who worked in the infamous Golden Shell restaurant on the East Side (infamous for being a hang-out of the mass murderer Richard Speck). What he didn't tell me at that late hour was that he told the damsel that I had promised to write a story about her for our paper, The Daily Calumet. Come Monday morning, she was ready for the interview. Fortunately, Bob Bong, my editor at the time, didn't sense any overt compromise and thought it would be a good story, so we did it -- with pictures. After the story ran, that was the end of my relationship with supple Rita.
“She was just 17, and you knooow what I mean,” was how we bridged night and day before we headed off for breakfast or the purgative penance of The White Castle. We were like comrades in a DH Lawrence novel; there was much brotherly love.
If there was a time between the moment I left home after college and the day of my marriage when I felt most alive --pulsating with possibility and the nearly self-destructive exuberance for experience -- this was it. I didn’t seem to fear anything. None of us did. We just sallied forth into the world of decay, adventure and bottomless pitchers of beer. If the world was falling apart around us or we were really in some kind of purgatory, we were oblivious to it in a decade of dashed expectations.
While his personality seemed to be like Teflon as far as trouble was concerned, I had a knack for pissing people off (still do). I was kicked out of offices, threatened by ward bosses and labor leaders. I was constantly watching my back and looking under my car. I was genuinely concerned for my health and well being after being told many times I was "going to get my lunch."
Not so with Jim. He grew up in South Chicago and had more friends than there were sidewalks. He knew everyone and everyone knew him. I came from the South Suburbs; this was his home and he always felt good about being a Bowen High School graduate who transcended the working’s man’s dilemma. He genuinely enjoyed people who came into his circle and was always challenging those who weren’t. After he came out of the hospital following a serious car accident that left his face scarred, he grew a beard and finished his bachelor’s degree. He later picked up his master’s in communication at the University of Illinois-Chicago, the same place I got my two diplomas (and same master’s).
We briefly parted ways after the Daily Cal, which was acquired and shut down not too long after he left. (The last great journalist the Cal incubated was John Kass, who eventually inherited Mike Royko’s slot at the Tribune). Although I was at the Daily Cal scarcely two years, there was so much compressed into that time that it has taken me 30 years to decompress from it. I saw thousands of millworkers become unemployed, fall into despair and fight losing battles to get their jobs back. I rode in the back of a bus as they lobbied Washington. I snuck into a meeting with then-mayor Jane Byrne, who like so many other politicians, had lied to them with promises of reopening their ramshackle mill, Wisconsin Steel. I was variously accepted and rejected by local steelworker union and political bosses, sworn at, threatened and stressed out to the point of exhaustion. I seriously doubted whether I would make it to 30; my doctor told me I had an ulcer and couldn’t subsist on pizza and beer. My hair started turning gray.
Jim, of course, was affected by the economic violence around him yet didn’t look fazed by any of it. I knew he genuinely cared for people – these were his neighbors and buddies after all – yet I sensed that he would move on in a profound way. He wasn’t going to stay in South Chicago and rot. I’m not quite sure what kind of relationship he had with his estranged father, although I’m reasonably sure he didn’t want to end up like him. He never talked about him. I sensed this immense void in his life that he attempted to fill with his intense friendships, marriages and vocation -- none of which he was ever ambivalent about.
After seeing the cops shoot some unemployed guy on a commuter train who had taken a woman hostage, in 1981, I had enough. I was off to pursue a quiet career in business writing and ended up at American Metal Market, a staid trade paper covering the steel and metalworking industries. I lasted six months. It was a bad fit and I was indifferent about being a trade journalist.
Jim and I reconnected shortly thereafter and he talked me into coming to a new venture called Keycom Electronic Publishing. At the time, personal computers were the sole province of guys with pocket protectors. They were hard to find. Cellphones were the size of bricks. Fax machines still ruled and the Internet was still the captive domain of researchers and the defense department. Nobody had any inkling of what the Worldwide Web would become.
At the time, newspapers and the print media had this well-defined paranoia of AT&T. They thought the phone companies would take over the world of telecommunications and be able to deliver information to everyone’s home for practically nothing. They heard the jeremiads of the consultants and business gurus who prophesized the end of media as we knew it. TV and radio news would go away under this scenario.
Ma Bell would rule with an iron scepter! That mantra catapulted every newspaper group to enter into the online realm. Everyone from Knight-Ridder to the Chicago Sun-Times was in survival mode with this odd new technology that they hoped would deliver them from the telephonic-induced Armageddon. The punishing inflationary years of the late 1970s forced major industrial restructurings well into the next decade as recession devastated manufacturing jobs, which continued to migrate overseas or to Mexico. Nearly every large old-line business would never be the same. The media business, however, was going electronic, a transition that is still underway.
Jim was on top of this trend and riding the Malibu-like wave of electronic publishing. He beckoned me to join this pioneering company that had imported an English system called teletext that could be broadcast on television or delivered on a computer. At some point in the future, this primitive ASCII-type system could morph into videotext, a truly interactive information medium. Imagine typing in a request for information and getting exactly what you asked for! That was a big deal in the early 80s, long before the Googles and Yahoos. Seeded by a management team from The Sun-Times and Centel Telephone, we were a mutt of company. The newspaper guys were hard-drinking, carousing and people-focused while the phone guys were into suits and bureaucracy.
We had a loose newsroom consisting of young journalists led by Mort Smith, an ex-BBC and Channel 4 editor and Peter Winter, a gregarious New Zealander. The chemistry was always volatile since we were producing a product for which the market hadn’t yet been established. Almost no one at the time got their news by computer and only a relative handful even owned personal computers, which certainly weren’t the modern telecommunications appliances they are today. Keycom marketed a clunky keyboard with mint-sized keys and microwave-sized converter that hooked up to your television set. The pong-like graphics improved over time, yet they were arguably worse than the most primitive handheld video game today.
The challenge was all in those pioneering days, which typically ended at the local watering hole “El Torito” with swaggering manager Ben Smylie plunking down his corporate Amex card on the bar and the rest of the staff enjoying the company’s generosity and endless flow of margaritas.
For Jim, I and the rest of the staff, this was an extension of our rambling newspaper days. We were now producing a news product that changed almost every minute. It seems archaic now, but we would rewrite news wires – often from paper feeds – feed it through a technically demanding Atex system originally designed for newspapers – then through another computer interface to be “broadcast.” The whole process was cumbersome, labor-intensive and prone to breakdowns, such as when a string of my solicitous emails to other staffers started backing up. Sensing my immediate and profound embarrassment, Jim quickly applied his technical expertise to fix the problem before I became a laughing stock of the newsroom. Email in those days was a fairly closed system among a handful of people, but more like instant messaging than the massive network system we have today.
At least some of those emails led to more than romance. A beautiful, blue-eyed graphic artist by the name of Kathleen Rose Conlon caught my eye when she joined the company to do an online narrative cartoon entitled “Escape from Titan.” Having just come over with her family from the civil-war-torn streets of West Belfast, this was a breakthrough job for Kathleen, whose family had known Smylie (and had offered her a job at a party). I was smitten by the (then) 18-year-old and five years later we married. Both of our daughters, Sarah, 13, and Julia, 9, have Kathleen’s blue eyes and her indomitable temperament. Had Jim not talked me into joining Keycom, I doubt if I would have ever met the love of my life, whom is still the center of my universe after more than a quarter century. Jim married his first wife Sheila, just before we got married, moved to Beverly and had three great children.
Toward the end of our Keycom tenure, Jim managed to talk me into disciplining our unfettered comedic talents (more his than mine). We enrolled in the Player’s Workshop of Second City, a training camp for improvisational actors, many of whom went onto the big Second City company and beyond. For me, Jim helped me attain what I later found to be an essential life skill – talking in front of a crowd of people. I’ve always been pretty much an introvert; Jim managed to pull out of me a more creative approach to the world. I know he had this effect on others as well.
We relished our year-long training and both graduated. Our “ceremony” consisted of performing skits on the famed Second City stage in Old Town. While I’ve used my improvisational training in nearly every speech I’ve given from coast to coast, Jim took his far-more advanced skills to a different stage.
A few years after Keycom, Jim started teaching (while also doing freelance writing) at Columbia College, eventually ending up as a great newspaper advisor to the Chronicle, the award-winning student paper. I know he influenced a lot of young journalists there and was loved by his colleagues. Jim and I became estranged after his first marriage broke up and he remarried, but I kept following his career and his health crises. Without reservation, I mourned the loss of his company during his last years. He was a lighthearted fellow traveler in an insane world. I truly missed him and loved him for what he was.
I know that this all-too-brief summary fails utterly at capturing the essence of a life that covered a half century. I can only surmise that the impact he had on me was as powerful on other people. He leaves much behind, and all of it screams frenetically to live every day, shout a Beatles song at the top of your lungs, don’t ever think that your day ends when you leave work. Keep on drinking that elixir of mortality.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
The Decade's Biggest Message
Axe the “Aughts:” Network Ecology Was Major Trend of the 00's
By John F. Wasik
There are several scenes in the spectacular new James Cameron film Avatar in which characters connect to animals and plants directly in a sort of bionic fiber-optic networking.
The connections are subtle, yet illuminate a much larger point that was missed by most commentators in reviewing the major events of the passing decade.
There was a universal trend at play in nearly every culture that drove the major trends of the decade: Network ecology. This is the knowledge that powerful networks are playing a growing role in social, natural, economic and political systems.
Let’s drop that silly euphemism extolling the decade of the “aughts,” a bland and fairly meaningless term. Instead, let’s focus on the rise of networks.
Networks are often tribal connections. Witness the insurgencies still continuing in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Somalia and other places where tribalism is being disrupted. This affiliation with the known and hatred of “the other” is in our genome and further enhanced through cellphones and the Internet. Al Qaeda is a stateless network that seeks to disrupt and destroy our culture, which is underpinned by a market economy. Some networks, like those of terrorists, are predicated on pure hatred and motivated by evil. Others are more benign.
Social Networks are Anti-Tribal. While guided by the inner clan in all of us, facebook friends and twitterers are often motivated by connecting with complete strangers. It no longer matters if people are in the same community or continent. We can seek affiliations through these networks to expand the message of our humanity. We still want to be linked to groups that represent who we are and what we believe.
Political Networks are More Powerful Than Ever. How is it that a not-quite one-term senator with no other federal legislative experience gets elected president of the United States? The most devastating financial crisis since 1929 certainly helped, as did disgust with eight years of ruinous governance. Yet President Obama is truly the first 21st-century candidate to have fully leveraged the power of networks. Getting his followers to email, facebook, text and call during the campaign (and beyond) was organized on a massive scale. Even his opponents have used these techniques to divert and dilute useful social legislation. Lobbies are even more powerful because they have the money and troops to build effective networks. We need global financial reform now.
Economic Networks are Not Fully Transparent. Do we really know if the financial system is safe from another collapse? No, because we don’t know who’s connected to all of the nodes of the derivatives buyers and sellers. It’s a $60 trillion unregulated market — even as I write this. This system of networks is still the most potent threat to civilization as we know it as we lunge into the second decade of the 21st century. Banks need to be separated from the buying and selling of securities (bring back Glass-Steagall). All derivatives need to be regulated and placed on exchanges. We need effective “systemic” watchdogs over the banking, bond, mortgage securities and insurance industries. These items are non-negotiable. Since every exchange and market on every continent is now linked, the next market debacle will not be like the Titanic. It will be like supertankers running aground and shutting down every major port and financial center.
We Need to Rework the Energy Network. After financial network failures, this is the most dysfunctional part of our modern life. Currently our energy network runs on fossil fuels that harm our health and hurt the planet. Oil is transported from unstable, hostile places to countries that use it as if it had no consequences. The cheapest fuel-commodity on the planet — coal — is among the most toxic, pouring mercury and carbon dioxide into our air and water every single minute of every single day. For example, one of the oldest nodes in this network — the Fisk coal-generation plan in Chicago — has been running since 1903 (and is one of the biggest sources of mercury in the Midwest). We need to tax and phase out dirty power and re-align our power network with clean energy (geothermal, solar, biomass, wind). To do this will take trillions to rebuild the electrical grid and infrastructure (see my books Audacity of Help and Merchant of Power) to channel green energy to major cities or solar power from outer space. It can be done with a carbon or consumption taxes and political and economic incentives to do it over time. Doing so as a long-term national project, it will also create millions of jobs.
Our Homes Need Bigger/More Useful Network-Connections. Anyone who has computers or other electronic devices networked at home or in the office already knows this, but we can go beyond that. Homes should be cyber-networked into the power grid to tell us where we can obtain the cheapest, greenest power and tap into it without us having to flip a switch. We should have customized information regularly uploaded to us that will help us live better lives through nutrition, social action and community involvement. Being connected to the Internet or facebook is not enough. How do we transform our homes into comprehensive network information tools (they are no longer investments)? How do we put all of that information to use? How do we take the next step and transform network ecology into a positive social and personal ecology?
We Need to Rebuild the Jobs Network. We started out the decade at roughly 4 percent unemployment. In many inner cities, it’s 20 percent to 30 percent (10 percent is a woefully understated average now). I am saddened and sickened reading stories about some person (mostly school age) shot at random on the streets of Chicago and elsewhere. People should be working instead of devolving into murderous tribal gangs. President Obama has the right idea in his “Green Deal” to bring jobs to every depressed area through the use of green technology. This is the best social ecology project we can imagine. Employ people to create useful and productive livelihoods that help the environment and their communities. They, in turn, pay taxes, buy homes, build communities and live decent lives. Let’s fund a massive jobs program. The free market won’t don this on its own. Market economics isn’t an ideology or a religion. It’s a description of chaos.
Let’s Better Organize Information Networks. While the decade was clearly dominated by Google and Facebook, we still don’t have a handle on sorting out truly useful information from noise. There’s too much of it. What’s meaningful and what’s rubbish? We need efficient tools that will give us relevant local news, health information, decent money-management advice and a host of other nuggets that are tailored to how we live and how we want to live. Look at the bestsellers of the past decade: the Harry Potter books, Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, the Twilight vampire series. These books would not have been possible without effective social networks. Teens and pre-teens are still interested in the semi-mortality of vampire networks (a sneaky metaphor for adolescence), a concept that goes back perhaps thousands of years. We still love wizard stories because we have a need for miracles and magic (even with all of this technology) and want to succeed in the cutthroat global/corporate world. Traditional ways of making things like autos, newspapers and books are being thrown out the door. We want our stories — and vocations — delivered with pertinence and a savvy understanding of what we truly need. Look for the completely customized news-mail-site. Look for the novel that’s written based on our life stories. Look for the diet book (and medication) that’s designed specifically for your health history and genome.
Let’s Understand and Heal the Natural Network. I know this will be heresy to many, but in a larger sense it doesn’t matter if global warming is caused by humanity. We are still dumping tons of poisons into our air, water and soil that have nothing to do with carbon dioxide production. Making electricity by burning fossil fuels creates acid rain and fouls waterways and poisons marine life. Mining metals dumps untold toxins into watersheds and the air. We are clearly disrupting natural systems in tens of thousands of ways. There’s only so much potable water on the planet and arable soil. If we’re looking at a population of 10 billion people in the next 30 years, we will need to make everything we do renewable and less toxic. By better understanding natural ecology, we will gain insights into cancer, heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune diseases and a host of other health maladies. We are all networked to what we eat, breath and drink. We have to stop poisoning ourselves.
What will the face of the new networked age look like? I heartily disagree that there is any one or group of symbols that are the emblems of the past decade. A Humvee, McMansion and Wall Street bonus don’t even come close to the complexity and vast power of networks. I would choose an ecosystem like a rainforest or prairie. It’s the sum of its parts and all interconnected.
Without being a spoiler, the success of the natives in Avatar relies not only on their access to their planet network, but their ability to organize each other. Let’s put down our iPhones, iPods, X Boxes, smartphones and charge cards long enough to do something useful in our communities.
You can sit in front of a computer all day long or read a book on your smartphone or ebook device and still not be better connected to the world around you. Really productive change occurs when you leverage that network.
Enter the decade of the dyrnamic Econet, a system of networks that changes things for the better on a large scale.
John F. Wasik is activist and speaker and the author of The Audacity of Help: Obama’s Economic Plan and the Remaking of America (www.audacityofhelp.net) and The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome: Turning Around the Unsustainable American Dream (www.culdesacsyndrome.com).
By John F. Wasik
There are several scenes in the spectacular new James Cameron film Avatar in which characters connect to animals and plants directly in a sort of bionic fiber-optic networking.
The connections are subtle, yet illuminate a much larger point that was missed by most commentators in reviewing the major events of the passing decade.
There was a universal trend at play in nearly every culture that drove the major trends of the decade: Network ecology. This is the knowledge that powerful networks are playing a growing role in social, natural, economic and political systems.
Let’s drop that silly euphemism extolling the decade of the “aughts,” a bland and fairly meaningless term. Instead, let’s focus on the rise of networks.
Networks are often tribal connections. Witness the insurgencies still continuing in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Somalia and other places where tribalism is being disrupted. This affiliation with the known and hatred of “the other” is in our genome and further enhanced through cellphones and the Internet. Al Qaeda is a stateless network that seeks to disrupt and destroy our culture, which is underpinned by a market economy. Some networks, like those of terrorists, are predicated on pure hatred and motivated by evil. Others are more benign.
Social Networks are Anti-Tribal. While guided by the inner clan in all of us, facebook friends and twitterers are often motivated by connecting with complete strangers. It no longer matters if people are in the same community or continent. We can seek affiliations through these networks to expand the message of our humanity. We still want to be linked to groups that represent who we are and what we believe.
Political Networks are More Powerful Than Ever. How is it that a not-quite one-term senator with no other federal legislative experience gets elected president of the United States? The most devastating financial crisis since 1929 certainly helped, as did disgust with eight years of ruinous governance. Yet President Obama is truly the first 21st-century candidate to have fully leveraged the power of networks. Getting his followers to email, facebook, text and call during the campaign (and beyond) was organized on a massive scale. Even his opponents have used these techniques to divert and dilute useful social legislation. Lobbies are even more powerful because they have the money and troops to build effective networks. We need global financial reform now.
Economic Networks are Not Fully Transparent. Do we really know if the financial system is safe from another collapse? No, because we don’t know who’s connected to all of the nodes of the derivatives buyers and sellers. It’s a $60 trillion unregulated market — even as I write this. This system of networks is still the most potent threat to civilization as we know it as we lunge into the second decade of the 21st century. Banks need to be separated from the buying and selling of securities (bring back Glass-Steagall). All derivatives need to be regulated and placed on exchanges. We need effective “systemic” watchdogs over the banking, bond, mortgage securities and insurance industries. These items are non-negotiable. Since every exchange and market on every continent is now linked, the next market debacle will not be like the Titanic. It will be like supertankers running aground and shutting down every major port and financial center.
We Need to Rework the Energy Network. After financial network failures, this is the most dysfunctional part of our modern life. Currently our energy network runs on fossil fuels that harm our health and hurt the planet. Oil is transported from unstable, hostile places to countries that use it as if it had no consequences. The cheapest fuel-commodity on the planet — coal — is among the most toxic, pouring mercury and carbon dioxide into our air and water every single minute of every single day. For example, one of the oldest nodes in this network — the Fisk coal-generation plan in Chicago — has been running since 1903 (and is one of the biggest sources of mercury in the Midwest). We need to tax and phase out dirty power and re-align our power network with clean energy (geothermal, solar, biomass, wind). To do this will take trillions to rebuild the electrical grid and infrastructure (see my books Audacity of Help and Merchant of Power) to channel green energy to major cities or solar power from outer space. It can be done with a carbon or consumption taxes and political and economic incentives to do it over time. Doing so as a long-term national project, it will also create millions of jobs.
Our Homes Need Bigger/More Useful Network-Connections. Anyone who has computers or other electronic devices networked at home or in the office already knows this, but we can go beyond that. Homes should be cyber-networked into the power grid to tell us where we can obtain the cheapest, greenest power and tap into it without us having to flip a switch. We should have customized information regularly uploaded to us that will help us live better lives through nutrition, social action and community involvement. Being connected to the Internet or facebook is not enough. How do we transform our homes into comprehensive network information tools (they are no longer investments)? How do we put all of that information to use? How do we take the next step and transform network ecology into a positive social and personal ecology?
We Need to Rebuild the Jobs Network. We started out the decade at roughly 4 percent unemployment. In many inner cities, it’s 20 percent to 30 percent (10 percent is a woefully understated average now). I am saddened and sickened reading stories about some person (mostly school age) shot at random on the streets of Chicago and elsewhere. People should be working instead of devolving into murderous tribal gangs. President Obama has the right idea in his “Green Deal” to bring jobs to every depressed area through the use of green technology. This is the best social ecology project we can imagine. Employ people to create useful and productive livelihoods that help the environment and their communities. They, in turn, pay taxes, buy homes, build communities and live decent lives. Let’s fund a massive jobs program. The free market won’t don this on its own. Market economics isn’t an ideology or a religion. It’s a description of chaos.
Let’s Better Organize Information Networks. While the decade was clearly dominated by Google and Facebook, we still don’t have a handle on sorting out truly useful information from noise. There’s too much of it. What’s meaningful and what’s rubbish? We need efficient tools that will give us relevant local news, health information, decent money-management advice and a host of other nuggets that are tailored to how we live and how we want to live. Look at the bestsellers of the past decade: the Harry Potter books, Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, the Twilight vampire series. These books would not have been possible without effective social networks. Teens and pre-teens are still interested in the semi-mortality of vampire networks (a sneaky metaphor for adolescence), a concept that goes back perhaps thousands of years. We still love wizard stories because we have a need for miracles and magic (even with all of this technology) and want to succeed in the cutthroat global/corporate world. Traditional ways of making things like autos, newspapers and books are being thrown out the door. We want our stories — and vocations — delivered with pertinence and a savvy understanding of what we truly need. Look for the completely customized news-mail-site. Look for the novel that’s written based on our life stories. Look for the diet book (and medication) that’s designed specifically for your health history and genome.
Let’s Understand and Heal the Natural Network. I know this will be heresy to many, but in a larger sense it doesn’t matter if global warming is caused by humanity. We are still dumping tons of poisons into our air, water and soil that have nothing to do with carbon dioxide production. Making electricity by burning fossil fuels creates acid rain and fouls waterways and poisons marine life. Mining metals dumps untold toxins into watersheds and the air. We are clearly disrupting natural systems in tens of thousands of ways. There’s only so much potable water on the planet and arable soil. If we’re looking at a population of 10 billion people in the next 30 years, we will need to make everything we do renewable and less toxic. By better understanding natural ecology, we will gain insights into cancer, heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune diseases and a host of other health maladies. We are all networked to what we eat, breath and drink. We have to stop poisoning ourselves.
What will the face of the new networked age look like? I heartily disagree that there is any one or group of symbols that are the emblems of the past decade. A Humvee, McMansion and Wall Street bonus don’t even come close to the complexity and vast power of networks. I would choose an ecosystem like a rainforest or prairie. It’s the sum of its parts and all interconnected.
Without being a spoiler, the success of the natives in Avatar relies not only on their access to their planet network, but their ability to organize each other. Let’s put down our iPhones, iPods, X Boxes, smartphones and charge cards long enough to do something useful in our communities.
You can sit in front of a computer all day long or read a book on your smartphone or ebook device and still not be better connected to the world around you. Really productive change occurs when you leverage that network.
Enter the decade of the dyrnamic Econet, a system of networks that changes things for the better on a large scale.
John F. Wasik is activist and speaker and the author of The Audacity of Help: Obama’s Economic Plan and the Remaking of America (www.audacityofhelp.net) and The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome: Turning Around the Unsustainable American Dream (www.culdesacsyndrome.com).
Monday, December 14, 2009
How Big Bucks Lobbies Sabotaged Health Care Reform
Dorgan, McConnell, Lieberman and the Money Behind the Politics
By John F. Wasik
I know what the future of America holds if health-reform isn't passed.
More people will be uninsured. Premiums will rise. More employers will either drop coverage or raise out-of-pocket costs. Self-employed folks like me will either lose coverage or pay exorbitant premiums because of chronic conditions or expensive diseases like cancer (our situation now). More people will be bankrupted. More will die because they can't afford life-saving care.
This is not the forecast of a health-care economist, a politician or even Ralph Nader. It is a guaranteed fact because of the current health-insurance business model, the aging of America and the way politics is financed.
Money, politics and health-care lobbies are in a dysfunctional marriage. It's an unholy union that isn't good for most people.
Claims are losses, in insurance lingo. As people get older and sicker they have more health issues. A vast swath of the population is overweight, underexercised and eating poorly. There's a heap of hurt coming to those who have to pay future bills, which is everyone.
As a progressive -- someone interested in a shared prosperity -- it mystifies me why the concept of a fair and affordable national health program is imperiled. We all need it. To me and many others it should be a basic human right and part of our constitution.
Yet as I explore the ecology between political financing, lobbyists and political agendas, the mystery is solved. Let's follow the money.
When Senator Byron Dorgan's (D-North Dakota) amendment finally surfaced last week to import drugs from Canada, the Senate debate melted down. Who could possibly be against allowing Americans to afford life-saving medication?
Dorgan's fellow Democrats Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg from New Jersey had a big problem with Dorgan. It didn't surprise anyone that they would object: New Jersey is home to more than 50 pharmaceutical companies and tens of thousands of jobs in that industry.
You could argue that the Garden State senators were protecting constituents; drug companies certainly contributed to their campaigns. An obvious connection.
There's no reason to let the Jersey solons off the hook, though. Lautenberg has a proposal to allow Canadian imports if the Department of Health and Human Services can certify every drug imported is safe. That's the equivalent of asking the Postal Service to inspect every piece of mail. Big Pharma speaks in many harsh voices.
Contributions from Big Pharma didn't appear on a list of top-20 industry donations for Dorgan, however, according to opensecrets.org, which monitors campaign financing. Lawyers, electric utilities and Wall Street, certainly, but drugmakers spread their money around elsewhere.
In rare act of political bravery, Dorgan held up the entire Senate health-care debate until he gets a vote on his amendment.
The White House would like to see Dorgan's modest proposal evaporate because it had cut some still undisclosed deal with Big Pharma earlier this year. Nearly every Republican would like the Dorgan amendment disappear to avoid going on record saying that they don't want Americans to be gouged by U.S.-based drugmakers.
Here's another case where big-money politics is completely at odds with the needs of the American people.
I know Canadian (or anywhere outside the US for that matter with national health programs) prices are cheaper because I've priced my wife's chemo-anti-nausea medicines and can save more than half on what they charge at my local pharmacy. It's the same medicine at lower, much more affordable prices. What a concept!
Let's look at a senator from a state with relatively little Big Pharma presence: Republican Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. There are five major pharmaceutical facilities in the Bluegrass State, representing a fraction of the workers that New Jersey employs.
Horse breeding is likely a much bigger industry in the Senate Minority Leader's Commonwealth. Yet drug company PACs were the single-largest contributor to McConnell in the current cycle -- some $262,785 out of a total $416,285.
Ironically, McConnell has a good reason to refuse drug company money. In 2003, the Kentucky Attorney General sued the nation's five largest drugmakers for allegedly boosting prices on drugs for that state's Medicare and Medicaid programs, overcharging them an estimated $100 million.
But McConnell's loyalty to the idea of keeping drug prices high was worth less than a half million dollars. What a bargain for Big Pharma!
What's more important to politicians than getting industry money for a campaign? Not getting it. A half-million dollars is still a lot of money in Kentucky. And it still takes tens of millions to run a successful Senate campaign, even if you're an incumbent.
Notice I haven't said a word about the even-bigger behind-the-scenes player in the health-care debate: the insurance industry. They know whatever happens, they will win big. The current House and Senate plans leave most of the private industry in place.
Insurers -- exempt from federal anti-trust laws -- will likely get even bigger with 30 to 40 million more policies to write if health-reform passes. A handful of companies dominate most states.
While Senators Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island), are seeking to repeal the antitrust exemption, it's largely a side issue at this point that hasn't been seriously discussed.
The House's recently passed financial reform bill does nothing to aggressively regulate insurance companies, which are monitored by much weaker state agencies.
As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich said in a recent blog:
"From the start, opponents of the public option have wanted to portray it as big government preying upon the market and private insurers as the embodiment of the market. But it's just the reverse. Private insurers are exempt from competition. As a result, they are becoming ever more powerful. And it's not just their economic power that's worrying. It's their political power, as we've learned over the last 10 months."
Finally we have Joe Lieberman, the erstwhile independent from Connecticut, home to many insurers. Over the weekend Lieberman said he wouldn't support the Senate proposal to allow people to buy into Medicare, the last gasp of introducing some competition into the mix.
It's rather anticlimactic to note that insurance money was the single-largest source of Lieberman's PAC funding. Since he's estranged from the Democrats -- although nominally part of the caucus -- he's going to hang onto every dollar coming his way.
Once again the corporate state has subverted democracy. Public-interest politics continues to be hijacked by billions in campaign dollars that flow like effluent. Everybody outside of the power circles of K Street and boardrooms suffer as a result. Can we have meaningful reform in anything without disconnecting the big bucks lobbies from campaign funding?
You can crow all you want about letting the free market create competition and keeping government out of health care. Yet when it comes to votes in the most exclusive club on earth -- the U.S. Senate -- big bucks lobbies have cornered the market.
John F. Wasik is an investigative writer and author of The Audacity of Help: Obama's Economic Plan and the Remaking of America (www.audacityofhelp.net) and The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome: Turning Around the Unsustainable American Dream.--
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Copehagen Rocks for Capitalism
Yes, We Can Copenhagen!
“I love the smell of carbon dioxide in the morning. It smells like…victory.”
Have you wondered what’s going on in Copenhagen? Are the usual suspects hopelessly protesting and government officials pining for some global accord that will only protect the Maldives and Banglasesh? What’s it all about, Alfie?
It’s about capitalism. Oh, remember that nasty thing that supposedly was killed by the greed of investment bankers, real estate brokers, hedge fund managers and mortgage companies?
Yes, that thing. It’s still alive and kicking, infused with the vigor of climate change steroids. One argument is that climate change treaties and regulations will snuff economic growth wherever it’s implemented. The other side will tell you that no, climate change is good for business. Let’s start with the killjoy side.
Climate Change Will Depress Economic Growth. Well, yes, it will cost industry more to reduce carbon dioxide production. That’s bad news for coal-fired power plants, steel, cement and transportation, among many others. But it’s not a zero-sum game. More growth will be created in the Eco-Tech sector, that is, industries that clean up dirty enterprises like diesel engines or coke ovens. Ultimately, a clean-tech national policy creates jobs. For every job making solar panels, there are 8 to 10 jobs produced for workers who install them. So mandating clean energy is going to spin off capital investment and jobs on a scale we haven’t seen since the Internet boom (which is still going on by the way).
Climate Change Will Boost Economic Growth. I’m backing this horse. Once you create a market for something, capital flows to it like rain. The Obama Administration has committed$11 billion to modernize the US electrical grid. That will enable electrons generated by wind power in the Plains and solar energy from the Southwest to go to population centers. Another $8 billion in loan guarantess and tax credits are going into clean technologies. That could generate some $60 billion in investment, according the The New York Times. For every innovation in a solar cell or wind tower, jobs and opportunities are created.
Of course, the climate change agenda will be stuck on commitments to carbon reduction. Nobody really knows what is possible because we’ve never sat down at a table with everyone from China to Bolivia to hammer out such a massive agreement. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done; it should be broken down into pieces.
1) Carbon should be taxed directly. The proceeds should go into Eco-Tech trust funds to build up clean technology infrastructures. Part of that money should go into re-training grants for displaced workers and into elementary and secondary education. This isn’t just about reducing global warming. We have to warm up everyone’s brains to the possibilities and rewards of reducing all of the garbage going into the air, water and earth.
2) Every nation needs a national renewable energy portfolio standard. I think Al Gore’s US goal is 20% from renewable energy by 2020. It’s ambitious, but doable if all levels of government from the Department of Energy to local school boards are required to reduce carbon dioxide production.
3) Every country needs green buildings and transportation. Most of the carbon dioxide generated comes from these two sectors. Implement green national building and zoning codes. Stop building developments away from public transportation and creating “spurbs” or sprawling urban areas only reachable by highways. Revise zoing codes for mixed-use development and higher-density housing. Start a massive campaign to convert buses, trains, ships and trucks to non-diesel engines — or at least clean up the emissions from those engines.
Climate change is good for business! Once the major commercial powers realize this, global climate change reforms will be as simple as eating a Danish pastry. Well, maybe not, but at least it will be a sweeter business proposition.
For more ideas, see my book The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome: Turning Around the Unsustainable American Dream (www.culdesacsyndrome.com)
Monday, November 30, 2009
Why US Housing Collapsed
This is an interview I did with Jason Stipp of Morningstar.com based on my book "The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome:"
Sunday, November 22, 2009
An "Eye-Opening Book"
This guest blog is from "In Another Country:"
The Audacity of Help
Benito Beck is quite right--President Obama does want to transform the United States with his policies. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times laments that a political system such as ours with so much special interest money blocking up the works may actually thwart our ability to solve large global issues. Unlike Beck who seems to believe in a libertarian utopia devoted to Jesus Christ, Friedman is extolling the current Chinese system with its authoritarian capitalism. We' ve been here before, folks, when people get all weak in the knees about democracy. That's why I support Eric Holder's decision to try the 9/11 perpetrators in New York City. He matter-of-factly defended the strength of our constitutional system and our ability to deal with terrorists using our own laws.
John Wasik has written an eye-opening book about Obama's Economic Plan and the Remaking of America called The Audacity of Help. ( 2009, Bloomberg Press) Anyone watching the health care debate might sympathize with Tom Friedman's remarks since the financial forces aligned against making any reforms have been awesome. In his book Wasik outlines the basic assumptions of Obama's economic plan and analyzes what has been promised and what Congress has or has not delivered. His previous work The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome: Turning Around the Unsustainable American Dream gives you some idea where he comes from. He has a keen eye of what Obama was and is trying to do with the Stimulus Plan and notes the pitfalls in stimulating a bottom-up financial recovery but sees there are not alot of alternatives.The most rewarding sections of his book concern the making of a Green, Digital Economy and the initial seed money the Administration has allotted for the development of alternative fuels and technology.
For my money, the most important speech given by President Obama was his MIT address where he outlined the transformation he envisions for the American economy. I would rank it up there with JFK's Moon speech. But that may be the problem--Obama takes a long view of our problems which he should but the short term hurt of the recession may slow if not stall the long term objectives entirely. Like Bruce Bartlett in another entry of mine, Wasik also is keen on a single-payer solution to health care, something that is off the table now. But as Wasik notes, Obama has taken on some of the most divisive issues in our political economy and contrary to his critics of the Left have stepped on alot of toes of entrenched interests. To make it to the Green Deal, Obama has to show that his stimulus package does heal the economy and help the unemployed and has made an impact on starting the transition to a more Green economy.
In a way, the whole healthcare issue is not only essential to resolve but also to build momentum for the other initiatives outlined in the book. As Wasik points out President Obama has vowed to cut the national deficit in half by the end of his term in office. While plans have been started from the first days in office to tackle this issue, President Obama will have to use his ability to explain complex problems to address frontally and fully the nature of our national debt. This will lead him into the territory of the third-rail of American politics--entitlement reform.
Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare all need funding overhauls and no recent administration has even come close to addressing this urgent issue. In addition, there is no consensus solution. Not only will the tax code have to be reformed but also the Administration must develop new revenue sources to maintain these programs at the present level just as the Baby Boomers are about to swamp them. This is the Administration's Herculean task if the American dream is going to be revived at all.
The Audacity of Help is an excellent primer on the Obama Economic Plan as well as its emphasis on the needs of people in an economic system. The format of the book lends itself well to following the different aspects of the plan and what needs to be done. The Economic Plan is ambitious and unfortunately it appears to be necessary in all its aspects. For those who want the President to fail, it is a challenge to them to present an alternative view of how to maintain and sustain the American dream.
John Wasik has written an eye-opening book about Obama's Economic Plan and the Remaking of America called The Audacity of Help. ( 2009, Bloomberg Press) Anyone watching the health care debate might sympathize with Tom Friedman's remarks since the financial forces aligned against making any reforms have been awesome. In his book Wasik outlines the basic assumptions of Obama's economic plan and analyzes what has been promised and what Congress has or has not delivered. His previous work The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome: Turning Around the Unsustainable American Dream gives you some idea where he comes from. He has a keen eye of what Obama was and is trying to do with the Stimulus Plan and notes the pitfalls in stimulating a bottom-up financial recovery but sees there are not alot of alternatives.The most rewarding sections of his book concern the making of a Green, Digital Economy and the initial seed money the Administration has allotted for the development of alternative fuels and technology.
For my money, the most important speech given by President Obama was his MIT address where he outlined the transformation he envisions for the American economy. I would rank it up there with JFK's Moon speech. But that may be the problem--Obama takes a long view of our problems which he should but the short term hurt of the recession may slow if not stall the long term objectives entirely. Like Bruce Bartlett in another entry of mine, Wasik also is keen on a single-payer solution to health care, something that is off the table now. But as Wasik notes, Obama has taken on some of the most divisive issues in our political economy and contrary to his critics of the Left have stepped on alot of toes of entrenched interests. To make it to the Green Deal, Obama has to show that his stimulus package does heal the economy and help the unemployed and has made an impact on starting the transition to a more Green economy.
In a way, the whole healthcare issue is not only essential to resolve but also to build momentum for the other initiatives outlined in the book. As Wasik points out President Obama has vowed to cut the national deficit in half by the end of his term in office. While plans have been started from the first days in office to tackle this issue, President Obama will have to use his ability to explain complex problems to address frontally and fully the nature of our national debt. This will lead him into the territory of the third-rail of American politics--entitlement reform.
Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare all need funding overhauls and no recent administration has even come close to addressing this urgent issue. In addition, there is no consensus solution. Not only will the tax code have to be reformed but also the Administration must develop new revenue sources to maintain these programs at the present level just as the Baby Boomers are about to swamp them. This is the Administration's Herculean task if the American dream is going to be revived at all.
The Audacity of Help is an excellent primer on the Obama Economic Plan as well as its emphasis on the needs of people in an economic system. The format of the book lends itself well to following the different aspects of the plan and what needs to be done. The Economic Plan is ambitious and unfortunately it appears to be necessary in all its aspects. For those who want the President to fail, it is a challenge to them to present an alternative view of how to maintain and sustain the American dream.
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