Got Education?

You’ll have to smarten up to find a productive place in today’s economy.

The old 20th-century way of doing things that my baby boomer generation grew up in has gone the way of the buffalo.

You already know this, right?

I came across an instigating article on Seeking Alpha a few days ago. As I read John N. Mason’s piece about the “New” corporation, it struck me that he had put together some pretty important observations and statistics about this 21st-century economy and where we are headed with it.

    https://seekingalpha.com/article/4290762-amazon-needs-workers-new-modern-corporation?

My take on his presentation is that he is, obviously, writing about a 21st-century work environment in which using your brain will be more important than ever before, more important than acquiring the old hands-on skills that enabled folks to get ahead in times past.

Oh, the developing digital work of our present work scenario is still “hands-on.” But it seems the hands will be mostly on keyboards that electronically deliver commands and programs that will run, automatically, the nuts and bolts, the widgets and equipment that will perform most of the tasks that we humans used to do, back in the day.

This whole progression got seriously cranked up about 170 years ago with the Industrial Revolution. There was a time, for instance, when a man could get on a horse, start riding westward, and eventually make it from Boston to San Francisco.

Then along came the railroads and changed all that.

Then along came the automobiles and changed all that even more.

And then there was a time when a person would mail a letter from Boston to San Francisco. The Pony Express or Wells Fargo or somesuch would deliver the letter cross-country, and yes it would get to the west coast, but it took a while.

A long while.

Then along came the trains, to make that delivery happen in just a week or so.

Then came the planes to make the airmail delivery in a day or two.

Now the message, or an order, is delivered with the push of a few buttons on your computer, or a scan on barcode, along the way.

You know that’s a “hands-on” technology that is fundamentally, quicker, easier and better than the old way of many different sets of hands that set themselves to crank up machinery and maintain it and oil it and fuel it and guide it all the way to some faraway delivery point.

As those technology changes revolutionized transportation, so shall the coming tech changes revolutionize manufacturing and wholesaling and retailing and every other industry or business you can think of, including knowledge itself.

So if you want to prosper in this 21st-century, if you want to find a place in the scheme of things, if you want to “get ahead”. . .

Get with the program.

Literally, the programming.

And this is what, in my opinion, John Mason is hitting on when he elucidates the workings of intellectual capital, which is a high-falootin' way of saying:

Education is, and will be, worth more than ever before. Get one. Learn how to think outside the old box.

If not, hey, we’ll always need somebody to clean up the place, flip the burgers, run the cash registers  while everybody else is booting up the world.

Back in the day we used to say money makes the world go around.

Not so any more. Now electrons make our developed world go around. Learn how to direct them, how to make them do whatever has to be done for profit, or for improving the world we inhabit.

Don’t just vegetate as a consumer. . . eating, drinking, watching shows, fake news and social media.

Be a producer. Make things happen for you and for those you love. Get out there and do it, make things happen. Life will be better.

Glass half-Full

From Grand Coulee to Grand Solar

Everybody ought to have something meaningful to do. Wouldn’t you agree?

A job, a volunteer project, or at least some personal pursuit, to occupy one’s time in an activity that is beneficial to one’s self, or helpful to others, maybe even improving society.

Whether it’s a job with a private enterprise—a small business,  a corporation, or a .gov agency, a non-profit foundation, or a personal pursuit . . .

Everybody finds benefit in having meaningful activity,

especially if it may make life better for the rest of us.

Recently I caught wind of some public discussion about maybe combining this need for individual productivity with work that benefits our public purpose. Consider the prospects of projects that would improve our infrastructure.

Infrastructure is, you know . . . roads, bridges, electrical grids, communication networks, parks, public spaces and lands . . . systems and places, etc. that we share—

networks and common spaces that tend to fall apart or degenerate if someone doesn’t take responsibility to maintain or take care of them.

As I was pondering this idea, my mind wandered back in time to an era in our national history--the 1930's-- when people working together got a lot of important work done by teaming up to improve what was our infrastructure at that time.

Back in that day there was a fella who went around lending a hand in public works of all kinds, and he wrote songs about his experiences, 

Woody Guthrie.

Woody wrote a good ole song about the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River, out west between Washington and Oregon.

It’s an authentic song about a great project. Listen to Woody singing  Grand Coulee Dam, which he recorded in 1941.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vLZOKshJPs. 

    

And check out this pic of what that immense, power-conserving structure, when it was being built, back in 1933: 

You can find more about the building of the Grand Coulee dam here:

    https://omsi.edu/calendar/science-pub-portland-building-grand-coulee-dam 

  

As I was a-listening to Woody’s song about the Grand Coulee, the thought occurred to me that we should perhaps take on a similar project, or two, today—construction of a cooperative facility to provide electricity in a manner that is clean and green and maybe even carbon-neutral.

So I added a verse to Woody’s ole song:

“ In a trillion solar sunbeams of any shining sunny day

flies a steady stream of energy, more watts than man can say.

We oughta build a great collector like the big Grand Coulee dam;

and capture solar megawatts in this great  Grand Solar Land.”

Have a listen and see what you think about it:

    http://www.micahrowland.com/carey/GrandCouleeSolar.mp3

And envision electricity this way:

King of Soul

From Digging to Digitizing

The history of mankind has consisted of humans pulling stuff out of the ground and reworking it to suit our own survival purposes.

As people became more and civilized, and organized, the underlying survival instinct took a back seat to other motivations—gathering surplus, tribal organizing, development of skills and trades, cooperation and competition. . . eventually industry,  government, education, business, recreation, sports, entertainment.

The progressive developments of all these human activities required something that was necessary and common to all of them:

Resources.

Stuff from the earth itself. Raw material. Basic stuff:

Water, dirt, plants, rocks, ores, animals, hides.

As civilization moved forward, these basics were refined by us— reconstructed, manufactured to fulfill the requirements of human development.

The list of basic stuff (above) was revised to include:

Drinks, processed foods, fertilizer, livestock, leather, pets, tools, machines, lumber, metals, trains, cars, planes, appliances, telephones, radios, televisions, computers.

Computers--aha! With these, human development embarked upon a new phase.

Information itself becomes as useful (or at least we think it is as useful. . .) as all the other stuff that we’re using to make the world a more convenient place since the beginnings. Knowledge itself has became a resource. Yeah, though I dare say it—a commodity.

So we notice that over the course of human progress we did move steadily from pulling stuff out of the ground, and reworking it so that we could improve our life, to—

Pulling information out of our data machines.

Like it or not, this is the outcome of human history. We have come to this. Now development is largely about retrieving and using data files to improve life or capitalize upon its developments.

In the same manner as we traditionally removed natural resources from the ground and turned it into our good stuff.

And bad stuff. Let’s not forget that part. Our progressive high-tech life now generates bad stuff. Pollutants, toxins, noxious substances and, of course, shit itself, which still happens every day on a very large scale. 

A consequence of our globally massive improvement project is that more and more persons are being driven into knowledge jobs.

Instead of all that plowing, digging, mining, constructing that we did all through history—more and more of us are typing, cataloging, programming, sitting at desks and watching computers do our so-called  work for us. Such activity (relatively, it is inactivity) becomes the order of the day for us as far into the future as many of us can see.

This digitized transformation of human development will bring us to some huge changes. I read an article about it this morning:

https://www.ips-journal.eu/regions/global/article/show/the-false-hero-called-digitalisation-3050/n

Seeing as how we now have entered the age of information retrieval slowly overtaking natural resources recovery. . . seeing as how we gaze collectively at what seems to be the setting sun of human physical toil, I offer a tribute to the noble enterprise of Human Labor.

This tribute I offer in the form of a song. Gordon Lightfoot wrote it years ago.

It is one of the best songs ever written about the glory of human labor. You may listen to the songwriter’s rendition here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXzauTuRG78 

I also offer my own rendition of Gordon’s “Canadian Railroad Trilogy”, a song that I dearly love to sing.

Gordon's Railroad Trilogy

As you listen to both versions, imagine you are watching a sunset—the disappearing brightness of human labor accomplishment, being supplanted by a foggy dawn of. . . whatever is ahead for our collective endeavor.

King of Soul

A New Bretton Woods?

We were in Rome about a year and a half ago, as part of a traveling celebration of our 35th wedding anniversary.

One evening as we were lollygagging through the busy rain-slicked streets and sidewalks, we passed in front of a very special building. It was the Rome headquarters of the European Union, or "EU".

I wanted to take a picture of the building's entry, because that is what tourists do--take pictures of important places. Seeking a broader view, I crossed the street. While positioning myself and the phone to snap a pic, the guard across the street noticed my activity. He started waving at me frantically, indicating that what I was doing was not permitted.

Excuse me. I was taking a picture of a public building.

In America, we take pictures of .gov buildings, because we have, you know, a government of the people, by the people and for the people, which means, among other things that the people can take pictures of their headquarterses (as Golem might say.)

Is this not the way you do it in Europe? No pictures of the RomeEU headquarters?

Nevertheless, here is my smuggled pic:

If you squint at my little jpeg here, you may discern the guard's upraised right alarm, a gesture of command intended to communicate a stop order on my touristic activity. It vaguely resembles another raised-arm signal that was in use in Europe 75 years ago, during the regime of Mussolini and that German guy who considered the Italian dictator to be his own puppet.

Or maybe I'm being too cynical about this incident. Maybe the guard was saluting me in some way, acknowledging my importance as an American tourist in the city of Rome.

Now, a year and a half later, this morning, seated comfortably in my own humble domicile, back in the USSA . . . I was pondering the idea of government--whether it is truly "of. . .by the people", or is it something else? Is it, as many citizens insist during these times of tumultuous societal change, actually an institution through which the "1%" (or as they said back in the old days, the "rich and powerful") project their oligarchical manipulations upon the rest of us?

I was thinking about this after reading online an article about how the worldwide financial system that has evolved.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/3993559-back-square-one-financial-system-needs-reset?ifp=0

In this Seeking Alpha blogpost, Valentin Schmid, as "Epoch Times" examines our international monetary system. His analysis appears to be generated from a well-informed position in the world of money, assets and power.

Mr. Schmid raises the question of whether the current (worldwide) debt load can ever be repaid, because there isn't enough "real money" to go around.

This got my attention, because I have been thinking for a while that there isn't enough "real money" to go around.

Haha, as if I knew about such things. I don't know much about money; if I did, I would have more of it.

Anyway, Mr. Schmid's question is answered by his guest interviewee, Paul Brodsky, in this way:

. . . "I would argue central banks lost the ability to control the credit cycle. Some relatively minor event could trigger a series of events that creates the need for a sit-down among global monetary policy makers who finally have to acknowledge publicly that their policies are no longer able to control the system, the global economy, which is based on ever increasing demand through ever increasing credit.

And what might occur is a natural drop in output. So you'll see GDP growth begin to fall. Real GDP growth across the world maybe even be going into contraction and that would spell doom for these balance sheets. And this is not something I'm predicting or trying to time at all, but the natural outcome of that would be a sit-down like a Bretton Woods where arrangements are reconsidered."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_Conference

So what is coming is, perhaps, this:

To compensate for a stalling of global productivity, the movers/shakers of the world may construct a new, top-down rearrangement of the world financial system. The purpose of this revision will be to fix the problem of not enough money to go around. Such an extensive reconstruction as this would be has not been done since the Bretton Woods agreement that was promulgated by delegates from 44 Allied nations in 1944.

In a 21st-century world inhabited by billions of inhabitants, our accessibility to natural resources has heretofore been determined by how many holes we could drill in the ground to extract natural resources; and how many acres of crops we could plant to produce food; how many factories we could build, and so on. . . building an economy to work toward spreading the bounty around.

In the future, however, we will be moving to a "knowledge" economy. Wealth creation will not be about how much you can dig in a day's time, nor how much you can plant, nor what you can cobble together in your back yard or over on Main Street.

Wealth generation in the future will be determined by what you know, so start learning now.

The first three essential things to know are these:

Reading, Writing, Arithmetic.

Well gollee, maybe it won't be such a brave new world after all.

However this thing plays out, if enough of us can master these three skills, .gov of the people, by the people and for the people will not perish from the earth, we hope.

Glass half-Full

The American Deal

Way back in time, hundred year ago, we was movin' out across the broad prairie of mid-America, slappin' them horse teams so' they would pull them wagon out across the grasslands and the badlands, and then blastin' our way 'cross the Rockies and Sierras all the way to Pacific and the promised land of California.

And it was a helluva time gettin' through all that but we managed to do it, with more than a few tragedies and atrocities along the way, but what can you say, history is full of 'em: travesties.

Troubles, wherever men go-- travesties, trials and tribulations. That's just the way it is in this world. If there's a way around it, we haven't found it yet.

But there has been progress too, if you wanna call it that. Mankind on the upswing, everybody get'n more of whatever there is to get in this life, collectin' more stuff, more goods, services, and sure 'nuff more money.

Movin' along toward the greatest flea market in history, is kinda what we were doing.

Taming the land, transforming the planet into our own usages, improving, or so we thought, on God's original versions.

After that great westward expansion transference/transgression, had been goin' on for a good while, and a bad while now that you mention it, we Americans found ourselves high up on a bluff overlooking history itself. At Just about that time, them Europeans had a heap of trouble that they'd been brewin' over there and they dragged us into it on account of we had become by that time quite vigorous, grasping the reins of manifest destiny and ridin' along, as so it seemed, on the cusp of history, seein' as how we had been raised up on our daddy's Britannic colonizing, mercantiling knee.

Then long about 1914, them Europeans dragged us into their big fatally entreched mess over there and we went and fought the first Big War, fought them high and mighty Germans that first time and when we got done with it and got back over here the world was a different place.

I mean the world was a different place, no doubt about it.

For one thing, everybody in the civilized world was so glad to have a little peace in 1920, we just went hog wild.

Everybody got out there a-workin', roarin' '20s zeitgeist, scrapin' crops out o' the ground, building great machines, skyscrapers. Edison had electrified us; Bell had sounded the bells of modern communication; Ford had tinkered us into a vast new world of mass production with a horseless carriage in every garage and a chicken in every pot and and we were skippin' right along like a cricket in the embers.

'Til '29, when the big crash came along.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39RKRelTMWk

Some folks said that Mr. Hoover, great man that he was, was nevertheless clueless, and so the nation turned to Mr. Roosevelt for new answers. FDR, young cousin of Teddy Roosevelt who had been the father, so to speak, of American progressivism-- cousin Franklin D., Governor of New York, took the bull by the horns and somehow managed to breed it into a donkey.

So from Teddy's bullmoose progressivism there arose, through 1930's-style unemployed populist cluelessness, Americanized Democratic Socialism; with a little help from FDR's genteel patriarchal largesse, the New Deal saved Capitalism, or so it is said among the theoreticians and the ivory tower legions who followed, and are still following, in Roosevelt's wake.

Well, by 'n by, between Lyndon Johnson's grand Texas-size vision for a Great Society, Clinton's good-ole-boy nod to residual crony capitalism, and then the 21st-century-metamorphosing, rose-colored proletarian worldview as seen through Obama's rainbow glasses, and now the upswell of Bernie's refurbished wealth redistribution wizardry-- we've turned this corner into a rising tide of flat-out Democratic Socialism.

It will be, quite likely, soon inundating the tidal basin inside the beltway as in 2017 we slog into the mucky backwaters of full-blown Americanized Socialism, dammed up on the other side of the slough by that other guy whose oversimplified version of the nation and the world seems to want to land us in a brave new world of American National Socialism.

And who knows which way this thing will go; only time and the slowly softening sedentary, dependent American electorate can tell.

Looking back on it all, today, my 65th birthday, having lived through Nov22'63, April4'68, 9/11, yesterday's disruptions wherever they may be, and everything in between, I find myself identifying with all the old folks whose weary outmoded facial expressions bespoke disdain, while I traipsed errantly along life's way. Here's to all them ole folks who I thought were a little out of it, one brick shy of a load, peculiar, decrepit and clueless. Now, I can relate.

How I wish America could be back at real work again, like we were back in the day.

We've pushed through vastly extracted frontiers that yielded to massive infrastructure networks punctuated with skyscraping towers of steel and concrete. Now we're lapsing into solid-state, navel-gazing nano-fantasies, living vicariously through celebrities in our pharma cubicles.

Maybe there's a new frontier in there somewhere but I'm having a hard time seeing it.

But hey! let me conclude this rant with a hat-tip to the man--he happens to be a Canadian--who best eulogized the essence of that once-and-future great North American work zeitgeist, which seems to be disappearing into the dustbowl of history, because it looks like there's nowhere left to go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjoU1Qkeizs

Well, maybe there is, somewhere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38bHXC8drHc

Glass half-Full

Oh, Give Them

Oh give them some land to work with

and some water to make stuff grow.

Give them some tools to turn the earth over

and push all that dirt around,

productively.

Teach them to Plow it and disc it and

tend it and harvest it

and ship the Fruits of it out so folks can

Eat.

And give them some Water; we need

water.

Oh yeah let 'em eat drink and be merry.

Yeah, let 'em do all that

in this our promised land.

Let 'em slice it and dice it and

multiply, divide it.

Let 'em add this that and the other

and subtract what they think they don't need,

let 'em Seed and Feed.

Let the wise lead,

and hope they've chosen wisely.

Let the simple be fulfilled,

and not by their leaders be killed.

At the Wonder of it all, let us be thrilled.

Let us carve the earth and marvel at it all--

what we've done and what

we've made.

But hey, please don't let it go to our heads.

Instead, help us

Try to keep it in perspective with

some eyes on the big picture,

eyes on the prize

not obsessing with the size

of all this stuff.

Give us some Air to breath

and help us put on some wings and fly

Oh yeah

but help them limit our negative effects; let them

temper their intrusions, boost our inclusion.

We need to regulate it and yet we need

to deregulate it help us

figure all that part out that

delicate balance

sensitive valence.

We gotta prioritize it and sensibly control it.

Let 'em have a firm hand, a steady hand,

but, yeah, a gentle hand.

Let them take care in what they do with the earth

and the air.

Let them share;

and yes, be fair.

Yeah, let us be fair to one another,

and make sure there's enough to go around

for everybody. I'm not making this up.

Let them prosper and proceed

with their plans

but let them pray

today.

Yea, Let us pray.

Hey God. . .



Glass half-Full

The Lady is at Work

She heard America singing;

through two centuries' labors they came a-ringing--

the song and the opus of bringing

a newborn project in a newfound world

'neath a loud stripey flag 't'was unfurled.



From ship to wagon to cart to railroads,

sending out them precious mother-lode payloads

over seas and lands and bridges and field rows--

he hauled 'em in, she bailed 'em out

through highways and byways they sent forth the shout.



Up with the work! and down with the grit

she dug and he hammered; she welded; he shipped it.

Turn up the earth, mine and weld and wield it 'til it fit--

a new land, a new time, new way of doin'

rolling on wheels where used to be horsehoin'.



They rolled up on the far edge of our vast continent,

on the heels of a gold rush at the shore of containment.

Along came the Okies, then Hollywood raiment--

not bein' done yet, we slid into Silicon valley,

so much bigger and brighter than the old yankee alley.



Now what's up with that and where do we go from here--

let bruthas and sistahs step to the music we hear

enduring the pain, dodging the rain, overcoming the fear,

we gotta discover what to do to pick up the slack

so we do not regress, do not turn back.



Maybe we will and maybe we will not--

forge a way past our lethargy, this entitlement and rot

what it is we got to do I know not what,

might have to grab that destiny from some ogre or grinch.

Let's get this ship turnin'--hand me that wrench!



Glass half-Full

the Ole Firmer's Almaniac

The ole firmer walked around the backside of the barn. His wearied eyes took a moment to focus on the horizon; dark clouds appeared to dominate that distant line; they'd been hanging there for quite a long while now. The immediate vicinity was clear, however, if BLS numbers are to be believed. Mixed signals here there and yon. The times they are a-changin', thought he, and things ain't

what they used to be.

The rules of the game have changed; the old computations are no longer working, with the ole firmer and his firm being blindsided by all the new manipulations, robo-washed sterile by robo-driven arbitragers as if someone behind the sprays and fluff were cleaning the clocks of commerce, wiping away the profits, constantly leveling the playing field and rendering the firmer high but not dry, now eyeless in nasdaq, then dumb in the dow, spooked by the S&P, then suddenly swept up again in a flood of liquidity, floating on Fed flotsam, pummeled by day trade dealers punting buyback fluff up and down the field. The firmer pondered all this while studying the broad side of his barn. Need to fix that roof-- the thought crossed his mind for the umpteenth time.

Then without warning, his step coincides with a pile of BLS. Oh shit, exclaimed he. Up on the rooftop, the ever-vigilant barnyard blackbirds squawked loudly, as if trumpeting their amusement at his misfortune. Caw! Buyback! Caw! Quoth the raven: Evermore! Now and evermore! So shall your ascending P/E path be: driving under the influence of BLS, monitored by SEC, checked with OMB, hog-tied with Dodd-Frank, frothing high in P/E ratios, fearless Fannie and fawning Freddie sharpening pencils in the background, consuming FOMC reports, leaning on Fed puts, flummoxed at SEC stops, disgusted with IRS farts and bewildered by WTF surprises.

LOL . . . not.

The ole firmer's labor participation rate was, and had been for awhile, after 89 months of zero-bound interest rates on the downward trajectory--headed south, as some folks say, although he wasn't comfortable with the phrase. And out there on what used to be the open prairie of Price discovery--that old crossroads of supply and demand-- well, it has become well-nigh impossible to determine where, when, how and why, it seemed to the ole firmer.

This is what it felt like, he surmised, to be on Main Street in a Kmart world, then at Kmart in a Walmart world, now being disoriented in an Amazon jungle, no way out, with the Fed ham-stringin all the supply lines so's to simulate demand on a rising level. How this gmo steady-state staid new world of post-capital never-everland came about he'd never understand.

The old firmer would never understand. He felt like the onslaught of old-timers' disease was gnawing away at his youthful entrepeneural sensibilities.

The obnoxious ravens on the roof calmed down, their screechy cawing now lapsing into a low zirping. Quoth the raven--Nevermore! There's no real investment any more. No more frontier, no more exceptional expansion, no more manifest destiny, where do we go from here, caught between rocknroll and a hard face.

They say casinos are big now.

Where's the high-flyin' high-multiplyin' authentic productivity? Inventories high, sales low. Slow go. What would Rockefeller do? Where's JP Morgan when you need him? Carnegie's steel has all been laid; Edison's taking a nap and Bell won't answer the phone. No Ford nor Chevy on the horizon that I can see, thought he. Watson's now a programmed response. Fairchild's been implanted in a solid state econ. Gates is creaky; Jobs is gone-- out there somewhere on that musky dark cloud horizon. What's everybody doing?

Tappin' on chinky glass, devolving in devices vices, sippin' Singapore slings, all sound and futility signifying no-growth, thought he, hobbling along on a programmed 2% inflation path. Old-timers like me can no longer hit the broad side of a barn with our antiquarian projections based on old-school free-market dynamics, rallies and hog bellies, bushels, widgets and gadgets, buy and sell orders 'til the bears come home, might as well lay bricks in mortars with all these start-up farters.

Out on the horizon, big dust-storm coming up. Bulls are at it again, trying to stampede their way out of the Everything's OK corral, but Uncle Fed and Aunt Fannie shut 'em down every time.

Glass Chimera

Them Immigrants

She said Send me

your huddled masses yearning to be free.

He said Lend me

your immigrant asses yearning to work for me.

She calls out for all mankind

have a little compassion willya cuz they need some time

to get their act together, find some opportunity--

to make it on their own, juz like you and me.



He insists they play by the rules

cuz our ancestors were no fools--

they broke the ground, forged their own tools!

She said yeah but that was then and this is now

they just got off the boat--they don't know how--

not yet.

Just get

me some productivity he said,

while masses toiled and earnings fed.



But then the Great Recession changed all that;

by n bye entitlements got fat;

while jobs went stale, wages flat.

All that pie in the sky we be been dreaming of

went splat in the face when push came to shove.

So now them huddled masses yearning to be free

dun scooped them jobs from you an me,

or so they say.



But hey,

it's all good in the 'burbs, it's hunky-dory in the 'hood,

them doin' what them could, we doin' what we should,

raisin' upward mobilitators, squeezin' out them couch potatoes,

'til black swans fly o'er white doves' gains,

and burnin' wood doth move against more-of-the-same.



Smoke

Chicago

I say

America moved, I say, back in the day.

She just came bustin' out from the East.

She came rolling in on wheels, gliding through ship-tossed spray.

She was blowing past some old dearth, yearning some new feast.

We heard her skimming' o'er Erie, Michigan, and along the deep blue sky,

plucking plunder low, grabbing gusto high.

And when the dust had settled,

after Illinois mud had dried,

when ore'd been changed to metal,

while papa sweated and mama cried,

the new was born; the old had died.

Where dreamers come and workers go,

't'was there arose:

Chicago.


Born of rivers and the Lake,

she was cast in iron, forged in steel,

bolted fast as rails n' timbers quake,

careening then on some big steely Wheel

making here a whippersnappin' deal,

and there a factory, a pump, a field,

o'er swamp and stump and prairie

tending farm and flock and dairy

in blood and sweat and rust

through boom and blust and bust.

They carved out block, laid brick and stone;

our groundwork for America Midwest they honed

with blade and trowel and and pick and shovel.

They swung hammers through dust as thick as trouble.

They dug a canal there that changed

the whole dam world; they arranged

to have goods shipped in, and products go.

Reminds me of Sandburg, and Michelangelo.

Many a man put meat on the table;

many a woman toiled, skillful and able.

Thousands of sites got developed, selected,

while many a factory got planned and erected.

Many a Chicagoan had a good run,

caught lots of ball games, had a whole lotta fun,

while working, playing, praying and such

with friends and families, keeping in touch.

In all that we do, the plans we make,

there's forever more going down than we think is at stake.

When people wear out, they sit around and play cards.

When widgets wear out, we pile them in scrap yards.

If we're lucky, or resourceful, or blessed,

we'll end up with a little something at the end of our test,

a hole in the wall, or a piece of the pie,

maybe a nice little place, by n' by.

While Democrats convened in Chicago in '68,

antiwar protesters got stopped at the gate.

Mayor Daley sent his men out to poke 'em in the slammer.

'T'was Chicago style justice: no sickle, just hammer.

Today in downtown, Chicago Mayor Daley's name is all over the place,

though about those radical protesters you'll find not a trace.

So what does that tell ya about Chicago, or America, today?

We're like the Cubs' in the Series; that's all that I'll say.

Glass half-Full

From Golden Gate to Golden Door

In 1903, we Americans erected the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor. The great bronze sculpture had been presented to us as a gift by France. On the inside of Lady Liberty's pedestal, these words, composed by Emma Lazarus in 1883, are engraved:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

These words still ring true to the American spirit. I am greatly inspired by the poem, which Emma had named The Great Colossus. But times have changed in the 133 years that passed since she was inspired to write it; and our nation has changed greatly since the sonnet became an anthem that came to express so profoundly our exceptional American optimism and generosity.

With tender admiration for Emma Lazarus, and for the her verse, and with great respect for all that Lady Liberty represents to so many Americans, especially the millions who first glimpsed her freedom torch as new immigrants, I submit an update. I hope it may appropriately express a challenge that yet looms on our bright horizons.



It's not like a political hack with vengeful fights,

and regulative burdens to constrict our plans.

No. Here within our yawning, paved-o'er shores still stands

a beneficent nation with bright hope , whose lights

form the grid and net of a people free, and this our name:

America. From our electrified sands

glows bold goodwill; our vibrant enterprise, our busy hands

will in time restore this great worn infrastructure's frame.

"Lose, o ye couch-potato louts, our cultivated TV sloth!" we must say.

"Stand aside, but hey!" Give us, instead, your energetic poor,

your troubled masses yearning to work their poverty away,

along the rusted refuse of our landfill'd shore.

Send these working folks, recession-toss'd, our way,

We'll renew it all, from Golden Gate to Golden Door!



CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

Fundamental Economic Growth

Here's the working stiff's explanation of why our economic recovery is in slow mode, and why we'd be better off to get used to it. My theory is that the days of 4 and 5% annual growth in Western nations are gone, for, probably, at least a generation or more, if not forever.

The following rabbit trail of rumination began when I read, yesterday, the article in last week's The Economist magazine entitled Where did everyone go?

In that article, Mr(s)?. Free Exchange--whoever that person or entity is--starts the column with Milton Friedman's comparison of the business cycle to a musical string that is stretched and then is plucked to produce a sound:

"How far the string is plucked determines how much it springs back; similarly, the depth of a recession decides the strength of recovery."

This analogy resonated with me, because I spent years and years of my life exploring the musical possibilities of plucked strings on guitars, fiddles and pianos. But even more productive, economically speaking, than those vibrato years of musical exploration were my twenty-five or so years of what seemed like high-multiplier growth-generating employment: building houses for people (. . .although those first three years of building stuff, back in the early '80s, were spent constructing an S-shaped bridge around Grandfather Mountain, on the Blue Ridge parkway.)

Anyway, back to The Economist, which is a very thought-provoking analytically opinionated publication that my son introduced me to several years ago, about the same time that I bounced out of construction work and into more age-appropriate pursuits such as maintaining apartments and writing novels.

The aforementioned article, Where did everyone go, said this:

"The plucking (a string) model presumes that, after a recession, the economy returns to an underlying trend of growth. . ."

That presumption may have been sufficient for statistical analyses of past phases of expansive American economy. But not any more. The long tails of 20th-century bell curves now morph into new bell-jar graphs, representing 21st-century demographics and new value-added activities, if you catch my graphical drift. And here's why: the fundamentals are changing.

Back at the plucked-string analogy, a "fundamental" in music is the "underlying" vibration that defines all other modes of string activity. Let us say, for instance, that a stretched string on a piano, of a specific length/diameter will, when plucked, produce a vibration of 440 cycles per second; it is thereby named an "A" note, which is the fundamental sound heard when the string is plucked.

Economic activity in the developed world is now morphing from an "A" to a "C," which stands for "Could be trouble ahead."

As for The Economist's analogy based on uncle Miltie's plucked string. . . the fundamentals, or underlying trend, of economic growth are determined by:

"the supply of workers, capital, and technology."

Well, in my presumptive working-stiff naivete, I am going to identify here a fourth component of growth. It is an underlying element--the constancy of which the economists unwittingly assume-- because it has always "been there": natural resources.

Here is what is changing, big time, during our age: Every conceivable expense for gathering natural resources from the earth is going up, up, up.

I remind us of this simple oversight because of this: our basic level of natural resources extraction, and use of the earth itself, is the most fundamental change of all that is happening during the present age of human development. Retrieval of planetary resources will go down, down, down, as extraction difficulties and costs go up, up, up.

We are at planetary peak oil production. This is, of course, debatable, but I happen to believe that we are at planetary peak oil production. For more about that, go to http://www.peakprosperity.com/discussion/81169/peak-oil-science-and-evidence-please-help.

Here's another factor that will slow our growth: disappearing topsoil. We have depleted it, and it will take a long time to nurture our earth back into organic productivity.

Another problem is: minerals. We're having to go deeper and farther afield for every mineral we pull out of ole mother earth, especially the you-know-what one, the one we put in the car-tank every once a week or so. Tar-sands, rapacious open-pit mining and deepwater drilling-- all those intensifying recovery processes required to recover shale-oil or other minerals--they just add more labor and capital expenses. Getting oil out of the ground will never ever again get easier or cheaper.

Another thing is: lumber.

Wood. Here's the one resource about which I have some sweat-equity credentialed expertise.

During the 20+ years that I spent building houses, here is what I noticed, project after project, day after day, week after week, year after year:

The miners pull minerals out of the ground.

The manufacturers form the minerals into concrete block, insulation, plastic pipes, metal appliances, shingles, etc.

The masons lay up the concrete blocks into a foundation.

The carpenters nail wood onto the foundation to construct a house.

Where does all the wood and minerals for this process come from? The earth itself.

But the earth itself is depleted by past abusively extractive processes that generate, albeit along with useful products and projects, millions of pounds of industrial and consumer waste and climate-altering emissions. And processes for gathering these natural resources are injuriously invasive at a more-and-more precious cost, both economically and environmentally. There are multiple issues associated with these extractions that will inflict sore points of contention among political groups for many generations to come. Bottom line: they are another impediment to growth, and will result in slow development of diminishing resources, which translates to slower growth. Witness the XL pipeline controversy. This kind of thing between Greens and Chamber of Commerce types is not going away, but here to stay. Part of the territory.

Finally, the elephant in the room is wage inflation in developed nations, a major factor in the "workers" component of growth determinants listed by the Economist. The long and short of wage inflation is this: American and European workers have priced themselves out of the now-worldwide labor market. Hence. . . slower growth for us, if any growth at all is possible on a yearly basis, while developing nations do most everything cheaper, and using emergent technologies.

So, hey America! Good luck with all that. Better get used to it. Time for slow-growth innovations--work better and smarter. The days of 5 and 6% growth in developed nations are over--gone with the horse and buggy, the icebox, the VCR, cassette tapes, maybe even the desktop computer.

I know I'm all over the map with this essay, but so is the brave new world: all over the map.

And tha's what I'm talkin about.

Glass Chimera

Extraction contraction

When the industrializing European culture hit American shores half a millennium ago, there wasn't much here except what God and the native peoples had made.

This was a virgin continent for sure.

Our English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian et al forebears got busy developing the unspoiled continent, slowly metamorphosing raw earth into commodities and products useful for civilization.

This development process required extraction.

For a few hundred years we were busily pulling stuff out of the land. We planted crops, harvested them, ate the food thereof. We chopped down forests and converted all that wood and pulp into houses, furniture, and paper. We dug and drilled the ground, pulling out water, oil, gold, silver, and iron.

We melted and we smelted; we forged and we gorged; we built and built, strove and drove; we ate and drank. Then while we slept, the wheels of commerce kept rollin' on, while profits an paychecks rolled in.

We woke up on Monday morning and did some more; we toiled in the day, we worked into the night. We manufactured, fabricated, alternated, generated; we designed and aligned, we account-padded and value-added. We sold and rolled. We were productive and we were bold ; we were young and now we're old. Now it's time for reflection in the evening, perchance goodbyes in the evening. May old acquaintance be not forgot, and always brought to mind.

By God's grace, we shall rise tomorrow morn.

But in in our human wake, the earth is torn.

So nowadays we're phasing out all the extractive stuff, or at least thinking about it.

We've discovered the terrible price of tearing up earth in order to pull resources out of the ground for further development. Slowly we convince ourselves that our planet can no longer afford to supply, with its raw investiture, the extractive extravagant carbon-spewing, fracking-cracking excesses of our past. It seems we can't keep going like this without depleting Earth to death.

So we begin to pull back on all the extraction. We outlaw clearcutting timber. We pooh-pooh open pit mining, criticize deepwater drilling, wail over crude oil spilling, regulate rapacious milling and legislate 24-ounce overfilling.

We convert our economies to service industries. Now we're cutting each other's hair, laundering each other's clothes, keeping the books, complimenting the cooks, filling the nooks, filling the crannies, taking care of each other's grannies.

We develop software, digitize hardware; we're playing whack-a-mole with malware, while whacking at the cost of health care; now we're virtualizing virtuosity, corralling creativity, curtailing suspicious activity. Let us now securitize mortgages, consolidate storages, collateralize the debts, take vacations in the sunsets. Surely It's time to securitize airports, containerize seaports, and spectate the extreme sports, while we salivate to tip a few, or sip a brew, and channel-surf on cable, while we're still able. We used to surf the net; now we milk it for all we can get.

For the best deal possible.

It used to be we sweated out holes in the ground to pull stuff out; new we've come to cruising the lanes of cyberspace, California-style, and exploring the overstocked waters of Amazon. Sometimes we still have to roam the aisles of China-mart to find what we're looking for.

But we may never find it until we ourselves are extracted from this present arrangement of things.

Glass Chimera

Who's got the Work?

In the predictable dialectic of American politics, the federal outcome is a burgeoning synthesis of the two parties.
Republicans like to trickle wealth down from the top, while Democrats prefer to spread it broadly from the bottom up. I think the GOP strategy is more consistent with the habitual, historical inclinations of the human race, and is therefore probably more effective. Whereas the Demo approach requires more social engineering and bureaucratic effluence.
Affluence vs. effluence is what we're talking about here in America.
Whether the statist Dems win the day in November, or the individualist Repubs gain the advantage, there is only so much that either administration can do to make an impact on the way things happen.
Our great ship of State is so massive that it just about takes three or four years to get the thing directed in a different direction from where it was headed before all the elocutionary hoopla.
So whether the Repubs or the Dems prevail in November, I'll work along with the victors, and try to do what's best for me and mine, by whatever resources are sent down the pike, or up it, as the case may be.
I of plan to vote for Romney/Ryan, because I want to see our great vessel veer toward less interference for people who are trying to earn a living in this difficult economy. The sad state in which we find our great economic machine is, by the way, nobody's fault. It is what it is, a function of both our collective genius and habitual dysfunction.
I want to see in the days ahead an official encouragement for those of us who are inclined toward less, not more, dependence on the obese nanny state. This is what I think we need just now.
Nevertheless, We the people will choose in November which way this barge lollygags through the next four years. After the dust settles, what's most important is that we pull together as Americans to get this beached barge back out into the channel of commerce. It could be that the very survival of our nation depends mightily on us working together, with emphasis on that word: working.
What is "working" anyway?
Working means you and me finding finding something that needs to be done and doing it, or finding something that you can do well, and doing it, whether or not you are being paid what you think you are worth, because times are hard.
Therefore I say, to all ye citizens of this great United States of America, certainly don't forget to vote. But more importantly, find something to do that will benefit you, your family, or your community. If you are unemployed, or if you are underemployed, you will do yourself and all the rest of us a big favor by doing something productive today, instead of languishing on the couch with a video or a six-pack or a jagged little pill.
You got to go out and git it; it ain't gon' come to you, as my friend Stacey says. Don't wait for the government of anyone else to lay it at your doorstep. Stay busy, and together we'll get this thing up and running again.
There's only so much the politicians and the corporatists can do for you. Really, when you get right down to it, the future of this nation depends on you, and me.
So get busy.
Glass half-Full

Couch potatoes, or real food?

Most Americans will not do the hard physical labor required to harvest our nation's crops. But in these days politicians, thinking that they're doing us all a favor, want to meddle with immigration laws that effectively kick out the migrant workers who perform that hard work. But most of us Americans are just not up to the task. Workers just will not do what many of our grandparents did back in the day to get all that food out of the fields, into the supply chain, and into the pantries and bellies of consumers. Here's what has happened in Georgia in the last year or so, after the legislature went trying to meddle with the sensitive dynamics of supply/demand in agricultural labor markets. In a conversation with Neal Conan of Talk of the Nation last Monday 4/30/12, Dick Minor, partner of Minor Produce, Andersonville Ga., and President of Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association, said this:

". . . that just anybody can come do this job is also a misnomer. We consider these people skilled workers because they are pretty much professional harvesters, and they're even skilled to particular crops. So people harvesting watermelons may not be able to pick peaches, and people picking blueberries may not be able to pick peppers. So certain crews that work in certain crops, and they do that year-round, as you know it's very tough work. It's very tough conditions - long hours. You've got to be in really good physical shape. You've got to know the process of harvesting crops."

When Neal Conan asked Mr. Minor about using parolees to do the work, the President of the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Associations said:

"It hasn't worked out. I was actually one of the test farms that we did that on, and we tried to make it work. It runs into the same problem of using any other domestic workforce: They're just not skilled in the technique to harvest the crop, nor are they physically able to do that work. I mean, you have to imagine being in 100-degree days for 10 hours, and, you know, very physically demanding work, stooping down, running, lifting. You've got to be, sort of, trained, almost like an athlete. You've got to be trained to be able to do it, and we offered open employment to them all summer long, and we had just a constant turnstile of people coming and going. And nobody was excited about doing it. A lot of them did it for several days, but none of them lasted."

The net effect of the legislature's misguided micromanagement of labor markets cost the state of Georgia, in Mr. Minor's estimation, lost revenuers of $140 million, which, when the "multiplier" effect of that money is factored in, amounts to about $390 million. This happened because 40% of workers needed to harvest Georgia's crops in the last year were not there to do the work. The accustomed agricultural pickers did not show up because they were not hired because of bad law, or the workes were afraid of the consequences of showing up and risking deportation. But American couch potatoes wouldn't get out in the fields and gather all those watermelons and peaches and whatnot. In this country, we've traded real potatoes for couch potatoes. This is largely the result of our leisurely lifestyle, and obsession with entertainments, and government welfare that robs workers of incentives to prosper, and just plain old-fashioned laziness. Americans don' know how to work any more. Its no wonder that the corporations sitting on all that funny Federal money are unwilling to take a chance and grant us more employment. CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

Wage Deflation

It is no coincidence that the last three callers--Shawn in Cincinnati, Philip in Louisville, and Edward in Baltimore-- on yesterday's Diane Rehm show made comments about wage deflation, because this is what is happening in America.

The developing world, BRIC countries et al, are now cranking consumer goods much cheaper than we can. No way around it. The great expansion of national wealth and productivity that we were manifesting a hundred years ago is what the emerging countries are now in the midst of. There is nothing wrong with this; its the way the world has always been. The lean and vigorous youngsters have always surpassed the older folks . This applies to nations and whole economies as well.

I enjoy listening to the Diane Rehm show immensely, and frequently. I caught it yesterday while painting and cleaning a vacant apartment, which is part of my job. Thank God for my job.

Susan did a nice job of filling in for Diane, as usual, although no one will ever really fill Diane's unique footprint in public discourse. The panel was, as usual, well-chosen, with Jim, Jerry and Betsy, all of whom are highly qualified to talk about their topic at hand, jobs and the economy.

But the illustrious panel spent the first twenty minutes or so, as is typical for today's talking heads, in the predictable media obsession about what Bernanke said, and the snail's pace increments of labor statistics and GDP and all the gov numbers and blahblahblah.

I got a little upset when Jerry said the major reason we're not getting job recovery is because growth is slow. Well that's like saying the sky is blue and leaves are green. Now Jerry had some very good points, as did the other panelists, points about international competition in business and manufacturing, discouraged workers and their segment of the unemployment statistics, the "sugar high" of Fed-generated liquidity, the "still real dangers" that threaten our hyped-up recovery, gains in the first part of the year with declines in the second half of the year and how that may be a pattern in the last few years, whether and how/why companies are producing more goods with fewer workers and less pay, the necessary once-and-future skills development and job training programs that our country needs and the emperor's new clothes and so forth.

But those three callers from the rust belt--they really drove, and without planning it, the point home: wage deflation. Too many people looking for work in a short production economy--wages go down. Its just supply and demand, as supplied to employment. No rocket scientist needed there.

But its time that some Americans start taking new directions; we need to find something else to do. And it is no coincidence that the first caller, Chad in Lansing, spoke about his chosen field of training and employment--agriculture--and how strong that sector is in our economy just now.

Agriculture has always been the heart of our great American expansion, and perhaps it always will be, because we have an abundant resource that many nations have a shortage of--land. And, as Jerry pointed out during the enlightened part of the discussion--the demand for food is high. Always will be. Not to mention energy sustainability, appropriate technology, etc. which is another topic altogether. Gotta go to work now; have a nice day.

Glass half-Full

Rascals, Scoundrels, and Settlers

Rascals rock the boat. Scoundrels would sink it, but Settlers stabilize it.

The boat, in this case, is the USS America.

The Rascals have sensed that something is rotten in Denver, or in Dallas or Detroit, or in anyTown USA. This is certainly true. But hey….they don't know what to do about it. And since their unemployed, or underemployed, or uneducated or unsettled condition renders the rascals relatively impotent to reshape the world according their tender sense of injustice, they take to the streets in protest. I can relate to it. I was out in the streets when we were in VietNam. Getting out there to make a stand seems like a cathartic something to do; it is exciting, with all the comraderie and the shared suffering-- until the nearby residents, shopkeepers, and civic leaders start upping the ante on the physical consequences of Occupation. Then the cops hype their heretofore patient vigilance into riot-gear insensibility.

Behind the scenes, chronic malcontents would manipulate the wandering rascals, maneuvering their newfound funk toward some kind of revolution, as yet unfocused. Maybe its Lennon's revolution, or Lenin's, or Marx's, or Stephen Lerner's, Naomi’s, or David’s, who knows.

There is a lot to be upset about, for sure. The rascals are enraged about the greedy corporations, mad at the mediocre politicians, intimidated by the police, yeah yeah. They screw you, yeah yeah yeah. A witch's brew of issues boil up here: the destabilizing consequences of competing globalized economies, inequality, outsourcing, bailouts for the 1%, outlandish executive bonuses, unpayable student loans, epidemic foreclosures, environmental degradation, polluted groundwaters, obsessive plastic lifestyles, plastic garbage in the Pacific, filthy pipelines, fracking, fricking...

It is true that we Americans need to be roused, before it is too late, out of our hydrocarbon/carbohydrate stupor, part of which is our self-immolating oil addiction. Our petrochemical habit is a dependency that has economically castrated this formerly-great nation's independence, and greased us down into a red-light slow-idle energy complacency, comfortably numbed by an obsessive compulsion for visual and audial stimulation.

Up on Capitol Hill-- where the WallStreet lobbying 1% conduct their dissonant orchestrations of unfunded mediocrity, the politicians pontificate about a lot of smokescreen issues. For instance, the so-called Solyndra-gate.

This is political grandstanding is dangerous. Their disengenuous inquisitions distract us from some imminent good news: New American job-creating possibilities are actually being worked on, even as we speak, if the government does not obstruct.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, somewhere in America a few enterprising business people have, believe it or not, quietly settled into the tasks of doing what needs to be done.

… like, heating up technologies to elevate us out self-destructive oil addiction.

Yesterday, while up on a roof clearing gutters, I heard on the radio about two trailblazing west coast solar-tech producers. Although Solar World and Solaria are not the the only two companies breaking new industrial ground, they are quietly settling us into a homesteading path that leads to real solar-tech cost-reduction productivity. Very soon (if not already), these manufacturers will, with a little help from their many power-hungry friends (US consumers), mass-produce photovoltaic roof- panels on an unprecedented scale. Affordability for John and Jane Doe will be the outcome.

I tuned into the ear-opening update about Solar World and Solaria yesterday while listening to NPR's ScienceFriday. As it happened, Ira Flatow's enquiry to the companies' respective spokesmen, Gordon Binser and Dan Shugar, focused largely on a side issue; the issue was what Gordon Binser calls "illegally subsidized" Chinese dumping of artificially cheapened solar panels. But the entirety of thieir podcast discussion reveals far more than a cordial dispute between two industry leaders about trade strategies. A half-hour listen draws us into a persuasive force field of updated solar capabilities. For instance, according to Dan Shugar and Gordon Binser:

~100,000 people are employed in US solar industry today. That's more folks than are working in coal mines, and more than in steel mills.

~The industry grew by 69% last year.

~5000 companies are involved in solar technology here today.

~Labor expense is only 10% of the cost of solar panels. So the issue of Chinese (or developing nations) competition is not as difficult as we might at first think.

~The relative fragility of glass panels reinforces the logic of domestic production and distribution.

~Actual production levels of rooftop electricity are approaching (or already at) a scale that is competitive with other power-generating sources such as nuclear and coal.

~Last year, the solar industry in USA installed, operated and delivered 17 Gigawatts of electricity, the equivalent of 17 nuclear power plants in the middle of a day.

~In the summertime, there is a direct, favorable correlation between solar energy supply and the peak power demand occasioned by widespread air-conditioning.

~When smartly integrated, individual home installations (or institutional ones) can be connected to our existing power infrastructure (with modifications) to inject electricity into the cumulative power grid. Thus, consumers can become net PRODUCERS of electrical power at certain times of the day, thus lowering their electric bills.

~As demand for solar installations has grown, the cost-reduction curve has followed the same pattern of cell phones, computers, and dvd players. Bet you didn't know that, huh?

~Solar World has over 1000 employees in Oregon, and has been making photovoltaic panels for over 35 years.

~In Germany, there are some peak-demand times when 40% of contributed electrical input is being generated by solar panels.

I was quite impressed with all these statistics, both yesterday as I heard Dan and Gordon list them for Ira on the radio, and this morning when I replayed the ScienceFriday podcast.

So hey! In the turbidity of all this stir-crazy Occupy controversy, and right in the middle of the bad banking news and European woes, here we find some very real, very timely good news about newfound American industrial innovation, and developing job opportunities on the dark-cloud horizon, maybe even on your community’s own rooftops.

What Dan and Gordon communicated to Ira really comes down to this: the time for cost-effective solar design and application is no longer future. It is now. This is one sector of manufacturing that the Chinese will not be able to dominate, because our automated capabilities can effectively competetive with developing-world low-wage production expense (which is only 10% of a solar panels cost).

And everybody needs a little sustainable wattage.

So, all you angst-ridden discontented shivering souls out there--

Before you Occupy the frigid streets and possibly get thereby injured, infected or arrested, think about a productive alternative:

Occupy, for an hour or two while you fill out the application, the human resources foyer of your local appropriate technology producer. If you don't find one locally, maybe you'd become the entrepreneur-installer to heat up this movement in your community. Perhaps you'd be the first one in your community to capitalize on this work--work that really needs to be done if America is going to continue to Occupy its Can-do legacy. The time to Occupy energy independence is now.

Think about it. Like Ira mused yesterday: we Americans invented the light bulb; we invented the energy-generating solar roof panel.

What’s the next thing (or process, or service) we need to invent to light our way out of this oil-pit we’ve dug ourselves into?

Glass half-Full

The Working Principle of Jubilee

In ancient Israel, the land was understood to be a posession of God, with its owners being stewards, or caretakers. When a parcel was sold by one Israelite to another, its transferrence was considered a lease of the land's use--that is to say, a sale of future crops therein--not an absolute ownership, since that domain was reserved to the Creator alone.

In order that the people of God might establish a manageable economy, their Creator mandated a fifty year cycle--a system of seven revolving seven-year periods, plus one extra year, later called the (50th) year of "jubilee." By this revolving arrangement the natural inclination of human productivity toward inflation would be neutralized with a built-in systematic deflation. A sale of land in year 1 of the cycle would obstensibly be worth 49 times its value in year 49, since 49 prospective crops were understood to be the virtual substance of the transaction.

Furthermore, the working out of this economy also required that existing debts among Israelites be cancelled every seven years, and also that indentured servants or slaves be freed in that same seventh (sabbath) year. In the 50th year, at the end of the cycle, the land itself was returned to its original family of ownership of fifty years ago.

By this means, incentives for upward mobility of productive people were woven into the economy, and periodic debt forgiveness eliminated accruals of huge, unsurmountable debt among the working people. Accumulations of vast landed estates and monopolistic entities were also prevented, if the system was working as the Creator had designed it.

In this way, the followers of God were set up to prosper, both individually, familially, and collectively, according to the respective levels of their own chosen productivity and stewardship. And a constant deliverance of the poverty-stricken (unemployed) persons from a poorhouse fate would preclude a permanant underclass.

In real time, it didn't exactly work out that way, but the theoretical principles of Sabbaths, Jubilee, systematic deflation (not as bad as it sounds), and debt forgiveness might be worth considering in light of our presently hyper-leveraged circumstances.

The principle of regular sabbath renewals goes back to God's original creative work as it is figuratively documented in Genesis. God revealed himself to humans as a Creator. A definitive part of that creative process included rest and introspective recovery for the sake of developmentally corrective alignment.

If you care to learn more about this divine economy, and perhaps to consider its applications to modern existence, read Leviticus 25 and Deutoronomy 15, in the Bible.

Glass half-Full

Shovel-ready? Hammer down

In the early 1980s, I worked with a large crew of men to construct the Linn Cove Viaduct. This massively intricate bridge project was a missing link to connect the two halves of the formerly uncompleted Blue Ridge Parkway. It was a long roadway which had begun during the Roosevelt New Deal jobs program in the 1930s; we finally finished the job in the 1980s during the Reagan years. The parkway wound through the Appalachians in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia.

This is funny, in an ironic way. The bridge's construction had been initiated by the granddaddy of American Democratic Keynesian Liberal Make-work Jobs programs, Franklin Delano Roosevelt; but its completion almost fifty years later was achieved during the administration of that great uncle of American Conservative Republican Trickle-down FreeMarket productivity, Ronald Reagan. I see some common ground there.

It must have been the presence of a rugged mile-high mountain (called Grandfather) in North Carolina, and a world war, that had prevented completion of the Parkway under the New Deal. But that was ok with me and the several hundred other guys who finished the job back in '85 or so. We were fortunate to have had the opportunity to do the work, and thus provide meat and bread, homes, paid light bills and so forth for our families during those years.

After that job, boy, was I in for a long string of years learning lessons in the school of had knocks. But Pat and I, managed, by God's grace and all that sweat equity, along with her embarkation on a nursing career, to get the three young'uns raised and off to Duke and Carolina. 'T'weren't easy, though.

But I was thinking, this morning, August 6, 2011, about that great public works project in which I played a part back in the day. Although I had been a student of English Literature, Political Science, and cannabis at LSU about a decade earlier, and although I had spent a few years after that selling debit insurance, newspaper classified advertising, and printing, I had drifted into the construction trades because--long story short--I was tired of using my mind instead of my hands. But of course I was yet to learn what "tired" is really all about.

All the current discussion about JobsJobsJobs! got me thinking about this. After hearing Democrats theorize these last few months about the FedFix making jobs, and shovel-ready jobs and infrastructure and why-cant-we-do-it-in-the-road projects like the WPA and like Interstate Highway constructions beginning with Eisenhower and so forth, and after hearing the Republicans wax eloquent about Main Street and balanced budgets and job-creators and free markets and efficiency and productivity and so forth, I woke up this morning thinking about that amazing work we did on Grandfather Mountain to finish the Blue Ridge Parkway, back in the day.

Believe me, it was no "shovel-ready" project. In fact, I'm wondering about this whole idea of shovel-ready, and make-work for the sake of keeping unemployment levels down.

The Linn Cove Viaduct on Grandfather Mountain, about twenty miles from where I live, was an astounding feat of engineering expertise. The design and calculations for that bridge had required, I am quite sure, years of preparation. As a novice steel worker--what they call a "rodbuster" who ties rebars together with steel wire--I had nothing to do with the brains part of the work. And I had nothing to do with the "shovel" part of the work either. I just did my job tieing steel, 40 hours a week, until all 53 segments of the 1/4 mile structure had been assembled and passed along to the concrete crew.

After each of those multi-ton segments had been intricately constructed in steel and concrete, with varying specifications in each segment determined according to each segment's unique position in the 1/4 mile S-curve--after all that--the huge pieces were taken on even huger trucks out to the bridge site on the side of the rocky mountain. And since there were, in the 1/4-mile length of the bridge, only seven direct-support points, an elaborate system of high-tension cables was strewn through the entire structure as it was being built to keep the thing up in the air.

And a multi-ton crane was driven out onto the cantilevered, epoxy-glued, cable-held roadway-in-mid-air with support at only one end, until seven segments had been erected and the next support structure was reached.

Maybe you didn't follow all that, but perhaps you will believe me when I say this: what men and women have figured out how to do on the face of this God's green earth--and what they subsequently do--is amazing, and seems miraculous. Furthermore, as this bridge project was an example of what humans can do in massively intricate works of concrete and steel, consider this:

The nano-projects we undertake beneath the world of electron microscopes and DNA and gene-snipping, and laboring viruses, amino acids, and polymers among the electrons with quarks and neutrinos and so forth is perhaps even more amazing. But I'll not go there, as if I could.

For general improvement of the human condition, we have a lot of work out there that needs to be done. Its good work, if you can get it. But so much of it, especially these days, is for smart people, skilled people, in this age of pioneering technology. If we can find ways--whether by FedFix make-work infrastructure projects or by MainStreet SmallBusiness, or by some combination thereof, I know not--we can make the employment happen. Perhaps we can make connections between the work that truly needs to be done and those skilled workers who are properly trained to design the work, engineer it, and then do the work, and thus keep unemployment numbers down to reasonable levels.

As for the unskilled folks, I'm not so sure how we'll keep so many of them busy. We make wisecracks about MickeyD's and the everybody's-favorite-store-to-hate-even-as-we-shop-there. But I do know this. Everybody has to eat. And I'm not convinced that it is FedFix's constitutionally-mandated responsibility to feed all these people, and pay their mortgages and light bills and flat-screen tvs and cellphones and whatnot. Such a massive undertaking is, as they say, unsustainable. Not only that, but its downright socialistic, and counterproductive in terms of inspiring the much-needed innovation and creative systemic improvements.

I suggest its time for unskilled folks to get back to the land. Grow food for yourself, your family, your community, instead of buying it all from bigbox stores that have been supplied by fleets of petroleum-spewing trucks that may be carrying suspect salmonella in their highly-processed payloads. This is advisable for skilled workers and educated people as well, if you have time. You might need to cut down on the tv time.

And while you're tending the garden, take some time out of the hot sun to do courses at your local community college or university. Therby, you may learn how to make this nation, and this world, a better place.

Glass Chimera

The Mistake of 1937 in 2011?

So Paul Krugman points out, along with many other economists these days, that our nation is in a tight spot. We are suspended, as it were, on a sort of precarious ridge. On one side is a dangerous trough of unemployment into which millions of people are falling. On the other is chasm of fiscal irresponsibility because we're spending more $$ than we gather. Mr. Krugman is of the Keynsian school which says that if we don't put people to work we are in big trouble and will yet be in bigger trouble as more and more folks find themselves without a job.

On the other hand, say the fiscal conservatives, if we don't balance the budget, or at least move in that direction, we slide off into the irrecoverable condition of national default and larger levels of financial collapse than we've already inflicted upon ourselves.
Mr. Krugman, referencing Gauti Eggertsson, adroitly points out that this situation is similar to the dilemma we faced in an earlier era, 74 years ago, and he refers to that unfortunate chain of events as "the mistake of 1937."

And that mistake was, as nearly as I can surmise without taking sufficient time to research the subject (because I don't have the time and because I'm not an economist anyway but I am a citizen taxpayer so I'm qualified to have an opinion and this is it)-- the mistake was that Congress chose to address the fiscal problem instead of the unemployment problem and thereby plunged our national condition into deeper trouble. That's this layman's uninformed, oversimplified statement of an admittedly very complicated problem.

Anyway, as a result of Congress' fiscal budget-cutting back in '37, the dreaded "double-dip" recession followed, says Mr. Krugman, in '38 instead of recovery. The historical lesson is that the same unfortunate outcome will happen now if we don't learn from their 1937 bad decision and, instead, spend some money to get the unemployed working again.
As if that could happen.
As if we could really get this nation working again by passing federal reserve notes around. Yes, maybe we can keep the monthly numbers juggled in mid-air for awhile.
But there is the supposition of Keynsians-- the unsustainable "mistake" of pump-priming deficit-riding economics--that the government can get the people working again.

No, it aint gonna happen, because it is not the government that fundamentally will put people back to work doing things like what they used to do back in the day. And maybe even corporate America can't get the damn thing going again because they're too busy investing in overseas stocks and BRIC 'n mortar industries, and circulating credit default licenses among themselves.

So maybe the Dems are right about the self-absorbed condition of corporate America; and maybe the Repubs are right about gov being the problem. Maybe every contender in this national roller derby has a little chunk of truth somewhere.

But what are people doing?
Back in the day, our ancesters, our forefathers and foremothers, spent entire generations, entire decades, and yea, I say unto thee, entire centuries, extracting stuff from the ground and turning it into finished products and then selling those products to each other. And we did it here in the USA in an exceptional way, with an unprecedented rapidity, because those enterprising European ancestors of ours had embarked on an undeveloped continent just shortly before the industrial revolution was dawning on mama England and her civilized contintental neighbors .

Forthwith, all that industrializing force, enhanced exponentially with cutting-edge mechanical might and hence newfound productivity, was unleashed upon God's green earth, America, in a way that had never happened before and never will again.

There was an awful lot of work to be done, and a lot of folk did it and it was great while it lasted but then we figured out, and I believe correctly, that the extractive demands on our planet were unsustainable at those previous levels of depletion, and so now we're in a kind of shell shock and trying to figure out what direction to take. While meanwhile back at the ranch, and perched precariously on that previously-mentioned precipice, we find ourselves confounded the fallacious decision of with whether to put people to work or to balance the budget.
Remember this, Paul. In the really big picture, people make work, and governments make budgets. Sooner or later we've got to get back to that reality check--which is not an unemployment check , nor is it a paycheck-- or we'll make the mistake of 2011 and 2020.

And guess what. It is a mistake either way! No way around this problem. We've got to take a hit, bite the bullet, take the bull by the horns. Furthermor, Bubby, there will be sacrifices and belt-tightening and defeating of obesity and tossing out of rotten couch potatoes, and there will be folks out of work for a long time and there will be deficits, and one way or another there will be defaults somewhere or perhaps even everywhere.

Bottom line: People have got to find something to do. People, not their governments. Its up to us. Nanny State and Big Brother are hooked up to a federal I-Vee, presently incapacitated or headed toward that medicared condition, and folks will be required to once again, as has happened before in the history of the world, find some work to do to keep themselves alive and functioning.

What are people doing?
What are you doing, you citizen of the United States of America?
Look around your home, your community, and see what needs to be done. Then do it. The unemployment checks cannot roll into your mailbox with a 44-cent stamp forever. Moreover, those weekly/monthly numbers that the gov and the media churn out don't really solve anybody's problems; they just give us something to wring our hands about, and a few excuses every now and then to explain our mounting dysfunction.

People solve problems. Are you a people? Are you hungry? Grow some food, even if its just a tomato or two in your window. Learn what is means to grow something from a seed, or what it means to build something from scratch. Begin something. Get to work, y'all. We're not going to move off this precipice without some blood, sweat and many tears.

Glass half-Full