Hitler arrives at Nuremberg for rally 1933 – another very popular orator

Normally I don’t write about politics here.

But not today.

I recently posted a note to Hoda Kotb from the Today Show. She had an item on her Facebook page asking what she should cover in her show.

Most of the answers posted related to shoes or clothing or divorces.  I told her she should speak out about the growing trend to publicly accepted racism in our culture, with Muslims paying the role of the Jews this time.

So far, she is sticking to shoes. Kotb, by the way, is Arabic for book.

The Failings of Public Education

When I went to school in the 1960s, almost all of my teachers were women.

They were women because in those days, the only jobs women could get were teacher, nurse or secretary. And so the smartest went into teaching.

And they were good. Very good.

When new opportunities opened for women in the 70s, (and I am old enough to remember when a woman going to Harvard Business School was still a big story), the smartest flocked to careers as lawyers or MDs or CEOs.  They followed the money.

In the days when women had no choice, schools could get away with paying teachers $23,000 a year, or less for women, and no one said a word – and they were able to attract the best talent in the country.

When other opportunities became available, the schools should have responded by making teaching as competitive as law, and paying as much.  But they didn’t. Instead, we debased the public educational system in America.  Oh, there are still those who teach out of pure dedication, but that’s like asking people to go to medical school and then head off to work for Medcin sans Frontiers. There are those who do, but not many.

I taught for many years at both Columbia University and NYU, and over the course of time, I watched as the level of basic education that my students came in with dropped and dropped and dropped. They were not stupid. Far from it, they were just uneducated – increasingly so. And interestingly, they didn’t care.  Most did not know the difference between Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, and if they had to find out, they could always go to the web and Google it.

What we eroded was a basic foundation of fundamental knowledge, which by now, I think, is pretty much gone.

And the price we pay is that we have created a society without the ability to process information through any kind of historical wisdom.

So when Glenn Beck goes to the Lincoln Memorial and proclaims that he is the true heir to the Civil Rights Movement; when he and his Tea Party follower proclaim that the President is the racist here; when he fundamentally rewrites the history of this country to suit his own ends, one would think that an educated nation would laugh him off the stage.

But they don’t.

They don’t because we no longer have an educated nation that can process what he says through a lens of intelligence.

We have a nation of people who get their information superficially, and lacking in any kind of grounding of basic education, can be easily swayed by demagoguery of the worst kind.

For two generations we have ignored the infrastructure of this country.

Our bridges rust out and collapse.

That makes news.

Well our schools are rusted out and collapsing. And when the education of our nation rots and collapses, its is a whole lot more serious than when a bridge collapses, or deciding which shoes to buy.

What is happening today at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Dr. King’s I Have A Dream Speech is nothing short of pornography. Public pornography based on a collection of lies.

But we have a public that has lost the ability to discern the truth for itself.

This is how it starts.

And if you know anything about history, you already know how it finishes.

But alas, most people don’t even know that.

But they will. Sadly.

 

I quote Michael Rosenblum in full today. For he touches on the peril that confronts America today.

Can America get its Mojo back?

In Jane Jacobs great book Dark Age Ahead - she makes the point that the signifier for a great states's decline is growing xenophobia. Leading to a retreat into a fortress culture. This is what happened to China and what happened to the Muslim world. Both were many steps ahead of Europe but bothy retreated into themselves.

In the "fortress" thinking is not allowed or welcome. As Michael notes - many do not care that they know nothing. There is a pride in ignorance.

Such a society will look to the simple and to demagogues. Such a society will set up the the preconditions of "Collapse" - a structural inability to respond to challenges.

Don't we see signs of this inability today? As I see it we do.

This is why I am passionate in my support for public TV and radio's efforts to expand their role from providing good content to providing a safe place where the community can have a discourse about issues that are important to them.

At KETC in St Louis this effort began with creating such a safe place to help each other cope with the mortgage crisis. Now we are trying to find a way of facilitating the kind of discourse that will enable America to have a better approach to Immigration - an issue that will surely determine America's future as much as any other.

WGTE in Toledo will be doing the same soon on local agriculture.

My hope is that such an approach - of having a local in depth discourse on challenging topics such as who is an American? How we get our food? Jobs and the economy? Health? Education? Is our only chance of breaking out of the polarization of our politices and the over influence of the corporate will.

I don't see any other opportunity? Do you?

One World Café cooks up a recipe for others to follow

August 6th, 2010 @ 6:12pm

By Jed Boal

SALT LAKE CITY -- A Café in Salt Lake has discovered there's a growing appetite for its altruistic approach to business. There's no set menu, you pay what you can and a national chain is even testing out the business model.

Eight years ago, One World Café opened up at 41 S. 300 East with a simple goal: feed hungry people in the community with good organic food. There was no cash register, and diners paid whatever they thought was fair.

Now, research shows that model works, and others are eager to learn the recipe.

One World Café

Where: 41 S. 300 East Salt Lake City
Hours: Monday - Saturday: 11 am - 10 pm
Sunday: 9 am - 5 pm
What: No menu, no prices. Customers pay what they want.
For more information click here.

 

KSL caught up with the lunch crowd at One World as they enjoyed the best balanced meal head chef Giovanni Bouderbala dreamed up Friday: salmon and crab cakes, organic stir-fry vegetables and vegan chocolate cake for dessert.

The restaurant now has a cash register and a board with suggested prices, but you still pay what you want, or you can work for a meal.

"In One World, we're all here in the same place," says Bouderbala. "We can help each other. Somebody else will drop a couple extra bucks for you. That's how it works."

Then you drop a couple of extra buck for them, when you can.

The original owner now consults businesses nationwide that are giving the concept a try. Panera Bakery, a national chain, now runs a pay-what-you-want store in St. Louis and plans to open two more.

So if our traditional way of life and economy is hitting the skis - where is the new one that might take its place?

I am looking at the really "Old Economy" and the really Old Culture that sustained us for millions of year - the tribal hunter gatherer society.

But I am not looking at it with the view of us living in caves but as people in the 14th century looked back at the Classic times at the advent of the Renaissance. Looking back at the truths, lessons and useful ideas that were forgotten and that could be used in new ways.

One of the ideas that made humans different from all apes other than Bonobos - who also like us love recreational and social sex - was the sharing of food. We are hard wired to share food.

Next to sex, sharing food is at the heart of human social interaction.

One World Cafe uses a business model based on this idea. I see it as a "Renaissance Idea" an old idea rooted in our deepest nature that was forgotten and can be revived because it works and it is suited to who we are.

Here is more on the idea:

The under-30 unemployment rate in Spain has just hit 44 per cent, twice the adult rate. Italy also has passed the 40 per cent mark, and Greece has gone even further. If you count all the people who’ve given up looking, it means the number of people between 20 and 30 who have any form of employment in these countries is something like one in five.

An entire European generation is leaving school to discover they have no place in the economy.

This is what is happening in Europe - the industrial work has been exported along with the jobs - the jobs are just not there.

Is this not true at home as well?

The classic Political work is to get "jobs" but the pool of jobs is empty - unless you want to harvest fruit, serve coffee, kill chickens, blow leaves etc. Even on PEI our "slave jobs" in fish processing are no longer filled by locals but by people from Russia, India etc - people who want an entry point to North America.

So what to do?

I think that this starts with food It was food that was the entry point for the destruction of communities it will be food that is the entry point for their restoration.

Our system has destroyed community. Food is now "made" in industrial settings far away from the consumer - where machines or "slaves" do the work. I use the term "slave" deliberately as people who do crushing hard and boring and often dangerous work for just enough to feed them.

This is what happened in Rome. The thousands of local farms - the source of the manpower of the legions and the votes in the republic - were bought up by a few. The unemployed farmers had to come to Rome where they were bought off with bread and circuses. The now huge corporate farms were manned by slaves. The result - a vast underclass and a tiny elite and a system all built upon the muscle power of slaves and the use of capital.

Is this not our story? We have seen our own equivalent of the "Republic" a nation based on resilient communities settled by people who were largely self sufficient and so independent transformed into "Rome" where millions depend on the system for every part of their lives.

It was only 100 years ago, when 80% of Canadians and American lived this way in thousands of small communities where the economy was based on local food production. Like in Rome, these small farms have been squeezed out by capital and by regulations that punish the small. On PEI there were 14,000 farms - now there are maybe 200 that struggle. The people at first got jobs in factories that made the transition hard by in the end bearable in North America where pay was good in the new manufacturing.

The pattern was the same in England but the transition was harder.

For it happened 100 years earlier and there were on,y slave jobs waiting for the masses or emigration. This was the "Enclosure" time when land owners saw that they could get a higher ROI by replacing their people with machines or capital. So millions of country folk were driven off the land that they had lived on for millennia and either emigrated to America or Canada or went to the cities where they became "labour" or servants.

In time the manufacturing sector paid well. But a new form of Enclosure has taken place. People have ben replaced by machines, capital and by a global distribution system that draws on a labour pool of 6 billion. This is why wages have been going down in real terms for 40 years. This is why 2 people cannot support a family anymore. The result has been that many of us have gone into debt to cover the difference.

This is why nations themselves are so far in debt that they too have to cut themselves off from their people to serve the bankers.

For all those unemployed and for all our children - there are no good jobs that will come back - not with this system.

For the Good the factory jobs have been exported - they are not returning. Now many of the middle management jobs have gone. Many of the tech jobs and even higher end jobs have gone.

Like Rome, there are now only "slave" jobs or TV and fast food and despair.

So what to do?

The starting point is food - as it was when communities were destroyed by enclosure and by exporting manufacturing.

The road home to viable communities and viable lives is emerging naturally in the local food movement. Our food system is always the system that shapes society.

A new system is emerging that is intensely local but with a difference. It is not farming as we knew it but a system of very small intense operations linked in a network - like the web.

If we grow food this way locally all the work related to this - the growing, the servicing, the processing, the sales and distribution - all return home. We start to create the habit and the systems for doing things locally.

From that will grow a local series of other services and products - equipment would be first - but a new distributed model might break the central model for nearly all things. Why not local distributed manufacturing? Surely local media?

A new networked food system will be the foundation of a new society.
It will not be a mandated top down shift - but a shift of desperation. We see it in places like Detroit where the only way left is local. With millions unemployed, how will they eat?

What times we live in!

Nick Clegg has criticised "unreformed gold plated" public sector pensions, as new figures show spending on them will more than double by 2014/5.

The Office for Budget Responsibility report says the cost is set to rise from £4bn to £9bn.

Deputy PM Mr Clegg said that was "unfair" and unaffordable. BBC political editor Nick Robinson said pensions cuts were on their way.

The coalition government has promised a review of public sector pensions.

'Not affordable'

Details of the review are expected to be announced in the Budget on 22 June, along with other plans to reduce the deficit, estimated at £155bn this year.

In a speech earlier Mr Clegg pointed to the figures in the OBR report and said: "Private sector workers have already seen final salary schemes close, while returns from defined contribution schemes fall.

"So can we really ask them to keep paying their taxes into unreformed gold-plated public sector pension pots? It's not just unfair; it's not affordable.

This week Canada's Finance ministers meet to talk about the Canada Pension. It's a good meeting about a real issue - most people do not save enough and most Canadians don't have a company pension.

But what was not on the agenda is what is being talked about in the UK and throughout Europe. People in the public sector have got too good a deal - a deal that cannot be sustained.

On PEI most people have no pension other than the state. But our civil servants have massive pensions that the rest of us with nothing - I include myself - will have to pay for.

What will happen? People will get cross. Very cross. Very very cross.

These pensions have not been funded - they will be paid out of current taxation.

In Europe where the pips are squeaking now, this injustice is exposed and will be corrected. Our time will come

I think that this is a vital story - what it tells us that there is no risk management system that can help in a blow out.

The only conclusion? Stop this.

But then o dear, we are closer than ever to peak oil - yes we are. So the real work is to break our dependence.

This short video tells an important story. Real wages have fallen in the last 40 years. Productivity has risen.

A tiny few have a stranglehold on all of us. What we have contributed has gone to them.

They control the system. As it crumbles and more and more of us fall off the perch, they suck more of what is left to them.

I actually don't think that this is a plan. I think it is how the system works.

We have made finance the core process. Not making and doing things that benefit us really.

So in a Finance world BP is rewarded for not being safe. Its cost cutting pays off in earnings and we all pay for their mistake. BP is not in the oil or the energy business it is in the making money for the gang that includes many of our politicians.

In a finance world, medical help is denied to most Americans because, the Insurance companies make more money that way. They pay off the gang.

In the finance world the defence business make stuff that is not use to the troops on the ground such as the F22 and America that spends more than the next 15 countries combined has the oldest, smallest, and least effective inventory of equipment since the end of WWII. The Defence industry is not about defending America but about making the gang, including retired Generals, rich.

The banks are not in the business of funding new business or our needs. They are in the cocaine business of binding us to them as nations, as organizations and as individuals. They are in the vigorish or loan sharking business.

As our culture has become dominated by finance - the real world - the needs of the planet and of us as a species go out the window and are replaced by the needs of the Capos.

We joke about the "Banksters" but look at the model - this is what a real gang does. They exploit our human weakness with sole goal of making the guys at the top rich.

So what to do?

I think that the first thing is to see the truth - that by using the finance lens, we actually don't get what we need. Organizations serve only the bankers. So as the population grows the opportunity to get decent work diminishes. So as our environment gets trashed, the incentive is to trash it more. As we get to the edge of our dependency on oil, we are kept in its thrall.

Worst of all, the leadership of our states and nations have been captured and are working hard to keep on the teat.

This reminds me of the end of the Soviet Union.

People like Havel at first tried to reform the system. They failed. Then they tried to combat it. They failed.

What worked was that they then stood aside and built a new system in parallel. That worked.

Gandhi took the same path in India. How was he to get the Raj to leave? He could not take the British on directly. He could not persuade them morally. What he had to do was to help the mass of Indians recognize that THEY did not need the Raj any more.

So what to do? I think that we have to disengage from the system and start to engage with each other. We have to start in our small local way to build a paralel system that works for the planet and for people

The oil companies and other giant corporations have a stranglehold on American policies and behavior, and are choking off the prospects of a viable social and economic future for working people and their families.

President Obama spoke critically a couple of weeks ago about the “cozy relationship” between the oil companies and the federal government. It’s not just a cozy relationship. It’s an unholy alliance. And that alliance includes not just the oil companies but the entire spectrum of giant corporations that have used vast wealth to turn democratically elected officials into handmaidens, thus undermining not just the day-to-day interests of the people but the very essence of democracy itself.

Forget BP for a moment. When is the United States going to get its act together? Will we learn anything from this disaster or will we simply express our collective dismay, ignore the inevitable commission reports (no one pays attention to study commissions), and bury our heads back in the oily sand?

President Obama said on Thursday that his administration was “moving quickly on steps to ensure that a catastrophe like this never happens again.” Well, he can’t ensure anything of the kind. And, in fact, his corporate-friendly policy of opening up new regions for offshore drilling (that policy is only temporarily halted) will all but guarantee future disastrous spills.

The U.S. will never get its act together until we develop the courage and the will to crack down hard on these giant corporations. They need to be tamed, closely monitored and regulated, and constrained in ways that no longer allow them to trample the best interests of the American people.

What is remarkable about this piece from Bob Herbert of the NYT is that this is now the consistent message of the NYT - a paper of record. This is not Mother Jones.

What it says to me is that the knowledge that America has been captured is seeping out into the mainstream.

The Tea-baggers may be laughable but I think they too have this sense - their anger is focused on government which is only part of the problem. When they see more clearly they will see that their government is a slave to corporate interest.

Feels like the 1760's to me. A nation that was governed by a government whose interests were for itself and not for those that paid the taxes. The American Colonies paid for Britain's imperial and business interests at the price of their own.

At first it was just a few hot heads like Paine. But as the decade moved on and especially after the end of the 7 years war when Britain had to pay for the war, the injustice and the pain of being controlled by a government that did not care for them entered the mainstream. When pillars of the local system like Washington and Jefferson could see that this situation could not stand.

Time I think for a new Declaration of Independence - this time from the Corporate control.

Jefferson's words ring with today's truth do they not?

"That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good."

Martin Luther did the same 200 years prior when he called the Church to account for their corruption. His point was that only God could offer redemption - not the Pope or his priests and certainly not as a commercial transaction. His point was that the Church had been captured by commerce.

"1. Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said Poenitentiam agite, willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance.

2. This word cannot be understood to mean sacramental penance, i.e., confession and satisfaction, which is administered by the priests.

3. Yet it means not inward repentance only; nay, there is no inward repentance which does not outwardly work divers mortifications of the flesh.

4. The penalty [of sin], therefore, continues so long as hatred of self continues; for this is the true inward repentance, and continues until our entrance into the kingdom of heaven.

5. The pope does not intend to remit, and cannot remit any penalties other than those which he has imposed either by his own authority or by that of the Canons.

6. The pope cannot remit any guilt, except by declaring that it has been remitted by God and by assenting to God's remission; though, to be sure, he may grant remission in cases reserved to his judgment. If his right to grant remission in such cases were despised, the guilt would remain entirely unforgiven."

The green curtain is being pulled back week by week. The man with the white hair is being exposed.

Mervyn King, the Bank of England Governor, summed it up best: "Dealing with a banking crisis was difficult enough," he said the other week, "but at least there were public-sector balance sheets on to which the problems could be moved. Once you move into sovereign debt, there is no answer; there's no backstop."

In other words, were this a computer game, the politicians would be down to their last life. Any mistake now and it really is Game Over. Or to pick a slightly more traditional game, it is rather like a session of pass-the-parcel which is fast approaching the end of the line.

The European financial crisis may look and smell rather different to the American banking crisis of a couple of years ago, but strip away the details – the breakdown of the euro, the crumbling of the Spanish banking system to take just two – and what you are left with is the next leg of a global financial crisis. Politicians temporarily "solved" the sub-prime crisis of 2007 and 2008 by nationalising billions of pounds' worth of bank debt. While this helped reinject a little confidence into markets, the real upshot was merely to transfer that debt on to public-sector balance sheets.

The problem is that this has to stop somewhere, and that gasping noise over the past couple of weeks is the sound of millions of investors realising, all at once, that the music might have stopped. Having leapt back into the market in 2009 and fuelled the biggest stock-market leap since the recovery from the Wall Street Crash in the early 1930s, investors have suddenly deserted. London's FTSE 100 has lost 15 per cent of its value in little more than a month. The mayhem on European bourses is even worse, while on Wall Street the Dow Jones teeters on the brink of the talismanic 10,000 level.

The problem is not merely that holders of Greek government debt would dump their investments, or even that they would ditch their Spanish and Portuguese bonds while they were at it. It is that government debt is the very bedrock of the financial system: should Greek government bonds collapse, the country's banking system would become insolvent overnight. In fact, banks throughout the euro area would be at risk, given that they tend to hold so much of their neighbours' government debt. That, at least, is the theory, but as was the case in the aftermath of Lehman's collapse, no one really knows how great their exposure is.

This feels like the "End Game" to me. At best the weight of uncertainty is enormous.

Where is the safe haven? At the moment it is the US Dollar and US Treasuries.

But if we look at the US - the fundamentals are not good there either.

I have struggled with "What to do?" Because we live in a system, other than retreating off grid there is not much we can do - we are embedded in the system. When Rome fell, you could not have your little Island of Empire that remained safe.

But maybe what you can "do" is to have a prepared mind. If you can only see our current reality as the only reality, then you may not be able to cope with what is to come. You will dwell in the denial phase too long.

This is what happened to many Jewish families in Germany in the early 1930's. You business was not movable - you had a shop or were a lawyer or dentist. Your family had been in Berlin for 200 years and your father had won the Iron Cross in WWI. You were German. Germany was the most cultured nation on Earth. But it was clear by 1933 what was coming.

A few could see the inevitable, that they would be made the scapegoat. They gave up everything and left while they could. Those that could not do this perished.

So I think the "Do" now is to be open for how big a change could confront us.

I see signs in the States that the new budget realities are going to strip out the services that all relied on. Teachers are already feeling the pain. All those who work for government and those that rely on government are going top feel the pain - there is no stopping this. The States cannot have a deficit and there is no way that their income can meet their outgoings. Soon as in Europe Pensions will be put on the table.

In Europe the entire social system will go away. In fact governments will tax and tax but only to pay the banks. The people will only get the pain. How long can that be sustained?

So what about us? We live in a hyper connected system. We cannot escape.

In places like PEI - we are already like Greece. We rely on the feds and a tiny group of people to pay the taxes and we commit to relatively massive social spending. We can do this now because we can finance the deficit. Interest rates are low and the market is open for us.

So when nations in Europe are rated as junk and maybe in default and the same is true for many states in the US, how will PEI finance its debt?

How can we avoid what is happening to nations and states? Do you see a way?

The Harper government is preparing to spend close to $1-billion on security for world leaders gathering in Ontario this summer – meetings in which one of the top items on the agenda is reining in state profligacy.

That price tag is more than 20 times the total reported cost for the April, 2009, G20 summit in Britain, with the government estimating a cost of $30-million, and seems much higher than security costs at previous summits – the Gleneagles G8 summit in Scotland, 2005, was reported to have spent $110-million on security, while the estimate for the 2008 G8 gathering in Japan was $381-million.

I find all this security thing a mystery - why does this not come out of the budget of the RCMP etc - after all they are getting their wages paid - where does the extra money go?

Even if I am stupid and this simple minded idea is wrong - how can it be possible to spend this kind of money?