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?

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!

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?

For the first time ever, senior citizens will outnumber children by 2021, according to new population projections from Statistics Canada.

The estimates, released Wednesday, indicate the population of over-65s will more than double, from 4.7 million in 2009 to between 9.9 million and 10.9 million by 2036. Seniors will surpass children aged 14 and under between 2015 and 2021.

“The ageing of the population is projected to accelerate rapidly, as the entire baby boom generation turns 65 [by 2036],” Statscan said in a release.

Canada’s changing age structure will affect many aspects of society, from health care to pensions. Indeed, Statistics Canada said the ratio of working-age people to seniors would decrease from five to one in 2009 to about 2.5 to one by 2036.

The national statistics agency said seniors would account for between 23 per cent to 25 per cent of the overall population by 2036, nearly double the 13.9 per cent recorded in 2009. As well, the proportion of the population aged 15 to 64 – the traditional work force – would decline from about 70 per cent to 60 per cent.

Most of our children leave school with few social or work skills. They enter a society where there is little or no work for them. They are on track to remain dependent. Those that do leave school with social and work skills find too that there is little or no work for them. So they leave.

The looming crisis for PEI and for the Atlantic provinces that have the most skewed demographics is partly rooted in our education system but has deeper roots in the structure and nature of our economy.

PEI is like Greece. We have given up any part of a productive economy and offer only a Disney like tourism and the state.

We import all our food, our energy and goods. We export our wages, our taxes and our savings.

Add this demographic picture and we are bound to fail.

So what to do?

We have to create a real local economy that is rooted in local food and local energy. This creates real jobs for all. Creates real hope and aspiration that will itself change our education system. That will in turn shift most of our systems to local and real.

Food I think is the starting place. Here is where the work is and the capacity building that we will need to do other things. I see lots of good will and support here from all over the place. We are ready to try some experiments. School is a great place to start - school food - cooking - horticulture - community kitchens - parents. This will be fun and spark other things. All can be part of this.

Heating is another. A Biomass strategy is under way. This is a high employment high return idea. There is $200 millin on the table that we spend on oil to heat our homes. If we shift to heat all institutions this way, we will have built the capacity to do this for all. Schools are a great way to begin and two already are doing this.

School can be changed and we can be changed.

(HT Jevon) CB asks us to look at ourselves - the Greek Deal demands the politically impossible for Greece - reforms and change that no nation could accept in a time line that is impossible.

Would France and Germany dare to reform their own pensions in such a way?

Is it all about money? One of the issues that he points out is the historic and bitter tension between Greece and Turkey that drives both to over invest in arms that both France and Germany sell - billions of Euros worth in the last 5 years.

It's all about the money not about the deeper reality.

 View Enlarged Image

Spiraling debt is Uncle Sam's shock collar, and its jolt may await like an invisible pet fence.

"Nobody knows when you bump up against the limit, but you know when it happens it will really hurt," said fiscal watchdog Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

The great uncertainty about how much debt is too much has tended to make fiscal discipline seem less urgent, rather than more. There is no obvious threshold beyond which investors will demand higher real yields for holding U.S. debt. Vague warnings from ratings agencies about the loss of America's 'AAA' status haven't added much clarity — until recently.

In the wake of the financial crisis and recession, Moody's Investors Service has brought new transparency to its sovereign ratings analysis — so much so that 2018 lights up as the year the U.S. could be in line for a downgrade if Congressional Budget Office projections hold.

The key data point in Moody's view is the size of federal interest payments on the public debt as a percentage of tax revenue. For the U.S., debt service of 18%-20% of federal revenue is the outer limit of AAA-territory, Moody's managing director Pierre Cailleteau confirmed in an e-mail.

HT John Robb http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/

Of course if interest rates rise we could be in a pickle a lot sooner. As I look at this chart, I wonder - what could happen to make this not happen? And the answer is......

Reducing early vulnerability is the key to strong economic growth and development

 

From HELP website:

The government of B.C. has committed to lowering the provincial rate of early vulnerability to 15% by fiscal year 2015. This goal is both commendable and achievable.

With support from the Business Council of British Columbia, United Way of the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Foundation, HELP has completed a groundbreaking research project that quantifies the costs and benefits of addressing early vulnerability in BC.

The resulting report 15 by 15: A Comprehensive Policy Framework for Early Human Capital Investment in BC dramatically illustrates why all of us – individuals, businesses and governments – should care about the real brain drain in BC today resulting from early vulnerability.

Here is the 2009 Strategic Plan for BC that shows the goal of reducing early vulnerability in young children to 15% by 2015.  See page 22 Download Strategic_Plan_Sept_2009

Source Jane Boyd - Here is how BC is planning to face this issue - My hope is that on PEI we can make this THE ISSUE rather than the current focus that seems to be about the daycare organizations.

Here is how BC open the issue:

The stock of human capital in British Columbia is key to its long-term economic success. This means early child development is a critical issue for business leaders, because the years before age six set in motion factors that will determine the quality of the future labour force.

Today, only 71% of BC children arrive at kindergarten meeting all of the developmental benchmarks they need to thrive both now and into the future: 29% are developmentally vulnerable.

While the poor are more statistically likely to be vulnerable, the majority of vulnerable children in BC reside in the more populous middle-class. Early vulnerability is a middle- class problem.

A rate of child vulnerability above 10% is biologically unnecessary. At three times what it could be, the current vulnerability rate signals that BC now tolerates an unnecessary brain drain that will dramatically deplete our future stock of human capital.

Economic analyses reveal this depletion will cause BC to forgo 20% in GDP growth over the next 60 years. The economic value of this loss is equivalent to investing $401.5 billion today at a rate of 3.5% interest, even after paying for the social investment required to reduce vulnerability.

Unnecessary early vulnerability in BC is thus costing the provincial economy a sum of money that is 10 times the total provincial debt load.

The implication is clear: governments, businesses, bankers and citizens have ten times as much reason to worry about the early child vulnerability debt as we have reason to worry about the fiscal debt. Reducing early vulnerability is therefore necessary for BC.

The region you live in also makes a gigantic difference in how you will live. There are certain high-trust regions where highly educated people congregate, producing positive feedback loops of good culture and good human capital programs. This mostly happens in the northeastern states like New Jersey and Connecticut. There are other regions with low social trust, low education levels and negative feedback loops. This mostly happens in southern states like Arkansas and West Virginia.

If you combine the influence of ethnicity and region, you get astounding lifestyle gaps. The average Asian-American in New Jersey lives an amazing 26 years longer and is 11 times more likely to have a graduate degree than the average American Indian in South Dakota.

When you try to account for life outcome differences this gigantic, you find yourself beyond narrow economic incentives and in the murky world of social capital. What matters are historical experiences, cultural attitudes, child-rearing practices, family formation patterns, expectations about the future, work ethics and the quality of social bonds.

The PEI Government is getting close to revealing a new policy for Early Childhood.

While they do this, the Health Care Budget hits 500 million and will reach 1 billion soon.

While they do this, we know that over 60% of Islanders leave school unable to read a complex sentence.

While they do this, we know that PEI will have only about 500 kids leaving high school a year in 15 years time.

Who is going to do the work, pay the taxes and cope with all the revolutionary change to come for PEI?

That is the context surely!

Poor Greece - It's Boil in oil (Default) or fry (IMF) - Only Germany can help but if Merkel helps she loses the election - don't you love the world today?