The wisdom of Dilbert
Join in Buy Nothing Day
Since our capitalist economy depends on us citizens consumers maxing out our credit cards to buy a lot of crap we don’t need, do we worsen the economic meltdown if we participate in Buy Nothing Day today? Personally, I believe that the financial crisis we’re experiencing is the natural consequence of Americans and others living an unsustainable lifestyle. From Adbusters website:
Suddenly, we ran out of money and, to avoid collapse, we quickly pumped liquidity back into the system. But behind our financial crisis a much more ominous crisis looms: we are running out of nature… fish, forests, fresh water, minerals, soil. What are we going to do when supplies of these vital resources run low?
There’s only one way to avoid the collapse of this human experiment of ours on Planet Earth: we have to consume less.
It will take a massive mindshift. You can start the ball rolling by buying nothing on November 28th. Then celebrate Christmas differently this year, and make a New Year’s resolution to change your lifestyle in 2009.
It’s now or never!
From Charles Eisenstein at Reality Sandwich comes the most clear and concise explanation of the role Wall Street greed has played in our current economic crisis that I’ve yet seen.
Suppose you give me a million dollars with the instructions, “Invest this profitably, and I’ll pay you well.” I’m a sharp dresser — why not? So I go out onto the street and hand out stacks of bills to random passers-by. Ten thousand dollars each. In return, each scribbles out an IOU for $20,000, payable in five years. I come back to you and say, “Look at these IOUs! I have generated a 20% annual return on your investment.” You are very pleased, and pay me an enormous commission.
Now I’ve got a big stack of IOUs, so I use these “assets” as collateral to borrow even more money, which I lend out to even more people, or sell them to others like myself who do the same. I also buy insurance to cover me in case the borrowers default — and I pay for it with those self-same IOUs! Round and round it goes, each new loan becoming somebody’s asset on which to borrow yet more money. We all rake in huge commissions and bonuses, as the total face value of all the assets we’ve created from that initial million dollars is now fifty times that.
Then one day, the first batch of IOUs comes due. But guess what? The person who scribbled his name on the IOU can’t pay me back right now. In fact, lots of the borrowers can’t. I try to hush this embarrassing fact up as long as possible, but pretty soon you get suspicious. You want your million dollars back — in cash. I try to sell the IOUs and their derivatives that I hold, but everyone else is suspicious too, and no one buys them. The insurance company tries to cover my losses, but it can only do so by selling the IOUs I gave it!
So finally, the government steps in and buys the IOUs, bails out the insurance company and everyone else holding the IOUs and the derivatives stacked on them. Their total value is way more than a million dollars now. I and my fellow entrepreneurs retire with our lucre. Everyone else pays for it.
This is the first level of what has happened in the financial industry over the past decade. It is a huge transfer of wealth to the financial elite, to be funded by US taxpayers, foreign corporations and governments, and ultimately the foreign workers who subsidize US debt indirectly via the lower purchasing power of their wages.
Read Eisentein’s entire post at: Reality Sandwich | Money and the Crisis of Civilization.
Related story: Worker dies at Long Island Wal-Mart after being trampled in Black Friday stampede
So what’s the one action you’re going to take to move toward a more sane and sustainable lifestyle?
Friday, November 28th, 2008Today I’m thankful for Woody Allen
“They wanted in Hollywood to make the definitive spy picture. And they came to me to supervise the project, you know, because I think that, if you know me at all, you know that death is my bread and danger my butter - oh, no, danger’s my bread, and death is my butter. No, no, wait. Danger’s my bread, death - no, death is - no, I’m sorry. Death is my - death and danger are my various breads and various butters.”
–Woody Allen on his classic 1966 spy movie “What’s Up, Tiger Lily.”
Thursday, November 27th, 2008US officials score woefully low on American civics quiz
So it’s not just George W. Bush who lacks curiosity and is uninformed. From Yahoo News:
US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent, the group that organized the exam said Thursday.
Ordinary citizens did not fare much better, scoring just 49 percent correct on the 33 exam questions compiled by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).
The first two questions from ISI’s American Civics Literacy Program:
1) Which of the following are the inalienable rights referred to in the Declaration of Independence?
A. life, liberty, and property
B. honor, liberty, and peace
C. liberty, health, and community
D. life, respect, and equal protection
E. life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
2) In 1933 Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed a series of government programs that became known as:
A. the Great Society
B. the Square Deal
C. the New Deal
D. the New Frontier
E. supply-side economics
Take the test
To take the civics test, click here. FYI, I answered 32 out of 33 correctly for a score of 96.97 %. Average score for this quiz during November was 78.0%. From the ISI website:
The results reveal that Americans are alarmingly uninformed about our Constitution, the basic functions of our government, the key texts of our national history, and economic principles.
- Less than half can name all three branches of the government.
- Only 21% know that the phrase “government of the people, by the people, for the people” comes from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
- Although Congress has voted twice in the last eight years to approve foreign wars, only 53% know that the power to declare war belongs to Congress. Almost 40% incorrectly believe it belongs to the president.
- Only 55% know that Congress shares authority over U.S. foreign policy with the president. Almost a quarter incorrectly believe Congress shares this power with the United Nations.
- Only 27% know the Bill of Rights expressly prohibits establishing an official religion for the United States.
- Less than one in five know that the phrase “a wall of separation” between church and state comes from a letter by Thomas Jefferson. Almost half incorrectly believe it can be found in the Constitution.
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In spring 2008, a random sample of Americans took a straightforward test designed to assess each respondent’s “knowledge of America’s founding principles and texts, core history, and enduring institutions”—ISI’s definition of civic literacy. As detailed below, over 70% of Americans failed this basic test of the kind of knowledge required for informed and responsible citizenship.
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Grade |
Number Surveyed |
Percent Surveyed |
|
A (90 to 100%) |
21 |
0.8% |
|
B (80 to 89.9%) |
66 |
2.6% |
|
C (70 to 79.9%) |
185 |
7.4% |
|
D (60 to 69.9%) |
445 |
17.8% |
|
F (59.9% & below) |
1,791 |
71.4% |
|
Total |
2,508 |
100.0% |
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008
I support Cecil Bothwell for Asheville City Council
The Asheville City Council is taking applications for the seat that opened up when Holly Jones moved to the County Commission. I think the injection of reality that Cecil Bothwell offers would be most excellent for our fair city.
Here’s how Cecil answered the first question on the application:
1. What motivates you to apply for this position?
I believe that every citizen owes it to the community to step up and serve the public good, in accord with his or her abilities and interest. It is the only way to take back the government from career politicians who are more interested in personal power and wealth than in the common good. I was initially very reluctant to apply for the Council seat, but have been urged to do so by numerous friends and supporters and have been convinced to overcome that reluctance.
As I explained during my campaign for the Buncombe County Commission last spring, it appears to me that we are in for some very rough sledding in the near to mid-term future. I believe that the confluence of the bankruptcy of this country created by Bush administration spending, the end of the petroleum era and global climate change will combine to beggar the U.S.
Our entire way of life is built on cheap and plentiful fossil fuels. We tend to frame that as a transportation issue but it is far more profound than that. Most of our food supply qualifies as petrochemical, in that we use vast amounts of natural gas to create nitrogen fertilizers, fuel tractors and then fuel transport of food. Our cars may be converted to electricity, but what about the asphalt roads? There is no affordable alternative to that petroleum product (Portland cement is energy-intensive). The range of industrial applications of petroleum is beyond easy categorization, and the impact of scarcity is incalculable.
Our economy is broadly dependent on cheap fuel as well, with many major manufacturers now relocated overseas.
Click on the link below to view Cecil Bothwell’s entire application for the open Asheville City Council seat.
My application for Asheville City Council « bothwell’s blog
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008Election’s mandate for change includes the dysfuntional American business model
I highly recommend this column by Shoshana Zuboff in Business Week. Her withering assessment of the crisis in American business relates how U.S. corporations have transformed themselves into huge money machines for their investors while almost entirely divesting themselves of social and civic responsibility. Zuboff writes passionately of the need to create a business model in which “advocacy, support, authenticity, trust, relationship, and profit are linked.”
* * *
The election confirms it’s time for sober reappraisal and reinvention within the business community. If you don’t do it, someone else will.
This column is dedicated to the top managers of American business whose policies and practices helped ensure Barack Obama’s victory. The mandate for change that sounded across this country is not limited to our new President and Congress. That bell also tolls for you. Obama’s triumph was ignited in part by your failure to understand and respect your own consumers, customers, employees, and end users. The despair that fueled America’s yearning for change and hope grew to maturity in your garden.
Millions of Americans heard President-elect Obama painfully recall his sense of frustration, powerlessness, and outrage when his mother’s health insurer refused to cover her cancer treatments. Worse still, every one of them knew exactly how he felt. That long-simmering indignation is by now the defining experience of every consumer of health care, mortgages, insurance, travel, and financial services—the list goes on.
Obama was elected not only because many Americans feel betrayed and abandoned by their government but because those feelings finally converged with their sense of betrayal at the hands of Corporate America. Their experiences as consumers and as citizens joined to create a wave of revolt against the status quo—as occurred in the American Revolution. Be wary of those who counsel business as usual. This post-election period is a turning point for the business community. It demands an attitude of sober reappraisal and a disposition toward fundamental reinvention. If you don’t do it, someone else will. (more…)
Saturday, November 15th, 2008I’m back from Ohio
I’m really glad for my time in Ohio. I’m excited that Barack Obama is our president-elect. And I’m very grateful to be back home in Asheville.
Yep, I’m back from southern Ohio where I served as a field organizer for the Barack Obama presidential campaign for just over three months. After weeks and weeks of 14-16 hour days seven days a week, I’m enjoying some down time and re-integration into life as I knew it B.O. (Before Obama).
I’m also collecting my thoughts and beginning to write about my experience. For now, however, check out the following posts from other blogs regarding Obama’s vaunted ground game, and you’ll get a feel for what I’ve been up to:
The New Organizers, Part 1: Obama’s neighborhood teams and the power of inclusion and respect
More later.
Friday, November 14th, 2008CBS News Poll: Americans Optimistic About Next Four Years
Perhaps America is not really composed of red states or blue states, but of United States. From CBS Campaign ‘08 Horserace:
Whether they voted for him or not, Americans are optimistic about the next four years with Barack Obama as president, according to a new CBS News poll. Seventy-one percent of all Americans say they are optimistic about the next four years, including nearly half (48 percent) of all those who voted for John McCain. Just 17 percent of all Americans are pessimistic, including 40 percent of McCain voters.
Eighty-three percent of African-Americans are optimistic and 88 percent of Americans under the age of 30 are as well. While 88 percent of Democrats say they are optimistic, so do 51 percent of Republicans.
Though we are in challenging times, I think these polling results bode well for our nation.
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008
