Prepare for Change

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1658818436/symbionomics-stories-of-a-new-economy I don't know who these people are, but I like the project. Internet Collective Action is a favorite subject of mine (see http://www.lisamcpherson.org/pc.htm). It's a quick and cheap way for like-minded people to collaborate on any type of project. If there's a way to make that even easier, I'm all for it.

http://io9.com/5720871/2000-vs-2010-how-the-world-has-changed Things have changed much more than you may realize in just 10 years. Cell phones, fast internet connections, and urbanization have grown quickly. What will the next decade bring?

50 million of us don't have health care ( http://www.kff.org/uninsured/7451.cfm ) 40 million of us use food stamps ( http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6465E220100507 ) We rank 30th in infant mortality ( http://www.healthnews.com/infant-mortality-rates-us-ranks-poorly-among-industrialized-nations ) Our students rank 17th in science ( http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-12-07-us-students-international-ranking_N.htm ) And yet, we have 57,000 troops defending Germany ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_deployments#cite_note-siadapp.dmdc.osd.mil-1 ) NASA had to spend $500 million on a project it wanted to drop ( http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/12/nasa_forced_to_pour_nearly_500m_into_nixed_rocket.php ) We're doing it to ourselves. We could be spending our money on health (BETTER! We spend much more per patient than any other country), education, and infrastructure. Instead we spend it on wasteful big projects, like $100 billion on a miss...

http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/09/clay-shirky-let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom-to-replace-newspapers-dont-build-a-paywall-around-a-public-good/ I love Clay Shirky. He distills information and comes up with a completely different way of looking at things. And then his ideas seem like common sense. Shirky thinks the current, 20th century format for newspapers will never last. There's no point in even trying to keep that idea going. The Internet gives you the precise information you want, rather than having you buy the classifieds, news, etc. when perhaps all you want is the sports. Advertising is mostly going to the Internet as well, so the income stream for newspapers is dwindling. In this article, the big question is, who will pay for investigative journalism? If newspapers can't afford reporters anymore, who will do the reporting? There are many possible answers to that, and Shirky essentially says let's try out as many as we can and see which ones work. Meanwhile, propubli...

http://bit.ly/hzn3KL This seems so simple to me. If a tiny minority hoard the money supply, then there is no money circulating. Just like blood in our bodies, money has to circulate to keep an economy going. So giving those minority of hoarders a tax BREAK is the opposite of what needs to be done to get the economy circulating again.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162-20023102-10391704.html Budget cuts are done to those in need. Why not cut the military budget and stop defending Italy, Germany, Japan, and other countries that don't need protecting anymore? We have over 33,000 troops in Japan, over 57,000 in Germany, and almost 10,000 in Italy, just as examples of wasted defense spending. Why are we there? None of these countries need our defense. [source: http://motherjones.com/military-maps ] Can't we spend our money on Americans who need help, instead of wasting our defense money on countries that have economies at least as viable as ours? Where did our priorities get so screwed up? We HAVE to take a break, lay out our expenditures, and cut what we don't need anymore. We DON'T NEED to be defending Germany! Who are we defending them from?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U_gHUiL4P8&feature=player_embedded When I started going to the Project Chanology protests and seeing all the young people stepping out to help fix a social problem, I was greatly encouraged about the future. This video encourages me as well. The LAST thing you want in society is complacent, passive citizens. The BEST thing is active, informed citizens. Which type do our schools produce?

http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/08/paypal-wikileaks/ the State Department asked Paypal to close down Wikileaks' account. Paypal said sure, why not? Mastercard closed down Wikileaks' account because they claimed wikileaks was doing something illegal? Really? What has Wikileaks been convicted of? Or even formally charged with? The spineless reaction of corporations to the US government's powerless requests is stunning. Is this how things work in the dark? Corporations working directly at the behest of the government? Isn't there a term for this; fascism? If that's the kind of stuff going on out of sight, then we need some group to bring light to these actions hidden from the public. Some kind of whistleblowing group... oh wait...

http://dontapscott.com/2010/11/10/macrowikinomics-and-rebooting-the-economy/ Don Tapscott wrote a book on collective action that helped me write my Project Chanology article. He has co-written another book, Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World , that argues that many current institutions need to be completely reworked. My books-to-read stack is pretty high already, but I hope to read this book soon.

The Moral Economy; What “The Invisible Hand” Left Behind by Jeff Jacobsen Philadelphia 1777 was a hot spot for revolution. The colonials had banded together and started their historic effort to pry a new nation from the clutches of the British. But the banding together did not preclude a community from going after one of their own, even a known patriot. Thomas Boylston was such a neighbor on Britain's enemies list. But he also tried to take economic advantage of the war by withholding coffee and sugar from the local marketplace in order to create a higher price for his commodities. The community chose otherwise for him. Abigail Adams wrote that around 100 women confronted Boylston at his warehouse, took his keys after an argument, and left with their booty, as “a large concourse of men stood amazed silent spectators of the whole transaction.” [Nash, 2005, p. 232] If one was inclined to believe that this was a unique occurrence from those times, one wo...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11849259 I believe protesting is a sort of way to "vote" by showing the strength your position has amongst the populous. So in that respect it is useful.

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration today announced random waterboarding of passengers at the Las Vegas International Airport. The stricter scrutiny was a result of a rash of called-in bomb threats recently in Las Vegas. Thad Tacker, regional director of TSA for the Western U.S., said "we need to make certain as best we can that no one getting on our planes is a terrorist, or a phone-in terrorist." Approximately every 100th passenger is randomly selected for the waterboarding procedure, which can take over an hour. Selectees who miss their flight are provided a ticket to the next flight to their destination, and an "I've already been waterboarded" voucher. Theresa Falls of Henpeck, Wyoming was one of the first passengers waterboarded. "It was so horrible, I thought I was dying!" said Falls. "I confessed to probably everything I've done wrong in my life, but still they kept accusing me of making phone threats." The ordeal l...

I highly recommend Kevin Phillips' book Wealth and Democracy. He compares our current (well up to 2001) financial dive with similar falls in 17th Century Netherlands, 18th Century Spain, and 19th Century England. It's a useful historical review. It's also jam-packed with interesting historical tidbits about US economic history. Here's my favorite quote: "The peril of any utopianism, of course, is how it suspends rationality and pursues a dream. In the case of millennial American conservatism, the political dream, for all its responsiveness to the tangible self-interest of rich constituencies, has been the illusion of markets as potential parliaments rather than descendants of carnivals, as rational decision-makers rather than precarious litmuses of human nature." (p. 371)

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/reagan-insider-gop-destroyed-us-economy-2010-08-10 David Stockman, Reagans' money man, says the GOP has already destroyed the US economy. Up next; class warfare. While everyone is looking for an economic "recovery," I'm afraid where we are now is where we'll be for quite some time.

The Military Industrial Complex has us by the balls. Even though the rest of the country is reeling from the recession, military spending keeps on going. We now spend more on defense than the rest of the WORLD does. Why are we so paranoid? Who is after us? We could easily cut our defense spending in half and perhaps save our teetering economy. We have no need to be spread all over the world like some old-time imperial power. We could close bases in other countries, cut back on mammoth projects designed to fight the nonexistent USSR, and start using soft power instead of destructive wars. http://caps.fool.com/Blogs/how-not-to-save-money/413647

Two books to get you started on the idea that groups of otherwise unconnected people can accomplish amazing things: Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, and J. Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds. As a quick example, the computer language Linux was essentially written by programmers who didn't even necessarily know each other, but contributed as much and as often as they desired to create a part of the whole. So "crowdsourcing" is becoming a cool idea. Have a problem? Post about it on an appropriate web site, and let the vast masses out there offer solutions. Often times, you'll get a pretty good result. This can go overboard though. As an example, when Allen Greenspan was head of the Federal Reserve, he deferred to "the Market" as being smarter than he was. He thought that there should be little regulation of the Market because the communal mindset was always smarter than any other input. Well, we know how that worked out. Another problem is tha...

http://www.visualeconomics.com/healthcare-costs-around-the-world_2010-03-01/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ifoo/sets/72157623493792126/ Universal health care will solve most of the healthcare issues. Insurance companies are already raising prices over 30% annually, 30 million Americans are without coverage, and yet people still fight against health care reform?

http://robinhoodtax.org.uk/ A simple, intriguing idea. The banks get kid glove treatment from our government, so asking them to give a little back is not outrageous.

Sure, I'm not the originator of this idea. But the SS Comfort sitting off Haiti got me thinking once again. What if our Navy fleet was mostly hospital ships and freighters carrying water and food? I mean, there's hardly any military in the world that can get close to coming against us. Can't we slice off, say, 20% of the military's budget and use it to prepare to help the next country that has an earthquake, tsunami or whatever? Imagine us as a country known for helping people, with no recompense. Who would care to attack us?

http://moveyourmoney.info/ A movement is rapidly growing to give up on the banks that are Too Big to Fail, and turning to community banks, where service and accountability still exist. I wholeheartedly agree with this idea. We can vote with our money for which type of banking system we get; one run by fat cats who only care about their bonuses, or local people who care about service and the local community. It's an easy choice.

An interesting debate is going on between Clay Shirkey, whose book "Here Comes Everybody" I used in my research on Anonymous, and Evgeny Morozov, a writer who often covers Internet issues. I'll list the urls of the debate in order, I hope: Morozov critiques Shirkey's sunny view of technology: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2009/11/how-dictators-watch-us-on-the-web/ Shirkey responds: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2009/12/the-net-advantage/ Morozov responds: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/01/why-the-internet-is-failing-irans-activists/ I'm on Shirkey's side here, but it's an excellent point to add that the government can just as easily use new technology as any protest that forms.