RCJ Front Page Report

Basic Errors of Management

Police Force “Bombing” in Iraq

The U.S. State Department, under Hilary Clinton, has been credited with a lot of good work since the Obama Administration came to office in 2009. The decision last week to abandon one of their primary objectives - to establish an American-style police force in Iraq - may prove to be revelatory of the less than stellar results of their probably over-heralded initiatives. READ MORE...

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Senate Kills Buffet Rule

When Do We Foreclose?

When will the majority population of the U.S. finally rise up and take control?

By RAR

U.S. Senate Republicans have done the expected, laid down their marker, and killed the "Buffet Rule" that would have made changes to a tax code presently under which millionaires pay a lower percentage of income tax than do wage earners. In other words, those who have less, pay more of their total income while those who have much, much more pay far less of their total income.

Here is Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl's math-based logic in countering the measure:

"You've got the top 10 percent of taxpayers paying 70 percent of all the taxes, earning 45 percent of the income. Those are certainly the wealthy, and they're certainly paying a big share... How about less wealthy? The bottom 95 percent -- in other words, everybody but the top 5 percent -- pays 41.3 percent of income taxes, earns 65 percent of the money, of the income. Is this fair?"

The correct answer would be that Kyl has provided inadequate information to make such a subjective judgment. One would need to include an apriori value; some variable that would capture the association between Kyl's "fuzzy math" and the actual experience of what it means to live as subsets of those formulations.

Seriously, does anyone other than hardcore Republicans believe in Kyl's "free ride" theory? That is based on the notion that the extremely poor - the unemployed bottom of the income ladder, who don't earn enough to qualify to pay income tax - "...have little direct incentive to care whether the government is spending and taxing too much. Maybe that's why the president has no problem with even more Americans getting a free ride."

House Republicans intend to leverage the momentum of the Senate decision by proposing a tax cut measure. Democrats vow to raise the Buffet Rule again and again leading up to election day, knowing it will not pass, but also knowing that it is the public position.

Though the Buffet Rule wouldn't lower taxes for anyone and would only effect people earning $1 million dollars a year - and then not at the maximum proposed 30 percent rate until incomes reach $2 million - it is supported by 72 percent of those surveyed in a CNN/ORC poll released April 16.

This is a grim future, when in a representative democracy the politics of Washington D.C. and the policy this dysfunction produces are so completely out of alignment with the will of the American people. This is clearly systemic, the output of a thought machine in which the gears have been stripped by conscious choice.

What Went Wrong

USA Over and Out

Whatever spin U.S. politicians may put on it during this election year, the U.S. as we have known it is gone, a casualty of a half century of bad policy from both Democratic and Republican parties. In this piece, the RCJ plots our timeline toward disintegration of a once-great nation. It will be useful in imagining a new and better way of running a country that, to work in the future, will need to be a complete departure from business as usual.READ MORE...

As context for the RCJ platform for renewal of the U.S., watch "Crips and Bloods: Made in America", which powerfully captures the entire arc of what has gone wrong with the U.S., from glorious promise through pitiless despair.

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By RAR

Mitt Romney is doing a pretty miserable job, in the Republican primaries, of pretending to be a far more right-wing figure than he really is. Conventional wisdom says that playing to those radical elements that show up to cast votes in primaries is a necessary part of what one has to do to win the party’s nomination to run against Obama. In the general election, Romney can drop the uncomfortable playacting and run from his natural political center. His problem has been that he lacks the social flexibility to misrepresent himself convincingly. People see through his clumsy guise, and it causes them to question Romney’s character. Who is he? What is his purpose in running for President? The Romney-despising mainstream press has covered this ad nauseum, which has inflated to threat status of Romney’s otherwise laughable competition for the nomination, particularly Rick Santorum, a true radical.

Watching the often amateurish-appearing Republican nomination process might lead one to assume that President Barack Obama has re-election in the bag, but wait. Obama has had his own wandering brand of politics on display as a sitting President for three-plus years, which has caused many of his 2008 supporters to wonder who the devil he is. His popularity surges to 50 percent when he goes on the stump, but for every charisma point he garners, he loses ten by dint of his jaw-dropping folds at the negotiation table. He did it again this week, with the Keystone XL pipeline compromise and his stepped-up efforts to shut down medicinal marijuana dispensaries in states where they operate legally under state law. READ MORE…

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2012 Election

The Right is Freaking - and Who Wouldn't?

By RAR

The Right Wing of the U.S. electorate is freaking out, and as Jonathan Chait wrote recently in New York Magazine the reasons are pretty clear: "America will soon come to be dominated, in a semi-permanent fashion, by an ascendant Democratic coalition hostile to its outlook and interests. And this impending doom has colored the party’s frantic, fearful response to the Obama presidency."

The coalition of which he speaks is the growing number of Black, Hispanic and Asian voters who are becoming a larger part of the U.S. electorate profile with each election cycle. The series of composites above, while only roughly representative of the statistical data they are based upon, more or less tell the story of an American voter profile that has undergone significant demographic changes over the last few decades. (If this were a more nuanced graphic it would further indicate the gender divide, which now balances on the side of women.)

There was a time when "Whitey", above on the far left, represented almost 85 percent of the voting citizenry. That "Whitey"-dominated vote rather reliably broke down the middle between Republicans and Democrats, with slightly more men tending to vote Republican, and many more women tending to vote Democrat. The Black vote, which was not significant until recent election cycles, since the 1960s has gone heavily Democratic, with an allegiance tied to the era of the Civil Rights movement and the sides chosen by the Republican and Democratic parties at that time.

By 2008, the White share of voting power had been reduced to around 76 percent of total, diminished by the growth in minority voting blocks, and spurred particularly by the enthusiasm for the candidate Barack Obama in two typically under-representative demographics: the Black and Youth votes. Both turned out big for Obama in 2008.

But then a fascinating thing happened in the 2010 cycle... READ MORE

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American Psycho

The Rise of the Psychopathic Rogue in American Life

"Psychopaths are increasingly common in business because they’re attracted to the pace and volatility of today’s hyper-competitive workplaces. And because companies unwittingly nurture them." - Robert Hare, University of British Columbia psychologist whose psychopathy checklist, the PCL-R, used worldwide to screen for psychopathic personalities. READ MORE...

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By RAR

There is a war being waged among economists over whether or not it is wise to stimulate - some would say, "prop up" - the U.S. economy using borrowed money.

Rather than let the marketplace find its own level, as current front-runner for the GOP nomination Mitt Romney is suggesting should have been done, the Bush and Obama administrations have green-lighted the Federal Treasury to create money in the form of Treasury Bonds, which the U.S. government has sold broadly, and some of which it has purchased from itself using funds borrowed from China and Japan. Funds have been doled out to financial institutions at zero percent interest, and most famously to auto makers (General Motors), to create stability within key companies. This is what Republicans refer to as "picking winners", while Democrats argue that it has saved the U.S. from another 1930s-style Depression, and therefore is one of President Obama's crowning 1st-term achievements.

The administration's policy has been to keep money available at low interest rates as a hedge against a double-dip recession taking place as the result of economic deflation. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Obama Economic Advisor Tim Geithner have championed this approach, which economists such as Paul Krugman have suggested has been too small. Krugman suggests that the Fed pump $8-10 trillion dollars more into the economy just to achieve "quantitative easing". Otherwise put, to keep the whole economy from collapsing more quickly.

Others aren't so sure that is wise. In fact, they doubt the stimulus and the bailouts were ever a good idea in the first place.

We should all know pretty soon about whether or not they were right.

READ MORE...

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Political Unrest in Russia

120,000 people demonstrated in Moscow against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on the eve of Presidential elections they say are rigged to keep Putin in power for six more years.

What can the U.S. learn from watching the former Communist state struggle with how far to take free market reforms? READ MORE

020512

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Community Action in Chimayo, NM

Fight to Preserve El Santuario

INCRIMINATING EVIDENCE: The two-century old Santo Nino Chapel began receiving the "Martinez Design and Build" treatment a few years ago. The result has been a makeover of this historic chapel, which some have described as Disneyfication, and the reportedly un-permitted addition to the back side of Santo Nino Chapel, shown above.

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The fight to preserve the historic and cultural integrity of tiny Chimayo, New Mexico has escalated to a struggle between organized forces.

It didn't begin that way. Chimayo is home to El Santuario, the "Lourdes of the West", where thousands of pilgrims come throughout the year, particularly on Easter, to be in the presence of healing powers purported to be associated with a cross discovered there over two hundred years ago. The RCJ has followed this story closely and background is available here. It is an important story because it comes along at a time when America is going through a painful period of redefinition, and what happens to El Santuario will tell us something about where we are headed as a culture. Are we people who find value in preserving our cultural heritage? Or are we business-first types who see value in exploitable opportunities to profit at the expense of our historic and cultural assets?

This month Santa Fe County Commission unanimously passed a resolution to initiate a planning process that would augment the County's Sustainable Community protection from unregulated development. Lack of a plan for historic preservation of the El Santuario, and of Portrero de Chimayo in general, has been at the heart of this issue. The Martinez developer group, in league with a Father Julio, who is the priest at el Santuario and associated with a group called the Sons of the Holy Family, who serve as property managers of Santa Fe Archdiocese-owned land, have been un-checked in their ambitions for assets including el Santuario, Santo Nino Chapel, and the Abeyta house.

The resolution from the County Commission recognized a group called the Chimayo Citizens for Community Planning (CCCP) as a participant in the process to augment planning regulations. Organized by Chimayo business leaders and preservationists, the CCCP has recently submitted a grant application to the New Mexico Department of Historic Preservation requesting funds in support of this process.

The CCCP has also announced a special session to be held during the May 3-5 New Mexico Heritage Preservation Association annual conference to be held at la Posada in Santa Fe. The session topic is Chimayo: Preservation of a Traditional Community in Santa Fe County. The CCCP has put out a call for planning professionals to engage in this process on behalf of the preservation and planning efforts regarding planned development in Chimayo. - RAR

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Is TED Anything?

The "Technology, Entertainment and Design" program known as TED has been getting a great deal of attention of late - and by "of late" I mean since 2005, when TED started awarding $100,000 prizes to people who the judges for the awards felt were moving things forward in some way connecting and contributing to those three TED disciplines.

TED's mission statement begins with "We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we're building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world's most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other."

So, it's like Facebook for a fee, with a convention and door prizes.

After 5 years of handing out prizes to three folks each year, who were expected to come back to the annual TED conference with information about how they had used the money to achieve a purpose, the TED program has only awarded prizes to one person for each of the last two years.

At the same time, the TED conference has experienced an explosion in growth, eventuating its move from tony Monterey, California to a somewhat grittier Long Beach conference center.

This has been driven by a guy named Chris Anderson, whose non-profit, The Sapling Foundation, took over the organization in 2002. Founded in 1984, TED had been conceived as an intellectual grow chamber and had plugged along for years with an invitation-only conference that cost $4,400 to attend.

The Sapling Foundation changed the TED model, brought in the prize awarding idea, and in 2007 transitioned involvement in the organization to an annual membership fee of $6,000. TED is a country club for well-healed intellectuals, who besides the conference enjoy "club mailings, networking tools and conference DVDs".

Not terribly unlike the far older Bohemian Grove group, up in Northern California, TED attracts a presenters such as Bill Clinton, Jane Goodall, Malcolm Gladwell, Al Gore, Gordon Brown, Richard Dawkins, Bill Gates, educator Salman Khan, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and a variety of Nobel Prize winners.

Whether or not TED actually is anything, other than a well-off person's annual excuse to go hang out with the swells, would be a hard thing to discern. Chris Anderson, the master of ceremonies of The Sapling Foundation, is a former computer magazine publisher, and he is most certainly an inventive and motivated promoter. He has come up with a catalog of offerings for TED, including books, DVDs, specialty conferences on Women's issues and Health, and TED offers licensing arrangements, so for a fee you can host a TED event anywhere in the world.

This would seem to give a wider group of well-off folks this same opportunity to throw a party in which all their smart friends can get together and offer up ideas to change the world.

There is, of course, no clear output from these group meets, which should be expected. A tremendous program to provide single-home solar panels in Angola may well change lives for village people there without anyone in the rest of the world being aware that anything happened.

Results of greater magnitude may come through any impact TED contributors may have on the decision-making processes of governmental bodies worldwide, though big initiatives seem antithetical to a world focused on austerity to solve our global economic meltdown.

So is TED anything that, given its membership, i.e., rich and well connected folk, wouldn't likely be anyway? Or is it just a social organization? - RAR

(030212)

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Losing Our Religion:

Incorporation of Entitlement

No business enterprise has interests of such vital importance to the global economy that their goals and objectives would trump any risks their enterprise might pose to our shared system of universal support: the environment.

And yet, we are constantly forced to go to "war" against entities, such as those championing the Keystone XL pipeline, who want to take the gamble that puts us all at risk: their gamble, everyone's risk.

One is moved to ask, when did we cross over this threshold of basic common sense, the transition of which is not different from any individual's slide into insanity? When did humankind, and specifically the masters of humankind, become so short-sighted in their thinking?

I suspect the answer is outside of the question, as is the case with so many of mankind's problems. And I further suspect that it lies in something as innocuous as business process. In this case, risk analysis.

Business strategies are built around the probability of certain things occurring along the critical path of operations and scheduling. These are expressed through entries on a spreadsheet that yield a mathematical probability.

It has only been relatively recently that risk management has become a routine analytical practice producing probability and impact analyses and contingency plans for countering the effects of plausible events.

In business practices, these are all myopic views of the world that are only as large as the project under consideration.

Due to economic influence - the power of big business - it has become the default condition in the U.S., at the macro level, to accept the activities of large business enterprises as if the generation of profits are more sacred than the survival of the human race.

Business leaders don't think of it in those terms, of course, because that has not been their training. In their behaviors, they are rather like train engineers on a track defined by the business they are in and the market forces that create its dynamics, and they are headed in the one direction their tracks have been laid for, guided by whatever gold they seek.

That we allow energy companies to produce products that deteriorate the quality of the environment, and produce waste materials that will require centuries of stewardship (the Federal Government just approved the first new nuclear power plant in 30 years), is something advocates and protesters can argue about, but it is insane that environmentally irresponsible actions seem acceptable to anyone in the first place. Such should be above debate, simply unfathomable to a thinking person.

That we argue over environmental issues like climate change (used to be called "global warming") misses the point, in many ways, while all too often having little effect on outcomes. (The Keystone XL pipeline has been the rare exception, but this debate is not really over. Besides, every rejection of one harmful energy company initiative seems to be balanced by approval of some equally destructive activity, such as the Georgia nuclear power plant, or the further approval of deep drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.)

The more potent question is, who in the first place gave powerful corporations the right to take risks that impact us all? Why would that ever be acceptable?

Here again, the counter is to focus the argument on the science of climate study, hiding the debate well within the larger issue, the business initiative sparking the debate, and even deeper within the larger issue of whether or not environmentally risky enterprises should ever be allowed in the first place.

Whatever the argument over safe engineering practices and quality controls, business leaders think too small to be the captains of our planetary vessel. We, the passengers and crew, had better expose these myopic maniacs and mutiny as appropriate until finally we, as a human family, start making sense along the lines of ensuring our continuing survival.

Fossil fuels, after all, are not keeping us alive, but instead are just allowing us to continue down an ultimately destructive path. - RAR 21012

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MEDIA:

Greedy Bastards!

Dylan Ratigan is the "Rick Santelli of the progressive-analyticals"

Glory unto Dylan Ratigan, the defector-reporter from CNBC's Fast Money and Closing Bell who now hosts "The Dylan Ratigan Show" on MSNBC. No matter how awful the cover design of his first book, Greedy Bastards!", he is providing a smart person's depiction (in graphics) of the mechanisms that have characterized U.S. capitalism over the past 40 years, and what it has finally produced: massive public debt, a disintegrating middle class, and an imbalance in wealth distribution far beyond that of the Roman Empire at its peak.

The former global managing editor for corporate finance at Bloomberg News, credited with developing and launching more than half-a-dozen broadcast and new media properties, has even come up with a solution for planning our way out of our economic despair: "Hot Spotting".

Ratigan's Website reports that he is "mad as hell. Infuriated by government corruption and corporate communism, incensed by banksters shaking down taxpayers, and despairing of an ailing health care system, an age-old dependency on foreign oil, and a failing educational system, Ratigan sees an America that has allowed itself to be swindled and robbed."

Ratigan's broadcast history has been fueled by angry rants, most notably this final broadcast from the floor of the NYSE upon leaving CNBC in 2009, in which he reported precisely what the world would soon know: "his guests, essentially 'perpetrated securities fraud' and an 'insurance fraud scam against AIG — and, by extension, the government and taxpayers funding that insurance company's 'bailout'". (Wikipedia)

Ratigan is the "Rick Santelli of the progressive-analyticals", voicing for the voice-less middle class what the Tea Party inspiring Santelli did for the greed-and-acquisition set.

Dylan Ratigan may be mounting a run for office, for he seems to be a guy on a crusade, taking his finance industry educated views to the public the way his MSNBC cohort Ed Schultz ("The Ed Show") speaks for blue collar workers.

Between the two, Ratigan seems the odd personality to foist himself so dramatically into the what's-wrong-with-America fray. He is cheeky while having one of the more unsettled television personas to be found anywhere; like watching Albert Brooks' sweat-flop scene from Broadcast News played out over months until finally an evolution occurs in the character. Dylan has been touring the west coast of late, doing shows from Silicon Valley and Treasure Island in San Francisco, and displaying a notable and new je ne sais quoi.

Perhaps the publication of his fascinating guidebook - see the various useful illustrated explanations at his site - has brought him a new level of comfort within his own skin. - RAR

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FOR INFORMATION ON
OCCUPY WALL STREET, including the daily agenda, and how to get involved with the broader movement through Facebook (see links once inside):

http://occupywallst.org

http://www.facebook.com/OccupyWallSt

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Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) - NTI is a place of common ground where people with different ideological views are working together to close the gap between the global threats from nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and the global response. For more visit http://www.nti.org

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Dedicated to Intellectual Disobedience and the Pursuit of Understanding, the Last Bastions of Hope

NEWS FEEDS

RCJ Front Page Report

Basic Errors of Management

Police Force “Bombing” in Iraq

Senate Kills Buffet Rule

When Do We Foreclose?

When will the majority population of the U.S. finally rise up and take control?

What Went Wrong

USA Over and Out

Community Action in Chimayo, NM

Fight to Preserve El Santuario

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