Chapter 9

CHAPTER 9. THE LARGER PLATFORM We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a programme which seems neither a mere defence of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible…Those who have concerned themselves exclusively with what seemed practicable in the existing state of opinion have constantly found that even this has rapidly become politically impossible as the result of changes in a public opinion which they have done nothing to guide. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our livliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost. –Friedrich August von Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (1967)

I am not a complete Hayak fan but his quote helps point out that nearly everyone is on the same path, but our footprints need not overlap. I need to add that, as the weeks go by, it looks to me that GardenWorld is not just an attractive option, but a life boat (read Noah’s Ark) for a world society that may actually be significantly failing, the kind of failing that, in the absence of an alternative, leads to local violence in a struggle for survival. We have been living America 1.0 for two centuries. Do we need 2.0? In this chapter I will lay out the issues we need to address to get to the eighty percent under the guiding image of GardenWorld. It suggests thinking beyond the 80% platform. In the next chapter I will talk more about the process. I am calling it “platform”, though I am fully aware that typical political platforms are ignored by their candidates. Unlike previous elections the 2008 election looks like it will focus more on issues than usual and the idea of “platform” make take on real significance. I gave an overview of the 80% proposal in Chapter 5. Now for more discussion and detail. If GardenWorld is to emerge, it has to emerge in the context of present institutions and their development. Yet at some point GardenWorld may break out of the current framework – Constitutional, societal norms, the place of private property – as the actualization of GardenWorld leads to the emergence of new issues and new attitudes. GardenWorld realized may

require some shifting in the workings of business, governance, laws, contracts, and some changes in the money system. Be prepared for surprises! Politics and the arrangement of life circumstances

Politics should be about the process of arranging life circumstances. Technology should be about making life better. I have tried to make clear that our leaders have different interests, often called “inside the beltway”, but really are more financial, from that of the country as a whole. But guess what they want to do with the profits. Find a piece of GardenWorld. Buy it ready made. Run businesses that destroyed the existing garden world of others in order to get the cash for their own private version of GardenWorld. They too are fearful. We need to enlist them in the attractive task of building and growing – not destroying and buying. I’ve said before, “The only excuse for rich people is if they have good taste. Otherwise they are too expensive.”

The only excuse for rich people is if they have good taste. Otherwise they are too expensive

Since the beginning of civilization leaders have taken the benefits of technology as their own, against the interests of the people. They have only use the technology for the people when they needed them, as workers or as soldiers. It is clear that technology, the fruit of human intellect over centuries, is treated as private property. Its potential is used to support power and enhance wealth and only occasionally, and then partially, to develop the qualities that make civilizations and cultures. Joseph Tainter wrote a profound book, The Collapse Of Complex Societies, looking at places like mesopotamia and the American Southwest as an archaeologist. He proposes that as society is grown larger they necessarily spend an increasing part of their income on maintaining the infrastructure. This process continues until infrastructure costs outpace growth and the society, finding itself in a deficit - in ancient times of food and water, in modern times in cash flow -and collapse. His view is that in most societies the elites of our view leads the cause they own the state organization for the corporations that build and maintain the infrastructure. The result is when it is becoming obvious that the costs will overshoot, the elites, instead of redesigning their systems, push all the harder to get out more cash in order to protect themselves from the inevitable. In the book and in a series of later papers he compares our own situation and its potential for collapse. He leaves it up to the reader to draw their own conclusions.

Law

The legal system surrounding GardenWorld is very complex and involves land use and private property. These are not given in nature but arise through a complex process of forces adapting to each other. Remember that the existing situation is not the embodiment of a single principle, or even a set of coherent principles but the balance of principles in struggle with each other. The present is always a mixed case, never pure. This helps remind us that change is part of the system and everything is up for rethinking if circumstances warrant. We like to think of our current situation has been enmeshed in a system of laws and public policy at more or less make sense. In fact it all just grew like topsy, herself child of the sharecropping messy southern culture, and is not good at reinventing itself. Just think of how confusing it is that most societies, and especially our own use the word " law" for both natural systems - the laws of physics - and human systems -codes and constitutions. It is a commonplace in the law of the law protects the property of the rich gained by other means. Law provides the rules of the game which give people the expectation that what they have Ms. What they will have. But when law makes wrongs into rights in ways that continue to be wrong, felt to be wrong and perceived to be wrong, our social process should be able to slowly change the law. land Increasingly the ownership of land seems to be narrowing. The problem with this is those most in need are those without land and their propensity to experiment with finding places to live and places to plant and places to work are frustrated by having no land to work with. With increasing population and stress on the land to house people, transport people, and feed people the opportunities for doing things in new ways as well as the resistance to doing them will become clearer. It is as if one were walking in a crowd of hungry children with a big ice cream cone. The tensions are intense. Struggling over the shape of the law, who benefits and who loses, the amount of wealth spent in legal cases, the power of the courts to enter into a scramble for who gets what, will be a major part of the history of the next few decades. Law, private property, and land use are going to be key players in the way we respond to climate change and migrations.

Environment - energy - food - land - transportation nexus Finance Is anyone touching on real reform: turning finance into a transparent efficient clear public utility, rather than a source of income for so many. As I understand the figures, the “financial sector” is 20% of the US GDP and 40% of the profit. Real estate commissions alone in 2006 were 1% of total US income. Should not the government print money rather than the Fed? Why pay all that interest?

It’s as if the house had not only 0 and 00, but eight more numbers that payoff to the house.

on LA real estate. Gives me the opportunity to point out that the standard view is to blame the poorer for trying to invest and gain. The reality is that people who had to buy houses, or wanted to, had to pay more than they would have if there had not been a bubble.

The lenders made more moony because the loans were bigger. The brokers made larger fees because the fees were based on a percentage of the sale, and the lender holds the note, which value remains constant, while the borrow holds the house, which is worth less. The difference can be seen as money lost to the borrower. This is deeply unfair. The new science of Complexity explains that limited knowledge prevents societies from predicting and controlling their developments. But Complexity further suggests that nature uses the limits of knowledge to evolve, which turns an apparent obstacle into an opportunity to reevaluate governmental institutions. As in nature, the limits of knowledge lead social systems to evolve by individuating, liberating, and empowering their members. Societies individuate and liberate their members to probe environments and exploit opportunities. Societies empower individuals to globalize their findings which requires constitutionally constraining governmental powers. Societies that respect human rights thus gain selective advantage. Showing that what nature is models what societies ought to be, Complexity may finesse the "naturalistic fallacy" of Hume and Moore. So the perspective towards the “platform” has several layers. First , what would be the appeal to get us to the 80% right now? Second, what would it take to actually get, not just to a rebalancing of wealth, the environment, foreign relations and health, but to GardenWorld itself? But starting at the beginning of a meaningful 80% platform. I am proposing simply that 80% requires most of the following six points.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Income and wealth: Reverse some of the most egregious negative curves of income and wealth concentration. This might mean simply reinstituting inheritance taxes and a slight increase in taxes with increasing income and a reduced Social Security tax rate not limited to the first 100,000 as now. These should be sufficient to reduce the current any qualities in wealth and income, reversing trends that have concentrated both. The result will not be an immediate recovery to a more equitable position but set long-term trends that can get us there. Deal straightforwardly with education and health as enablers of participation. Public money spent on education has been given that grudgingly because people do not see the connection between education and the economy. Under current conditions they are correct. It is not at all clear that education is necessary when the economy is shifting production and capital overseas. Health also is seen as a cost and not an investment. In a healthy economy healthy workers and educated workers are an asset to themselves and society. Create a multilateral friendly values based foreign policy. The United States used to have tremendous goodwill around the world based on its values. Much has been lost that needs to be regained the brand name is tarnished. We are no longer seen as a society of law, nor openness, nor honesty, nor of opportunity. Simply beginning by having problem oriented discussions with countries around the world rather than demanding acquiescence to policies that favor American corporal economics would be a sufficient beginning. Shift to a more viable economy, where strong regulation drives innovation and local efforts at environmental and building restoration and retrofitting. Deal with energy through radical (Rocky Mountain Institute) energy conservation and retrofitting of buildings, and a good example is at the ton of Juehnde in Germanyi[i] Bureaucracy. Many people feel that money given to a bureaucratic program yields to bureaucracy and not program fundamentals. More money in a school system does not mean either more money to teachers for more education to children. So long is this perception persists it will be hard to get citizen participation in the legitimate government activity. Progressives should begin with an understanding that this complaint about bureaucracy is completely legitimate. Proposal: to reinstitute the program led by Al Gore in the first Clinton administration called national performance review, or reinventing government. This needs to be done at every level of society. And realize that these allow for the emerging context for the realizable goal of living called GardenWorld with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness absent tyranny.

These would require working innovatively under the discipline of strong environmental regulations, encouraging local business activity that would create non exportable jobs. Doing these would be good in themselves, and a real achievement. But to get us out of the directionless conflict laden atmosphere we live in, we need the direction of

a vision such as GardenWorld, and a fuller realization of GardenWorld would require further innovation. So, second, to get from the 80% solution to GardenWorld I've suggested that it probably is important to deal, in the long-term, with other issues such as

1.Laws about how corporations function, such as extreme salaries and illegal tax and trade policies, and further onto anti-social behavior, such as seeking out cheapest labor in the poorest countries where labor is controlled, and dealing with corporate support of policies that hurt most us, such as replacing local labor with illegal immigrants who, just trying to get a life, are dependent on local welfare that is paid for not by the corporations using he labor, but by the general tax payer. Perhaps the most important in our economy, using the doctrine of “person”, is that corporations, chartered, as they all are, by the state, become autonomous in action and legal status. It may be a fatal cancerous shift in The US Constitution’s DNA and later legal interpretation. Corporations were not part of the original deal. Capitalism, corporations, money and markets do not together make a unitary structure, but a jerry rigged culture of control. Teasing these apart and separating their healthy from their destructive actions may be part of the way forward. I've been mulling over the role of money: its psychology. An obsessive symptom seducing us into thinking there are equivalences among all things (price), thereby erasing differences. I fear that the money thing will run its course. It is already about the only game in town, and the way it works gives those with money a better chance, for example, simply because if you have a lot, you can borrow a larger more and at a lower rate. The result is concentration. If it isn't the corporations, what drives this? The Federal Reserve, the legality of interest..? If nothing will stop the money concentration onslaught, where are we? It is of course THIS that drives me to want to consider the role of corporations. 2. Laws about justice and, unfortunately related, is the issue of imprisonment. We have a legal system that has two million people in jail and something like 10 million who have lost the right to vote because they have been in jail. We have procedures of entrapment and plea bargaining which are innovations to speed up the legal process by forcing innocent people to accept a plea of guilty in order to avoid the terrible legal costs and all too likely rigged set of evidence. And the same time only one in 100 felonies leads to a conviction. If there were far fewer felonies it would be easier to try them adequately to avoid both guilty verdicts for the innocent and innocent verdicts for the guilty. That would be in doing some analysis of why there are so

many arrests and so many in jail, and why this number is so different in the United States compared to any other industrialized society. 3. Land use and private property. 4. Immigration 5. Energy. The discussion is moving very rapidly. Amory Lovins in his book, OilThe Endgame, lays out a vision that is rather comprehensive. What is striking is that being a practical man he leaves the corporation structure alone, appealing simply to corporations’ sense of profit and cost within a market system. But as Peter Barnes makes clear in Capitalism 3.0, the corporations are rather narrow in their sphere of operation. 6. Transportation – cars? Planes? For whom? 7. Science policy 8. Culture policy education. 9. US place in the world : partner, empire or bully? 10. Legalizing drugs slowly 11. Weapons trade 12. Support of mainstream arts. 13. Transparancy 14. Open source. In the preface I proposed a group of scenarios that showed that a sane strategy would blend technocratic and democratic trends: otherwise the fear on each side leads to defensive protectiveness that is felt as violent and leads toward more fascist or mafia tendencies (please look again at page xx). I suggested that the analysis indicates that a strategy that blends technocratic and Jeffersonian tendencies is more likely to work and one that tries to be exclusively one or the other. The technocratic institutions are in place and the Jeffersonian desire is nearly universal. The world cannot be managed with eight billion people without strong institutional foundations. But if the intent of these institutions is self aggrandizement as in Dijas’ book, The New Class, about the rise of bureaucracy under communism – and that certainly is the situation prevailing in the United States today – and the conflict and with the Jeffersonian will be intense and lead first to a soft and then to a hard police state. However, if the institutions are working under the guidance of a GardenWorld outcome, then violence can not only be avoided, but institutions will be seen as legitimate. I’d like to return to bureaucracy. I was a participant in Gore’s Reinventing Government. Kamarck seemed to me to one of the people who shut it down. So I am interested in her current vision. I do believe that most people believe that more money for bureaucrats does not mean more public service. For example, a larger school budget will

neither pay teachers more nor deliver better service in the classroom. Until progressives agree that rethinking government organization is important, the blowback against bureaucracy will limit progressive success at the polls. I also believe that we want high morale government employees, which means treating them well. Start with dreary office space, much worse now than fifty years ago. I think of the old Pensions building, now the architecture museum, in Washington, from the end of the civil war, and the concern for worker health. The larger fame has to be the struggles between powers post cold war. ii[ii] The United States, instead of helping Russia and the ex-satellites after the collapse of the Union (soviet), helped US companies align with local elites, usually ex party members, to privatize assets and make life miserable for most. Russia under the very intelligent Putin has taken Russia back to its imperial roots in the Czar and responded to American push with its own armaments and oil maneuvers. The result is a much stronger Russia. And with it the shadow of the cold war, once thought dead, reemerges. But not quite, for Russia is winning in the il struggle (with china also doing well compared to the US), and Russia and China know that the US is bankrupting itself in Iraq and they can chose highly technical asymmetric warfare as the way to further weaken the US, stuck with its major old style weapons systems. This new cold war can be seen as communism vs. capitalism. The real issue is what kind of communism, and what kind of capitalism? The US wants to identify capitalism with its own brand, and the world doesn’t like it. Communism we thought was defeated by the fall of the Soviet Union, but what really fell was the soviet brand. Socialism is amazingly alive around the world, and is openly discussed everywhere but in the US, Stupid communism is power without socialist humanism. Stupid capitalism is production without distribution. A new cold war between stupid communism and stupid capitalism is terrible to behold. GardenWorld is a path that makes for a much more attractive distributive capitalism. It requires some re-writing of the rules so that capital manipulation – finance capitalism – has much lower payoff than now, and meeting real needs much higher. The merry-go-round game now is rigged, and it needs to be un-rigged. As I’ve said, simply changing the direction of the curves of increasing concentration of income and wealth would have very positive effects. But here I am saying we must do this if we are to avoid a new cold to hot war between two views of the word that are both unattractive. Again, communism, fascism and nationalist capitalism were three attempts to deal with power, money, technology and nations. Two failed and the third is, now morphed into ‘globalization”, not doing well. But we still have the problem of how to put capital,

technology, populations and status together into a workable – even attractive – culture and society. Amory Lovins proposes the following •

Advanced Resource Productivity

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Systems Thinking

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Positive Action

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Market-Oriented Solutions

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End-Use/Least-Cost Approach

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Biological Insight

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Corporate Transformation

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The Pursuit of Interconnections

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Natural Capitalism

And Joe Firmage proposes Capitalism 2.0 And Peter Barnes proposes Capitalism 3.0 GardenWorld is a larger frame of vision and goal, a decision template for every act along the way, and easily incorporates these really creative proposals.

i[i] http://www.german-renewableenergy.com/Renewables/Navigation/Englisch/Biomasse/case-studies,did=132906.html ii[ii] See W Joseph Stroupe The Cold War: Fears of an unfinished victory Pasted from This defined the state of the issue as of May 30, 2007