Friday, December 26, 2008

Crackpotism, Delusions, and Obama Stimulus

1930s New Deal stimuli projects will not help this country prepare for the 21st century global economy. Shock of all shocks:
Economic growth comes NOT FROM CAPITAL but from people who have and implement ideas AND if you have cognitive diversity, you have much better problem solving.

Maybe NOW, we'll pay attention?

ResearchChannel - The Flight of the Creative Class (2006):
Richard Florida paints a picture of a global giant on the verge of one of the toughest economic battles of its life. In this wake-up call to business, political, and cultural leaders alike, he argues that to stay at the cutting edge, the U.S. will have to find ways to compete. He offers many ideas such as: mitigate gross inequality; harness the creativity of all human beings, take on political polarization; retain the traditional openness of American society to international influence; revamp K-12 and post-secondary education; and adapt to the global creative economy.

Monday, December 22, 2008

Industrial Capitalism vs. Techno Democracy

"[Industrial] capitalism is as anti-human philosophy as you can possibly conceive. They try to tell you that capitalism and democracy are not at variance. Actually, the whole Marxist, Leninist, Socialist thing was a side dish. The real life and death struggle is between capitalism and democracy. Democracy says, 'everybody has an innate worth that must be honored.' Capitalism says, 'those who die with the most toys wins.' You cannot reconcile these two things; but nobody wants to talk about this [because] we're still having the party over the fall of communism."

"I'm not anti-capitalist; I think capitalism needs to severe its connection to materialism. This is again why virtual reality is interesting. You sell things made of LIGHT, not made of beryllium, metal, brass, steel and wood but light. We've got all the light we need, but we have to stop making things out of STUFF, or we're not going to be around to tell the tale."

-- Terrence McKenna

Personally, I'm not a sold-out McKenna groupie, but he certainly does a peerless job of specifying many fundamental components of our current socio-enviro-econo-political environment. It's this unvarnished assessment of What is the Actual Current Situation that we cannot fail to understand, in order to build a Resilient, Adaptable, and Sustainable conversational economy, moving forward.

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Stop Taking Comfort in Superficial Agreement over Mammoth, yet One-Off Injustices

No pun or disrespect intended when I suggest here that we simply cannot waste any more time whining about these Endless One-Off Injustices.

There will be no meaningful market-originated change unless the 9% Alpha Wannabes -- those ahead of 90-99% of us, who will never *actually* get to the top 1% after which they so pathologically lust -- champion the demand for the Market Devastating hoarders to LET GO.

How to Create 90,000 (up to 1 Million) U.S. Startups in One Day

Not long ago, we asked, "how many billionaires, really?"

According to the L-Curve, below, that number was about 400 as of 2007. However, we still need the CASH billionaire number. Assume for the moment, that it's only 25% of that 400. That's 100 billionaires.
Update, April 2009: There are 793 billionaires, down from over 800, according to CNBC. Feel free to adjust numbers in this article accordingly. If every billionaire participated, their all heralded Private Market could create upwards of 700,000 individual, million dollar seed-funded startups -- in ONE DAY! If they fail to practice what they preach by dispersing resources in a way that promotes economic circulatory system health, the consequences they face are due to their own individual and collective psychoses, which should absolutely be specified in upcoming DSM-V.
Each and every one of those billionaires could right now, today, hand out 900 $1M Venture Grants and still find some way to "struggle by" on a measly $100,000,000.00. That's 900 X 100, or 90,000 900 X 793 or 713,700 seed-funded startups. Dig just a little deeper and the allegedly all-enlightened Private Sector could launch 1 Million, $1 Million grant-funded startups in ONE DAY.

Think that would be an effective, non-government stimulus program? I do. But you and I know that will not likely happen, right dear reader? Therefore, if the hoarders will not change their lifestyles and dissolve the blood clot from the economic circulatory system, we will need to save the patient by other means.

It's too bad that these Market Destroying Hoarders suffer from such a delusional sense of entitlement; however, we cannot continue to stand idly by and allow an utterly Delusional Sense of Entitlement of these few humans to threaten the long term welfare of our great American Democratic Republic.

A common defense of many such hoarders is that "we earned this by our wits and will and it would all just end up back in the same hands anyway." Okay, that's great. That is even greater reason that you have absolutely nothing to lose, right?

If it will all just magically return to your god-ordained superior possession, then you can safely repeat the cycle over and over, right? And there is literally no need for the treasury's printing press if you Give Back the Public Goods -- the cash -- you are currently holding hostage. Credit is NOT the life blood of the economy; liquidity, CASH is life blood of the Economic Circulatory System that is terminally clotted in the top 2% and 5% hoarders accounts. As mentioned repeatedly, those Federal Reserve Notes do NOT BELONG TO YOU. They belong to The People.

A case can be made that by clotting the cash in their own greedy arteries, these relatively few dysfunctional clotters border on outright traitorous behavior that threatens the very sustainability of the United States of America economy. Yes, strong words, in response to unsustainably strong skews.

America could create 90,000 (Update: actually, up to 700,000!) $1,000,000.00 seed-funded startups in one day, if 100 cash billionaires acted in unison. Clearly, empirically, this is within their means. So what is the problem? Where is the hold up?
It's time for Open and Transparent. We want the list. We want to know who they are. After all, the hoarders who are hoarding have OUR MONEY; the public's cash. It's not theirs. It belongs to the Treasury of the United States of America and WE are America. It's OUR MONEY and we want most of it back, circulating in a Healthy and Sustainable Economic Body. Could it be time to turn Mr. McCarthy's tactics upon those who created him in the first place? The hoarders seem to be bringing such a fate upon themselves.
Next, Scoble (or if lacks them, someone with the cajones) can sit down with each of of them, individually, on Tokbox or BlogTV, or similar, to ask WHY this Private Sector Market-wide Reboot cannot or should not be done immediately.

We want to ask each one, if you are a Patriotic American Billionaire, why, in a billion years, would you not now come to the aid of the country that Made You?

We warned you that it was going to get personal. If you're in the Problem Club, you've brought it upon yourselves and you can solve it yourselves by following the suggestions in this post and taking similar aggressive and creative action, immediately.




References:

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Tweetgrid for Capitalism++

Organizing Capitalism++ Work

I'll be gradually migrating this early capitalism++ content over to this site, which will allow me to create a better focus on this topic and return my home blog to it's regular programming.