If only

If there were only a few of us, like maybe one or two hundred family members scattered across some farm land, how would we do collectively?  What would it look like?

The Kraemer family farm in Oregon where 

everybody does their part for the benefit of all.

So there's perhaps a few dozen really capable adults, perhaps the same number of really young and really old people, plus the young adults making their way into responsible life.

Would the productive members take care of the ones without the skills or perhaps without the strength to do the hard work?  Of course.

Would the skilled take the time to teach and equip the youngsters who wanted to step up?  Yes, absolutely.

Would the oldies with a lifetime's accumulation of resources share with those who hadn't yet developed their own and help them become productive?  You know they would.  Families watch out for each other even if there's sacrifice involved.

What you wouldn't see in the family is the grandfathers and grandmothers enslaving their youngsters.  You wouldn't find moms and dads indebting their kids and extended family members just to get more wealth.

If you did find such things, that would be Wall Street World, of course, and modern capitalism, the bottom-line driven culture of acquire and consume, a continuation of mankind's record of pillage and plunder.  What a shame.


The world is just a couple hundred countries, humanity's extended family. Most could be prosperous, but currently about 80% of the family members live on less than $10 or so a day. The rich gain their wealth at the expense of the poor, and continue to do so deliberately despite the visible harm being done.

Ever thought about your part in all of that?
You've got options.  You don't have to play by those rules.

Yes We Can. Should We?

Mars, terraformed over time (artist's modeling)

Emerging capabilities mean we could transform Mars into an Earth-like planet in just a few centuries.  But should we?

Absolutely! ... provided some questions can be answered adequately.

Having a new home in space opens incredible possibilities.  What issues must be settled as we move forward?

• Who will own the finished product?
• How will the new region be governed?

• Do we follow the 'colonial' model from our history?
• Is this an effort for all mankind?  Or is it an investment for the benefit of some?
• ... and the business model?  

• Startup, development, deployment, O&M, ROI, shareholders
• Settlers and their descendants will be ... employees? citizens?  occupants?

Yes we can, but should we?
     How are we doing with the world we have?
          In a half-century, we've completely transformed the world economic system.

• Financial corporations are now larger than countries.
• Interconnected corporations control segments of the world economy.
• The financial industry extracts wealth here from countries on the far side of the world.
• Corporations (and a short list of powerful individuals) can own government policies.

In the 'business model' we see today, wealth rules without conscience.  Life for 80% of humanity is constrained by fiscal practices to living on $10/day or less.  Often. much less.  Poverty is not the result of bad luck, ignorance, or unwillingness to work.  Poverty is done to you.  Know who did it?

Many are surprised to find that the poverty of 5.6 billion people is the byproduct of deliberate choice by the wealthy and powerful throughout history.  In a chilling, recent example from the finance industry, one analyst describes his task as determining the GDP of a developing country and how it could be extracted by his company through debt instruments.  That's what you get when the business goal is the bottom line.  'Serving well' is a better purpose, but it's generally lost in the upper ranks of finance.

Following the money, the 'student loan' initiative, as a recent painful example, has devolved into a similarly destructive trap fraught with practices that preferentially benefit the lenders.  Like the welfare program's effect on poverty, there are few exits for those who get trapped inside.  Though it started as a helpful idea, now a graduate can spend a decade or more in the equivalent of indentured servitude.  (11 May 15: CNN this morning - 70% of millennials say their parents still pay a significant portion of their living expenses.)

Solutions:
Disassemble (or prosecute) the 'too big to fail' corporations?
     Probably an essential step for several reasons.
Refocus government on service and quality of life instead of GDP?
     The U.K. has begun discussion on such things ...
Perhaps every corrupt politico and business exec should be permanently exiled to the world's poorest country.

Should we hold the players accountable for the fallout of their actions?  A deliberate failure of ethical diligence in the 07-08 collapse resulted in the transfer of $trillions from the many to the pockets of the few.  Every household in the world (yes, the world) suffered financial loss.  The poor at the survival level lost the ability to school their children, to feed their families, and millions suffered permanent harm or death from deprivation as a direct result of finance industry actions.

History repeats itself - monopoly, legislation, taxes, the Robber Barons of the middle ages and today

No enemy has caused greater destruction. Ever.
Questions about going forward must include resolving such injustice, or we'll take the plague with us into the new world.  Again.  

From history:  Engulfed in Flames, 1848 Again?

Rule vs. Role

What role should the more experienced among us play?  Should they rule from far above?  Or might they perhaps work alongside and equip others for life and service.

In a vertical arrangement, power and position carry the risk that one person can take everything and everyone down.  We've seen it in many attempts at such rule, whether it's national government or organizational leadership, the flaws of one can affect all.

We're given prophets and apostles, evangelists, pastors and teachers for the equipping of the saints for the work of service.  It's that equipping that's their goal, not rule and authority, of course.

Churches were dragged in under emperors and governments centuries ago.  Rulers of nations merged themselves with rulers of churches and gave us the Crusades, the Inquisition, pursuit of empire, and other corruptions of intent.  Despite deliberate separation, that framework of hierarchical governance persisted in much of the church.

That which remains of the living church ... equips all to serve well.  The calling is not to sit and listen but to live and worship together and shine like a light on a hill, and we're changed by it all.

There must, perhaps, be authority for decisions, for law, to ensure freedom and justice, but in each case, the higher the hierarchy, the greater the risk.  In business, in the marketplace, in organizations and administrations, the risk is there.  Dictatorial rule can be the most destructive.  Such are the reasons for checks and balances.  Here's hoping it works.

Never Again

“ ... never again will America allow any insured institution (to) operate without enough money ... ”

President George W. Bush, following the savings and loan crash in 1989.

The savings and loan debacle in the 80's was 1/70 (one-seventieth) the size of the 2007-8 crash, both in terms of losses and the amount of fraud.  In that smaller debacle, regulators made over 30,000 criminal referrals and  produced over 1,000 felony convictions in cases designated as “major” by the Department of Justice.

Regulators worked with the FBI and the Justice Department to create a list of the top 100 — the 100 worst fraud schemes. They targeted roughly 300 savings and loans and 600 individuals; virtually all of those people were prosecuted. We had a 90 percent conviction rate, which is the greatest success against elite white-collar crime (in terms of prosecution) in history.

In the '08 crash, by comparison, the Office of Thrift Supervision made zero criminal referrals. They were supposed to regulate Countrywide, Washington Mutual and IndyMac, among others, which collectively made hundreds of thousands of fraudulent mortgage loans.  The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which is supposed to regulate the largest national banks, made zero criminal referrals. The Federal Reserve appears to have made zero criminal referrals. And the FDIC refused to answer the question.

Back in 1989, we established the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) as a United States federal agency under the Treasury Department to regulate banks and loan institutions. It replaced another federal agency that was faulted for its role in the savings and loan fraud crisis. The OTS was initially an aggressive regulator, but backed off in subsequent years.  It is funded by the industry it regulates, interestingly; it evolved into an auto-approval mechanism for the industry, more a partner than regulator.

It only took about a decade of Wall Street sponsored Federal deregulation to produce the Great Recession. "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there'd be a shortage of sand." 

--Milton Friedman, American economist and Nobel Prize recipient

President Obama put the financial industry on notice, "My administration ... is the only thing between you and the pitchforks."  

To date, however, there have been zero CEO prosecutions despite tens of thousands of criminal acts by the finance industry leading up to the crash.

  
No enemy has caused greater destruction. Ever.
Mortgage fraud continues unabated, according to the FBI.

Too Corny for Words

Ethanol - has it solved any problems?  Not really, in case you hadn't heard.

“Increasing bioenergy crop cultivation poses risks to ecosystems and biodiversity”  (WGIII).  That's the polite version from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

It turns out that the environmental impact is different, but not better.  Land use, forest clearing for farming, competition for food uses, government subsidies and price spikes ... any benefit was lost in the cloud of dust along with the tradeoff between direct vs. indirect emissions.  No improvements, but a visibly troublesome downside.  Oh, well; it had seemed like a good idea.  I hear even Al Gore has pulled the plug on this one.

The timing was really bad, by the way, for taking one sixth of the world's corn crop out of the food market.  As the biofuel initiatives began, the 2007-8 market crash exaggerated the impact, and corn prices doubled.  Production couldn't keep up, and folks who live primarily on maize meal (cornmeal) starved.  They don't have alternatives; they don't even have grocery stores.  Millions went hungry and hundreds of thousands died in the first year.  (We were close enough to see some of the heartbreaking results.)

As is continually true, we'll perhaps need to adjust if we're going to minimize the damage and achieve the goal we were reaching for in the first place.  Fortunately, there are alternatives to competition between food crops and fuel crops.

It's difficult to balance the issues, isn't it.  Preserving a healthy world for our children vs. feeding mankind vs. preserving our lifestyle ... are we adequately clear on what 'values' we hold?

____________________________________________________________

Converting rainforests, peatlands, savannas, or grasslands to produce food crop–based biofuels in Brazil, Southeast Asia, and the United States creates a “biofuel carbon debt” by releasing 17 to 420 times more CO₂ than the annual greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions that these biofuels would provide by displacing fossil fuels. (Ref.)

PRAXIS

Good ideas come and go, but most don't materialize.  How do ideas make the leap to where something good gets done?
prax·is

ˈpraksəs/

noun

formal

1. - practice, as distinguished from theory
   - doing, as opposed to talking

Praxis is the process that transforms an idea into action; i.e., working it through.

Praxis: It's not an easily used word,
    but the concept is great. 
       Talk becomes action.  

                      Ideas become industry.  

               Good ideas become great work.

When acted out, good ideas become help and change for one or perhaps many, but most inclinations to do something significant just evaporate in less time than it takes to read this page.  Our great loss.

Next time a good idea pops up, get up and do something with it. (he said, talking to himself again)

Change makers and help bringers - what are we going to do with what we know?