This is a rerun on this list from 1999. At that time we were speaking of "Lean and Agile" manufacturing and what that meant for the labor force. I said that a large number of the jobs of any society was make-work based upon the needs of the society to:
1. Keep the people the off of the streets and in constructive cultural endeavors. 2. Keep the people's children in school and off the streets and out of the courts. 3. Achieve certain public works goals that created a better life for all including business. I also said that government shouldn't supply all of those jobs because: like the International Government oil companies, private business cannot compete with government jobs. They are simply too limited and they don't control armies unless "private" means a warlord. The Whiskey Rebellion tells us very clearly what the ancestors thought about that idea! Therefore the purpose of a private sector, entrepreneurship, small term creativity, a certain type of non-big research innovation and as a place for the radical side of society, like myself, who just doesn't get along with institutions, is a good idea. We radical Artist types can provide a good service as a small business or in a not-for-profit sector. Government exists for the big Infrastructure jobs, (i.e. Public Health, education, public safety) Public Goods jobs that are required for a coherent culture - happiness - quality of life issues, standards and regulations, courts and the law, and large public works projects like NASA, dams, chip-fab labs, cancer cures, etc. and National Defense. Using the private sector in any of the above is prohibitively expensive, only locally successful and open to huge bouts of graft and cronyism as they use their money to interface with the government for private advantage. I contend that the current worship of the private sector and marketplace has skewed this agreement between public and private and is in danger of toppling the whole structure in favor of the hyper wealthy of the world. Its the modern version of the Oliver DeLancey Tory family in 1775 New York city that couldn't afford to be supporters of the revolution and so lost everything. The modern version of that is the GOP in the U.S. I don't know about Canada. Figuring this out is not chromatic harmony. That's hard and takes years. You can't learn by fugueing around. You just have to think design and what you want. The wealthy are very clear about what they want and they "don't care" (their words to me, not mine) about the rest of the 98% of the population. In fact they are derisive of the 98%. Their Art, (as described by the NYTimes Magazine in the 1990s), is the growth of money for its own sake. Art for Arts sake? Money for money's sake. That has to change. I tried to find the poem but it's been since the 1960s but I will try to remember as much as I can. "This General in British garb is Oliver DeLancey He's from a noted family He's really very fancy, very fancy. They owned large portions of New York And quite a lot of Jersey But when the revolution came They all cried out: Oh Mercy!" Somehow it reminds me of Ayn Rand Paul the son of Congressman Ron Paul decrying Obama. It's a time when the Industrialists promise a return to the old Drone contract (1880s) that replaced the revolutionary (1776) "Secular Covenant" and elevated religion to the Marxist paradigm as an opiate of the Drone workers. (Something that the science crowd now takes to heart and mis-represents serious religion about in their diatribes. They are speaking of Industrial Revolution Drone Religion.) But the early folks like the Ana-Baptist Theologian Roger Williams, who was the man who coined the phrase Separation of Church and State almost a hundred years before the revolution and made it possible for non-Christians, Jews, Quakers and other philosopher types to have an agrarian life here away from state persecution. They were people who refused the idea of a state church (and who communed with the natives) and would later with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson form the foundation of the entire republic. The current Baptists are not from that Ana-Baptist source but from the Pentecostal ecstatic movement that came to the fore in the Baptist and Methodist Churches during and after Reagan. I have many of my father's letters from that time as he decried the bringing of a culture that had no roots with them into the church door along with a GOP voter registration booth. The Alliance between the conservative scholars coming from Germany and Austria escaping Hitler and the Evangelicals is one that I watched as Samuel Lipman and the conductor Gerard Schwartz made those connections through music and the founding of the Los Angeles Chamber Symphony in a fundamentalist church in L.A. Interestingly, Lipman a concert pianist was also a Political Science major at Berkeley in the 1960s and the son of parents who considered themselves Socialists. I'm not implying that the conductor was political but Lipman certainly was and he founded the conservative flagship Journal the "New Criterion." I believe the current danger to the Republic is due to the immigrant philosophies that came here running away from Hitler and World War II, primarily to the University of Chicago. These are pre-Hitler German/Austrian political, economic and philosophical ideas. They have little to do with the political history I was taught on the government reservation and at the private Presbyterian University of Tulsa before the rise of the hyper rich beginning in the 1980s. They are more conducive to an Aristocratic Authoritarian Parliamentary government system than to a system of checks and balances (with a longer timeline) that was the system designed by the Founding Fathers of the U.S. Government. It matters not that they have the American Libertarians like Ron and Rand Paul on their side. You could call these "petty authoritarians" basing their authority, just as in feudalism, in ownership with the meaning of life being thoroughly material. Such materialism was never a part of my education and I don't think it is a very stable philosophy for freedom and individual growth. Now, have I thoroughly offended everyone? Sorry. Thank you Arthur for you uncommon wisdom and the stimulation of a lot of thought about these things. Your depth is apparent. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Arthur Cordell Sent: Saturday, July 17, 2010 8:10 PM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'; [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] timesizing not downsizing http://www.timesizing.com/2ts.htm The standard response to technological innovation today is downsizing, rationalized by the myth that "technology creates more jobs than it destroys." The myth is belied by companies' repeated success in getting taxbreaks by threatening to take their jobs elsewhere, by the huge increase in makework <http://www.timesizing.com/1mkwkegs.htm> in both public and private sectors, and by mounting numbers of people on welfare, disability <http://www.timesizing.com/3disab.htm> , homelessness <http://www.timesizing.com/1homless.htm> , prison <http://www.timesizing.com/2jailvu.htm> , forced retirement <http://www.timesizing.com/1retire.htm> and forced "self-employment" with no clients. Globally, downsizing has turned the goal of competitiveness into a race to the bottom and darkened the world's economic and ecological outlook. But the good news is that very few changes in approach can stop the downturn and get everything spiralling UPward again. -------------------------------- This web site may be of interest to some. Arthur
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
