Keith, Thank you for your comments. I'm always aware and amazed at how
different our life experience is. We have both accomplished but in wildly
different venues and systems. Below is my experience of what you are
speaking about. I put mine in italics and bold because I can't see. It
has nothing to do with aggression. :>)) REH
-----------------------------------------
Ray,
A few comments on your latest:
At 21:56 19/08/2010 -0400, you wrote:
William Baumol told us in 2004 that productivity has vastly increased the
money that is available. The problem was where it was going. We have
plenty of real capital. We are not a small island nation off of the coast
of Europe. We have vast resources and a population that is a tremendous
natural resource as well.
Neither of these is important in itself. Small countries with almost no
resources and small populations can do very well -- e.g. Sweden,
Switzerland, Singapore. What's important is innovative ability and a culture
that will support unusual initiatives.
REH: Are you advocating for "small is beautiful?"
-----------------------------------------------
What we suffer from is a lack of genuine ideals that stress life,
equality, unity and the effects of actions down to the seventh generation.
Most of all you need a cultural program that
. builds individual competence and insight,
True
REH: good
. develops a program that is a part of the real world and not
fantasy based in religious theories.
True
REH: good
-------------------------------------------------
. Seriously caring about every single citizen in the country and
their growth and evolution
Not necessarily. Besides, is it possible?
REH: Yes. My family and people have a history of it prior to 1900 when
our nation was broken up by the U.S. private enterprise immigrant
government. Today we are reconstituted as a properly competitive
cut-throat nation ala the Western Powers. Note this response about us from
the 1880s:
"
In 1883 a small group of Eastern humanitarians began to meet annually at
Lake Mohonk, where with an agreeable background of natural beauty, congenial
companionship, and crusading motive, they discussed the Indian problem. At
their third meeting Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts, a distinguished
Indian theorist, gave a glowing description of a visit of inspection he had
recently made to the Indian Territory. The most partisan Indian would
hardly have painted such an idealized picture of his people's happiness and
prosperity and culture, but, illogically, the senator advocated a change in
this perfect society because it held the wrong principles of property
ownership. Speaking apparently of the Cherokees, he said: "The head chief
told us that there was not a family in that whole nation that had not a home
of its own. There was not a pauper in that nation, and the nation did not
owe a dollar. It built its own capitol, in which we had this examination,
and it built its schools and its hospitals. Yet the defect of the system
was apparent. They have got as far as they can go, because they own their
land in common. It is Henry George's system, and under that there is no
enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neighbors. There
is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization. Till this people
will consent to give up their lands, and divide them among their citizens so
that each can own the land he cultivates, they will not make much more
progress." (36)
(36) 1900, pp. 25-32; Lake Mohonk Conference, Report, 1904, pp 5-6;
Department of the Interior, Annual Report, 1900, pp. 655-735.
I would contend that these are ultimately more efficient than the current
competitive market model. These processes were what I was taught at my
parents table and what I lived and live by. It is my culture. It is
also the reason that so many of the voice teachers in New York give away so
many lessons to the deserving and disciplined poor. The same was true of
my English, Black, German, French, Italian, Cherokee and Lakota teachers and
artists. It does seem that Artists are the "Indians" of the European
cultural world.
--------------------------------------------------
There is nothing long range about the private sector and working with it is
tremendously expensive when compared to the public sector.
Energy and resource companies think much further ahead than any current
government in the world -- except China perhaps.
REH: Good point. I grew up in Oklahoma where the oil and mineral
companies ravaged the landscape, destroyed the minds of children with lead,
zinc, heavy metal and petroleum pollution as well as polluting the aquifers
for three states in order to get the last little bit of oil out by pumping
saltwater into the depleted oil wells.
-----------------------------------------------
America has made the business of the private sector into a simple profit
machine for share holders. That is new.
No, it's out of date already in the case of many of the largest firms,
particularly in the financial sector. Shareholders (and pension funds with
high shareholdings) take second place to the top managers of firms who are
only concerned with their current earnings and perks, not with longer-term
profitability.
REH: I wish you would talk to our bank creditors about being out of date.
We could use you to advocate for us.:>))
------------------------------------------------------
Companies that were seriously involved in community building and long
term planning have been replaced by companies that ravage communities and
steal the resources of the weak.
Most firms don't want to ravage communities. They want a large consumer base
which willingly buys their products.
REH: This is a big difference in our experience. I would not deny that it
was that way up until the multi-national craze. However, I believe the
case can be made for community development and support for companies being a
respite in the timeline of Imperial Capitalism's History. That would make
the current TNC's a return to the old model but without the tie to the
governmental base they had during the Nationalist Empires. But although
I am a fellow of the Organization of American Historians I would never claim
to be more than an observer of these trends since I neither write nor teach
history.
---------------------------------------------------------
They call it the creditindustry and it has permeated the entire stock
market structure of the country. It is also recent.
True. But the immense growth of credit has been due to the running-out of a
chain of uniquely new consumer goods such as we had between 1780 and 1980
and for which customers saved for. Motivation for "new" products since about
1980 has been so weak that an entirely new financial sector had to arise
that would thrust credit onto customers and firms.
REH: You may be right about that. I simply comment on the effects of the
changes that happened at the end of the Clinton Administration and
accelerated under Bush II.
------------------------------------------------------------
How long before this fact is realized? I dont know but in my experience
the private sector can only do very simple economie of scale processes that
force it to follow the public sector in the really creative public projects.
What creative public projects are these? I know of none. Creative projects
only arise in individual minds and can only be taken forward by relatively
small groups. In many cases if they're successful and it's in bureaucracies'
best interests such projects are taken over by the state.
REH: We wildly disagree on this one. I don't believe you can separate
individuals from their environment and culture. Creativity means
competence and inner motivation. There is bloody little of that in
capitalism and in government. But I find more creativity in the Artists of
the two U.S. Army Musical organizations than on the outside. Stable
salaries, even though far below the private sector, create an environment
where the men and women of the ensemble literally develop cultural gold in
the outside organizations that they work in as second jobs. The only
downside is the Authoritarian structure which was too much for me. It is
not oppression and abuse but authoritarianism that I find intolerable. I
will create no matter what. It is a part of my culture and my family and
people's history that we take things in one area and apply them to new areas
and develop new ways of thinking.
---------------------------------------------------------------
. You dont have serious private space programs.
. Nor do you have a chip-fab lab anywhere in the world financed by
the private sector.
The biggest ones are in Taiwan and they're private.
REH: My source on that statement is Hedrick Smith's 1995 book "Rethinking
America" where he analyzed the Sema-tech government/private program that
created a chip-fab lab as well as the successful government/private programs
around the world. At the time he made several observations about the Asian
versus the American processes:
"1. During war, American always cooperate, but in a peacetime we never
cooperate,"
2. We knew that their universities are not better than ours... We found out
that they are cooperating much more closely-the suppliers and users-and the
government has helped them. They are providing a catalytic environment for
industry to work together."
3. .according to a global study done by the U.S. Semiconductor Industry
Association, entitled "Creating Advantage". The study found that the free
market had never generated a computer chip industry anywhere in the world.
etc. etc."
The private sector in America has destroyed government research in favor of
more expensive private research. Has destroyed the public sectors in
culture, healthcare and is working on education and is hopelessly more
expensive in the production of energy which is highly subsidized in order to
make private succeed. They are also working on private prisons and
privatizing the military for profit.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
. The private sector cannot even develop a profit making complex
artistic ensemble.
What about Glyndebourne Opera and thousands more projects around the world?
Glyndebourne is a Chamber Opera right? Under a thousand seats?
Patronage Showcases by the wealthy do not make a national program for the
general public. America is filled with Glyndebourne's. Where once
there were 66,000 opera houses, there are now 210, just the right number to
service the wealthy and give Trinkets and Trash to the average citizen for
their brain development.
----------------------------------------------------------------
The best they can do is widgets and trinkets and trash. Shiny things.
Many are, but many more make "widgets" that the modern artistic world, among
others, depend on.
Actually the history of Art is the opposite. Galileo got his processes
from his father a music theorition. The "Ultimate Abstractions" that
Whitehead speaks about as the basis of all knowledge, are found as the
foundation for the virtuosic development of the human instrument through the
Arts. There have been plenty of engineering widgets to come out of both
the theater and the work on perspective and images by painters, sculptors
and over the last thousand years or so and opera design since Vincenzo
Galilei and the Camerata di Bardi "invented" the form .
I suspect the real history is more like 100,000 years or so when it comes to
creativity stirred by psycho-physical abstract exploration and disciplinary
virtuosity.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Great works of the human spirit do not come from the private sector.
Nor does equality of opportunity and an efficient use of resources.
Once again, great works arise in individual minds and are usually taken a
long way forward by quite small private groups. There is a maximum of
opportunity when a new idea first starts to shape up. Efficiency can only
arise from competition, never from a unitary owner like a monopoly or the
state.
Once again, my experience is totally the reverse of yours on this point. I
would argue that the current problem in the market is not some cycle but a
mistake about the root of human creativity and how it is grown.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Perhaps your comments about a war are true of England but I can
guarantee that they are not true of here. America is arming itself.
I wouldn;t guarantee anything about England or America except that the
Western world is going to experience an even worse financial condition than
we have now -- caused by the nation-states' takeover of money a century ago
which is now crashing about their ears. The politicians and treasuries of
the Western world have absolutely no idea what to do next.
Agreed, especially on the final sentence. They have lost their culture
and their way. When they say Art they are talking old works that have
little use for them other than simple entertainment or pleasure based in
predictability. Science works to discover and build predictability down
to a singularity. Art is the reverse, as is creativity, it is a flowering
evolution away from a singularity to many points of enlightenment. In
music, as you well know, we call that a messa di voce.
Thank you for your time and for your thought. It was fun.
REH
KSH
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