Both Rupert Ross in Canada and John Warfield here spoke about systems theory as being a part of the traditions of the First Nations. Whenever they took these forms into a community, they found that the councils were sophisticated in their use of the materials and the primary difference between the Yonega model and the Indian model was speed. The Yonega model used computers that sped up the process considerably. Of course if you drive to the top of Mount Washington rather than doing the hike, you don't know much about the mountain and consciousness is a big part of what it means to be from those cultures. Systems theory is a part of traditional religion.
REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Michael Gurstein Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2010 2:45 PM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: Re: [Futurework] The Picher Plan Great stuff Ray. Add ICT to the mix and you will have reinvented community informatics ;-) M -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ray Harrell Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2010 10:11 AM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION' Subject: [Futurework] The Picher Plan This article below, in principle, comes close to what my father did in Picher when the mines collapsed and jobs were lost. He created new jobs by stimulating the private sector in coordination with the biggest source of funds, the school budget. First he got Johnson/ O'Malley governmental funds to build a new grade school that consolidated all of the old schools into a new image. Second he funded the Arts as the core curriculum of the school to get rid of the mental depression of lead poison and sports to help cleanse body of the actual lead. He created apprenticeships between the schools and business to help the fledgling businesses and formed a corporation to keep the local highway in the town rather than going around the town as the state wanted. He didn't cut, he built infrastructure and stimulated business. He also got the town to tax itself in order to fund things. This was necessary because the town was not eligible for regular taxes being Indian reservation land. The key here was not that private industry was the answer but a partner in the solution. Private Industry would have preferred to outsource to cheaper sources of labor as would the schools with their budget. But dad left the funds in the town which was more expensive in the short term but supported the community which supported the schools. A later superintendant removed the schools funds from the local bank for a better rate and the bank collapsed, the community lost population and the school lost students and was worse off. We can draw another parallel with Phillips Petroleum and WW Keeler, another Cherokee, like my father. W.W. Keeler was the CEO of Phillips and the Chief of the Cherokee Nation. He not only reorganized and made possible the current Cherokee Nation West but he also made Phillips responsible to and for the community of Bartlesville, Oklahoma in the 1960s. For a while Bartlesville was awarded the status of All American City during that time. It was a wonderful place. As a result of Keeler's attitude the whole city flourished. It became an architectural mecca of good taste in the State of Oklahoma. But it wasn't all Cherokee, the Osage were next door and the Delaware were centered in Bartlesville. The Cherokee language course a came out of a Bartlesville resident Betty Smith. Keeler funded a new Cherokee dictionary with Durbin Feeling and the Delaware scholar Nora Thompson Dean lived in Dewey. There was and is a lot of that traditional Indian spirit of cooperation and generosity as well as the responsibility of the wealthy for the good of the community to be found in Bartlesville. But in the 1960 Keeler era my parents and sister were there and the city had ample services because Phillips made their company gym and other services available to the town and especially to the Elderly of the town. Like my father, Keeler and Phillips knew that a community was the reason for the prosperity in the first place not just a resource to be mined and walked away from. Keeler lived in Bartlesville. That all changed when T.Boone Pickens another Oklahoman but not Cherokee in mentality, raided the town, considered all of those things "pork" and took the money for them, from the company, just to go away. After that Phillips was raided again and pretty well busted as a community by the Wall Street corporate raider Carl Icahn. It seems to me that the neo-classic economic Senator Coburn plans are just not in our tradition. We prefer instead to design our way out of a problem with good positive long term solutions that are good for all. Coburn instead thinks just like the surgeon he is. It's all about healing the problem even if the patient dies from the wound. That was what happened to dad when he went into two heart surgeries and the business attitude of the hospital and bank at Bartlesville almost killed my mother. She missed the change that had happened in the community as a result of the corporate raiders. Her assumptions about the stability of the business structure were not correct. As a result of the shock of the Wall Street raids there is a new more harsh and fundamentalist feel to the town than before. It seems private business was leaving the Indian tradition of community responsibility and replacing it with responsibility only towards their shareholders, a feudal European model of business. Anyway, this article speaking of growth is like the Cherokee models of my father and Cherokee Chief W.W. Keeler. It is also the model that Clay Harrell, my father's younger brother, did in Vienna, Virginia when, as city manager, he developed Tysons Corners the largest shopping center in America at the time and the Wolf Trap Farms National Park of the Performing Arts. Clay did the same thing earlier in Muskogee, Oklahoma when he was instrumental in getting the "Port of Muskogee" for the city of 38,000 which made middle America available to the Gulf of Mexico through the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers. None of those projects nor Picher or Bartlesville (with its architectural treasures) would have been developed under the surgical Coburn model which is more consonant with both Pickens and Icahn than our traditional models. REH PS Coburn is my half cousin and Clay's stepson. When Clay's wife died he married Coburn's mother. Coburn is not from our tradition and is not Cherokee. November 16, 2010 One Way to Trim Deficit: Cultivate Growth By DAVID LEONHARDT <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/david_leonhard t/index.html?inline=nyt-per> We look back on the late 1990s as a rare time when the federal government ran budget surpluses. We tend to forget that those surpluses came as a surprise to almost everybody. As late as 1998 <http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/3xx/doc316/eb01-98.pdf> , the Congressional Budget Office <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/congres sional_budget_office/index.html?inline=nyt-org> was predicting a deficit for 1999. In fact, Washington ran its biggest surplus in five decades. What happened? Above all, economic growth. And that may be a big part of the answer to our current problems. Yes, the government became more fiscally conservative in the 1990s. Both President George H. W. Bush <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/george_bush/in dex.html?inline=nyt-per> (who doesn't get enough credit) and President Bill Clinton <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/bill_clinton/i ndex.html?inline=nyt-per> , working with Congress, raised taxes to attack the 1980s deficits. But those tax increases were the second most important reason for the surpluses that followed. The most important was the fact that the economy grew more rapidly than expected. The faster growth pushed up incomes and caused more tax revenue to flow into the Treasury <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/t/treasur y_department/index.html?inline=nyt-org> . Today's looming deficits <http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=11579> are almost surely too large to be closed exclusively with growth. The baby boom generation is too big, and the rise in Medicare <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics /medicare/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> costs continues to be too steep. Yet growth could still make an enormous difference. If the economy grew one half of a percentage point faster than forecast each year over the next two decades - no easy feat, to be fair - the country would have to do roughly 40 to 50 percent less deficit-cutting than it now appears, based on my reading of budget data from <http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/url.cfm?ID=1001373> the economists Alan Auerbach and William Gale. To get a concrete sense for what this would mean, you can play around with the The Times's online deficit puzzle <http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic .html> . It asks you to find almost $1.4 trillion in annual spending cuts and tax increases by the year 2030. If growth were a half point faster than expected, the needed savings would instead drop to less than $700 billion. That would mean many fewer painful choices, be they tax increases or Medicare cuts. So arguably the single best way to cut the deficit is to make sure that any deficit-cutting plan does not also cut economic growth. Ideally, it will lift growth. There are two main ways to do so. First, we shouldn't plunge ourselves back into another economic slump by raising taxes and cutting spending too quickly. President Franklin Roosevelt <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/franklin_delan o_roosevelt/index.html?inline=nyt-per> made that mistake <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/business/economy/30leonhardt.html> in 1937, and this time (one hopes) the country won't be able to rely on war mobilization spending to undo the error. In the short term, we should actually spend more. "Some politicians and economists present a false choice: reduce unemployment or stabilize the debt," argues a new bipartisan deficit plan <http://www.bipartisanpolicy.org/projects/debt-initiative/about> that will be released Wednesday, the second such plan to come out in the last week. As Alice Rivlin <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/alice_m_rivlin /index.html?inline=nyt-per> , a Democrat who oversaw the writing of the plan with Pete Domenici <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/pete_v_domenic i/index.html?inline=nyt-per> , a Republican, put it: "We can do both. We can put money in people's pockets in the short run and trim government spending in the long run." . The plan calls for a one-year payroll tax holiday for employers and workers, costing $650 billion. But remember that's a one-time sum, while the needed deficit cuts will be hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Relative to those cuts, a payroll tax holiday - or more spending on roads and bridges, as President Obama <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/i ndex.html?inline=nyt-per> favors - is a rounding error. And, of course, putting people back to work has its own benefits. Even more important than the next couple of years is the second part of a pro-growth strategy: the long term. A good deficit plan doesn't simply make across-the-board cuts for years on end. It cuts funding for programs that do not spur economic growth and increases funding for those relatively few that do. Likewise, it raises tax rates that do not have a clear record of promoting growth and cuts those that do. This task is not an easy one, because advocates and lobbyists inevitably claim that their idea, whatever it is, will help the larger economy. Just look at farm subsidies, a form of welfare for agribusiness that is supposedly crucial to the American economy. Or look at President George W. Bush <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/george_w_bush/ index.html?inline=nyt-per> 's tax cuts, which, after being sold as an economic elixir, were followed by the slowest decade of growth since before World War II. The two bipartisan deficit proposals that have come out over the last week each do a pretty good job, but not quite good enough, of focusing on economic growth. The most pro-growth part of both proposals - the Domenici-Rivlin plan and the one <http://www.fiscalcommission.gov/sites/fiscalcommission.gov/files/documents/ CoChair_Draft.pdf> from Erskine Bowles <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/erskine_b_bowl es/index.html?inline=nyt-per> and Alan Simpson <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/alan_k_simpson /index.html?inline=nyt-per> - is their emphasis on tax reform. Today's tax code is a thicket of deductions, credits and loopholes that force people to change their behavior and waste time trying to avoid too large of a tax bill. A tax code with fewer deductions and lower rates - which, to be clear, is not the same thing as a tax cut - would instead let businesses and households focus on being as productive as possible. The potential to make good money would drive more decisions, and the ability to qualify for a tax break would drive fewer. Beyond tax reform, both deficit plans mention the importance of making investments that will lead to future growth. In particular, the Bowles-Simpson plan calls for a gradual 15-cents-a-gallon increase in the federal gasoline tax <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/g/gasoline_tax _us/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> to pay for highways, mass transit and other projects. The plans also urge the government to prioritize education and science. These are clearly among the best ways to promote growth. The United States created the world's most prosperous economy last century in large measure <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/magazine/01Economy-t.html?pagewanted=5> because it was the world's most educated country. It no longer is. Federal science dollars, meanwhile, led to <http://www.thebreakthrough.org/blog/Case%20Studies%20in%20American%20Innova tion.pdf> the creation of the intercontinental railroad, the airline industry, the microchip, the personal computer, the Internet and numerous medical breakthroughs. Yet science funding is scheduled to decline as stimulus money runs out. Unfortunately, the plans don't get more specific than saying that education and science are important. The only dedicated money for specific investments in either plan is the infrastructure fund financed by the gas tax. And, realistically, exhorting a future Congress to avoid wasteful spending and prioritize growth has about as much chance of success as exhorting it to find the political will to revamp Medicare. The two bipartisan deficit groups deserve a lot of credit for starting to move the debate beyond vagaries. There is one more step they can take, though: making sure we remember that cutting the deficit is not only about making cuts. E-mail: [email protected]
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