[p2p-research] gotta read this

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Michel Bauwens wrote:
> I feel you have to read this: http://www.counterpunch.com/green09182009.html
> 
> and would love reactions from our American friends,

 From the link: "I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in 
which proposing a new and better version of corporate-plunder masquerading 
as national healthcare gets you burned in effigy for being a socialist 
stooge by gun-toting angry mobs. ... Looking at America today, it all feels 
so very past tense to me. ..."

As a US American, that feels all too true sometimes. Still, ultimately, we 
don't have the luxury of despair. As I wrote here:
   http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"""
We can, and should, ask how we can create institutions that help everyone in 
them become healthier, more loving, more charitable, more hopeful, more 
caring (even as they may be dying or even if they are tragically taking 
others with them).
   The last word on almost all airplane crash cockpit voice recorders is the 
same -- "Shit!" -- usually after the pilots' calm struggle for minutes with 
a seemingly impossible situation like trying to get an airplane with a 
multiple failing engines over a mountain -- they don't give up even when the 
task seems impossible. But those are just the aircraft tragedies, the same 
training helps pilots fly millions of safe and comfortable air miles.
   We should also ask how we can create institutions which even help 
everyone in them become even more faithful in the sense of believing at 
least in values like health, love, charity, hope, community, and caring. As 
I say later in this essay, it is part of the human condition to have faith 
in something (even if it is faith in faithlessness).
"""

I grew up being taught I lived in Ancient Athens (Democracy); it took a long 
time to realize I lived in Ancient Sparta (Military Empire).

At this point, even Sparta's looking pretty good. :-(
   http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html
"""
Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is 
hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse 
than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we 
have in America today.
   One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a 
reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have 
great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult 
but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 
21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us 
in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power 
and wind power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding 
populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean 
power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure 
that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, 
including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.
   Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate 
legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really 
playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, 
arms folded and saying “no.” Many of them just want President Obama to fail. 
Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he’s a centrist. But if he’s 
forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be 
whipsawed by its different factions.
"""

Whatever US American was, it has ceased to exist on more than one occasion, 
and now is another example. What lies ahead is uncharted waters. We can 
hopefully build on the good (diversity, abundance) and let go of the old 
(empire, territoriality, discrimination, militarism). But, that's just a hope.

US America is dead; long live US America. :-)

President Carter said it best in 1979:
   http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/filmmore/ps_crisis.html
"""
We ourselves are the same Americans who just ten years ago put a man on the 
Moon. We are the generation that dedicated our society to the pursuit of 
human rights and equality. And we are the generation that will win the war 
on the energy problem and in that process rebuild the unity and confidence 
of America.
   We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. 
One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to 
fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of 
freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That 
path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in 
chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.
   All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the 
promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and 
the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our 
nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin 
to solve our energy problem.
"""

Well, we took the wrong path. And we have three decades of going in the 
wrong direction to undo.

 From John Gardner's 1971 book "Self-Renewal: The Individual and the 
Innovative Society":
http://www.amazon.com/Self-Renewal-Individual-Innovative-John-Gardner/dp/039331295X
"As I was browsing in a university bookstore recently, I heard an 
apple-cheeked girl say to her companion, "The truth is that our society and 
everything in it is in a state of decay." I studied her carefully and I must 
report that she did not seem even slightly decayed. But what of the society 
as a whole? Decay is hardly the word for what is happening to us. We are 
witnessing changes so profound and far-reaching that the mind can hardly 
grasp all the implications. ... Only the blind and complacent could fail to 
recognize the great tasks of renewal facing us -- in government, in 
education, ..."

John Gardner goes on to say that every generation faces the problem of 
renewing itself to meet new challenges emerging from the very success of the 
old ways of doing things. And he suggests that social values are not some 
drying up old reservoir, but rather a reservoir of variable capacity that 
must be recharged anew in every generation.

Democracy -- use it or lose it.
Free speech on the internet -- use it or lose it.
Social capital -- use it or lose it?
P2P -- use it or lose it? :-)

Again, Gardner's book was written in 1971, so, about forty years ago. 
Although it's true the last thirty years in the USA has pretty much been a 
disaster socially ("greed is good"), even if technically we have advanced, 
and there has at least also been a growing environmental consciousness.

The article mentions US nukes. Sure, if it gets really ugly and the nukes 
and plagues are loosed, it will be really bad. Let's hope that can be 
prevented. Good examples of alternative ways to live and interact can help 
by providing a good example of something positive to transition towards.

A sci-fi example of moving forward.
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
"The government of the Mayflower II utilizes various methods used throughout 
human history in its attempts to exert control over the Chironians; 
bureaucratic legislature, a capitalist financial system, and proselytizing 
religion. However, they are frustrated by failure at every turn: as a people 
that have never been exposed to Earth's coercive authorities, the Chironians 
lack the social conditioning to even comprehend the attempts at subversion. 
Soon many of the crew from the Mayflower II are abandoning their 
increasingly futile positions in the invading hierarchy in favor of adopting 
the more rewarding Chironian lifestyle. Amid widespread speculation that a 
violent conflict will soon break out, some of the people who arrived on the 
Mayflower II realize that the Chironians do not intend to harm the majority 
of the ship's occupants, but rather use a form of satyagraha (Mahatma 
Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolent noncompliance) to integrate the peaceful 
travelers into their society and isolate the small number who present a real 
threat."

One thing that Iraq is an example of, that I read in the run up to Iraq. 
Rotten countries and hollow dictatorships generally collapse really fast; 
like a piece of termite infested wood, they continue to look solid even if 
there is no substance inside, until they suddenly collapse upon applying 
some pressure. It is what comes afterwards that is the challenge -- the 
decades of rebuilding. As that article shows, the US government has 
collapsed as far as being able to effectively relate to reality or its 
people (even if the routine continues). Or, another way of saying that is 
that the USA has gone senile. The question is, what comes afterward?

Of course, I doubt most other US Americans would agree with me yet. Maybe I 
do paint too strong a picture? But, when you look at states that have turned 
violent, the USA could all too quickly go that route. The use of guns to 
intimidate and defend a status quo is all too scary, like the people showing 
up at health care rallies with assault weapons. Reminds me of other 
countries where impromptu militias are used to enforce strict religious 
codes, like with the Taliban. What these gun toters are saying is, we're 
willing to defend the status quo. Normally, that would be great 
(conservatism of important values, like the environment), except it is a 
problem when the status quo is driving off a cliff (conservation of 
polluting the planet).

If only conservatives would really conserve. :-)

And if only liberals would really liberate. :-)

Contrast
http://www.famousquotes.com/show.php?_id=1009329
"If I knew...that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of
doing me good, I should run for my life." -- Henry David Thoreau

Versus:
http://djterasaki.wordpress.com/2007/12/19/lila-watsons-quote-well-sort-of/
"If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have
come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together"

Jacque Fresco mentions in one video how if we don't come up with a better 
way to live, people will turn to strongmen (dictators) to tell them how to 
live and how to organize the economy, as security starts to trump all other 
concerns. That sounds all too true historically.

The article mentions 1930s Weimar Germany. See also:
   "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"
   http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
"""
"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, 
"was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the 
people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in 
Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close 
to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true 
democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this 
has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.
    ...
   "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands 
will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and 
worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and 
smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, 
let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the 
‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of 
course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of 
little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to 
be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you 
did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
   "And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of 
them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too 
heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a 
baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that 
everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. 
The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were 
born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the 
houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the 
cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you 
made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now 
you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do 
not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is 
transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility 
even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the 
beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
"""

Really, the only antidote to hate and fear is love and laughter.
   http://www.humorproject.com/

But also knowledge helps. We know a lot more than we did then.
   http://www.lucifereffect.com/
   http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/0151010986
   http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm

That is all reason for hope.

Something else that is positive:
   "The Optimism of Uncertainty" by Howard Zinn
   http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
"""
In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in 
comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay 
involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will 
get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards 
have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play 
is to foreclose any chance of winning.
   To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the 
world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment 
will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden 
crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by 
unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse 
of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history 
of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, 
because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so 
ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of 
someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone 
halfway around the earth. ...
"""

I doubt most US Americans are even aware of these issues. Something is 
wrong, but it is not clear what. The TV says it is liberals and taxes that 
are wrong, so that must be it. Even if the most prosperous times in terms of 
economic advancement for most US Americans were after WWII when the USA had 
a 91% marginal tax rate, and as a result of liberal and governmental 
interventions.
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal
And even that was just to prevent a revolution and a move to "communism" in 
the USA, which was in the air in the 1930s as the economy imploded.

It's taken me many years to move into a better understanding of some of 
these issue, like the limits of the free market (while still accepting it's 
virtues). The Iraq war was a big motivator there, to understand the horror 
and how it could happen, in my case to call Hillary Clinton's office before 
the invasion and talk to a staffer and tell them vast numbers of people will 
die if that goes forward and to have the staffer just repeat stupid scripted 
junk. Where is the accountability for millions of deaths and trillions of 
dollars wasted?
   "George Bush - "Imagine" (Bush is gone, let it go, people!)"
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n41bRHlr76Y

For me, that was a decision point, to say something in public or to just 
hunker down. Two stories written from my time posting to Pacifica Radio 
forums before the Iraq war:
   http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-lion-and-the-butterfly.html
   http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-lion-memo.html

The first is very much a p2p story in a way. :-)

Someone conservative on a forum (slashdot) once told me we differed on one 
thousand assumptions. I think that was accurate. :-) Over time, hundreds or 
thousands of assumptions to be questioned, and hundreds or thousands of new 
ideas to be accepted. (And I'm not saying I'm right on all those.) But, 
questioning a thousand assumptions is a process that takes a long time (even 
the most basic ones, like Alfie Kohn's criticism of competition, or John 
Taylor Gatto's criticism of compulsory schooling).

From:
   http://www.historyisaweapon.com/
"We cannot simply be passive. We must choose whose interests are best: those 
who want to keep things going as they are or those who want to work to make 
a better world. If we choose the latter, we must seek out the tools we will 
need. History is just one tool to shape our understanding of our world. And 
every tool is a weapon if you hold it right. "

It's an unfortunate self-defeating violent metaphor at the end of that 
statement and in the name of the site, though.
   http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html

So, after trillions now to war that has made the US less safe, we just spent 
trillion for bailouts to banks. There was tens of billions for failed auto 
industries that deserved to fail (advertising people into buying wasteful 
cars and using lobbyists to resist reforms that would have saved them). And 
now, as the article suggests, we get a health care plan that is essentially 
a gift to the insurance industry and drug industry and so on, but, further, 
still manages to link the taxpayer into covering much of the projected 
doubling in cost for hospitalization over then next decade. And we still 
can't cover everyone, because US$100 billion a year more in taxes (even if 
the economy would save many times that) is too much.

That is not a Congress accountable to the interests of most of the people.

The facts:
* Covering everyone with platinum level medical care is cheaper than what we 
have now in the USA.
* Converting the USA to all renewables (plus energy efficiency) would cost 
less than one-half of one year of the US defense budget, most of which goes 
to defending supplies of foreign oil.
* It would be cheaper for the US tax payer to give everyone a free electric 
car than pay to subsidize gasoline cars. :-)

For the last, see my post to the OM list: :-)
  "Why luxury safer electric cars should be free-to-the-user "
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/6cdc99eaaba91855/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en#09eb7f4c973349f2

We are reaching the end of the importance of money as a control system for 
making major production decisions in our society. Yet money still controls 
Congress, related to TV advertising. One might hope that the rise of the 
internet in elections might lead to better representation in Congress. We 
will see.

We might be better off controlling our economy through email than through 
money. :-) Mentioned somewhere in here:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/0aed023131815d6b/753dfc84784c1f17#753dfc84784c1f17
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/3743c17d86b9c5ab?
"""
And discussion is a key aspect of democracy. With democracy, we often focus
on the "voting" and forget about the discussion and attempts at consensus
making. Cybersyn and the Venus Project and ideas in the Zeitgeist Addendum
may all fail too in that way, to not see the discussion aspect as hopeful,
and how the internet is empowering that (even with negatives of the
internet). When there is active discussion within a democracy, even with
voting machine fraud, the greater that top level decisions deviate from the
general consensus, the more stress there will be on the system, and the more
likely, overall, the system will eventually correct itself.
    http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/27074.html
"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some
of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.
(Abraham Lincoln)"
...
So, while I actually like the idea of a cybernetic backbone (say, to collect
data to be used for planning mining needs or other aggregate needs), it
would be interacting with more locally autonomous systems where resources
were turned into products (as gifts, as local production for oneself, or
through formal rationing). Within that framework, I can wonder if what we
have as far as governance through open public mailing lists like with the
Debian GNU/Linux project is maybe enough already to run a planet well? :-)
Really, is it going to be that much better to have numbers flitting around
unseen through a network and AI than to have people discussing the numbers
on mailing lists? We tradeoff convenient accounting for robust
accountability. :-)
"""

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/