Honestly, do you still believe in the future?

I offer up this letter to the editor (still to be published) as just one indicator of the many impediments to that "easily created" idea of "the switch"  (it might better be termed The Great Transition...

The people who take buses to their place of work - most of them unable to afford to own an automobile - are about to be offered a sedate ride on rails along main street, Kitchener-Waterloo, whether that meets their basic needs or not.

For some, like students, it will serve. But for a large and growing number of people, the light rail option will only mean that money will not be available to provide useful bus services into the still-growing sinkhole of public transportation and infrastructure, the suburbs.

Light rail will service the bulging demographic of boomers, for whom condos will spring up along the rail corridor. And the problem of how to concentrate them will have been solved.

And what of the people far from the corridor who are forced from their automobiles by the rising cost of oil? The theory has long been that only the rising price of fuel will bring the end of the auto-dependent culture and stave off a more violent, carbon-charged climate.

It is clear that an affordable public transportation system will be needed as increasing numbers of people fall victim to unaffordable fossil fuel prices in the great transition.

It is also clear that planners and others able to carry on driving for now, pretend not to understand this.

"The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling...their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We are many and they are few. They need us more than we need them.  Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. on a quiet day I can hear her breathing." Arundhati Roy

Catchfire wrote:

"Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing." —Arundhati Roy (h/t Maysie)

 

I absolutely love this.

Northern Shoveler wrote:

 Many mangers who get her e-mails don't quite know what to make of it.

Here's an excellent interview with her.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnTS9gHCZoI

That seems to me to be a failure in imagination.  Thank you for the link.

Being management sucks, unless you actually enjoy lording your figment of power over others who need their jobs to pay the rent and eat.

I've been management, and if you have any creativity, any imagination, it's sucked out by the job, leaving a souless vacuum.  Never again.

I've seen the future, and it isn't about running stuff.  It's about getting along with people you dislike.  Everyone has something noble in them (well, almost) - it's just a matter of digging deep enough.

George Victor wrote:

You see, Fidel, there are still lots of private firms...there's an owner and there's the workers.

But usually, when they get big enough( Google, etc. etc.) they go public, and everyone can buy shares, speculate, invest their savings for their old age, including the blessed workers.     That "blurs" things.  And as you see from Absentia's response, some folks don't even want to hear about such things. 

I think Absentia's concerns about the predatory nature of it all are valid. Buying and selling shares and getting rich sounds nice. But the truth is that there is very little integrity in the system today and especially not the stock market, which has turned out to be a large Ponzi scheme for the benefit of insiders and those spelling off at the top of the money pyramid while the gettin's good.

They use uber computers programmed with special algorithms based on some fancy math to do the picking and selling of stocks for them. And if their games of chance aren't rigged enough by math they don't really understand, then they do what's known as "co-location." Stock trading companies pay big money to setup these supercomputers within a few hundred feet of the stock exhange's puters and eliminate information latency down to just microseconds. It's like insider trading by knowing things before anyone else does and trading thousands of stocks in an instant to make only pennies per. Their sole purpose is to drain stock markets of money. Stock market genies know nothing about the companies stocks they short and undermine with their calculated speculations. They don't care if it's a good company or a lousy one. The system has no soul, George. It's not representative of man or man's needs. Man is not at the centre of this economic system distorting everything from human behaviour to the end results.

Noah_Scape wrote:

In the more distant future, after we recover from the crash of the biosphere, technology will die out in favor of enlightenment where we live etherally, getting the energy to run our bodies from just the oxygen in the air, levitation is our transportation, and we will be communicating telepathically. Its all good.
Of course, there is the chance that humans, the newest and most fragile life form on earth, WON'T survive the crash of the biosphere, but consciousness will rise again one day on earth in another species. I hope they will be nicer.

Okay that's depressing. WHy not a future where we survive predatory capitalism and evolve into reall intelligent beings, like the dudes on Star Trek? We may survive our technological adolescence and never blow ourselves to pieces with bombs. We may survive pollution and dangerous climate change.

We may evolve into exquisitely intelligent human beings millions of years from now, and perhaps only a few hundred thousand. A blink of an eye in the larger scheme of things. And we(our descendants) could someday engineer another universe from this one. Today the gods of math and physics would say it's technologically impossible. Pure fantasy. To do so would imply intelligent design(I'm not one of those). They will tell us that things have evolved and come together to form life in this universe by happenstance and mathematical laws of nature. They don't understand any such laws themselves, but it must be, they say. I think we will one day understand the laws of nature, and the power of the gods will someday be in the hands of children. The future is rushing toward us.

Rebecca West wrote:

Fidel, this is one of those occasions that you say is what should be/will be said. Realism we have. Dreams, we are in short supply.

I liked the first part of Noah's possible future and so prompted me to reply with enthusiasm. I should have said that. But Noah's alternative outcome was depressing. Realistic and possible but depressing.

6079_Smith_W wrote:

@ Fidel

Parts of the system have no soul. But to write it all off as rotten and some sort of rigged game is sheer fatalism and accomplishes nothing.

It's happened before, and they fixed it before. They undid those fixes in the 1980s and 90s. And this is the result.

6079_Smith_W wrote:

Just like cooperatives, benefit societies  and collectives were one wave that challenged that system there are other more contemporary ones that some people are trying to use to challenge the system - micofinancing, ethical investment, barter and alternative currencies, and alternatives to the standard system of brokerages, as well as businesses based on open source, and creative commons licensing.

Not all people who invest care nothing for what they put their money into, and we don't defeat the thieves by leaving them in charge of everything. 

Ya, well, that part of the system is good. But it open source and workers' collectives are generally not promoted by leading edge(banks and corporate hirelings) economists and think tankers on the right. It's part of the flora and fauna flourishing beneath the facade of capitalism. The leading edgers pay lip service to their gods of prosperity and tend to ignore reality. Not me, them.

Money is a mere symbol with arbitrary value except when you don't have it. And while it may mean nothing to the wealthy, those who don't have enough of it to sustain themselves or engage in that commerce can benefit greatly by alternative and ethical means of getting access to it.

And the division into overlords and underlings? I agree with you completely.

Northern Shoveler wrote:

Does any one understand the Iranian banking system?  I understand they do not allow usury much like medieval christianity.  They do operate a modern economy seemingly without interest on capital. I wonder how or if it works and whether there is a shell game going on and the fees add up to the same cost they just have a different name.

You've got it.  The end result is that people get paid the same amount they would have if the deal was structured as "interest".  Otherwise companies like AIG would never have entered the Takaful field.

Northern Shoveler wrote:

There are a few things in the old testament that were insightful.  The prohibition on interest on loans is a good idea. Does any one understand the Iranian banking system?  I understand they do not allow usury much like medieval christianity.  They do operate a modern economy seemingly without interest on capital. I wonder how or if it works and whether there is a shell game going on and the fees add up to the same cost they just have a different name.

For roughly 3000 years, the Babylonians through to the Greeks knew that interest on debt doubles at some point. Beyond that it becomes impossible for debtors to repay in their life times. The religious people of those periods through to Judaism influenced kings to cancel debts of the land once it became burdensome to repay. There were debt jubilees with every new king, and all debts were cancelled and lands returned to farmers who lost them due to foreclosures by creditors, which in those days were kings themselves to whom all taxes were owed.

It was easier to cancel debts in those days because all debts were usually owed to kings. Today we have a large and parasitic banking system that has nothing to do with the productive labour economy and which are the main political campaign contributors to today's bought and paid-for governments. The banks and creditors have made somewhere more than $8 trilllion in bad loans and lost money gambling on stock markets etc. What they've done from Washington to London is take on all the bad debts that can not be repaid in anyone's life times, and put the bad debts on the taxpayers tab. People think their governments are working in the public's best interest, but they are merely bailing out their banking and real estate friends contributing money to political campaigns. The bad governments are now saying, hell no we won't help out the little people because we need to help out our constituents in banking and finance paying good money for the corrupting of governments. Governments and taxpayers will lose money on the bad debts they've taken over from the crooks and parasites. Why? Because debts that can not be repaid won't be.

And so while the capitalist centres of industry are moving from the US and Americas in general to Asia, there is risk of conflagration of war and conflict in general. They want to also continue monopolizing money and dominating the world monetarily except we aren't producing much that the rest of the world wants in order to pay all the bad debts piling up on this side of the ocean. They want their cake and to eat it, too, and the rest of the world is saying no can do to these parasites.

So, no, there were no bubble economies in ancient times, because they were careful to avoid bad debts piling up and wrecking their agrarian economies. Their interest calculations told them everything from when debts would double and become impossible to repay to when flocks of live stock would double and triple and so on. Capitalism will always tend toward collapse unless prevented from doing so by policies of upside down socialism and taxpayer handouts for rich people who come begging with caps in hand to bought and paid-for hirelings in government.

There is no doubt any economy in the hands of a small number of global financiers is in big trouble.  When a hedge fund buys part of your local economy your community suffers.  Just look all over BC for many examples.  It is exactly because we know longer have business people in charge of companies trying to produce goods and services for a profit.  We have financial vampires leveraging their way int control of businesses and the sucking the life blood out of the business and moving on to the next merger or acquisition.

The problem in Canada is we still believe in the myths of our democracy.  I am sure the vast majority of Canadians would agree that a free media is the cornerstone of a democratic society.  What is little understood is how little diversity in views there are in our MSM compared to almost anywhere else in the world.  The Canadian elite is amongst the best in the world at manufacturing consent by wielding a tight control over all the major media players. There are no proud socialist newspapers in Canada, hell there aren't even any really liberal ones and not a single social democratic paper.  

The people in Canada heard about the Arab Spring but the MSM never reported on the ongoing strikes and demonstrations in Cairo that preceded the peoples uprising in the streets.  Cairo was used to seeing thousands engaged in battles with security forces in the streets long before the Square was occupied and the people en masse arose and said enough is enough.  

The good news is the crowds in downtown Vancouver celebrating hockey are all of the right cohort.  The trick is to get them believing that going back into the streets to demand better from our society will make a difference in their lives.

None of those things is in our public discourse.  One of my tests in the old days of my youth when travelling was to look at the police.  When the police were carrying cattle prods you knew the state was ultra authoritarian.  

What most people don't get is that the vast majority of citizens comply with police states.  Head down, shoulder to the grindstone and don't talk politics are preferred survival mechanisms for all underclasses.  It is only when that strategy becomes ineffective in a corrupted and brutal regime that the people arise in an "Arab Spring."  Police states that only cull the people who lift their heads up or talk regime change survive for very long periods.  I fear we are entering just such a period in Canada.

As a senior I can only hope the youth take inspiration from Egypt, Greece, Spain and Ireland and stand up when the financiers come to shred the rest of our social safety net.

absentia wrote:

 The trouble is, we are willing to; we enjoy it!

If some of the comments on this thread are any indication some of us certainly enjoy talking about it in lurid detail. I am beginning to wonder if we would know what to do with a better world if we ever managed to build it.

I agree that exploitation and abuse of power is always going to be with us. The difference is I know it is only one part of the picture of how the world runs. If that is all someone wants to see, that is a choice.

When I look at the world, I see many things which are more threatened, and more polarized than they were 50 years ago, but I also see positive changes and freedoms which would have been unthinkable back then. As for the increase in tension, did you really expect that the forces of oppression would just give up without fighting as hard as they can?

One thing is for sure, There are plenty of examples of people in far worse straits than we are today in this country who did not give up hope that they could work to effect positive change.

Indeed, there are people who are doing that work right now, rather than building brick walls in their minds and pining for the revolution.

If the only thing I can do is effect as much positive change as I can with what I have in front of me, I will not have wasted my time. And although I might not succeed in everything, I'll be damned if I am going buy into the oppression and defeat myself.

No imagining.

I don't think I would have seen two men walk hand-in-hand down the street 50 years ago, never mind that they could marry.

Nor would I have seen a FIrst Nations-run business in the city

The residential "school" system was still operating.

Fifty years ago you could still receive the death penalty in this country. Abortion was illegal. Sodomy was a crime.

Fifty years ago Canada saw itself as a white, anglo nation with a "french" enclave.

Fifty years ago the notion of a safe place for women who are victims of violence barely existed. 

Twenty years ago I did not have the option of buying local produce and meat directly from the producer. It all came through agribusiness and grocery chains. Unless I was prepared to search, I did not have they option of buying heirloom, non-hybrid seed. There was virtually no organic food industry. No recycling. Little in the way of alternative and renewable energy. 

That barely scratches the surface of the changes that have happened in recent history. Sorry, but I have to go take the kids for a bike ride. Do I deny the fact that there has been a strong backlash, and an increase in inequity in recent  years? Of course not. But that is not the whole story, and given the choice I would certainly not want to go back to what we had before,

Fifty years ago there were millions of people dying of starvation and related diseases around the world. It's still happening today. 50 years ago universal health care and daycare and social housing existed in a country in Asia while millions of Americans and Canadians lived in shacks along dirt roads with open sewers and ditches and couldn't afford to see a doctor. Yes we've come a long way since the bad old days. But we are still a long, long way from paradise.

The denial of history, the lack of a learning curve and thus learning, the lack of a knowledge base and thus knowledge, the various incarnations of Cointelpro sequels.

I am not confident that we currently know what steps to take nor do I believe technology is the issue. Not confronting power where it actually exists seems the far bigger obstacle.

Exactly? I said technology is not the issue and you are saying that "invariably" ends in the wrong hands. We are not saying the same thing.

No, I do not see the Left as confronting power. The current power structures are very different from what existed before the French revolution. Again, you are saying nothing ever changes. I am saying the Left has forgotten or forsaken those thing that actually set the stage for change.

If you do not believe change is possible, why are you here?

Maybe all that each one of us has to do is convince 4 or 5 people...