Tuesday, January 7, 2014

We Can Do Anything ... Yet Are No Longer Capable Of Coordinating Anything Except Looting One Another

  (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



Many of the images listed here are of ongoing protests against austerity.

A friend from Ukraine writes: "There are some very good people living in Kiev who are choking in the insane tornado of corruption and violence. Breaks my heart."

In parallel, a friend from Bulgaria writes: "Turned out BG antigovernment protests [Nov, 2013] were kidnapped by the opposition, .. which is the same as the government :-(
.. So now we are waiting the misery to make all Bulgarian people go out and protest. 2 million young already left the country during the last 20 years. Mostly old are left. Old people don't protest, or do they??"
Other contacts, from Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Spain, Portugal and Greece have all sent similar emails - about most of their talented people and/or youth simply leaving, or becoming a lost, unemployed generation. And our coping methods in the USA are not much better.

Will Europe survive this? Will we?

That such stupidity could re-occur, in the 21st Century .... is simply unbelievable! 

How is this happening?

Humans can't possibly be this selectively stupid ... can they?

Sadly, I think yes. I still routinely meet highly "educated" and/or experienced people in Washington DC - from all kind of professions - who truly believe that we should simply return to the gold standard, stop welfare, stop immigration ... yada, yada. Every blind person groping every context is increasingly certain of their view on parsing a human context, the vast majority of whose operations they are not even aware of, let alone understand!

Millions of specialist plumbers, programmers, PhDs, Engineers, Physicians, Bankers .... even priests, you name it .... and 99% of them are so narrowly informed so as to be more trouble than their talents are worth.

In the midst of all this talent, we need to remind ourselves that organized teams can do amazing things ... yet we somehow find ourselves no longer capable of coordinating anything except looting one another?

The trivial, distracting details DO NOT MATTER. We first need to decide to stop being this stupid.

Then, as always, anything is possible. All we need to do is simply remind ourselves that coordinated teams, especially whole electorates, can accomplish truly amazing things.

If it doesn't have to be this way, then it won't ... as soon as people decide that it doesn't have to be this way.

Please stop all the preaching and protesting, which only trigger defense mechanisms (exactly what the worst frauds WANT to hide behind). Then please start PATIENTLY engaging all the disconnected people, on what desired outcomes they'd like to see happen. Only by patiently going over the actual operations, context and finally data ... can all people get on the same wavelength, and work well together.

What we're doing now simply isn't working. We're smarter than this. There is ALWAYS a better way, but only if we're willing to look for one, and are then persistent and patient enough to avoid useless argument.

The few frauds who want to see us all arguing are the very idiot savants who pursue their looting strategy of divide & conquer. 

Do NOT let the idiot savants conquer us! 

We can be smarter than them, but ONLY if we choose to act more intelligently.




8 comments:

Roger Erickson said...

I really mean what I wrote here. The 1% seem to be playing the entire USA exactly the way the Brits divided & conquered India.

It's always the same story.

A foolish population and it's options are soon parted.

john lutz said...

look what happened at Boeing
IAM national overrode local
workers gave up everything
Boeing will do what they want anyway
workers have no options left

Ryan Harris said...

A majority of people agree there is a problem. No agreement exists on a solution. Few people, even in economics agree MMT type solutions. The wider population is usually dubious and often down right hostile. It gets better every year and the JG and Platinum coin have been invaluable in illuminating basic concepts in peoples minds but there is a very, very long way to go before the CBO, Fed, Congress and other political institutions stop trying to oppress the population in the US, even longer for universities and even longer for conservative minded individuals. I don't see Germans and Euro-elite suddenly admitting that deflation and internal devaluation are the wrong path. It is considered strong medicine but the most effective treatment available. In order to coordinate and organize a credible resistance to take over, you have to agree. We aren't there, even within the liberal elites, there isn't agreement.

The Rombach Report said...

".....and even longer for conservative minded individuals."

Ryan - I consider myself a libertarian / constitutional conservative, and yet I am also strongly influenced by MMT.

"In order to coordinate and organize a credible resistance to take over, you have to agree."

The problem I see on this website is that it is very much like an echo chamber with a lot of people of pretty much the same persuasion repeatedly spouting beliefs that most everyone agrees with. To broaden the base, MMTrs have to seek support from outside groups and individuals who may not agree with MMT on everything or even on most issues, but nevertheless agree on enough critical issues to build coalitions.

I predict the 2014 and 2016 elections will be punctuated by just such a convergence of key interests between the libertarian right and the liberal progressive left.

Vytautas Vakrina said...

There are other groups of progressive people trying to solve coordination problems.

Effort worth attention - Multitude project
http://multitudeproject.blogspot.com/2014/01/why-do-we-need-value-accounting-system.html

These people theorized value creation processes and a couple of years worked creating some (possibly usable) open networking software.

"The Open Value Network (OVN) model describes a blend between the 3 arrangements mentioned above, mostly coordination and some stigmergic collaboration. No one works for anyone else. All labor is transferred into fluid equity through a value accounting system, which grants ownership to the participant member to a percentage of the future revenue generated for the lifetime of the product created, if a product is the goal of the project, and if the project reaches maturity. At the same time, we also need to understand that risk is shared among all contributors, which is not a bad arrangement if it is distributed on a wide basis and diversified. The value equation is the algorithm used to assign fluid equity to every participant based on contributions."

Roger Erickson said...

posting for John Hemington:

"What we're doing now simply isn't working. We're smarter than this. There is ALWAYS a better way, but only if we're willing to look for one, and are then persistent and patient enough to avoid useless argument."

Roger, I couldn't agree more, but as I have said many times this leaves out the "how" part of the answer. We do need to patiently talk to those around us and we do need to form stronger alliances – even with those who do not fully agree with us.

But the quote from your piece says it all too well, "there is always a better way." The downside implication is that we will always be working the less good way and perhaps are doomed to do that. The bigger problem is getting enough people on the same page at the same time to come up with a critical mass. At this point, even those working toward solutions, are almost totally atomized and dispersed in a myriad different and conflicting directions. There is nothing out there to draw them/us together and the “system” is exceedingly agile at keeping us separated and at each other’s throats; either competing for funds or for ideological purity.

There is no question that if most Americans really understood (or cared) what was happening to them, to this nation and to this world, most would be in the streets tomorrow, if not sooner. But the sad fact is that most of us are too busy trying to survive and to be entertained to bother with their surrounding environment – be it political, social, environmental or cultural.

We are an aging empire teetering on collapse and few are willing to step up to be the first to be mowed down in the protest ranks. We have been told to be afraid and we are. That is the problem, and I wish I had some realistic idea of how to fight this, but education is the only tool I can come up with and that process is entirely too slow in this time of crisis.

googleheim said...

Boeing gave away their core competency of wing design and fabrication to the Japanese.

Why need workers or ip ....?

See Eamon Singleton

Matt Franko said...

Roger,

"we can do anything" ... ok c'mon there are always REAL constraints... all we are talking about here all the time is to erase the needlessly self-imposed financial constraints...

And "looting one another" is impossible as in the non-govt ultimately most of us have nothing to "loot"... many live 'paycheck to paycheck'...

The non-govt provisioning cohort (which provisions BOTH the govt and non-govt sectors) is positioned to obtain and retain ultimately ALL the govt $USD flows as "retained earnings" and there is nothing wrong with this as long as our govt authority assuredly maintains the originating/leading flows of USDs to ALL of we in the non-govt to provide for a robust means of subsistence for ALL of us.

Many are being left out of these flows right now, because unqualified morons in positions of authority think "we're out of money!" .... and this is the problem.

Its not 'looting' or any sort of 'fraud' imo...

We have let chimpanzees take over the controls of the aircraft...

Bill Black imo is entirely off his rocker if he thinks all of this is being caused by his 'control fraud' or whatever he keeps rattling on about... he's clueless in all of this too imo...

rsp,