Catastrophism vs. Linear Thinking

Or how I think we will survive.

Of late I have been busy trying to understand all the dire and unholy predictions of the coming catastrophes. My friend HJ as been supplying me with dozens of articles from the Internet about the coming socio economic cataclysm. I have also been reading “future books like,” “The Next Decade” George Friedman

The oil shortage. We have already passed peak production. Climate change, rising oceans already flooding low lying areas. As clean drinking water disappears we can look forward to the “water wars.” Increased storm activity ie. This year the US broke records for severe Tornadoes. Increased population plus increasing food shortages makes for social unrest. Food shortages will send people on the move to advanced industrial countries. Border wars, already started by Denmark closing its borders. Same is happening here. All of this will increase with time. Why? Primarily because we are running out of cheap energy producing fuel.

There is a paradox here. On the one hand there is a prediction of a variety of shortages that will only continue to intensify with increased population and exhausted commodities that the people are totally dependent on. I have no problem with the 15 papers I have read and the Friedman book, except for one thing. They are all the result of Linear Thinking. Linear thinking sees things happening in rigid straight lines. Sort of from point A to point B. Yes,there is another way to think about what lies ahead.

It is called catastrophism, (Primarily concerned with geological changes. I am applying it far more broadly.) I arrived here a long time ago through my very own life experiences. First came my mothers sudden death at age 7-8. Then cam the Great Depression of 1929. World War 2, Bombings, Concentration Camps, Holocaust etc etc. Yet through all this people some how or other survived. It lead to what I call the Fish and the Tern phenomena. A swarm of Fish swimming along minding there own business. Out of the sky comes the diving Turn and goodbye a fish. Just one not all, That’s how I see our lives. More important I live my life with that metaphor very much present in my unconscious.

This brings me to the 15 papers and the Friedman book. All of these pieces suffer from linear thinking. They see the world and its resources moving in a clearly predictable direction, straight ahead. Catastrophic thinking does not. This is not to say that the problems outlined in these documents are not real or untrue. No, not at all, What I believe is that crisis, or catastrophes can change our best laid predictions. ie, the Tsunamis and the Japanese nuclear crisis, the Iceland Volcano, 1883 Krakatoa exploded, (maybe that’s how the world was darkened for 40 days and nights. Thank you Emanuel Velikovsky.)

There is also a whole world of ways that individuals have adapted to changing circumstance. Already mentioned. moving away from unlivable places, planting Victory Gardens, de salinating water by filtration, riding bicycles, wind & solar generating,etc. etc.

That’s an important unpredictable for what is up ahead for future generations. They will be faced with some really tough issues. Look, it’s not to say that my generation had some tough ones as well and guess what? Some of us are still here listening to the birds singing and admiring the sunsets over the Bay. We are blessed with a will to live. Yes it may be tougher at times but we will survive. What about, “The pursuit of happiness” Ahaa, that’s a question for another blog.

EXTREE EXTRTEE

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AARP CAVES ON SOCIAL SECURITY !!

When I was growing up that's what the Newsboys would be yelling. That meant an EXTRA, Edition of the paper was out. That’s how we got the Hot News of the day. Yes and that's what happened a few days ago.. These days I find myself getting a saw neck from shaking my head in disbelief. These people don’t know diddly about negotiating? You don’t open with with a give back. Pulease.

In my many years negotiating union contracts I knew, and the membership knew when we were in a tough spot. Like the Companies business was way off. BUT! We didn’t start with a give back. That just demonstrates your total and complete WEAKNESS ! Stupid. You may have to do that but don’t open with it.

Yes this stupidor is John Rother V.P. for Policy at AARP. (I really tried to find out his pay at AARP. But alas i could not find it.) Talk about your head up you know were. Looking at his picture I guess he’s about 70 something. I betcha his salary at AARP to be in the 6 figures. Obviously he isn’t concerned about retirement income.

But here’s what pisses me off. He is proposing Soc. Sec. cuts in 2063. That's when the present Trust fund runs out. WHO THE HELL DOES HE THINK HE IS ? BARGAINING AWAY THE RIGHTS OF THE PRESENT 40 YEAR OLDS????. Besides if the US Government gave back the money it stole from the SS Fund we would be okay well until 2050.

I am sure there are very capable 40 year olds out there who should be doing the bargaining for THEIR FUTURE. I am sure there will be a “burning of AARP Membership cards.” Wrong strategy. Better we show up at the National Convention and raise hell inside the organization. Leaving just leaves the field to the knuckle heads who don’t have a clue of what it means to live on Social Security.

PS I am already calming down because it’s hot as hell already and summer has just arrived.

Left Strategy Highly Questionable

On the Internet recently I have run across a rising tide of criticisms from the left aimed at President Obama. Yes, they are frustrated with him, as I am over his lack of fight on very fundamental issues. I can go back to the single payor issue on health care through his collapse on the budget deal with the GOP leaving the tax cut for the rich etc. I am very fearful of the kind of deal he might cut with the GOP to raise the debt ceiling. He has absolutely no feel for the economic beating the American worker has been taking for the last two decades. Obama got to where he is by being nice to white men. That's what he knows how to do.

As I have written before Obama, is not a fighter. There is nothing in his life experience that would have taught him that a good hard tough fight is how we bring about change. Remember how he promised “change”? His major strategy was seducing the GOP to learn the love of compromise. I wont dwell on it. You have watched with horror as he got snookered on one issue after the other trying to just be nice to his adversaries. Look, the GOP conservatives just hate that Black man in the White House. If tomorrow he walked on water it would make absolutely no difference.

Perusing through the left oriented Web-sights I noticed a rising tide of, “we gotta do something to move this President so he starts to put up a real fight for workers rights.” One proposal was to run a candidate against him in a primary fight. If that didn’t move him then run a third party candidate. Ralph Nader was mentioned but I think he’s to old and tired. This sort of thinking reveals the frustration that Progressives have with Obama. I understand it.

However in face of the present relationship of political forces I do not think it serves a useful purpose. There is a critical danger that a strategy of attacking Obama from the left simply lends support to his extreme enemies on the right. Yes the ones who simply hate him no matter what, I hear some of my best friends saying. “So what are we suppose to do? Just sit here and watch as the right wing destroys all that we built in the last 100 years?”

I do not underestimate the dilemma. Permit me to use my long life experience to again go back to similar situation. First we need to agree that the threat from the far right could have very serious consequences for this country of ours. Back in the 1930s we had similar far right schemes that would dump the cost of the depression on the backs of the working class. We didn’t think that FDR was really the best fighter against the crazies on the right. (Our fear of fascism was critical to our thinking.)

We don’t characterize our present right wing extremists as fascist. A close analysis of what some of them are saying gets you very close. This is precisely why we need to be careful that our frustration with Obama doesn’t help elect Michelle Bachman. Yes I seriously believe that’s a possibility.

So what’s to do? The best example comes from Madison Wisconsin. Organized resistance against the attacks on the working people of America is the most effective way to pump some fighting spirit into our representatives in Washington as well as the State Capitals across the country. That’s what the Wisconsin workers are doing. Moaning about what Obama is doing wrong will be counterproductive. We need to demonstrate with action what are the right things to do.

Back in the 1930s we had intensive arguments about “the lessor evil problem.” Okay, I can deal with that. Is Obama a lessor evil than Bachman, Pawlenty, Romney etc. Yes of course he is. Is he an ideal candidate for the Progressive cause? No. BUT, He’s the best we got so we had better run with him or we could be very very sorry with the alternative. Comes November 2012 I don’t want to be writing a piece I have had to do a few times before about why progressives should not leave the country because of McCarthy, Nixon and yes, Reagan.

"Companies Spend on Equipment Not Workers"

Front page headline New York Times June 10 2011

Kate and I have had many conversations about how employers following large scale layoffs always come out of rehiring less employees. Kate was Human Resources VP. in charge of hiring and firing. We agreed that, once business begins to pick up companies figure out how to get the same level of production prior to the layoffs. The Times piece says, “Business would rather buy new machinery. That’s cheaper than increasing the payroll.” I might add that they have a strong underneath pull not to help this President no matter what.

All of this reminds me of a blog I posted back on March 10th 2010. Oh! man a sure sign of aging is when you go back a year to quote yourself. Not me but, an old friend, a Noble Economics Laureate, Wassily Leontief.

He had received the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1972. His work was the development of an input output analysis that became an essential tool for major manufacturing companies. He was frequently consulted as the job market changed regarding the kinds of jobs that would be available It was in that capacity that we became friends.

In Washington he would often participate in various meetings regarding the training and job placement for unemployed youth. At these meetings he was always very professional and careful in his labor force projections. Early on he predicted the demand for computer literate people to meet the demand of that fast growing industry.
He also acknowledged the growth of the service sector and its advantages for women.

It was in the more informal New York City social settings that he would express a very different kind of concern. It turned out that a mutual friend lived in a loft in SOHO. Meeting Wassilly there I told him that these lofts, that were now home to artists, used to be the workplaces of many of the members of my Local of the Machinists Union. He was very interested in the kind of manufacturing that was done here. “It was mostly small parts manufacturing as well as specialized plants for making all kinds of fastenings, screws, nails, washers, lamp parts etc.” Wassily wanted to know what happened to them? “ I told him that most of that stuff was automated. I had the pleasure of participating in eliminating dumb jobs like hand feeding punch presses. “Lots of fingers were lost in those operations.” “But you were eliminating jobs by doing that. Weren’t you?" he asked? “Yes of course” I replied. “But nobody should have to do that hazardous dumb work when we can automate it.” That really caught his attention.

Wassily went into a lengthy explanation of what he thought was ahead for the job market. Yes there would be a big increase in the computer sector as well as the service sector, including health care. “Machinist” that’s what he called me, “as you and I and all those baby boomers age we are going to need a lot of care. That will create Health Care as the number one employer in the country.” "Okay, I understood that but what about all those members of my old Machinists Union? What about jobs for them?"

He paused for a long time, as if he did not want to give me the bad news to come. He spoke slowly as if measuring his word very carefully. “You see, Machinist, we are now in the second part of the Industrial Revolution. First part created jobs, second part is eliminating them through automation and now computer controlled manufacturing.” “I have experienced that when I was still working in a plant.” “Yes” he said “But the pace is now picking up and we are looking toward a time when we simply wont need all those workers of yours anymore. What we don’t automate we will export to the new rising economies in the third world countries.”

“Wassily” I said. "What are we to do?” “He smiled laughed a little said, “Your job Robert Machinist is to find things to do for all those workers we don’t need in the factories,” “Are you serious. I asked, “or are we drinking to much at this party?” He looked around at all the artists gathered, shook his head said, “These folks are all just trying to get a piece of work accepted into the Modern cause the curator is here. Maybe some of your old Union members could take up painting? Anyhow that’s your job now? Good luck,” As his wife came to drag him away from all that, “shop talk.”

I have often thought about that conversation with Leontief back in the 80s. With the unemployment rate sticking around the ten percent and a large number of workers not seeking jobs anymore.That adds up to something around 20 to 25 million out of work. Not to promising future if Wassily’s prediction is finally coming true? What do you think?

Romancing Utopia

Tahrir Square Cairo 2011 upraised fist.
A new day JUSTICE, FREEDOM. EQUALITY!
Tahrir boom dee yay Tahrir boom dee yay.
May a new day dawn in Cairo today?

Utopia a place desired and wished for.
Adam & Eve, New Harmony, Brook Farm
Dream, dream DREAM.

1917 Russian wish a utopia born?
Strawberries & cream for all.
Frostbite from Siberia shatters the dream.
Utopia on a slow fade to Armageddon.

“Ideology & Utopia” Carl Mannheim 1936
“Social movements must have a Utopian vision.”

Oh, did we ever!

The vision never dies. It just goes on hold.
Is Utopia like an orgasm?
Chillingly glorious but--- short.

1938 Union Square “Hold the Fort
For we are coming” down Fifth Avenue.
Dawn of the new day. Karl Marx said it,
“From each according to ability
To each according to need.”
It talked, Utopia, Was it?

Socialist picnics were all love and skittles.
Beer, bratwurst, frankfurter and honey-cakes.
It was the “Long long dream
of a world that’s pure and free.
When the world is owned by labor.
In the commonwealth of toil that is to be.”

We used the word free so much
Even love was to be.

Little Utopian summer camps practiced it.
Fresh air, clean water plenty to eat
For a fleeting moment or two.
Singing made it feel “WE MADE IT.”

I loved those little utopias. “IS THAT ALL THERE IS?”

The Holocaust births a Jewish Utopia, Israel.
Yet, another dream?
Drowned in a sea of Palestinian upraised fists?
Marching for their dream-------of--------yes!


Here we are. The Arab Spring, Dreams of utopia.
This one is democracy.
Awakened by tanks in the street
Screams from the prison walls.

Do we ever stop dreaming of utopia?
Webster say’s it’s “No Place,”

Memorial Day 2011

I am trying to remember my very first Memorial Day. I believe it was somewheres around 1925-6. Papa would get me dressed in my best “gawn to meeting clothes.” We’d catch the subway at 180th street in the Bronx for a trip down to Fifth Ave. to watch the Memorial Day Parade.

Papa liked parades. We were often on Fifth Avenue or Broadway watching a parade with papa’s running comment. (Wow! do I ever Remember that Lindbergh ticker tape.) On a number of those Memorial Day trips I actually saw the last Civil War Veterans being pushed in wheelchairs at the head of the parade. Papa said that war was between Feudalism with its Slavery and Capitalism with its wage slaves. “That Southern system was far to expensive for the capitalists. Why feed and house workers when you can just lay them off and not worry about them,” “Papa I said, would we be better off if we were slaves?” “Well that depends” he said. “ If we were lucky enough to have a nice owner maybe? But generally speaking no because we wouldn’t be free to take the subway and go to Coney Island or wherever we wanted.”

What I always found most heartbreaking in these parades were the wounded vets. Most without one limb or another. sometimes both. Yes, people watching would always give them a lot of applause. Papa would say, “look carefully that’s the price of war. The people who make them aren’t here. They are sitting in their fancy clubs up the street having a whiskey and a cigar. They just make the wars because it is a very profitable business. They don’t come near the front lines of battle.” Papa never missed an opportunity to educate about the Ruling Class.

So, here we are in 2011. I did see a bit of our local Memorial Day Parade. There were still quiet a few WW2 veterans but like the Civil War Vets back then their ranks are rapidly declining. The Vets I am very sad about are the ones who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. In some ways they are like the Vietnam veterans. With a very heavy heart I remember watching that belated parade for those very sad men who finally got their ticker tape shower up Broadway. Watching that sad,sad march I just knew in my guts it was a terrible waste and even more sadly they knew it too. Is the high rate of suicides amongst returning veterans just a symptom of the malaise that they suffer?

Because of improved armor and medical help in the field we have an increased number of wounded. 42,000 thousand from Iraq and Afghanistan. Many double and triple limb amputees. As the Fire Engines go by on Main Street’s part of our Memorial Day Parade I close me eyes and see these thousands of wounded men and women vets passing. They are asking why are we like this? What were we fighting for? I feel this great sense of shame for I have no answer.

Strauss Kahn Circus Coming Soon

I am conflicted about writing this as Mr. Kahn has not been convicted. But I gather a dirty licentious, Clinton like trial is on its way. Oh the Tabloids will love it, SEX,SEX, SEX. rated 3 XXX with a Frenchmen and Black maid from Africa main characters. Whoopee.

A little Background

In 1975 I wrote a piece for the Harvard Business Review “Three Men Two Women on a Raft” It was an honest revelation of what had occurred on an Outward Bound Trip down the Rogue River in Oregon. Going down the river each person on the raft took turns as the helms-person in charge. In the article I wrote, the men on the raft did everything they could to undermine the women. The result was an overturned raft with all of us in the ice cold water. The women then declined the helms position. The men said “oh that’s okay we’ll take over.” At the time I suggested that was pretty much the way in the corporate world. That Harvard Review piece became a “best seller Reprint.” It was republished 25 years later. Mostly to see how things had changed. I think they have. (Women may find themselves in that same “predator” position as the men. Yupp I experienced that.)

That article gave me a kind of legitimacy among women who at the time were struggling with the issues of fairness and equality in the workplace. And that’s how I became the recipient of stories of sexual harassment at work. At the time I was at the Ford Foundation. Many young women researchers one way or another made their way to my office at the Foundation to relate horror stories of what went on at their workplaces. I have chosen a few examples. However I do have to go much further back into the 1930s for my earliest lesson in sexual exploitation.

It came with Edith my first wife. She was a dancer who appeared in a WPA show called “From Gospel to Swing.” In the reviews she was singled out as a “dancer to watch.” Look, she was really good. She danced with an infectious joy and the audience loved her. Some time later she was auditioning for Broadway, Hollywood shows. God, I remember it so well. She was up early and bright for an interview with an agent in the old Brill building on Broadway in the 50s. Alas, she comes home practically in tears. First she doesn’t want to talk about. Slowly she lets on to what happened. The Agent tells her to take off her clothes. She say’s “for what?” He tells her she has to understand, if she really wants to make her way in the Show-biz world she’s gonna have to “put out.” Yes he says “that’s how it is and if you can’t do it go find some other way to make a living.” She did.

It’s decades later. A young women was doing a survey of ways to create job opportunities for Black youth. She goes to see, (I am not going to mention names.) an important leader in the field. After a few minutes of questioning he asks her, “How she feels about sex? She suggests it’s is none of his business. In a short time he is up and suggesting they go in the closet for “some fun.” She picks herself up and is out the door. Asks me ”what is wrong with these men?

A friend in Washington tells me of a staff opening in a NYC Congresmen’s office. Oh, yes of course I know a young women, Brandies graduate good research background. She goes for the interview. Gets passed a couple of other staff people is ushered into the Congresmen’s office. He shuts the door. Spends his time looking at her Legs asking questions about her experience and then out of the blue asks,”do you enjoy fucking.” It’s not that she never heard the word before. But she really believed she was going to work at a level beyond that.

In my years in the Lindsay Administration I would hear a constant chatter about women being harassed at the top level of City Agencies. I knew some of the men involved. I began to wonder what was about them that made them think that the position they were in entitled them to take any women who happened to be in proximity for their immediate sexual gratification?

For at least some men there seems to be a confusion with the power inherent in their job position and what that entitles them to. Is it a purely neurotic need to transfer that power to sexual satisfaction to make it complete? I can’t answer that. What I do know is that women should not have to put up with the distorted maniacal view that power entitles men to harass women to satisfy a sexual urge. Unfortunately there are just to many men who need to learn that.

As women come into the positions of power will they have to learn that as well? It is also why I am not surprised by the Strauss Kahn revelations. Been going on forever. Mostly the victims shut-up. This one didn’t. How many women out there could add to these stories? And why don’t they? Anyway here comes the 3XXX Circus. Do you think our suppressed sexual fantasies arrived on the Mayflower?