1. Sequester additional carbon in the soils and forests in a sustainable manner;

2. The most effective, efficient and safe technologies will be used in this effort;

3. The carbon sequestered will have a half life of at least 250 years;

4. As a metric, the majority of soils in the US will have double their current level of carbon content within 15 years.

5. That the activities listed above be considered for the creation of carbon offset credits.

In the end, how can we have low carbon economies if we do not also have low carbon agriculture as well?

Robert David Steele has posted a free book: Election 2008: Lipstick on the Pig.

Author’s Preface

The financial fraud now capturing the attention of all who focus on the pathologies of both Wall Street and Washington is NOT our Nation’s greatest threat. While the proposed bail‐out is both unconstitutional (seeking to negate legislative or judicial review in its formulation), and also fraudulent in every respect that matters (an honest rescue would focus on bottom‐up case by case remediation, ending all foreclosures and capping all interest rates including credit card interest rates at 10%), it is actually the lesser of three clear and present dangers to the Republic.

The FIRST threat is the pervasive electoral fraud:

1) that being pursued by the two parties now, as Democrats rush to register voters in more than one state, and the Republicans rush to manipulate the voting machines both physically and electronically; and

2) that which has stolen the Constitutional right of every voter to honest open elections—gerrymandering, the exclusion of alternative parties from fair and just competition and most explicitly from the debates, the exclusion of alternative voices from the public media. Voters can and should demand an Instant Run‐Off in the Presidential election of 2008, so that a proper national baseline of rejection of the two criminal parties—each one side of the same biopoly spoils system coin—can be established, and the stage set for federal funding for all parties in 2010. Voters can and should demand Electoral Reform legislation now, in October, or fire every single Senator and every single Representative if they fail to yield on this basic point of order.

The SECOND threat is the imminent dissolution of the Republic.

There are over two‐dozen active secessionist movements in the United States of America today, all with legitimate grievances, some with claimed historical rights that merit consideration but may not have standing. In addition, States’ Rights have been trampled, and the Federal Government in its three parts is no longer the honest, balanced, public good that it was meant to be. The financial fraud that both parties have nurtured and now seek to capitalize in a massive robbery that boldly claims it cannot be subject to review is the last straw. ENOUGH!

It merits comment that history teaches us that the best time for secession is when an Empire is severely over‐reaching abroad, financially destitute at home, and generally lacking in public support. That time is now. From Vermont to the South to Texas to California to the Pacific Northwest, the Republic is as close to dissolution as the Soviet Union was in the aftermath of the Reagan Revolution. We the People are supposed to be sovereign, but we are not, as things now stand. However, We the People are also a power that the government cannot suppress. The visible incapacity of the U.S. Government to be open, honest, and effective in the matter of the Wall Street and Federal Reserve and Secretary of the Treasury fraud being presented to the public, is in my view, grounds for exceptional public action.

The THIRD threat is the Federal Reserve combined with Wall Street greed.

The Federal Reserve is neither Federal nor a reserve. It is a front for the private banks, and as such, it represents their interests, not those of We the People. We need a twelve year exit strategy for the Federal Reserve, one that starts with eliminating all individual income taxes and financing the much reduced U.S. Government via taxes on financial transactions among banks and corporations, and that over time eliminates our debt and restores a “hard money” economy. Wall Street greed has been condemned by John Bogle, Warren Buffet, Lee Iacocca, and Ralph Nader, among many others, all of whom forewarned the Congress that this disaster was looming. Neither the Secretary of the Treasury, a full dues‐paying member of the Wall Street cabal, nor the Congress, can be trusted to represent the public interest. The public is being lied to on a massive scale that makes the lead‐up to the Iraq War pale in comparison.

Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and the Two Political Parties are One. We have only two political parties in power today, both equally guilty of abdicating their Constitutional responsibility under Article 1 for balancing the power of the Executive; and both also equally guilty of neglecting the public interest in favor of two forms of corruption:

• the first is the traditional legalized bribery that permeates corporate financing of campaigns, with secret earmarks—Wall Street owns both parties, and the public can be assured that both candidates are acutely conscious of the pros and cons of contesting a fraudulently‐won election—we all lose as things now stand, for as things now stand, neither candidate has access to non‐partisan advisors.

• The second is the less well understood corruption of “party line” voting that negates the unique interests of their respective state or district constituencies.

The Republicans have for the past eight years not only pursued reckless supply‐side economics, but they have betrayed the public trust by choosing, in Congress, to be foot‐soldiers supporting the Executive, blindly rubber‐stamping everything from war to warrantless wiretapping that unbeknownst to Americans, is easily mirrored in Israel and elsewhere via the provided software. The Democrats, nominally in power now, albeit tenuously and with no real spirit, are capping off eight years of being doormats for the Republicans, with a totally unrealistic if not maliciously deceptive faith in being able to keep spending without even attempting to explain how they will generate revenue, reduce the debt, and address future unfunded obligations.

Our national political system is the pig—we must demand electoral and governance reform. We urgently need non‐partisan appreciative inquiry and dialog—what some call postpartisanship, others transpartisanship. We must re‐engage every voter in the public policy decision process. The pig is dead. Lipstick is not going to bring it back to life. Defer bail‐out to mid‐November. This is simple: Electoral Reform NOW; no bail‐out under this Administration; and the new President becomes the authority in transition over the rescue of the U.S. economy, addressing it from the bottom‐up, NOT top‐down. Thus do we restore the Republic. This is your chance to reconnect to our Founding Fathers and restore America the Beautiful. Use it or lose it.

Semper Fidelis,
Robert David STEELE Vivas

Some may note that these days the dividing line between big business and big government is becoming blurrier. Others may note that this discuss applies much more broadly and may talk about peer-to-peer networks as opposed to highly centralized networks. These are interesting topics worth exploring. However, today, I want to focus on the conservative response and what I think are some of the flaws.

The conservative response focuses on the free market, and their belief that free markets are the best ways of addressing problems. Some would argue that our markets are not really free, but that government policies particularly benefit big business. They would point to the vast sums that big business spends on lobbying. This argument has a lot of merit, but still, we need to dig deeper.

The free market enthusiasts all recognize the danger of monopolies. Monopolies prevent free markets from doing their magic. Yet they often look at monopolies in terms of whether there is a single corporation controlling the market, and over look the aspects of when several companies are virtually indistinguishable from one another and this group of similar companies controls the market.

This leads us to the key issue. Free markets are good at rewarding short-term profitability, short term profitability may not be the best way to address problems. If one company is very successful, other companies will imitate these companies and the largest companies end up being very similar, and we lose any sort of diversity. Personally, I don’t find a lot of difference between Burger King, Wendy’s or McDonald’s. I don’t see a lot of difference between Verizon and AT&T. I don’t see a lot of difference between ABC, NBC, and CBS. I don’t see a lot of difference between Borders and Barnes and Noble. I don’t see a lot of difference between Budweiser and Miller. I don’t see a lot of difference between Ford, GM and Dodge.

Essentially, free markets tend to create monocultures with minor differences between the brands. So, what is wrong with monocultures? Look at nineteenth century Ireland for the answer. Everyone was growing the same type of potatoes. It was the most profitable crop, at least in the short term, just as SUVs had been the most profitable vehicle in the United States for quite a while. However, when things changed, such as the potato blight in Ireland, or the steep increase in gasoline prices, the profitable crops and products rapidly became unprofitable and massive dislocations were created.

Those interested in longer term stability would do well to look beyond a simplistic view of free markets and think about how we can promote a better diversified economy.

What is the “The Trap“?

It is a three part film by Adam Curtis, broadcast by the BBC in March 2007.

Curtis’s narration concludes with the observation that the game theory/free market model is now undergoing interrogation by economists who suspect a more irrational model of behaviour is appropriate and useful. In fact, in formal experiments the only people who behaved exactly according to the mathematical models created by game theory are economists themselves, and psychopaths.

For the last 50 or so years we have been badly led astray by “the game theory/free market model”. It has become a rigid political dogma strictly adhered to by the majority of Republicans, champions of unregulated free market capitalism, the neoconservative proponents of “The Project for the New American Century“, and the far right. It has been supported by a brilliant propaganda program, as documented by Curtis, that has suppressed critical thinking and turned too many Americans into one dimensional consumers. It was not an accident that right after 9/11 we were urged to simply “Go Shopping”. See here and in 2006 as well.

Can Obama get us out of “The Trap’ with a new model? “The game theory/free market model” has been too well used to justify the current gross excesses of our present “Gilded Age II”. I suggest that we must break free of the gilded age and its dogma. Only if we can reclaim our freedom, will we be able to have any hope of dealing successfully with Global Climate Disruption, Peak Oil, and the end of cheap money. Why? Because this will require very high levels of cooperation and altruism in support of the common good, all values denied by the entrenched dogma of “the game theory/free market model” and the trap it has caught us in.

The U.S. political and economic systems are not equipped to deal with the looming problems of the 21st century.

I was 19 in October 1979, when I first stepped into a campaign office. It was the Draft Kennedy (Teddy) for President office, located directly east across the Daley Plaza from Chicago’s City Hall. I would work on that campaign across the country for ten months, and it would instill in me an interest in politics, more accurately an interest in the politics of self-government that has lasted 30 years. It was a time when economics dominated political discourse from the nightly news to the kitchen table. Unfortunately, little did I understand, two months before I walked into that campaign office in 1979, President Jimmy Carter had appointed Paul Volcker head of the Federal Reserve, an event that would change American politics for the next three decades. Almost everything I learned on the Kennedy campaign about how American politics worked collapsed over the course of the next ten years. A new political regime, people, institutions, thinking, and culture replaced what had been the dominance of New Deal politics. Monetarism, Reaganomics or Neoliberlism, call it what you may, would totally dominate the American political landscape until today.

—- snip

Read the whole post here.

In this essay, Joe Costello identifies some of the key changes we are facing. These changes, driven by the end of the greed powered fantasy of infinite and unlimited growth, are, however, not being addressed by any of the major candidates for President. Given that our candidates can not bear to admit that tomorrow simply can never again be like yesterday, much less that, Neoliberalism dogma to the contrary not withstanding, infinite growth is impossible, why am I not surprised?

For other sources on the changes we are facing, see J. H. Kunstler’s The Long Emergency.

Another excellent read is Tom Wessel’s The Myth of Progress.

Lastly, I blogged on our need for a new economics here on Greater Democracy.

The Long Emergency Predicts a Dire Future

James Kunstler’s The Long Emergency is something like required reading among peak oil activists, and it’s a great primer for those not yet familiar with peak oil’s full ramifications. But I know of no other book so deeply, consistently pessimistic; it’s a vision of a future that resembles Hieronymus Bosch’s nightmarish depictions of the apocalypse. Or maybe the movie Road Warrior.

But the scope of Kunstler’s inquiry and his scholarship make it uncomfortably plausible.

The book begins with an excellent history of our discovery, use of, and eventual over-reliance on fossil fuels, primarily oil. The sheer quantity of energy that humankind was suddenly able to access, and the changes it wrought, cannot be adequately conceived by those of us who have lived our lifetimes amidst its benefits.

The first well was drilled into a surface seep in Pennsylvania in 1859. With the coal, water, and horse-powered industrial revolution already ramping up, the new energy source was quickly exploited to power new machines of all kinds. The U.S. led world production for over a century, an era Kunstler describes as the “cheap oil fiesta,” when low prices and an apparently inexhaustible supply led us to build a society based on easily-accessible energy. According to Kunstler, the party’s about to end in “a tremendous trauma for the human race.”

Perhaps this will help us understand better why President Bush and Vice President Cheney, The Oil Twins , have put so much stress on getting us into Iraq — and staying there. Could it be about the oil after all? The end of the oil era will also spell the end of the American Fantasy of no limits and no consequences, which ended up with producing the Abu Ghraib events as an expression of its recklessness.

Read the whole review here.

How about a new narrative that incorporates thermodynamics into accepted economic theory; that addresses the demand side as rigorously as the supply side; rejects growth as the dominant goal of our society — too much entropy; rejects corporatism in favor of re-localized capitalism; that recognizes that there are limits with consequences and thus the question of the distribution of wealth becomes a conversation about morals and ethics; promotes Rawlsian Justice as Fairness?

I could go for that.

Speaking of change with pain, looks like the world stock markets are about to smack us hard up side the head – and but hard. May knock us senseless. Lots of pain tomorrow.

A Little Laptop With Big Ambitions
How a Computer for the Poor Got Stomped by Tech Giants

Cambridge, Mass.

In 2005, Nicholas Negroponte unveiled an idea for bridging the technology divide between rich nations and the developing world. It was captivating in its utter simplicity: design a $100 laptop and, within four years, get it into the hands of up to 150 million of the world’s poorest schoolchildren.

World leaders and corporate benefactors jumped in to support the nonprofit project, called One Laptop Per Child. Mr. Negroponte, a professor on leave from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hopscotched the world collecting pledges from developing nations to buy the laptops in bulk.

But nearly three years later, only about 2,000 students in pilot programs have received computers from the One Laptop project. An order from Uruguay for 100,000 machines appears to be the only solid deal to date with a country, although Mr. Negroponte says he’s on the verge of sealing an order from Peru for 250,000. The first mass-production run, which began this month in China, is for 300,000 laptops, tens of thousands of which are slated to go to U.S. consumers. Mr. Negroponte’s goal of 150 million users by the end of 2008 looks unattainable.

Why am I not surprised that the premature death notice of the OLPC project was published in the Neo-Colonial paper of record? Simply put, they had to do it. The old guard knows their days are numbered. They have sworn not to go gently into that good night — at least not until they cash out. The new guard is still young and has yet to take over. We are, consequently, in the midst of a very messy but interesting transition – one ripe with opportunities.

The entrance of the old regime cartels into this very thin, as in zero, margin territory of One Laptop Per Child is more about protecting their business and social models of citizens as one dimensional consumers than anything else. They are fighting against the tide of the rampant Open Source and Peer-to-Peer alternative reality to their world view.

In the end, OLPC will win simply because it puts the power to “fix it” and “grow it” in the hands of the users at the edges — NOT in the hands of a centralized “expert other” from away and NOT on the edge. Two questions: 1] Is the platform “good enough” to motivate users to change and take responsibility; and 2] Will the young people be given enough time and support so that they are in fact empowered to prove the power of this new model? Will the support package promote peer-to-peer independence or will it reinforce the old colonial notion of dependence on “other experts”? Will, in the end, the support function insist on imposing the gross limitations of the old economics of every transaction a billable event — ala the cell phone cartels?

This will be an intreresting proof of concept that each of us being a Producer, Distributor, and Consumer is more powerfully advantageous than each of us merely being a consumer. If I am right, OLPC will seed the Peer to Peer Power revolution in politics, economics, and much else — hopefully including spectrum management.

For more on this, see my post: Framework for a New Economics & a New Politics: The P2P Power Economy

In the end, the OLPC could be the anti-Colonial model. Microsoft and Intel, with all of their faults and imperfect knowledge, surely represent the neo-colonial model of power. They have become the 20th century re-incarnations of the East India Company we fought a revolutionary war against.

This is going to be very interesting to watch.

Corporations are the dominant force in modern life, surpassing even church and state. The largest are richer than entire nations, and courts have given these entities more rights than people. To many Americans, corporate power seems out of control. According to a Business Week/Harris poll released in September 2000, 82 percent of those surveyed agreed that “business has too much power over too many aspects of our lives.” And the recent revelations of corporate scandal and political influence have only added to such concerns.

Where did this powerful institution come from? How did it get so much power? In Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy, author Ted Nace probes the roots of corporate power, finding answers in surprising places.

A key revelation of the book is the wariness of the Founding Fathers toward corporations. That wariness was shaped by rampant abuses on the part of British corporations such as the Virginia Company, whose ill-treatment killed thousands of women and children on forced-labor tobacco plantations, and the East India Company, whose attempt to monopolize American commodities led to the merchant-led rebellion known as the Boston Tea Party.

(Via Jim Warren. Thanks, Jim.)

See also Thom Hartman’s 2002 book: Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights.

A must read on our current economics

“It is through the newspapers and TV channels that the
socially destructive notions of a small group of
extremists have come to look like common sense.”

The Guardian UK
By George Monbiot
Tuesday 28 August 2007

A cabal of intellectuals and elitists hijacked the
economic debate, and now we are dealing with the
catastrophic effects.

For the first time the UK’s consumer debt exceeds the
total of its gross national product: a new report
shows that we owe £1.35 trillion. Inspectors in the
United States have discovered that 77,000 road bridges
are in the same perilous state as the one which
collapsed into the Mississippi. Two years after
Hurricane Katrina struck, 120,000 people from New
Orleans are still living in trailer homes and
temporary lodgings. As runaway climate change
approaches, governments refuse to take the necessary
action. Booming inequality threatens to create the
most divided societies the world has seen since before
the first world war. Now a financial crisis caused by
unregulated lending could turf hundreds of thousands
out of their homes and trigger a cascade of economic
troubles.

These problems appear unrelated, but they all have
something in common. They arise in large part from a
meeting that took place 60 years ago in a Swiss spa
resort. It laid the foundations for a philosophy of
government that is responsible for many, perhaps most,
of our contemporary crises.

When the Mont Pelerin Society first met, in 1947, its
political project did not have a name. But it knew
where it was going. The society’s founder, Friedrich
von Hayek, remarked that the battle for ideas would
take at least a generation to win, but he knew that
his intellectual army would attract powerful backers.
Its philosophy, which later came to be known as
neoliberalism, accorded with the interests of the
ultra-rich, so the ultra-rich would pay for it.

Neoliberalism claims that we are best served by
maximum market freedom and minimum intervention by the
state. The role of government should be confined to
creating and defending markets, protecting private
property and defending the realm. All other functions
are better discharged by private enterprise, which
will be prompted by the profit motive to supply
essential services. By this means, enterprise is
liberated, rational decisions are made and citizens
are freed from the dehumanising hand of the state.

This, at any rate, is the theory. But as David Harvey
proposes in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism,
wherever the neoliberal programme has been
implemented, it has caused a massive shift of wealth
not just to the top 1%, but to the top tenth of the
top 1%. In the US, for instance, the upper 0.1% has
already regained the position it held at the beginning
of the 1920s. The conditions that neoliberalism
demands in order to free human beings from the slavery
of the state: minimal taxes, the dismantling of public
services and social security, deregulation, the
breaking of the unions; just happen to be the
conditions required to make the elite even richer,
while leaving everyone else to sink or swim. In
practice the philosophy developed at Mont Pelerin is
little but an elaborate disguise for a wealth grab.

So the question is this: given that the crises I have
listed are predictable effects of the dismantling of
public services and the deregulation of business and
financial markets, given that it damages the interests
of nearly everyone, how has neoliberalism come to
dominate public life?

Richard Nixon was once forced to concede that “we are
all Keynesians now.” Even the Republicans supported
the interventionist doctrines of John Maynard Keynes.
But we are all neoliberals now. Margaret Thatcher kept
telling us that “there is no alternative”, and by
implementing her programmes Clinton, Blair, Brown and
the other leaders of what were once progressive
parties appear to prove her right.

The first great advantage the neoliberals possessed
was an unceasing fountain of money. US oligarchs and
their foundations, Coors, Olin, Scaife, Pew and
others, have poured hundreds of millions into setting
up thinktanks, founding business schools and
transforming university economics departments into
bastions of almost totalitarian neoliberal thinking.
The Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, the
American Enterprise Institute and many others in the
US, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for
Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute in the UK,
were all established to promote this project. Their
purpose was to develop the ideas and the language
which would mask the real intent of the programme, the
restoration of the power of the elite, and package it
as a proposal for the betterment of humankind.

Their project was assisted by ideas which arose in a
very different quarter. The revolutionary movements of
1968 also sought greater individual liberties, and
many of the soixante-huitards saw the state as their
oppressor. As Harvey shows, the neoliberals coopted
their language and ideas. Some of the anarchists I
know still voice notions almost identical to those of
the neoliberals: the intent is different, but the
consequences very similar.

Hayek’s disciples were also able to make use of
economic crises. An early experiment took place in New
York City, which was hit by budgetary disaster in
1975. Its bankers demanded that the city follow their
prescriptions: huge cuts in public services, smashing
of the unions, public subsidies for business. In the
UK, stagflation, strikes and budgetary breakdown
allowed Thatcher, whose ideas were framed by her
neoliberal adviser Keith Joseph, to come to the
rescue. Her programme worked, but created a new set of
crises.

If these opportunities were insufficient, the
neoliberals and their backers would use bribery or
force. In the US, the Democrats were neutered by new
laws on campaign finance. To compete successfully for
funding with the Republicans, they would have to give
big business what it wanted. The first neoliberal
programme of all was implemented in Chile following
Pinochet’s coup, with the backing of the US government
and economists taught by Milton Friedman, one of the
founding members of the Mont Pelerin Society. Drumming
up support for the project was easy: if you disagreed,
you got shot. The International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank used their power over developing nations to
demand the same policies.

But the most powerful promoter of this programme was
the media. Most of it is owned by multimillionaires
who use it to project the ideas that support their
interests. Those ideas which threaten their interests
are either ignored or ridiculed. It is through the
newspapers and TV channels that the socially
destructive notions of a small group of extremists
have come to look like common sense. The corporations’
tame thinkers sell the project by reframing our
political language (for an account of how this
happens, see George Lakoff’s book, Don’t Think of an
Elephant!). Nowadays I hear even my progressive
friends using terms like wealth creators, tax relief,
big government, consumer democracy, red tape,
compensation culture, job seekers and benefit cheats.
These terms, all invented or promoted by neoliberals,
have become so commonplace that they now seem almost
neutral.

Neoliberalism, if unchecked, will catalyse crisis
after crisis, all of which can be solved only by
greater intervention on the part of the state. In
confronting it, we must recognise that we will never
be able to mobilise the resources its exponents have
been given. But as the disasters they have caused
unfold, the public will need ever less persuading that
it has been misled.