Dear Friends of Society on several mail lists, The following four replies to my previous post "Ends of Globalization" illustrate various obstacles in the way of our progress toward a sustainable global society. To each reply I have added an appropriate, from my point of view, comment in the format: (WSB, comment. WSB). The second initial is in case the comment is so long that your mind wanders and you forget who is commenting. Below the four replies, please find the full text of two nine months old posts with additional insight on the obstacles to a sustainable global society. When the two posts are viewed on line at URL <http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/3142/IR/items/19990119WesBurtSustaina bleFuture.html>, direct linls to macro model Figure 6 and micro model Figure 7-9 are included in the text. I welcome the replies of Colette Fagan, Christoph Reuss, Diana G. Collier, and John Courtneidge because they teach me what I need to know. Kind regards, WesBurt XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX 1 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Subj: Re: The ends of globalization Date: 99-09-20 07:10:30 EDT From: [log in to unmask] (Colette Fagan) Reply-to: [log in to unmask] To: [log in to unmask] Dear Wes Burt, I am not sure how I have come to end up on your mailing list, but would like to be removed from it. Please arrange this, or let me know which global mailing lists you are distirbuting to. Thank you. (WSB: Dear Ms. Fagan, Your address <[log in to unmask]> is not on my copy list, so here are the global mailing lists which I post to. CC: WesBurt (# of Members) BCC: [log in to unmask] (?) No distribution BCC: [log in to unmask] (?) Sorry, only the moderator may send mail to this list. BCC: [log in to unmask] (?) 99-09-19 20:23:10 EDT (4 min) BCC: [log in to unmask], (?) 99-09-20 05:50:17 EDT (9 hrs) BCC: [log in to unmask] (?) 99-09-19 20:24:10 EDT (5 min) BCC: [log in to unmask] No distribution BCC: [log in to unmask] No distribution BCC: [log in to unmask] (?) 99-09-19 20:43:58 EDT (24 min) BCC: [log in to unmask] (?) 99-09-19 20:39:07 EDT (20 min) BCC: [log in to unmask], (?) 99-09-20 02:24:51 EDT (6 hrs) BCC: [log in to unmask] (51) 99-09-19 20:24:08 EDT (5 min) BCC: [log in to unmask] (10) 99-09-19 20:24:13 EDT (5 min) BCC: [log in to unmask] (15) No distribution BCC: [log in to unmask] (2) 99-09-19 20:24:15 EDT (5 min) BCC: [log in to unmask] (21) No distribution BCC: [log in to unmask], (22) 99-09-19 20:24:10 EDT (5 min) (Burt's copy (99-09-19 20:19:21 EDT) (55) Minimum total readers 140 Your request calls to mind a paraphrase of the Twenty-third Psalm: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. I will fear no evil: for I have illuminated the valley before me. WSB) XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX 2 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Subj: Re: The ends of globalization Date: 99-09-20 16:33:06 EDT From: [log in to unmask] (Christoph Reuss) To: [log in to unmask] 99-09-20 16:55:57 EDT (22 min) CC: [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask] On Sun, 19 Sep 1999, Wes Burt quoted EU Commissioner Pascal Lamy: > Globalisation: a win-win process I guess a nice illustration of this "win-win process" is the ongoing EU--U$ trade war over U$ hormone beef. If Globalisation finally succeeds, the EU will lift its ban on this beef saturated with genetically engineered, carcinogenic growth hormones, so the EU's consumers can finally eat the stuff! Clearly a win-win process: U$ corporations can sell more hormones, beef and cancer drugs, and the EU farmers in Mr. Lamy's country can resume exporting their Foie Gras and truffles, without those nasty 100% punititive tariffs on them. (So much for teaching other countries what Free Trade means !) Mr. Lamy surely hopes this will happen before the local farmers will have devastated all McDonald's outlets in his country... > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ snip ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > > Debating the threats of globalisation > > I am particularly aware of the requirement for debate on trade policy. > I know that part of public opinion in Europe focuses more on the risks > than the benefits of globalisation. Such opinion is concerned about > possible instability, aggression, loss of identity. I do not share > these concerns, but we have to take on board these worries, and seek > to convince our fellow European citizens that the answers lie in the > quality of our own internal policies, and in progress towards > multilateral rules. We must not allow globalisation to become an > alibi, or to be seen as a malign influence. This requires reflection, > dialogue, openness to debate. << Too bad that so far, the EU Commission's policy represented quite the opposite of "reflection, dialogue, openness to debate" as far as the citizens are concerned. Let's hope the new Commission will do a better job than the old one (which had to go after the great scandal), but Mr. Lamy's NewSpeak style doesn't seem to give much reason for hope... Chris (WSB: It seems that Chris, in Switzerland, sees the European Union and the United States as equally objectionable proponents of globalization at the expense of each small nation's soverignty. This is to be expected when the U.S. has a 5% of GNP deficiency of purchasing power in its domestic market, and the European Union is trying to copy the U.S. public policy. In previous notes and in Figure 1 of the global model I have pointed to Switzerland as the best example of a sustainable society to be found in the World Bank's ATLAS of 200 nations. Their Catholics and Protestants have kept the peace for a century or more and they use only 1/3 of the water and energy, per capita, used by the U.S. Does that mean that the Swiss are unwashed and unheated compared to Americans? I don't really know, I've never been in Switzerland. WSB) XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX 3 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Subj: [ATTAC] response to WesBurt Date: 99-09-20 16:33:32 EDT From: [log in to unmask] (Diana G. Collier) Reply-to: [log in to unmask] To: [log in to unmask] Ref WesBurt's remark, that we might respond to Pascal Lamy by attempting to "overcome Europe and Canada's fear of a more powerful and prosperous United States" -- I suggest that we must question exactly what the notion of a prosperous US is. In point of fact, measured in scores of international, domestic and NGO researches on social wellbeing indicators in relation to health, shelter, education, economic equity, etc., the US generally lags at the bottom of the list of industrialized countries. Even if "prosperity" disregards the wellbeing of the citizenry and is registered solely in terms of soaring markets/GDP, can this possibly be sustainable when it is purchased at the cost of degradation of the human capital component? Is this US model, then, the model globalization should be following?? This comment on degradation of "US human capital" is amply backed up by a new publication, Discovering America As It Is, by former high-profile Soviet dissident, Valdas Anelauskas, see http://www.bookmasters.com/clarity/b0015.htm. This book of 584 pages has literally 80 pages of citations of scholarly researches demonstrating the devastating effect American public policy has had on the American people over the past decade and a half. (The book has been endorsed by leading American social critics such as Howard Zinn, David Gill -- Director, Dept. for Social Change, Brandeis, and Ward Churchill). What this book documents is that European countries provide a much better model for development -- but how long will they be able to maintain this, if the U.S. is able to convey its model as "more successful"? Diana G. Collier (WSB: In the 1970s I also thought that European countries provide a much better model for development than the U.S. because they, together with the Japanese, had stabilized their economies after World War II by eliminating the 5% of GNP deficiency in purchasing power among their parenting families, which is the root cause of the English Disease in the U.K. and the U.S. The performance of European countries during the 1980s and '90s suggests they may have either contracted the English Disease or may have shifted too much of their total tax burden from direct taxes on personal income to indirect taxes on their capital plant and thereby contracted the Russian Disease. WSB) XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX 4 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Subj: [ATTAC] Re: response to WesBurt Date: 99-09-20 19:24:00 EDT From: [log in to unmask] (john courtneidge) Reply-to: [log in to unmask] To: [log in to unmask] Dear Friends, I snip: > What this book documents is that European countries provide a much better model for development -- but how long will they be able to maintain this, if the U.S. is able to convey its model as "more successful"? < The certainty is that the next paradigm shift will occur in western Europe (see Eric Hobsbawm's 'The Age of Revolutions') because, I believe, the call for socialism is most widely developed and the human institutions are most deeply embedded. The call for Public Service Banking is thus irresistible and, thus accounts for the world elite's (note singular) call for enhanced global ownership 'rights' (ha!) over intellectual property (even more-so, ha!) Onward Friends - let knowledge be shared ! j(WSB: Perhaps the world elite's (note singular) have "socialism" in mind when they say, one to another: "Moses commanded us a law for our inheritance, it is our inheritance, not theirs! I know the law well enough, if John would name the three most socialist nations in the World Bank's ATLAS of 200 nations, then I could know socialism also. WSB) >>>>>>>>>>>>> End four replies and Burt's comments<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>> Begin Burt's two posts on Ian Ritchie's list of resources at URL <<<<<<<< <http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/3142/IR/items/> A Sustainable Future, How??? by Wes Burt, 19 January 1999 This note fairly summarizes my present understanding of the obstacles to a sustainable future and provides a way to surmount those obstacles. The primary obstacle is the fear with which our teachers, managers, and governors (the 13th. tribe) regard the public. As long as the conventional wisdom asserts that we live in THE ZERO-SUM SOCIETY and that THE ZERO-SUM SOLUTION is the only solution, then the establishment quite properly may truly believe that if they give the public an inch, the public will take a mile. And P. T. Barnum affirmed the common practice and belief when he said: "Never give the suckers an even break!" That baseless self-delusion of the comfortable classes was discussed by Jose' Ortega y Gasset in THE REVOLT OF THE MASSES, 1930. In a word, we can hold out until violent change is inevitable, or, we can engage in a constructive dialog to find alternatives to THE ZERO-SUM SOCIETY and THE ZERO-SUM SOLUTION. A lesser obstacle is that the public does not possess a commonly accepted and technically valid conceptual model of an industrial economy with which they can reliably evaluate the constructive dialog. It is only necessary to present a technically valid conceptual model to a few folks who are open minded about new ideas to remove this lesser obstacle. A few people speaking with one voice can overcome a multitude of Devious Defenders of the Status Quo (DDotSQ). >From a technical point of view, my understanding of this problem was complete in 1969, since then I have only added to my presentation historical and religious references in support of the technical solution to our social disorders, which is, to apply the same financial rules to our people that we consistently apply to our capital assets. As they used to say, when Ronald Reagan was public relations spokesman for one of America's best managed corporations, "People are our most important product." The economic and environmental data from The World Bank and other sources shows that progress toward a sustainable future is being made by those nations that treat their people like capital assets. We English speaking people are not following their example, we are not even able to talk about their progress. One way around this obstacle may be to concentrate on developing a technically valid model of the whole society, building on figures 4 & 5, and avoid questions of "who gets what," and "whose ox will be gored," until the technical validity of the model is confirmed by public dialog and the public has in hand a reliable means of evaluating its long range interest. The attached file Fig 6b is based on Fig 4 or Fig 5 as previously distributed, and is scaled upward as if The Optimum Policy (TOP) had been in place long enough to raise the U.S. GDP/capita up to the $37,180 GDP of Switzerland in 1994. This particular way of representing a national economy, is just a different way of looking at things. It ties together that old folk lore "it takes a village to raise a child" with the old wives tale that is heard from time to time in business circles and asserts that about 10% of net sales should be invested in the engineering budget (capital investment), another 10% for executive compensation, and the next 10% for debt service and stockholders. This structure of 30% G&A rates helps explain why other industrial nations are investing 25% of GDP in their capital plant while the USA and UK are investing only 16% of GDP. But more importantly, this conception of the social order provides a way of looking at a whole national society as a unit, as a single self-regulating closed system with 260,000,000 active elements in the U.S., the nature of which has not changed much in the last 10,000 years. In other words, this model provides what is missing from Jude Wanniski's 1978 book, THE WAY THE WORLD WORKS, is missing from IN DEFENSE OF CAPITALISM, 1937, by James H. R.. Cromwell and Hugo E. Czerwonky, and is missing from A THEORY OF MONADS, 1922, by H. Wildon Carr, D.Litt., University of London, that is, a framework that can integrate the whole earth and all of man's capital improvements with the cardinal principle of human nature as described by Benedict De Spinoza in A THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL TREATISE, 1670, when he wrote: "Now it is a universal law of human nature that no one ever neglects anything which he judges to be good, except with the hope of gaining a greater good, or from the fear of a greater evil; nor does anyone endure an evil except for the sake of avoiding a greater evil, or gaining a greater good. That is, everyone will, of two goods, choose that which he thinks the greatest; and, of two evils, that which he thinks the least. I say advisedly that which he thinks the greatest or the least, for it does not necessarily follow that he judges right. This law is so deeply implanted in the human mind that it ought to be counted among eternal truths and axioms." Spinoza's axiom and the propensity of people to improve their condition are the only motivating forces in the continuous-flow life-support process illustrated by Fig 6b. When the model was last updated on 09/27/94, I missed one minor correction. Government spending, B to C, should be a clear gap in the world market, at 0 degrees in the economic cycle. Letter "D" was intended to indicate the "Indirect Tax" line , slightly below line "C" which marks the top of the real physical economy. Recall that in the late U.S.S.R., "deductions from enterprises and organizations (indirect taxes) accounted for more than 92%," of the states financial resources (Source: Seventy Years of Soviet Government, 1987, Novosti Press Agency). Have any of you re-drawn Fig 6b to show the level of indirect taxes in Russia or the European Union today? As Adam Smith said in his First Maxim of Taxation (Page 777 of The Wealth of Nations): "the expense of government is the same as the expense of management." He seemed to expect that his readers would know all about "the expense of management" and could apply that knowledge to public policy. Either Smith did not know his readers, or his readers had something else in mind than good government. For the capital plant at 90 degrees, the three tithes of management are Development and Construction (D&C), Executive Compensation (E. C.), and Interest and Dividends (I & D). For the workforce and their dependents at 270 degrees, the first tithe of government is for the Support and Education of children, the second tithe is for Executive Compensation of the Thirteenth Tribe who constitute both management and government, and the third tithe is for defense, justice, and welfare. Notice that the first tithe is critical for both management and government, because an impairment of either function reduces the flow of GDP through both functions which operate in series. So The Optimum Policy (TOP) consist of keeping the first tithe both adequate and out of the budgets of either households, or, corporate profit centers. Notice at 270 Degrees, the half-tithe for K to 12 education has been a public expense since the 19th century in the U.S., while the half-tithe for support of children and other household dependents is shown on Fig 6b as subsidized from total taxes but spent by the family. The half-tithe for support of children is still regarded by U.S.tax law as a "consumption expense" of the family. I think the model could be more clearly presented by inverting the order of functions in the real economy between lines 0 and C, so as to have the most important function, the tax structure, at the bottom of the stack, the personal spending next, the dependent flow of Purchased Material at the top of the real physical economy, and the speculative activity above line "C" like the head on a mug of beer. Any suggestions on how to improve the model, and make it more familiar to the public, would be welcome. After the model is corrected and accepted by the frequent posters, we can go back to Fig 8.GIF to show again why The Optimum Policy (TOP) consists of nothing more than giving "Joe Six-Pack" the same even break we give our developing capital assets? What in Hell are the DDotSQ trying to accomplish by keeping the public ignorant of this simple structure which Thomas Paine proposed to England and France in 1792-7 and Bertram Russell described in a few thousand words in his 1915 book, PRINCIPLES OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION? Whose payroll are they on? Why don't they see the urgent need for some "damage control," or at least the kind of lip service to this financial structure which we read in the encyclical letters of the Catholic Church since 1891? The Whole Divine Law (Fig7-9b) The last American economist, Henry Carter Adams, addressed our past and present second-best public policy in his 1887 essay, RELATION OF THE STATE TO INDUSTRIAL ACTION, American Economic Review, VOL. I, 1887, when he wrote: "I am not arguing for any particular line of public policy, but rather for a change in the attitude of mind with which men commonly regard the agency of government; for great reforms are, after all is said, nothing but a change in the way people look at things." Everything bad that Ayn Rand, the Austrian economists, and their American students have said about government is certainly true. But the one thing that only governments can do successfully is to distribute a public expense uniformly over the productive members of society by means of a flat tax rate applied to all income. So we do need a change in the way we look at government, and we must learn the different results produced by direct taxes at flat rates on all income (Thomas Paine's "from each according to his ability), and, indirect taxes at different rates on selected products of the capital plant (only people pay taxes). Then H. C. Adams went on to write: "And it may not be inappropriate to say, as guarding somewhat against misunderstanding, that I consider the attitude of mind by which this essay has been directed to be essentially conservative. It stands opposed to anarchy on the one hand, which is individualism gone to seed, and to socialism on the other, which , both historically and logically, is a revolt against the superficial claims and pernicious consequences of LAISSEZ-FAIRE. Its purpose is to conserve true democracy, and this it would do by weakening the influence of commercial democracy which now rules the minds of men." Since the word, CAPITALISM, has been made meaningless by the advocates of postmodern relativism, we might find it useful to call our present condition, commercial democracy, as Adams did one-hundred and twelve years ago. That is to say, we live in a society that has all of the mechanisms for effective democracy still in place, and still in working order, but yet the commercial interests exercise an undue influence on public policy, to the detriment of the environment and our quality of life. The closest analog I can think of to illustrate our condition is the biology experiment which begins with a stable and healthy colony of laboratory rats. Rats, as you know, are in the middle of the obnoxious species continuum, somewhat larger than cockroaches but smaller than poor people, and we can learn a lot about poor people by experimenting on rats. Anyway, the experiment calls for restricting the rat colony's living space and reducing its daily food supply. I have never seen the experiment performed, but I hear that all sorts of social pathologies are demonstrated and I also hear that it takes a strong stomach on the part of the experimenter to continue the process to its logical conclusion, or "die-off." Our human condition is much like that of the rats. There is no direct connection from the experimenter to the individual rat, nor from our public policy to the individual citizen. The experiment imposes less space and less food. Our public policy has imposed for the last hundred years and more 4-10% unemployment and a 2-3%/year decline in the value of our money. But the single imposition on either the rat colony or the nation produces a different response in each rat, and a different response in each citizen, so it is a mind stretching intellectual effort for the rat or the citizen to reason from his own experience back to the root cause of his experience. People can see the cause of the rat's experience because they are outside the system. They cannot see the cause of their own, until they find a conceptual framework, and make the intellectual effort, that lets them view the whole system from a vantage point outside of the system. This is what drawings, charts, and visual-aids help people to do, that is, to stand outside the system under discussion and look at the whole system in operation. Notice that the system operates, regardless of whether or not we look at it, understand it, neglect it, or change it to our heart's desire. The attached file Fig7-9b.GIF has been re-sized to display properly on your monitor and print properly on 8.5x11 inch paper, so the outsized image of previous posts is no longer an excuse for not discussing the systemic defect of omission in our public policy which is illustrated by the three charts. That defect of omission is the lack of a dependent allowance adequate to remove from the family budget the head tax of $5,000/year/dependent on parenting families, which is the root cause of our social disorders. For those of you who have read the REVELATION of St. JOHN THE DIVINE, and think I am adding something to the bible by pointing out that the ten commandments are incomplete, I beg to differ. Something was taken away from the bible long ago and those who took it away, and everyone else, have suffered ever since. I don't think anyone will be punished by God for restoring those parts of the Law which may be found in the book of Numbers, but are not taught to Englishmen and Americans. For those of you who have not read the bible, the relevant parts of the last book of the bible, written in A.D. 96 on the island of Patmos after the Temple had been distroyed, and the Jews dispersed, reads as follows: (REV. 22:18) "For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophets of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book:" (REV. 22:19) "And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book." >>>>>>> End Burt's two posts on Ian Ritchie's list of resources at URL <<<<<<<< <http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/3142/IR/items/> %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%