This looks interesting:

In the current economic climate, I am curious how much play this video will get, and how much publicity the movie will generate. This just might turn into a real blockbuster.

November is going to be exciting.

From Instapundit

WHAT TO DO? In response to this piece by Angelo Codevilla on America’s ruling class, readers wonder what to do. Well, a few things suggest themselves.

First: Mockery. They are very mockable, and they are very thin-skinned. That leads them to erupt in embarrassing ways. Use their sense of entitlement against them.

Second (and related): Transparency. One-party government makes you stupid, and although composed of both Democrats and Republicans the political class is basically its own party, and these people are pretty stupid. Point it out, repeatedly. Use FOIA, ubiquitous videocameras, and other tools to make the stupidity show.

Third: Money. Codevilla writes: “Our ruling class’s agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof.” The coming budget crisis — already here, really, but still largely denied by the rulers — is an opportunity to defund a lot of this patronage stuff. They’ll try, of course, to cut the muscle and preserve the fat, but that won’t work very well if they’re closely watched (see above). Cut them off in other ways, too. Don’t support the media, nonprofits, and politicians who support them with your money.

Also, make sure that money flows TO things you like: Businesses, alt-media, politicians who aren’t part of the problem, etc. Build up countervailing institutions that don’t depend on the government to survive.

Fourth: Organize and infiltrate. Take over party apparats from the ground up. Create your own organizations that can focus sustained attention — the “ruling class” relies on others having short attention spans while it stays focused on amassing and protecting power.

Finally: Don’t act like a subject. Rulers like subjects. Don’t be one. As a famous man once said: Get in their face. Punch back twice as hard. Words for the coming decade?

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I just read a troubling article in The Future of Work newsletter. I find it particularly troubling in this era of “Government-as-provider” thinking that seems to be all the rage in the US capitol.

Will Automation Lead to Economic Ruin?

by Charlie Grantham and Jim Ware

Martin Ford is an entrepreneur, the founder of a Silicon Valley software firm, and a very thoughtful person. If you care at all about the future of the economy, the future of work, and the future of society, you will find this a very provocative read.

Ford asks an important but unusual question: will automation lead to economic ruin?

His basic argument? Technology is so good at increasing productivity that it could eventually eliminate just about every job in the entire economy. At first that sounds almost idyllic: we’ll have everything we need with almost no effort at all.

But wait a minute; if we don’t have to work, we don’t have jobs—and that means we don’t have any personal income. How do we feed and clothe ourselves?

Yet that’s a very likely future in Ford’s view. But he’s really just asking “What if?” He’s not claiming that a jobless high-tech future is inevitable, but he does raise some really important questions about what that kind of world might be like. Just as importantly he offers some very concrete suggestions about what we as a society could do to stave off disaster.

… this is where Ford gets really creative; he suggests imposing new taxes on companies to capture for society at large a small portion of the savings that come from automation. [emphasis mine, Ed.] When you think about it, most of the revenues society uses to pay for basic needs like defense, education, fire and police protection—and yes, even health care—come from personal income taxes. And as we experience one “jobless recovery” after another, the percentage of the population that is employed full-time—and paying all those taxes—continues to decline.

So Ford recommends a new kind of tax policy, one that transfers some of the productivity gains from automation into the federal treasury, for redistribution that creates purchasing power for those who are displaced by automation. Now before you get too worked up about that “socialist” idea, remember that without personal income there wouldn’t be customers for anyone’s products.

Let’s pause for a moment here and unpack what you have just read. If automation continues to improve and to displace workers from the workforce, would this cause some kind of large-scale poverty? I believe that the answer is, “It depends”. If some sort of android were suddenly introduced on the market that could cheaply replace a large percentage of the workforce in a very short time, then yes, I believe there would be an employment crisis.

However, I do not believe that this transformation of the workplace would happen quickly enough for labor markets to experience such a drastic upheaval. Certainly not requiring a new tax to support all of the newly unemployed – possibly forever. Unfortunately there is an apples-to-oranges comparison that – at first glance – appears to offer a morally-sound example of how this has happened in the past:

Another Ford—Henry—understood that reality so well that in the early years of the automobile industry he voluntarily increased the hourly wages of Ford Motor Company employees so they could afford to buy the cars they were producing—thereby increasing the market demand for those very cars. Think about that for a long time before you dismiss Martin Ford’s “radical” ideas for a very different kind of economic justice.

Ugh. “Economic justice“. The last words that you hear before someone steals something from you to give to someone else. This analysis seems to leave out an important issue: transformation of the workplace leads to a transformation of the economic system itself. An exponential increase in automation would indeed lead to the ruin of the current system, however, the system will, by necessity, have to change. The Industrial Revolution transformed not just the nature of the manufacturing system but the entire economy, and the governments that once controlled them.

The Industrial Revolution swept away the Feudal economic system, as automation transferred the ownership of the means of production from the nobility to the new merchant class (peasants with hand looms were replaced by steam powered looms, etc.). Obviously a steam powered loom was not in the political or economic best-interest of the land-owning nobility, but they did not have the foresight or the ability to control these technological developments. I would submit that the coming “era of automation” would have a similar effect.

Who Can Control the Means of Production?

Governments that would attempt to control these new means of production would soon find that there were less people willing to automate their businesses if it meant that they would have to give up their own profits to support the people that had been displaced. What is the point of replacing a worker with a robot if you can’t use those savings the way that you want to? Changes in law and policy often result in unintended changes in corporate behavior.

The ubiquity of the Internet in the developed world has already had a massive impact on personal behavior and once again threatens the status quo of the the current economic system with regards to the ownership of the means of production. Increased automation would soon reach a point of diminishing returns, with respect to the economic and political power of large corporations and manufacturing industries. In fact, the ultimate result of automation would likely come from the invention of a “nanofactory” that would have the potential of utterly transforming all economies. (The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology has more on the risks and benefits of nanotechnology)

In conclusion, I would like to say that I believe that increased automation is a good thing, something to be worked toward rather than be afraid of. In fact, I would like to see the systemic transformation of an economy that automation would bring. For more information on this subject, I recommend Cory Doctorow’s brilliant work of speculative fiction, Makers (Amazon aff link).

In this video clip (below the jump) from 1979 you can witness an exchange between a brilliant man with a grasp of history and a wishful dreamer who believes in ‘virtue’ rather than productivity, as they discuss economics.

If you would prefer not to see it, scroll on down.

This train of thought, sadly, is no longer taught in schools, colleges, or newsrooms. 30 years have passed since this exchange was recorded and we have witnessed the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise quasi-capitalism in China, and explosive growth in the newly-minted capitalist states in southeast Asia (Vietnam and S Korea).

Why can’t people learn this?

I love Twitter. This morning John Haydon pointed me to a video that he made regarding the censorship by flickr of the “Obama-as-Heath-Ledger’s-Joker” image that has been splashed all over the place.
TechCrunch had some things to say, too:

Flickr v. Free Speech. Where Is Their Courage?

(Read the whole article for the links to more material)

Flickr really stepped in it this time. And they’ve sparked a free speech and copyright fascism debate that is unlikely to cool down any time soon.

Sometime last week they took down a photoshopped image of President Obama that makes him look like the Heath Ledger (Joker) character from The Dark Knight. The image was created and uploaded to Flickr by 20 year old college student Firas Alkhateeb while “bored over winter school break.” It was also later altered yet again by someone else and used to create anti-obama posters that went up in Los Angeles.

Thomas Hawk has a good overview of some of the other details, but the short version is the image was removed by Flickr sometime last week due to “due to copyright-infringement concerns.”

Free Speech and Fair Use – More Important than Politics

As many people are pointing out, this is a Fair Use and Free Speech issue – an issue larger than whatever political affiliation that you may have. The really ironic part of this is that some of the initial commentary, from that brief time that the artist was unknown, called the picture “racist” and “the work of a White, Right-winger”. As this LA Times article points out, Alkhateeb is neither.

This post is a little bit hard for me to write, without throwing my own political views into the mix, but my views don’t matter. Artists, cartoonists, and writers have been attacking the politicians in government since the very beginning of our Republic. It’s part of how we do business and how we do politics (more on this here). As John mentions in his video, it is when the agenda of power is co-opted by businesses that Free Speech and Fair Use get trampled on. And this is why I am doing my part to help spread the news.

I believe that this issue is very important, thanks for reading and I look forward to hearing your opinions.

Bill Whittle and Austin Bay have a discussion about how Twitter can be used to network and communicate in ways far beyond “what am I having for lunch”: The Strategic Implications of Social Media (link to the video, 12 minutes).

Here is part of a post with some background info:

“Iran’s Information Age demonstrators, exploiting the capabilities of the social networking and “micro-blogging” service Twitter, surprised then threatened Iran’s tyrannical mullahs. Tehran’s thugs in robes suddenly discovered they could not control information within Iran. Kicking out BBC reporters used to separate dissidents from the global megaphone, but no longer. Now that mobile phones are essentially small computers, instant Internet access is widely distributed. Men, women and children hold a global link with audio- and video-recording capability in their palm.

Twitter is the latest in a line of “social media” phenomena spawned by the digital communications revolution. Social media like Facebook and MySpace connected users on the Internet. Twitter, which specializes in brief “text messages,” bills itself as a service that answers the question, “What are you doing?” That message is shared with a group of friends or the world.

“Tweeting” Iranians let the world know they were launching street demonstrations and seeding an anti-regime rebellion. “

I have been Tweeting about this sort of action for a while now, calling for a “clean sweep” in Congress for the 2010 elections. As you know every single Representative in Congress and 1/3 of the Senate are up for re-election. It is time that we the people took America back from the entrenched power-lobby in Washington.

The career politicos.

The “elite” influence-peddlars.

Shelly Roche has taken this idea and run with it: Operation Clean Slate 2010 – New Political Leadership in Congress

Identify & Encourage New Leaders
Identify & encourage people who have the potential to be great leaders to become “Clean Slate” candidates.

What is a “Clean Slate” candidate?
* NOT a career politician
* Committed to representing his or her constituents with integrity
* Passionate about upholding the Constitution
* Impervious to special interest bribes
* Understands what the role of our government SHOULD be, as set forth by our founding fathers
* Prepared to stand up to the establishment and demand transparency and accountability throughout government

Watch this video:

From Tristan Yates: (To) American Industry: We Are the Cavalry

This is an open letter to America’s managers, executives, and investors.

If America is going to come out of this crisis, it’s going to be up to us to make it happen. The cavalry is not going to ride in at the end of the movie to save us.

We are the cavalry.

It’s critical to understand the situation we are in. We are not in a recession, economic slowdown, demand slump, or any of those other phrases used to describe the normal variations of the business cycle. We are in a full-blown financial and economic collapse brought about by years of public mismanagement.

There is a political narrative being advanced that the current financial crisis was caused by deregulation. In fact, the opposite is true.

Congress actively encouraged the origination and securitization of subprime loans, and it is to no one’s surprise that the most regulated entities in the system — the FDIC-insured banks, the investment banks, and Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae — ended up holding this worthless paper, going under, and getting bailed out.

Then we were told by the same Congress that created the problem, and then failed to act as it worsened, that the remedy for a massive misallocation of trillions of dollars of wealth is to spend trillions more to bail out the guilty. The public recoiled and responded with protests in 100 cities. Still, the bill passed within two weeks, supported by the presidential nominees of both parties.

Upon taking office, the new president promised to make economic recovery his top priority and announced one more stimulus, the largest yet, that would create or save three to five million jobs by directing funds into shovel-ready projects. Four months later, less than six percent of the funds have been spent, two million more jobs have been lost, and the vice president charged with overseeing this fiscal outlay has only the lame excuse that “everyone guessed wrong.”

Still, more fools are asked to suffer gladly.

Pajamas Media » Small-Town Heroes From the Heartland

But when it comes to “community,” rural America personify how Russell Kirk described the concept:

Although Americans have been attached strongly to privacy and private rights, they also have been a people conspicuous for a successful spirit of community. In a genuine community, the decisions most directly affecting the lives of citizens are made locally and voluntarily. Some of these functions are carried out by local political bodies, others by private associations: so long as they are kept local, and are marked by the general agreement of those affected, they constitute healthy community.

Faith — in God and each other — and an abiding sense of togetherness that manifests itself in the way this “voluntary community” leans on each other in good times and bad is what defines small-town America. No community organizers needed here. They do all their organizing through their local church, or volunteer fire department, or lodge, or other association to which they choose to belong.

Watch this and weep for America: