Uncanny Predictions Sealed Our Fate

Nikola Tesla didn't invent techno-hype.  That had been going on for generations, picking up tempo when railways first linked communities, spanned continents and spawned electronic communications.  But his astonishing  predictions, captured in the pages of Colliers magazine in 1926 were perhaps the most accurate of any.

What Tesla and his colleague Hugo Gernsback energized after the  first world war, others inflated into a cultural tsunami, with the proliferation of consumer-based economics and the explosion of mass media after WWll.

Most of Tesla's followers were less accurate, even careless.  But their purpose wasn't to be prescient. They filled the print  media and the airwaves with predictions to generate demand for consumer goods.  They succeeded beyond their own fertile imaginations, driving economic growth and prosperity throughout the 20th Century.

Industrialists and businessmen soon realized the potential of future-hype.  Their zeal propelled the advertising industry to unprecedented heights.  It created the futurist  movement, when they began to worry  that the engines of commerce were producing a population saturated with choice.

Only now are we beginning to understand the real cost  of expectations inflated by decades of  hype. Crippling consumer debt has collided with income inequality to create a middle class only now waking up to the fact that economic growth doesn't follow some trickle-down theory.

This new reality may  have played a role in Justin Trudeau's election victory October 19.  It is now certainly being played out in the U.S. primaries, where voters are  ready  to choose any option as long as they believe they aren't being duped.    

           

We're Back!

Hi there folks -- family, friends and fellow skeptics.  So you've had a break from my perpetual pestering.  Well that's all  over now.  It's been three years since I went missing from this forum to discover the true meaning of press freedom in  this new information age.  Thanks to some personal experience with the online news media, I've discovered it means working for nothing.  If I'm going to do that, I'll publish my own views.

According to today's contribution from the  CBC's Ideas series that may be a good thing.    Hard as it is for an old ink-stained wretch to accept, I understand the point that  writer Paul  Mason has made in his latest book entitled Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future  If you think that idea is too much to swallow, have a listen. It will only take a few minutes and I promise you it won't hurt.  What WILL hurt  is continuing to live with  this unsustainable system that rewards greed and ignores all other reality.

Oh, and by the way, if you're among those who cringe every time you've heard that "We're Back" since October 19,  that too is a good thing.

Is It Time to Just Show Up?

Woody Allen may have said it best.  Eighty per cent of success is showing up. 

The time may not be right for Occupy Wall Street to forge a common message.  But a unified slogan could be just the thing for the moment when critics are trying to debunk the movement for its formlessness.

"Just Show Up" could serve the purpose.

Six million Americans have been out of work for more than six months.  If that doesn't qualify people to protest against the greed and opportunism that has exploited them, what would?  The thing about the six million -- and all their dependents -- is that most of the time they're invisible.  So it's hard to imagine how much misery and shame that represents.

As long as people who are suffering from the system's excesses remain huddled by the hearth -- as long as the unemployed protest their fate from corner bar stools across America -- they can be dismissed as an inevitable consequence of capitalism.

Right-thinking people know they are not.  Increasingly, they represent the silent majority.  Instead of being shuffled out of sight, isn't it time for the real majority to JUST SHOW UP?

Occupy the Western World

Occupy Wall Street is still a burgeoning, largely moderate collection of interests

So far the violence-prone anti-global hoardes haven’t taken over.  The odds are that either they will or at least that there will be a clash between the moderates in the movement, who are openly declaring themselves, and the extremists who like to wear black masks.

Nobody with any sense is arguing that capitalism should be dismantled, only that its excesses must be reduced.  Equality of opportunity is the goal, not chaos.

But the longer the movement continues as a formless mass, the greater the likelihood that it will be hijacked by extreme positions, violent or otherwise. 

Its shambolic state has certain advantages:  as long as it is undefined, it can be inclusive.  Until it adopts a manifesto – and by doing so defines the basis for negotiating a new social contract in America – the worst that can be said about its philosophy is that it is meaningless.  But this lack of precision is the very nourishment that allows the movement to grow.  For now, it appears to have sustainable momentum and the spontaneity that can attract new adherents. 

At this point, calls for the mass demonstrations to coalesce around a common theme would only fragment it.  However there is a limit to how long this street theater can remain formless, due to its vulnerability.     

Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney lent momentum to the movement when he gave his endorsement in an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Carney told Peter Mansbridge that the Occupy Wall Street protests and their ilk, that hit Canadian cities on the weekend, are a “democratic expression of views’’ and “entirely constructive.’’ 

“It makes it more tangible, the challenges that that economy is facing, and it makes it more important to demonstrate success on issues such as financial reform,’’ he said.  Carney’s utterances couldn’t have been more apt.  Nor could they have been more potent since he is about to become the head of the Financial Stability Board, tasked with reforming the international banking system using Canada’s model.    

As moral authority goes, Carney’s utterance was as powerful as Warren Buffet’s assertion this summer that people like him aren’t paying their fair share for public services.  And it is more timely, since the replacement of the FSB’s current chairman takes place next month. 

It’s vital for the momentum of Occupy Wall Street to be sustained right now.  That’s because, like Sisyphus, Carney is having to push a very large bolder up a hill.  Europe’s money managers are slow to respond to demands for a trillion-dollar infusion to shore up the continent’s banking system.  Canadian spokesmen have told the Europeans that action is already overdue and further delay will only make it harder to stabilize the system. 

Carney could use the evidence that there is a growing impatience with the status quo throughout the western world.  This virtual constituency, uncontrollably linked by social media, is becoming a new political reality much larger than national boundaries. 

Due to its common cause – angered and frustrated by being disinherited and futureless -- it is becoming the basis for a new global political reality.  To falter now would remove a powerful force for change just when it is most needed.              

Conversation of a Decade

As we said when we launched Prophets of Boom, the crisis brought on by credit default swaps in 2008 and the subsequent collapse of the U.S. housing market would begin a conversation that will likely last a decade or more.  Young Americans who fear they are being disinherited by the excesses of the elites have brought the debate about their future out into the open with their move to occupy Wall Street

The movement is spreading to cities across the U.S. and there has been online chatter from the West Coast about expanding it to include main streets in Canada.   The power of the internet to mobilize like-minded people is being demonstrated to anyone who cares to check. 

In fact, the conditions that move New Yorkers to demonstrate at the altar of capitalism are being felt everywhere that the powerless are being dominated by others.  Increasingly in America thanks to skewed expectations, downloading of public expenditures to communities in crisis and outright greed, the conditions for dissent are being defined by one's distance from the centers of power.  That distance can be measured in miles, money and years of experience.  A very large constituency exists within those parameters - one that is finding its voice and exploring its influence.

The system of goverenance that was devised to harness regal and economic power for the collective good is seen to be failing.  Web-based means are mobilizing an opposition that is far more united and adroit than traditional politics or the ballot box.  How these dynamics play out in the coming decade could change policies or it could change the democratic system itself.   

One thing is clear:  contemporary leaders will need the widsom of the founding fathers to fashion a compromize that will satisfy the parties to this debate.  So far they have mostly been mute.