Move toward a Resiliant Suburbia?

moving solid line | stable divided line | moving solid line … fire moving to earth

stable divided line | stable divided line | stable divided line … earth

The hexagrams …

36. Wounded Brightness Wounded brightness. Beneficial is laborious persistence. Being weakened. It is good to work diligently on the situation. (The brightness is the light of consciousness, one’s aliveness, one’s energy. It being injured means that one’s aliveness is diminished, one is being weakened.)

2. Land Land. A foundation for progress. Beneficial is the persistence of a mare. The noble one has a goal to move to. Being confused at first, later acquiring mastery. It is beneficial that companionship is gained in the southwest, companionship is lost in the northeast. Calm persistence brings good fortune. There is a new potential, for you to develop. At first you’ll not know your way, but you’ll gain a handle on the situation and eventually master it. Just calmly proceed. It is beneficial to make partners and allies, and not to move on with people who have different interests. (At the original place and time of the Yijing, allies were in the southwest, territory they wanted to conquer was in the northeast.)

…

Cross-posted from the new, improved, Burning the Midnight Oil blog and grill.

It is now well known around the place where I work that I not only, oddly enough, bike to work, but that I do not have a car at all. And so, one of the things that brings a smile to my face when I’m at work is the worried queries how I’ll get to work when winter sets in.

I smile because last December I was biking 14 miles up to the warehouse in snow, sometimes feeling like counting my toes when I arrived to make sure they were still there. Given that, a bit under three miles to work this winter is far from daunting. But it is far from the imagination of the small town / exurban Buckeye, who view bikes primarily as fair weather recreational kinds of things.

Now, having gone through it before does not mean that I laugh, LAUGH!, in the face of the Ohio Winter, but rather that I know enough to cope with it.

Cross-posted from Burning the Midnight Oil

Well, Modular Pumped Hydro and Bio-Coal, I reckon.

And, yes, this is about winning friends and influencing people.

Bio-coal … the technology is just about ready for prime time, but we do not have the feedstock. Define soil-conserving and soil-building perennial production techniques, make sure that coppice production is in there, and establish strong soil husbandry income to entice Appalachia into coppice wood production.

Unlike subsidies on the product side, soil husbandry payments can explicitly discriminate in favor of production on degraded sites and against any production that involves breaking ground in old-growth forests. It is, indeed, mostly a matter of enforcing the common sense and defending it against nonsense modification.

And corresponding capital subsidies for the establishment of decentralized bio-coal production in areas with depressed labor markets and substantial perennial bio-mass production … that money will zero in on Appalachia like a laser beam.

Cross-posted from Burning the Midnight Oil

Seriously.

Hurray, Senator Obama is now President-Elect Obama.

Hurray, John Boccieri is now Congressman-Elect Boccieri.

Hurray, Larry Kissell is now Congressman-Elect Kissell.

Hurray, What’s-is-name in Cincinnati is now Congressman-Elect What’s-is-name (I guess I should look that up again)

California passed … narrowly, but it passed … Proposition 1A for a High Speed Rail system, including $950m for funding non-HSR systems to connect into the HSR system, helping set up the possibility of leap forward into a more sustainable, more Energy Independent future.

And I’m crying.

You have to be hiding under a rock to be unaware that at this point in the race, Senator Obama is leading.

What I cannot for the life of me understand, though, is complacency as a result of seeing, say, that FiveThirtyEight.com has a projection of a 94.9% chance for Obama versus 5.1% chance for McCain. Because the same site says that there’s less than a 50% chance of a Landslide win by Obama.

We gotta think about victory like Republicans (even as we refrain from acting like Republicans in pursuit of victory). After bare victory, with the substantial public good that John McCain is not President and had not right to come near to the “Nuclear Football”, comes a strong enough victory to be seen as claiming a mandate, and after that comes a landslide, driving the Republicans into a likely circular firing squad.

Consider the possible fruits of victory. Then go out there and fight for the landslide that we need.

Excerpted from Burning the Midnight Oil for Progressive Solidarity,

in the Burning the Midnight Oil blog-within-a-blog, graciously hosted by the good people at Progressive Blue.

Progressive Solidarity … its a core concept for building a progressive change coalition. It is, indeed, a core concept for Progressive Populism itself. It says, “You got such a great idea for fixing things? Don’t just put it out there and then blame people for not ‘getting it’. Go out an earn their attention by finding out what they say they need and working for it.”

Its not exclusionary. If someone is willing to step forward on an important issue … even someone who is not going to be a partner in the change coalition … even a moderate conservative like Colin Powell who was and continues to be wrong on one of the central foreign policy decisions in our nation in our time … accept it.

When Colin Powell says, in his endorsement of Senator Obama for President:

But right now we’re also facing a very daunting period.  And I think the number one issue the president’s going to have to deal with is the economy.  That’s what the American people are worried about.  And, frankly, it’s not just an American problem, it’s an international problem.  We can see how all of these economies are now linked in this globalized system.  And I think that’ll be number one.  The president will also have to make decisions quickly as to how to deal with Iraq and Afghanistan.  And also I think the president has to reach out to the world and show that there is a new president, a new administration that is looking forward to working with our friends and allies.  And in my judgment, also willing to talk to people who we have not been willing to talk to before. Because this is a time for outreach.

… I have no doubt that the economic solutions he would most prefer and those that I would most prefer will not be the same solutions … I have not doubt that the foreign policy stance he would most prefer and the one that I would most prefer will not be the same stance … I have not doubt that the terms on which he would wish to “work with our allies” would not be the same as the terms that I would favor.

Colin Powell is, after all, a “moderate Republican” in a time when being a “moderate Democrat” would be considered a center-right political position in most of the industrial world. We almost certainly have different views on how things should be done.

However …

A two part answer to the question of how McCain can fix Social Security. First, Social Security is not broken and does not need fixing. Second, McCain can’t fix Social Security.

Social Security and Medicare are often lumped together as “entitlements”, and the threat of Social Security not paying off to the current working generation is used to try to grease the wheels of efforts to allow Wall Street to gain income from Security taxes.

Ezra Klein capably addresses the point that Social Security is not “in crisis” in Social Security as Signifier, so I’ll focus on why John McCain can’t fix it. But to get the basic … look at that gentle slope in Social Security … look at that massive explosion in Medicare … Medicare, that’s an entitlement crisis. Social Security, not.

Here at Docudharma yesterday’s diary on The Magic of Default Swaps: You Too can be an Insurance Company, cassiodorus says:

Dollar hegemony, however, can only prevent a general contagion of dollars up to a point.  What that point is, however, is a mystery. … Thus hyperinflation and currency crash.

As I see it, there are two paths ahead.

(1) A crash program of investment in sustainable energy production and energy efficiency in transport, housing and farming, leveraging the exporters-exchange-rate the US$ will be seeing into a central position in the growth industries of the 21st century … or …

(2) We try to continue on the same unsustainable course, and have a hyperinflation.

Background, more detail and analysis beyond the fold.

The numbers that are thrown around are so mind-boggling that they are mind-numbing. The total amount of Credit Default Swap (CDS) obligations outstanding, according to the Bank of International Settlement, was 57 trillion US$ in December 2007 (pdf).

That is roughly Four Times the size of the US GDP.

These are the things that Warren Buffet called a “time bomb”.

What are they? Well, suppose that we are watching a little old lady crossing a street, and want to take out a life insurance policy that pays if she gets clobbered by traffic. Unless she is close family, or she is a business partner, we can’t do that … we have no insurable interest.

But if we were watching a company, and wanted to buy a contract that pays off if the company can’t pay on its bonds, we could. We’d buy a CDS.

So, Monday a bail-out package described by opponents a excrement on toast went down to defeat because after getting compromises to make it, in my view, worse, the Republican leadership could not then deliver enough Republican votes to get the thing passed “on a bipartisan basis”.

Like they are unwilling to take unpopular votes to protect business interests? What was more than a decade of votes against the Minimum Wage about, then?

So, the first step is to see if the non-finance sector business lobby has been on the phone with the Rebel Replicants, cursing them a blue streak for screwing the pooch so badly before the Christmas shopping season. Perhaps they are, and so perhaps they will toe the line.

And if not, then the Democrats can turn to putting together a Beautiful Financial Rescue Package that the caucus can support. So, what would that look like?

OK, now, Wash-Mooooo has been taken to the slaughterhouse and the choicest cuts bought by JP Morgan Chase (full disclosure: I bank at Chase).

Didn’t anyone know that this was going on? Well, of course people did. For example, back in May of this year, William C. Dudley, an Executive VP at the New York Federal Reserve Bank said:

So what has been driving the recent widening in term funding spreads? In my view, the rise in funding pressures is mainly the consequence of increased balance sheet pressure on banks.

And, obviously, “balance sheet pressure” is a nice way of saying trending toward a risk of insolvency.

Of course, the Fed has been acting for a year now like we are facing a liquidity crisis, when we are actually facing a solvency crisis … but if you carefully read an analysis by a fairly senior person in the Federal Reserve System, its all there. What’s up?

Join me below the fold.