Just fancied a change from two days of Democratic Deficit. So today’s post is a brief overview of the US State that Jean and I live in, together with our animals, the State of Oregon.
Now it’s easy to look up a Wikipedia reference to Oregon but what really caught my eye was as a result of a recent visit to the local Grants Pass office of the Bureau of Land Management. We had gone there to purchase a $5 permit that allows us to go on to BLM land and harvest our own Christmas Tree!
In the Grants Pass office were a number of brochures of scenic attractions in Oregon and we picked up one describing the Rogue-Umpqua National Scenic Byway. Just a quick browse reminded us of Oregon’s stunning and dramatic scenery. Just wanted to share some images.
At a depth of 1,932 feet Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States. It was formed more than 7,500 years ago when the Mount Mazama volcano erupted and then collapsed back in on itself.
The lake partly fills a nearly 2,148-foot (655 m)-deep caldera[1] that was formed around 7,700 (± 150) years ago[2] by the collapse of the volcano Mount Mazama. Human interaction is traceable back to the indigenousNative Americans witnessing the eruption of Mount Mazama. There are no rivers flowing into or out of the lake; the evaporation is compensated for by rain and snowfall at a rate such that the total amount of water is replaced every 250 years. At 1,943 feet (592 m), the lake is the deepest in the United States, and the seventh[3] or ninth deepest in the world, depending on whether average or maximum depth is measured.[4]
Watson Falls is the third highest waterfall in Oregon at 272 feet. It is the most beautiful waterfall along the North Umpqua River Valley. You will cross a wooden bridge below the falls that will put you right into the lower rapids with an amazing view of the falls as they roar over the basalt lava cliffs ahead.
Someone who goes under the handle of HikingTheWest posted this video on YouTube about 6 weeks ago.
Oregon Caves
These caves are an Oregon National Monument with full details on the US National Park Service’s website. That website explains:
Nestled deep inside the Siskiyou Mountains, the caves formed as rainwater from the ancient forest above dissolved the surrounding marble and created one of the world’s few marble caves. The highly complex geology found on the Monument contributes to the unusual and rare plants and animals found nowhere else but here.
A view of the inside of the caves.
There are many good videos of the Oregon Caves on YouTube so do have a browse if you want to. This one caught my eye, especially as it was filmed in January, 2013..
Rogue River
The Rogue River
Final sight for today, the Rogue River runs close by Grants Pass, our nearest town to where we live. Again there is a Wikipedia entry from which one learns that, “Although the Rogue Valley near Medford is partly urban, the average population density of the Rogue watershed is only about five people per square mile (12 per km2).”
Just reflecting on that last paragraph, a simple calculation reveals that the State of Oregon has a population of around 3.9 million people with an land area of 98,300 square miles. Thus the population density of Oregon is 39.6 persons per square mile. To put that into perspective, our neighbouring Californians to the South enjoy a population density of 238 persons per square mile!
Jean and I are very lucky to be living in such a beautiful part of Southern Oregon.
Yesterday, I introduced the essay by George Monbiot, Why Politics Fails. He opened his essay with the sub-heading: Nothing will change until we confront the real sources of power.
His last paragraph read:
So I don’t blame people for giving up on politics. I haven’t given up yet, but I find it ever harder to explain why. When a state-corporate nexus of power has bypassed democracy and made a mockery of the voting process, when an unreformed political funding system ensures that parties can be bought and sold, when politicians of the three main parties stand and watch as public services are divvied up by a grubby cabal of privateers, what is left of this system that inspires us to participate?
And who would disagree with those closing sentiments!
Then just four days ago there was an item on Permaculture News that continued where Mr. Monbiot left off. It was an interview by Marcia Gerwin of Professor Lyn Carson that sets out a positive approach to correcting the widely-acknowledged issue so well articulated by George Monbiot.
Professor Lyn Carson, is a Professor at the University of Sydney. As Professor Carson’s website Active Democracy explains:
Hi, I’m Lyn Carson, welcome to my website. I hope to provide easy access to information which individuals, groups or organisations can use to enhance citizens’ involvement in the activities of local, state or federal government.
I’m currently a professor with the Business Programs Unit at the University of Sydney, Australia. I’m researching in the fascinating area of community engagement and deliberative democracy. I’m teaching ‘critical thinking’ which will have resonance for those familiar with public deliberation.
Democracy, for me, is active, interactive, deliberative and genuinely representative of the wider population. It’s as valid to speak of a democratic personality (Gould, 1988) as it is to speak of a democratic workplace or a democratic society. We can enact in microcosm what we imagine for the level of nation state. We need not restrict our thinking to systems of government—we can do democracy at any time, any place.
Like C. Douglas Lummis, I see democracy as the antithesis of centralised power:
…democracy is one of those beautiful, absolute clear principles… that poses a maddening, tantalizing puzzle to humankind and launches us on the historic project of seeking to realize it in our collective life (Lummis, 1982).
I note the words of Frances Moore Lappé (2006): “To save the democracy we thought we had, we must take it to where it’s never been.” One way of saving democracy—or causing a democratic breakout (Blaug, 1999)—is to involve citizens in political decision making.
I’ve written numerous articles on public participation in decision making—from setting up citizens’ juries to improving community consultation in your local council. Go to Publications if you’d like to download some of my written works. Your feedback is warmly encouraged after you have roamed around this site.
Marcin Gerwin: There are many people who are disappointed in the way the democratic system works. They see politicians arguing and making decision in the interest of their political parties rather than the common good. What is wrong with modern democracy?
Lyn Carson: The difficulties that relate to modern democracy probably start with the use of that term. We have begun to believe that the system of
Professor Lyn Carson
representative government that is pervasive in both the West and increasingly in other locations is actually a democracy. I think we do well to reflect on the origins of democracy, and how democracy was first conceived. We know it was a very different system. We also know that representative government was designed during periods of the French, the American and the English revolutions to perpetuate elites. It was certainly designed to ensure that those who had money, who had property — usually men in the early days — would have their power maintained. I think what we have are the remnants of that.
Democracy is a beautiful ideal in its true sense of people power or the ability for people to make decisions about their own destinies, about things that affect them. In locations where we’ve been able to replicate at least of some of the qualities of ancient Athens, which was the cradle of democracy, then I think we can say that democracy can take root and can actually deliver its promise. It may serve us better not to use the word, I would suggest, to describe what it is that we have, which is far from the notion of genuine democracy. If we call it representative government or even an oligarchy we might start to realise what it is that we have.
MG: I think politicians will not be happy to hear that. They like to present themselves as democrats and some of them don’t acknowledge that there is a problem with a political system.
LC: Scholars are increasingly using the term “democratic deficit” to describe what is happening in the world. There is a widening gap between the governed and those who are doing the governing. There is a crisis of trust, and a growing mistrust because of what is called short-termism — political parties, because of the system, have an eye on the next election and not on the long-term needs of either humans or the even bigger picture, the environment and planetary survival. What we try to create in deliberative democracy are circumstances where all of the voices are in the room, where we can create what we call a “miniature population” or “mini-public” that resembles the entire population so it can achieve what we call a descriptive representation.
At the moment we have representation in parliaments, but it’s not descriptive of the wider population. In Australian parliament there is an inordinate number of lawyers, policy advisers, unionists — usually male — and they don’t resemble the entire population. As deliberative democrats what we are trying to do is to tune into the wider population. We can’t ask the entire population constantly. We can certainly ask what their opinions are but we actually want their judgment, which can only be arrived through a process of very deep deliberation, through a lot of education, through a lot of sharing of information, experience and stories. We want to achieve a very different democratic space than anything that we see in parliaments.
MG: Do you think that mini-publics could be used for actual decision-making instead of public consultations only?
LC: In deliberative democracy we talk about three ideals. That’s the notion of inclusion, or representativeness — that’s the principle of the miniature population. The second ideal is deliberation — you need people to be able to really wrestle with the complexity of an issue, to be fully informed, to argue it out, to use reason, to use storytelling, including emotion. The third ideal is the notion of influence. It is incredibly important that it is attached to decision-making. The NewDemocracy Foundation, that I’m a director of, deals only with projects that have influence. We have continually proved that we can achieve representativeness and deliberation, but the most difficult to achieve is influence. And that’s because elected representatives don’t want to give up power. They believe that they have a mandate to govern and they are disinclined to do so.
But there have been some fantastic examples where elected representatives have done just that. We’ve had a premier of a state in Western Australia who promised to act on the decisions of mini-publics. As Minister for Planning and Infrastructure she stood by citizens’ recommendations. We’ve had a participatory budget in New South Wales with Canada Bay Council. The local government agreed to abide by its decisions. It was the only reason we agreed to be involved. So it is happening. It’s not happening enough, but it’s certainly possible. I would suggest that none of us should proceed with mini-publics anymore unless it has the imprimatur of the decision-maker. It’s a little wearisome to keep proving that we can do these robust processes and then have the decision-makers ignoring the recommendations.
MG: What does the participatory budgeting work like in Australia?
LC: In the case of Canada Bay people were randomly selected, we had a group of 40 who came together face to face over five weekends. They deliberated on the entire budget of the council, they listened to expert speakers, they spent many hours having discussions. They split into small working parties to consider different aspects of the budget and they worked hard to deliver their recommendations to council and it was considered in a council meeting.
MG: Five weekends is a lot of time. Did the citizens receive a compensation for being involved in participatory budgeting?
LC: They received compensation, but it was a very small amount, something like 50 dollars a day or a weekend. It’s not huge and people don’t actually need a lot of money. They don’t want the equivalent of their salary. It’s an honorarium, a way to say “we value your participation”.
MG: If it was possible to change the law, would you like to have the decisions made by mini-public binding just like those made in referendums?
LC: That’s certainly my dream and there’s no reason why it can’t be so. A couple of examples exist. In Denmark there was a Danish Board of Technology which routinely convened mini-publics and fed those recommendations into the parliament. The parliament had to say why it wasn’t going to abide by those recommendations. That’s in a way the closest we’ve come to it. There’s a law in Tuscany in Italy, it’s called the Tuscan Law 69 which had a trigger mechanism which said that if there was a controversial issue it had to go to a deliberative process and again the regional government had to say why it would not act on those recommendations.
If I had a dream it would be to say that we would routinely convene policy juries to consider issues like education, health, transport and so on. You wouldn’t want to do it for everything. The whole point is to use these processes when and where appropriate, otherwise you would be bogging down the decision-making process which is often working quite well just through the current mechanisms that we have. It’s only when controversy emerges or long-term decisions have to be made, or when politicians are reluctant to act.
MG: What about the referenda? Are they a good way of making decisions?
LC: I’m not a fan of referenda. The reason is that they lack the deliberative element. We’ve had many referenda in Australia. I think we’ve had 44 and 36 of them was unsuccessful. That’s because the issue tends to become very polarized unless it has bi-partisan support, from the two major parties. They are inevitably rejected by the population because it’s so easy to run a negative campaign. Australian governments provide a lot of information when there is a referendum. But this can be quite confusing and citizens need an opportunity to deliberate on them, as they do in Oregon with the Citizens Initiative Review, or to have serious discussions with other people. A referendum for me without that deliberative component is nothing more than an opinion poll. It’s absolutely destined to failure unless you have all the major parties supporting it.
The citizen-initiated referendum sounds good on the surface because there is a groundswell of support, but what I would like to see is the groundswell of support demanding a deliberative process and then letting that deliberative process make a decision instead of putting it to a referendum.
MG: For some people it may be hard to accept that only those who are chosen by lot are going to make a decision instead of everybody as in referenda.
LC: That’s going to vary from country to country. In Australia we have a great deal of faith in random selection because it’s fair. Everyone has an equal opportunity to be selected. We also have an independent Australian Electoral Commission that has earned public confidence and it could have oversight of such lotteries. As long as you have faith in the process there shouldn’t be a problem. The difficulty is that it is not a routine to do that, although in Australia it is quite a routine to do that through criminal juries — people are randomly selected to sit on those juries. So actually we understand that process and we have faith in it to make very binding decisions about whether or not someone is guilty or not guilty, whether they should go to jail for life. We actually give that power to citizens at the moment. If that process doesn’t exist in a country, then yes, it needs to become a routine in order for trust to develop.
OOOO
Wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that many, if not all, that read that interview had heads nodding in agreement.
Back on Lyn Carson’s website you can find an interesting selection of her publications. I, for one, will be browsing through them.
“Minds together do not just bind together, they find together.”
My post last Monday, The lure of patterns, appears to have resonated far and wide. In the sense of many echoes reinforcing the perilous nature of our present times and the desperately uncertain decades ahead. Tomorrow I shall be writing specifically about those echoes.
Today, I wanted to spend a little time reflecting on dogs and communities! After all this blog is called Learning from Dogs!
In Monday’s post I opined that the future may well see a return to people re-evaluating and re-energising the benefits of local communities. Now when it comes to communities, there are no better examples than dogs and, so many thousands of years before dogs, grey wolves. These species have an incredibly strong social structure. I mean, of course, the pack. It’s a shame that the expression ‘pack of wolves’ or ‘pack of dogs’ has such misplaced negative connotations.
Before dogs were domesticated, as in when they first evolved from the grey wolf, they shared with wolves a natural pack size of around 50 animals. There was a very strong social cohesiveness within that pack yet a very ‘light’ status differential between those dogs having pack status and the mass of the pack group. Ditto with wolves.
In fact there were (still are) just three status roles: Mentor/Monitor/Nanny. Or has been described previously on this blog: Alpha/Beta/Omega roles. Even within the domesticated dog, thousands upon thousands of years later, those social instincts are alive and well. Many followers of Learning from Dogs will know that Pharaoh, him of the Home Page, now an elderly German Shepherd is a Monitor or Beta dog. I could write about this aspect of dogs for hours!
Pharaoh being a monitor for young Cleo.
So back to us funny old humans.
I closed last Monday’s post off with three predictions:
That the power of internet communications will allow more people, more quickly, to find their soul-mates wherever they are on this planet.
That the realisation of how dysfunctional many Governments are, of how truly poorly they serve the majorities of their citizens, will lead to mass rejections of these so-called Governments’ policies. Such rejections predominantly peaceful, as in taking the horse to water but being unable to make it drink.
That there will be a new form of localism. At two levels. Literally, people geographically close to each other creating 21st C. versions of local communities. Virtually, those local communities linking to other like-minded communities right across the world resulting in highly effective and innovative learning, accelerated common-sense, (call it wisdom if you wish), and extraordinarily efficient and sustainable ways of living on this planet.
Dear Paul: I like your predictions. They will play some role. But maybe somewhere in the bushes only. I think predictions of the future beyond the next 12 months are obsolete.
Jeremy remarked: (and do click the link and read some of Jeremy’s fantastic poetry)
I am hoping for a new localism. I see signs of this in the local food movement and a growing concern about factory farming, for one thing. I think people are really scrutinizing where their food comes from, where their medicines are made, and I think there also is a dawning awareness of how we are living on the backs of exploited third world workers (and poorly paid service workers here at home). I do see signs of these things permeating the consciousness of many people and leading them to want to become more “local.”
Your predictions are good, and I liked the one of communities from different parts of the world working with each other… that was creatively brilliant.
(Click on their names to see three wonderful blog sites, by the way.)
So my idea of a return to an era of localism, but a 21st C. version reflecting the way so many millions of us are connected electronically, wasn’t immediately rejected.
Patrice recently published a post called Devils In The Details. I mentioned in a comment to that post that I would be referring to it in this place. Patrice replied [my italics]:
Very good, Paul! No doubt you will bring more common sense to one more of these interesting collaborations you bring together! Internet debates! A long way from the paleolithique cave!… But still the same idea. Minds together do not just bind together, they find together.
I found that last sentence so powerful that it was used as the sub-heading to today’s post. Then Alexi Helligar commented:
The word consciousness, breaks down to con+scious+ness, which literally means together knowing or shared knowledge.
Adding in a subsequent comment:
In other words: Without society there is no consciousness. The sages of old knew this. Why has it been forgotten?
So right before my eyes (and yours!) we are seeing the power of ‘finding together‘.
Finally, just on the spur of the moment, I did a web search under an entry of ‘early caveman social structure’. Guess what! One of the top search returns was an essay by an Erik D. Kennedy under the title of On the Social Lives of Cavemen. From which jumped off the screen:
Human beings are no strangers to group living. Call it a family trait. Our closest animal relatives spend a good bulk of their time eating bugs off of their friends’ back. While I’m overjoyed we’re not social in that manner, I’m less pleased that we’re not social more to that degree. In study after study, having and spending time with close friends is consistently correlated with happiness and well-being. And yet, the last few decades in America have seen a remarkable decline in many things associated with being in a tight-knit social circle—things like family and household size, club participation, and number of close friends. Conversely, we’ve seen an increase in things associated with being alone—TV, commutes, and the internet, for example.
This trend is quite unhealthy. It’s no surprise that humans are social animals—but it may be surprising that we’re such social animals that merely joining a club halves your chance of death in the next year—or that living in a close-knit town of three-generation homes can almost singlehandedly keep you safe from heart disease.
My goodness me, this sharing idea may be core to a healthy society in ways that we need to return to. Erik’s essay goes on thus:
That particular case—of Roseto, Pennsylvania—is mentioned by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. In 1950’s Roseto, the incidence of heart disease in men over sixty-five was half the national average (and suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, and serious crime were also basically unheard of[ii]). Bewildered doctors searched for solutions in genetics, diet, exercise, and geography, but finding nothing, reached the conclusion that it was the close-knit social life of the community that kept its residents so healthy. Dinners with grandma, friendly chats between neighbors, and a precocious level of civic involvement were the driving factors in the health of a town that nothing but old age could kill.
The happiness and health I’m describing are not, however, ingredients to a long-lost elixir of well-being. This sort of paleo social life occurs in cultures large and small all over the globe. America just happens to be an enormous exception (and the one that I live in). The whole reason Roseto was an outlier is because it was a town whose inhabitants more or less collectively moved from rural Italy to the middle of Pennsylvania over a few decades. This was basically an Italian village in the American countryside, and it stood out because Italy’s social culture was remarkable compared to America’s—and that was in the 1950’s. America’s social culture has only deteriorated even further since then. We’ve lost a lot, but my thesis is a positive one; we have as much to gain as ever.
So if wolves and dogs naturally settle into packs of 50 animals, what’s the optimum ‘pack’ size for humans? Dear Erik even offers that answer:
Along with that urban emigration came a shrink in residents per household and a widespread decline in community and organization engagement. This isolation has been taxing on our physical and mental health, and the reason has been clear from the beginning: it’s not good for man to be alone.
So we’ll spend more time with other people. Fine. But who should we spend our time with? What kind of groups should we hang out in? And how big of groups? The simple answer is: as long as you’re pretty close to the people you’re with, it hardly matters. Piles of research back up what is essentially obvious from everyday experience: that the more time you spend with people you trust, the better off you are. That’s not to discourage actively meeting new people, but seeing as though close friends push us towards health and happiness better than strangers, there does appear to be a limit on the number of people you can have in your “tribe”.
And that number is about 150, says anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who achieved anthropologist fame by drawing a graph plotting primates’ social group size as a function of their brain sizes. He inputted the average human brain size into his model, and lo and behold, the number 150 has been making a whirlwind tour of popular non-fiction books ever since. Beyond being the upper bound for both hunter-gatherer tribes and Paleolithic farming villages, it appears that everything from startup employee counts to online social networks show this number as a fairly consistent maximum for number of close social ties.
You really must read Erik’s essay in full; it really ‘spoke’ to me and maybe it will do the same for you.
So no other way to close than to say that of all the things we can learn from dogs, the power of sharing, of living a local community life, may just possibly be the difference between failure and survival of us humans.
Dogs and man should never be alone.
oooo
I’ll say it again! Dogs, and man, should never be alone!
Literally, as a long-case clock is tickled back to life.
We are experiencing a period of foggy mornings giving way to brilliantly clear and sunny afternoons.
Yesterday was no exception.
Looking out to the North-East with Mt. Sexton behind the mists.
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Having walked some of the dogs around 9am it seemed a good idea to find a task indoors for the morning. How about sorting out the ‘grandfather’ clock, or long-case clock in proper speak!
Every since we came up from Arizona to settle here in Southern Oregon, now almost a year ago, that clock had not been running well. It’s nothing special in terms of its lineage but over many years of collecting and repairing clocks in my earlier days in Devon, UK, I’ve always had a soft spot for the long-case clock.
The project!
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This particular clock, as seen in the above picture, is a real hotch-potch. The original face is nothing special and somewhere along the line a previous owner came across a more ‘antiquey’ face and screwed it over the original.
Possibly the original face?
oooo
Old over new!
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Anyway, the first task was to even up the movement, again a real mess.
A long way from how this clock was originally built!
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All this a long-winded way of saying that by the time the clock seemed to be running in a settled fashion it was coming up to 4pm and my creative juices for blog writing, such as they are, had evaporated.
Hence the clock story!
And in answer to those who might wonder why so much time and effort went into such a dreadful jumble of a clock, the one thing I adore about mechanical clocks is the sound of the ‘tick’ and the chimes.
There is no better sound than the steady tick of a long-case clock and those haunting chimes on the half-hour and on the hour.
The video below is a wonderful example of a real vintage clock!
This is a client’s beautiful longcase clock that I serviced not long ago. The clock is by J. Woolfenden – Royton and it dates to roughly 1785 (based on some research that was done on it).
In this video, you hear the clock striking 11 o’ clock on a nice original bell. The clock was running during testing, but it was not in beat (I had to fix the leveling later).
Somewhere in my aged brain cells is the memory of having heard that humans are great lovers of patterns. In other words, patterns are deemed to be very important for the progress and evolution of homo sapiens. Of course, it is not just humans who learn from patterns; I’m sure most of the animals who live around us are great pattern matchers. To support that proposition, anyone who has owned a dog or cat will have spotted how quickly they learn patterns. (As an aside, some months ago our puppy German Shepherd, Cleo, work me at around 4am because she needed to go outside for a ‘call of nature’. I now get woken every single night variously between 2am and 5am for Cleo’s benefit!)
The British mathematician G. H. Hardy who lived from the last quarter of the 19th Century well into the 20th Century, reputedly said (and I cheated and looked it up!):
A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.
So why has this post opened with the theme of patterns? Because, call it coincidence or what, within the last couple of weeks there have been three articles, each from very a different source, predicting that the present levels of inequality in society are both unsustainable and the beginning of the end.
Global wealth inequality: top 1% own 41%; top 10% own 86%; bottom half own just 1%
—–
Just 8.4% of all the 5bn adults in the world own 83.4% of all household wealth (that’s property and financial assets, like stocks, shares and cash in the bank). About 393 million people have net worth (that’s wealth after all debt is accounted for) of over $100,000, that’s 10% own 86% of all household wealth! But $100,000 may not seem that much, if you own a house in any G7 country without any mortgage. So many millions in the UK or the US are in the top 10% of global wealth holders. This shows just how little two-thirds of adults in the world have – under $10,000 of net wealth each and billions have nothing at all.
This is not annual income but just wealth – in other words, 3.2bn adults own virtually nothing at all. At the other end of the spectrum, just 32m people own $98trn in wealth or 41% of all household wealth or more than $1m each. And just 98,700 people with ‘ultra-high net worth’ have more than $50 million each and of these 33,900 are worth over $100 million each. Half of these super-rich live in the US.
Michael Robert’s essay closes:
All class societies have generated extremes of inequality in wealth and income. That is the point of a rich elite (whether feudal landlords, Asiatic warlords, Incan and Egyptian religious castes, Roman slave owners, etc) usurping control of the surplus produced by labour. But past class societies considered that normal and ‘god-given’. Capitalism on the other hand talks about free markets, equal exchange and equality of opportunity. But the reality is no different from previous class societies.
The uprisings in the Middle East, the unrest that is tearing apart nations such as the Ivory Coast, the bubbling discontent in Greece, Ireland and Britain and the labor disputes in states such as Wisconsin and Ohio presage the collapse of globalization. They presage a world where vital resources, including food and water, jobs and security, are becoming scarcer and harder to obtain. They presage growing misery for hundreds of millions of people who find themselves trapped in failed states, suffering escalating violence and crippling poverty. They presage increasingly draconian controls and force—take a look at what is being done to Pfc. Bradley Manning—used to protect the corporate elite who are orchestrating our demise.
We must embrace, and embrace rapidly, a radical new ethic of simplicity and rigorous protection of our ecosystem—especially the climate—or we will all be holding on to life by our fingertips. We must rebuild radical socialist movements that demand that the resources of the state and the nation provide for the welfare of all citizens and the heavy hand of state power be employed to prohibit the plunder by the corporate power elite. We must view the corporate capitalists who have seized control of our money, our food, our energy, our education, our press, our health care system and our governance as mortal enemies to be vanquished.
The PRI editor’s preamble to the Chris Hedges essay included a couple of videos that he recommended watching. One was a talk by Robert Reich: How Unequal Can America Get Before We Snap?
The other one was a recent TED Talk by Richard Wilkinson (his profile is here).
Mr. Wilkinson explains that for the majority of people there is an instinctive feeling that societies with huge income gaps and corresponding high levels of social inequality are somehow going wrong. He charts the hard data on such economic inequality and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: ergo, the very real effects on health, lifespan, and even such basic values as trust.
Just 16 minutes long, it’s a very revealing talk. Do watch it.
oooo
The final, third piece of the pattern was me coming across an essay on the blog DeflationLand, not a blog I had come across before, on the same day that I saw the PRI article. This essay, published just two days before the PRI article, was about patterns; the patterns of the centuries. More specifically, how the characteristics of a century generally evolve to a new culture within the first 10 to 15 years of the following century. It was a most interesting proposition and, to my delight, I was given permission to republish that essay here on Learning from Dogs. So here it is.
oooOOOooo
Why I stopped worrying and learned to love the currency collapse
For the past 300 years, the historical pattern has been for the era marked by a century to continue into the following century by fourteen or fifteen years. Let me explain. Everyone knows that the 19th Century, its uprightness, its optimism and sense of purpose, the halcyon days of British Empire, came to an end with World War I, starting in 1914 and building to a nasty crescendo by 1916. The 20th Century had arrived, and it had some real horrors in store for us.
Germans before Kraftwerk
But if we return back another hundred years, we notice that the 18th Century ends in 1815 with the final defeat of Napoleon, that final project of the Enlightenment and of the French Revolution. With the Congress of Vienna in 1814-1815, we have a new Europe along the lines of Metternich’s plan, and the 19th Century at last is here.
“Sorry, guys. My bad.”
In 1713 and 1714, we have the Treaties of Utrecht, Baden, and Rastatt, bringing an end to the era of Spain as a major power, and the rise of the Habsburgs. Louis XIV dies in 1715, after reigning for 72 years. The Baroque period is over, and we are now firmly in the 18th Century.
War of Spanish Succession
We still live in the 20th Century. Nothing much significant has changed in our lives in the past twenty years. Symptoms of a deeper rot are appearing here and there, foreshadowing a larger crisis, but the crisis itself has not arrived yet. We still live in an era of Pax Americana, the old republic very much a strained and tired Empire now, with the U.S. Dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
That is going to change.
The next task for History is to dismantle the untenable structures and institutions put in place by late Modernity, which have been extended now as far as they can go. Our debt-based monetary system will collapse, our unbacked fiats will be worthless. The debts and unmeetable obligations will all default.
There are ironies and great contradictions as the former home and hope of Liberty becomes viciously unfree and increasingly despotic. Our leaders no longer govern, but try instead to rule us — they are less legitimate with each passing day, their laws corrupt or worse. They are nearly finished, and will be swept away with the tide.
Just as in 1914, the internationalist system will break down, dashing the hopes of the would-be first-world nations. We will probably have a pretty good war as well, or many local ones worldwide. These transitions tend to involve war.
Deflation first — it clears the way for the complete loss of faith and hyperinflation that will follow. The next big wave down in the financial markets is the battering ram. The U.S. national debt is about faith, so is quantitative easing, and so is the very idea of magical coins that could ever be “worth” a trillion dollars. When this faith breaks, in concert with loss of faith in perpetual growth and unlimited cheap energy, then things will move very, very quickly.
There is nothing any of us can do at this point, except navigate the rapids as well as possible, and to stay out of the way of a dying empire, which is still very dangerous in its death throes. We are actually very privileged to be alive and witnessing this next transition, to what we do not know just yet. But what an honor to live at this time, not in ignorance but with an existential resolve to come out of it alive and much the wiser.
Ass Americana.
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** Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author and former international correspondent for the New York Times. His latest book is The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.
I am neither a scientist nor a historian; just someone who has lived in and observed the world for coming on for 60 years.
So you have to understand that my prediction is hardly worth the ‘paper I write upon’ (which certainly dates me!). But, undaunted, here are my predictions for the 21st Century:
That the power of internet communications will allow more people, more quickly, to find their soul-mates wherever they are on this planet.
That the realisation of how dysfunctional many Governments are, of how truly poorly they serve the majorities of their citizens, will lead to mass rejections of these so-called Governments’ policies. Such rejections predominantly peaceful, as in taking the horse to water but being unable to make it drink.
That there will be a new form of localism. At two levels. Literally, people geographically close to each other creating 21st C. versions of local communities. Virtually, those local communities linking to other like-minded communities right across the world resulting in highly effective and innovative learning, accelerated common-sense, (call it wisdom if you wish), and extraordinarily efficient and sustainable ways of living on this planet.
The ride of Paul Revere is a famous poem by Longfellow, as in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It commemorates the American patriot Paul Revere who on the 18th April, 1775 rode furiously across Middlesex County, Massachusetts spreading the alarm that the British were approaching.
Spreading the alarm throughout Middlesex County, Massachusetts.
In 1774 and the Spring of 1775 Paul Revere was employed by the Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Massachusetts Committee of Safety as an express rider to carry news, messages, and copies of resolutions as far away as New York and Philadelphia.
On the evening of April 18, 1775, Paul Revere was sent for by Dr. Joseph Warren and instructed to ride to Lexington, Massachusetts, to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that British troops were marching to arrest them. After being rowed across the Charles River to Charlestown by two associates, Paul Revere borrowed a horse from his friend Deacon John Larkin. While in Charlestown, he verified that the local “Sons of Liberty” committee had seen his pre-arranged signals. (Two lanterns had been hung briefly in the bell-tower of Christ Church in Boston, indicating that troops would row “by sea” across the Charles River to Cambridge, rather than marching “by land” out Boston Neck. Revere had arranged for these signals the previous weekend, as he was afraid that he might be prevented from leaving Boston).
On the way to Lexington, Revere “alarmed” the country-side, stopping at each house, and arrived in Lexington about midnight. As he approached the house where Adams and Hancock were staying, a sentry asked that he not make so much noise. “Noise!” cried Revere, “You’ll have noise enough before long. The regulars are coming out!” After delivering his message, Revere was joined by a second rider, William Dawes, who had been sent on the same errand by a different route. Deciding on their own to continue on to Concord, Massachusetts, where weapons and supplies were hidden, Revere and Dawes were joined by a third rider, Dr. Samuel Prescott. Soon after, all three were arrested by a British patrol. Prescott escaped almost immediately, and Dawes soon after. Revere was held for some time and then released. Left without a horse, Revere returned to Lexington in time to witness part of the battle on the Lexington Green.
I mention all this simply because when John Hurlburt recently sent me a guest post his email opened with these words: “Thanks for the call. Hopefully, we are beginning to turn a global corner. Here’s a slightly modified version of “the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere”.”
So with no further ado, here is John’s essay.
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Random Thoughts
The United States is a two hundred-year-old modern experiment in Democracy. Democracy is an inclusive government by a majority of equal citizens. Oligarchy and plutocracy are forms of government by the few rich people. Both have historically ended in chaos. Our hearts and our souls are deeply saddened by the ignorance and lack of compassion of a technologically enhanced corporate struggle against the earth and humanity.
Dualism is divisive. We’re butting heads over false equivalencies which have very little if anything to do with the true nature of a global environmental, cultural and economic melt-down. People who believe that money makes the world go round either don’t know much or don’t care at all about the realities of physics.
Sooner or later, fundamentalism self-destructs as a result of a failure to adapt to change. The longer we continue to push Nature’s envelope, the longer it’s going to take the earth to recover. Our hope is that we won’t destroy human culture and the sustaining crust of mother earth in the process of regaining our balance.
Most animals live primarily by instinct. Humans have added discernment. Today is the tomorrow we dreamed of yesterday. Who knows if we’ll get another opportunity to do what we are still capable of doing as a species today? Unfortunately, the last thing that many Americans truly cared about was when the “Twinkie” factories temporarily shut down.
It is far better to live into solutions then it is to live with problems.The spiritual energy of life is as warm and welcoming as the sun. The first step is to accept that Nature requires life to adapt. We need to see the integral vision beyond ourselves and live into that vision.
What we can’t accomplish alone we can accomplish together.
Ne cede malis!
an old lamplighter
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Fabulous words, as I’m sure you’ll agree. Oh, and if you like me didn’t understand that Latin expression ‘Ne cede malis’, it means yield not to misfortunes.
Let me close with that Longfellow poem.
Paul Revere’s Ride
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,–
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm.”
Then he said “Good-night!” and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war;
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon like a prison bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.
Meanwhile, his friend through alley and street
Wanders and watches, with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the barrack door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the measured tread of the grenadiers,
Marching down to their boats on the shore.
Then he climbed the tower of the Old North Church,
By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the sombre rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade,–
By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town
And the moonlight flowing over all.
Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,
In their night encampment on the hill,
Wrapped in silence so deep and still
That he could hear, like a sentinel’s tread,
The watchful night-wind, as it went
Creeping along from tent to tent,
And seeming to whisper, “All is well!”
A moment only he feels the spell
Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread
Of the lonely belfry and the dead;
For suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On a shadowy something far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay,–
A line of black that bends and floats
On the rising tide like a bridge of boats.
Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.
Now he patted his horse’s side,
Now he gazed at the landscape far and near,
Then, impetuous, stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry tower of the Old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely and spectral and sombre and still.
And lo! as he looks, on the belfry’s height
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns.
A hurry of hoofs in a village street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet;
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.
He has left the village and mounted the steep,
And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,
Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;
And under the alders that skirt its edge,
Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,
Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.
It was twelve by the village clock
When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.
He heard the crowing of the cock,
And the barking of the farmer’s dog,
And felt the damp of the river fog,
That rises after the sun goes down.
It was one by the village clock,
When he galloped into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, black and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon.
It was two by the village clock,
When he came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,
And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning breeze
Blowing over the meadow brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket ball.
You know the rest. In the books you have read
How the British Regulars fired and fled,—
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farmyard wall,
Chasing the redcoats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.
So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,—
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.
There’s been a couple of posts that I want to refer to because they underline the fact that humans are so prone to forgetting that we are of the wild, from the wild and connected to the wild.
The first of those posts was a recent essay by Patrice Ayme under the title of Rewilding Us and is republished on Learning from Dogs with the kind permission of Patrice.
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Rewilding Us.
REALITY IS WILD & FEROCIOUS. IGNORING IT IS INHUMAN.
And Presents A Civilizational Risk.
Princeton is freaking out. Flesh devouring aliens are lurking out in the woods, threatening academia’s fragile thoughts. Krugman:
A growing population of coyotes in the wooded area bordering the Institute for Advanced Study has motivated the Princeton Animal Control Advisory Committee to recommend that sharpshooters be hired to help handle the problem. “There is a big pack over at the Institute Woods,” officer Johnson said this week. “I’m having a lot of complaints that they follow people around.”‘
You Can’t Always Eat Who You Want
The “Mountain Lion”, is a relative of the Cheetah (erroneously put in the cat family, felis, until last year or so). It has 40 names, in English alone, and is found from the American Arctic to Patagonia, from the sea shore to the high mountains. The weight above is that of the female. Males are heavier (typically up to 100 kilograms). The heaviest puma shot in Arizona was 300 pounds (136 kilos).
The lion/cougar/puma is capable of jumping up twenty feet from a standstill (yes, 6 meters; horizontally, 14 meters). It is capable of killing a grizzly (pumas and ‘golden bears’ were famous for their naturally occurring furious fights to death in California). The feline’s crafty method consisted into jumping on top of the bear, and blinding him with furious pawing. Top speed: 50 mph, 80 km/h. (By the way, there used to be pure cheetahs in North America, recently exterminated by man. I propose to re-install the Asian cheetah in the USA, in a sort of cheetah diplomacy with Iran.)
The philosophical question here is: what is this world all about? Is it about living on our knees, or ruling among animals and wilderness?
Why would Princeton panic about small canids? Because they don’t obey the established order?
Coyotes are totally clever, and not at all dangerous (being so clever). They have very varied voices, when in packs. Going out and shooting them is really primitive, and misses the main point of having nature around. That is: to teach humility, and teach the richness of our planet, visit hearts with emotional diversity, and minds with complexity.
Bears and Mountain Lions are a completely different matter. They are both extremely clever too, but can be very dangerous.
Running and hiking in the Sierra, I got charged by scary bears several times. I view this dangerosity as a plus, but it never loses my mind, and I got scared nearly out my wits more than once.
Once, in a national Park on the coast, I literally ran into two large lions in 30 minutes! Then I got charged by a large elk before he realized I was not a lion. Other high notes were finding a bear cub on the trail in the near vertical mountain side, on the way down, as dusk was coming.
Another high point was the large bear by the trail, who was lying like a bear rug, at 9pm, in an apparent ruse to let me approach until he could jump at his prey, as he did, before realizing that I was not a deer, something that obviously infuriated him. He was torn between making the human into dinner, and the instinct that this would turn badly for him.
In Alaska I was charged by a moose with her progeny… although I did not go as fast as an experienced mountain biker who happened to be there too, the anti-grizzly cannister in my hand emboldened me to succeed in a circuitous move to proceed towards my distant destination, something facilitated by the calf’s crash into some obstacle, drawing his mother’s concern. Mountain running often requires to proceed, no matter the obstacles in the way, when one is too far to turn around.
Bears know rocks, they have been hurt by them, and so they fear airborn rocks (throw the rock on something noisy, to impress; I had to hit, with a very large rock, a charging bear directly, once; it fled; it was killed by rangers later after he caused a flesh wound to somebody else; some will find all this very violent; well, it is, that’s part of the whole point).
Mountain Lions are better charged and/or, roared or barked at. They fear insane behavior.
In general making lots of noise helps, with bears and lions. I don’t have clever tricks to suggest for bathing safely in the murky icy Pacific. Although I assume that the presence of sea lions bobbing on the surface placidly is indicative of the absence of an obvious white shark prowling… In any case the pacific is so cold, you will probably die of cardiac arrest before you are devoured.
In Africa, there are about 500,000 elephants. 25,000 to 30,000 are killed, a year, to send the ivory to east Asia (China, Vietnam). So African elephants may disappear. This is beyond tragic, it’s irreplaceable. Elephants understand people’s gestures, without any learning (they apparently learn to use trunk gestures among themselves). One is talking about extremely intelligent animals here. (In contrast, chimpanzees have great difficulties understanding human gestures.)
Intelligence and culture are dominant among apex mammals. That’s what makes them so superior. Washington State had the smart idea to shoot full grown adult male mountain lions. Thus mountain lion society and culture collapsed, uneducated teenagers took over, and incidents with humans exploded (something about the quiet macho society!).
A Japanese specialist of chimpanzee intelligence who happens to have a bear in his lab, found that the bear did not underperform chimpanzees on mental tasks (that’s actually a problem with bears; being so clever, they can be unpredictable, one can never know what they have up their sleeve, like the one who mimicked a bear rug, above, or one who drove a car in Tahoe). A number of social mentally advanced animals (sea mammals, parrots) use advanced languages.
So what are my recommendations? The Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies ought to realize that, if it wants to become really brainy, it ought to give our fellow species a chance. They are part of what make our minds, in full.
Elephants and rhinoceroses used to be all over Europe and North America. They ought to be re-introduced right away, using Indian and African species (rare camels too; later, thanks to genetic engineering, part of those could be replaced by re-engineered ancient species, such as the Mammoth). Lions and leopard like species ought to be reintroduced too.
It can work: in the San Francisco Bay Area, there is an impressive population of mountain lions. I had many close calls (in the most recent incident, a few weeks ago, a lion peed an enormous and dreadfully smelling amount on a trail I was making a loop on, obviously to show me he owned the territory, a total wilderness reserve a few miles from Silicon Valley… especially at dusk).
However, the lions are extremely good at avoiding people (although one got killed by police in downtown Berkeley in the wee hours of the morning). They will all be collared in the next ten years, to find out what is going on. With modern technology (collars!) and sophisticated human-animal culture, there is no reason why extremely dangerous, but clever species could not live in reasonable intelligence with humans.
So rewilding is possible. It’s also necessary. Why? So we humans can recover our hearts, and our minds.
Whether we like it or not, we are made for this wild planet. By forgetting how wild it is, by shooting it into submission, we lose track of the fact human life, and civilization itself, are much more fragile than they look.
And thus, by turning our back to the wilds, we lose track of what reality really is. Worse: we never discover all what our minds can be, and how thrilling the universe is. We are actually bad students who refuse to attend the most important school, that taught by reality itself.
Rewilding is necessary, not just to instill a mood conducive to saving the planet, but also to remake us in all we are supposed to be.
Expect Evil, And Don’t Submit.
These are the times when, once again, the plutocratic phenomenon is trying to take over. That’s when the few use the methods of Pluto to terrorize and subjugate the many (to constitute what is variously named an elite, oligarchy, or “nomenklatura“, or aristocracy, that is, a plutocracy).
And how is that possible? because the many have been made into a blind, stupid, meek herd (I refer to Nietzsche for the condemnation of the herd mentality).
How do we prevent that? Nietzsche advocated the mentality of the “blonde beast“. That meant the lion (and not what the Nazis claimed it was; few were as anti-Nazi as Nietzsche). Why lion? Because lions are domineering. I learned in Africa that one could go a long way with wild lions, as long as one gave them respect, and time to get out of the way. However, disrespecting a lion means death.
Lions don’t accept to live on their knees. When abominable forces from the giant Persian theocratic plutocracy put the tiny Athenian democracy in desperate military situations, Athenians fought like lions. And democracy won.
Yet, 150 years later, when fascist, plutocratic, but apparently not as abominable, Macedonian forces put Athens in a difficult situation, Athenians surrendered. They did not fight like lions. Democracy would not come back to Athens for 23 centuries (and only thanks to the European Union).
We will not defeat plutocracy if we do not rewild ourselves. First. Let there be lions.
***
Patrice Ayme
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What I read in Patrice’s essay is this. Man is, by definition, part of nature. Yet man, uniquely of all the natural species on this planet, has contrived to ‘evolve’ a set of beliefs that run counter to the core integrity of nature. Perhaps more accurately put: sections of modern man have evolved this way.
I have a background piece on Learning from Dogs called Dogs and integrity. Here’s an extract:
value and cherish the ‘present’ in a way that humans can only dream of achieving
are, by eons of time, a more successful species than man.
And have poetry written for them:
Inner Peace
If you can start the day without caffeine,
If you can always be cheerful, ignoring aches and pains,
If you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles,
If you can eat the same food every day and be grateful for it,
If you can understand when your loved ones are too busy to give you any time,
If you can take criticism and blame without resentment,
If you can conquer tension without medical help,
If you can relax without liquor,
If you can sleep without the aid of drugs,
You are probably the family dog!
Those words apply equally to all the animals on this planet; all of Nature’s animals. In other words, integrity must be and has to be the one and only framework within which we live.
I occasionally read sad stories in my local media of senseless cruelty against wildlife around my town of Colchester: the smashing of barn owl eggs; people suffocated badgers by closing their den up. People have no opportunity to expose themselves to nature, and thus connect with nature, some experts call “Nature Deficit Disorder.”
Technology, far from liberating, enslaves the individual to a relentless need for entertainment and personal validation, backed by demands of television, homework, cellphones and money earning. Many view nature as a health and safety risk, so that it is either managed or avoided. The situation is best illustrated in a satirical YouTube video called“The discovery of the last child in the woods.”
The solution is simple: expose yourself to nature.
The indigenous Native American expresses a connection to nature in this video:
Here is that video. Watch it without interruption. In less that 3 minutes it spells out everything that we humans have to relearn about the world we live in; the world we are part of. The integrous world we must fight for. Fight for as lions!
When all the trees have been cut down,
when all the animals have been hunted,
when all the waters are polluted,
when all the air is unsafe to breathe,
only then will you discover you cannot eat money. ~ Cree Prophecy ~
How the foreclosure crisis was a boon for the super wealthy.
For some time now, must be quite a few years, I have subscribed to Yves Smith’s Naked Capitalism blog. I do so for a number of reasons.
Thus it was that a few days ago I read with a mixture of anger and disgust an article about the consequences of the foreclosure crisis on the wealthy. Within a few hours of me requesting by email permission to republish that article on Learning from Dogs came the reply from Yves granting such permission.
This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 53 donors [now well over 400, Ed.] have already invested in our efforts to shed light on the dark and seamy corners of finance. Join us and participate via our Tip Jar or another credit card portal, WePay in the right column, or read about why we’re doing this fundraiser and other ways to donate, such as by check, as well as our current goal, on our kickoff post.
It’s a welcome departure to see Adam Davidson’s weekly column in the New York Times, which usually puts a happy face on how the 1% are winning the class war in America, have a guest writer look at the other side of the story.
Catherine Rampell has a short but compelling piece on how the foreclosure crisis was wealth transfer from lower and middle income families to the rich. Her points are simple: the typical person who lost their home wasn’t a greedhead who bought too much house or refied to buy flat panel TVs and go on cruises (if you hang out with mortgage types, you’ll get a big dose of profligate consumer urban legend). The people who were like that (and there were some) for the most part were in subprime loans that reset in 2007 and 2008 and were in the early wave of foreclosures. The people who’ve lost their homes in later foreclosures were overwhelmingly people who had the bad fortune to buy late in the housing bubble (so when the bust hit, they had negative equity and couldn’t use lower rates to refi into cheaper payments) and took economic hits as a direct result of the crisis (hours cuts and job losses; other people who were hurt were in the more typical “shit happens” categories, like suffering medical problems, with their situation made much worse by their inability to sell or refinance their home).
Rampell’s contribution is to look at the phenomenon of investors, both big and small, and how they’ve bought properties at foreclosure and then flipped them. Separately, Josh Rosner recently released the astonishing statistic: that sales of owner-occupied properties showed only a 1% gain in the last 12 months. The gains that have been driving the indexes were all in investor owned properties. Some flipped to other investors. In hot markets, local investors have been doing “mini-bulks,” acquiring small portfolios to sell to private equity investors, some without renovating them, others with modest fix-ups. Others sold them to homebuyers.
Rampell uses the example of a couple who believed that renting was throwing away their money, and had the bad luck to buy a moderately-priced fixer-upper in early 2007. Each wage earner saw their income drop and unable to get a loan modification, they lost their home. Their $309,000 Seattle home went to an investor for $155,000 in the summer of 2011. That investor just sold it to a homeowner for $290,000, not far below what the hapless couple paid for it. But the new buyer paid all cash.
Rampell tells us:
Of the 87,062 foreclosures in the last five years that were bought by corporate investors and have been flipped, about a quarter were sold for at least $100,000 more than what the investor originally paid, according to [an online real estate listings site] Redfin (Although it’s impossible to know how much investors spent on upgrades or renovations.)….
The boom-bust-flip phenomenon is just one of the most obvious ways that research suggests the financial crisis has benefited the upper class while brutalizing the middle class. Rents have risen at twice the pace of the overall cost-of-living index, partly because middle-class families can’t get the credit they need to buy. That means “landlords can raise rents with impunity,” says Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin. And according to a report by David Autor, the M.I.T. economist, job losses during and after the recession were concentrated in midskilled and midwage jobs, like white-collar sales, office and administrative jobs; and blue-collar production, craft, repair and operative jobs. Employment for higher-skilled workers, on the other hand, has grown substantially.
There is a second way foreclosures have served as a wealth transfer to the capitalist classes. Foreclosures don’t necessarily result in evictions. Banks often leave properties in a “zombie” state, starting foreclosures but not completing them, leaving the owner who thought he was foreclosed on still on the hook for property taxes. Another variant which is much less damaging is to leave the homeowner in place. I recently met an investor who is acquiring homes in Atlanta. The day after he buys a house, he goes to introduce himself to the former homeowner to see if he can work out a deal to keep them in place as tenant. In the overwhelming majority of cases, he can. “They were paying $1100 on their mortgage and the bank wouldn’t give them a mod. I’ll let them rent for $700, which is way above what they’d have gotten if they wrote the principal down to the price at which I bought the house. And I tell the tenants I’d be happy to sell the home to them.” We didn’t discuss details, but it sounded as if he’d be willing to structure rent to own deals (where part of the rent would go to a down payment on the house).
He was clear that his business depended on what he saw as value destroying behavior by banks. He described how he’d recently bought a home and when he went for his usual visit to the house, a well-dressed black man met him and invited him in, saying he’d be out in 30 days and assumed it wasn’t a problem. The new owner saw the house was in impeccable shape. He chatted with the owner a bit and found out he was a bodybuilder with a high-end training business. He asked the homeowner: “You look like you take good care of yourself and the house. You’d been paying on time. What happened?”
The trainer told him that he’d bought the house at the peak of the cycle for $160,000. The house was clearly now worth way less. He tried to get the bank to modify it to a principal balance of $100,000. The bank wouldn’t consider it. “So I bought a house which is comparable to this one for $50,000 and gave this one up.”
In this case, the homeowner had enough cash to arbitrage himself. The investor told me he’d bought the foreclosed home for $40,000. Had the bank cut a deal for $100,000 (and who knows, the homeowner might have accepted a higher number), it would have come out way ahead. But that also assumes that the bank owned the mortgage. It’s pretty much a given that the bank was a servicer, and as we’ve seen again and again, servicers don’t have the incentives or the infrastructure to do mods. So investor in the mortgages lose, homeowners lose. The winners are the banks as inefficient looters (the money they skim off the servicing is chump change relative to the damage done by negligent and predatory servicing) and the investors who profit by picking up the pieces. This is isn’t a well-functioning economic system, it’s rentier capitalism. And it’s looking more and more like a doomsday machine for what remains of the middle class.
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Can’t add anything polite to this! Except, to say it’s a very long way from integrity!
Yesterday’s long rant was the outcome of me promising ‘a debate’ with Patrice Ayme. Succinctly, I had disagreed with a comment from Patrice where he had written: “Force is the truth of man. Everything else is delusion, even the vegetarian style.” and wanted to respond within the space of a post rather than the more restrictive comment.
For my disagreement with Patrice had been essentially about his statement, ‘Force is the truth of man‘. I don’t recall a war in the last 50 years that has been a force for good.
But then it was Alex’s comment, see below, that stopped me short. For I realised that I was confusing ‘force’ with ‘war’ and that was probably a big mistake on my behalf. Of course, I’m writing this without the benefit of knowing better what Patrice meant in his comment! Blogging, as powerful a media as it is, does not provide for immediate interaction!
Nevertheless, Alex’s comment yesterday was powerfully inspirational. Because so many of us (and I include me in that ‘us’) all too often behave as though we are a species utterly divorced from Nature.
So what to do? Because I am fundamentally at odds with the sentiment expressed by Patrice Ayme; “Force is the truth of man. Everything else is delusion, even the vegetarian style.“
The answer takes us to tomorrow’s post, A return to integrity.
And, yes, it does mention dogs! Rather a lot as it happens!
Dogs are the one species that man has lived with longer than any other species. So when we refer to the qualities of the dog it is simply because we are so familiar with them. In no way does that exclude the numerous other species that bond with man and share the same wonderful qualities.
Qualities so easily seen: Love, Honesty, Loyalty, Trust, Openness, Faithfulness, Forgiveness and Affection. Together they are Integrity.
Of course dogs will kill a rabbit, for example, as readily as a cat will kill a mouse. In this respect force isthe truth of Nature.
The only way for species man to survive on this planet is for every element of man’s existence on this planet to be rethought of in terms of the natural order. Read the comment left by Alex in yesterday’s post:
Hi Paul, what you highlight are examples of disconnection between humanity with nature and each other. I have on my own blog highlighted a concept of Ubuntu – “I am because we are” – which is only possible when the self realises they are part of an inter-connected network of life. Your example of islands of fragmented forest where disconnected wildlife are dying out is how it is with disconnected humanity, we are doomed to destruction because we are cut off from the life-giving connection to nature.
All the problems you highlight are symptoms of the disease of disconnection, until there is reconnection to nature none of these symptoms can be successfully addressed.
War is an integral part of nature, when people seek to dismiss this then they add to the disconnection from nature. I was stung in the face by a drunken wasp a few days ago, this is how it is with nature, it is beautiful but also brutal. Peace and balance are illusions, life is in a becoming because of unbalance and strife. I advocate harmony, like a downhill skier we do not seek to control our surroundings, but instead act in harmony by moving around the obstacles such as rock and tree.
Disconnection can be as large as destroying whole forests by ignorant energy policies to those idiots who kicked a puffball to pieces before I could harvest it, or the new owners of my former home who have taken a chainsaw to all the trees and bushes in the garden. People who are disconnected do not consider how their actions impact nature or people contrary to the philosophy of Ubuntu.
“I am because we are!” Each and every one of us is where we are today, for good or ill, because of what we are: part of Nature. It’s so incredibly obvious – we are a natural species – yet who reading this wouldn’t admit at times to behaving “as though we are a species utterly divorced from Nature.”
Millions of us have pets and animals that we love. Yet we still miss the key truth of our pets. That we are a part of Nature, subject to Natural order, just as much as our pets are. We have so much to learn from our animals.
Take this rather sad story but, nonetheless, a formidable story of the integrity of one species for another. Watch the video.
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Take this rather happier story about the integrity of one species for another. Watch the video.
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Thus when we see the extraordinary benefits that arise from love and trust, from loyalty and faithfulness, and much more, why oh why is so much of our society fundamentally broken?
As John Hurlburt wrote in a recent email, it is because, “we are spiritual bankrupt. We spend too much of our time thinking about ourselves and what we want and too little of our time thinking about other people and what we all need.” John went on to add that this spiritual bankruptcy had preceded our moral and economical bankruptcy. He pointed out that the solution to our moral and financial problems, as well as our salvation as individuals and as a species, is spiritual. “We simply need to love the Nature of God, the earth and each other regardless of what we may believe God to be.”
Now whether you are a religious soul, or a heathen, or somewhere in the middle, it matters not. For if we continue to defy Nature and the natural laws of this planet we are going to be dust before the end of this century. Again in John’s powerful words:
Denying climate change is a death wish.
Nature always wins in the long run.
Nature is balanced. Are we?
As if to endorse the great examples that Nature offers us in terms of the benefits of love and trust, take a look at these three recent photographs from here in Oregon.
A young timid deer showing her trust of me as I sat quietly on the ground less than 30 feet away.
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A mother and her fawn trusting Jean’s love for them, and getting a good feed!
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Little Sweeny and Cleo converting trust to peace and happiness. (Not to mention Jean!)
Now these are not photographs to ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’ over, these are reminders that kindness, generosity, selflessness and trust are part of Nature. All the great virtues and values of man do not come from a vacuum, they come to us via Nature.
We have been blessed by an evolution that has allowed mankind to achieve remarkable things. Even to the point of leaving the confines of our planet and setting foot on the Moon and sending probes from out of our Solar System. There’s a sense, a distinctly tangible sense, that man has conquered all; that we have broken the link from being part of Nature; from being of Nature.
And now Mother Earth is reminding all of her species, every single one of them including species man, that everything is bound by her Natural Laws.
Does this mean that man has to revert to some form of pre-civilised stone-age era? Of course not! Progress can be as much within the Natural order than in competition with it, as it has been in recent times. In fact, Professor Pat Shipman explains our progress is benefited by being part of that Natural order. Here’s how Amazon describe her book, The Animal Connection.
The Animal Connection: A New Perspective on What Makes Us Human
A bold, illuminating new take on the love of animals that drove human evolution.
Why do humans all over the world take in and nurture other animals? This behavior might seem maladaptive—after all, every mouthful given to another species is one that you cannot eat—but in this heartening new study, acclaimed anthropologist Pat Shipman reveals that our propensity to domesticate and care for other animals is in fact among our species’ greatest strengths. For the last 2.6 million years, Shipman explains, humans who coexisted with animals enjoyed definite adaptive and cultural advantages. To illustrate this point, Shipman gives us a tour of the milestones in human civilization-from agriculture to art and even language—and describes how we reached each stage through our unique relationship with other animals. The Animal Connection reaffirms our love of animals as something both innate and distinctly human, revealing that the process of domestication not only changed animals but had a resounding impact on us as well.
It’s a powerful read and greatly recommended. Here’s an extract from the book [page 274, my emphasis]:
Clearly, part of the basis of our intimacy with tame or domesticated animals involves physical contact. People who work with animals touch them. It doesn’t matter if you are a horse breeder, a farmer raising pigs, a pet owner, a zoo keeper, or a veterinarian, we touch them, stroke them, hug them. Many of us kiss our animals and many allow them to sleep with us. We touch animals because this is a crucial aspect of the nonverbal communication that we have evolved over millennia. We touch animals because it raises our oxytocin levels – and the animal’s oxytocin levels. We touch animals because we and they enjoy it.
From the first stone tool to the origin of language and the most recent living tools, our involvement with animals has directed our course.
So to round this off. These last two posts came from my need to debate with Patrice the statement that “Force is the truth of man.” If Patrice’s meaning was that the truth of man is subject to the force of Nature, then I agree one-hundred percent.
For the time for man to recognise that the force of Nature is “the truth of man” is running out.
Each of us, whoever you are, for the sake of your children and for all of the children in the world, embrace today the qualities, the values of Nature.
Learning from Dogs 