December 2009
December 27, 2009
Embracing risk
By Bill Kraus
If you’re looking for more correspondence and don’t mind if its mostly abusive, what you do is suggest that the state should spend less time and money trying to get Mercury Marine to stay in Wisconsin and General Motors to come back.
What you do is contend that the future of the Wisconsin economy and the way to keep all that money ($72 billion more or less at last count) that has been put into the public employees’ pension funds safe is to be more daring not less.
In the wake of the tanking of almost everything due to the stupid, greedy, even crooked kings of the financial world, the natural reaction is to do less not more. Like buy mattresses? Debt investments are thought to be safer than stocks, but the rates of return make the mattress option not only safer but almost as rewarding.
The only safety play is in investments in enterprises and ideas that create jobs. Except there is no safe way to do that. The old standbys--automobiles, housing, paper, manufacturing of all kinds--are still there, but they are hardly the drivers of growth that they were before we decided to spend on things we need instead of things we want, and the American economy suddenly didn’t look the same anymore. This is not to say that we should overlook traditional initiatives like all of the above and especially mining equipment and water. These are filling identified needs. The tougher, riskier job is to create a new series of needs. Unfortunately, no one knows what they will be.
What we do know is that the idea factories in and around our graduate schools are spewing out choices for the people who are investing our money.
We also know that most of these embryonic enterprises will go nowhere. We also know that a few will succeed beyond even their inventors' rosy expectations.
But none will even get started unless someone puts up the dough needed to put wheels on them. NY Times columnist David Brooks says we are becoming a “protocol” society whose economy will be about ideas rather than stuff. Wisconsin is overflowing with ideas.
Our own David Ward of NorthStar Economics says our “new normal” and our next economy will be about talent, technology, tolerance for risk and diverse ideas.
All of these things are expensive and risky.
The alternative is to sit tight and wait for things to get back to normal if there is such a thing (which is doubtful).
There are no sure things.
Our choices are among the unsure. To the extent we pick the surest of the unsure, we will be rewarded in our pension funds and in our next economy.
It is hard to imagine that putting our money in mattresses is sure or even safe. Fasten your seatbelts, ignore the hate mail, and find the future.
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December 23, 2009
It's still not too late to shop at the FightingBob.com Bookstore
By Ms. Forward
Now you can finish your holiday shopping at the FightingBob.com Bookstore from the warmth and safety of your computer and help FightingBob.com at the same time.
Through the FightingBob.com Bookstore you can learn more about the books and films cited throughout the website. And when you buy those books a portion of the sale is donated to FightingBob.com. And if you enter Amazon through the link at the top of the FightingBob.com Bookstore a portion of everything you buy will go to sustain Wisconsin's progressive voice.
It's a painless way to help us through a painful economy. We do not accept advertising because we have heard you tell us that you don't want us to. But, as with so many other non-profits, this recession has hit us hard. Individual donations and foundation grants are down. We have not inundated you with fundraising appeals because we know many of you are hurting, too.
But if you are going to buy some books online, please remember to buy them here.
And happy holidays from Ms. Forward and everyone here at FightingBob.com.
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December 21, 2009
Shop at the FightingBob.com Bookstore
By Ms. Forward
You're in luck. With just a few holiday shopping days left and the mall parking lot even less inviting than it is the rest of the year, you can finish your holiday shopping from your computer and help FightingBob.com out at the same time.
Through the FightingBob.com Bookstore you can learn more about the books and films cited throughout the website. And when you buy those books a portion of the sale is donated to FightingBob.com. And if you enter Amazon through the link at the top of the FightingBob.com Bookstore a portion of everything you buy will go to sustain Wisconsin's progressive voice.
It's a painless way to help us through a painful economy. We do not accept advertising because we have heard you tell us that you don't want us to. But, as with so many other non-profits, this recession has hit us hard. Individual donations and foundation grants are down. We have not inundated you with fundraising appeals because we know many of you are hurting, too.
But if you are going to buy some books online, please remember to buy them here.
And happy holidays from Ms. Forward and everyone here at FightingBob.com.
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December 20, 2009
Shop FightingBob.com
By Ms. Forward
You're in luck. With just a few holiday shopping days left and the mall parking lot even less inviting than it is the rest of the year, you can finish your holiday shopping from your computer and help FightingBob.com out at the same time.
Through the FightingBob.com Bookstore you can learn more about the books and films cited throughout the website. And when you buy those books a portion of the sale is donated to FightingBob.com. And if you enter Amazon through the link at the top of the FightingBob.com Bookstore a portion of everything you buy will go to sustain Wisconsin's progressive voice.
It's a painless way to help us through a painful economy. We do not accept advertising because we have heard you tell us that you don't want us to. But, as with so many other non-profits, this recession has hit us hard. Individual donations and foundation grants are down. We have not inundated you with fundraising appeals because we know many of you are hurting, too.
But if you are going to buy some books online, please remember to buy them here.
And happy holidays from Ms. Forward and everyone here at FightingBob.com.
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December 13, 2009
The future, should you choose to accept it
By Bill Kraus
There was a well attended legislative hearing last week on a very large, very complicated, very important proposal. The name of the proposal is the Wisconsin C.O.R.E. Jobs Act. It deals with the next Wisconsin economy generally and what the state government could and should do to find and support what one witness called “the new normal.”
That description encapsulates the size and difficulty of what is being attempted. It dismisses the fantasy that says that, as this recession recedes, Wisconsin will return to normal.
That kind of normal in which our economy was driven by construction and automobiles is history. The new kind of normal is being visualized and invented in many mostly small ways by many people, but it is still not clear what it will look like or when it will arrive.
Part of the reason for the hearing was to get expert testimony and viewpoints from the smartest people in the room and state who are working their way through this maze.
The committees introducing C.O.R.E. are headed by Senator Julie Lassa and Representative Louis Molepske. This hearing gave the members of their committees a chance to express their views and recommendations on the concept generally and the specific ideas in it that a lot of people doing a lot of hard work have fashioned.
Those familiar with the committee-hearing process will not be surprised to learn that many legislators on these committees wandered from the subject at hand to criticize the current administration, deplore the sad state of the economy, or get a plug in for whatever is on the top of their personal agendas.
It did strike me that these side trips into ego-land indicated that a lot of legislators are still playing a hand in a game that is that is no longer being dealt. They didn’t seem to notice that there were no reporters in the room. Or that the audience for their wisdom was strictly limited, or, as another old journalistic hand once said, “If the press doesn’t cover it, it doesn’t exist.”
This is a small loss on the sideshows, but a grievous one for the future of C.O.R.E.
It would be amazing if the 14 main elements of C.O.R.E. repair the damage that has been done to our economy, but it seems to be a step in the direction of re-imagining and re-inventing our economy that is needed and of playing in particular to the enormous strengths of a 150 year investment in education and academic research.
Everyone in the hearing room who testified endorsed the effort.
Even the committee members who were critical mostly complained that it didn’t go far enough.
If all the gubernatorial wannabes don’t rush to Senator Lassa’s office for their transcript of the testimony and a personal copy of the paper prepared by David Ward’s NorthStar Economics company, they shouldn’t even go to the trouble of filing nomination papers.
This is the issue for 2010. This is the challenge for the century.
Or to steal from the less polite but more graphic way a long ago campaign advisor to a long ago president did in a previous millennium said it, “It’s about jobs, stupid.”
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December 9, 2009
Making sense of the surge
By Bob Menamin
The more one examines our latest Afghanistan “surge” the more it seems that President Obama wants us to suspend logic. War is peace, black is white, and up is down.
Let's get this straight. We're sending in 30,000 troops so we can pull out in 2011? Our new mode is to engage in preventive wars. Prevent the terrorist crimes before they happen. As our senators and congressmen are rented and sold by special interests in the business and financial sectors, we decry that the Karzai's Afghanistan government is corrupt? It has been noted by former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski that it is the height of hypocrisy for the U.S. to talk about the corruption of Karzai when the norm of our political process is corruption.
The rationale, given by Obama, for escalating the number of troops in Afghanistan is an illustration of how stupid our government thinks its citizens are. Lies are dressed up as truth and marketed to all of us fools. How can we even pretend that we live in a democratic republic with representative democracy? Wars and the permanent military industrial complex are the heart of our economy. Perpetual war is the result. The tail (military) wags the dog. When and if we leave Iraq and Afghanistan we'll have other wars to "protect our way of life," sustained by public money for private arms merchants.
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December 6, 2009
Obama's unabated Afghanistan problem
By Bob Menamin
It's Bush's policy and Obama's war now in Afghanistan.
President Obama has decided to send more than 30,000 troops requested by General Stanley McCrystal to shore up the fight against the Afghan insurgency. Robert Baer, a former CIA agent, says what the U.S. faces when it comes to an "Afghan insurgency isn't terrorism, but a war of national resistance." Baer says, "They simply want us gone because we're foreigners, and they're rallying behind the Taliban because the Taliban are experienced effective fighters."
Matthew Hoh, a former state department official in Afghanistan, resigned his post in October because he believes we are caught in the middle of a 35-year old civil war. Hoh has said the "9/11 New York attack, as well as the Madrid and London bombings, were primarily planned and organized in Western Europe; a point that highlights the threat is not one tied to traditional geographic boundaries."
Baer, Hoh, and many others serving the U.S. as civilian and military officials see the futility of fighting the Afghans. Baer says "the people that want their country liberated from the West have nothing to do with Al Qaeda." These Afghan fighters are protecting their homes from occupying forces. One must ask, “Why are we staying in Afghanistan?
Obama appears to be on a path of channeling President Lyndon Johnson's escalation almost 45 years ago in Vietnam. Both of these presidents were seduced by the power of being the commander-in-chief, captivated by the special interests of the military industrial complex, and held hostage to a political pragmatism that succumbs to the pressures either real or imagined of being seen as a weak leader. Where are leaders with the qualities of Gandhi when we need them?
Obama faces serious economic and financial problems with mounting unemployment on the home front. Dealing with this requires his attention and our nation’s resources. Instead, he is choosing to continue the Bush/Cheney war games. Maybe he wants to distract us from our real domestic problems. This is a serious mistake from someone who promised so much, but daily shrinks away from the change we could believe in. We should all encourage our congressional representatives to withhold the funds to continue underwriting these insane military adventures.
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