A New Inconvenient Truth

"Nobel prize winner Al Gore shifted from his longstanding focus on regulating carbon pollution to advocating direct government investments in clean energy as the best way to deal with climate change. Gore is the country's most prominent spokesperson on climate change and a shift in his thinking in reaction to new economic and political circumstances is highly significant."

A New Inconvenient Truth

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Op-Ed Contributor - What’s Good for G.M. Is Good for the Army - NYTimes.com

General Clark on the importance of the automobile manufacturers.

Op-Ed Contributor - What’s Good for G.M. Is Good for the Army - NYTimes.com

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Know It All - - Local Area Networks: How the Obama Campaign Works on the Ground

Know It All - - Local Area Networks: How the Obama Campaign Works on the Ground

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10 Weeks of Financial Turmoil - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com

10 Weeks of Financial Turmoil - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com

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The Patriot Tax: We Need a Price Floor for Gasoline

In 2001, the Congress passed the Orwellian-sounding Patriot Act, a Faustian bargain, requiring Americans giving up privacy rights in exchange for increased security. It's time to put an ironic twist on that euphemism by passing a Patriot tax, a gas tax to help transform the transportation grid into a petrol-free zone.

The benefit of a Democratic win in November 2008 will be a more serious discussion of the use of taxes. Granted no one likes taxes but, as Republicans like to say, when you tax something, you get less of it. And we need less burning of fossil fuels.

Consequently, we need to tax gasoline. I think we need to implement an additional $1 dollar per gallon tax in 2010 and increase it a dollar a year until 2020.

This would be considered a regressive tax but we could rebate people at the end of the year. Say $200 a year for people making over $100,000 and $250 for those making less than $100,000 and $300 for those making less than $50,000. This would reduce the amount of oil people burn while also providing an economic stimulus.

Most importantly, a predictable, dependable price floor will lay the foundation for the renewable energy industries and technologies that will reduce the US trade deficit and help save the planet.

Capitalism Needs a Purpose

I visited President Clinton's office in Harlem yesterday to talk about some potential digital projects. Unfortunately he was not there as we were working with some of his people, but on the way home I was thinking about an interview he did recently with CNBC's Maria Bartiromo in the same office for her Wall Street Journal Report. While the ex-President is brilliant on a number of topics, his instincts on the economy are probably the most notable. During his administration, the US experienced a phenomenal economic expansion and no doubt his instincts were refined by the incredible success of the e-commerce revolution due to the commercialization of the Internet. When asked if former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan was to blame for the current credit crisis because the Fed left interest rates so low, he had this to say.

The real problem was that good money at low prices didn't have a lot of options apart from housing, or other real estate. Because there was not enough other growth. I believe that if we had started a serious energy policy six years ago, we might still be in this fix, but it wouldn't have been nearly as bad. Cause we would have had whole other range of other things for people to invest money in, areas for people to work in, and less incentive for people to move this money in every more clever ways, just through the same old hole in real estate.

Clinton's government witnessed and benefited from the IT/dot.com revolution. More important he saw the decisive role an activist administration played in propelling the movement. Not through massive government intervention but by hyping the technologies and setting up the conditions for competition in this new industry and letting the investment flow in. Capitalism needs a purpose. It needs direction and cheerleading. Prime the pump then let the market churn out the details.

Obama and the East-West Center

I went to an East-West Center (EWC) Alumni dinner the other night and was pleasantly surprised to learn that Barack Obama's parents were "grantees" there during the early 1960s. I attended the EWC in Honolulu first as a Research Intern and co-authored a book, Computerization and Development in Southeast Asia (1987) and I stayed on as a grantee to get a Masters degree. They also funded the first two years of my PhD before I moved to New Zealand to teach at Victoria University and where I finished writing my dissertation.

But enough about me. I have been able to piece together a bit more about Barack Obama's parents and the role the East-West Center played in their lives. His mother, Ann Dunham, arrived in Hawaii with her parents from Seattle in 1960 and began to attend the University of Hawaii. She soon married Barack Hussein Obama Sr. and gave birth to Barack Jr. on August 4, 1961. Both parents were sponsored by the East-West Center, which was newly created at the time to help foster better relations between the US and Asia. The EWC requires its grantees to take a foreign language (I took Japanese and Indonesian) and they met in a Russian language class. In 1963, the elder Obama took a scholarship for graduate study at Harvard University and eventually returned to his native Kenya. Ann married another East-West Center grantee, Lolo Soetoro from Indonesia, who was studying for a MA degree in geography.

Obama never studied or spent much time at the East-West Center, but his parents were very much part of the dynamic international East-West Center community. His mother and Kenyan-born father spent considerable time mixing with other international students at the Center’s famous cafeteria that looks out over a beautiful Japanese garden. Moreover his Kansas-born mother and stepfather from Indonesia were each selected to participate in the East-West Center’s highly competitive graduate Scholarship Program." 1

The East-West Center is funded almost entirely by the US Congress and has been run since its beginning by the US Information Agency (USIA) which also ran the Voice of America (VoA). Reports of it being a "left-wing" institution are greatly exaggerated, although like the VoA, it tried to develop good relations with other countries in Asia-Pacific, many of which had been left-of-center or at least partial to "development" thinking where government has a crucial role in a nation's economic, educational, and social growth.

In 1967, the new family moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, during the tense years of the early Suharto regime. So intense that his mother who worked for the US Embassy, brought him back to Hawaii in 1971. After several years, she decided to move back to Indonesia. Barack asked to live with his grandparents and stay in Hawaii. His grandfather had been very attentive to the father-less boy and his grandmother was a rising star and eventual Vice-President at the Bank of Hawaii, one of Hawaii's two largest banks. Obama's mother returned to Indonesia where she continued her work in rural development that would take her to many countries in the area: Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Nepal and Thailand.2


For myself, I also met my wife during my days as a EWC grantee and I would be pleased if our daughter continued the tradition and ran for US President one day.

Sources

1) http://www.pacificmagazine.net/page/features/polynesias-first-us-president/
2) http://www.midweek.com/content/story/midweek_coverstory/08_year_of_obama/P2/

Cerf on National Technology Policy

I've been researching the possibilities of a "czar" coordinating the broadband/electrical grid in the future and ran across this interesting interview with the "Father of the Internet" Vint Cerf.
Towards a National Technology Policy

"I'd like to see visible evidence of the reconstitution of bodies providing technical input to policy makers. A small example would be the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, PITAC, that President Clinton put in place. I'm a little biased because I served on the committee, but what I observed in the course of my time on that committee is that it had a very strong drawing power, convening power to bring together people from various parts of the government who were particularly concerned about information technology and its further development.

And the consequences of the committee deliberations had what I thought was direct effect not only in policy decision in the executive branch, for example in the research area, but also helped influence thinking at the legislative level. The committee went out of its way to brief members of Congress and staff about issues that had come under the purview of that committee. I think more of that is really valuable, not just at the national level but at the state level, and maybe even at the local level, when you're talking about infrastructure development, broadband access to Internet, things of that kind, you want some locally sensible decision making that's driven in part by technology and economics."

CIOI: If a technology czar of some sort is the result of the DC process, would that still be better than what we have now?

Cerf: Maybe a compromise is that there is an office of Science and Technology policy for the executive office of the President. That's where PITAC was situated, there's also the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, PCAST. These are existing mechanisms, or previously-existing mechanisms that could be reconstituted. Drawing on the technical community at different levels of government is what I'm looking for here. If you try to centralize it, you don't get decision making at the level of detail that is needed in all the various instances where you want to have technical input. Local conditions are going to involve different kinds of solutions.

My concern about centralizing things is that you don't get very good solutions. If you want to draw attention to the importance of technology in policy making at the national level, perhaps you do need to have a cabinet level person - but what is the purview of that person? I would compare it to the evangelist position I have at Google. I don't make decisions, I don't believe it's appropriate, but I can lobby like crazy in every venue where people will listen, to apply principles like net neutrality, for example, in the course of deciding policy. It's encouraging people to draw on valuable and distributed resources of information that strikes me as the most important outcome of this kind of thinking.

CIOI: Obama has talked about a national Chief Technology Officer. Is what we need really more of a national Chief Information Officer?

Cerf: Maybe, although it's fair to say that there's more to technology than information. So it depends a great deal on what Senator Obama has in mind in terms of scope for such a position. For example, DARPA acts a kind of central resource for research for the military, including to the military departments' own research branches. So in a funny way, from the defense point of view, that is the central technology arm of the organization. But it engages in a very broad way across the country, finding some of the best people in the United States and in some cases outside of the United States to help resolve really tough technical issues.

So if there were such a position, whether a CIO position or a CTO as the Obama campaign refers to it, having that position in the cabinet begs the question, what does that party actually do? Does that party have a budget? Are there things that the organization that forms under this position have authority for? The worst thing in the world is to have a position where all you can do is say no, because if you say yes you can't afford to pay for anything. That's the source of some frustration for a number of people in the private sector who serve as Chief Technolgy Officers, if they don't budget and staff it's very hard to make something happen.

Drill, Drill, Drill it into our Heads

Probably nobody has had as much influence on projecting Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin into veep consideration than the anchor of MSNBC's Kudlow and Company who interviewed the former Miss Congeniality on several occasions. Larry Kudlow's show is one of my favorites although I rarely agree with him politically. One of Kudlow's mantra's is "Drill, Drill, Drill" - meaning give the oil companies everything they want, especially drilling rights in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Gov. Palin fits right into this thinking, serving a constituency that gets fat checks from oil royalties and other perks as well as a husband who works for BP (formerly British Petroleum). (Hmm, as a New Yorker, I wonder if I should get royalties from Wall Street?)

Gov. Palin was picked recently by Senator John "The Google" McCain as his running mate on the GOP Presidential ticket. McCain has been slowly selling his soul to the oil special interests, completing the transaction last June. Note this quote from the Washington Post:

Oil and gas industry executives and employees donated $1.1 million to McCain last month -- three-quarters of which came after his June 16 speech calling for an end to the ban -- compared with $116,000 in March, $283,000 in April and $208,000 in May.

Washington, of course, was taken over by the political "oil sludge" in 2001. President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, National Security Advisor Condi Rice, and Department of Commerce Secretary Don Evans, and of course, in the shadows, Enron's "Kenny Boy" Lay were all beholden to fossil fuel interests. The combination led to a $1 trillion+ war in the Middle East and oil prices that peaked near $150 a gallon in the summer of 2008 as unregulated speculators took advantage of the Fed's 2% interest rates to bet on America's vacation plans and overall addiction to the hydrocarbon saturated liquid. The political ideology associated with this oil cabal has been highly resistant to recognizing the "externalities" (costs born by third parties) associated with fossil fuel usage, particularly its role in polluting the atmosphere and creating global warming.

As I've written before, whether through incompetence or design (to give the benefit of the doubt) Bush created a discussion on energy that Gore's proselytizing probably could not achieve. As gas rose to $4 a gallon, oil expanded beyond the global warming conversation to an economic issue as cost-push inflation made commuting and other forms of travel more expensive and energy costs pushed prices up among a wide range of products dependent on cheap fuel or hydrocarbon components (ie tires, plastics, etc.)

The time is right to begin to institute widescale change. The time is right for an Intellectrical Revolution based on the newest technologies in microprocessing, telecommunications and non-carbon based energy sources.

But now McCain is becoming the new voice of this dying industry and he is quickly picking up the "drill, drill, drill" mantra. With Palin providing the echo and a Republican Party desperate for an economic theme, we can expect the message to be drilled into our heads this Fall. Slowly lulling us back into "Fossil Fools".

Live From Denver

Well in HD anyway.

Senator Edward Kennedy looked great speaking at the Democratic Convention in Denver tonight. I could hardly tell he has been suffering from brain cancer. He has made mistakes in his life, but they are far, far outweighed by his accomplishments. Unlike Bush who has tried to return a class system to the US, Kennedy has stood for equal opportunity and advancement towards a society where class, race, gender and sexual preferences are not barriers to a rich and fulfilling life.

Obama's Political Roots

Bodysurfing in Hawaii

Barack Obama was born in Hawaii and went to its prestigious Punahou High School, spending a few years of his childhood in Indonesia. I lived across the street from his high school, although a few years after he graduated. I don't know Obama, at least not much more than anyone watching the news these days, but I do have some insights into the environment he lived in while in Hawaii.

One of the things to recognize was that Obama lived in Hawaii while a Japanese-American governor came to power. While in high school, he would have seen Gov. George Ariyoshi emerge as the first US governor of Asian descent, an extraordinary event at the time that was widely celebrated in Hawaii.

Why Political Economy?

Political Economy examines the interplay between powerful economic actors and market forces. It looks at government, NGOs, news organizations, religions, unions, oligopolistic corporations, and even individuals that possess either great wealth, political power, charismatic personalities and/or celebrity status.

Economics is based on a beautiful yet fleeting abstraction: that dynamics of nature drive the forces of supply and demand to produce an equilibrium price that will satisfy everyone involved. The state of natural perfection, often called the "market" will constantly adjust and readjust via the price system to achieve the "one price" that will "clear the market" of all products and send all customers happily on their way home.

Political Economy does not deny market forces, but recognizes that the real world consists of actors that have little interest in being subject to market forces. Every business strives to transcend market forces and establish a dominant presence with the power to set its own prices. Governments work to even out the business cycle with intentional policies to either stimulate or (rarely) slow down the economy. Central Banks like the Federal Reserve use their power over the money supply to influence the economy.