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Countering the smoke, mirrors and the manure.

23/January/2012 09:15
If we alter the calendar for a day, so that the week begins last Saturday, this week may turn out to be one of history’s most widely spun times —the smoke, mirrors and plain old verbal manure should set a record. To counter this mountain of worthless rhetoric we offer four homework assignments to help you find a little terra firma amongst all the whatever.

Of course this week of ours begins in the USA with Newt Gingrich’s resounding defeat of establishment front runner Mitt Romney in South Carolina’s Republican political primary. So as we go forward, we have somewhat of a political horse race, out of a dozen or so potential Republican candidates, with numbers 5, 6, 7 and 8 still in the race, it comes down to numbers 5 and 6 really the choice that remains.

The real interesting statistic that I haven’t heard covered is that the proclaimed “conservatives” (Gingrich and Santorum) out distanced the “moderate” Romney better than two to one, 57 percent to 28 percent and that Romney has yet to get into the higher percentiles, except in New Hampshire, just up the street from his New England base.

Tomorrow evening of course the current president will give his State of the Union address to the American people, and most of the American people with cable television, a Netflix movie, or a Kindle or an iPod, may find something more productive to do with their time.

Finally in Europe we have The Davos World Economic Forum. Having skied in Davos way back when, if I had the opportunity, I would rather be in Davos too. The world’s economic outlook however is still focused upon Greece, the euro and other problems that make the probability of a global normalcy of deviance event more likely.

For your homework, we start with a short and somewhat humorous video, where we find out that the Justice Department’s lawsuit against a number of energy companies in the Midwest has been thrown out. If the government had won, we would have had to outlaw, dogs and cats, raccoons, windshields, hunting, climate change and eventually old age.

Then on the very serious side we get to the economic and jobs information that should be the center of the American political debate, but is the last thing none of the dinosaurs, behemoths and troglodytes want to deal with. We have used those ancient terms as relating to twentieth century business, finance and politics for some time, but we have yet to define those terms: dinosaurs = crony capitalism, behemoths = global finance, troglodytes = politicians and their lobbyists.

Some months ago, I think I heard a “journalist” say that in the 1980s and 90s the United States decided to no longer be the manufacturer of the world, but rather the financial center. I don’t remember that debate, I surely didn’t vote for it. I believe that George Bush 41, Alan Greenspan and Bill Clinton were in favor of it, and that really were the roots of the fruit of our current mess, but its time to cut down that bush and plant some new seedlings for the twenty-first century.

That will only occur by letting the economic climate change take place naturally so that the seeds of a twenty-first enterprise-financial-political order can be planted . That will come, one way or another and bring about the demise of the dinosaurs, the behemoths and troglodytes. The long Bill Moyers interview with David Stockman shows that there are a whole lot of things the majority of Americans can agree upon. Take the time to watch the whole episode, perhaps instead or in spite of the State of the Union; it will give you context for the rest of the week.

Steve Moore, Justice Department’s Complaint of Dead Birds —Dismissed, Wall Street Opinion Journal, January 20, 2012, 1 minute 34 seconds

Andy Grove: How America Can Create Jobs, Business Week, July 1, 2010

Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work, The New York Times, January 21, 2012

Bill Moyers with David Stockman, On Crony Capitalism, January 20,2012, 57 minutes

Moyers & Company Show 102: On Crony Capitalism from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

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European Downgrades — Productivity and Wealth

15/January/2012 17:00
In last week’s article we played around with the normal gross domestic product (GDP) formula creating a modified alternative domestic product (MADP) that included provisions for the creation of new wealth, productivity, inflation and a risk premium. After American equity markets closed on Friday, the Standard & Poors rating agency officially downgraded the debt ratings of a number of European countries, but earlier in the day these downgrades rumors were the talk of the business news. The following clip from CNBC is with Edmund Phelps, 2006 Nobel laureate in economics, which discusses the European ratings, especially the so-called “Club Med” southern European countries in the context of declining economic productivity and increasing passive wealth through government entitlements and low taxes. Professor Phelps is the Director of The Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University. After you finish watching the video you might like to check our their Theory of Capitalism section to give you a broader context of our capitalist economic universe than you will get in our current political-financial media.

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Happy New Year! from Wonder Springs

31/December/2011 18:15

You can't do that!

03/December/2011 14:09
“You can’t do that!” was the phrase, in some context, my now former neighbor up on big Boulder Creek told me as we finished packing the 26 foot Penske truck for the move to Reardan early Wednesday afternoon.

When I was searching for some title for this brief update, the term that seemed most appropriate was — “You can’t do that!”

The move itself, with the truck leaving north Spokane after 9 AM Wednesday and completed in less than 12 hours, was a reality trip proving you can’t do that is many times wrong.

The senior citizen on this move was my late 60s aged Bannon cousin Jim, with a knee replacement, which he says is his good knee.

For me, a few years his junior, I have my porcine aortic valve and a piece of Dacron that ties it to the rest of my blood distribution system. As I was carrying one of the boxes into the house in Reardan, I got to thinking this is exactly not how my doctor told me to carry heavy objects with my left shoulder torn rotator cup.

A year younger than me, was another part of the moving crew, cousin Stan from the Miller side of the family. He had a slight stroke a few years ago after which they found an enlarged aorta also, which they are closely monitoring.

Then the youngster on the team, in his late 50s, was my neighbor Rick Sphuler, who once I moved to the big BC (Boulder Creek) determined we were in the University of Washington Medical Center Hospital at the same time; me for a heart valve and an artificial section of aorta, Rick for a bone marrow transplant. Rick and his wife Sandy, on Wednesday celebrated their thirty-eighth wedding anniversary, hence he only helped with the loading in Kettle Falls.

If you think that a bunch of old duffers can’t do that, you really can’t believe in a series of miracles, which will form the renewal basis to what the world’s scoffers attribute to the decline of historic American opportunities.

Uncle Sam maybe getting old, but he is far from dead, and as a virtual reality figure, is not subject to the natural decay of we mere mortals, who like to export our limitations on everything we cannot control within our limited spheres of personal understanding.

While we got the move accomplished in less that 12 hours, the new behemoth on the local communications front, Century Link, was supposed to have me set up with my new high-speed DSL internet link last Tuesday and hemmed and hawed until yesterday; they now say that it will happen this coming Wednesday.

Therein is the contrast that will change the way the United States and the world operates in the remainder of this century. The corporate dinosaurs, behemoths and leviathans will not be able to move rapidly enough to keep from becoming extinct in an economic world that more closely models natural law than the artificial environment we created during the Industrial Age and the Debt Supercycle.

As far as the new digs in Reardan, this century old house, needed a few new electrical outlets in the master bedroom, which required a new sub electrical panel and a significant rewiring of about a third of the house in total. This will require sheet rock and finishing of one bedroom wall before the move will really be moved in.

As a graduate school alumnus of Washington State University, about the only news I have kept up on in the last week is Wazzu has hired a new football coach, one-time national coach of the year Mike Leach, formerly of Texas Tech. I bring this up because the WSU athletic director Bill Moos, is from Edwall and played his high school football on a field a few blocks to the south of my new home, at Reardan High School. This historically rapid and expensive move in WSU athletics has been reported in the local press as akin to “You can’t do that!”

Now that I am situated in the Eastern Washington wheat belt, one of the conversations I had the other day brought up the potential reality that under the current practices and incentives in American agriculture, it maybe impossible to provide our citizens a truly healthful diet. If you couple that with the totally unsustainable nature of our current nationalized scheme of agribusiness incentives, we will need to refocus our whole concepts of “doings in the dirt;” the title of next week’s full column.

A whole future concept of how a nation goes about “doings in the dirt” will also give many people the economic opportunity to show the fallacy of “You can’t do that!”

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The Kauffman Foundation and The Startup ACT

08/September/2011 13:11
As a professionally trained environmental scientist-engineer and entrepreneur I have spent much of my life trying to develop environmentally sensitive technology companies in America and foreign markets, which work in what is generally considered natural resource development.

The Wonder Springs Chronicle’s parent company PREFER Ltd, is essentially a gold mining equipment supplier and refiner that emphasizes individual and small commercial operations, below the threshold considered to be profitable by large mining companies. This is a restart of a 1980s company I tried to get funded during the dot.com bubble’s formative years, to no avail. By now I think I have a pretty good idea what I want to do and how to make it work.

In that illumination, I understand quite well the need for entrepreneurship, as the Climax Entrepreneurs & Entrepreneurial Pioneer Areas post from yesterday illustrates.

This morning my inbox received an email from the Kauffman Foundation about their support for a program called The Startup Act. The two videos from the main page are embedded below.

I will have many things to say about these proposals, but I must make a brief comment about Section 4 of the Act that has to do with sunset laws. Not to mention the name of any specific state, but one up in the Northwest corner of the USA, I consider the “You can’t do that state,” The major reason to reject even excellent ideas is. . . — That mindset goes down to the county level!

Just as it is important to recognize entrepreneurship at the national level, that emphasis must go down to the local communities and that is one reason the Climax Entrepreneurship article focuses upon Entrepreneurial Pioneer Areas especially, a drastic need in rural areas of the nation.



Three Things Entrepreneur’s Do



The Startup Act Ilustrated

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