Tomorrow, Truthout will debut my new column: “Solutions: Making Government Work.” This weekly column will be a platform for myself and others with inside experience to seek solutions to ineffectiveness, waste and ingrained problems within the federal government.
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I will continue to investigate fraud in the government where I see it, but after so many years of exposes, I wanted to try to move reform in a different way by trying to find solutions to the government problems once they are exposed. Our current government has immense problems that will require big institutional changes and solutions.
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I believe that it is crucial for the next generation to try to make the government effective and find ways to make it work, or the suffering and cynicism will just continue to grow and plague our national debate and the future success of our country.
Charles Ferguson's new movie, Inside Job, is a fast-moving and fascinating account of the process and the people who wrecked the economy with their blind ambition and unfettered greed. The timing could not have been better, coming amidst the Wall Street establishment's celebration of the second anniversary of the TARP.
Kevin Rollins is the founder and publisher of Free Liberal, executive vice president of InnoSci Technologies, Inc., managing editor of Econ Journal Watch, and an adjunct fellow with New Mexico’s Rio Grande Foundation. He holds a master’s in Economics from George Mason University.
It's often said that America's an uncompetitive economy–unable to produce stuff that satisfies global demand. Hence, a yawning current account deficit.
I'd say the reality's harsher. America's caught in a toxic, self-destructive relationship with the globe's second most significant economy. In short, it's making the worst trade in the world.
Welcome to the worst decade since the Great Depression. Trillions of dollars of financial assets and shareholder value destroyed; worldwide GDP stalled; new jobs vanishingly scarce. But this isn’t just a severe recession. It’s evidence that our economic institutions are obsolete—a set of ideas inherited from the industrial age that no longer work for business, people, society, or the future.
In The New Capitalist Manifesto, economic strategist Umair Haque argues that business as usual has outgrown the old paradigm of short-term growth, competition at all costs, adversarial strategy, and pushing costs onto future generations. These outworn assumptions are good for creating only “thin” value—gains that are largely illusory and produce diminishing returns every year.
For “thick” value—enduring, meaningful, sustainable advantage that deeply benefits the larger society—Haque details five new cornerstones of prosperity in the twenty-first century:
•Loss advantage: From value chains to value cycles
•Responsiveness: From value propositions to value conversations
•Resilience: From strategy to philosophy
•Creativity: From protecting a marketplace to completing a marketplace
•Difference: From goods to betters
The New Capitalist Manifesto makes a passionate, razor-sharp economic case that these methods will produce a more enduring prosperity for business as well as society.
About the Author
Umair Haque is the Director of the London-based Havas Media Lab and heads Bubblegeneration, a strategy lab that helps discover strategic innovation. He studies the economics of the future: the impact that new technologies, management innovations, and shifting consumer preferences will exert tomorrow on the industries and markets of today.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a website, an effort to further a movement that has not been successful to date, and a very intelligent article by a very experienced agitator for change (and former Army Ranger who has also been homeless on multiple occasions, each time rising like a Phoenix).
Now that its clear to all the “political system is broken”, please be discerning about the expert “solutions” you hear being put forth. Knowing what I know about the “game controllers” — having been a junior league game controller myself — bipartisanship (with a third party “outsider coalition” similar to the British system) will be the professional solution offered to our current crisis. Already you see nostaligc images of the truce between Gingrich and Clinton and other “party fathers” who were adult enough to “put aside their differences.”
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Phi Beta Iota: This is worth a look because it is backed by a co-founder of Facebook who has also been an advisor to President Barack Obama on social networking; because it is a variant rip-off of WISER Earth: The Social Network for Sustainability; and because it represents the beginning of the World Brain & Global Game in which all individuals are connected to all information in all languages all the time. It lacks a strategic analytic model and a “true cost” and policy-budget engagement tool, but it is a milestone in some ways, largely because of WHO is behind it. When combined with the Google purchase of GroupOn for six billion dollars (which Google will screw up big-time, but that gives Eric Lefkofsky, a Chicago-based social networking entrepreneur, more money to experiment with–that is a good thing. This is BIG PICTURE stuff that will scale rapidly.
