Excited Delirium

Stories about Excited Delirium, the Shock Economy and a little fiction here and there.

Daily Archives: November 4, 2008

A New ‘Platform’: Idealist.org

i signed up with idealist.org last week and will likely start using it a lot more in the coming weeks to promote a number of initiatives that I’m working on, as well as work with others to develop visibility for their products and/or services.

Idealist is a pretty comprehensive activist and social network.  The number of people using the site ranks in the tens of thousands and the range of activities include job searching, groups, blogging, organizations, opportunities for speakers and so on.  Communication is in three languages (English, French, Spanish) and I’ve signed up for their email alerts.

If you’re seeking to change the world, it might prove to be too massive a task, but if you’re hoping to affect change in just a few small ways, this might be the place for you.

It’s the Facebook for all of us, without the tracking (I hope) and without the restrictive use of personal information.  If you want to delete your record, it’s obvious how to do it once you’ve registered.

So become an idealist.  Enjoy the community!  I’ll post more stories about Idealist in the future as I integrate more with the community.

Free markets fail

Duncan Cameron of rabble.ca discusses in this article how the free market has, and continues to, fail us.

I copied the following:

… price setting is not politically neutral after all. The market does not abolish power relationships: it facilitates the accumulation of market power in fewer and fewer corporate hands. The accumulation of economic power leads straight to the concentration of political power and allows corporate executives to increase their take of what we all produce, while reducing the share anybody else gets.

Contrary to market dogma, governments do not fail, they are the main instrument for deciding who gets what, and corporations have invested continuously to achieve political power commensurate with private economic wealth.

It is still widely assumed that private investment in corporate stocks and bonds outperforms public investments in non-military government services. It is thought wiser for you to put your money in Coca-Cola than in public health insurance, not only because you might not get sick, and could well make a financial gains, but because the market rate of return always outshines iffy public investment spending on health, reduction of child poverty, recreation or the arts.

The reality is otherwise. In most of the world people do not have any funds to invest as individuals, while people have basic human needs for food, shelter and water that go unmet. Societies fare poorly when illiteracy is widespread, poor health prevails, and social inequalities are widespread. Despite the market works best rhetoric, allowing corporations to control investments in education, healthcare and other basic public services is expensive and inefficient compared to public investment and delivery of services, as comparisons of the two models (say Norway with the U.S.) shows.

Market rate of return is not up to measuring human well-being, and quality of life. As the world economic crisis deepens, rather than continuing to speculate about how to maximize rates of market return, financial market participants are now more concerned about the return of their funds: the money that was entrusted to the care of the market. The neoliberal world may never be the same.

The Night of the Shredders and Black Markers

Obama will win the US election.  I know he will.  I hope he will.

There’s still the outside chance that pre-programmed electronic voting will steal it from him, at which point, there will be a complete meltdown in the US.

However, I remain cautiously optimistic that his margin of lead is so broad that not even Rovian corruption can steal this election from the man who deserves it.

Of course, this means that as soon as the final outcome is decided (which I pray is tonight), the paper shredders, disc erasers, black markers and other paraphernelia used to hide and disguise the disgusting history of the Bush Administration will come out in full force.  Expect to see hundreds of Iron Mountain trucks hurtling around Washington and area as files are packed, shipped and locked away until the GOP can secure more reliable candidates for the next election.

In January, when Barack Obama and his team takes over, they’ll find little in the way of any tangible records and information and this will be a good thing.  The cleaner they can be coming in, the cleaner the operation will be in the long run.  The Bush gang will not hang for their crimes, but making anything stick to Obama will be very, very tricky (and I’m sure they’ll all try to find a way).

What an exciting day in history.  Things are about to change and I really (possibly naively) believe that the change will be positive.