I see there's been some focus on Ron Paul here, recently. And on a few other candidates. I'd like to offer a different type of analysis of the candidates than looking at the individuals, themselves. I looked down through here and didn't see this topic, but I'm somewhat new, so I apologize if it's already been brought up.

These days, the presidency is more like a top level CEO and a team running a corporation, and in many ways the president is just an icon, a public figure representing to the public some sanitized version of what a team creates the office to be. So looking at the individual becomes more of a symbolic analysis than a character analysis. Another important layer is the individual's choice of advisers in the election process, because it's those advisers who help to shape the thoughts presented, and more, they tend to be the cabinet the president relies on during time in office.

While this sometimes mindless-seeming horse race for the figureheads of the elites we are going to get to vote for in November makes the headlines, and while we faun daily over their not so very significant differences, trumpeted as "disagreements" in order to give those headlines something "gripping" to display, thereby setting up the next spell binding lap around the track in the next state, a recent Democracy Now! segment focused on a different kind of analysis, and one which could tell us much more about the character of the administration itself -- the "presidency" not the president -- we are choosing on election day. This said it well:



The segment looked at all the candidates' advisers, and I recommend looking at it, and reading this article by one of the participants in the discussion, Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, a freelance journalist in Washington. Her article on presidential advisers titled, “War Whisperers: The 2008 Hopefuls Promised a Change in Foreign Policy Then Hired the Old Guard,” appeared in the American Conservative.

But to start with, I just want to focus on one candidate and one adviser to give an illustration of why the advisers are an important area to pay attention to when selecting a president.

Obama is being trumpeted as someone focusing on change, contrasting in the media with Hillary, who is doing in this Democracy Now! analysis the throwback routine to her husband's administration.

But one of Obama's advisers is President Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Look carefully there! Especially if you want to ask what is meant by "change."

Brzezinski, a geostrategic "realist," author of US globalist strategy books like: The Grand Chessboard, is one of the fundamental intellectual parents of the current Middle East policy, which was essentially formulated at the end of the Carter Administration, when he managed to convince Carter that oil in the Middle East was more strategically important than focusing on a home grown program to begin serious efforts to develop renewable, self sufficient energy sources. In 1999, Carter was talking about a fundamental change in government initiated energy R&D, a year later he changed course and US policy focused on stabilizing the Middle East, where the primary energy resources of the world were seen to be located. Brzezinski is credited with influencing that "change."

The Soviets had designs on the Middle East, Brzezinski knew that, and I'm sure Carter was well aware of those long term foreign interests as well, though he was perhaps not as sophisticated in his understanding as his advisers. He found himself in a terrible position in 1979, and he as the president had to make a choice. He made the one he made, and he did so while listening to a man for whom he had proclaimed himself an "avid student" when he appointed him his National Security Adviser. I would try to argue that his decisions took us down the road we are on now, even to the extent of setting up the Reagan Administration's turn away from a primary CIA focus towards "democracy promotion" with the advent of the National Endowment for Democracy in 1983, a very Brzezinski-ish conception based on his love of the Trilateral Commission that was set up in 1973. Much of that strategizing is reflected in his book, The Grand Chessboard. And if you look at the foreign policy progression from then to now, the moves to make those free trade agreements Clinton was involved in, NAFTA, GATT, fit a long term globalizing pattern, and the pattern has a stamp on it that includes Carter's adviser Brzezinski.

So, perhaps a thread for each candidate, looking at their current advisers and therefore the potential character of their administration? A way of looking at candidates that we won't see much of in the evening television summaries over the next few months, or in the newspaper headlines?

So, as an introvert, I understand your meaning, but without some kind of a suggestion as to why, and who you support, we're left with the assumption that you're one who likes to make accusatory statements without providing an opinion...

That's all well and good, yet I know most of us are thirsting for your views...

from this post, you don't trust Obama, and in your introductory thread, you told us that Paul scares the hell out of you,
but that leaves a lot of open territory...

Who's the best person for the job?

I agree totally, Ren, that the candidates "shadow players" need exposure.
I usually start with the PNAC and work back.
So that's almost all the Republicans flushed down the pan of fascism-4-us, despite the baby kissing and beaming white smiles.
Dr Ron slips through the net, and it remains a mystery to me why the PNAC never bothered with him, but I think his anti-zionist stance maybe gave them ulcers (good !!)

As for the Dems, apart from Kucinich, I don't see a lot of useful people there, but compared to the Republicans, their Foreign Policy advisors are all bridge-building geniuses !

Obama could choose a lot worse than Zbigniew. I would rather him than a John Bolten or Paul Wolfowitz any day, despite the attempts some make to link him with the neocons.
Then again, the CSIS, Freedom House, all the Bilderberg stuff, it's all pretty incestuous.
What do YOU propose to wean us off this relience on career diplomats and FP advisors who may or may not be in thrall to corporate paymasters, or worse ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zbigniew_Brzezinski

It is a good thing to look at.

Who are they choosing, mentioning, or hinting at would be in their admin?

I have heard that Ghouliani would ask Cheney to come back. Not a good move on his part.

Interesting and welcome perspective Ren. I just leaped out that box I keep falling back into ! Thank you.

I'd be very interested to hear your answer to this question:


And this one:

Highstreet said "I have heard that Ghouliani would ask Cheney to come back. Not a good move on his part."

Haven't you heard of " The Night of the Living Dead" ?

Seriously, that would win Gui9/11ani at least one more vote, from the last supporter of Cheney in America, because lets face it, it's a physical impossibility that people can be so pig-shit stupid, ignorant and trimming-the-sails-on-the-Iranian-speedboat dumb to still think that Darth Cheneycon represents any sort of articulate and intelligent future for America, unless it's spelt "Aaaaarrrrggghhll !!!"

As for the Ghoul, he's already attached the dead-weight of Ponderousfukwitz to his rapidly sinking, stinking, asbestos-lined neocon pResidential rowboat campaign. Maybe Cheney could serve as the oar ? Or his pace-maker (curse modern medical science !!!!!) as an outboard. He could wire it into William Kristol's lips and the rapid and vacuous flapping could propel this neo-Gang of Four swiftly to the bottom, or beyond........

I'm not sure what being an introvert has to do with it, hasn't that more to do with different types of parties?

Are you saying you can't simply analyze the different candidates without knowing my opinion first? Aren't we trying to find out who to vote for by watching these folks and looking into what they have to say, and from that try to figure out what kind of chief executive we are going to elect? Or is it really just a horse race, you pick your favorite at the beginning and watch, have conversations with others in the stands as the races run, arguing with each other about why yours is best?

I'm suggesting a method of analysis for seeing other dimensions of a future presidency. How many folks really understood what a Neoconservative political philosophy was about in 2000?

Personally, I in general don't trust any of my future employees without a careful examination of their backgrounds. It's too difficult to get rid of them if they turn out to be psychopaths.

I approach it similarly Rouseau. Although I see a broader spectrum of geostrategic theorists than just the PNAC when I look at the Republicans. Giovani, for instance, is setting himself up to be Bush on steroids with a heavily weighted PNAC oriented staff. Bush himself had a mixture to begin with, but after 911 the realists were shoved aside -- Powell, for instance. Condi also tends to be a realist, and one looks with hope towards her tendencies to bring about something saner in US interaction with the players in the region, but she does end up carrying out the "company" program for the most part, and I look to Cheney as the brains coordinating the program, not Bush. Cheney has been the focus of the UET strategy, for instance, his staff probably prepares all the signing statements for Bush.

Brzezinski is a realist, and he is much more comfortable with the folks from the HWBush administration than with GW's swing towards the Neoconservatives after 911l Gates is a realist, and we can see that the slant on how to deal with Iraq after the last election had some changes as a result of his influence, but it's difficult for one person to steer a giant ship of state onto another course alone. Large ships turn slowly.

I have a lot of layers I back through looking at these players, and for me, the most dangerous of the political theorists tend to be the Neoconservative idealists. Their philosophy tends towards making the world like them, by whatever means possible to do that. And they have been fighting for the preservation of the US military industrial complex -- with modernization of course -- since the end of the cold war. In that sense I don't see great differences between them and the extremists they like to label evil, or with names like "Islamofascist." To me it's kind of like they are looking in one of those "fun house" mirrors. Realists, on the other hand, are willing to tolerate a lot more cultural differences, so they will tend towards diplomacy and negotiations. That's why Brzezinski has stood against this Iraq debacle created by the Neocons, as I see it.

Hi, Karen,

My proposal would be to look closely at our Constitution and ask if it serves us anymore. Is it an antique design and perhaps not capable of providing us with a democratic governing institution? Can it be modified or maybe we need a whole new format?

First, any presidential system is by nature the more dangerous of the democracy governing choices. I think what we are seeing now, with this movement towards a unitary executive on steroids, thanks to the ability of the president to unify things under the guise of protecting the nation from a national threat is only one example of why that's so. My thinking about it is we have grown too large and complex as a nation from those rudimentary 13 colonies to trust the current tripartite balance of powers to work at the federal level. I think we need to look at that possibility. I feel strongly that we are in the midst of a constitutional crisis.

I think at the very least we should attempt to fix some of the most undemocratic features of our electoral system. We desperately need something along the lines of instant runoff voting in order to get out from under the claustrophobic trap of this duopoly we seem stuck with, where a small group of elites are carefully groomed and we only really have a small set of choices for our once in four year's chance to cast that vote. Options that appeal to people in ways that don't make it into the corporate media are simply not even conceivable. People won't even think about voting for who they might really want when the choice is between a follow up to Bush and something that seems like a hopeful, yet possible alternative. Kucinich, we are told, is not even a remote possibility, and the propaganda about that is reinforced by our own awareness that we have only one chance to vote.

The propaganda machine is immensely powerful because the very structure of our system itself is integral in design with the way propaganda works. Propaganda coevolved simultaneously with the structure of the governmental system that's come together over some 200 plus years. Propaganda will always be employed by those who want power. I think that's a given. To counteract it involves having in place a structure of options that offers some variety in our political menu. Right now it's mostly corporate pork no matter how we get through the maze to the feeding station where the President is chosen. Our options now are somewhat like the options of a rat in a maze. It's almost pre-determined.

I don't see us as "relying" on career diplomats, they are simply a necessary part of the structure of the government in order to have continuity through elections. I also think we have some fundamental flaws in how we see what we call "our leaders." Technically our leaders are our employees. I see this Orwellian design in a system where the public servants somehow become "leaders." I would also see that a big part of that design is built into our very culture through institutions, from kindergarten on, that teach us by the very basis of our involvement in the forms of these institutions, all of which have a coordinated purpose, to accept authority without much question, since questions by the nature of the structure is nearly impossible, often because the focus is on the mechanisms of efficiency and questioning is inhibiting to efficiency. Democracy itself can be inhibiting to efficiency, but that depends on the definition of democracy. Most of our democracies these days, in the core nations where globalization's rewards are greatest, are polyarchic -- ie, rule by the elite who are selected through elections from a pool of elites.

The other question:



As I said earlier, I don't trust any of them, and my interest is finding out as much as I can about them.

I'm still looking.

I think it's important to remember that these people are brought in to offer their knowledge and expertise. We have lived long enogh with "advisers" like Karl Rove, advisers that wield that kind of clout are the exception, not the rule.


And a smart person surrounds himself with differing viewpoints that themselves, and choose to listen or not.

Heck, were I were supreme ruler of the universe, I would want people who were going to have a different angle than me.

on second reading, my post may have come off harshly, but that wasn't the intention... sorry about my word choice.

The introvert comment was basically a way of saying "I doubt you'll answer my question because you said previously that you don't like talking about yourself."

and, to answer your question, "Are you saying you can't simply analyze the different candidates without knowing my opinion first?" No, I'm just curious about you, the same way you're curious about the candidates.
i do appreciate your topic, and i believe that their future staffers deserve consideration, but I also believe that candidates name prospective cabinet members to anthropomorphisize portions of thier stump speeches. In other words, they only name those that will aid their agenda... They tend to leave the questionable ones until after elections, so by looking at what they say now may not be a very accurate assesment.

Well said, Seuss.

I'm not sure if I liked the old avatar of Rudeboy better, though, because that new one dun' scart me......

Thanks for your input Ren,

Speaking as an outsider I think I can safely say that the Constitution of the USA is a fine document - would that we had something similar here in the UK! -but I agre that it could use some modernising and, I dare say, democratising! I think a constitutional convention is due, but how delegates to such a convention would be chosen may well prove tricky, particularly if the States decide that the choice will be ultimately made by the electoral collage - one of the things hat a constitutional convention would have to address!

I once asked, during a discussion in this forum, why t was that the framers of the constitution had foreseen a multi-party (or candidacy) system, yet America had wound up with a two party system. I was referred to the election of, if I remember correctly, 1836. I looked that election up at the time, and couldn't see the connection. By the time I had a chance to bring my questions up, the boards were full of something new. I'm not sure how relevant it is now though... America seems stuck with it's two party system, and that is a problem which needs addressing.

The propaganda machine, in fact the whole of the information and entertainment industries, seems to becoming more and more an instrument of the state, or maybe I'm just nieve in thinking it was ever different. The way I see it, the only way for free thinking individuals to avoid this machine and try to overcome its influence on the wider population is to take to the streets, universities, collages, parks, etc... to protest, and leaflet, and get on soap-boxes and rant, and pamphlet. Oh, and blog! In short, to use what ever means necessary to inform the population of the truth. Trouble is, that sort of behaviour may well lead to disappearances these days!

While I understand and appreciate that you have not yet decided on a candidate, nor will you until you are on possession of as much information as possible, I've already set my mind, and my heart on Kucinich (the rest don't even come close). I find it incredibly sad that not only have the corporate media shunned him, but also he is perceived as having no hope even by his supporters.

It's a toss up... i can't tell if I like it more because it reminds me of "invasion of the body snatchers", or because it implies that she is either afraid of or angry at... YOU!

Hi, Karen,

thanks for your lengthy and informative response. It will take me awhile to get to know the folks here and responses like yours are a gift in that direction for me.

I would be more than happy to go into the problems I perceive with the US Constitution, but perhaps that might be better on another thread, with that as the focus. I actually think the Parliamentary system that's come about for Iraq (however questionably it came about) has features that would do well here in the US. I especially like the regional governancy feature, which only the Kurds have tried to use so far. The US is huge, and we have major regions of biodiversity, just for example, that could do better if they were locally governed and regulated. Having a monolithic bureaucracy at the direction of an executive branch, organized as a cabal or otherwise, creates what I consider to be an unhealthy hierarchy, which can be altogether too heavily influenced by the executive branch and appointed heads of departments. Much of the unitary executive theory that's coming strongly into play since introduced in the Reagan Administration, especially with this presidency, has to do with unifying the bureaucracy under a CEO like president, and removing Congressional oversight. Those are the very mechanisms of the Constitutional checks and balances. And this is being done as an utterly legal maneuver, which needs more oversight itself. Many of this president's signing statements on these past two Congress's bills are designed to put the president's stamp on the legislation to that effect, and instruct the bureaucracy to ignore certain reporting elements built into the legislation designed to retain Congressional oversight.



This too is fairly complex, and systemic in my view. These trends combining industry, propaganda and the state are co-evolving. As corporate influence grows through various avenues, K-street in making the laws, the purchasing of the presidency, in effect, and the ownership of the press, hierarchical structures get set up so that the professionals in management have more and more say over who gets jobs and who keeps jobs.

As Stan Goff once said in a talk:



Seeing that you are from Great Britain, I wonder if you've seen the wonderful BBC documentary, Century of the Self? I have a copy of it in four parts at my vodpod. Incredibly revealing history of the evolution of marketing over the last Century, and how influential Freud's theories were in that process. Eddie Bernays, his nephew, is a marketing major figure, who only just died in the nineties, and he's featured heavily in the documentary. I find that it is no longer available here in the US, for reasons left only to our imagination, as far as I can tell. Just as another powerful documentary by the BBC, The Power of Nightmares, about the Neoconservatives is not available.




It's worse than sad to me. It's about the power of the system itself and how it can control who we vote for. Instant runoff would be one way those who really like Kucinich (that includes me) can more easily stand up to confront the programming that pressures them to look for the ultimate winableness of a candidate over the qualities they may value in other candidates. I think those factors have a lot to do with what people will even bother to listen to. There's a subconscious factor we all learn that begins a screening process, looking at priorities of what we imagine to be publicly acceptable, and that acceptableness itself is fed to us through the media in a daily programming process.

Great response, good topic.
"Century of the self" is a most disturbing peek under the veneer...

No problem Ren. It can be hard to get to know the characters when you join a new forum, but I think you'll find many like-minds here, and enough who'll disagree and question you to make things interesting.


These are topics which crop up (unsurprisingly) in here from time to time. On the face of it your opinions are pretty much the same as many of us here. Your views on possible solutions tothese problems will make very interesting reading, I've no doubt!




Nice quote!



I haven't seen 'Century of the Self' yet - I stopped watching TV entirely last May or June, before then I gave it a very wide birth! - so thank you for the link. Hope you don't mind that I've bookmarked it?
I think it was either Seuss or Rousseau who posted links to 'The Power of Nightmares' for me last year. I still have them archived (assuming they're still working) I'd be happy to pass them on if you want to add them to your collection?



I like your thinking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

Glad to have you aboard.

Thanks for the kind offer, I have The Power of Nightmares, a high quality version that can be projected on a big screen, and I've been sharing it with anyone interested.

I'm famous on the Hartmann board for having thrown a baseball bat through my television set. I never enjoyed television, can't stand the commercial interruptions to start with, even as a kid, but I haven't had a television most of my adult life. I'm enjoying access to things like these documentaries on the internet. Oh, and I do like movies, but I don't go to a theater much anymore. I have a projector that plugs into my laptop as a second monitor and I play movies on a screen from that.

I don't follow the line of thinking that having similar ideas means people just sit around and nod to each other in agreement. I feel there's much about ideas that can be explored no matter how much agreement may appear on the surface.

Let me take another stab at keeping this going.

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos wrote the article referenced in the lead post, and appeared on Democracy Now! In her article she takes a brief look at the advisers of all the major candidates. I'd like to start with Hillary's.

I'll start with this general quote summarizing the Democrat's bevy of advisers:




So, is that true? Any conceivable Democratic White House... It's been drummed into us that Kucinich is not conceivable, so I guess we get to scratch that one.

Let's look at the one's she correlates with Hillary:



And how about this paragraph for members of a board called "Project for an Old American Century"?



There's more in the article, but I'll stop there for now.

I don't know what the board's general approach to the subject of American Imperialism has been, but I find much in this talk of candidates' advisers related to concepts that have arisen in the past 27 years correlated with what some critics, like Chalmers Johnson, are now seeing as American Imperialism, one concept in particular, "democracy promotion" which is a nexus for a web of related issues, including globalization agreements for transnational corporations and all that goes with those. Neoconservatives -- a focus apparently of this board -- are only one breed of geostrategic globalizer. Their methods have proven to be clumsy and crude given the results in the Middle East since 911. But other methods have been in the works as well before them, and those may very well have set the scene that became 911.

Is a foreign policy based on this Wilsonian notion of "democracy promotion" the direction the US should be going in the 21st Century? I think that's a question related to each of these candidates, and one way of looking at how they might answer, if asked, is to look at their advisers.

I think the most important source is not the advisors if we want to really get an idea of where foreign policy is headed, but who bankrolls the politicians, and who bankrolls the "think-tanks" and who decides who staffs them.
Most of the career advisors on FP are professional diplomats, former military and ex-heads of state. They may have agendas, indeed, almost surely do, but whether those agendas are neccissarily a bad thing or not is a vast subject.

I believe that the fiasco in Somalia was simply down to the persistant inability of the US military/industrial complex and the gung-ho propagandising of virtually all the US politicians that US military power is supreme and the UN is a hopeless and corrupt agency which is incapable of acting dynamically, and therefore should let America go her own sweet way. This does not work. The proof is in every single conflict where the might of one nation goes surging ahead of International consensus. It does not work. Point final.
Joint operations, clear goals, international support, no crypto-agendas and genuine, honest Humanitarian and global causes.

I agree whole-heartedly that the UN needs re-organising, that a cleaner, leaner, faster, better, more Security Council and associated structures needs to come out of the current monolith, but as long as there are vested interests pushing to discredit the UN and promote their own agendas, that'll never happen.
Focus on these people first, the advisors are just the tentacles, if you want to kill the Kraken, go for the brain and the eyes. That is, if you want to destroy it. Maybe it would be better to try to tame or capture it, if it REALLY is impossible to let it go free....

There has been screeds and screeds written by insiders from the belly of the Mil/Ind beast, all of them with clear ideas on how America should approach FP, and nearly all have been ignored. The neocons just had the balls and cunning to go top-down in their approach, instead of being polite and trying to do things the right way.
Who sponsored them should be the crucial issue, and how many of these people are still implicitly involved, and how much cross-over is there ? And I think we all have a pretty good idea......

Between Iraq and a hard place.
So, what are the alternatives ?

It's a revolving door of elites, I agree. But when I connect the dots, I see a system, and I don't exclude the advisers from the bankrollers. I feel the communication is intricate to the whole system moving along. A system that's become quite well developed to be self sustaining.

I just want to see that as clearly as possible. It amazes me no end to find resistance to that. And I do.

I really don't see much value in arguing about the good or bad of it. My interest is in understanding it, how it works, and trying to see if I have any options for myself at all within that. I figure if I can see them for myself, then others can, if they want.

I consider it very probable that we have very real issues of collapse facing us. Don't know if you are familiar with Joseph Tainter's work on collapse, but it finds its ways into most bibliographies of any of the books that come out on the subject.

The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter

Here's an accessible essay that condenses a few of the main points from the book:

COMPLEXITY, PROBLEM SOLVING, AND SUSTAINABLE SOCIETIES by Joseph A. Tainter, 1996

The reason I bring that up is not as a tactic to create fright, but because I believe at a certain point we can face the system we are in, itself, and perhaps find choices of some sort to lead us in a direction to prepare ourselves, and these choices themselves accumulate and can lead to fundamental societal changes. One possibility is the creation of interconnected but semi independent "rhizome like" communities within the broader matrix that is, now, a globally interlaced and monolithic economic system that is, in effect, a complex society, but upon which we all find ourselves dangerously dependent, should collapse take place. But by it's very nature of being what I would correlate to an r-selected "species" of culture, it's one that, like in ecological systems, has inherent features that make it subject to dramatic imbalance. That's a whole 'nother subject. I'm just suggesting why I want to look at and understand as much of how this all works as I can.



I certainly can't disagree with your assessment. As far as the UN issue, I'd like to suggest one point I've found to be worthy of consideration with the Political Realist's Theory:



Everyone complains about the UN, but the real problem is we have no overarching, enforceable legal world government system, we now rely on the "good will" of the nation states to work for the good of all.

No nation wants a world government that's not theirs.

I think those are a couple of givens that make the UN almost unworkable as it stands. Can it be organized in a way that will give it the powers that are missing to take the anarchy aspect out of the world? Just ask that and imagine why a Neoconservative who believes the US has the military might and the ideological right to dominate the world was appointed and sent to the UN.






I'm not sure all of them have been ignored. I suspect many are part of the different ideas that have been invoked, by the intellectual experts who happened to be in the right place at the right time to influence someone, such as my example of Brzezinski, and when they are a little less involved they write books.

I think essentially they are all working with the same system, they just have slightly different slants and tweaks. Certainly I can appreciate the Realist approach that tends more towards diplomacy than war. But they are very much proponents of an economic globalization process, combined with democratization, and it makes sense in their logic because the Democratic Peace people have put forth reams of evidence to show that democracies don't make war on each other, and there is the underlying theme that trading nations find ways to interact more peacefully, so a global economy will lead to a world of trading nations. Of course, the Democracies work best if they are polyarchic, and run by an elite, essentially the monied elite, which means the corporate elite, not people's democracies such as those like the much feared Caesar Chavez.

The board indicated an error but it turns out it had posted, so when I backed it up and reposted this is what was an unnecessary double post.

yeah, well, the repube hackers try this play every fundraiser, and everytime, we have to deal with the lag... it seems POAC is going to have to deal with a whole bunch of new hacking angles, since he's updated and changed things for better service... please bear with us. If you have expertise on this kind of thing, news and advice would be helpful.

if I'm wrong, POAC will tell us as much...

That was an very interesting reply. Is Tainter still alive, because he sounds pretty doomed, if you know what I mean. I'm not so sure that I agree with his conclusions about the causes of the decline of the Roman Empire, but I'm going to go back and read some of his writing.

You're right that energy, and abundent and cheap sources of it are the lifeblood of any Civilisation.
I'm getting quite good calorific value out of recycling neocons as compost. They were full of shit anyway...and there's still plenty left under rocks.

I'm in the heart of Europe, and I'm watching the peaceful and prosperous growth with a lot of interest, especially considering that less than 80 years ago we were busy tearing each other apart with unbridled hate. True, we do have some common background, but still...
The more I've voyaged, the more I realise that we are all the same, and all have the same basic needs, complexity or not. I don't have any solutions to the clique that installs themselves in power, and so I go for total transparency of all political organisations to ensure that the voter has the maximum of information to ensure that their choice is the one which is best for them and for their circle. It's all we can do. Information, education, raising awareness and proposing solutions. The problem comes when the valuable info is buried under an avalanche of spinning waffle.

That's also assuming that voters are able to understand the issues. Scott Adams had some very sharp comment on voters and politics early on on his blog, now transformed into a book, and I think he hit the nail on the head with his comments, bitter pill that they were.
You guys, Antifascist and you, are obviously well educated and literate, with a certain amount of time to be able to investigate and understand how things work, and that's a rare and precious thing in these Interesting Times. It's also a gift.
The problem is taking complex problems and explaining them simply, and most importantly, the overview.

There's a lot of truth in the saying "Can't see the forest for the tree's...."


BTW, the board's a bit funny tonight, possibly the NSA plugging in their remote spy-drones. Hi boys.

Thanks for the explanation, Seuss, I don't have any recommendations. I am an administrator on a small, fairly private board, and we don't have those issues, so I've never looked into them. I suspect they go deeper than the control access I would have to the software anyway. Probably something going on at the server level.

Joseph Tainter is still very much alive. Here's a bit about him from Wiki.

We have parallel interests and so I find his ideas particularly interesting to my own efforts to work out some sense of the world.



That makes a lot of sense to me, and in looking at that, I can get past a lot of conspiracy theorizing and "look" at the abstract dynamics involved.

What he said about the Roman Empire in that article is a tiny microcosm of his explanation in his book:



The article I linked is only a taste of that. But when I saw his margins of return graph in that article, I immediately visualized several other graphs.

Tainter's graph:



r-selected species graph:



r-selected species growth curve compared to K-selected species, note that r-selected species tend to crash, think of the lemmings as an example. K-selected tend to be stable over a long term. Humans as a species have K-selected characteristics, but with human cultural capabilities, can change their adaption strategies. Infinite growth economy based cultures are an example. Complexity in those cultures tends to be a result of problem solving based on keeping the infinite growth process going:




Peak Oil margin of returns graph:





Human population over time, with the "r-selected" cultural change coinciding with technological innovations to account for cheap, abundant, but non renewable energy:








Just something to think about in terms of Tainter's Complexity discussion.

Notice that the extreme exponential growth of the human population coincides with the extraction and technological employment of non renewable energy resources.

In terms of these advisers I'm suggesting we look at, and our current crop of presidential candidates, the only candidate I am aware of willing to look at these factors and bring them to the public's mind is Kucinich. The others are undoubtedly aware that to discuss economy without the magic word "growth" is a death sentence to their candidacy.