#JeSuisCharlie

#JeSuisCharlie, for Anna, 01.11.15

With deepest respect for the writers and artists at Charlie Hebdo, we see the world as you did. DECcommunications and the #iThinkOutsideMyBox™ project were founded on the concept of freedom of expression and will continue #EngagingThePublicInPublicArt℠ so long as we remain alive on this planet to do so. Long live Charlie Hebdo!

'Inequality For All': Another Inconvenient Truth

This documentary made my viewing list this week and it brought to mind the reality that as the middle class shrinks, advertisers will have fewer people to advertise to. 

Last year I made a presentation to America's largest advertising agency and my charge was to wake up their top creative staff - people in the top 2% income bracket - and it was amazing how hard they didn't have to work to not hear a single thing I said regarding America's income gap - and how it might affect them, negatively,  if they didn't tune in to it.

The film, "Inequality For All", a sort of economic "Inconvenient Truth" features economist Robert Reich in a fascinating expose on how America's extreme income inequality is bad for everyone. The key graph from the film (above) shows how income inequality in 2007-2012 nearly matches that of the US before the great depression and explains how America ranks worst among developed countries in economic fairness - even worse that Iran and Nigeria, countries much less developed...(continued here.)

America 2013: a State of Denial

As we enter our second week of the "Government Shutdown" we come to realize that the government hasn't really shut down at all - just the fun parts like the National Park Service and all the museums. But the mail still comes, police are on the street, prisoners still locked up and the military has been assured that their paychecks won't stop - not to mention that all the legislators who voted for the shutdown, or didn't, are still getting their cheques as well. 

So it doesn't matter. The sky is not falling, but even assured that the sky will stay where it is, there is disconcerting evidence that our underpinnings are eroding - that creating the world's largest prison population through the War on Drugs and creating a permanent underclass of people who live below the poverty line through unemployment and insufficient job creation will eventually come to threaten the backbone of our country. And the average American is just blithely unaware of any of this at all - living in a State that is in a State of Denial.

The New Jim Crow - Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

This book, by Michelle Alexander, Stanford Professor and Civil Rights lawyer, has become a national best seller by illuminating the fact that since 1980 and the start of the War on Drugs, that the US prison population has grown from roughly 300,000 to over 2.3 million (the highest in the world) and that over 80% of the prisoners are black or Latino - not to mention that there has never really been a 'drug problem' in the United States (Crack didn't even show up until 1985 and most of the prisoners are in for minor marijuana violations).

But the fact that most of the prisoners are black cannot be overlooked. As simple as it might be for the police to be busting down the doors of frat houses at universities across the country looking for joints, that's not what's happening. Instead the police focus on low income areas with more poorly educated residents because it's just plain easier to not only arrest, but to convict them. And once convicted, mostly of drug felonies, they lose their chance of ever becoming functioning, taxpaying, members of society - and so end up adding to our national economic woes. And did you know that prisoners are not counted in our numbers of unemployed? And that once released, stay unemployed because felons are certain pariah for any worthwhile employment.

And so we, as a country, have chosen not just to incarcerate our poorest, least educated members, but to screw them for life by never giving them the shot that Barack Obama or Oprah Winfrey got. That's not going to work out well for us.

Give us your poor, your tired your hungry - or we'll just make them ourselves

What's the poverty rate in America? How many are there? What's the poverty threshold? And what is one supposed to do once they reach a 'threshold'? According to the US Census Bureau, nearly 50 million Americans can be considered as living below the poverty line - and 20% of our entire population are children living below that line. How might we think that's going to grow into the future? When the total poor population of any developed country reaches the size of more than Spain or Argentina that just can't be a good idea. Statistically, the Chinese have fewer people below their poverty line than we do. And the average American thinks the Chinese are poor.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg here in New York thinks that just adding more rich people to the mix would solve it - so that they can pay the taxes that support everyone else. "If we can find a bunch of billionaires around the world to move here, that would be a godsend, because that’s where the revenue comes to take care of everybody else.", he says. But that seems just totally bass-ackwards, because the way people get rich is by selling things to the middle classes - so the more you grow the poor side of the equation the less market there is for reasonable profit margins from the people who are making a decent buck.

Why not grow the middle class by growing it out of the less fortunate class? Why not graduate the poor to the middle by providing a path of growth based on acquiring knowledge, experience and providing value to society? Maybe Mr. never President Bloomberg can answer that question for me - because I'm not a billionaire - just an aspiring social architect.

But economically, it makes sense. For every commercial dollar you put back into the hands of a socially dependent citizen, that's less you have to spend on taking care of them, and the more that they put back into the commercial spectrum by buying a bag of chips, a bus ticket, whatever. The money our government puts into the food-stamp program doesn't help anyone economically. It's just an expense - whereas, should that dollar go directly to that person, they're going to spend it in a way that benefits a few other citizens.  

Take your percentage, rich people, but don't take so much. The disparity between rich and poor in this country is the issue - not that we don't have enough money so we have to shut the good parts of the government down. We just manage our finances poorly. That's the issue - our State of Denial.

So where does the money come from to realign our society?

Chart please:

World military spending in billions

But wait a minute. China has five times the number of people to protect as we do. So why are they not near as preoccupied by war as we? Maybe it's because they're not pissing off nearly the number of people we are globally. And maybe because one of China's major sources of income is us - both in commercial products made in China and sold in the US and in debt. For all the money the US borrows every time we raise the "debt ceiling", the majority of it comes from China. But that's not really the story here. The story is that for all our military spending, for having not only the highest incarceration rate (and wildly higher per-capita) in the world and for having the developed world's nearly worst child poverty rate - that we are grossly fucking up our future.

World child poverty rates by country

And barely a small fraction of America knows these things. A collective State of Denial that allows the rest of them to make the monthly payments on the Chevy, keep the cable and maybe repaint the house next year. But the last thing most Americans want to hear about is how their children will have to deal with this - and a Chinese kid will not. "Just get the kid out of college - and then I'll be out-a here", they think. 

But when you think that the total number of convicts sent to Australia over an 80 year period from England (the penitentiary in England being embarrassing and a totally American concept they thought) was only 160,000, and they turned out fairly well, I might think that setting our prisoners free, growing a society that supports the common man and not needing a military to defend anyone against that - might be a worthy goal. 

But it won't be called America. It will be a State of Acceptance - instead of a State of Denial. 

Maybe called just, "Home".

Wall Street Protester Arrested for 'Using a Bullhorn' Without a License

And the land of the free passes another day. Metro New York reports that not only was a man arrested for using a bullhorn, but gasoline for an electric generator was confiscated by police and cited as a 'fire hazard' - fuel that would be otherwise legal if used for a lawnmower, chainsaw or motorbike. Welcome to America, where freedom of speech is ok, so long as you don't use a bullhorn and petroleum products, the ones we wage wars over, are reserved for those who don't have a problem with the current economic situation. I have personally seen the protest and can tell you that activities are entirely peaceful, but it certainly seems as if the police are being brought in to disrupt things. And they are doing a fine American job of that. Luckily, attorney Samuel Cohen supports our right to free speech and is representing the protesters. "What these people are doing is the essence of the First Amendment. We want to make sure this is allowed to continue", he said. For video of police brutality against peaceful protesters, click here.

In other news, Mayor Bloomberg warns of "Panic in the streets if companies don't start hiring". Maybe finally, somebody in some position of power is getting it. Maybe.

America's #1 Export? Debt

According to Time Magazine in 1988, the US' largest export was debt - Treasury bonds and mortgage backed securities that we sold to other countries. Japan bought tons. But now, post financial crisis, the question remains. Since we borrowed billions from China to bail ourselves out, what do we sell to China to make the money back? And the answer seems to be, according to news site The Economic Collapse, garbage - waste paper and scrap metal. Just the same as the Romans exported out of their empire towards the end of it's days. For every American household to get themselves back on solid footing and out of this government induced overseas money drinking binge the answer is not so difficult. Save. Don't take that raise. Put the extra in the bank, and then take this year's raise next year, and put next year's raise in the bank - year after year. Maintain your car. Pay it off and then take a fraction of what you used to pay in interest every year and use that for upgrades - new tires, a nicer stereo, whatever. Keep the house. It's a lousy time to sell a house anyway so simply refinance it if possible, at the lowest rate possible, and then add a room or a deck or a patio. Stop borrowing money for at least 10 years and you'll find yourself a lot more comfortable and possibly able to buy a house or car or an education like the Asians do. In cash.

The government is spending your tax dollars recklessly, as the video above illustrates. The $850 billion dollar bank bailout is more than the entire NASA program budget over the its history. It costs us $6.5 billion a month just to be in Afghanistan. And you don't have a job? Save your money. And give the government as little as possible - until they get their own financial house in order.

It's Not The Economy Stupid! So WTF Is It?

Military spending
in billions

Over the last few months any number of publications including the Wall Street Journal and Businessweek have used the headline above (You can't copyright a headline can you?) but all with different answers to the question, "But WTF is it? I proposed an answer in my post, "Squandering the Peace Dividend on War", along with Seth Godin, as did Author, John Rachel in his blog using the illustration to the left. If you haven't sorted out the answer yet, look again at the chart. The big bar on the left is America's military spending in comparison to the rest of the world. Hmm. Simple you would think. But our government seems to think that all this war is somehow good for the economy, and job growth, and innovation, and whatever else we lack. Clear answer: It isn't. And hasn't been for the last ten years. Time Magazine asks recently, "Is America the World's Next Banana Republic?" in its comparison of North and South American financial standards - as China keeps military spending in check whilst building a modern infrastructure that makes America look like the 1800s. Sure, we may be able to beat the crap out of any banana republic or even China or Russia in a war, but what is that buying us? Not a future, that's for sure. 

How to Solve the Jobs Crisis in America? Re-Elect Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton

Newsweek and Bill Clinton tackle the sticky question of how to get America back to work this week with Clinton's 14 ideas on how to get the wheels of commerce rolling again in the good ole US of A. Over the last few weeks, many of you may have begun to wonder if I have somehow become un-American, what with my calling out all the ways we are having our lunch eaten by our Asian tiger friends and basically calling America fat, lazy and out of touch - when what we are really doing is fighting a series of unnecessary wars in the name of a fuel that has gone the way of the dinosaurs - wait a minute, it is called a fossil fuel, right?

But what I am really trying to do is play a small part in waking America up from a dream that is not real and certainly not working. In the last 10 years, China has built the world's largest high-speed rail system whilst we have steamrolled over a number of banana republics in search of that "Bubblin' crude", "Oil that is - Texas Tea", us hillbillies we are. But the question remains, how can America reverse this and many other economic  discrepancies and regain its luster as an entrepreneurial and economic powerhouse?

Cutting military spending and redeploying the monies in other more friendly ways is certainly a favourite option for many, but Clinton steers away from grand gestures like that and instead offers more practical solutions from getting congress off their asses and speeding approvals for new initiatives (In 1933 the Civil Works Administration put 4 million people to work in a month), or government funding for start-ups in green businesses, to painting roofs white (A white roof saves 20% electricity costs on a hot day) - suggestions which ween the country off its current oil dependence and eventually the wars it has created.

With 14 million Americans out of work, the last thing any of us wants to be us un-American. What we need to be is pro-American and realize that we have 14 million soldiers fighting an economic battle that has insufficient government support and we need to fix that. Mr. Clinton's comments simply help us to begin to give us a workable start.

D a v i d E v e r i t t - C a r l s o n

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Emerging and Submerging Markets: The Morton Report Shows Me the Difference

Andrew Morton

Funny. Having dinner with Dr. David Williams from Mojo Innovations in Shanghai and the ideas roll around to 'submerging markets' (David coined that) - the idea that we work in emerging markets but David, an Englishman, and another Brit, a woman from The Netherlands and myself are having a bottle of white and figuring out why we are all here, instead of living in our birth countries - the submerging markets - rich countries and the only victims of the recent financial crisis (and then we order the fish).

The woman from Holland, a young professional, is leaving an executive job at a foreign university here, to move to Istanbul, Turkey, with no job at all - just to live life, and live the best. Neither David, nor I nor the English interior designer showed much interest in going back to our home countries, for individual reasons. And so many of those reasons have nothing to do with money.

We are all career professionals, all capable of getting name-your-number six-figure salaries back home, yet we do not. Why not?

It's all about where the future is, and we have all run into the roadblocks of our western countries trying to maintain the status' quo of an old century while things here are just the Wild Wild East. It's fun, and a whole lot better than pushing sand uphill back home to feed an economic model that is so obviously broken.

This all came to real this week when it was time to be paid for my first month at an American webzine, The Morton Report. When it came time to pay, an editor said they would 'send me a check'. Ha. I laughed. Were they serious? Turns out they were.

When I explained that the check system they used in the US (Yes, printing personal money that may or may not be any good) did not work outside country, they truly didn't understand - and then they got mad. "Wire transfer? WTF is that?", they said. Now, this particular webzine, luckily has an online shrink, so I'll leave it to her to figure out how f-ed-up that is - but that was the story. Getting mad over watching the world change? "Gee, American money is no good anymore?". Call the Chinese.

And in telling that story, David chimed in, "Ha! I had an American client look at my invoice and say 'What's EFT?" - Electronic Funds Transfer. "I'm not sure we know how to do that", the American company responded.

So it's true, in submerging markets they will never understand that the reason the other markets are emerging, is that they are not just not doing the SOS. They are building something, something their children won't have to pay for like America's children will have to pay the Chinese.

So we are in Asia, emerging, and America is submerging. Do the math. Good Morning America!

D a v i d E v e r i t t - C a r l s o n

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Happy Birthday America! How's that workin' out for ya?

As this 4th of July begins I find myself in an interesting position on the present state of our country. I don't live there. Recently,when discussing being asked by an editor to look at a story on the release of Tran Khai Thanh Thuy, a writer and pro-Democracy advocate here Vietnam, a British friend reacted, "Ha, Democracy, how's that workin' out for us these days?" And that's a more than reasonable retort considering the world's economic changes over the past 10 years or so. Is it democracy that makes people happy, or economic prosperity and the peace of mind that their government is doing the best job they can on behalf of all of its citizens?

Promoting the wealth and prosperity of citizens doesn't seem to be a hallmark of democracy alone. Does it really matter that countries have one party, or two, or tens - or a monarchy, or even a benevolent dictatorship? The United States supports any number of monarchies throughout the world, including Kuwait and Saudi Arabia with nary a lecture on 'democracy' to them and our history of supporting dictators of the non-benevolent variety and then not supporting them later is spotty at best.

And when was the last time anybody voted on a war, or an economic stimulus package or anything else that mattered to their daily lives? We just voted for the people who made those decisions. And did that make the decisions better? Over the last 10 years, democracy has been behind the evaporation of a federal surplus left to us by President Clinton, two new war fronts we didn't have (or need) previously, and the single worst 10 years in the stock market ever. How's that workin' for us? Need we credit or discredit democracy?

Democracy had nothing to do with any of that. And our efforts in Vietnam over 50 years ago to "stop the spread of communism" didn't do much in our favour either. So it seems that labeling governments by their brand of politics has little to do with the policies those governments produce. China has endured harsh western criticism of its human rights record in the past but has also doubled its GDP, twice, in the last 30 years, bringing modernity and prosperity to the greatest number of people on the planet ever. Somehow now, with our new enormous debt to that country, I suspect there will be a lot less diplomatic finger wagging towards them in the future. A very democratic decision, for sure.

So Happy Birthday America. That's 236 years of Democracy and freedom from British taxes - now, if we could just pay those Chinese taxes.

A suspension of disbeliefs is a desirable delusion when watching a film or play, but a less desirable one with regard to participating in the politics that shape our lives. Once this anniversary party is over it's time for Americans to get back to the real-life game plan of providing appropriate jobs and social welfare on a standard with the top countries in the world (which we currently don't). The question is, what can you do to help?

D a v i d E v e r i t t - C a r l s o n

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Find me on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Read my previous blog: The Wild Wild East Dailies.