November 28th, 2011 — Government
Taijitu - diagram of ultimate power
In the last example of Fourfold Problem-Solving we looked at How Buyout Funds Work as an industry on the microeconomics level. Today we’re going to look at national and global examples on the the macroeconomic level.
A national example of fourfold thinking
Macroeconomics is simply the “big picture” economics. At this point in time that usually means on the national or international level. Microeconomics, on the other hand, is anything below the national level, e.g., industry, households, regional and local governments.
The national level is where Americans can clearly see the downside of binary either/or thinking. We think we have two national political parties in this country; Republican and Democratic. The reality is that we have four parties:
conservatives ultraconservatives
liberals progressives
Our ultraconservatives have pulled conservatism one way; now our progressives are pulling liberalism back towards its former place, and even beyond that into more progressive territory. Meanwhile, we have a liberal Democrat President who is trying to moderate the damage of that split, and traditionally conservative Republicans appear to be becoming more and more of a minority in Congress.
A global example of fourfold thinking Continue reading →
November 21st, 2011 — Banks, Investing
Normally I don’t write about a the story from a single article in a newspaper, but today there is an article in the London Financial Times that is so outrageous I have to write about it. This article shows the epitome of the craziness going on in the saga of what rich banks and wealthy investors are doing to themselves, this country, and to the world.
Most Americans will never know about this story because it is taking place in Ireland. And that’s unfortunate!
Scylla v. Charybdis
These were my two favorite monsters from Greek literature. These two sea monsters awaited Odysseus (Ulysses) on his way home from the the battle by the Greeks to retrieve beautiful Helen from her captors in Troy. Scylla was an enormous rock shoal near Sicily. Charybdis was a gigantic whirlpool that was so close to Scylla, ships could not get through the gap. Odysseus had to sail between these two sea monsters in order to get himself and his crew home to Ithaca.
Odysseus was caught “between a rock and a hard place”. He had to choose one. For the “good of the many” as Star Trek puts it, Homer’s story of the ten-year Odyssey back to Greece reveals that Odysseus chose Scylla, the rock. He risked losing a few of his crew, rather than take the “all or nothing” course and risk falling into Charybdis, the whirlpool, and destroying all of his twelve ships and his men.
Today taxpayers are the modern variants of the crew on the Odyssey, and we too are having a hard time surviving. As this Irish tale shows, the reason is that bankers and investors are locked in a destructive battle that threatens to take all of us down underwater. Continue reading →
November 16th, 2011 — Economics and Investing
Yesterday I drove by the Occupy Berkeley encampment on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. I only had a brief glimpse of the tents and a make-shift cardboard sign as I passed. So my first thought was of a small town somewhere in Oregon.
Long ago, while on a camping trip with my college boyfriend we came into the town as it was getting dark. We asked a pedestrian if there was a place to camp nearby.
“Sure” they answered, “ the city park is right down the street.”
Amazed we drove down to the center of town. Indeed! There were tents, green, tan and orange, beginning to sprout up all over the town square. There were ample bathrooms and water. And it was all free. The only rule was you had to leave in the morning. You couldn’t live there. You couldn’t become a resident.
Our experience that night was a bit exhilarating. True, we’d camped in one of the rest stops on the way out where sleeping overnight was legal, but never had we seen a campground in the middle of a town that was just for travelers.
In a way completely different from any protest we’d ever been at, that peaceful camping area in the middle of a small American town was like suddenly awakening in a whole different country, a country where people really were free.
