Monday, July 22, 2002

Why America Is Failing? Timothy Wilken writes: When America was founded in 1776, the North American continent provided relatively unlimited resources.  The early colonists were in the right place at the right time. The right place was the nearly empty continent of North America. Millions of acres of arable land and forests, filled with abundant water in millions of steams, rivers, and lakes and stocked with uncountable numbers of wildlife. This was further enriched with enormous reserves of iron, coal, copper, aluminum, zinc, lead, gold, silver, oil, and much more – all available for the taking. ... However, today things have changed. The North American continent is getting full. In 1776, there were less than a billion humans on the planet, today we are over 6 billion. We no longer have a limitless abundance of natural resources available for the taking. Our world of plenty is being reduced to a world of scarcity. In fact, petroleum already peaked in America in 1971. The world peak is estimated to occur somewhere between 2007 to 2012. ... In the 18th century, Neutrality was a major advance for humankind. The neutral system gave individuals opportunities for great economic success. The birth of capitalistic economics greatly enriched the human condition. Neutral organization was more powerful than adversary organization. Neutrality did work well in the free world for many humans who inhabited it two hundred years ago. But that was then. ... (07/22/02) Organizing in the Information Age Barry Carter writes: By definition, the company or controlled economy is public work and public work is bureaucracy. A two-person bureaucracy with one person reporting to another is a bureaucracy and carries the same negative traits as the 5,000-person bureaucracy. As Tom Peters has said, “Any organization with more than four people is a hopeless bureaucracy... On the other hand, at the core of the Mass Privatization organization (the neural net structure) are teamnets or networks of teams. These are virtual groups of partners who are overlapped and interconnected with other partners and teams. They come together, work on projects, disband and reformulate as needed. The relationship that we find at the core of the teamnet is partnership. Teamnets have the intelligence and flexibility of a “mom and pop shop” but with the size power and momentum of a traditional bureaucracy. When we synthesize the subordinate relationship we get a full-blown bureaucracy and when we synthesize the partner relationship we get a teamnet or Starburst or neural net organization. (07/22/02) British Ships Carrying Plutonium Run Blockade TASMAN SEA (CNN) -- Two British-based tankers carrying nuclear fuel have slipped through a Greenpeace flotilla of protest craft under the cover of darkness.  A Greenpeace inflatable boat then embarked on an eight-hour chase, before unfurling a protest banner demanding a "Nuclear Free Pacific" on Monday morning. Environmental activist group Greenpeace set up the blockade of 11 boats in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand to protest the shipment of plutonium fuel from Japan to the United Kingdom. ... Greenpeace says the two ships are carrying a cargo of plutonium mixed oxide which is being returned to the United Kingdom after being rejected for use in Japanese nuclear reactors because it is faulty. The company responsible for the plutonium, British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL), said Monday the protesters had recklessly endangered their own lives through the action. ... BNFL says the plutonium fuel pellets on the ships pose no danger to the environment, saying that even if they were dropped into the sea they would take thousands of years to dissolve. (07/22/02) AOL: Add It Up Steve MacLaughlin reports that , Bob Pittman's days at AOLTW are over. Let's take a look back at this mess. (07/22/02) FollowUp on Wheat Crisis Washington Post -- Israelis Fear Bread Shortage: Israelis scrambled to buy bread and other baked goods Sunday, fearing a shortage because of a six-day strike by flour mills, which are demanding a 20 percent increase in prices to offset the higher costs of U.S. wheat. Baruch Turjeman, head of three of 18 flour mills in Israel, said the they could no longer absorb the increased cost of importing wheat from the United States, where he said a poor crop this year had resulted in higher prices. "When we are talking about small changes, we don't have any problem absorbing it. But now this is a big change," Turjeman told Israel Radio. The government, which must approve the price increase, has made no immediate decision on the demand for a 20 percent price rise. (07/21/02) Yachts Block Path of Nuclear Ships BBC News -- A flotilla of anti-nuclear protesters in yachts have formed a blockade in the Tasman Sea against two ships carrying plutonium to Britain from Japan. ...  Greenpeace says the ships - Pacific Pintail and the Pacific Teal - are carrying enough plutonium waste to make 50 nuclear bombs. The organization believes the ships are a potential terrorist target and says it wants to stop the South Pacific becoming a nuclear highway. (07/21/02) The Emancipation of Capitalism Barry Carter writes: Today we face the greatest move towards personal responsibility, ownership and personal power in all of human history. When we synthesize Age Wave Theory with the changes in work, business, science, information technology, organizations and wealth-creation we see a new work and wealth-creation institution emerging—the Mass Privatization enterprise or community. I define Mass Privatization as a wealth-creation organization or community in which the individual worker, or a small team of workers, owns the specific work they perform. These private owners work in partnership with other private owners. Networks of small virtual teams (teamnets) form chains of customers, linked by information technology to form powerful global enterprises (Lipnack, Stamps 1993). They are flexible enough to customize at the individual level while producing en masse, hence Mass Customization. Partners are bound together through a compelling vision and mission, as well as alignment that comes from an organizational structure based upon win/win compensation. Internal to the organization, suppliers as partners are compensated directly by their customers. Likewise, internal customers pay their suppliers directly. There are no managers, salaries, bosses, hierarchies, employees or central controls. Is Mass Privatization socialism? No! In socialism the individual worker owns nothing. Is it capitalism? No! In capitalism the individual worker does not own the individual work performed. Though socialism purports to be a system in which workers own the means of production, and capitalism espouses the right of the individual to own a whole business, neither system supports the individual owning the means of production for his or her own work. Both systems are, however, based upon the central control and ownership of work.  (07/21/02) The CRASH of 2002 5:48:41 AM

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