Tuesday, March 16, 2004

Leaving the market world to enter the culture world.. Posted here Tuesday, March 16, 2004 at 5:05:54 PM       I am thinking about the equivalent of people coming to America before 1776, to escape, to create better… but now, a choice to leave market space and enter culture space. Could it be done? ********

What is democracy? Posted here Tuesday, March 16, 2004 at 11:54:31 AM     The tendency is to confuse American style democracy with deeper democracy economic development with human development. so that we get economic development and American style democracy on one side and non development and popular democracy and human development on the other. This is a bad choice. The possibility of a republic, with representatives and a human development agenda and local level direct democracy is left out. from the UN HDR This Human Development Report is first and foremost about the idea that politics is as important to successful development as economics. Sustained poverty reduction requires equitable growth-but it also requires that poor people have political power. And the best way to achieve that in a manner consistent with human development objectives is by building strong and deep forms of democratic governance at all levels of society. Global - 2002 Another way to see it would be to realize how much democracy is treated as the handmaiden of economic "freedom, or one dollar one vote. The paradox is not resolved. A deeper democracy and human development would focus on the soulful personal development and community development issues, going deep into the lived experience of people's lives. Democracy as spiritual and intellectual freedom is quite different from one that supports economic growth as the major criteria, ********

The real Bush hides the real America Posted here Tuesday, March 16, 2004 at 9:56:02 AM     We need to face the possibility that Bush is not so much bad minded, as weak minded, and out of his depth, and because of this he brought on board a bunch of used up has been advisers (not taking the best of his dad's like Baker), and weak provincials like Rove,  and then getting caught in a major event that required breadth and the ability to see it (9/11) in the context of long term trends. Instead, he reacted as a spoiled brat, with a bottom the class private school sense of superiority (I may be at the bottom here, but we here are all better than those who are not). The result has been to take a complex America facing a globalizing world where it plays a smaller, not a larger part, of the whole, and forced it to be a single issue America, replacing the middle class quality of life drive with a sense of fear requiring security requiring an authoritarian focus. And this militaristic paranoid style is as provocative as a red flag to a small bull. Even now, terrorism is a minuscule part of the real consequences and forces in the world -  headline grabber for sure, but hardly the cause of most of the pain in the world. ********