Fwd: New Honor: Designated Educator of the Quarter/FUTURES LEARNING SECTION BULLETIN

A wonderful statement about Arthur Shostak, a great futurist, especially the futures of unions and of education.

After Hawaiian independence

In Hawaii, there has for many decades been a small, but vocal, subset of people dedicated to the hope of regaining political independence for the islands. Earlier this week, HRCFS director (and Professor of Political Science) Jim Dator spoke to a community group of Hawaiian pro-sovereignty activists, to explore possible scenarios for the islands in the -- eventually, probable -- event that their shared aim were to be realised.

Below is a video of the first ten minutes of his address on 26 October, which was part of an occasional series sponsored by Ka Lei Maile Ali`i Hawaiian Civic Club, and convened by Lynette Cruz.



(The remaining four segments can be found via YouTube: two, three, four, five.)

In this presentation, titled "After Independence, What?", Dator highlights the importance of preparing a coherent sense of the possible political landscapes that may lie beyond the milestone of recognition of sovereignty. He lays out a variety of sharply differing models for post-independence Hawaii, noting the diversity of preferred scenarios even among members of the audience, and urging them to work towards a shared transitional agenda sooner rather than later. And he gives an account from personal experience of the sudden changes undergone by several Eastern European polities, to a post-communist era; countries which achieved "whatever it was that they had been striving for, but they weren't prepared for the next step."

Although these issues have been of great concern to a variety of Hawaiian independence advocates for a long time, at the moment there seems to be a surge of public interest in these issues, perhaps in part due to the grim global economic outlook, and the accompanying realisation that the place of the U.S. in the world is shifting. At the Hawaii International Film Festival last month the winner of the Best Documentary award was Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai'i, directed by a local journalist, and it is currently screening at the University of Hawaii's Manoa campus, where HRCFS is based.

Have a mediocre day!

Compared to other nations, the US ranks 16^th in college and 20^th in high school graduation rates; 60^th in proportion of college graduates in natural science and engineering; 23^rd in GDP devoted to publicly-funded nondefense research. US high school students rank near last in math and science abilities.

 

To correct this, a US National Academies committee published "The Gathering Storm" in 2005, recommending policies for substantial change.

 

And impressive accomplishments have indeed been made!

 

A research university equal to the current endowment of MIT has been created. 200,000 students study abroad on government scholarships, mostly in science and engineering. Government investment in R & D increased 25%. A world-class nanotechnology institute has been established. $10 billion has been added to K-12 science and math education. And $3 billion has been added to the nation's research budget.

 

Quite a feat, isn't it. It shows what a good report can do!

 

BUT NONE OF THIS HAPPENED IN THE U.S., of course. These things happened in Saudi Arabia, China, the UK, India, Brazil, and Russia, respectively.

 

To the contrary, since the report was issued, in the US research and education funds have been cut; 2-day-per-month "unpaid holidays" have been instituted at some major federally-funded research laboratories; and $152 billion distributed to the US population in tiny sums in an "economic stimulus package" (remember that?).

 

And all of those things happened BEFORE the collapse of the stock market and the multi-trillion dollar give-aways to the rich and powerful, achieved by indebting future generations forever while simultaneously dumbing them down.

 

Most of the above information comes from an editorial in "Science" (September 19, 2008, p. 1605) written by Norman Augustine, the chair of the committee that wrote "The Gathering Storm".

 

Augustine ends by writing that the US is well on its way to becoming "America, the land of the free and the home of the unemployed."

 

And he did not know that the worst by far is yet to come.

 

As the local bank ad says, "Have a mediocre day!"

 Jim Dator

Two Meanings of the "Bailout"

First, for years I have been harping on the fact that there are three kinds of debt which, though apparently separate, need to be looked at as a system: personal debt, corporate debt, and national debt. I argue that they create an unsustainable system. In the late 90s, I went to a revered Dean of the UHM Business School and expressed my concerns, saying that if it were not for our high levels of debt, our economy would have failed long ago.

He assured me that debt was OK and I shouldn't worry about it. I even asked him about this in public in a talk I gave later, and was again re-assured. (Even more ironically, it was a variation of talks I gave earlier about the future of shopping malls and about the future of mortgage banking, which were subsequently published: "Mortgage Banking for the New American Empire, and other futures," Foresight, Vol. 6 No. 1, 2004, pp. 13-18; "The last supper of the dinosaurs, Redux," Journal of Futures Studies, Vol. 5, No. 4, May 2001, pp. 93-110.)

Yet, I am sorry to say, each of the three forms of debt did contribute massively over the years to the growing crisis, and primarily to the present unfolding catastrophe.

And what I most feared in response to the collapse is what has just recently happened:

Unsustainable personal debt (especially in the form of subprime mortgages, but in other forms as well, including credit cards) brought down corporations whose own debt was confounded by various unfathomable novel debt instruments (like interest-rate swaps, quant-funds, hedge-funds, derivatives, credit-derivatives, auction-rate securities, collateralized debt obligations, and credit-default swaps) so that the insolvent corporations (after decades of bad-mouthing government and praising the "magic of the market") turned without shame or confession of guilt to the US government which unflinchingly assumed their debts simply by passing them on to future generations to deal with, thus "solving" the crisis.

Second, another major flaw in the $700 billion federal bailout is that it is entirely intended to restore the ability of everyone to go into debt again. It is like giving everyone $200 to spend in a game of Monopoly in order to keep the game going. The money is not intended, per se, to be spent for any productive activity, such as addressing the other Persons of the Unholy Trinity, especially Peak Oil. The entire point is to get people shopping for Asian products again.

That is the second most troubling thing about the bailout. It may bail out the boat but it is the same old boat dependent entirely on debt-fueled and utterly unsustainable consumer spending. We need an entirely different economic system based on providing goods and services that people need and want–such as sufficient clean, renewable and affordable energy and an evolvable environment, and not on the endless acquisition of goods alone.

Where will the money for alternative energy (or even tar sands, off-shore drilling, or new nuke plants) come from as the economic collapse continues?

And how can people discuss and decide these issues authoritatively since all governments are utterly ineffective, being ideologically discredited and profoundly and purposefully debt-bound themselves?

Jim Dator