jueves, septiembre 25, 2014

Would middle-class 'indignados' prefer direct democracy?

Second update. Here I suggest how Global Debout can reverse the escalation of The March of Folly of the Dark Globalization. This is the response that has emerged to the initial question of this post "Would middle-class 'indignados' prefer direct democracy?" The answer is YES! In fact it strongly supports the later post of January 2015 Why global Middle-Class Indignados should unite to demand strategies of trajectory.

 That response emerged in the Dominican Republic because it is one of the places where positive feedback on a vicious situation has escalated to be one of the largest in relative terms. That's what I been saying: we have one of the most anti-systemic markets of the whole world, which follow the axiom "What's most (anti-)systemic is most local." 

 Trying to be just with myself, this response emerged also because of my personal involvement in the process, since I was asked to make comments to the new electricity law being discussed back in 1992, at a time when I was probably the person best positioned to discover what has been going on, as I described, for example, in the April 23, 2014, post Innovación: puerta al progreso (Innovation: door to progress).

 That post was followed up by Invitación a conversar sobre las posibilidades de 'los otros' trabajadores que tienen la 'pasión del explorador ( Invitation to talk about the possibilities of the 'other' workers who have the 'passion of the explorer' ) of June 15, 2014 and ¡Sumemos! Tercera invitación a conversar ( Let's add! Third invitation to talk ) of June 27, 2014, without any success. Now (as the third time's the charm) we know why the Dominican Republic was so important a target for the global governing elite as the technology of the emerging information revolution which we have been calling the Computing Big Shift was only available to the wholesale market and not to the retail market. The places where organized market have been operating have been extractive institutions, according to the book "Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty," first published in 2012, by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson.
By extractive economic institutions, Acemoglu and Robinson mean practices and policies “designed to extract incomes and wealth from one subset of society [the masses] to benefit a different subset [the governing elite].”
In fact the dark side of technology has been used to extract incomes and wealth from the masses, and this time not just in developing countries, but in developed countries as well. In the following two images I had given earlier evidence of The March of Folly.



To the above we can now repeat what I wrote in the 2006 post Let's Get Out of Back Rooms to a Generative Dialogue, that for example says:
Deregulation, as explained in 2001 was design as a scam. Donella Meadows got it very close to its essence in the article Restructuring and Faith in the Market. She said that a price control in one part of the system is perverse socialism. That is what price controls do to any industry by lacking transparency (read as corruption).

I suggest a generative dialogue (not a debate) here in Energy Pulse, instead of back rooms, based on what Donella left us:

… some general rules are obvious. Plan far ahead, and plan for the welfare of the whole system, not just the utilities or the big consumers. Remember that demand reductions are as effective as supply increases and cheaper and cleaner. Don't set up the poor to bid against the rich. Don't try to control prices in only one part of the system. Don't hide real costs. Throw away comfortable myths about how the market will do everything for us and start thinking. 
Above all don't allow anything as critical as electricity (or health care or airline safety or food or pharmaceutical safety) to be restructured by power brokers in back rooms.

Donella's warning about other critical sectors that helped emerged middle-class indignados was re-confirmed independent of myself in the evidence of the following image.  

First update. #GlobalDebout #15M #OWS #TheWealthOfGlobalization #ElFinDeLaImpunidad (#TheEndOfImpunity) @lsnmafalda @giovannida. 



The Reasons for the Arab Spring: The Root Causes of the Arab Awakening in 2011. The 10 reasons (see below) for the Arab Spring only make sense when considered under The Wealth of Nations influence, where Margaret Thatcher TINA (There Is Not Alternative) to neoliberalism rules. However, under the emerging future of #TheWealthOfGlobalization (please hit hashtag), the root cause of the Arab Awakening of 2011 can be single out as corruption.

4.  Corruption

Economic hardships can be tolerated if the people believe there is a better future ahead, or feel that the pain is at least somewhat equally distributed. Neither was the case in the Arab world, where the state-led development gave place to crony capitalism that benefited only a small minority. In Egypt, new business elites collaborated with the regime to amass fortunes unimaginable to the majority of the population surviving on $2 a day. In Tunisia, no investment deal was closed without a kick-back to the ruling family.

The other reasons can be taken as secondary under an emerging future of The Wealth of Globalization.

1.  Arab Youth: Demographic Time Bomb
2.  Unemployment
3.  Ageing Dictatorships
5.  National Appeal of the Arab Spring
6.  Leaderless Revolt
7.  Social Media
8.  Rallying Call of the Mosque
9.  Bungled State Response
10.  Contagion Effect

Well supported from the initial text of this post, the above proposal to complement the local action plan organized for January 22, 2017, benefits a lot the post itself, for example, from the post Replacing the Science of EcoNoMics with the System Profession of EcoIsOurs (where direct democracy emerged as #DD_SM) and its:
First update, I posted the following comment under the article a Forbes article mentioned below, that says:

Second update. To Paul Krugman: let's 'destroy the EcoNoMy' to help emerge the EcoIsOurs by embracing Great Capitalism.

Third update. Can this primer on The Wealth of Globalization be important for the future of humanity?

Fourth update. Thought hypothesis: “I spiritize, therefore I am.” – José Antonio Vanderhorst Silverio 
Would middle-class 'indignados' prefer direct democracy?

"Everything that is done in the world is done by hope." -- Martin Luther



Following Steve Jobs's quote, in which he said that "you can only connect the points backward," I am now able to connect backwards key important points for the Middle Class 'Indignados' (defined below) liquid movement cause. Such a movement might now have a Protestant Reformation solid cause, like the one Martin Luther lead against the Catholic Church. 

 First let's consider the article Taxed energy: thought Occupiers aren’t expecting, but will love, where I responded to the story "The 15-M is emotional, lacks thought," published in El Pais, October 17, 2011, [by] Zigmunt Bauman, Polish philosopher and sociologist known for his concept of liquid modernity," to provide the missing thought required to make their cause solid on the electric power industry.

That though was intended to be generalized the point of the article "On the basic services expected by middle-class 'indignados','' which was written July 16, 2013 and only made available to a wider audience today, where it can be seen below as a point that can also be connected backwards. As can be seen, while Francis Fukuyama argued "for a conventional political approach" with representative democracy, a market approach has recently emerged for direct democracy in order to connect backwards.

 Such an approach, emerges after developing the post Synthesis of a proposed global partnership on climate and development, which can be contrasted through of government solution shown in the Wall Street Journal news Middle Class Brazil Lifts Voice, as an example of the obsolete representative democracy reality. I am sharing the new approach to a wider audience of Middle Class 'Indignados' to see if they can connect the points backwards to enable the direct democracy being proposed. Please help get this solid proposal across.

On the basic services expected by middle-class 'indignados'''

© 2013. 2014. José Antonio Vanderhorst Silverio, Ph.D.
Systemic Consultant
IEEE Life Senior Member
Advanced text shared for individual use and feedback only [on 2013].
Please comment!

In what follows it is shown that Jim Collins’ bestseller “Good to Great: Why some companies make the leap… and others don’t” is the revolutionary management book that has been expected to be able to end the tyranny of the prevailing style of management envisioned by the late well-known management guru W. Edwards Deming. Listening carefully to Jim Collins we may jump to the conclusion that the non-revolutionary title Good to Great needs to be understood as the revolutionary title Mediocre to Great.

In fact the idea of mediocrity shows up in the back cover jacket of Good to Great. It is in the praise given by the late management guru Peter Drucker, which says: “This carefully researched and well written book disproves most of the current management hype – from the cult of the superhuman CEO to the cult of IT to the acquisitions and merger mania. It will not enable mediocrity to become competence. But it should enable competence to become excellence.” For those who still don’t know Drucker, according to Wikipedia he was “one of the best-known and most widely influential thinkers and writers on the subject of management theory and practice.”

In addition, on the back cover jacket of the 2011 HarperCollins book Great by Choice, by Collins and Morten T. Hansen, most of the praise by the business press is for Collins, as a great leader himself. Fortune: “… the most influential management thinker alive;” Wall Street Journal “With both Good to Great and Built to Last, Mr. Collins delivers two seductive messages: that great management is attainable by mere mortals and that its practitioners can build great institutions. It’s just what us mortals want to hear;” The Economist “… excels at the American method of empirical business research;” New York Times: “For this guru, no question is too big.”

Based on the empirical research of Collins books, I assert that the “… the failure of governments to meet the rising expectations of the newly prosperous and educated" is a management problem as a result of mediocre basic services. That quote is taken from the last part of the subtitle of the Wall Street Journal article The Middle-Class Revolution by Francis Fukuyama, which starts with "All over the world, argues Francis Fukuyama, today's political turmoil has a common theme: the failure of governments…”

In his article, Fukuyama says that “The theme that connects recent events in Turkey and Brazil to each other, as well as to the 2011 Arab Spring and continuing protests in China, is the rise of a new global middle class. Everywhere it has emerged, a modern middle class causes political ferment, but only rarely has it been able, on its own, to bring about lasting political change. Nothing we have seen lately in the streets of Istanbul or Rio de Janeiro suggests that these cases will be an exception.”

It is asserted that such middle-class is all over the world and not just where protests have emerged.  That’s why in the title of this article middle-class indignados (MCIs) is generalized to refer to all protestors. In effect they include the Occupy Wall Street and particularly the Spanish indignados movements that were hinted by Fukuyama in the last paragraph of his article with “No politician in the U.S. or Europe should look down complacently on the events unfolding in the streets of Istanbul and São Paulo. It would be a grave mistake to think, ‘It can't happen here.’"

In response to the exception mentioned above, Fukuyama argues for a conventional political approach. He says that “Unless they can form a coalition with other parts of society, their movements seldom produce enduring political change.” He later adds that MCIs “…failed to follow up by organizing political parties that were capable of contesting nationwide elections.”

Using a different political approach, it is argued here that instead of a coalition, now that Mediocre to Great management is available, MCIs all over the world should unite to press for the end of the tyranny of the prevailing style of management, as described in W. Edwards Deming, book “The New Economics For Industry, Government, Education,” published in 1993 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Advanced Engineering Study.

In fact to start to bring about lasting change in government, industry, education, heath, global MCIs must unite in a civil rights like basic services movement to protest for the implementation of a Good to Great culture of discipline which shifts basis services away from the “Doom Loop” and into “Flywheel Effects.” The pressure to governments will require reforms that enable markets in which the private sector will compete to provide great basic services.

It is now understood that the rising expectations of the MCIs can only be met by great companies through markets, not by more government regulation. MCIs already know that we live in a world where, for example, Steve Jobs showed how their rising expectations could be met for basic services they were not expecting but will love.

Last but not least, it is important to stress that citing “cross-national studies,” Fukuyama wrote that MCIs “… want not just security for their families but choices and opportunities for themselves. Those who have completed high school or have some years of university education are far more likely to be aware of events in other parts of the world and to be connected to people of a similar social class abroad through technology.”



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