Dana Blankenhorn

Hate is a Luxury at Times Like This

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 44 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

Here is a headline from next Wednesday's paper.

The personal crap did not work.

By personal crap I mean ads like the one above, designed to make one candidate seem like a bad person, with bad motives. This is an extreme example of the type, but similar ads have long been a campaign staple. Usually they work.

Not this time. A lot of the down-ticket races will go this time to the candidate who goes positive first, who talks about what they stand for, and what they want to do, first, rather than trying to paint their opponent as a bad person.

Hate is a luxury at times like this.

Hate is a luxury when you can remember having plenty and find yourself with nothing. Hate is a luxury when you have been brought low, you're sitting there stunned, and you need a reason to get back up.

I'm not talking here about ads which point out a difference between two candidates, which criticize the other person's record or their stands on the issues. You can make such ads, and run such ads, and some will be effective. But make sure, as of the moment you read this, that your campaign has a positive message for the weekend or you are going to lose.

Hate is a luxury at a time of crisis. Hate is not to be confused with determination. Back in 1968, at the height of our last crisis, the Nixon campaign closed with an ad saying something like "This time, vote as if your whole life depended on it" and that was fine. You want people to feel that the coming election is important, that their vote is vital to the outcome. Had Nixon closed with ads saying Humphrey hung out with hippies (something many of his supporters felt at the end, since Humphrey had come out against the war in Vietnam by that time) it's possible he would have lost.

Or think about the last two elections which took place against a backdrop of economic pain. Did Reagan close with negative ads? Did Clinton close with negative ads? No. And if you want a chance of winning on Tuesday you had better not, either.

One more thing.

Replacing Lost Money

It's a little like calculus, which may be why people like Ron Paul can't understand it.

What happens to money that is "lost" in the market? What should happen?

We have run this experiment before. We ran it in the 1930s. Money was lost in the stock market, a lot of it. The U.S. government, and other western governments, refused to replace it. That would be printing new money, they said. It would lead to inflation. Just like Germany in the 1920s.

The result was stagnation, and actual deflation, as fewer dollars were available to chase goods.

The answer was inflation.

Where the Next Boom Will Start

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 43 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

Every economic recovery is different. What worked before may recover but it's never the same.

That said, note that every new boom starts slowly. Growth is never uniform, not between industries or within an economic cycle. Recovery will be slow. It will take years. But its pace will accelerate and at some point we'll forget again what hard times felt like. That's when we'll be ready for another bust.

Let me start by looking at previous booms I have lived through:

• The 1970s happened in the oil patch. I was in Houston then and it was a lot like Dubai has been the last few years. One bank put up what looked from the air like a huge green dollar sign. That's how things were. After the crash, which was hard, there was finally a recovery, but it was never the same as it had been.
• The 1980s happened on Wall Street. I was a business reporter then and I watched as supposedly brilliant people took apart companies, then put them back together to reveal value. Everything else went up in sympathy. After the crash the Wall Street game changed. You still read about the "heroes" of that era, like Carl Icahn, but it's not the same. Nor will it be.
• The 1990s  happened on the Internet. I was an Internet reporter. I started warning of the crash in 1997, but the boom happened despite me. The bust took down a ton of companies, and I was out of work completely for over two years. But it did come back. Amazon and eBay came back. Other sites came back. Google barely existed at that time. But, again, this decade, online, has been mainly about consolidation and steady change, not revolution.
• The 2000s were all about housing. Whether the boom was real or artificial, the product of lax regulation or an attempt to cover up for the Iraq War's costs, is irrelevant right now. We created enough Confederate Money to paper the world, backed by houses that were only worth a fraction of what we paid for them, and it will take years to unwind that. When housing does "come back" it won't be the same. It can't be. But, in time, it will come back.

Tootie Seals the Deal

The coming Obama landslide is a direct result of the financial panic, and the two candidates' reaction to it.

But there remained uncertainty until this week, when Tootie sealed the deal.

Tootie is the nickname of Madelyn Dunham, now 85. She's Obama's grandmother. She's the lady on the left in this Chicago Tribune picture, taken in 1979.

She not only helped raise her grandson, whom she usually called Barry, but she gave him the example of a strong, executive woman who could come out of her suit after work, throw on a muumuu, and become grandma again.

Madelyn is now gravely ill, and so Barack Obama has taken a few days off from campaigning to see her, to become Barry again.

How does this seal the deal?

Big Threat to the War Against Oil

There is an enormous threat developing to the War Against Oil we all need to conduct in order to save the planet.

Low oil prices.

The price of crude on world markets has been cut in half over the last few months, as the recession we started with our Confederate Money spreads around the world. While the U.S. has responded appropriately, injecting new liquidity to partly make up for what has been lost, the world has yet to respond. The dollar is up against the Euro as a result.

Why is a lower oil price bad? If you spent the last year working on a plan to develop solar or geothermal or hydrogen energy, based on a price equivalent of $100/barrel oil, your project is now dead in the water. Your investors have pulled out and that energy won't be produced.

So long as energy prices are subject to the instant fluctuations of hedge funds and day traders, it is impossible to plan for new supplies.

The solution is simple, and it's time we went for it. As I have stated here many times, that solution is to set a floor price for oil.

End of the Greatest Generation

I have not been online the last few days.

I was at a funeral. For my mother-in-law. Ruth Estelle Robin Steinhauser was her full name. My daughter was named for her.

She lived a full and rich life, a life ahead of her time, becoming head librarian for a school district with 90 schools in it. She had everything she could have wanted, most especially a marriage that lasted 66 years. She even knew her great-grandchildren.

Before her funeral (a really moving affair and a full house) we had a little get together in the home her husband designed and built back in 1961. I suddenly noticed something about halfway through.

There was no one from her generation left.

Yes, there are stragglers. My mom is 85 and I love her very much. My wife's uncle Otto has survived cancer and looks pretty good for 86. But 86 is the magic number here.

The Greatest Generation, as Tom Brokaw called them, is just about gone.

As recently as 2001, when we traveled to Texas for Ruth and Bennie's 60th anniversary bash, the Woman's Club of San Antonio (Ruth's favorite place next to her own home) was packed with people who'd danced to Glenn Miller's In the Mood when it was new. But if you make it to your 80s (and you're lucky if you do), you know the weight of time is pressing down hard, pressing you into the ground.

There is serious significance in this moment. These are the people who not only won the war, but who invented the Generation Gap, rejecting many of their hippie children as those children rejected the Cold War. These are the people who switched from Kennedy to Nixon and became the backbone of the modern Republican Party. They are the people who defined the suburbs and the Sunbelt retirement.

Gone. There is serious political significance in this moment, as we may be about to elect a President whose grandmother, not mother but grandmother, was part of that generation. But I can't do more than note it here. My heart is too heavy for that.

Doc B and Doc C

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 42 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

There are two sides to politics, science and art.

The science of politics uses data to show trends or identify change as it is happening. Data can either be a snapshot in time or a rear-view mirror.

The art of politics is based on ideas, and what rules exist are focused on how those ideas play off one another. It's inexact but more human. It's focused on the present but its study is the future.

This week Earl Black, the Herbert Autrey Professor of Political Science at Rice (and brother of Emory's Merle Black) came to Atlanta and plugged their new book, "Divided America," to the alums. It was a great chance to listen to a fine political scientist, and to see the old undergrads again.

The Blacks' book is based on hard data and clear trend lines. The most important trend is a transformation of the political parties into firm ideological coalitions, with the drift of white Christians to the Republicans balanced neatly against the move of "non-Christian whites" and minorities to the Democrats. Thus our political system is finely balanced, and increasingly resistant to consensus, he said.

No Statute of Limitations on Bush Era

This is addressed to all my liberal friends who say Bush is "going to get away with it," that the abuses of this era will be swept under the rug while W and his buddies go off to Dallas and plot a counter-attack on the Constitution.

There is no statute of limitations here.

Exhibit A from the BBC. A Spanish judge has launched a criminal investigation into the abuses of the Franco era. Francisco Franco, as SNL fans of a certain age know well, died in 1975 and is still dead.

The point is, again, that there is no statute of limitations on war crimes. There is no statute of limitations on torture. And there is no way on Earth that a war criminal can immunize him against this reality.

You can't write a "signing statement" that absolves you. You can't just pardon everyone around you and avoid the International Criminal Court forever, especially as we enter an era where international law is becoming increasingly important.

Saddam tried that. Milosevic tried that. Fat lot of good it did either one of them.

Where I Am To Obama's Left

It's the War Against Oil.

Sen. Obama has couched his energy policy solely in terms of energy independence, specifically "independence from MidEast oil."  Since a lot of our oil comes from outside the Middle East (Nigeria, Venezuela and Mexico are all major suppliers) this makes his10 year  goals truly modest.

More important, Obama is not committed in his rhetoric to really fighting hydrocarbons. He and his running mate, Joe Biden, talk at length about "clean coal," which is a sop to Appalachian coal producers, not a working reality. They talk about "clean ethanol," but ethanol is not clean, nor is it really green. Even cellulosic ethanol systems, using non-food crops as feedstocks, are years away from coming onstream. Heck they're blind enough to support natural gas and offshore drilling, which is a sucker's game because it maintains our dependence on foreign suppliers, keeping their game going longer.

Then there is nuclear. Forget about the arguments over its efficacy. It is undisputed fact that a nuclear plant is most dangerous in its early years of service and its later years of service. Nuclear plants take years to permit and build, even in the best circumstances. You can't get much lift from this in the near term, and the danger from these new plants will be at a maximum just as existing plants enter their most dangerous phase of life.

When it comes to The War Against Oil, Sen. Obama is very much a conservative.

The General Welfare

What we are seeing in both politics and business today is the return of something the Founders understood well.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,^[1] promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Promotion of the general welfare has been distinctly lacking in the generation now fading from the scene. Baby boomers were chastened by the Nixon reaction and we have spent our lives looking out for number one. Our nation, too, has also been looking out for number one, and our domestic policies have taught that the general welfare is merely a calculation, our specific welfare added together.

We now see where that gets us. The banking system has had to embrace the idea of general welfare in order to merely survive, not just within this nation but globally. We have seen this week, at McCain-Palin rallies, where this obsession with our specific welfare can lead us. It can drive you crazy.

So voters are turning to Barack Obama as the alternative, but he seems more like a life raft than the more substantial recovery we need. That is because we don't know where he is coming from, a theme I have been developing here for several years.

Let me explain.

What I have been tracking through my journalism and my advocacy is what might be called an Internet Thesis, or Open Source Thesis, in politics and in business. It is based on the values and myths underlying the Internet, which can be seen this decade in the rise of open source technology.

The Internet works by consensus. It requires a technical consensus to work. Protocols like TCP.IP, the addressing scheme, the way we map numerical addresses to names (like www.danablankenhorn.com or www.google.com), the way in which this browser can visualize for you what I have written as a clear page, with pictures, even video, although it's stored online as computer code.

All this requires consensus to work.

Consensus finds what we agree upon and works outward from there. Competition, by contrast, finds points of difference and works inward. The tech industry has embraced consensus in our time, and this embrace has been extended from the way our global network works into a new business model for software code, and thus another way of looking at our industry, one in harmony with the interests of customers and users.

It is in the difference between competition and consensus, in the difference between our specific welfare and the general welfare, that we find the politics of Barack Obama.