Dana Blankenhorn

Run Against The Oilagarchs

The "enthusiasm gap" is as great today as it was 40 years ago, when the anti-war movement was at its height, when Nixon seemed surrounded by enemies, when his cause seemed most hopeless.

He had tried everything he could think of to accommodate the left. He supported creation of the EPA, OSHA, the Consumer Product Safety Commission. But it meant nothing to his enemies, and his friends were turning on him as a result.

So what happened? He won a virtual draw in the 1970 elections, with highlight races like James Buckley (right) winning a minority victory in New York and Bill Brock knocking off Al Gore Sr. balanced against losses elsewhere. (It is easier to score gains when you start with a minority, as Nixon did.)

And he learned not to accommodate. He would never again appear so liberal to his own base, and would try henceforth to feed them more than rhetoric.

The Core of the Issue

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 35 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Every political crisis in American history is, in fact, a sign of economic transformation.

Today's transformation is the move from energy defined by resources to energy defined by devices, by technology.

There is plenty of energy around -- from the Sun, from the ground, from the wind, from the air all around us. All we need do is harness and deliver it. This will trnasform all our financial, political and international relationships, so those who depend on the old relationships are fighting back with everything they have.

It's not about mosques or gay marriage or anything else we seem to worry about. All these issues are means to an end. They are pushed by, and products of, the financial strength of the oil power. Follow the money and this becomes obvious.

The coming labor shortage

The papers are filled with stories bemoaning unemployment.

The job market does suck right now. Kids are growing up more slowly and experts bemoan that.

Well here's what the experts won't tell you. The kids are all right. And we're heading for a labor shortage.

Some areas of the economy are already short on trained hands and minds. Health IT, the field I cover at ZDNet Healthcare, has a severe labor shortage. This is going to become far more generalized across the economy over the next decade.

The current unemployment situation is temporary. People who have jobs are being worked harder than ever. It's part of the deflationary spiral we are in -- salaried employees are getting virtual pay cuts. There is also a startling disconnect between the skills many people have, and their location, and the skills some employers need.

These things tend to work themselves out. Fact is there are immense opportunities in today's economy. There is a need for green energy and insulation services not being met. Our infrastructure is crumbling, and that's a need. Chronic conditions and an aging population guarantee big needs for health workers. Getting capital to these opportunities is a short-term problem.

But over the longer run, seen from the perspective of the next two decades, we will have bigger and bigger labor shortages, in all industries, at all levels. Baby boomers want to retire, but there aren't enough younger workers to replace all their roles. And there certainly aren't enough younger workers to clean out our leaking bodily fluids as we head for that great dirt nap in the sky.

If kids are growing more slowly -- and parents who spent the last 20 years scaring their kids about the evils of society deserve a lot of the blame -- that's going to even out. They're likely to live longer. They're very likely to be working longer, because they will be needed, and because the physical demands of work fall with each generation.

So chill.

An Opportunity Agenda

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 33 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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This is the point in any crisis Presidency when the ghouls come out.

The problems haven't been solved. The President seems to be moving too slowly. He's trapped between his need to be the old AntiThesis (Clinton the Triangulator in this case) and the old fading Thesis (Bushism) still practiced in the Capitol. His own troops are dejected. Change is hard.

What turned things around for all past crisis leaders was, simply, an agenda. Setting a course against the true enemy, in defiance of political assumptions, is the test of leadership.

In the current case, that agenda is simple.

The War Against Oil.

As I've said before, a climate bill isn't really a climate bill. It's really a jobs bill. It's also, right now, the hardest bill to get through the Congress. Republicans won't touch it, and many Democrats are wary as well.

The argument is over stimulus. The question should not be how much, but what the stimulus does. A stimulus that doesn't take us in a useful direction is mindless spending. Whether that's in the form of government aid or tax cuts, it's equally mindless.

We need a stimulus that creates stuff.

The last depression was ended by World War II. Republicans love to say that. They don't like to admit that the war was fought at a deficit, although it was. But we don't have to build bombs to win this war. We can win it with plowshares.

But we first have to declare it.

Opportunity Lives Here

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 32 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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More than 15 years after the Web was spun it is still filled with opportunity.

What marks many of today's opportunities is that they're not about machine work. Machine work is the low-hanging fruit of the Web. Machine work has an immense profit margin, and incredibly low costs.

Google does machine work. Its success proved that, when machines face man online, machines are going to win. Yahoo was, originally, a directory, and invested heavily in sites like Geocities and Broadcast.com which required human work to fill them with stuff. Google, meanwhile, invested in machines, in software to parse the Web in various ways, and proved that's the way to the greatest profit.

This does not mean people have no place. It just means profit margins aren't quite as fat.

I have written many times here about the opportunities in my own field, journalism. Many of them still remain. The way to approach them, as always, is from the business side, defining an under-served market, place or lifestyle for which you have passion (and about which you have some knowledge), then organizing that market, and finally offering sellers the chance to meet buyers through entertaining editorial.

This is CNN's real problem. It has nothing to do with what the yahoos who argue about "journalism's failures" think. The channel never really defined its audience, its target market. Fox did. MSNBC (finally) did. So did dozens of other cable success stories. CNN never did -- they said they were a news station, and above all that. Bullshit. No one is above all that.

Let their failure be your guide in your journalism endeavors. And now with no further ado, some new niches for you to profitably explore:

Sheikhs of America

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 31 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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What may appear to journalists, or even historians, to be an ideological war usually turns out, in America, to be a choice between economic interests.

In our time the choice is on the title of this blog. It's a choice between energy defined by resources, which come out of the ground, or by devices that harness the energy all around us.

A new Thesis is born when the crisis leader turns definitively toward the new economy, explicitly rejecting the old. And it's brought on by the old economy seizing political power in an attempt to hang on against the new.

In other words the fight of our time is not between left and right, liberal and conservative, Democratic or Republican. It's between devices (the alternative energy of windmills, solar cells, tidal energy, and geothermal) and resources (coal, oil, natural gas). The former should define wealth, not the latter. And it's the climate bill that matters, nothing else. 

The current situation can be seen in the graph above from the Environmental Law Institute. We're subsidizing resources. We're choosing oil, coal and gas over other forms of energy, through the instrument of government. This is what the President must change if he is to seize the crisis of our time and put our economy on a sustainable path.

Everything You Know is Wrong

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 30 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Here is what you know, or think you know.

The Democrats are toast in November. They may lose the House, even the Senate. Barack Obama is doo-o-o-o-omed because America is a center-right country.

Wrong. Democrats may lose seats but they're not toast. They will lose neither house although majorities may be narrowed. Barack Obama is the closest thing we've had to a shoe-in for re-election (barring assassination) since Ronald Reagan.

Here's why.

It's the Economy, Stupid

The President's problems and those of his party are the result of a lousy recovery from the Great Recession.

But the next few months will show improvement. There will be jobs. Wall Street is heading up.

The reason is that corporate America is awash in cash that's losing value in its vaults and needs to be invested. Even if CEOs just buy back their own stock the value of that stock goes up. Buying each other, mergers, also cause the market to rise. And there are enormous opportunities in technology, in alternative energy, and in new manufacturing technologies, areas where America is a natural leader not just because we're educated but because you can find money here easier than anywhere else. 

Why hasn't the recovery been bigger? Partly because the stimulus wasn't big enough. We know that because consumer prices are falling -- we have deflation. When no one is spending free money, the country that steps up to the plate first wins.

Want proof? Look at Ireland. Under pressure from so-called smart people, they launched a program of austerity, cutting spending in order, they said, to cut their debt. It hasn't worked. That never works in a deflationary spiral. And it won't work here, either.

Not that Republicans really want that. If they did they would gladly foregoe the Bush tax cuts, which are due to expire. Or they would at least demand that tax cuts be offset with spending cuts to balance the books. But they don't think it's necessary. They think tax cuts "always" pay for themselves, even though Arthur Laffer's famous curve was a letter D lying on its back. At s0me point, according to the Laffer curve, lower rates do indeed mean lower revenue.

Even absent congressional action, growth is baked-in. Some parts of the stimulus, notably the health IT spending and broadband money, remain unspent. Companies are already hiring to grab those dollars -- the health IT area actually faces a labor shortage. The Federal Reserve can also act to stop deflation by simply printing money.

The biggest problem our economy faces is a disconnect between what many people know how to do and the jobs we know will create the next boom. The previous economy was about real estate and finance. The next one will be about conservation and green production. Until results start appearing on bottom lines and investment bankers start pounding the table for new growth stocks, things will seem to be bad.

But they're getting better, and it's the direction of the economy in November, not its present state, that people will take into the voting booth.

Go long stocks.

Home Ec for Everyone!

I know. Title sucks. But the idea is right. If you like, let's call the course "Survival Skills" instead.

I actually got this idea from Anthony Bourdain's last book (right). Since getting the standard rich and famous contract with Kitchen Confidential, he has gone through a series of changes. Most recently he quit smoking and became a father. He even lives in the suburbs.

But one thing he wrote in his latest book, Medium Raw, really struck home. Everyone needs basic kitchen skills. Everyone needs to know how to use a knife, a skillet, and throw together an edible, even (dare I say it) nutritional meal. Black or white, male or female, it doesn't matter.

It also occurred to me there are a few other things everyone ought to know before they leave high school. Some basic financial skills, for one thing. What to do when your car craps out. How to hang a picture. Yet for the last few decades a whole generation of people has left high schools without these skills.

And the results are predictable. We were all ready fodder for the Wall Street sharpies. We willingly went to the slaughter pens of McDonald's, WalMart and TGI McFunsters. And now that jobs are hard to come by, now that we really need survival skills, we don't have any.

The New War on Crime

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 28 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Lately I've grown as angry as the gang at Firedoglake.

It happens whenever I turn on CNBC, or read any business newspaper. There is an assumption that the Obama Administration is "anti-business," "proven" when gazillionaires like Jaime Dimon (right) switch financial support to Republicans because of the FinReg bill.

I think most Americans believe Jaime Dimon and his Wall Street pals should be pounding rocks with Bernie Madoff, not pontificating on TV, and certainly not deciding who our leaders should be. I think most feel the same way about BP chairman Tony Heyward.

I think they're right.

Regulation is not "anti-business." Regulation is crime prevention. A properly-regulated market does not "stifle innovation." It is not "socialism." Imagine Las Vegas without casino regulation. That's today's Wall Street.

A center of the conservative ideology that has ruled this country for a generation is that a law that keeps you from destroying someone with a gun must be rigorously enforced, while one that keeps you from doing the same thing with a pen hurts the economy.

A central tenet of conservative tactics is that you attack someone at their strength, or what they think is their strength.

I think we're on to A Clue here.

The Big Dog

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 27 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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One of the recurring patterns of our political history is that the weapons of the previous antithesis must be relied upon to push forward a new thesis, even though the thesis and antithesis have no relation to one another.

Some examples:

• Lincoln was a Whig. He was a great admirer of Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser. Yet his thesis, of union, seemed to be the opposite of what Clay stood for.
• Teddy Roosevelt was a Mugwump. The Mugwumps were "big chiefs," influential and powerful men, who coalesced around Grover Cleveland to fight the corruption of the 1880s. His chief opponents were always other Republicans.
• Franklin Roosevelt identified with Wilsonism. Wilson combined Bryan's populism with an aggressive foreign policy, all supposedly in the name of principle.
• Nixon was Eisenhower's vice president. Eisenhower was the antithesis to the New Deal, accepting its premises but promising a kinder, gentler, more business-friendly version.