Dana Blankenhorn

Not Yet Begun To Fight

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 36 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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As I noted last week, proof that this is a crisis Presidency is obvious in the polls. (Hey, Tea Party. Two can play this game.)

No crisis President is popular at this point in their term. Lincoln wasn't -- we were losing the war. FDR wasn't -- there was serious doubt as to whether democracy would survive. Nixon certainly wasn't -- "We're all Nixon's niggers now," said George Carlin, and the crowd roared.

Why is this? It's because politics are driven by myths and values, by assumptions of right and wrong. A crisis President, by definition, is elected in rejection of these assumptions, and gradually creates what I call a new Thesis, a new set of myths and values that will define power in coming decades.

So it is today. Every poll I see shows the President and his party are unpopular. They all show Republicans winning. But they don't see the Republicans as popular, because they're not.

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.

The ghosts of hate

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 34 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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One important point liberals conveniently forget is that, despite controlling the Presidency and Congress, they don't yet control the agenda.

The agenda is controlled, still, by the old Thesis. It's only after a new Thesis is validated, as the Nixon Thesis was validated by Reaganism, the FDR thesis by Truman, or the Lincoln Thesis by Grant, that the ability to set an agenda shifts. 

This is what makes life so hard for the leader of a new Thesis. His followers are rushing ahead of him, the media is making every analysis based on the old Thesis, and believers in that old Thesis are going crazy.

Seriously crazy. 

The death of James J. Kilpatrick last week is a good place to start the discussion. Kilpatrick was a conservative in a liberal age. He was an outright segregationist in the 1950s, but had to retreat from that position, as he retreated from others during his career. Ideological offense was not his metier which is why, by the time Reaganism flowered, he seemed antique. 

How does today differ from, say, 1994? It's important to note that Republicans today don't really have a coherent agenda, save opposition. They don't really have an agenda because everything that should be their agenda has been discredited -- tax cuts, foreign wars, "small" government, government as a business.

How can I prove my point to you? It's right here on this page. Just look at the left side.

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.

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.

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.

Antietam Needed

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 26 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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At the heart of every generational crisis is a period where the new thesis appears on the verge of rejection.

Elections, by themselves, don't solve crises. They begin them. They set a political force against serious momentum, bent on transforming the country by tearing at its foundation. The success of the new movement is never guaranteed.

The problems of the time appear intractable. The uphill fight seems endless. Then, just when it's needed, an event occurs that allows the thesis to move forward, that shifts momentum just enough so that the thesis leader gains confidence and moves as he knows he must.

• During the Civil War, this was the Battle of Antietam. (Above, from Matthew Brady.) It was a bloody, narrow victory, which mostly turned on luck, when Confederate orders were captured. But it was enough to move Lincoln toward proclaiming the Emancipation Proclamation, which while it nominally freed slaves only in areas in rebellion, transformed the war from a struggle over commerce to one over human liberty.
• For the progressive era it was the Spanish-American War. It boosted nationalism, made Theodore Roosevelt a hero, and made America a world power, so he could stamp the age with a progressive thesis of slow, steady reform meant to maintain social peace and order.
• For FDR the crisis really came in 1935, when the National Recovery Act was declared unconstitutional. Much of its work had already been done, but the rejection gave Roosevelt an enemy he could focus on, rally people against, so the alphabet soup he created against the Depression might have a chance to change public attitudes.
• For Nixon the crisis was Cambodia. He sacrificed an entire people for domestic political advantage and it worked. The war, and the war against the war, united conservatives and also gave Nixon the image he needed to open China, which in the end may have been his most important legacy.

In all these cases there was one crisis, and one event, threatening the national future. There was one action that served to give the new thesis momentum.

This crisis is not like that. The Bush era didn't leave us with just one legacy, but a host of crises just waiting to explode. The financial crisis. Two wars. Deregulation, and a feeling among businesses they could act with impunity, that the cops would never come.

But at the heart of all is a more existential question, the immediate past demanding to rule the unknowable future.

Just as the assumptions of the Civil War period set the stage for the 1896 crisis, and the slow pace of progressive change made Roosevelt necessary, and the hubris of America's governing power made Nixon necessary, so Nixon-ism holds the seeds of our present difficulties.

A Solution to Your Imaging Problems

I caused big problems, for myself and my employer, back in April when I used an image, with credit, but without permission on one of my employer's blogs.

I have always been more interested in solving problems than causing them, however. Despite my poking at critics, I knew both I and Chris Buzelli are in the copyright business, and believed technology could create some common ground.

The good news, I've found, is that a Web permission engine exists. The folks at Picscout called to tell me they've been in this business for almost a year, and best of all they have a competitor, LicenseScout, which has been in the business a while longer. (Competition is always good. It helps a market grow.) LicenseScout sees its mission broadly -- including all kinds of content -- while PicScout is focused on images. 

The difference between PicScout and a regular photo agency is that everything's automated, and can be integrated with browsers and search engines. For image owners, it integrates with a service called PhotoShelter, aimed at increasing sales of images for re-use. (The picture above leads to this sales page.)

Amy Love, PicScout's  vice president of marketing since September, was kind enough to lead me through it.  The heart of the offer is ImageIRC, which indexes images through digital fingerprints, maintains a metadata registry on the images, and offers an API through which buyers and sellers can connect.

The result is a suite of software-driven services:

• ImageExchange, which identifies images with metadata and throws up pricing information, then handles transactions. (There are currently versions for Firefox and Explorer.)
• ImageTracker, which lets owners of images see who has accessed them, again by following the metadata, and
• ImageQualification, which helps site owners know the status of their images as soon as they are posted. 

What has me most excited is PicApp, a spin-off that not only allows access to license-free thumbnails, but includes meta data aimed at helping sites hosting the images get more traffic. They're pitching it as a free Search Engine Optimization (SEO) service for sites and a tracking system for image owners. There's a plug-in for Wordpress and a Firefox plug-in.

Most of what I have described is a service for owners and users of stock photography, and in fact big rights owners like Corbis and Getty Images are already playing. But Amy said any artist can register to have their art catalogued, free, because once art goes online it becomes an image by default. Artists can either do this directly or through the agents they prefer to use.

There's money here for someone. Reuters signed up with PicApp last month and traffic has been growing smartly as word has gotten around that friction in this market can be reduced.

I like a happy ending, don't you?

The Blitz of the Gulf and the War Against Oil

What has happened in the Gulf, what continues to happen, is not Barack Obama's Katrina. Nor is it anyone else's. It's not Pearl Harbor, nor is it 9-11.

What it's most comparable to, in terms of American history, is the London Blitz.

(I don't like using AP or even linking to them, but the picture on this page, by the APs Charles Riedel, is becoming the Iwa Jima Flag-on-Mount-Sirabachi moment in this disaster, so I've thumbnailed it. Historians know that an earlier group's arrival on that mountain, with a smaller flag, was the real deal to the men fighting there, and the second flag was put up for show. Yet it's that one we remember. As we'll remember Riedel's Laughing Gull. I entirely agree with AOL's Matt Mendolson on that.)

For most Americans the Gulf is distant. This can be hard to believe but it's true. Even here in Atlanta, where I live, the impacts for now are slight. My neighbor won't be heading to Destin any time soon. Beyond that life remains normal.

This is how America was during the Blitz. It was something happening elsewhere and to other people. What most today have forgotten is that, for many Americans of that time, this was highly desirable. War was highly controversial.

What President Roosevelt did, what Barack Obama needs to do, was to mold public opinion, slowly, toward a war footing. The movies which appeared and were green-lighted in 1940 were not all propaganda pieces, as they would become in the succeeding years. But many did take the gathering darkness as their subtext. And in that era, movies were the dominant medium.

Today the Internet is the dominant medium. It is a medium that is very difficult to dominate. Anything with the taint of propaganda is taken with a grain of salt. Yet, as we see time-and-time again in the Middle East, propaganda gets through.

It gets through when the target is clear and the aim is simple. The Administration's problem lies in its targeting.

The oil is not the enemy. Even BP is not the enemy. The enemy is the system that makes this eternal search for oil necessary, and that makes it the path of least resistance for BP's profit.

I'm not naive enough to think that we can flip a switch and create a world of bullet trains and windmills.  But I'm unwilling to accept the inevitability of oil, and all the bloodshed and destruction that entails.

What has people down right now is just this, the idea that we have no choice but to drill and fight, fight and drill, in order to continue our way of life. That's why the President's approval ratings are down so far, I believe, because his sights are set too low.

Raising those sights means creating a political environment in which an energy bill that moves incentives decisively from carbon to renewables is seen as patriotic, as a jobs bill, and as simple common sense, so that any opposition is seen as unpatriotic. In the face of Big Oil the President has been acting as Chamberlain at Munich, pushing back slowly hoping for "peace in our time."

He needs to become Churchill, not against BP but against the system that made this disaster inevitable.