Dana Blankenhorn

Changing Times

Near the end of every period of excess, in American political history, figures associated with the old regime flip. They turn on their old ideas and embrace new ones.

One of my favorite examples is from back in the 1960s. Frank Sinatra sang what became the Kennedy theme song, "High Hopes" and appeared, not just on campaign stops, but at the White House. The embrace of Camelot by the swing era was important in giving the Kennedys an aura of "cool" that played well in Middle America.

This shifted during the decade. Like other members of their generation Sinatra and other "Rat Pack" members (most notoriously Sammy Davis Jr., above, with friend) came to embrace the Republicans. And so did their audience. This shift in attitudes, among voters then in their 40s and 50s, was crucial in building the conservative coalition which still holds power today.

Now, flash forward 40 years.

A Carnegie Moment

Today's announcement by Warren Buffett that he will give the bulk of his fortune to Bill Gates' foundation will go down in history as a major turning point.

The two richest Americans joined forces to condemn the "me-first" trend of the Bush Era and to embrace the idea of working together on behalf of a common good.

It was a true Andrew Carnegie moment.

He once wrote that, "The man who dies rich, dies disgraced." Andrew Carnegie did not die in disgrace.

Buffett and Gates are leavng money to heirs. Buffett is giving some (some in this case representing hundreds of millions of dollars) to foundations run by his kids. Gates has promised to leave his own two children a good stake in life. They won't be Paris Hiltons.

This is very much a political story. Gates and Buffett are single-handedly shaming the move to end the Paris Hilton Tax, which the right continues to call the Death Tax, and which those without a dog in the fight (most of us) call the Estate Tax.

But this is not just about one issue. This is a major statement on behalf of collective action, on behalf of working together against the world's problems.

In other words, it's a statement on behalf of open source.

American Political History In Brief

Regular readers know I have a generational theory of American political history.

Great change emerges from great crises. These crises scar generations, and inform politics through smaller crises. Finally problems emerge that the past generation has no answer for, and a new crisis emerges.

In this post, I want to briefly review U.S. political history in terms of this theory. Consider it a review. I hope to link back here periodically and make this an important chapter in whatever book emerges from Open Source Politics:

We Wuz Robbed!

At least this time we're not alone.

I was prepared this weekend to write a long screed about how the U.S. was robbed in both the Italy and Ghana games (abusive red cards in the first, a bogus penalty kick in the second) until I watched the "octovo finals" over the weekend and saw how commonplace it is.

Refereeing a football match well is as hard as playing in one. So FIFA has created an elaborate mesasurement system for refs, and a hard retirement age of 46. (You will never see a beer gut on a World Cup pitch.) Only the best refs come to the World Cup Finals. They are being measured each game, and the best of the best will be on the field in the last matches.

Yet still we have games like this, and more:

•    A card-happy ref makes a mockery of the Czech-Netherlands game.
•    A dive in the last minute by 10-man Italy wins its game against Australia.
•    Insert your own example here.

There will be more of these.

There is no complete solution. Instant replay might help in some cases, but people disagree on interpretations. A system of challenges, as used in American football, might limit all this, but it would not be perfect by any means. 

Now, what about the U.S.?

What Everyone Knows About Copyright

Current copyright law goes too far.

The protections given corporate copyright owners are out-of-whack with consumer expectations.

So everyone ignores the law. Everyone?

Wall Street Journal: You watch physics lectures and Harlem Globetrotters [on YouTube]?

Bill Gates: This social-networking thing takes you to crazy places.

WSJ: But those were stolen, correct?

Bill Gates: Stolen's a strong word. It's copyrighted content that  the  owner wasn't paid for.  So yes.

Yes, everyone.

More after the jump.

This Week's Clue: China Plays its Hand

The following is the lead story for my free weekly e-mail newsletter,  A-Clue.Com. Subscribe now -- always free.

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Stability.

This is China's card.

Stability made China an economic power during the 1990s. Stability is the "gift" China now seeks to give the world.

At a time when the U.S. is contributing mightily to global instability, other nations have been grabbing Chinese stability as a lifeline. Most Americans have not noticed because stability is quiet. It doesn't make headlines. And, we thought, it didn't impact us.

In The Chinese Century I posited an unstable way in which Chinese stability might be imposed on us. I saw things happening in an American way, dramatically, with big sudden events arising from simple misunderstandings.

In fact it's happening far more subtly, in a Chinese way. Recently, for instance, U.S. markets tanked. So did European markets. So did commodity prices. Analysts on CNBC were saying things like "nothing is working."

Well, something was working. The Chinese Central Bank was working.

How Markos Moulitsas Took Over The Democratic Party

Open source politics isn't just a set of principles. It's a way of doing politics, from the ground-up.  Everyone in an open source community has the same right to speak. Based on the content of users' code leaders emerge, "committers" who can enact changes to the project on their say-so.

In this way a business model becomes a political system.

It wasn't supposed to be this way.

Almost three years ago, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Jerome Armstrong were hired as "Internet consultants" by the Howard Dean campaign and dutifully told those folks what they should do.

Scale the intimacy. That is, don't use a blogging system like Movable Type, which Dean's campaign was using at the time. Instead, use a Community Network System like Scoop (or Drupal) to turn the Blog for America into a massive community, so that as the primaries approached and millions of people sought the intimate relationship the first volunteers had gained from the site, it would scale.

They were ignored. Instead of slinking away, Armstrong and Moulitsas drank their own Kool-Aid. It did for them what that radioactive spider did for Tobey Maguire in Spiderman. It transformed their sites -- Dailykos and MyDD, into super-sites, communities that would scale and grow in value the more people joined them.

All this should be known (by now) at The New York Times, which concocted an unctuous piece of nonsense that the Kos and MyDD sites were "shaking down politicians" when in fact they were doing what I have just described, telling pols what to do and having their advice (on the whole) rejected.

This is not the first time I've recounted this.  I have reported on my knowledge of all this at my old blog, Mooreslore.

Flash forward three years and Dean still hasn't gotten the Clue. His brother's Blog for America and his own DNC blog still use blogging software. They don't scale. But Markos and Jerome do, so guess who's running the Democratic Party clubhouse, and guess who has the best-selling book?

Kos and Jerome.

The Bells Impose A Software Tax

You will now be taxed by the Bell companies for using your software.

It's the old Monty Python Dennis Moore sketch. "He steals from the poor and gives to the rich."

What you'll read in the paper tomorrow is that the FCC has agreed to allow USF fees to be collected for VOIP, but make no mistakes.  Your use of software is being taxed to pay for the Bellheads' new mansions.

The USF stands for Universal Service Fund. It is a 20th century idea to subsidize rural phone service. The idea is that it costs more to run wires out to the piney woods, folks won't do it without subsidy, so urban callers will pay into a fund which rural callers will benefit from.

And if you believe that I have a bridge to sell you.

Megatrends: Why Real Change Always Surprises

Most reporters, politicians, political observers, and businessmen get all they know about change from John Naisbitt's Megatrends.

Megatrends was a ground-breaking book when it first came out in 1984, but the methodology was simple. Naisbitt and his staff collected a whole bunch of stories from the recent past, then extrapolated those trends into the future.

Naisbitt was fortunate to be working in the center of a political era. Trends were established, and change was incremental. The assumptions of the Nixon era, of conflict, narrow majorities dominating, of established enemies (Communism, Big Government) and established ways of dealing with them, were all at their height.

But something else was true. The method Naisbitt used is about the only reliable way anyone has of telling the short-term future. Stock analysts look for earnings or price momentum, and trade based on it. Technologists look at the long-term plans of chip companies, and do their own product planning based on it. Reporters look at their notes, and write based on it. Hollywood moguls look at the latest box office returns and greenlight based on them.  Sportscasters look at who won last year and make predictions for next season based on it.

Reversals are always a surprise.

 

Many liberal bloggers are currently amazed at the right-wing bias of the media, which flies in the face of an assumption of our time's political Thesis, namely that the press has a left-wing bias.  They should not be. The same observers are amazed at how baked-into Washington the political assumptions of the President's party remain, despite evidence that the policies don't work. They should not be. Washington is simply looking at the Megatrends, which are actually microtrends, and ignoring the possibility of real change.

The 1966 Game: Who's Ramsey Clark Now?

Last time we played The 1966 Game we left you with a poser.

Ramsey Clark is now a political synonym for "batshit crazy." Since his time as Attorney General, in the last years of the Johnson Administration, he has been busy defending the undefendable. Most recently he became a defense attorney for Saddam Hussein.

What Clark represents, in terms of the larger themes of history, is excess. His father was a Supreme Court Justice, Tom Clark, appointed by FDR. He was brought up to believe the myths of his father's time. These were the liberal myths of the New Deal, of the Civil Rights movement, of the Warren Court.

People forget, today, how popular bumper stickers reading "Impeach Earl Warren" were in the 1960s. Decisions we have come to take for granted -- Brown vs. Board, Gideon vs. Wainwright, Miranda vs. U.S. -- were highly controversial at the time. And it became a central mission of the Goldwater movement to see these precedents overturned.

This is now in the process of happening. Only now, 38 years into the Nixon era, is it starting to happen. This was the intent of the Founders, to slow the pace of legal change, and to give new precedents time to do their work, outside the political process.

So who is Ramsey Clark now?