Dana Blankenhorn

The 1939 Game

We are now 7 years removed from the Great Crisis that brought us Barack Obama. (We are also no further removed in time from the movie poster at the right was from the end of the war it portrayed.) 

For those keeping score at home, that means we are now playing the 1939 game, as that year provides the best analogy to our time.

In 1939, the world was slouching toward war. The West had returned to the austerity policies, negative growth and deflation of the crisis because bankers were back to making policy, and bankers don’t understand that money is a verb.

The bad guys of the time got this. Hitler ignored the bankers and re-armed his country. So did Japan. So did Italy. They demanded that money be spent, they directed it be spent on arms, and in the course of spending that money the economies of the Fascists grew rapidly.

In our time, bankers have far more control of the world than they did then, so austerity and deflation are more widespread. Austerity rules Europe, it dominates the U.S., and it’s becoming increasingly popular in China.

Only Vladimir Putin is prepared to ignore this reality and put money to work. He has sunk his currency, sunk his economy, but he has spent, believing that aggressive wars to win territory can succeed.

Cyber War in a Gibson Age

Some 20 years ago, when the Web was still being spun, my editor and I at Interactive Age saw the Internet ushering into a golden age of freedom.

(The kid on the right in this picture is me, with my dad, who passed in 1999, at the wedding of my younger sister. Just wanted to see him again.) 

The online world makes liberty binary, we argued. It’s on or it’s off. Economic growth demands that it be on, so it’s going to be on. We became among the earliest cyber-libertarians.

But human nature is not binary. It’s analog. There are degrees of good and evil in all of us. And the Internet, as part of the human world, must respond to that. It’s a misunderstanding of this fact that is at the heart of cyber-libertarian dismay with (even hatred of) the Obama Administration.

The fact is that we’ve entered an era of Cyber War. The Internet has become the focus of the key struggle of our age, between modernity and medievalism. Groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda know that the best-and-fastest way to go after the U.S. and its allies is through the Internet. North Korea has demonstrated this beyond a doubt.

Barcelona Atlanta

One of the most important sports stories in decades is unfolding just miles from my home and hardly anyone is covering it. No one is covering it right.

That story is the Atlanta Hawks, our local basketball team. There are NBA fanatics who know the team is having a grand season so far, the “Beast of the East” at the regular season’s halfway point, with just 8 losses.

But when I went to New York this week and asked folks about the Hawks, they just shrugged their shoulders, insisting the team will “come back to Earth,” implying they’re doing it with mirrors. Maybe, one “expert” said, they will make the conference finals this year.

The 1436 Game

In the year 1436 the Renaissance was just getting started. The Reformation had not yet begun. Columbus hadn't even been born. 

That’s the year we’re now on in the Muslim calendar. The Catholic Church, in this case based in Arabia, reigns Supreme against an Orthodox Church based in Iran.

To modern eyes it all looks barbaric, but it’s in line with Christianity’s own history. As Europe Christianized it also devolved. The Muslim World dominated “technology” and trade for the first 500 years after the prophet, and then entered a dark time of internecine warfare that has lasted from that time to this, with various forces seeking dominance based – at least in part – on how orthodox they could be, on how hard they could make it for “true believers” to consider themselves true.

America Deserves a Raise

One of the good things about losing the Senate is that it liberates President Obama from his habit of trying to placate Congress. He can act as he wants, and say what he wants. Given that the things he says and wants have wide support, albeit inch-deep support, this is of huge political benefit.

One thing he’s free to say now is that America deserves a raise, because it does. So-called Wall Street “analysts,” with their 8-figure incomes, love to bemoan “wage pressures” on the economy, as though that’s the worst thing that could possibly happen. But America has been under wage pressure for years, from the wealthy, and the economy has done fine.

The great historic achievement of this President, history will record, is what he has done for the rich. While the percentage of national income held by the rich fell sharply during the Great Depression, and in fact fell after every panic before that, it has recovered completely since the Great Recession, which this President solved through stimulus and an activist Federal Reserve. This President kept the rich from poverty

The Age of Human Capital

The 20^th century was dominated by resource capitalism. The great wars of that century were all built around a desire of great powers for direct access to natural resources – coal, gold, diamonds, and most especially oil.

The crisis we have just passed through, the one that began with the economic collapse of 2008 and the election of Barack Obama, is the last paroxysm of this old order.

Oil’s control of our economy is fading, just as manufacturing faded in the 1970s, production economics faded in the 1930s, and unregulated monopoly faded in the 1890s.