ILF POST

By Douglass Carmichael I’ve been pushed by colleagues looking at science as a culture to clarify my own beliefs about what science at its best is. Their premise has been that science needs a new openness if we are to benefit as fully as we might from it, so here are my [...]

By Douglass Carmichael In the last post I gave examples of how, to our surprise, the father of modern capitalism, Adam Smith, in The Wealth Of Nations, was very critical of the monopolizing power of corporations.In my own reading I next turned to John Locke to try and understand the origins [...]

By Douglass Carmichael In the process of writing a book on getting to GardenWorld (It’s where we really want to go so why aren’t we using our wealth and resources to get there?) I found myself needing to better understand our political vocabulary. It has led me to look at original sources [...]

By Douglass Carmichael The Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan has been writing about the overwhelming complexity of modern society and its impact on human growth. His book is titled “In Over our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life”. Lately he has been writing about the impact on the presidency of modern complexity. [...]

By Douglass Carmichael We hear that education is the answer to America’s problems. But isn’t more education in a tight market merely going to have educated people competing with each other for scarce jobs, driving down the salaries they will get (amplified in part because some of the competition also comes from [...]

By Douglass Carmichael Neither the staff nor any Bank President can do the job now the way it is structured and the contradictory requirements of its mission as both a bank and a development agency.
The World Bank is not what people think it is. It is really the only multinational corporation, [...]

By Douglass Carmichael How can we manage our corner of the world when we face simultaneous crises in

Housing bubble (based on easy Fed money to keep interest rates low)
Pension funds, (invested [...]

By Douglass Carmichael During the last few weeks, with travels East and West coast, across extreme class lines, I find it hard to be in a conversation that is not dominated by Bush – how can we stand two more years? This war, the impact on our image, the impact on the [...]

By Douglass Carmichael The narrowing at the top of the US government to a hermetically sealed small group of people whom we cannot get at needs to be explained.
Sovereignty (not subject to rule from above) has narrowed at the political top because real power has moved from politicians to corporations. That is, [...]

By Douglass Carmichael Bush’s speech was lacking in energy, with almost no rhetorical body language, yet he probably wins in that the issue is now framed as escalation vs. no escalation – a real shift from get out or stay the course. Bush has bought time and saddled the country with inertia, [...]

By Douglass Carmichael Capitalism seems to be central, and I am asking, with the idea of reversing the worst trends, such as income concentration, to change a bit the dynamics of capitalism. But we need to be clear that “capitalists” and the political process they mostly control, are part of the system but not the [...]

By Douglass Carmichael There are some issues post election. Can anything change? Or are the Democrats locked in? For the country will then divide between a war party and a peace party, taking the majority of both parties with them.
The Baker Commission is meeting this week, and both [...]

By Douglass Carmichael When I was divorced, in the early nineteen seventies, I read widely about marriage and divorce to try and understand what was happening to me. I found most of it quite unsatisfying and giving me no insight into the turmoil I felt. I came across a pamphlet by the [...]

By Douglass Carmichael Leo Marx in his still extraordinary gift, his 1965 book, The Machine in the Garden: technology and the pastoral ideal in America , helped lay out the psychological and cultural issues as reflected in American literature read deeply.. William Cronon’s Changes in the land: Indians, colonists and the ecology [...]

By Douglass Carmichael So we are writing in difficult times. Each day it seems we are closer to ME chaos, destructive economic ripple effects, migration woes, and a total failure of governance. Lovelock says that the global warming is enough out of control that we must anticipate the tropical regions becoming uninhabitable [...]

By Douglass Carmichael Bush took 9/11 as an opportunity for defining the world in terms of war when it needed to be defined in terms of economic participation.
As a result we have a very narrow vision for this presidency and an economy controlled by a few [...]

By Douglass Carmichael There exists a political program that 80% of the US population would vote for. It is an issue of a tone and approach more than specifics – though specifics count. People want realistic hope, pragmatism and some serious working to reverse negative trends. What we have been offered – by both [...]

By Douglass Carmichael The standard view is that the country is split between those who want change, the progressives or liberals, and those who want to standstill or go backwards. But the model of change that we are offered by the leadership of both parties, often called neo-liberal economics, has become what Bush means by [...]

By Douglass Carmichael My intent is to lay the groundwork for the idea that there is a platform that 80% of the population would easily assent to. The platform combines the best of progressive and conservative thought in the large territory where, in their modem form, they do not conflict. It basically is an approach [...]

By Douglass Carmichael

There is conceptual confusion in our use of the labels that best fit the leaderships of the two parties, and the labels that best describe the supporters of the two parties. Much of the confusion is because the supporters do not have the values of the leaders. Moreover the President, a “conservative” [...]

By Douglass Carmichael My view is that the centers of power: Washington, Wall Street, industrial centers, and real estate interests (rent and interest on loans), have created a very dynamic but fenced in merry-go-round of activity that is set up in such a way that most of us can’t get on. There is not room. [...]

By Douglass Carmichael To start, a quote “According to Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon of Northwestern University the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution increased by only about 1 percent per year between 1972 and 2001 whilst over the same period that at the 99th percentile rose [...]

By Douglass Carmichael. In the coming weeks I’ll explore the idea that there exists a political program that 80% of the US population would vote for. It is an issue of a tone and approach more than specifics. Though specific s count.. People want realistic hope, pragmatism and some serious working to [...]