A European standard of living. •

Over here and there we’re working on raising up the standard of living… the same project. “How do we do it.” But it’s political, childish, obstinate, neurotic, compared to how to live gently — or we could call them “stealth externalities,” humans with the footprint of a bird? — so the plants and critters have room to eat, breathe, sleep, with new situation.

Maybe our bubble is a macrocosm of the General Motors Ross Perot knew:

In 1984, he joined the Board of Directors of GM after selling his successful company, EDS, to the auto giant. He could scarcely believe how stodgy, bureaucratic, and insensitive GM executives were in running the company.…

Two years later … Perot called the “General Motors system a blanket of fog that keeps people from doing what they know needs to be done.”

Warming up, Perot continued: “One day I made a speech to some senior executives. I said, ‘Okay, guys, I’m going to give you the whole code on what’s wrong. You don’t like your customers. You don’t like your dealers. You don’t like the people who make your cars. You don’t like your stockholders. And, to a large extent, you don’t like one another. For this company to win, we’re going to have to love our customers. We’re going to have to stop fretting about dealers who make too much money and hope they make $1 billion a year though us. The guys on the factory floor are the salt of the earth — not mad-dog, rabid, burn-the-plant-down radicals. And all this sniping at one another — the financial guys vs. the cars guys — is terribly destructive.’”

Now construct the “versus” to pit every high-impact human specialty against all others, and make the stakeholders everything alive, and you basically got it.

GM could only collapse. Leveraged themselves to death to prop up their favorite story. What do you think about that. What do you think.

What will be the planetary reserve requirements. How much leakage. How much arbitrage. How much risk. Will the solutions be flexible? No. They will be crap. Nobody’s imaginary eggs will be broken. Dean Baker and Dani Rodrik, they’re not fools, and look how smooth the future rolls from their fingers, like a magic carpet, from materials out of nothing. “On rails,” again, the least resistance, the thing you’ve been planning, the thing you always knew would be there no matter how bad you beat and robbed it.

“Oh come on. It’s not like the ocean or the forests are some kind of bank.”

(•) Pretty good half hour talk with Alex Steffen to switch mood. More GM.

(•) OK I see Alex has written what I super-liked from the interview in a longer way.

There are plenty of reasons for despair and cynicism these days. But it’s really important not to underestimate the power of the politics of optimism, the power of actually having better ideas and answers. They are especially powerful when the people opposing us have nothing whatever to offer besides a white-knuckled grasp on a broken status quo. Their only weapons are fear, uncertainty and doubt. It’s time we counter with optimism, vision and examples. We need to counter with a future that works.

Not sure it has to work. Mainly now it has to pay…? I mean if all it has to do is work, people will only “swap” because “if it ain’t broke”/”path dependency” will shape most outcomes…?

In the months leading up to Copenhagen we need to insist on the fierce urgency of now: on why we cannot wait, why we have no more time, why half measures and stalling tactics are no longer acceptable; why, in short, the day for real change has come.

To-tal-ly.

We need to make that point ring in the media, in political debates, in our corporate boardrooms, in our community meetings, in our classrooms, in our churches and at our cultural events. Everywhere people talk about who we are and where we are going, we need to loudly demand actual reality-based realism… and a bright green economy.

This means we will need a lot of support materials and training. Like PM said in the green hypothetical, “The marketing effort took efficiency door to door in homes and businesses, offering a full package from efficiency audits to finance and installation.” Marketing efforts fail when they are based on people bullshitting while not wearing pants.

This summer is the calm before the clamor. This fall, we need to let the world know what time it is.

What time is it.

It’s time to go to the mass of crash-shocked reductionist bankruptees who have no fucking clue how über-money works and tell them we’re gonna solve a semi-invisible gigantic problem by increasing the deficit to approximately the shitloadth power because that’s what it costs to declare dreadlocks the national hairdo.

“Hey, country mouse. ‘Me city mouse.’ Hahaha. Oh! we’ve met? on a talk radio show. How’d that —Aha. You know actually I was hoping we could talk without that media —Wow, that looks like a real gun. —It is. OK. Hey you know what! I forgot to tell everybody about the incredibly big tax break —that you don’t care about because it doesn’t really make a dent in your bills —and I can’t guarantee you a job, oh, come on, I didn’t have anything to do with NAFTA —Seriously? You won’t change unless everything in your fucking life is fixed? What kind of baby —Jesus, fuck, no wonder you live out here in —No! —Oh, God, I didn’t even get to say goodbye to my daughter.…”

Oh, too bad. I was hoping the stereotypes would both die.