Why America Is Failing?

Timothy Wilken writes: When America was founded in 1776, the North American continent provided relatively unlimited resources.  The early colonists were in the right place at the right time. The right place was the nearly empty continent of North America. Millions of acres of arable land and forests, filled with abundant water in millions of steams, rivers, and lakes and stocked with uncountable numbers of wildlife. This was further enriched with enormous reserves of iron, coal, copper, aluminum, zinc, lead, gold, silver, oil, and much more – all available for the taking. ... However, today things have changed. The North American continent is getting full. In 1776, there were less than a billion humans on the planet, today we are over 6 billion. We no longer have a limitless abundance of natural resources available for the taking. Our world of plenty is being reduced to a world of scarcity. In fact, petroleum already peaked in America in 1971. The world peak is estimated to occur somewhere between 2007 to 2012. ... In the 18th century, Neutrality was a major advance for humankind. The neutral system gave individuals opportunities for great economic success. The birth of capitalistic economics greatly enriched the human condition. Neutral organization was more powerful than adversary organization. Neutrality did work well in the free world for many humans who inhabited it two hundred years ago. But that was then. ... (07/22/02)

Organizing in the Information Age

Barry Carter writes: By definition, the company or controlled economy is public work and public work is bureaucracy. A two-person bureaucracy with one person reporting to another is a bureaucracy and carries the same negative traits as the 5,000-person bureaucracy. As Tom Peters has said, “Any organization with more than four people is a hopeless bureaucracy... On the other hand, at the core of the Mass Privatization organization (the neural net structure) are teamnets or networks of teams. These are virtual groups of partners who are overlapped and interconnected with other partners and teams. They come together, work on projects, disband and reformulate as needed. The relationship that we find at the core of the teamnet is partnership. Teamnets have the intelligence and flexibility of a “mom and pop shop” but with the size power and momentum of a traditional bureaucracy. When we synthesize the subordinate relationship we get a full-blown bureaucracy and when we synthesize the partner relationship we get a teamnet or Starburst or neural net organization. (07/22/02)

British Ships Carrying Plutonium Run Blockade

TASMAN SEA (CNN) -- Two British-based tankers carrying nuclear fuel have slipped through a Greenpeace flotilla of protest craft under the cover of darkness.  A Greenpeace inflatable boat then embarked on an eight-hour chase, before unfurling a protest banner demanding a "Nuclear Free Pacific" on Monday morning. Environmental activist group Greenpeace set up the blockade of 11 boats in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand to protest the shipment of plutonium fuel from Japan to the United Kingdom. ... Greenpeace says the two ships are carrying a cargo of plutonium mixed oxide which is being returned to the United Kingdom after being rejected for use in Japanese nuclear reactors because it is faulty. The company responsible for the plutonium, British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL), said Monday the protesters had recklessly endangered their own lives through the action. ... BNFL says the plutonium fuel pellets on the ships pose no danger to the environment, saying that even if they were dropped into the sea they would take thousands of years to dissolve. (07/22/02)

AOL: Add It Up

Steve MacLaughlin reports that , Bob Pittman's days at AOLTW are over. Let's take a look back at this mess. (07/22/02)