The Creative Process Forum Forum: The Creative Process

aavans on "Thomas Greco interview and presentations at Auroville"

aavans — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 23:00:45 +0000

http://circ2.home.mindspring.com/Thomas_Greco_interview_2006_march_01Ed.mp3

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2313386777646675470&hl=en

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=8818306664633291890&hl=en

Or you can visit all these links from Thomas Greco's site, http://www.beyondmoney.net.

aavans on ""Green" cities and the real world here in Kansas City"

aavans — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:49:41 +0000

At a time when peak oil, peak credit (see http://www.opencapital.net/peakcredit.htm) and climate change are on the front-burner of any rational agenda worth discussing, it might be helpful to consider the place of what is arguably the most fundamental, dynamic and vital social, economic and political infrastructure on this planet:the city and its region roundabout.

Ah, yes, cities are very important, no doubt, but aren't cities among the things responsible for the present good, ugly and bad state we find ourselves in?

Allow me to humbly join my voice to that of Jane Jacobs and others, such as Kenichi Ohmae, to suggest that our present state of global affairs is driven by empire and by centralized nation-states, both of which are presently dying a death-by-a-thousand-cuts, having bled themselves bone dry to shore up our lamentably defective monetary and banking systems which even in the best of times are in a constant state of crisis. These governments have subsidized corporate and consumer behaviours that no truly free market economy would support. Here in the United States of America we blast efforts to fund mass transit while at the very same time we pour funding into subsidizing automobile transportation. Our federal government subsidizes the cost of lumber and thereby crowds out what would otherwise be cost-effective building alternatives. Agricultural subsidies enable "profitable" food production that must be transported hundreds, nay thousands of miles to their general markets in far-away cities. There are literally hundreds of such examples that one can give. The result of such subsidization is, among other things, a lot of faulty feedback that is monitored by the business community....not just faulty, but murky and overly aggregated. It's tough to determine what the market (that's us, the masses of humanity) truly wants and needs when the data you get is so tangled up by with deficit-financed subsidies.

Cities on the other hand are where real people gather in real places to get real work done. The more people that gather to the marketplace in the city the merrier....the more diverse and self-reliant the city will be in terms of products and services, and the more innovative as well. What might this mean to those who are committed to a green pattern of human development in the cities?

Assuming that people are rational creatures and have something resembling enlightened self-interest, it means that the more the nation-state and the last existing empires on the planet are decentralized and power placed back into the hand of cities and of the people the more likely the people, including people organized in the marketplace, will have the tools and proper feedback to act on their true self-interest. In practical terms this means turning the power of credit creation to the cities rather than to continue to leave it in the hands of our national and supranational central banks. In the ultimate sense there really is no such thing as national trade. Global trade is trade conducted between cities, mostly on the same places on the economic ladder. Global trade is now tangled in the monetary mess created by a few national players that are not really directly involved in the trade for which our currencies are meant to provide relevant feedback.

Therefore, our centralized governments and the Wall Street casino establishment should step aside and let Main Street do what Main Street and the city do best:solve problems, create solidarity and community and generate a constant stream of innovation that allows us to do more with less. In other words, a Green City must have at its foundation an empowered city that values liberty, fairness, trust and justice and that is capable of designing and developing the co-lLABORorative institutions and the checks and balances of interests that allow citi-zens to build trust and to govern and self-organize themselves in an open economy, without compulsory means.

aavans on "What if Obama can't do it all?"

aavans — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:35:28 +0000

This morning we were asked "What if Obama can't do it all?"

Well, obviously he can't "do it all" alone.

On Sept 8th Obama spoke at the Austin Polytechnical School in Chicago and said he wanted to fund 1,000 such schools. It remains to be seen how he delivers on this promise, but what is important is the economic model he was silently endorsing as he voiced his support for this new school. What is so outstanding about this school that President Obama would single it out for such praise?

Austin Polytech is a pre-engineering school operating in the deindustrialized Chicago neighborhood of Austin, a neighborhood I spent a lot of time in the mid-80s. Its African American and Hispanic high school students are being taught not only how to use general and special purpose machine tools, they are being groomed to become business people of the most collaborative and civic-minded kind, based on a model pioneered in the marketplace by the Communist-led government of Emilia-Romagna, Italy.

Morale among these youth is high and they've already been interacting personally with the leadership of business concerns in Emilia-Romagna. Emilia's fruits are sweet...in a region roughly the same population as eastern Ohio or Western Pennsylvannia, Emilia-Romagna has over 100,000 highly networked and collaborative MANUFACTURING firms, and tens of thousands of these companies are worker-owned.

Emilia-Romagna's collaborative economy is and has always been a regional initiative. This initiative was largely the fruit of disciplined urban activism that has been well-executed.

The greatest thing Obama has going for him as the American President is his community organizing background. That background and the campaign he built with it should sustain his leadership....but has limited application to the practical matter of serving as the chief executive of our Federal government. Any US president, whether of the right or the left is constrained by various constitutional checks and balances to govern from a "mushy" center.

Meanwhile, on Main Street, or in my case, Santa Fe Drive in Overland Park Kansas, his campaign runs the chance, a respectable chance, of living beyond Nov 4th and beyond Inauguration Day, and if enough goes well, beyond Obama's presidency. His campaign could result in the most profound grassroots social movement for economic change since the days of the NPL in the upper Midwest. It is my hope that Organizing for America might sustain the process of transforming his campaign into such a social movement.

Though he will be constrained as President of the United States he can continue to transition and lead his transformed campaign in a much less constrained manner than his presidential duties will require. He can do so with the power of organizing members of his transformed campaign to communicate powerful ideas that Americans can implement in their states, counties and cities regardless of what gridlock that may or may not develop in Washington D.C. and quite possibly despite what is going on at the Fed, on Wall Street and in the global financial casino in general.

He can do so because in the real world, the one I happen to pay the most attention to, social movements have already shown how to build both economic and political power concurrently and against such obstacles as adversarial national governments. They have staying power because while they cannot always choose the leadership at the commanding heights of their national political pecking order, they can consciously choose to work on their economic, social and political agendas 24-7-365 in their cities and their regions, much as the Communist Party and Christian Democrats (now under a new roof together, the Democratic Party) have done in Emilia-Romagna over the last several decades. The Communist Party may not have been in power in Rome, but nevertheless the regional party in Emilia-Romagna has successfully built a formidable "high road" counter-hegemonic economy by working out its agenda in the marketplace as well as in the civic social space.

And we can do this in every state and city-region and county in the United States to one extent or another. Once he is President, he can still provide significant leadership for our regional, state and local efforts. But we must understand, we must do the heavy lifting on Main Street, much as Dan Swinney, Carl Davidson and their cohorts are doing in Chicago and much as Gamaliel Foundation has been doing as well. There is only so much Washington D.C. can do, especially since our federal government has bled itself bone dry trying to prop up the banking system.

So states and cities, the next victims of the tsunami of tightening business credit lines and the resulting shrinking taxbase that will be left in its wake have both a crisis and a grand creative opportunity at hand.

And that opportunity belongs to progressives of the right and of the left willing to work every street, including Main Street, and willing to build coalitions with the business communities in their states and cities. The experience of Emilia-Romagna can inform our efforts here in Kansas City.

Nancy on "Is anybody out there?"

Nancy — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 12:39:43 +0000

Hi, guys. I'm new to the forum, and want to know if anybody else is out there yet. I'm not able to get to all the meetings, since I live so far away, but my computer is right here...

I'd love to correspond with fellow listers, to see what's on your mind.

Nancy Merrill Sayed

admin on "learning to use the forum"

admin — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 18:59:14 +0000

I have just downloaded the bbpress script from WordPress, made the alternations to the config file, consulted the bbpress support forum when this forum didn't work as expected the first time ;-), and am now willing to expose myself to your testing of the script.

There are several agendas to The Creative Process Forum - the first is to provide virtual space for dialogue dedicated to exploring humanity's evolutionary freedom and responsibility for creating existence, in other words, "the creative process". I'd set up Creative Process Blog yesterday. People have the opportunity comment on the blog posts, but it just doesn't seem right for a dialogue. Blogs feel like they should be reflective, the forum format feels like it will be more suitable for exchange.

Since there are instructions for integrating the WordPress blog and forum, I will be working on getting that done. Just remember I am more of a 'stewing hen' than a 'spring chicken', sometimes what seems obvious will cause me to have to take a nap to figure it out.

Our lives, (speaking for just Fred & myself right now) are intertwined in organizational efforts The Creative Process, Center for Global Community, and The Collegium Spiritus. Then there is World Peace Celebrations from 1986 to 2000, The Heart Forest, and the Troost Festival. We just can't separate all these out into neat and tidy piles.

I do have another agenda - I have to increase web exposure for creativeprocess.net and the Global PathMarker posters we publish. I developed the Creative Process Educational Posters & Resource Guides pages as a supplement to our posters - if a teacher didn't want our Global PathMarkers posters for their classroom, then maybe I could help them find one that suited their purposes. I personally think I have done a good job, and for a few years Google must have thought I did a good job too. However, at some point people saw how high creativeprocess.net was in the search results for "educational posters" so they 'jacked my code (I mean I could find a search result that looked like it should have been us, click on the link and you would end up at some other place, caught in a refresh loop); also at about the same time Google went public. Between those two circumstances creativeprocess.net disappeared from Google's radar for the search term "educational posters".

So I am hosting the blog and forum on our web site in an attempt to generate a cash flow that will let us keep on providing the Odd Thursday breakfasts, gestalt groups, and spiritual support. Really and truly the business end of The Creative Process is not the only, or the first and foremost, reason for getting the blog and forum up and running, though the ability of creativeprocess.net to generate an income, will keep the heat (or ac, depending on the season) going.