Council of Social Advisors to Parellel the Economic Team of the Obama Administration

 

This is an email that was sent by Jim to his network in March of 2009.  Its message is as relevent today as it was when he wrote it. 

Interesting that all of the attention is going into the economic team, yet the recovery will mainly depend on how the people take action into their own hands. There must be an alignment, an interface, between the social policies and the economic policies, but to do that we need parity between the economic push and the social conditions that will determine Obama’s success as a new paradigm President.

How is it that  we do not have a Social Council or a Council of Social-Cultural Advisors that heads us toward empowered social policy, towards enhancing our heart and soul of our communities.  We have the Council of Economic Advisors, and Economists in all kinds of positions coming out of our ears, but no talk of the social partner in all of this. There are no sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers at the White House level who can advise on how to make economic formulas work at the grass roots level.  All are economic advisors, as though economics can be separate from the social/cultural geographic environments in which we livepeople. 

Is this a blind spot for Obama?  He was elected by moving the consciousness of millions of Americans to come out of their deep sleep and take charge of our own empowerment.  We did that.  I am concerned that I do not want to be an email recipient for community organization.  I am a hard core community organizer that understands the dynamics of what has to happen at the grass roots or heart and soul level of society in order for permanent change to happen.

There has to be more.  Maybe this is the time for a Council on Social Advisors or  Recovery to parallel the Economic team.  The Council on Social Advisors or  Recovery could have been all over the Katrina mess immediately building from the ground up through the organization of the informal networks that still existed and proliferate the New Orleans cultures.  This would have generated a recovery of family and individual enterprise from the ground up,  creating the opportunities for new private enterprise.  This is not unlike what FDR did with WPA, CCC camps, etc.  New Orleans is a city of thousands of private entrepreneurs and to have missed using them as the base for recovery is stunning.

Many of our citizens are ill-clad, ill-housed and ill-nourished and to recover from this we will need a social/cultural pathway to leverage the economic processes now being designed in absentia of a social policy. Economic redesign that leaves the social to chance is no solution.  We are more than jobs.  We are a complete social phenomena, we live in villages and neighborhoods, we go to gathering places, we want pedestrian oriented towns, we can make or grow much of what we need, we are individual and family enterprisers, we believe in equity and social justice, we cherish our informal networks for caretaking, survival and cultural maintenance, we are caretakers of each other, communicators, story tellers, and historians.We believe that we should have more say in creating the jobs we will inhabit.  Jobs without consciousness and moral underpinnings are no different from the service jobs that have put many of our citizens into poverty in the last 10 years.

In Basalt and Carbondale, Colorado we have been revitalizing the social capital or heart and soul of our communities.  This needs to happen in thousands  of local communities.  All local governments must restructure to be viable and resilient.  There is no returning to the revenue stream of the last four years.  Therefore the social capital of our towns must be nurtured and enhanced by our governments for citizens to take charge of their own survival, cultural maintenance and caretaking, in a manner that we have never done before.  There is a distinct trend in our society towards citizen-based ecological stewardship, where people are taking charge of their local environments.  We need to work ahead of this trend in order that we benefit from a more rapid transformation from a consumptive economy to an ecological economy.

Regionally we need to think about ideas such as manufacturing our alternative energy hardware-wind mill blades, ball bearings, solar cells, etc. so that manufactured goods do not have to be shipped thousands of miles.  My company has defined ten Culture Units in the United States within which the regional economies and social structure brought into alignment could flourish.  Every region can manufacture the alternative energy hardware that they need reducing the need for thousands of miles of transportation

Time to rethink our social/cultural, economic/political and ecological/environmental integration. It is the social/cultural phenomena  based on human geography that will drive an economy of the future that sees value added and  multipliers that the traditional global model, that Tom Friedman talks about, does not produce.

(see Jim’s blog titled: China and Alternative Energy).