Today it was held in Madrid an outstanding conference of the 2007 peace nobel prize, the professor Woodrow W. Clark. The Rafael del Pino Foundation hosted this amazing event where we could feel the good sense of humor of Mr. Woodrow to expose in the best possible way the dramatic reality of our time with the amazing opportunities we have in front of us to make it possible global change. He focussed on the Energetic problem but with the spirit of interconnection between all the issues that I try to express from time to time in this blog or other arenas.

I’ll try to connect Mr. Clark’s gift of this evening with some ideas yesterday stated Mr. Alberto Recarte, one of Spanish most standing economists and the Internet as a catalyst of all the events and the reflect all this has in a mirror such us Puerta del Sol in Madrid where in this moment 2000 people are behind the rain not criticizing the government, but claiming out loud for a change, somebody listen, we are no longer laid down, we are awake.

Mr Clark is known for having been awarded with the Nobel price along with Al Gore, pushers of the renowned movement about climatic change called «An Inconvenient Truth» that I haven’t seen yet but I’ll do as soon as possible.

Anyway, he stated a big truth, the people who want to work on sustainability have to be good at many aspects of life, not specialist in law or specialists in Public policies or specialists in International Relationships or… whatever, they have to be specialists in all, to see the whole picture and being able to change the reality in all the aspects because it’s all interconnected and to focus on one aspect would be a narrow view that would make us defend a simple aspect of reality forgetting we can be worsening other parts thereof. We need to dive and see the whole iceberg and not only the top of the iceberg or we’ll never be able to address in a scientific and serious way today’s systemic problems.

Said that he stated that Economics has not been a Science but numbers that contrast personal opinions. And he defended it’s not a science because it was unable to predict 2008 crack. He’s working in making economy a science able to predict the future. I really think it is possible, but it’s possible now, now we live in a time that the uncertainty of statistics is no longer necessary because the powerful of computing system permits us to use all the data in real-time. We are the owners of reality, not slaves of our past. If we would want today we could celebrate general elections every day changing governments in real-time with no paper cost. If we follow celebrating general elections every 4 years is because of vested interests because technology permits this kind of unthinkable things (unthinkable 10 years ago). Then making Economics a science is possible, today it cannot be because there’s a huge separation against Macroeconomics, Microeconomics and a big reliance in corruption (The Inside Job) and statistics, but when somebody begin to think holistically and mix all the separated theories together and eliminate, using new technologies, reliance on corruption (laws, politics) and statistics, we can generate really mathematical economic models in the sense that they would be totally predictable. I think that only the new technologies would make it possible, in the past when only the privileged had access to information it was technically impossible, economy was corrupted in root.

Vested Interests has been a concept that has been alive all this evening in the amazing evening with Mr. Clark, huge companies of United States control the System. It was not obvious, but today, It is. We have been presented and hybrid car made in 1904 and the history of Henry Ford using cars working with renewable energies (and we know that in the 50’s we used electric cars in Spain) so why have we been depleting the valuable Earth oil just for burning it? Because the oil was crucial for the jump from the first Industrial Revolution based in coal to the Second Industrial Revolution based on oil, and then the capitalist system based on the capital was controlled by the oil companies owners of the capital and thinking only in the short-term interest of the Shareholders. We’ve talked about several patents made in US but then used in Japan or new economic powers.

In that sense United States and Europe are seeing how their economies collapse as slaves of the vested interests of the Second Industrial Revolution while China or Japan lead the world making long-term plans thinking in new energetic sustainable systems (I’m not going to repeat myself http://aglimpseoflightintothedarkness.wordpress.com/2011/04/30/the-energy-problemsolution/). We have seen the China plans to use solar energy to produce the majority of the Energy. Europe have similar prospects, what’s the difference? China participates in that movement, not letting the market alone. The Laissez-faire is a great disaster, if you let the market alone, the market decides what benefit to the capital owners, for this change, the Government has to put the money, make the R&D and lead the change.  It is not a communist thing, It’s common sense, you can let the Laissez-faire be only where the basis is in a correct way and then an incentives system based on money can improve things, but the transitions between systems has to be done in a controlled scientific and globally agreed way and China is making a good choice, at least in this change.

In the end of the talk, Mr. Clark has focused on more scientific matters, how to create sustainable communities using H2 cells and sustainable energies in the distributed way I defended in other post, where there’s no a huge nuclear energy producer that transport the energy to silly homes, but where we put the intelligence in every home, producing its own energy and storing or sharing the surplus with other homes. Thanks to the modern telecommunication networks we wouldn’t need money for such transactions, we could monitor easily how much energy every home produces and gives away and how much it takes from others and consumes. I repeat, we wouldn’t need money to control the most complex market in the world, we can reduce it all for a basic barter system based on generosity and sharing, controlling the level of generosity and sharing through modern technology just to avoid leeches, parasites, people who try to take advantage from others, that would be the same people who today secretly do the Inside Job that has taken the economic system to collapse, but there’s no more room for this kind of secrets, let’s share information.

I want to join this with yesterday’s Alberto Recarte’s talk in the sense that we are used to see the top of the iceberg and not the whole Iceberg. We see high level of unemployment, but what Mr. Recarte told us, turn an eye to the vested interest of the autonomic powers that don’t permit Spanish law system to work even decently. Let’s see the vested interest of Spanish Union that are like leeches of the System, people who don’t want to share, only to impose a hidden dictatorship on the System. There’s no Company that want to be big in Spain, because being big means problems with the Unions. Unions had an important role in the past, but today there’s no real room for them. We need people who share and not people who take advantage of others.  We then go to the beginning…. if we want to work on sustainability we cannot be in one side, defending Unions, defending politics, defending workers, defending entrepreneurs,… we have to see the whole picture. We need everybody to be specialist in everything, everybody to understand everything. Today with the Internet and multimedia possibilities that is possible and that would permit a Union member to understand that making harm to the entrepreneurs they make harm to themselves because they would see a big interconnection. The same applies to an entrepreneur taking advantage of his or her employees, in the end it would have a boomerang effect.

I think that if you see what it’s behind this lines, you can see that Internet and the modern computing and telecommunications technologies are necessary to make it easy to see all those interrelations that in the past have been difficult to see and the States have to finance the necessary simplification of the system possible only with intense use of new information technologies. They have to finance the change that possibly will end with the System itself as we know because Society claims for a change to a modern economic system.

And now I go to give a personal opinion about Madrid 15M movement, and Egypt and Libia. Because the underlying energy is the same in any case. I like a lot Madrid President but I think She made a mistake stating it’s not the same, because it is the same. In Spain we are not claiming for democracy, but for a change as we are under another hidden  dictatorship. In Egypt, the change comes at the same time a dictator falls. But what is behind? … People are awaken because of the access to information. Wikileaks effect was not about making US ashamed of its secrets but about making it clear that the scary states that control all, the CIA, the FBI, the Spanish CNI, they don’t know nothing, their powers are very limited, and they have had power because people were really ignorant and people were very easy to control. With the Internet people have access to all information on real-time and with Wikileaks people realize that governments are extremely weak and they realize of one more important thing, they are the owners of their lands, and they don’t need to be slaves of dictatorships (evident ones or hidden ones) and people begin to claim for democracy, but a real democracy in where people really have the control and not just the political elite.

This has been utopia until now, now it is not utopia, it is just laziness. We have a very democratic system in Switzerland where almost everything has to be voted by citizens. Today with electronic ID’s and Internet 2.0 technologies it is automatic to publicly vote every decision, today more than ever in modern history, people can talk.

To sum up, changes are necessary and with people like Woodrow W. Clark II change is easy and possible. We just need to use modern information technologies at a Global level to coordinate the change and I’d focus the change in several mainstays:

– Sustainability as the basis of economy (it has a lot to do with environment and R&D)

– Extreme focus on human rights without forgetting the obligation to share.

– Real Democracy based on the intensive use of new information technologies.

Peace