Kenneth Cole weighed in on how to solve the economic malaise in America

Guest contributor Andrew Huff highlighted an innovative new milk jug that may help save the environment

Louise Reid Ritchie contributed a photo from a Barack Obama rally in Oregon

Kenneth Cole Media Marketing Manager Heather Dumford profiled two politically-themed programs on PBS

Marc Schiller uploaded the trailer for a new documentary film about the Amazon

We're in a classic catch 22, not unique in our history. The dilemma is that until we believe the economy has already gotten better, it can't get better.

Until enough of people are comfortable that all is stable and the worst is behind us, they won't feel comfortable relinquishing (spending or investing) their precious remaining dollars. However, until they do, the economy can't get better.

The inverse of this is also true. The economy will continue to get worse if people simply believe it isn't getting better.

There is only one other circumstance I can think of where perception similarly must precede reality, and while it potentially trivializes this message, it's fashion. Unless people who are cool decide to wear something they believe is cool, is it?

In regard to the realities of America's Great Depression (which was about the state of our economy, not our wardrobes) President Franklin Roosevelt addressed the perception issue when he said that "the only we have to fear is fear itself."

So, ironically, in looking to choose our new leaders, it does matter, because he who can most likely inspire us best to feel best about our realities (real realities or perceived ones) as well as about our potential, is the one who can most likely get the economy onto its feet.

We need to remember that the stakes are high, and that it's important to be conscious of for what we stand, as well as in what we stand.

[Image Credit: USA-satellite.jpg by U.S. Government from Wikipedia]

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it (for now).

Days before the Oregon presidential primary I was visiting Portland when I learned that Barack Obama would appear at a rally at University of Oregon. From September 11, 2001, when I saw on TV the second plane hit the World Trade Center, I had dedicated my life to peace. Because Obama had voted against the war, he was my candidate.

So, I stood in line for two hours so I could be among the 7,000 people at the rally.

It reminded me of the 1960s when many people attended political events because people had hope of changing the course of our country and the world. Among the Obama supporters that I met were a tattooed punk rocker, a middle aged African American man and his best friend, a white woman, and people who were there with their toddlers and same sex partners. Since I'm African American and came of age during the civil rights movement, it added to my joy to see such support for Obama in a state that is overwhelmingly white.

I framed this picture to show the diversity of people at the rally, and the themes of hope and change that we can believe in.

Today Michael Kinsley and Conor Clarke launched their website/ social experiment "Creative Capitalism: A Conversation." The cyberspace location will serve as the sounding board for a forthcoming book -- to be published by Simon and Schuster in the fall of 2008 -- which riffs on Bill Gates' January speech on the limits of philanthropy at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The speech, titled "A New Approach to Capitalism in the 21st Century," touted the idea of harnessing the power of free market capitalism and economic self-interest to better the lives of the world's poor. Many great economic minds have signed on as contributors.

Consider all the lost potential of Third World children that never make it to adolescence, thus never bettering the world with their contributions. Leo Strauss, that profoundly misunderstood political thinker, used to say something to the effect of the fact that he was not philosophizing, , per se, but merely preparing the ground for the Burmese philosophical genius of the future who will take up where Aristotle left off. It is an interesting idea. What if that genius of a world-historical calibre dies of cholera in South America, unheralded and unsung? What if the next Stephen Hawking or the next Marie Curie or the next Miles Davis is presently dying in Darfur from the drought?

Can the profit-motive of the free market somehow be harnessed to help the world's poor? It is certainly an experiment worth talking about. And so let the conversation begin here.

[Image: Harvard Business School]

Ronald Reagan once quipped - he always had good writers -- that the eleventh commandment of politics is "Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican." A similar law operates with even more urgency in the continental affairs of Africa. It could not have been easy then for Nelson Mandela, Africa's most respected statesman, to speak ill of Robert Mugabe. It is sort of like airing one's family's dirty laundry in public. But Mugabe's Zimbabwe, which began perhaps with the best of intentions, has veered, horribly, into what can only be properly construed as a nightmarish thugocracy. And when so many lives are at stake, as in the case of AIDS, one must speak frankly, customs notwithstanding.

You know your regime is in bad shape when veteran diplomats like Kofi Annan and the current UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon, men who speak in profoundly guarded sentences, toss around words like "basket case." There is no other way to describe Mugabe's Zimbabwe, broken after 28 years of misrule. Tomorrow's runoff election will be a sham wholly without any semblance of legitimacy. Mugabe's opponent, the noble Morgan Tsvangirai, has withdrawn from the election citing thug violence against his supporters agitated, of course, by the reigning Zimbabwean strongman. The AIDS rate in Zimbabwe is a mind blowing 40%. In the wake of this electoral instability NGO's working in the HIV/AIDS sector have been prevented from providing care to those that need it most.

Now, how about some good news? Zimbabwe, though clearly sick, is in the hour of the wolf. And Nelson Mandela's public rebuke seems to be a tipping point, the straw that broke the camel's back so to speak. Observes The Financial Times, albeit at a distance:

"Something is stirring in Africa. Belatedly, often reluctantly, its leaders are speaking out on Zimbabwe. The rogue president in their ranks, they are coming to realize, poses a threat with the potential to destabilize their fragile continent, already caught in a growing storm.

"...The causes are complex, the faults not exclusively Africa's. Yet far from rising to the challenges, the region's leaders have seemed incapable of the co-ordinated response the crisis needs.

"But change may be under way. In Rwanda, President Paul Kagame is among the first to raise his head above the parapet, joining Botswana's Ian Khama and Zambia's Levy Mwanawasa in a growing band of African leaders who are prepared to condemn a tyrant."

Because of the still sore wounds of colonialism - and the anti-imperial rhetoric of the strongman - Mugabe's Zimbabwe is a problem that can only be solved by the governments on the continent. Western involvement in, say, an illadvised overthrow of Robert Mugabe would only feed into his diseased narrative of colonial power and Western interference as being at the root of Zimbabwe's sickness. Any such maneuver would only strengthen Mugabe's already weak hand. Nelson Mandela's public statements, however, have begun a dialogue about the fire in the kitchen that Africans have been avoiding for quite some time. And that, dear reader, is a good thing.

[Image: Mail and Guardian]