“The political party, as currently defined in America, feels like an out of date, anachronistic apparatus whose value is in the past, not the present and certainly not something aligned with the future.  If it is to survive, it must reconstitute itself or crumble under its own dead weight.”   -www.evolutionshift.com 5/31/06
When I set aside any personal and political points of view and look at the state of electoral politics and the two party structure in the United States, I absolutely believe the above statement to be true.  As mentioned in earlier posts, we are in one of those historically infrequent periods of transformative change.  As someone who has taken on disintermediation as a subject to explore, I can’t help but see that dynamic force taking place to some degree in American politics.  As a futurist who looks at the larger dynamics affecting the world today to help see with some clarity as to what lies ahead, I think that the next 10 years could be a time of true historic change as far as the state of politics and political parties in America are concerned.  I cannot predict exactly what will happen but I do think there are some interesting possibilities to consider.
It’s not working.
That is the first thing to see and accept.  As written in a post last week, members and voters of both the parties are less than excited about the state of their respective parties.  Substantial numbers of people feel disconnected with the direction, or …

I read an interesting article in the New York Times the other day.  The headline was “New Campaign Shows Progress for the Homeless” and the sub-headline quote was “Cost -benefit analysis may be the new expression of compassion”.  OK, lets read this.

 A little known, formally dormant, office in the Federal government called the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness has, in the last few years, launched a major initiative to reduce the number of homeless living on the streets by providing free housing. Evidently, the catalyst of this effort is a man named Philip F. Mangano, a Bush appointee who has spent five years visiting numerous mayors in an effort to coordinate efforts to get those that are homeless off the streets.  It was Mangano who spoke the above quote, as he uses ‘cost benefit analysis’ to persuade and financially support urban efforts to provide free homes, saying that it is cheaper to house chronically homeless people than to have them repeatedly visit shelters, soup kitchens, hospitals, drug centers and jails.

This entire approach has been modeled on a 1990s campaign initiated by a New York group called the Pathways to Housing.  The process was to get chronically homeless people into ’supportive-housing’ where they are monitored by social workers and offered psychiatric and other services in the hope of stabilizing their lives.  According to the article, in experiments around the country, 80% of such housed people remained in their quarters after a year.  Around the country, cities like Philadelphia and San …

Earlier this week there was a report on the rapid growth of broadband high-speed internet hook-ups during the last year. The numbers are impressive and speak to the widening demographic and economic base of broadband users.

According to a survey from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, broadband adoption increased 59% among households with incomes between $30,000 - 50,000 from March 2005 to March 2006. It increased 40% in households earning less than $30,000 and increased 121% in black households. This is incredible growth in economic and demographic segments that had here to fore been lagging far behind more upscale homes and white households. One of the reasons for this is the drop in pricing for both DSL and cable. Middle and lower income households still lag behind more affluent ones with the $30-50k households at 43% compared to 68% penetration in households with more than $75,000 annual income. Overall, 42% of adult Americans have broadband at home, compared to 30% a year ago. This means that we can expect penetration to exceed the key 50% threshold in the next year.

To put these numbers in perspective, the only comparable periods of new media growth on a percentage basis were the early 1950s with TV and the late 1990s with dial-up Internet. When you factor in the fact that there are almost twice as many households in the US today as there were in 1950, the growth in actual number of households is …