Bruce Sterling is one of the brilliant sf authors of the past few decades - and since we all live in a science fiction reality now, his futique perspective is more relevant than ever before...

The political "experts" and, sadly, most of the progressives dont seem to have any clue or vision about our future, and they certainly can't get anything meaningful accomplished - witness the fiasco of Obama's servitude to the military-ndustrial complex and the corporate elite - so maybe turning to the creative class for ideas makes more sense than looking to the pilitical class.

http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/373/Bruce-Sterling-State-of-the-Worl-page01.html

""Making plutocrats more accountable."  Dunno.  In the past decade we
seem to have created two new social classes, unaccountable global
moguls with no regulations, and global unlawful combatants with no
civil rights.  It's either the penthouse or Guantanamo, and they're
both invisible netherworlds out of reach of the rule of law. Both very
dangerous to the rest of us.  Not just that they assault us, but that
we neglect the issues there.

Putin more or less solved his own mogul problem by picking on one
scapegoat mogul and having the guy railroaded into the slammer.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky was as crooked as a dog's hind leg, but clearly
he's in the Russian Bastille there at the pleasure of the state, so
Khodorkovsky's kind of a unique example of a guy who's both an oligarch
and an abductee.  You'd think this was a pretty likely treatment for
oligarchs, actually.  Given that they create so much misery, destroy so
much wealth, and harm the interests of so many other social classes,
why not just car-bomb them?  Russian moguls used to car-bomb each other
with great glee.  The same goes for mafia chieftains -- anybody with
tremendous wealth and influence outside the rule of law ends up in
great fear of others with similar characteristics.

Jailing Khodorkovsky sure didn't make anybody more "accountable" to
the civil population, though; it's just another example of Putin's
political genius for fighting ugly wildfires with dirty water.  The
Russians sincerely love that guy Putin.  I think his policies are
spooky and pernicious, but Putin's so much better than the normal run
of leaders the Russians get that you have to understand why they
genuflect to him.

There are some societies today completely untroubled by moguls, like,
say, Sweden.  You look at all the statistics that technocrats use to
determine where people are doing just great, where society is thriving,
and Sweden's been in the top five percentile for decades.  Sweden does
everything perfectly from a technocratic policy perspective, Sweden's
like Oz, apparently. 

And then you ask Swedes about their future and so forth, and they're
like: "Bring the razor and the bathtub!  When can I die?"  There are
penniless, vitamin-deprived guys in the Dharavi slums of Mumbai who are
upbeat and perky compared to Swedes.

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever
made," as the philosopher used to say."
------------------

"On the subject of geo-engineering, I think it's a crock. We'll never
get there.  They're all techie fantasies, far-out sci-fi notions, Star
Wars physics-style.  The cheapest and most effective method of
geo-engineering is to cut the world's population in half. 

Just a tremendous massacre. That's the genuinely effective
geo-engineering: it's fast, it commonly works, it's been proven
effective for centuries by lebensraum exponents everywhere,  and if you
chose the right tactics and weaponry it might even look like a big
accident.

  You don't have to put on a fascist armband and start ranting for the
public's blood; an effort like that could be quite subtle and covert,
the very opposite of showboat geo-engineering.  "Mysterious deadly flu
in the Congo?  We'd better keep all our health workers right here,
they're badly needed in New York!"

Nobody's gonna sit around watching Copenhagen delegates debating giant
phony orbital solar mirrors if the windmills in Copenhagen harbor are
blowing over  When and if it becomes obvious that we truly need
massive, ultra-costly geo-engineering interventions, that we have no
other choice, then somebody -- likely some traumatized veterans of
weather havoc who are full of Al Qaeda self-righteousness -- they're
gonna cut emissions in half by cutting people in half.  Mankind
wouldn't lack for means, motive, opportunity and eager volunteers.

Genocide has much more proven shelf-appeal than any of these hokum
Rube Goldberg geo-schemes.  It's by no means easy to kill off half of
everybody, but we've already invented a wide variety of ingenious ways
to attempt that, and almost all of 'em are much simpler, more rugged
and more plausible than putting the North Pole under a tinfoil hat. 

You don't see these Gothic issues raised in public discourse much, but
you go hang out with some Beltway thinktank asymmetric-warfare types,
and man, they talk this kinda stuff all the time.  Kind of a Herman
Kahn think-the-unthinkable industry.   "Should the Center for Disease
Control be scanning flu-strains for signs of designed interventions?"
"Gee uh, maybe not, could cause panic... but if we had some
off-the-books funding for that, that capacity could be pretty handy."