The author's bottom line: not only must we come to grips with how power is managed in every nation and organization, but also we must manage at the *global* level if we are to succeed in optimizing fulfillment at the *individual* level.
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The author's bottom line: not only must we come to grips with how power is managed in every nation and organization, but also we must manage at the *global* level if we are to succeed in optimizing fulfillment at the *individual* level.
This is among the most heavily marked up books I have read in the past four years, and instead of summarizing it in detail, which may cause some of you to avoid buying it, I will simply endorse the primary author's view that social movements are needed now more than ever, for the simple reason that the powerholders are making life on the planet unsustainable–everything they do (think Dick Cheney here) to increase profits, control, and power, is also “increasing unemployment, the gap between rich and poor, violence, ecological collapse, and unsustainability”.
There are four aspects of the book that are especially valuable as we all find ourselves in a “world war” between fundamentalist groups (both Islamic and extremist Americans of the religious right falling prey to neo-conservative doctrine) and progressive individuals seeking the common good:
1) the author's focus on sub-movements, on creating a strategic campaign that specifically embraces each sub-movement as a distinct but coordinated element, is the “aha” factor in leaping forward.
2) the author's specific discussion of negative rebels and how much harm they can do to the larger movement is compelling, to the point of actually suggesting that we need to create a counterintelligence service within social movements to address this. The few violent protesters in Seattle got all the media coverage, and the non-violent mass lost a great deal of credit.
3) the eight-stages of social movements are extremely detailed and the case studies help to explain why the “slump” must be overcome in the fifth stage, when success has been achieved but there is a perception of failure.
4) the importance of having an economic strategy for where the social movement's vision needs to go, is not understood by most presidential candidates. This book is valuable to anyone who would be president, or senator, for it explains not only how to organize and lead a social movement, but how to govern resources to its desired ends after the fact of victory. Real world budgeting is a neglected aspect of leadership during the electoral process.
I would say that this book (together with Tom Atlee's “The Tao of Democracy: Using CO-INTELLIGENCE to create a world that works for all”), is core reading for anyone interested in saving his or her neighborhood, his or her country, or the world at large. The primary and secondary authors are also to be commended for making the point that it is possible to be effective *regardless of who is President or what party is in charge in the capitol*–they emphasize local grass-roots effectiveness that is non-partisan.
Juliette Beck and Nancy Gregory make contributions that should have been acknowledged on the cover. Juliette Beck especially, with her focus on globalization and the sub-movements and stages of the aggregate movement, provides a most satisfactory case study that concludes the book.
New Comment: Oprah Winfrey has replaced Al Sharpton as the leader of black America, and while Barack Obama is a rising star and has already earned my vote, Al Sharpton is still, in my view, an essential voice and spirit. See links below for why.
Black Commentator noted in November that Al Sharpton has assumed the mantle of leadership for black America, and that it is highly likely that he will receive a majority of the black votes, at least in the South. For that reason alone, this book is *must reading* for every Democratic and non-Republican voter.
Below I summarize a few highlights from this rich book that took an afternoon to absorb:
1) Reverend Sharpton is strongest in his articulation of the hypocrisy of America, its lip service to slogans. I take him at face value when he speaks of the need to unite the country again around its values, and when he speaks of the emerging black/Latino coalition that resonates on the street level.
2) He lists some of his role models, and it merits comment that three of the four are pioneers of non-violence: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Mahatma Ghandi. Later on the in book Reverend Sharpton discusses James Brown and Adam Clayton Powell as length, and I found his account of their merits and his lessons drawn from them to be compelling and credible.
3) Fidel Castro comes in for special mention, as do Ronald Reagan and Minister Louis Frarakhan, and I have to give Reverend Sharpton very high marks for directness and accuracy. Others, those with less integrity, might have left Fidel Castro out for fear of the kind of unethical attacks it might unleash against him from the extremist Republicans. I for one agree with Reverend Sharpton, as I agree with his view that the embargo against Cuba should be ended immediately.
4) He is powerful and convincing when he addresses the prison-industrial complex, a complex as threatening to America's long-term security and prosperity as the more well known military-industrial complex. As he points out, prisons are big business, and politicians on pay-offs have every incentive to keep pumping out contracts for major construction and related services including guard employment.
5) Reverend Sharpton is intellectual and emotional dynamite when he describes the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) as an anti-Rainbow Coalition organization, and Bill Clinton (and by extension, Joe Lieberman) as rich boys eager to stay to the right and reap the benefits, rather than true Democrats committed to delivering people from poverty. In brief, Al Sharpton has to run for President precisely because neither the DLC nor Dean are unwilling to reach out to and represent black America in the truest sense of the word. On this basis, I see Ralph Nader's 2000 campaign in a different light–Nader was campaigning for those that the DLC had shut out of the Democratic Process, and Al Gore was too slow to understand that he was leaving a very big crowd out of the big tent.
6) Reverend Sharpton impresses me on the foreign policy front. Although his experience is limited to foreign travels and specific interviews, his intellect and his gut instincts are totally consistent with the 430+ books I have reviewed on national security and international relations. Reverend Sharpton gets it: America has made many deals with the devil, with dictators like Saddam Hussein, with terrorists like bin Laden, and the American people do not realize that 9-11 is in fact the beginning of payback for decades of official US hypocrisy in its international relations.
7) Although very short on the topic, in my special area of interest, intelligence qua spies and secrecy, I give Reverend Sharpton the highest marks. He is the only Democratic candidate to really understand that we need “an intelligence unit that would allow us to really know what's going on out there in the world.” Reverend Sharpton is also committed to allies, investments in nation-building, and strong relationships nurtured over time. He also understands that you cannot threaten those who are not afraid to die suicidally, and that whipping out a bigger gun against them is precisely the wrong thing to do.
8) He focuses correctly on the internal dynamics of America as its greatest area of vulnerability, as the area most in need of attention if America is to be strong and prosperous. He correctly notes that the 30 percent increase in the US military budget in 2002 was *not* about making America safer, but about buying all the things that could not be rationalized before, and at the expense of domestic priorities such as health and education.
9) There are several chapters that offer up specific lists of initiatives that he would support, across many policy areas, and I find them all sensible. This is a man I could work for and follow.
10) I am satisfied that he puts the Tawana Brawley matter to rest with a chapter.
11) His chapters on black leadership, Jessie Jackson, why anti-Semitism is strongest in the Billy Graham-Richard Nixon crowd, and how the hip-hop movement is both wrong to be obscene and yet a major power in waiting, a power that can mobilize youth toward a more Christian vision, are quite fascinating, words that are not to be found anywhere else.
Bottom line, and I say this with the utmost respect, being scornful of most beltway politicians and bandits: Al Sharpton may have baggage and be a spendthrift in some ways, but when all is said and done, his voice absolutely must be fully and consistently heard as America charts its course into the future. Like Pat Buchanan, Sam Nunn, and a few others great voices that may never be President, Rev Sharpton has a depth of intuition, understanding, and experience that he has ably articulated in this book. We need to read it and we need to ask for his views in all major future decisions bearing on the security and prosperity of American's core black community and constituency, a community and constituency that too often in the past has been over-shadowed by new immigrant communities–Asians and Hispanics, for example. America cannot be great if its black community is not itself great. Rev Shapton stamds for this.
See also, with reviews:
Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor
The Working Poor: Invisible in America
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism: How the Financial System Underminded Social Ideals, Damaged Trust in the Markets, Robbed Investors of Trillions – and What to Do About It
Exporting America: Why Corporate Greed Is Shipping American Jobs Overseas
War on the Middle Class: How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War onthe American Dream and How to Fight Back
State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America
Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart
I notice from the tags that those who do not like this review appear to be literate but ignorant whites. As Michael Moore notes, it is the whites that have done the most damage to our economy and our society, and in my view, the Wall Street whites have finally realized the error of their ways, and Reverend Sharpton's views will receive a more respectful hearing, especially if we can all come together to elect Barack Obama as President in 2008.
New comment: Tom Atlee opened a door for me, and because of him I have joined the co-intelligence movement and will be publishing an edited work, COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace, both free in PDF form at OSS.Net/CIB, and on Amazon from mid-February.
I see so many things starting to come together around the world and through books. The Internet has opened the door for a cross-fertilization of knowledge and emotion and concern across all boundaries such as the world has never seen before, and it has made possible a new form of structured collective intelligence such as H.G. Wells (World Brain (Adamantine Classics for the 21st Century)), Howard Bloom (Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century), Pierre Levy (Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace), Willis Harman (Global Mind Change: The New Age Revolution in the Way We Think), and I (The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption), could never have imagined.
This book is better than all of ours, for the simple reason that it speaks directly to the possibilities of deliberative democracy through citizen study circles and wisdom councils.
The book is also helpful as a pointer to a number of web sites, all of them very immature at this point, but also emergent in a most constructive way–web sites focused on public issues, public agendas, new forms of democratic organization, and so on.
Still lacking–and I plan to encourage special organizations such as the Center for American Progress to implement something like this–is a central hub where a citizen can go, type in their zip code, and immediately be in touch with the following (as illustrated on page 133 of New Craft):
1) a weekly report on the state of any issue (disease, water, security, whatever);
2) distance learning on that issue;
3) an expert forum on that issue;
4) a virtual library on that issue including links to the deep web substance on that issue, not just to home pages of sponsoring organizations;
5) a global calendar of all events scheduled on that issue, including legislation and conferences or hearings;
6) a rolodex or who's who at every level for that issue;
7) a virtual budget showing what is being spent on that issue at every level; and
8) an active map showing the status of that issue in time and space terms, with links to people, documents, etcetera.
I cannot say enough good things about this book. If the authors cited above have been coming at the same challenge from a “top down” perspective, then Tom Atlee, the author of this book, gets credit for defining a “bottom up” approach that is sensible and implementable. This book focuses on what comes next, after everyone gets tired of just “meeting up” or “just blogging.” This book is about collective intelligence for the common good, and it is a very fine book.
Five other books (all I am allowed to link):
Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World
When Howard Dean used the shorthand expression “guys with confederate flags on their pick-ups” he was actually talking about what some call “NASCAR dads” and Michael Weiss calls the “Shotguns & Pickups” cluster (number 29 in his first book, number 43 in this advanced and improved edition).
Although others have written about the nine nations of North America (Joel Garreau), various “tribes” across the nation, and demographics in general, Michael Weiss stands head and shoulders above all of them in providing the definitive reference work that is also a form of novel about America.
With this book he also begins the process of extending his ideas to he world, showing how neighborhoods in 19 countries can be classified into 14 common lifestyles, the bottom three being Lower Income Elderly, Hardened Dependency, and Shack & Shanty….billions of people disenfranchised by amoral capitalism, whose desperate circumstances have not quite made themselves felt, yet, in America.
I have only one major criticism of this book, apart from its obsession with understanding people in order to sell to them–it fails to go the extra mile in understanding the future consequences of each group's economic status and consumer preferences. Although the book very specifically addresses the politics of each group (predominant ideology, 1996 presidential vote, key issues), it lacks the transformation analysis that might be helpful in understanding the political economy dynamics of each group, and what might be required to craft a new national progressive consensus that reduces materialism, corruption, waste, and restores democracy, community, and sustainable national security and prosperity.
Regardless of this modest shortfall, this is an extraordinary book, as was the first that I also own (The Clustering of America). Those interested in how these clusters are coalescing into a new progressive movement that is in-front, deep green, against big business, big money in politics, and amoral globalization, might wish to read Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World, Search for “Cultural Creatives” or visit culturalcreatives.org. America is changing. This book by Michael Weiss is a brilliant snapshot of where we are today.
I want to save America from its craven politically corupt and economically bankrupt systems. This book is a first step in understanding who we are so we can transform ourselves, and our world, to create a prosperous world at peace.
Other books I recommend, with reviews:
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
Five Minds for the Future
THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter
Do buy the book–the details are wonderful and every American needs to understand the degree to which most public statments and most public reports about the Administration's policies are outright deceptions.