People's Primer on Main Obstacle to Self-Governance,
March 28, 2002
Lori Wallach
Lori Wallach has got to be on her way to a Nobel Prize. She has hit an exposed nerve of the corporate system, and illuminated it in a manner that moves tens of thousands. This book, a very short version of a much longer study, is very cogent and well-documented. The bottom line is clear: the WTO operates in secrecy, for the convenience of corporations, and is systematically undermining and overturning higher standards of protections and sanctions related to the protection of children, public safety, and the environment.It merits comment that Wallach (and her lesser known co-author, Michelle Sforza) would never have reached as many people with their thinking in the absence of the Open Media Pamphlet Series. This series is addictive, brilliant, and consistently cuts to the heart of major issues.
Vote on Review
Primer on Key Issues for Next and Future Elections,
March 28, 2002
Juliet Schor
I am just blown away by the quality and utility of the Open Media Pamphlet Series, which brings very high-value thinking to the people in a very low-cost and easy to understand format.Juliet Schor, author of two books on related topics, and a lecturer at Harvard since 1984, does a lovely job, in 64 pages, of hitting on the key issues that voters must address as they move forward in taking back the power from political parties now held hostage by corporations.
Her reasoned and logical discussion of basic premises (sustainability, democractic control, egalitarianism), of key issues in the relations between workers and their corporate employers, of how to achieve environmental as well as social balance, and of the larger global issues including needed changes in federal law, provide the single best primer I have ever seen for anyone–at any level of understanding–who wishes to invest time in understanding what needs to be done to protect future generations who have no one to represent them other than the people.
My highest complement for a book used to be how many pens I broke on it. This book leaps into a new category. I actually had to read it three times, short as it is. It is brilliant, with paragraphs of such substance that multiple readings are needed to “unzip” the implications. This is not an undergraduate text although it could certainly be used as such, to open deep discussions.Among the strategic thoughts that I found most valuable were these: 1) a plenitude of information leads to a poverty of attention; 2) in the absence of time or means to actually review real-world information, politics becomes a contest of competitive credibility (with the Internet changing the rules of the game somewhat); 3) Japan has vital lessons to teach Islamic nations–that one can adapt to the new world while maintaining a unique culture; 4) we are failing to adapt our democratic processes to the challenges of the Earth as well as the opportunities of the Internet.
This last merits special attention. I found in this book an intellectual and political argument for restoring democratic meaning to our national policies. From its evaluation of the pernicious effect of special interest groups on foreign policy; to its explanation (“When the majority are indifferent, they leave the battlefields of foreign policy to those with special interests.”); to its prescription for healthy policies: a combination of national discussion (not just polling), with a proper respect for the opinions of others (e.g. foreigners), the author clearly sets himself apart from those who would devise national policies in secret meetings with a few preferred pals.
Throughout the book, but not given any special chapter as I would have preferred, the author is clearly cognizant of the enormous non-traditional challenges facing the community of nations–not just terrorism and crime, but fundamentals such as water and energy shortages, disease, genocide, proliferation, trade injustices, etcetera.
Operationally, the book is slightly disappointing. Despite the fact that the author has served as both the Chairman of the National Intelligence Council (and perhaps left the operational bit to his Vice Chairman, Greg Treverton, whose book, “Reshaping National Intelligence for an Age of Information” I recommend be read in conjunction with this one), and as an Assistant Secretary of Defense, I did not see two things in this book that would have bridged the gap from strategic reflection to operational implementation:
1) How must we change the manner in which our nation handles information? What should our national information strategy be, to include not only a vast new program for properly collecting, processing, and understanding foreign language materials that are openly available, for but improving our K-12 and undergraduate education with respect to foreign affairs?
2) How must we change the manner in which our nation authorizes, appropriates, allocates, and obligates the taxpayer budget? While noting that we spend 16 times as much on military hard power as we do on diplomatic soft power, the author left this issue largely on a single page.
On the topic of values and accountability the author excelled. Although I would disagree that values by themselves are the foundation of national power (“knowing” the world, in my view, is the other side of the coin of the realm), the author sounds very much like Noam Chomsky with a social make-over–we have to be honest on human rights and other core values, and not act nor permit our corporations to act in ways that are antithetical to our true national commitment to decency and honesty. The section on new forms of accountability and transparency being made possible by changing in information tools and practices are valuable–admitting non-governmental organizations to all bodies; accelerating the release of records into the public domain, and so on.
We learn from this book that the author is an avid admirer of The Economist, that he thrives on Op-Ed reading (I have never seen a more comprehensive use of Op-Eds in the notes), and that he is largely accepting of the World Trade Organization and other multi-lateral groups, most of which have not yet accommodated themselves to the new world of citizen-centered policymaking. As good as the notes are, the book would have benefited from a bibliography. The index is acceptable.
If we part ways on any one thing, it would be that I am less sanguine about any foreign policy, however much it might use “soft power,” being successful if it persists with the notion that we can cajole and seduce the world into wanting what we want. We've done that with Hollywood, and McDonalds, and chlorine-based plastics, and it is not working to our advantage. It may be that America must first recognize its own demons, adjust its global goals accordingly, and interact with the world rather than striving for a grander version of the “Office of Strategic Influence” that recently got laughed into oblivion. We appear to agree that the U.S. Information Agency must be restored as our two-way channel between our people and all others. I would dramatically expand USIA to also provide for a Global Knowledge Foundation and a Digital Marshall Plan on the one hand, and the education of all women on the other (Cf O'Hanlon's “A Half-Penny on the Federal Dollar”).
This book opens the great conversation, and in doing so, renders a valuable service. Missing from the public conversation is the Department of State. Both the politically-appointed and the professionally-trained leadership of the diplomatic service appear to have been cowed into silence by a mis-placed coda that confuses abject compliance with loyalty to the larger national interest. If this book can draw State back into the public service, into a public debate on the urgency of protecting and expanding our most important soft power tools, then the author's ultimate impact on the future of American security and prosperity will be inestimable.
Big Money Buys Poverty and Kills, Citizens Being Looted,
March 10, 2002
Noam Chomsky
This is one of Noam Chomsky's most interesting pamphlets (actually a quarter-size booklet of 78 pages). It has a special relevance and importance to citizens in the aftermath of 9-11 because he directly links our corporate criminality (“Justice Department estimates the cost of corporate crime as 7 to 25 times as high as street crime”) to our national policies against human rights (poverty pays, for the corporate class that strives to liquidate Third World nations in their predatory roving of the planet).He pointedly identifies the U.S. arms industry as being among the worst violators, but even more importantly, points out that U.S. policies favoring our arms dealers are opposed by 96% of the U.S. population. While that number might be high, I believe there is no question but that Washington is being instructed by corporations rather than its citizens on this vital point of policy. It is time for citizens to take the power back.
Chomsky notes that in 1996 the World Health Organization characterized extreme poverty as the world's most ruthless killer and the greatest cause of suffering on earth. This ties in with the United Nations finding that human suffering is now a legitimate basis for intervention, and with George Soro's observation in The Washington Post of 24 February 2002, that “We can't be successful in fighting terrorism, unless we fight that other axis of evil–poverty, disease and ignorance.”
This little gem of a book also includes well-footnoted observations about how nations seek to carry out trade negotiations in secrecy, in part because they are agreeing to overlook if not actively participate in the looting of poor countries as a condition for prosperous trade among the already developed nations.
The book begins and ends with thoughts from Chomsky on the intellectual discipline he founded, the relationship between linguistics, ethics, and action. He begins with pointed observations on how the most horrible crimes are allowed to go without comment because of *self* censorship, and ends by noting that our citizens do not need to be forbidden to speak of these monstrous deeds that our corporations and government are secretly agreeing to perpetuate, because we have chosen to remain ignorant and silent.
U.S. policy today is *not* founded on moral values, and it is *not* representative of the will of the people in so far as it is carried out in secret collaboration with major corporations and in opposition to the minimal mandatory needs of developing nations for water, food, disease, and economic security.
This is not about political ideology–Ralph Nader, the ultimate spoiler, has one thing right: the parties are irrelevant, this is now about the people versus the corporations. Absent a huge popular turn-out *prior* to each election, to make it clear to candidates that they will be held accountable by the people for keeping all trade and other negotiations in the public domain, and for voting on issues mindful of the will of the people rather than their corporate Enron-like paymasters, then we are the ones ultimately responsible for U.S. policy's misdirection.
Edit of 20 Jun 09 to add links (feature not available back then)
This book begins with a very fine introduction by Robert McChesney, who defines neoliberalism as an economic paradigm that leaves a small number of private parties in control and able to maximize their profit (at the expense of the people). He goes on to note that a distracted or apathetic or depoliticized public essentially “goes along” with this, resulting in the loss of community and the rise of consumerism.
Chomsky himself, over the course of 167 pages, points out the damages of neo-liberalism (public abdicating power to corporations), not just to underdeveloped nations and their peoples, but to the American people themselves, who are suffering, today, from a fifteen year decline in education, health, and increased inequality between the richest and the poorest.
Over the course of several chapters, he discusses various U.S. policies, including the U.S. policy of using “security” as a pretext for subsidizing the transfer of taxpayer funds to major arms dealers. The declaration of Cuba as a threat to U.S. national security is one that Mexico could not support–as one of their diplomats explained at the time: “if we publicly declare that Cuba is a threat to our security, forty million Mexicans will die laughing.”
At the end of it all, Chomsky comes down to the simple matter of protecting both civilization and the civilians from their own governments in cahoots with corporations. His observations on the deaths by disease, starvation, and so on, at the same time that billions are being spent on arms which perpetuate the cycles of violence, are relevant. So also are his observations on the dramatic increase in both the extent and the damages caused by increasingly unregulated financial markets. He singles out the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) as an especially pernicious organization whose machinations are invisible to the public and harmful as well.
I note with interest a review of this book that seeks to call Chomsky a liar, uninformed, and a laughingstock among “serious” scholars. I wish to address that point of view kindly. I can understand, when scholarship consists largely of going through the motions, reading a limited number of works, and answering by rote with the prescribed thought, how so many of our allegedly educated people in business and government are simply socially tuned in. I have myself come to the conclusion that Washington runs on 2% of the available international information (and is largely witless about the 75% or so that is in foreign languages), and I also agree with Howard Bloom's observation in Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, to wit, that half one's brain cells are killed off by the time one is an adult, due to normal biological adjustments to accommodate the prescribed social, cultural, and intellectual parameters that are demanded if one is to “get along.” In that light, I view Chomsky as one of our more important vaccinations against premature stupidity among our loosely-educated adult policymakers. For myself, with considerable reading and a 25-year national security career behind me, I find that while Chomsky is repetitious, he is generally meticulous about foot-noting (something that cannot be said for the lazy authors residing in most think tanks, all of them being paid to think along very specifically prescribed directions).
The bottom line for me is clear: citizens must read and think, or perish from the earth as slaves to those who control money. There is only one thing that matters more than money in this world, and that is the vote. In a representative democracy, the vote can be bought with ease *until* the moment comes when citizens realize that they can combine the use of public sources to reach conclusions (open source intelligence) with self-organization via the Internet, with civil action (cyber-advocacy, street-advocacy, communication and voting) to *take back the power.* It is not terrorism that scares the corporate carpetbaggers, it is something much more powerful: thinking citizens willing to spend the time keeping their corporate servants in line.
Chomsky has labored for over fifty years to keep that part of our brain alive that our schools, seeking to train obedient factory workers, have worked so hard to kill. It can be disheartening, to see citizens so freely give up their rights and their powers, but I do believe, that with the The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics (Halstead and Lind), The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World (Rya and Anderson) and other books I have reviewed, there is, without question, a tipping point. The Internet has changed everything-now we need for the people to notice, and act. Chomsky sheds light in a way that no prostituted scholar or preppy business acolyte will respect-but if the workers wish to begin reading for the future salvation of their children's rights, Chomsky is as good a place as any from which to step off into true democracy.
Conventional Wisdom At Its Very Best–Missing the Edge,
March 10, 2002
Gideon Rose
This is an extraordinary collection, conventional wisdom at its very best, and would have to be considered a fundamental and useful reference. It does, however, have a weak underbelly, and misses the edge of truly breath-taking genius.I will sum it up concisely: every one of these pieces adheres to the core idea that that what we are doing in general is adequate, we simply need to do it a bit differently. Even authors who have been brilliant, such as Laurie Garrett, who clearly documents in her book Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health, that the real enemy is bacteria and disease, and the collapse of preventive public health in favor of the more expensive medication and remediation approach, have been “subverted” as it were, in how they are represented here.
We spend half a penny of the taxpayer dollar on foreign aid–we spend 16 cents of the taxpayer dollar on military defense that is useful roughly ten percent of the time. Let me say this in a different way: we spent 32 times more on military weapons and forces useful only 10% of the time, than we do on addressing what George Soros calls “the other axis of evil–poverty, disease and ignorance.”
Several of the articles by folks I admire and respect, are simply off the mark–the article on intelligence, for example, tends to accept the attacks as unpreventable and unpredictable, while failing to note that we have been spending less than 2% of our intelligence budget on terrorism, and that our continuing excesses in technical collection (85% of the intelligence budget) have forced the consistent underfunding of everything else including serious clandestine operations, access to foreign-language open sources, and top-notch analysts who actually have the deep foreign historical, cultural, and language knowledge necessary to make sense of it all. The fact that our intelligence community spends $30 billion a year and more on the 5% of the information it can steal, and less than one half of one percent on foreign language open sources, suggests such a severe imbalance that in a person, this would be called lunacy–instead, we use secrecy to delay a full accounting, and elected politicians who don't know any better tell our citizens that we have the best intelligence we could have had. That is utter nonsense and should be exposed as ignorance at the highest levels about what intelligence can or cannot do.
Others refer to Afghanistan as unconquerable, a view that prevailed within the Administration until Russian President Putin persuaded our President that we could take Kabul before the winter set in. The articles on defense assume that we should spend a bit more on confronting rogue nations, but do not really get into the larger trade-offs, between hard power and soft power, between force and assistance, between state on state and people on people accommodations.
Nowhere in this book, which is excellent and a must read, do we learn of the daunting water shortages that threaten to further destabilize China, Turkey and Egypt, Russia, and other less developed areas already producing plagues, refugees, and corruption. This book addresses terrorism as an annoyance, as something we can deal with if we simply adjust our corporate organization a tad. It does not go deeply into the much larger issues, and rather than suggesting that such readings are available elsewhere (they are not, at least in a single work), I will end by complementing the editors of this work, and suggesting that they go to work immediately on a sequel–only this time, we need a sequel that highlights both the deep conditions of poverty, disease, conflict and ignorance that characterize the world within which we live, and the iconoclastic authorities-most of them not American and none of them “members of the club”-whose views will cause discomfort to those who still think they are in charge.
The essence of this book that captured my attention was not the impact of the West on the Middle East, but rather the divergent manner in which the West separated religion from business and government, while the Middle East generally did not. I would point readers toward two other books: Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, in Islamic Leviathan: Islam and the Making of State Power, has done a fine job of looking at the differing manner in which Malaysia on the one hand, and Pakistan on the other, utilized Islam as a means of legitimizing the state. In the end, both states had to control their fanatics.The other book, by Howard Bloom, Global Brain: the Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, adds value to the very educated efforts of Bernard Lewis in this volume, because it points out that culturate training kills half the brain by the time one is an adult. This is serious stuff, to wit: if religion and culture can embed in an entire region the makings for a sustained collapse of social and economic measures needed to achieve stability and a minimalist quality of life for the population, is it safe for us to stand back? Are we to leave them to their own devices? What must we do to ensure that we *share* some common brain concepts and what will it take for both their educational system and ours to “build for peace” from grade one?
These are complex issues, even more challenging that the more tangible issues of intervention in the face of epidemics, gang wars, genocide, and so on. Certainly we cannot intervene with force nor confront our Islamic brothers, but we must ask ourselves: at what point should we consider substantial investments in both Islamic studies and socio-economic, even ideo-cultural and techno-demographic assistance, to the nations of Islam?
Are they our brother, or not? If we are to respect the universal declaration of human rights, and acknowledge that human suffering is justification for intervention, ideally peaceful intervention, then at what point do we create a national capability for responding to these needs in a manner that is both appropriate to the tangible challenge and consistent with the religious challenge?
In my view, this book is most valuable for outlining the depths of the challenge of modernization in a deeply religious region, and rather than ending on a note of “on your own heads be it,” I wonder if we might not better ask, “what do we need to do differently to find a middle road toward modernization, one that can be accepted within the strictures of Islam?”
