The way the world is set up, nations are assigned the job of solving the worst human problems and protecting people against the worst threats. There are other ways to organize human power and make decisions that affect humanity, but seven or eight hundred years ago the nation configuration was settled upon, and since then has been sustained and pumped up through ballyhoo patriotism and economic self interest.
The result begins to look like the end of humanity’s ascent, an ascent measured by increasing longevity, health, productivity, creativity, and fun. Now humans confront habitat decay, WMD agony, and debased civilization.
The BP oil disaster is a good example of our vulnerability. Not surprisingly, the nations involved - the United States and Great Britain - are called to account and turn on one another. Britain is blamed for tolerating a corporate monster that exploits natural resources and the environment while eluding safety and pollution regulation, while the U.S. is blamed for tolerating, even promoting, fossil fuel dependency more than any country, and for inadequate regulatory control.
Prime Minister David Cameron asserts that the economic value of BP to the British and American people should earn BP respite from blame. London Mayor Boris Johnson says that “It starts to become a matter of national concern if a great British company is being continually beaten up on the international airwaves.” (Financial Times, June 11, 2010)
The power centers of nations are relatively small coteries of people who constitute their governments, and the monied interests that facilitate their control. Corporate power centers are still smaller coteries, of investors and senior managers. The endangered, affected billions - most of us, in self defense, had better empower ourselves where power is available, which is by uniting the cities and towns of the world. Nations are here to stay, for the foreseeable future, but thinking, sentient, suffering humanity had better not leave it at that.
Showing posts with label WMD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WMD. Show all posts
Friday, June 11, 2010
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Newsweek For Sale
The Washington Post is trying to sell Newsweek Magazine because it lost $28 million last year, with circulation down more than a third since 2000. A journalism professor explains that a mass circulation publication is “just not going to cut it in this highly niched, politically polarized, media-stratified environment that we live in today.” (NYT, 5-6-10)
The Times writer, Stephanie Clifford, comments, “The notion of a cultural common ground that Americans could all share was changing.” Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham observed that “national coherence was still a worthwhile goal...There are not that many common denominators left.”
You said it! We had better figure what we have in common, speaking of Americans and of the rest of humanity as well. May I suggest security as the common ground - security from war, from terrorism, from Weapons of Mass Destruction, from environmental disaster. Plenty of people would agree - question is, do they have enough civic, political spirit and gumption to act on it, to get beyond the supplication of sign holding and marching and reach for power that can counter the vested interests in mayhem.
On display at this very moment are ratification of START and progress on non-proliferation. The nuclear targeted populations have projected no effective voice about Senate ratification or about the NPT five year review conference, though lives by the million, and civilization itself hangs in the balance.
If targeted populations exercised the survival instincts that they would exercise if they were hunted animals in a forest, which they are beginning to resemble, their clamor would batter down every political, monetary, ideological, and historical block to replacing the world of war with a world of enforced law. They might even discover they still needed common sources of news instead of clicking away separately at their favorite web feeds.
The Times writer, Stephanie Clifford, comments, “The notion of a cultural common ground that Americans could all share was changing.” Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham observed that “national coherence was still a worthwhile goal...There are not that many common denominators left.”
You said it! We had better figure what we have in common, speaking of Americans and of the rest of humanity as well. May I suggest security as the common ground - security from war, from terrorism, from Weapons of Mass Destruction, from environmental disaster. Plenty of people would agree - question is, do they have enough civic, political spirit and gumption to act on it, to get beyond the supplication of sign holding and marching and reach for power that can counter the vested interests in mayhem.
On display at this very moment are ratification of START and progress on non-proliferation. The nuclear targeted populations have projected no effective voice about Senate ratification or about the NPT five year review conference, though lives by the million, and civilization itself hangs in the balance.
If targeted populations exercised the survival instincts that they would exercise if they were hunted animals in a forest, which they are beginning to resemble, their clamor would batter down every political, monetary, ideological, and historical block to replacing the world of war with a world of enforced law. They might even discover they still needed common sources of news instead of clicking away separately at their favorite web feeds.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Complex or Neglected?
Today’s Sunday Times has a feature piece by David Segal asking whether society will collapse because it is too complex. Examples of complexity are drawn from the financial melt down, the BP oil spill, and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Seems some professors have been saying that the Romans and other historical has-beens declined and fell due to their complexities, and we will, too. Segal sums up, “There is no point in hoping for a new age of simplicity. The best we can do is hope the solutions are just complicated enough to work.”
I disagree with Segal’s conclusion. The modern public policy imbroglios that he cites are due to policies, laws, and rules being surrendered by the citizenry to private opportunists. The opportunists resort to complexity as they camouflage profits, political reward, ideological crusades, and so on. Instead of a rational system, the outcome is non-functional, jerry-built monstrosities that collapse, explode, leak, and all the rest.
My book, City, Save Thyself! Nuclear Terror and the Urban Ballot concentrates on a single public issue, the WMD threat, but my conclusions apply as well to the screw-ups that Segal cites. I offer three recommendations, and others that flow from these.
First, instead of trying to figure out what we should do today or this year to meet crises, we should think ahead fifty years, imagine a secure world, imagine the essential components of that world, and formulate policies for today and this year that will produce security. One inevitable conclusion will be to substitute enforced law for war as the route to security, after adopting some form of the global democracy that must precede the delegation of international enforcement powers.
Second, instead of playing one’s democratic hand solely in national and state elections, where outcomes are determined by money, media, and the gerrymander, or in lobbying power holders who answer to private interests, some number of concerned citizens, a large number but it would not require a majority, should self-select themselves to fight for their share of power, and to do so in the arena where power still is obtainable, in their cities and towns. Joining NGO peace groups, marching, and writing letters to editors is fine if one has time, but does not produce the power to simplify our security problems (or our financial, or energy, or other issues whose outcomes are in the hands of the self-interested).
Third, instead of serving as they have for sixty years as passive targets in a complex and civilization threatening web of ICBMs and nuclear armed submarines, the cities and towns of the world should form a global security congress of municipalities that would pressure their nations to transform the complex war system into a rational and therefore inherently simpler system of enforced law.
Contributing to our peril is the distrust that professors and media people have for democracy and citizens, which takes us back to self-selection and the necessity to contest for power.
I disagree with Segal’s conclusion. The modern public policy imbroglios that he cites are due to policies, laws, and rules being surrendered by the citizenry to private opportunists. The opportunists resort to complexity as they camouflage profits, political reward, ideological crusades, and so on. Instead of a rational system, the outcome is non-functional, jerry-built monstrosities that collapse, explode, leak, and all the rest.
My book, City, Save Thyself! Nuclear Terror and the Urban Ballot concentrates on a single public issue, the WMD threat, but my conclusions apply as well to the screw-ups that Segal cites. I offer three recommendations, and others that flow from these.
First, instead of trying to figure out what we should do today or this year to meet crises, we should think ahead fifty years, imagine a secure world, imagine the essential components of that world, and formulate policies for today and this year that will produce security. One inevitable conclusion will be to substitute enforced law for war as the route to security, after adopting some form of the global democracy that must precede the delegation of international enforcement powers.
Second, instead of playing one’s democratic hand solely in national and state elections, where outcomes are determined by money, media, and the gerrymander, or in lobbying power holders who answer to private interests, some number of concerned citizens, a large number but it would not require a majority, should self-select themselves to fight for their share of power, and to do so in the arena where power still is obtainable, in their cities and towns. Joining NGO peace groups, marching, and writing letters to editors is fine if one has time, but does not produce the power to simplify our security problems (or our financial, or energy, or other issues whose outcomes are in the hands of the self-interested).
Third, instead of serving as they have for sixty years as passive targets in a complex and civilization threatening web of ICBMs and nuclear armed submarines, the cities and towns of the world should form a global security congress of municipalities that would pressure their nations to transform the complex war system into a rational and therefore inherently simpler system of enforced law.
Contributing to our peril is the distrust that professors and media people have for democracy and citizens, which takes us back to self-selection and the necessity to contest for power.
Monday, April 19, 2010
The Policy We Don't Have
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been in the news the last two days because he wrote a secret three page memorandum admitting that the United States does not have an effective long-range policy on Iran. (NYT, April 18, 19)
The policy that we don’t have as to Iran’s presumptive quest for nuclear weapons is the same policy that we don’t have as to the long term aim to reach zero nuclear weapons world-wide. The missing policy is a policy to replace force based security with security through enforced law. President Obama champions the goal of nuclear zero, but does not dare assert that it cannot be reached by arms reductions and non-proliferation treaties alone, as essential as they may be to assist the process.
Dependable security requires not just nuclear zero but war zero. Before Iran and a good many other nations including the United States will substitute security through enforced law in place of weapons superiority, an alternative security mechanism must exist. This will necessitate the same components as all nations depend on for domestic security - administrative, judicial, and police resources, but on an international scale. And, before it will be safe to empower international law enforcement institutions, global democracy must be erected adequate to make the power holders accountable.
In 1949, just before the Cold War began, Democrats and Republicans alike anticipated the United Nations evolving into such an institution. 111 co-sponsors in the House and 21 in the Senate favored concurrent resolutions stating that it should be a “fundamental objective” of U.S. foreign policy to develop the U.N. into a “world federation, open to all nations, with defined and limited powers adequate to preserve peace and prevent aggression through the enactment, interpretation, and enforcement of world law.”
The co-sponsors included Republicans Jacob Javits, Christian Herter, Gerald Ford, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and Democrats John F. Kennedy, Henry Jackson, Abraham Ribicoff, Mike Mansfield, Hubert Humphrey, John Sparkman, Lister Hill, and Russell Long.
Frantic preoccupation with military force will not permit even the best of today’s Congress Members to offer such leadership. They would be vilified and lose their seats at the next election. This is why the initiative must come from another power base. The only power base in sight unless one controls a media empire or has a billion dollars, is our cities and towns. As the targets of WMD attack by terrorists on in the event of war, they have the right to be heard. They also are within the political reach of citizens world-wide, as national governments are not. Gates is right - we have no policy for Iran. Iran does however have cities and towns that cities and towns in other nations might reach.
The policy that we don’t have as to Iran’s presumptive quest for nuclear weapons is the same policy that we don’t have as to the long term aim to reach zero nuclear weapons world-wide. The missing policy is a policy to replace force based security with security through enforced law. President Obama champions the goal of nuclear zero, but does not dare assert that it cannot be reached by arms reductions and non-proliferation treaties alone, as essential as they may be to assist the process.
Dependable security requires not just nuclear zero but war zero. Before Iran and a good many other nations including the United States will substitute security through enforced law in place of weapons superiority, an alternative security mechanism must exist. This will necessitate the same components as all nations depend on for domestic security - administrative, judicial, and police resources, but on an international scale. And, before it will be safe to empower international law enforcement institutions, global democracy must be erected adequate to make the power holders accountable.
In 1949, just before the Cold War began, Democrats and Republicans alike anticipated the United Nations evolving into such an institution. 111 co-sponsors in the House and 21 in the Senate favored concurrent resolutions stating that it should be a “fundamental objective” of U.S. foreign policy to develop the U.N. into a “world federation, open to all nations, with defined and limited powers adequate to preserve peace and prevent aggression through the enactment, interpretation, and enforcement of world law.”
The co-sponsors included Republicans Jacob Javits, Christian Herter, Gerald Ford, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and Democrats John F. Kennedy, Henry Jackson, Abraham Ribicoff, Mike Mansfield, Hubert Humphrey, John Sparkman, Lister Hill, and Russell Long.
Frantic preoccupation with military force will not permit even the best of today’s Congress Members to offer such leadership. They would be vilified and lose their seats at the next election. This is why the initiative must come from another power base. The only power base in sight unless one controls a media empire or has a billion dollars, is our cities and towns. As the targets of WMD attack by terrorists on in the event of war, they have the right to be heard. They also are within the political reach of citizens world-wide, as national governments are not. Gates is right - we have no policy for Iran. Iran does however have cities and towns that cities and towns in other nations might reach.
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