Category Archives: Globalization

Senator Smith of Oregon. The President is wrong and you need to tell him.

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I just sent this off to Senator Smith. Here in Oregon we have excellent representation from Senators Smith (R) and Wyden (D). Both are bright, ethical guys with a global vision. This letter is about the reckless spending and the ill-concieved idea that terrorists should be treated with techniques that most of the world views as torture. Maybe they should, but both our current terror spending and terrorist interrogation practices appear to be counterproductive.

Dear Senator Smith,

First, thank you for your excellent efforts on behalf of our wonderful state. I want to express my opinion on two items related to the war on terror:

* The President is wrong about treatment of terrorists. They *deserve* death in most cases and he’s right we may have a right to harsh interrogations, but world opinion and the opinions of Sen. McCain and Powell should be respected by the President as we face even more global condemnation. We are not an imperial power but we are seen as such because the President has such poor sense of marketing and presentation. He’s leaving a legacy of mistrust and global condemnation we’ll feel for an entire generation, and you must stop this at the Senate level and stop it now.

* ROI is far too low and spending should decrease immediately and dramatically. All scenarios involve risk and we need to absorb more risk to save trillions over the next decade, trillions that can save millions of lives using high ROI means.

You (we) are spending at levels that cannot be sustained, and this “war”‘ will go on for decades. It’s not even clear the current spending has a positive ROI. I think the neoconservative mindset is “stuck” on the idea that the potential threat of a major attack justifies virtually all available resources. This is not true. The EPA and DOT make this type of decision all the time, and appropriately place monetary values on human lives of approximately 5 million per life saved, to justify spending on safety measures. This type of equation should also be used to determine spending on terrorism threats but I get the idea it is not.

Make Marketing, not War. Allocate 25% of military spending to a strategic global marketing initiative.

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Yesterday I learned that the USA is the top donor to 1) Sudan and 2) Palestinian Territories.
(I already knew we were the top funder of the U.N.) This did not surprise me, but I’m always struck by how generous our Government is in areas where we are despised.

I’m not opposed to generosity – in fact I think we should send more money to poor and war-torn areas even if it means raising my already usurous income taxes, but it pisses me off that we don’t get a lot more credit for it because credit for all this generosity is deserved and, far more importantly, it is a strategic imperative in the fight against those who fight against us. I doubt the Palestinian or North Korean kids eating food provided by the USA are even aware of the source. They should be.

Given that the results of the “wars on terror” all over the globe are yielding dubious results – perhaps even solidifying the resolve of a new generation of “America Haters” – I propose we do what any good business would do at a time like this. We should reallocate our dubious spending toward something more likely to yield positive results.

My proposal is to establish a highly funded global marketing campaign by reallocating military spending to something that works better. The campaign’s goal will be to restore to the USA the type of international respect we had back in the 60’s. Then, Peace Corps folks would go into the hut of an African or Indonesian villager and find a poster of JFK rather than an arms cache. Why? Obviously not a simple equation, but the 1960’s villager saw the USA’s prosperity and and global influence as a blueprint for their own future prosperity and freedom. Now, a generation later, that villager is more likely to see the USA as exploiting him far more than offering hope.

The sad irony is that exploitation of poor countries is largely a mythology concocted by left wing intellectuals to justify their narrow world view that corporations don’t work well to raise the standards for most of the participants in societies that embrace the corporate capitalist model of development. Corporations do raise standards, and excellent examples abound of the contrast between non-corporate and corporate models of development.

The South Korean villager did in fact become very prosperous and lives in a society with a very high standard of living and reasonable freedoms, while his brother in North Korea struggles just to eat. The poverty in Africa is characterized by a *lack* of corporate capitalist participation, not by an excess amount of it as we’d expect with a “USA as exploiter” world view.
Cuba? Isn’t that the same guy in charge who has been there for forty five years? Has Cuba thrived by pulling themselves out of the corporate capitalist game for half a century? Hardly.

This is not to suggest that there is not exploitation by US corporations. There are plenty of examples, and one person’s exploitation may be seen by someone less fortunate as a road to prosperity. However I’d suggest that most forms of “capitalistic exploitation” are the exception not the rule, partly for the entirely selfish reason that the capitalist model seeks higher profits and this requires more consumers living at higher standards. Global prosperity is not a zero sum economic game, and in this fact lies the key to the success of the corporate capitalist model of development and the bankruptcy of most socialist paradigms.

Thanks to forces of “negative marketing” from self-serving and corrupt Governments, combined with many legitimate grievances against the USA’s imperial stance in global politics, the USA’s reputation appears at an all time low. Strategically this is leading to more terror and more terrorists. If we continue to respond militarily we 1) continue to kill innocent people, our own soldiers, and destroy infrastucture and 2) expend resources that could be put to better use.

Better use? Marketing the USA as a friend not an enemy.

Budget: $109,825,000,000   (25% of proposed 2007 military spend of 439.3 billion)

The US Military approach has failed to win the hearts and minds of the globe, and this puts us at increasing strategic risk.    We live in the world’s most sophisticated marketing empire and it’s time we acted like it.   Let’s just do it.

Poverty? Cool!

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I really like the ONE campaign because I think it’s doing something other development efforts have failed to do – harness celebrity power and “coolness” into the mix which encourages those who otherwise do not think about these issues to …. think about them a lot and jump on the bandwagon. One is making it “cool” to care about poverty, and I can think of few more powerful forces of change than the coolness factor. http://www.one.org

Hurricanes! Not.

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I’ve been assuming that Global Warming was in fact contributing to an increase in the severity and number of hurricanes, but wondering if the alarmists had been exaggerating the effects for psychological effect. But here is the NOAA Hurricane data and this more recent NOAA analysis.  Neither suggest any catastrophes are looming. In fact we may have one of the *least* severe Hurricane seasons on record this year unless some big ones are brewing out there in the twinkling eyes of …. mother nature.

Excuse me but I’d like people to separate the politics from the science. Why is this so hard for *scientists* to do these days? I’m rapidly, and with great frustration, coming to the conclusion that it is because alarmism fuels research and focuses more attention on scientists.

Global warming is clear but catastrophic consequences from it appear to be so uncertain, so ill defined that it would be immoral and foolish to base hugely expensive public policy decisons on delaying warming for a few years.

Let’s try an experiment for a few years.

1) Take $80 billion – each year – from our bloated defense and homeland security budgets.

2) Ignore Global Warming

3) Solve *every major human problem* on earth. (The UN estimates that approximately 80 billion per year would solve virtually all major health, water, food problems).

Steven says I’m insane. OK, but I’m still right.

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Steven Berlin Johnson, the clever fellow who suggested that TV and video games often make kids smarter and we should stop fretting so much over screen time, is now defending the indefensible – mainstream journalism.

Here Steven suggests that all sane people would agree that Mainstream, top-down, professional journalism will continue to play a vital role in covering news events, and in shaping our interpretation of those events, as it should. [emphasis added ].

Well, it should NOT play that role because mainstream journalism’s commercial focus, though natural, is NOT healthy. In fact it’s tragic because the interpretations are so misguided and narrow. Blogs can help fix this, and they will.
I replied:

I think, therefore I’m insane?

Your first point – that professional journalism “should” play something like the powerful role it currently plays is as misguided as a Fox News analysis and simply absurd. Mainstream journalism stinks, and is getting worse. Blogs will help fix this deficiency, and hopefully will replace mainstream superficiality with in depth, smart coverage of complex events.

Although blogs are only beginning to challenge the absurd commercial sensibilities of mainstream journalism I have much higher hopes than you that blogger journalists will prevail over mainstream celebrity journalism which reaches new lows every year. (cf many great mainstream journalists who are impressive but stifled by forced brevity).

Mainstream journalism has fallen very far from reasoned analysis of current events. It no longer pays more than superficial attention to critical news events (e.g. “Oral rehydration therapy saves millions”, “Congo War”, “Global Child Welfare”, etc, etc.

You call US military spending a bargain? I want my money back.

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At a Pentagon news conference I’m watching on TV Don Rumsfeld is explaining to me that with only 3.8% of US Gross Domestic Product going towards military spending nobody should complain since this is lower than back in the good old days of  Mutually Assured Destruction nuclear buildups.

I’m complaining.

Neoconservative hypocrisy regarding Government spending has become far more outrageous than the naivete that continues to characterize liberal notions that Governments are a good environment for the allocation of other people’s money.   They are not, and they have never been.

Political spending, whether in the social or military sectors, is rarely rational spending, and tends to evolve quickly into territorial “feathering of nests”, inefficient allocations, and choices based on conflicting sets of Government priorities. This was well understood by the founders who wanted Government small and taxes low.

Although “fighting terrorism” is a legitimate Government objective, the current approaches are so recklessly expensive it is unlikely they can continue much longer.  Also, military spending does not build infrastructure (often it destroys it), so unless you are truly saving the nation from disaster – a weak argument given the current state of the world  – wasteful military spending has far less favorable impact than, for example, wasteful spending on infrastructure.    However I’m not advocating wasteful liberal spending either.

Alternatives?    Recognize that risk is a part of life, allocate resources rationally, and trust that people will spend their money far more effectively than the neoconservatives have been spending it, or the liberals will spend it when they take control of the bloating corpse of Government spending.

Global Challenges vs Global Warming. An Inconvenient Truth * * *

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I finally got to see “An Inconvenient Truth” On the upside I think Al Gore comes off like the fine, sincere, bright fellow he is.    A movie like this around election 2000 would have given Florida, and the Presidency, to Al Gore.   The film’s creative use of graphics and video is also very impressive.  This is educational media used in compelling fashion and all presenters should take note of this approach which cleverly blends animation, video, and lecture.

Unfortunately the fundamental premise of this film – that global catastrophe is looming just around the corner – is misguided and not supported by the science Gore claims he holds so dear.   As the film suggests, global warming is well established and it has become clear that much of that warming is a result of human processes (anthropogenic warming).   However, the film strongly implies that castastrophic sea level rises and weather conditions are “likely” when science says only that they are “possible”.   Many things are possible and it’s very foolish to allocate resources without addressing “how likely is this to happen?”.

The science Gore abuses to support the wild claims comes mostly from IPCC reports which actually suggest that sea levels will probably rise at most a few feet *over the next century*.  The best estimates suggest that global climate change is not creating catastrophic sea level rises and killer storms.

What is certain is that we have many current global catastrophes.  They are the hunger, disease, and bad water supplies that plague hundreds of millions of people on earth right now, killing tens of thousands of people *daily*.

First let’s solve those problems, which are much cheaper and easier to solve than global warming and have much clearer and immediate positive benefits.

Clear thinking people should work towards prioritizing issues of global concern and then solving as many of those significant global concerns as possible given the constraints of money, politics, and human ignorance.  Drive less?  Sure.   Support wise resource use?  Of course.   We should apply common sense principles to all problems and wiser use of resources is important.   It’s just not the world’s most pressing problem.  Not by a long shot.

Rather than simply jump on another alarmist bandwagon of the many that litter the historical landscape I’d hope folks will ask themselves “If I could allocate a billion dollars to solving some global problems, what would be the best use of that money?”

Need a hint? It’s been done here:  Copenhagen Consensus 

Mechanistic Apocalypse on the way?

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Even if you are not religious and believe the world runs on fundamentally mechanistic principles you need to fear that current global tensions could in fact lead to the type of destruction envisioned by those who hold that an Apocalypse is coming … soon.

Israel could lay waste to the entire Middle east in minutes and it’s unlikely that a broader war with Iran would not bring in the USA and perhaps Europe.

Pakistan and India continue to threaten nuclear exchanges.   And North Korea?   Yikes.

But rather than *prophetic*, I find it  *ironic* that these tensions are more often than not fueled by the recent and rapid rise of thinking and analysis more in line with what was in vogue in 12th century than even the Renaissance, a curious blend of religious fantasy, zealotry, and denial.

Will we as humans pay the ultimate price for our primal notions of how the world works?   Only your primal brain knows for sure.

Myspace vs Congress

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Myspace and other social networking sites won’t be accessible from schools or libraries as a result of  congressional legislation passed a few days ago.   The Myspace ban was a fairly predictable type of response from congress, reflecting increasing concerns by adults who basically had no idea what their children were doing online.

The Myspace ban is very unlikely to have much of an effect on anything since kids, and the predators the bill is supposed to help thwart – probably were not using these access venues very much.   Hopefully the news about this will get some parents to pay closer attention to their children’s online activities, which in general should be supervised far more than they are by all but a few parents.

As a parent I’m more supportive of restrictions and content filtering than most other internet folks, but I think the entire debate is missing a key point regarding a dramatic change in social norms.

I’d suggest that changes in social norms are something like those that happened in the USA in the 1960’s in both scope and substance, but that these changes in morality, personal identity, and social responsibility are “going global” thanks to online activities, online communities, and the explosive cross-cultural connectivity facilitated by 24/7 broadband access and online awareness.

Silly laws like this will hardly put the online Pandoras back in their boxes.   However it will also be funny to hear free speech zealots whining about government intervention which will never have a chance of making truly significant changes.

The ships of sweeping social change sailed long ago and they are powered by exploding global online communities.   Our best course is to look forward to the uncharted waters.