19X More Energy Independence

Let's do the math on the corn ethanol hoax.

For every unit of energy I put into making grass biofuel pellets, I get 14 out = 14:1 net energy.

With corn ethanol the net energy is just 1.67:1

14/1.67 = 8.383 better return on the investment made in grass pellets.

Now consider how the two fuels will be used.

Pellets will be burned at 80% efficiency. Lets say 70%.

Ethanol will be burned in an internal combustion engine at just 30% efficiency.

.7/.3 = 2.333

So the systems advantage of grass pelllets over ethanol is: 8.383 X 2.333 = 19.56X

Solid biofuel in the form of grass pellets, gives us 19X more return on our investments, 19X more energy independence. And 19X more national security than corn ethanol.

So why is it that all of the subsidies etc go the the biofuel with 1/19 the benefit?

Isn't it amazing, the out right stupidity of corn ethanol? It is just a mechanism to transfer and redistribute wealth to ADM and Cargill. It just another example of corporate looting of the public treasury. It also depends utterly on fertilizers made from fossil fuels. Not to mention the virgin water degraded by the corn ethanol process: gallons of water degraded for each gallon of corn ethanol made.

Can we say that there is a pathological condition in this market and its supporting politics?

Your thoughts?

'Good' and 'bad' Taliban

By: FAROOQ HASSAN
The Nation
January 16, 2007

My friend from my Oxford days, and now a Professor and Dean of the Harvard of Kennedy School and formerly the Deputy Chief of the operations of the most sensitive institution of US government in the Clinton administration, and I were analysing over tea after Christmas some important issues of contemporary politics. While talking of the decline of President Bush’s political stock in the US the Dean said: “Nothing disturbs the mind of a politician or the public like a body bag.” He was speaking of this normative generality of common sense as it were a rule of universal application.

However sad as it may sound, this aphorism does not seem to apply to this country. In Pakistan it does not apparently matter how many people get killed so long as the highest in land are well and alive. Not a day passes when there isn’t a blast somewhere in this country but particularly in the areas next to Afghanistan in the two Pakistani provinces of Frontier and Baluchistan. As I see it these issues are likely to emerge as the top matters to affect the current phase of history of Pakistan. This perspective applies to foreign policy as much as in Pakistan’s domestic affairs.

Read the whole column here.

Pakistan, Musharraf & Terrorism

By: Dr. Farooq Hassan

National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, the head of US spying operations says “the leaders of al-Qaeda have found a secure hideout in Pakistan from where they are rebuilding their strength.” He further said that al-Qaeda was strengthening itself across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. He told the Senate Intelligence Committee that al-Qaeda was still the militant organization that "poses the greatest threat to US interests". In his written statement, he admitted that despite world wide efforts of the US, terrorism was still very much in evidence in the regions where despite tremendous sacrifices Washington had even gone to war. Such a claim will be embarrassing for General Musharraf, whom Negroponte described as a key partner in America's war on terror.

Not surprisingly, Pakistan rejected these comments, which are the most specific on the issue yet. Afghanistan has welcomed the comments. President Hamid Karzai's chief of staff, Jawed Ludin, told the BBC that Afghanistan has long maintained the Islamic militants operate from within Pakistan and Negroponte's “statement was refreshing in its honesty”.

But the precise accusation made by him is very interesting. Until now the US has not been so specific about where it believes al-Qaeda's leaders are hiding. Does it indicate an inherent and subtle policy shift may be possible in this regard? A careful perusal of such a determination by the Americans is certainly not impossible. Hikmatyar’s recent admission of helping the al Qaeda leadership escape the US led onslaught on Tora Bora five years ago has to be seen in this context. Without question he remained and may be still have the support of important Pakistani leadership.

Negroponte’s statement which has been extensively carried by the American media on Friday, the 12th of January significantly added that “They are cultivating stronger operational connections and relationships that radiate outward from their leaders' secure hide-out in Pakistan to affiliates throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Europe," he said. "We have captured or killed numerous senior al-Qaeda operatives, but al-Qaeda's core elements are resilient. They continue to plot attacks against our homeland and other targets with the objective of inflicting mass casualties," Negroponte added.

The unusually forthright statement by Negroponte is the first time the US has publicly singled out Pakistan, one of its key allies, as the current home of al-Qaeda's high command. Previously, officials had spoken more vaguely about the group having bases in the mountainous border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan. However, the US spy Chief was also personally kind to General Musharraf by saying that he had indeed been instrumental in handing over key suspects of the Al-Qaeda to the US in the past. "Musharraf is our partner in the war on terror and has captured several al-Qaeda leaders. However, Pakistan remains a major source of Islamic extremism," Negroponte’s submissions the Senate committee continued.

A clear distinction is being apparently made by the US by emphasizing that:

(1) General Musharraf remains loyal to the US interests.
(2) Pakistan, as a State continues to remain suspicious as far as the US is concerned about harboring, terrorism and its chief benefactors.

As such it is easy to understand that all the relevant Pakistani official spokesmen really asserted the role of the “country” rather than that of the current military junta in command in Islamabad. Who accepts such meaningless distinctions for a country like Pakistan is anybody’s guess. In Pakistan whatever the ruling regime wishes seems to occur. Not long ago General Musharraf said plainly that “if the people did not elect his supports, there was disaster in store for the entire country”. He clearly has in his mindset what Louis XIV had in view when he said: “Après’ mois le deluge!” There is no doubt that General has come to believe that he and Pakistan is synonymous!

A statement from Pakistan's foreign ministry said that Islamabad had done more than any other country to break the back of al-Qaeda and that while its security forces continued to pursue remnants of the group, it was wrong to link these to al-Qaeda elements. Pakistan's Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao also downplayed Negroponte's comments as "too general", saying that Pakistan responded to specific information about al-Qaeda members and claiming that the “movement was totally marginalized”. It would see therefore that in the current mood that exists in Washington, the occurrence of a one serious mishap in the pursuit of terrorism could be the harbinger of an alteration of American foreign policy towards Pakistan. I am aware that only this week the US Ambassador to Pakistan said that democracy was Pakistan’s “internal affair”, but I doubt if that is really Washington’s stated objective or a fundamental ingredient of is foreign policy. The tragic rise and fall of Saddam until his disgraceful death is the latest illustration of this point. Until he served the interests of the powers that may be, he remained “acceptable”. People still remember vividly photos of people of the level of Rumsfeld standing in attention in honor of the now defamed dictator! However, how the scenario changed leading to his ultimate downfall was predicated by the avowed accomplishment of a pursuit of “democracy” in Iraq.

So clearly with terrorism now being placed at Musharraf’s door steps, the moment of truth for the General might be nearer than he thinks. With the change of key army personal in Central Command in the US military, Musharraf has to re-convince everyone of has continued loyalty and obedience. How he does so if the accusing finger is pointed towards Pakistan itself and not to him remains to be seen.

He also has the task of convincing he new spy master of the US about his bona fides. President George W Bush last week named retired Navy Vice Admiral Michael McConnell as the new US national intelligence director. Negroponte took charge of the 16 US intelligence agencies in April 2005, but is shortly due to move to the state department where he will become Condoleezza Rice's deputy. Would that mean that even in the State Department Pakistan and or the General may have critical times ahead? It seems to me that both in the Pentagon and the State departments Pakistan had, relatively, speaking an easier time. Now with intelligence services opining otherwise about the activities of the Islamic hardliners or activists, there is the possibility of newer attitude in the US foreign policy towards Islamabad.

While talking of terrorism and Pakistan a word may be helpful about the current activities regarding hostilities in Afghanistan. Recently the head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt-Gen Michael Maples, said Pakistan's border with Afghanistan remained a haven for al-Qaeda and other militants. He was of the view that the tribal areas on the border are thought to be where al-Qaeda leader Bin Laden and his deputy Zawahiri could be hiding. He admitted that Pakistan and Afghanistan share a 1,400-mile (2,250km) mountainous border which is extremely difficult to patrol. Taleban and al-Qaeda fighters are thought to be operating on both sides.

But the buck stops when this is realized that Afghanistan remains within the territorial military control of the Americans. Where they cannot do much except sophisticated guess work in addition to electronic espionage, is to conclude that the real perpetrators have to be there within the Frontier Province of Pakistan. Two points of interest are however with which we can conclude:

(1) Kabul particularly opposes the Pakistani idea of mining stretches of the frontier, saying it will endanger civilian lives. Pakistan has reiterated its intention to fence and mine sections of the troubled border. No one in the world that matters, such as he EU, or UK or even the US including Afghanistan accept this measure which is considered by them to be dangerous and self serving mechanism devised by the Inter Services Intelligence of Pakistan.

(2) An Islamist insurgency spearheaded by the resurgent Taliban militia is at its strongest in the southern Afghan provinces bordering Pakistan. Presently an objective overview will compel one to conclude that except for Kabul most of the southern regions have already passed back to the resurgent Taliban. These fundamentals stem from a proper understanding of the conceptual problem at hand.

Finally a word about history is necessary. Not only the Americans are not familiar with this phenomenon, it is clear that even Pakistan’s General Musharraf seems to be oblivious to these nuances that emanate from such a historical reality.

It is over 250 years since Afghanistan was cobbled together, from many ethnic groups, and two centuries since British colonisers tried unsuccessfully at stretching their writ to India's (now Pakistan's) north-western frontier, where the plains crumple up towards the Hindu Kush. Yet, in both places, a large part of the population is still wedded to Pushtunwali. Some 15m Pushtuns live in Afghanistan, or 50% of its population; and 28m in Pakistan, mostly in NWFP, representing about 15% of the local population there. Most of them are still ruled by their tribal codes, the notable exception or addition being where the rival Islamist teachings, including some of the stringent Saudi variety which is preached by the Taliban are strong and followed. Islamism has rivaled Pushtunwali for centuries; it has often gained prominence, as currently, in times of war. More typically, the two competing ways have cross-fertilized in both in Afghanistan and North West Pakistan, each subtly influencing the other. Whatever the device that Musharraf comes up to finish either Al Qaeda or Taliban with, until this basic fact of the demographics and peoples dynamics is perceived in totality, it is very difficult to realize what he wants to accomplish for what Qazi Hussain Ahmed calls, are his “external masters”.

General Musharraf’s basic inability to fathom such matters is that he is not, in American constitutional terms, a son of the soil since he only migrated from Delhi to Pakistan after the country had been created. This cultural gulf apparently still stands to disable him from comprehending the human strength of the local elements and forces at work in this area and domain. Except for DeGaule or Eisenhower military generals are not good at understanding the realities of an adversary historical legacy that may confront them some day. Even the British, the greatest recent imperial power to exist in recent history in this part of the world, learnt this to its chagrin in Afghanistan when it foolishly fought two Afghan wars in 1841 and 1842. It is one thing to be a good general or to assume unlawful power in a country such as Pakistan. Is an altogether different matter to do well as a statesman?

Dr. Farooq Hassan, D.Phil.;
BA (Juris),MA,M. LiTT (OXON);
DCL (Columbia),DIA(Harvard);
Sen.Adv.Sup.Ct. (Pakistan),
Barrister at Law (UK),Attorney at Law(US).

In search of a people powered narrative for 2008

What will the master narrative for the 2008 Presidential race be? This is a question that has been bouncing around in my head over the past couple of days for several reasons.

In The Decider from “On The Media” this weekend, Paul Begala said, “Democrats tend to be the party of the laundry list. We have four point plans for everything. We have more solutions than the country has problems. Republicans, understanding the media better, because they mostly are still disciples of Ronald Reagan, the master of the media, they mostly tell narratives, they tell stories and stories beat laundry lists every time.”

At a party this weekend, I was speaking with a journalist about what happened with the Lamont campaign. The discussion came down to narrative. The pre-primary narrative was about an unknown challenger taking on a three-term senator and former presidential and vice-presidential candidate. It was about Ned, who he was, what his issues were, and what was wrong with the political system. After the primary, the narrative shifted. It became about Lieberman, how he was fighting to hold onto power. How he wouldn’t give up.

I am reading drafts of a book about the Dean campaign that focuses on the archetypal narrative; Trippi’s role in the narrative, and how email was used to foster that narrative.

Narrative is important, and as I think about Lakoff, I think that perhaps what matters is less the frames, than the underlying narrative. The frames help shape the narrative, ideally, they give it some archetypal structures, but it is the narrative that matters.

So, what will be the narrative for the 2008 presidential campaign. Already, I imagine, people are trying to shape that narrative. When I was down at RootsCamp in DC, there were people from different campaigns there looking for possible staff and perhaps trying to start shaping the narrative.

You see the narrative taking shape already in blogs. Some of it is the superficial horserace components. Who has the most money and the most support early out of the gate? Who is the dark horse to watch? Some of it gets to issues: the environment, the economy, the war. A big component is excitement.

In Washington, one person, knowing I was from Connecticut asked what I thought about Sen. Dodd. I started talking about things like habeas corpus and reforming the bankruptcy law. My interlocutor didn’t want to hear about that. His question? Would the bloggers in Connecticut be excited about Sen. Dodd.

I like Sen. Dodd a lot, but exciting isn’t one of the first things that come to mind when trying to characterize him. How will the narrative shape around his campaign? I’m not sure yet.

At the other end of the spectrum is Sen. Obama. He is a great orator. The idea of a draft Obama movement is generating a lot of excitement, as can be noted by the hordes turning out to hear him in New Hampshire. Will that excitement carry forward? What sort of shape will it take? What larger narrative will emerge?

Perhaps a clearer narrative is emerging around Gore. His message about climate change resonates. There is a tension in the question of whether or not he will run. That tension will be resolved at some point, but a clear ongoing narrative is easier to imagine.

The same applies to Sen. Edwards. His message about economic justice also resonates. Katrina brought economic issues into stark focus. Yet economic justice seems to recede from the spotlight fairly quickly. Will Edwards’ supporters be able to build a sustained narrative around economic issues and/or expand the narrative?

Gen. Clark’s narrative seems to remain around security and defense. The way things are looking in Iraq right now, Gen. Clark may end up with a compelling story handed to him.

Sen. Clinton’s narrative seems a bit more challenging. She has a lot of money, a lot of connections; a lot of power. She is also being portrayed as polarizing. How will that play against the One America sort of themes that seem to reside in both Sen. Edwards and Sen. Obama’s speeches? Can something new be added to the narrative?

Likewise, for Sen. Kerry, what sort of narrative will emerge for him? Vilsack and others have potentially interesting stories, but can they catch fire? People have started to talk about a Bobby Kennedy-esque narrative. Will Obama, or perhaps Edwards take on the mantle of RFK?

More important, where will the narratives come from? How much will they be produced by ‘the people’, or to stay with the archetypes, from the Greek chorus? Will the people be the netroots? Something more than the netroots, or something other than the netroots? How much will the narrative be crafted by the campaigns and how much will the narrative be crafted by the traditional media?

I don’t have any specific answers. However, I will try to keep friends focused on what the underlying story is or could be.

Treason or terrorism?

By: DR FAROOQ HASSAN

The recent news about the criminal activities of an agent of the Intelligence Bureau (IB) about planting a bomb next to the residential compound of the Chief Minister of the Frontier Province sends ominous signals to the country and indeed the world about the mindset and scope of operations of such super-national level spy agencies that work with the tax payers money in Pakistan under the directions of the Federal government.

According to the latest press reports the said would-be saboteur has been “eventually” handed over to the local police. This occurrence came about after the alleged culprit had been forcibly whisked away by his own superiors from the grasp of the local police after he had been apprehended on the spot in broad daylight. It does not need much emphasis that police comes under the constitutional domain of the provincial government where as the Intelligence Bureau is a Central department under the scheme contained in the 1973 Constitution.

So the ultimate legal question is that does this act, if true, constitute treason? Treason means to undertake any act to undermine the state apparatus, in this by violence, and thereby, to “subvert” the Constitution of the country. The relevant proviso of which says:

Article 6: (1) Any person who abrogates or attempts to conspire to abrogate, subverts or attempts to subvert the Constitution by use of force or show of force or by other unconstitutional means shall be guilty of high treason.

Read the whole essay here.

Global Warming and Cycles

On October 28th, 2006, the 7th Southern New England Weather Conference was held. Joe D'Aleo - Alternative view of climate change - was one of the presentors. You can download his two slide decks here.

D'Aleo argues that cycles in solar activity and ocean flows are more significant, and offer more useful explanations, than changes in the amount of CO2 in atmosphere.

According to D'Aleo, some Russians think that 2022, the end of sun cycle 25, will mark the beginning of a period of significant cooling -- even to the degree of a mini-ice age.

Some of D'Aleo's slides are very compelling. Is there a climate dynamics model that integrates solar energy output, ocean cycles, CO2, Methane etc? As Robert Steele writes: It would appear to be prudent to look at all this stuff across at least 5 centuries and ideally ten, and certainly be acutely conscious of 2025-2075 time frame in terms of planning and not over-correcting for a "temporary" half century cycle.

Post Election Day Blues

This news won't break my heart
It's already been blown apart
I feel like a helpless girl
In this tender troubled world

It’s something I seem to get every November, those Post Election Day Blues. I work my heart off fighting for a candidate and a cause I believe in only to get it blown apart, never to see the promised land.

Oh but the promised land
Is just across another line in the sand

But you know? That is where the hope really lies. I’ve written before about this. Winning isn’t about getting elected, it is about changing the dialog, and last night, Ned Lamont’s victory became apparent. Gov. Dean stood up and spoke out when it wasn’t popular to do so. What did that get him? The DNC Chairmanship, where he started pushing an unlikely idea, the Fifty State Strategy. What an idea, that we should have a vigorous discussion about the direction the country is going in every precinct in America. It was supposed to be a long term strategy. Rebuilding a political party takes years, it takes many election cycles, or so we thought.

Ned Lamont stood up and said, “If Sen. Lieberman won’t challenge President Bush’s failed policies, then I will”. After defeating Sen. Lieberman in the primary, a lot more people started challenging President Bush’s failed policies. The discussions around the dinner tables became a little more vigorous. What happens next? I don’t know, but I do have my suggestions.

While the candidates that I worked hardest for last night were not elected, many others were and there is a lot to be joyful about.

Last night, I was asked about these “Stand up for Change” signs that were all over the place. Someone hadn’t followed the bus tour as closely as some of us. They asked, is that a new leadership PAC or 527 that Ned is going to grow out of his campaign, sort of like how Gov. Dean formed Democracy for America out of his 2004 Presidential bid?

I don’t know, but it fits well with my hope that we all stay together. That was the topic of many of my discussions. One person came up and said, “This changing the world stuff is really exhausting”. Yeah, it takes more time and takes more energy than any of us would really like. We might not even see the promised land, but it is what we must keep on doing.

In the background, the band Black47 played. They started one song with the melody of Skye Boat Song, an all too apt melody for the night. It is about Bonnie Prince Charlie’s flight to the Isle of Skye after some disastrous battles for Scottish independence. The last verse ends with “Charlie will come again”.

So, what about us? At the end of Ned’s concession speech last night, he continued his call for bringing our troops home to the heroes welcome they deserve. He continued his call for sensible foreign policy, for affordable health care for all. He said he approved that message and we all responded, “And so do we”. Yes, the dialog has changed, and it is a good thing. We need to keep the dialog going and the change alive.

Outside, a light rain is falling. Lucy Kaplansky’s song, “Line in the Sand”, which I quote at the beginning of this blog entry ends off with

”I hope a forgiving rain will fall sometime
And wash away that line”

Blumenthal’s First Draft of History

November 7, 2006

By Rick Perlstein

How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime

By Sidney Blumenthal
Princeton University Press · $26.95

Journalistic compilations are a crucial part of America’s literary, intellectual and political heritage. They enjoyed a golden age in ’60s and ’70s trade publishing: Gazing over the library of books I am using to write my own history of the years 1965 to 1972, I see collections by Joan Didion, Garry Wills, Jack Newfield, Steven V. Roberts, Jonathan Schell, J. Anthony Lukas, Tom Wolfe and Michael Herr, compiled from Esquire and the Nation, National Review and the New Republic. Without them, our understanding of postwar America would be much the poorer.

Well, we are without them now. Trade publishers today rarely print such compilations—and our understanding of the years we are now living through has suffered for it. Thus it is altogether fitting and proper—though, in the grand scheme of things, a little sad—that university presses should pick up the slack.

It fell to Princeton University Press to publish How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime, a compilation of articles from the (London) Guardian and Salon by the great Sidney Blumenthal, a former Clinton aide and a longtime journalist who did some of his important early work for In These Times. The best of the classic journalistic compilations draw out common threads that lie scattered across occasional pieces, often tied together in an introductory essay. This gives the compilation a twofold purpose, as both a document of an era and an argument about that era. In this regard, How Bush Rules is exemplary, convincingly arguing that George W. Bush is “the most willfully radical president of the United States,” by documenting in real-time the episodes that have made up his presidency.

Snip ----

Read the entire review here.

The vote's about Bush

The New York Times is offering its subscribers free access to Times Select for this week only. I clicked through and when immediately to Paul Krugman's latest column, called "Limiting the Damage." He says tomorrow's elections are really all about Bush, and "whether voters will pry his fingers loose from at least some of the levers of power, thereby limiting the damage he can inflict in his two remaining years in office." [Link - works only if you have access to Times Select] I think this is an important point, and why voting in this election is critical. Krugman summarizes very well why Bush's power should be limited:

At this point, nobody should have any illusions about Mr. Bush’s character. To put it bluntly, he’s an insecure bully who believes that owning up to a mistake, any mistake, would undermine his manhood — and who therefore lives in a dream world in which all of his policies are succeeding and all of his officials are doing a heckuva job. Just last week he declared himself “pleased with the progress we’re making” in Iraq.

In other words, he’s the sort of man who should never have been put in a position of authority, let alone been given the kind of unquestioned power, free from normal checks and balances, that he was granted after 9/11. But he was, alas, given that power, as well as a prolonged free ride from much of the news media.

The results have been predictably disastrous. The nightmare in Iraq is only part of the story. In time, the degradation of the federal government by rampant cronyism – almost every part of the executive branch I know anything about, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been FEMAfied – may come to be seen as an equally serious blow to America’s future.

And it should be a matter of intense national shame that Mr. Bush has quietly abandoned his fine promises to New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast.

With his party dominating the legislative and, now, the judicial branches of government, we have a scenario where "absolute power corrupts absolutely" and a leader whose limited competence, insensitivity, and ethical blindness creates a political perfect storm the catastrophic effects of which has, among other things, trashed the USA's standing in the world community as well as our competitiveness in the world's economy. I know I'm preaching to the choir, but just in case you haven't already – please vote tomorrow, and pray that your vote will be fairly counted.

What happens next?

I am girding my loins for the disappointment I expect to overtake me on Wednesday. I am not talking so much about one candidate or another that I am committed to not getting elected. I expect this to happen. It comes with the turf. Some of the candidates I’ve been supporting have always been long shots at best.

I am not talking about the need to find a new purpose that will come. I’ve spent the past two years preparing for tomorrow night. I know that when this is over, I will spend some time figuring out what the next cause to demand my attention will be. I know that it will come.

No, my biggest concern is what happens to the wonderful communities of supporters that have sprung up during this election cycle. What will happen to them? How can we hold them together as we go from one cause to the next?

Over the past few years, I’ve been on several panels which have talked about the future of political parties in the United States. What is the role of political parties in the twenty first century? The best answer I’ve heard about why we need political parties is ‘institutional memory’. When I visit friends on the local Democratic committee, they have incredible institutional memory. They remember who is who. They know how to find the people that will get the job done. They are the social networks that existed before it became in vogue to talk about social networks.

On the national level, many of my best friends are people that I met online during the Dean campaign. We have stayed in touch. We’ve used mailing lists, online social networks, and any other tools we can to stay in touch.

The tools have gotten much better over the past few years, and I hope that everyone finds ways to stay involved. Please, sign up for the DNC’s PartyBuilder. Please, sign up for DFA’s DFALink. Please, sign up for OneCorp.

Beyond that, stay involved with national blogging communities like DailyKos or MyDD. Get involved with, or stay involved with local blogging communities like the Soapblox based sites, or those that leftyblogs point to.

Yet if you are reading this entry, the odds are that you are already plugged in, most likely to many of the tools I’ve mentioned. However, you are also probably someone that can influence other supporters, especially those new to politics. Be sure to encourage them to sign up and stay involved in the communities that last beyond campaigns.

So, let’s get out the vote. If we work hard, today and tomorrow, we might be able to lessen the our disappointments about election returns. But let’s also keep an eye on how we hold together the wonderful communities we’ve been part of.

Winners and Losers

In a few days, everyone will be writing about the winners and losers in the 2006 elections and I will feel frustrated that the real stories aren’t be told. The most obvious stories will be about who was or wasn’t elected to the U.S. Congress and some Governor’s seats. Beyond that, the discussions will be about changes in the balance of power in congress and whether one party or another exceeded or failed to meet expectations.

People will talk about whether one group or another is gaining or losing power. This is already happening over at Firedoglake, where Pachacutec looks at the potential fortuntes of the DC/K Street Elites, the Grassroots Theocrats, and the Grassroots Progressives.

Meanwhile, Michael Davies, Executive Director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee tries to get people to look at State Legislative races.

With this, let me approach this from a different perspective and talk about some of the stories that aren’t being told. I think there is a problem with black and white, or perhaps red and blue thinking in American politics, and the discussions about winners and losers is misguided. To illustrate this, I am going to declare a winner in the 149th Assembly District in Connecticut. The winner is, my wife, Kim.

But, some of you might note, Kim isn’t even running this time around. True, and it is also true that when she ran in 2004, her opponent received more votes and was easily re-elected. Nonetheless, Kim won back in 2004, and with people who have been inspired by her running this year, Kim will win again.

The second winner I want to know is ‘the unknown volunteer’. If you work with campaigns, you’ve probably met her. You may even know his name. The unknown volunteer may or may not read blogs. She comes to campaign headquarters, and does whatever needs to be done. He becomes friends with the other volunteers and her life is enriched by the experience. One of the reasons the Lamont campaign and Connecticut as a whole is winning is because of the great volunteers that have been showing up at headquarters around the state. My biggest question is, how sustainable will this be? What will these people with their newly energized civic spirit do after the election? Will there be things to do, groups to be involved with?

Beyond that, I want to move towards looking at elections as part of a continuum. Will this year’s election move us closer to a government, of, by and for the people, or a government of, by and for lobbyists for large corporate interests? Will this year’s election move us closer to post broadcast politics which is more of a dialog between voters and candidates, or reinforce the ‘air game’. When I look at YouTube, I see glimmers of hope, which are countered by the massive air buys for negative ads which seem to only be making broadcasting companies better.

But perhaps the biggest question is, how will this really affect the people of our country and our world. I remember going to the No Nukes rally in New York City in 1982. It was the largest rally in New York City history. I remember leaving the rally and heading home down Second Avenue. On my way, I passed a funeral home, where I saw a hearse and a large procession leaving. For that family, the funeral was the big event of the day.

Now, twenty-four years later, nuclear weapons proliferation and U.S. energy policy are still problems. Today, and everyday, between 30 and 40 people are likely to die of cancer in New York City. It is easy to look at politics and say why bother.

Yet if we do that, extremists and corporate interests that are currently taking advantage of our political system will only expand. No, we need political change in this country, but that change needs to be about more than just who is heading down to Washington. We need to be changing the way people do politics. We need to take a play out of Dean Corp, John Edwards OneCorp or Matt Dunne’s Service is Politics.

We need to make politics an ongoing effort to make our country a better place, through not only elections, but also advocacy, service and ultimately restoring the fabric of our society.

Iran Lures US Into Invading Iraq and Attacking Iran "Pre-Emptively"--Nuclear Riposte Anticipated

I wonder if this is could be "the plan" that has Rove so confident? Let us all hope not.

Here is a scenario that spells disaster. It is also a bit too possible for any comfort.

2006-11-01 Iran Lures US Into Invading Iraq and Attacking Iran "Pre-Emptively"--Nuclear Riposte Anticipated

It is our best judgement, drawing exclusively on open sources of information, an understanding of history, an understanding of the intent of the Bush-Cheney Administration, and an understanding of the reluctance of the US military flag officers to "stand down" and refuse to obey illegal and stupid orders, that the U.S. is about to launch a "pre-emptive" strike into Iran, and that this will result in a Sunburn missile with a Pakistani nuclear warhead taking out whatever is in the Red Sea (six times Hiroshima), or the nearest carrier battle group, whichever is closer.

Read the full post and supporting material on the source site.

Tom Atlee: About RedBlue

[This is cross posted from Tom's list.]

As Daniel Yankelovich noted in a post-2004-election Christian Science Monitor article, "Democracy requires space for compromise, and compromise is best won through acknowledging the legitimate concerns of the other." Yet today, there is little space for the other to be heard. We talk about issues with people who already agree with us, re-circulating the same ideas within our own communities of interest. We take our cues from our favorite media outlets, where opposing TV sound bites pass for honest dialogue, or from partisan information sources like talk radio, email lists and weblogs that aim to further polarize the electorate.

Recognizing that opinions differ, and then creating the means for people to engage in constructive rather than destructive conversations, can reduce invective debate and set the stage for the deeper dialogue so necessary to democracy, negotiation, and solving the problems our nation faces.

RedBlue will be an interactive Internet application that will provide an exciting yet safe way to engage directly with someone on "the other side" of the political spectrum. This new approach to civic engagement is designed to leave behind the confrontational and polarizing forms of discourse that dominate today's Red vs. Blue debates and reintroduce Americans to the old-fashioned notion that in matters of public policy, there can be room for reasonable people to disagree.

RedBlue will create a private, one-on-one online dialogue process by matching participants with contrasting views. "Counterparts" will learn about the ground rules of productive dialogue, then engage on a difficult issue by viewing or reading a fictional narrative scenario that frames a front-page issue in personal, rather than theoretical, terms. Their email-style discussion will be monitored by a "virtual facilitator" that will make suggestions, provide feedback, and offer to step in when the heat of the moment threatens to derail the civility of the dialogue.

The partners who have joined forces to create RedBlue are uniquely qualified for the task: Internews Interactive is a non-profit pioneer of digital media convergence which has been creating innovative public policy dialogue using digital technology since 1989; Gekko Productions specializes in adapting video tools to online and offline interactive media, and is a frequent InterAct partner in realizing the technical aspects of projects; Public Conversations Project is a nationally-recognized facilitation group working with contentious policy issues that has extensive experience in on-line dialogue, and Alejandro Levins serves as strategic and technical lead on innovative web-based initiatives for businesses and non-profits.

Questions about the project? Email us.

Want to participate?

The first phase of the project, to develop a proof-of-concept prototype, is now underway. We are recruiting testers who will be matched with cross-spectrum counterparts, and who will then use the system to conduct a dialogue. Their feedback will help us refine the system. If you're interested in participating, please enter your email address below (we will use your email address only for this notification, and will not share it with anyone). Thanks for your interest.

Tom Atlee * The Co-Intelligence Institute * PO Box 493 * Eugene, OR 97440
http://www.co-intelligence.org * http://www.democracyinnovations.org
Read THE TAO OF DEMOCRACY * http://www.taoofdemocracy.com
Tom Atlee's blog http://www.evolvingcollectiveintelligence.org
Please support our work. * Your donations are fully tax-deductible.

Joe Lieberman Sells Out the Internet

Monday, October 16, 2006

by David S. Isenberg

I just got a letter from my senator, Joe Lieberman, dated Oct. 6, that indicates that he's completely flaking on network neutrality and other key telecom reforms. The letter says that he supports the principle of net neutrality, but underneath the letter's tricky language he's saying that he will vote for the telecom industry's telecom bill (S. 2686), the bill approved by the Senate Commerce Committee last summer without any net neutrality provision. Moreover, it shows that Lieberman is not willing to wait a year to see if his (former?) party wins a majority in one House of Congress so maybe the country can get a more balanced law.

Commerce Committee chair Ted Stevens (R-AK) has been scrambling to find the 60 votes needed to stop the filibuster promised by Senator Wyden, Senator Kerry and others who believe that the Stevens bill is anti-democratic and an industry give-away. To date, Stevens has lined up about 57 votes, and now with Lieberman and perhaps other swing senators falling Stevens' way, passage of the Senate telecom bill looks more likely than ever before.

Continue reading here.

Note: For more about David, see his home page.

Who Killed the Electric Car?

This is a cross posting from Dewayne Hendrick's list:

[Note: This item comes from reader Mike Cheponis. DLH]

From: Mike Cheponis
Date: October 14, 2006 11:10:17 PM PDT
Subject: "Who Killed the Electric Car" video now online and free

Watch it here

Good stuff!

I highly recommend you watch this film. One note on the problem of charging plugin hybrids with power from coal fired power plants that discard 2/3s of the energy in the coal they burn as "waste" heat.

We know from all of the global warming studies that releasing the sequestered carbon in the oil, gas and coal that we are currently consuming in vast quantities is a very significant threat to the viability of the biosphere. If this is the problem, then an important and common sense part of the solution will be simply to keep all sequestered carbon safely sequestered.

A major step in this direction will be for all of us to make our own electricity in our basements with micro-CHP units powered by solid biomass fuels. Carbon neutral solid biomass fuel has a superior net energy content of 14:1. On the other hand, when we convert biomass into liquid fuels, the net energy drops to only 7:1, if not a mere 2:1. Further, the production of ethanol also results in the degradation of several gallons of water for every gallon of ethanol produced.

In this scenario, we will power our plugin hybrid cars with electricity we make in our homes with appliances that achieve 95% efficiency. In this way, our personal transportation becomes an integral part of what Al Gore calls the “electranet".

The Political Palimpsest

The movie, The Ad and the ego has caused me to spend a bit of time thinking about the overall effect of political messages getting etched in our consciousness, only to be scraped away for newer messages to be added, a sort of political palimpsest.

As an aside, I am ever indebted to Judge John M. Woolsey for introducing me to the word “palimpsest” in his decision in the case United States of America v. One Book Called "Ulysses.", which I found in the forward to my copy of the book Ulysses.

Joyce has attempted - it seems to me, with astonishing success - to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impression carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man's observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious.

I started exploring this idea in a post I put up on MyDD entitled, Ad Watch and the Ego Research.

Since I was offline for a few days, I’m digging through all the emails that have piled up in my inbox. There is the standard collection of emails from Howard Dean, John Kerry, Barbara Boxer, and so on, asking me for money, to take time off to get out the vote, to vote in a poll on who my favorite progressive candidate is, etc. I’ve often wondered if these political request emails have become superfluous. I typically barely glance at them before I move them off to my ‘requests’ archive, paying them no more attention than I would an advertisement on TV.

That is when it struck me that we need to look at all these requests in a similar light as we look at the advertisements on TV. It isn’t about the request or the messaging, it is about residue that gets left on our political palimpsest.

My email box is still overflowing, but I can only take so much at a time, so I took a moment to try and catch up on blogs that I follow through Bloglines, as well as a few others that I go directly too. I scanned a couple hundred posts on official campaign blogs from around the country, again, with about as much attention as I devote to advertisements on TV. This too, then is another part of the political palimpsest.

What then, is the emerging image of our political landscape? I have my own thoughts, which people who read me regularly probably have a sense of, but I wonder what the vista is to you? Perhaps more importantly, are political campaigns thinking about this in their messaging? How could or should they change the whole of their communications to more effectively bring about the change they want?

Islam: Environmental Protection

By: Professor Dr. Farooq Hassan
President Pakistan Ecology Council

(Presidential Address to the Pakistan Ecology Council at the Karachi Hall, Lahore High Court Bar Association, 6 October, 2006, Lahore)

I am grateful to be invited to give this year's main Annual address on the highly important subject of Islam and protection of the environment. As Chairman of the Bar's Environmental Committee as well, I am pleased to be here at this historical Karachi Hall, the venue for many events dealing with this country’s constitutional history. To days talk is even more significant since it deals with the survival of the human race. My interest in this subject is not new. Let me at the outset take a brief moment of your time to submit to you that as far back as 1975, that is thirty years ago, I was elected amongst a handful of Third World delegates to the First International Ecology Congress in Vienna, in which I presented my views on a subject which was in some ways similar to the one today but without reference to the available Islamic conceptions about it. [1]

The current debates on environment and its much needed protection seems to be at the center of many controversial aspects of US foreign and domestic policy. Conservationists feel that exploitation of earth’s resources for commercial goals is leading the entirety of human race into an uncertain future. On the other hand, many Western governments, led by Washington, maintain that this threat is over exaggerated and that putting an end to useful acquisition of such resources by latest scientific methodology would be tantamount to impeding human progress.

It is the purpose of this presentation to examine this debate from an Islamic perspective. My research indicates that although some aspects of this topic have been handled by a few scholars mostly in the Arabic language, this appears to be a pioneer effort to do so in an exhaustive manner. I request therefore, that you give the message of this address, the needed significance for an adequate dissemination to the people of this country. Not only third of world countries are comprised of Muslims, a number of them are pivotal in enunciating policies with respect to oil exploration.

In this context, we may keep in mind the peculiar environmental controversy intertwined with fossil oil which Muslim states have in abundance. Their rapid utilization at the urging of mostly Western states, and by the US in particular, causes serious pollution hazards and also emission of gases that are a cause of acute danger to the ozone protection of the world’s atmosphere. This has resulted in clearly the single most dangerous pollution hazard, namely, global warming to which I shall revert to later in this presentation.

The ensuing analysis examines the Islamic injunctions, if any, on this subject. This is with a view to see the philosophy of the Muslim faith towards this most crucial of current topics of human concern. Islam is considered a comprehensive way of life whose teachings, directly or indirectly, cover every possible human relationship including what today is described as “environment”.

These teachings are primarily available in the revealed knowledge which comprises the Quran and in the teaching of Prophet as handed down in the Sunnah. In articulating and expounding the thesis of these presentation two further sources, namely Ijma and Qiyas, have been kept in mind by me. But, as they are dependent on the first two primary sources, it is not necessary to go into them in detail.

In what follows, therefore, reference will be mainly made to those verses that define the epistemological parameters of the Quranic teachings in this respect. In support, I would refer to some sayings of the Prophet through which the quintessence of the Shariah may be perceived. In sum, I would rely on the highest form of sources from Islamic Shariah to present my conclusions and analysis.

To begin with at the beginning of Sura Al-Baqarah, the Quran is presented to mankind as a book of guidance: "This is the Book; in it is guidance sure, without doubt, to those who fear God" (Quran, 2:2). God furthermore says that the Quran encompasses the foundations for knowledge and ethics: “Nothing have We omitted from the Book…" Quran, 6:3. In addition, the Quran announces that Islam, as a Din (Faith), has been perfected by God. It is considered a comprehensive way of life which accommodates every aspect of it. The Islamic world-view is established upon the very notion of Islam as a perfect religion:

"This day have I perfected your religion for you, completed My favor upon you, and have chosen for you Islam as your religion" Quran, 5:3

In the light of these Divinely ordained articulations, it can be justifiably submitted that a jurisprudence of the environment can be discerned and should be locatable from the confines of the metaphysical and practical messages in the Quran.

It should be equally self evident that all aspects of the environment's protection cannot be summarized in this limited initiative of mine. But sufficient coverage in depth would be provided to see if the current controversies can be resolved by applying the message of God for Muslims. This much however, is clear. That norms relating to environment from within the Muslim theological foundations would have an Islamic world-view of this topic. Once a Quranic injunction is located, it has to prevail and applied.

Depletion of resources

Before a more direct mandate about environment is referred to, it would be helpful to expound the general guidelines that may be usefully kept in mind while understanding the Islamic philosophy on ecology. Moderation is one of the main attributes of Islam. Islam furthermore discourages self indulgence, lavish living and waste. Those peoples in the past that did so were destroyed by the Almighty. The Quran says in Sura Al- Isra 17:16:

“When we intend to destroy a township, we permit its luxury loving people to commit wickedness therein. Then the word is proved true against it and we can destroy it utterly.”

Therefore many sayings of the Prophet towards modesty in living have to be kept in mind. Excessive indulgences of any kind are likely to inflict incalculable damage to our surroundings. It is manifest that such a tendency has to be stopped and discouraged by the Faithful through all forms of available legal recourse, influence and intellectual dissemination. Once it is grasped that human beings essentially remain care takers of the earth, it follows that they must preserve the environment in which they dwell. Humanity should behave in such a way that would maintain the balance that exists within the kind of environment that we inherited. In fact it is incumbent as a moral duty to restore and even retrieve the balance that had existed before we caused, collectively, many ecological disasters( See Quran: 15: 19):

"And the earth We have spread out; set thereon mountains firm and immovable; and produced therein all kinds of things in due balance."

The earth and its countless bounties have been created for mankind. It is also manifest that God made such natural bounties for all human beings in perpetuity. This huge reservoir is available for human use, without abuse or misuse. The circle of naturally available blessings for the benefit of humanity has to be kept alive for all generations to come.

“Environment”, as a term of art as we use it, has to be in the forefront of all such human thinking, policies and actions. There are numerous verses in the Quran that could be cited in this respect, but it suffices to mention three of them:

"And He has subjected to you, as from Him, all that is in the heavens and on earth: behold, in that there are Signs indeed for those who reflect.” Quran,45:13

Again the Quran says that His bounties to Mankind are always there: 


"Do you not see that God has subjected to your (use) all things in the heavens and on earth. And has made His bounties flow to you in exceeding measure, (that are essentially both) seen and unseen?" Quran, 31:20



 In another part the Quran maintains that:

"He has made subject to you the Night and the Day; the Sun and the Moon; and the Stars are in subjection by His command: verily in this are Signs for people who are wise." Quran:16:12.

There are other verses in the Quran that emphasize the point that mankind has merely a temporal use of nature and over other similar environmental elements. So tremendous is the ability of Man that God made night and day, stars, moon and the sun subject to his potential control. Therefore the primary reason for highlighting the temporality of things is to remind people of the Hereafter and to focus upon the non-permanent character of human existence on this earth. It is hoped that once people are conscientious of the limitation of life on earth, they will behave in a positive and constructive way. As a result, it is anticipated that the environment itself will benefit from the proper behavior of people.

The cosmic order of things seen or unseen and natural phenomena ultimately come to an end, as is reflected in this verse:

"…He has subjected the sun and the moon (to his Law)! Each one runs (its course) for a term appointed. He does regulate all affairs, explaining the Signs in detail that you may believe with certainty in the meeting with your Lord." Quran, 13:2

The subjection of the elements that make up the environment is spoken of in many chapters of the Quran:

"It is He who has made the sea subject, that you may eat thereof flesh that is fresh and tender., and that you may extract there from ornaments to wear; and you see the ships therein that plough the waves, that you may seek (thus) of the bounty of God and that you may be grateful." Quran:16:14

Concept of Vice Regency

Mankind and the human being are perceived as the trustee of the earth. The notion of trusteeship implies specifically that he is not supposed to cause corruption in any form on earth (i.e. the environment). Life on earth entails great responsibilities. This test implies accountability. It is followed by either reward or punishment. These concepts are mentioned both in the Quran and in the Sunnah. The Quran says in the following verse:

"It is He who has made you (His) vice regents, inheritors of the earth: He has raised you in ranks, some above others: that He may try you in the gifts He has given you: for your Lord is quick in punishment: yet He is indeed Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful." Quran, 6:165

This verse proclaims with clarity that mankind in this vice regency role is subject to a natural system of reward and punishment. If the cosmic order is preserved in good order, human beings are better of; if they interfere adversely with such natural order of things, punishment shall surely follow. The Quran further says in famous verse which ordains the preservation of environment:

"Then We made you heirs in the land after them, to see how you would behave!" Quran, 10:14

I feel that this verse of the Quran may be said to be the simplest magna carta of the genesis of a law of environmental protection in Islam. The same message is implied in the Sunnah of the Prophet:

"Verily, this world is sweet and appealing, and Allah placed you as vice regents therein; He will see what you will do. So, be careful of [what you do in] this world and [what you do to/with] women, for the first test of the children of Israel was in women!" [2]

These emphatic commandments of the Quran make it clear that the Islamic perspectives of mankind’s vice regency on earth forms a test which includes how human beings relate to the environment. Is it going to be based upon divine instructions, or based upon personal desires, greed or commercial exploitation that might lead to the destruction of our environment? If the latter condition prevails, then vice regency will be entrusted to another and different people or generation. The possibility of this kind of a change over of the inheritance of this earth to another set of people is understood from the following two verses:

"Call in remembrance that He made you inheritors after the people of Noah…" Quran,7:69


 Again the Quran says at a different place about changing the “inheritors” of this earth: 


"And remember how He made you inheritors after the 'And people and gave you habitation in the land…" Quran, 7:74

These verses of the Quran contains the philosophy that God can and does switch the vice regency on earth to different peoples if the ones who are incumbent fail to honor their Divine commandments. This would be particularly relevant to those set who alter the human environment for the simple reason that with damage to such natural legacy by a certain set of people they would appear to lose that mantle of leadership of incumbency.

Maintenance of Natural balance

This leads me to the next issue which in terms of the epistemology of this matter deserves our consideration. How does one maintain the natural legacy of mankind as is implied in the verses of the Quran cited above? Clearly it seems to me by the continued adherence of a “balance” in the natural order of things that exist in this earth since the dawn of civilizations.

Therefore, mankind’s dominium over the earth is based upon knowledge that enables human beings to remain care takers of the environment in which they live and have inhabited it for thousands of years. Humanity must, a fortiori, behave in such a way that would maintain the balance that exists within the environment ultimately for the survival of the human race. Efforts must indeed be made to retrieve and redress the balance that has existed before any current generation may have caused collectively ecological disasters of great magnitude (see Quran: 1519):

"And the earth We have spread out; set thereon mountains firm and immovable; and produced therein all kinds of things in due balance."

The earth should remain therefore available for human use; its use without abuse or misuse has to avoided, indeed shunned as it is tantamount to a breach of trust imposed by God on the believers. The following verses may be cited from the Quran that support this perspective:

"And He has subjected to you, as from Him, all that is in the heavens and on earth: behold, in that there are Signs indeed for those who reflect." Quran, 45:13

In another verse already cited earlier we may re-emphasize when God tells mankind that all things in heavens and earth are in abundance and care must betake to part-take of such bounties with prudence and care: Quran 31:20. God further ordains in yet another well known verse:

"He has made subject to you the Night and the Day; the Sun and the Moon; and the Stars are in subjection by His command: verily in this are Signs for people who are wise." Quran: 16:12.

We can see the same message in other verses that point to the temporal nature of the natural elements. The reason behind highlighting the temporality of things is to remind people of the Hereafter. It is hoped that once people are conscientious of the limitation of life on earth, they may respond in a positive and constructive manner. As a result, it is anticipated that the environment itself will benefit from the proper behavior of people. Even the cosmos and the natural phenomena remain subject to this balance and ultimately come to an end when they go against the Divinely ordained course:

"…He has subjected the sun and the moon (to his Law)! Each one runs (its course) for a term appointed. He does regulate all affairs, explaining the Signs in detail that you may believe with certainty in the meeting with your Lord." Quran, 13:2

The Quran contains an elaborate identification of the natural order of this universe by pointing that nature’s elements too are governed by norms of the cosmos. As such the elements that make up the environment are spoken of in many important verses:

"It is He who has made the sea subject, that you may eat thereof flesh that is fresh and tender., and that you may extract there from ornaments to wear; and you see the ships therein that plough the waves, that you may seek (thus) of the bounty of God and that you may be grateful." Quran: 16:14.

The Quran again reminds us:

"It is God who has created the heavens and the earth and sends down rain from the skies, and with it brings out fruits wherewith to feed you; it is He who has made the ships subject to you, that they may sail through the sea by His command; and the rivers (also) has He made subject to you." Quran:4:32

Then yet at another place the Quran tells us that Man has been even given the ability to: 


"Then We subjected the Wind to his power, to flow gently to his order, whithersoever he willed …" Quran: 38:36

These verses highlight the simple point that natural facilities that are available to human beings must be utilized in manner that genuinely furthers the nature’s design of human progress and not in way that bedevils that scheme. Whether it may be the utilization of the strength of animals or be it natural elements, all these measures of human assistance have to be used with prudence and care so that natural balance remains in tact:

"That has created pairs in all things, and has made for you ships and cattle on which you ride, In order that you may sit firm and square on their backs, and when so seated, you may celebrate the (kind) favor of your Lord, and say, "Glory to Him Who has subjected these to our (use), for we could never have accomplished this (by ourselves), And to our Lord, surely, must we turn back!" Quran, 43:12-14

Clearly humanity was not restricted to the use of ships and animals to move from one place to another. There are many other modes of transportation that are subjected to our use. The utilization and use of natural phenomenon and elements that mankind uses has to be undertaken in a humane and visionary manner.

Focus of Islamic on natural eco-system

The above discussion may be summarized as under:

(1) That Islam gave to mankind a message which is complete for guidance for all times to come. This message contains injunctions against human misconduct or excesses including, it is submitted, about utilization of nature and the elements.

(2) That in the support of this thesis we find numerous quotations from the Quran about harnessing the natural elements such as wind, water and the produce that comes from the land. The design of Almighty being to provide reasonable comfort and well being of the human race for all times to come.

(3) It is also clear that in such exploitation of nature and its resources and the elements there is depletion of such natural heritage of mankind.

(4) That as such God ordains Muslims to maintain a balance in these exploits so that the natural equilibrium is kept aloft as we inherited it.

(5) It is well to remember, as the Quran emphasizes, that those peoples who did not obey these natural laws were changed.

(6) On this earth God has appointed mankind as trustee and vice regent to oversee the affairs of its earthly existence. It is a trust that needs to be faithfully executed.

The above summary succinctly provides us with the fundamental philosophy of Islamic provisions of the earth’s eco-system and its conceptions relating to the environment. While there are many aspects of this environmental attitude of Islam, this exploratory analysis is only intended to concentrate on one particular aspect of this otherwise large subject. Do the injunctions of Islam address the current critical problem of global warming which is arising as a consequence of excessive fossil fuel burning and emission of carbon at the expense of the earth’s ozone environmental protective layers? I particularly refer to this problem as by itself it is quite sufficient to wreck havoc on the current living patterns of all kinds of living species on our planet.

Irreversible environmental damage

There has been an increasing worldwide clamor against this non-abating and irreparable damage to the earth’s environment through this peculiar form of “pollution”. At the international scene European countries have been generally in the forefront of this visibly active movement at both the governmental and at the NGO level.

This international furor finds support in a recently made powerful statement from a notable American personality. It would be instructive to refer to a memorable passage from the address of former Vice President of the US, Al Gore, who in a speech to the New York University on 18th September 2006 in which he said:

“A few days ago, scientists announced alarming new evidence of the rapid melting of the perennial ice of the north polar cap, continuing a trend of the past several years that now confronts us with the prospect that human activities, if unchecked in the next decade, could destroy one of the earth’s principal mechanisms for cooling itself. Another group of scientists presented evidence that human activities are responsible for the dramatic warming of sea surface temperatures in the areas of the ocean where hurricanes form.

A few weeks earlier, new information from yet another team showed dramatic increases in the burning of forests throughout the American West, a trend that has increased decade by decade, as warmer temperatures have dried out soils and vegetation. All these findings come at the end of a summer with record breaking temperatures and the hottest twelve month period ever measured in the U.S., with persistent drought in vast areas of our country. Scientific American introduces the lead article in its special issue this month with the following sentence: The debate on global warming is over.”

Manifestly, this quotation gives a capsule summary of the major assaults on the existing environment by and under the guise of exploitation for “scientific progress” through this process referred to as “global warming”. These “assaults” to which I refer have been noted most contemporaneously by the international community when analyzing the Kyoto Protocols. However, Islam examined the philosophical genesis of this danger fifteen hundred years ago. The fundamental genesis of this fear is that this ceaseless drive to deplete the fossil fuels’ reservoirs of the earth for purely commercial goals is at the expense of the eco-system and environmental balance that was identified above.

Message of Kyoto Protocols

Let us initially focus our attention on one basic facet of this contemporary debate. It seems to be beyond any doubt that mankind is faced with a huge danger because the Kyoto Protocol was not put really into effect by the all the relevant actors of this pollution drive on account of the commercial aims of a few but important international actors. This inability of the world community to act in unison has resulted in a potential disaster of incalculable proportions. The acute and impending damage to the earth, inteneded to be averted through the Kyoto Protocol, continues to loom large on all of humanity. We would initially briefly examine the contours of this controversy. Once the fundamental issues are realized we would with advantage visit the corresponding position of this topic from the confines of Islamic theological formulations.

Kyoto Protocol was signed in Japan in 1997 initially by 165 countries but that number now stands at over 180. The ideas behind Kyoto were aimed to achieve that state of affairs that existed as far back as in 1972, when human development and environment initially came under serious international discussions. This was at the Stockholm U.N. Conference on Human Development. Twenty years later, in 1992, came the famous Anniversary meeting of the UN at what is known as the “Earth Summit” when the UN Conference on Environment took place in Brazil.

Its landmark contribution was the signing of Agenda 21 and the Rio Declaration. In these international instruments the UN brought together conflicting interests of development and environment firmly into public view for an evaluation. As a consequence, two binding international texts were produced. These international texts of far reaching influence were the agreement on Biological Diversity and the UN Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCC).

The quintessential elements of the Kyoto Protocol were that it committed the 38 most industrialized countries of the world to cut their emissions of greenhouse gasses between 2008 and 2112 to levels that are 5.2 percent below those that existed in 1990.

The simple question that arises, therefore, is why is the danger still there if nearly all countries of the world are in favor of abiding by it? The answer, regrettably, is that the US, possessing the world’s largest economy, and Australia, are holding out and refusing to ratify this crucial treaty engineered and crafted for the future survival of the human race on this planet. This danger is directly connected with the emanation of the greenhouse gasses by the industrialized states and pollution caused by transport vehicles by fuel emissions.

How are greenhouse gasses produced? What is the disastrous impact they produce on the environment?

Greenhouse gasses are a term that means those gasses like carbon dioxide which are mainly generated as a result of burning fossil fuels like coal, petrol and diesel. While burning these resources have been greatly beneficial to gigantic oil corporations producing them trans-nationally, they have simultaneously resulted in raising the level of carbon in the atmosphere. This has been the chief cause of world-wide pollution. Scientists predict significant global warming as a consequence of this process by warming the earth by about 5 degrees Celsius. This could potentially be disastrous to ecology by changing environment, expanding deserts, melting ice, causing sea levels to rise and engulf low lying coastal areas of the world. Were this to occur, many well known cities and seaports of the world would be submerged for ever under the oceans.

Islamic theological perspectives

(a) Basic terms

Before proceeding further to analyze the relevant Islamic perspectives, let me make a lexicographical submission of far reaching impact. We must, a priori, make a basic philosophical distinction between the concepts of “environment” and “ecology” or eco-systems”. Both these terms are interchangeably used in contemporary literature on this subject. However, there does exist, prima facie, a clear difference between the two terms. Intellectual exactitude requires that we keep it in mind for appropriate application the relevant term when necessary.

Both terms are employed in Muslim texts of authentic value. Indeed, it can be said that there exists a branch of jurisprudence (fiqh) about 'environment' (bi'ah). It may be described as the Fiqh al-biah al Islam. This would be the equivalent of Islamic jurisprudence of the environment.

On the other hand, the word “ecology” does appear to be utilized in lexicographical and epistemological semantics through out Islamic texts of the highest validity. Ecology in its lexicon sense means a branch of human knowledge that deals with living organisms, habits and modes of life.

Historically, therefore, it is necessary to comprehend that whereas the term ecology or co-systems have a direct base in the Quran, “environment" is newer addition to the classical texts on this subject. This is invariable. Not long ago, such a term was not even used in Western legal parlance.

It should be thus emphasized from the above analysis that Islam does advocate the protection of the environment as a matter of “law”. At the same time the preservation of earth’s ecology is equally mandated as the Quran normatively contains literally dozens of verses about keeping the natural balance that prevails on this earth. The quotations from the Quran cited earlier were clearly of this category and import.

The various verses of the Quran cited at the outset were towards establishing the thesis that Islam does have an in ecological sense. We tried to establish that Islam does have:

(1) A broad set of guidelines towards nature that calls for preservation of this earth.

(2) In these guidelines there is the warning that there must be avoided damage to this human legacy.

(3) There is the allegorical reference to the past history of mankind that those that did not obey such guidelines were removed and replaced by another people.

It may further be noted that the term “environment” per se, along with its diverse connotations, gradually evolved in recent times through interpretation provided by essentially jurists. This important development is predicated on the premise that all concepts that owe their genesis to the Quran are of an injunctive kind. Hence, I used the phrase of “towards jurisprudence of the environment.” Islam clearly has a high regard for the environment as support for such a proposition, as submitted above, is found in the Quran and the Sunnah.

(b) Basic norms

However, this should also be noted that by emphasizing that nature must be preserved does not mean that there has to be no human progress! In fact, it may be necessary to undertake the contrary route involving scientific advancement for the preservation, protection and for alleviating the difficulties of the human race itself. According to one Hadith, the Prophet is reported to have said that a person who uprooted a tree (which formed an obstacle) in the path of people, ended up in heavens. In other words, the object of interfering in nature has to be higher and nobler than mere exploitation for economic gain of the relevant actor.


The fundamental postulate in this context is thus the “balance” we adverted to earlier and to maintaining a course that keeps nature as purified as we inherited it, but subjecting it to mankind’s use intelligently with prudence. That this is the role and responsibility of a Vice Regent on earth is reiterated again and again in the Quran. It is incumbent on all peoples at all times to so perform their assignments in this world that nothing impinges or adversely affects on the natural state of scheme of such matters.


Islam modulates a middle path between human behavior that has disregard for the environment and those who practically want the environment or certain parts of it to remain untouched. While the Islamic world view supports the protection of environment from the greedy behavior of human beings, it also allows room for sustainable development.

At this juncture let me pause and introduce you to a term “I’mar”. Generally this term is given the conception of “to inhabit”. It is useful to comprehend the wider conception of this word. Such meaning includes spreading and settling all over the earth, inhabiting every livable quarters, building and undertaking civic projects that benefit the community at large. In short, it includes every positive activity that would make life on earth prosperous. If an activity diverts humanity from the right path which means against the Shariah, then it cannot be considered as I'mar.

It is clear from a study of the Quran that the earth is our habitat and that we are required to dwell on it, work it out and establish a balanced way of life without excesses or deficiencies. The Quran says:

"To the Thamud People (We sent) Salih, one of their own brethren. He said: "O my People! Worship God: you have no other God but Him. It is He Who has produced you from the earth and settled you therein: then ask forgiveness of Him, and turn to Him (in repentance): for my Lord is (always) near, ready to answer" Quran, 11:61


A well known commentator on Muslim theology says on this verse:

"And Salih reminded them (the people of Thamud) about their origination from earth, the creation of every individual from the nutrition of the earth or from its components that make up their bodies. Despite being (created) from this earth and its elements, Allah appointed them vice regents so that they may inhabit it! He wanted them to be vice regents as a species, and as individuals to replace those who came before they did!" [3]

In advocating the cause of preservation of inherited human environment and the prevalent eco-systems, the Quran reminds us with this warning that those who did not heed such messages before were wiped out of existence themselves.

"Do they not travel through the earth; and see what the end of those before them was? In strength they tilled the soil and populated it in greater numbers than these have done: there came to them their apostles with Clear (Signs), (which they rejected, to their own destruction): it was not God who wronged them, but they wronged their own souls." Quran, 30:9

The I’ mar of the earth should be in areas and projects that could benefit humanity and not harm it. This means that projects and activities that destroy the environment are excluded from permissible human enterprise. The brute form of the capitalist system encourages such “destructive” industries as drilling oil as long as the earth’s reservoir lasts. They find imaginative ways to counter the facts of pollution of the air, destruction of human health, lost energies and funds in combating and treating the resulting diseases, misuse of the land which could be used otherwise for other humanely beneficial purposes for mankind.

Protecting environment

Every act, as long as it is good in protecting the environment and done for the sake of generating and assisting life and also preserve the earth is allowed by Islamic teachings. A middle road between two extremes is the proffered solution; neither there should be a total disregard for the environment’s integrity nor an abandonment of the justifiable progress that mankind may achieve through sustainable development and evolution.


The total disregard for the environment is detrimental for the human being is not to be encouraged. Similarly it is equally true that the adoption of a position on the other end of the spectrum of protecting the environment in an absolute sense must not adhered to. 



The Islamic position forms a middle path between human behavior that has disregard to the environment and those who practically worship the environment or certain parts of it. While the Islamic world view supports the protection of environment from the greedy behavior of human beings, it allows room for sustainable development.

The oft quoted Hadith mandate on this point is in the following verse:

"He who cuts a lote-tree (without justification), God will send him to Hellfire." [4]

The lote-tree grows in the desert and it is very much needed in an area which has scarce vegetation. A well known Muslim theologian, Dr. Al-Qaradawi, is of the view that this Hadith provides us with the most vivid illustration in terms of protecting the natural resources and preserving the balance that exists between the diverse elements of nature in the environment. [5]

In this background, where the continuity of even one tree is appreciated, one can visualize what would be the Islamic position towards destroying millions of trees, or depleting the earth’s resources, or the destruction of the ozone layer of this planet? Non preservation of the natural environment of mankind or the habitat of the human race as a result of humans directly acting upon nature (e.g. deforestation) or indirectly (e.g. acid rain) cannot possibly be contended by Islamic dictates.

In this context there is much, for instance, on plants and the activity of agriculture in classical Muslim teachings. The Prophet indeed encouraged people to work hard under all circumstances in maintenance of the earth’s natural heritage. He explained that people should plant and undertake all kinds of plantations. This trend is particularly focused upon for those plants that bear fruit particularly a palm-tree seedling. So much is this emphasis that it is enjoined upon all Muslims, even if it is the Day of Judgment and that the world is coming to an end, they should still do it!

It is for this reason that it is prohibited by Islam to let the land set idle for a long time without working it out. Reviving a "dead" or “barren” land could lead, under customary Islamic law, to creating a legal right to use it indefinitely, as long as it was continued to be planted. This was a direct incentive from the state and the community to encourage cultivation of barren land. Hence it is obvious that Muslim jurists from the very inception had been brought up to frame normative norms of positive law which were helpful to environment.

Protecting Land

Protection of land finds many verses in support thereof by emphasizing that it must be kept clean and free from rubbish. It is reported by a famous Hadith that God likes cleanliness. [6] Further, the Prophet is said to have warned Muslims not to throw refuse in public or near the fruit trees. The message that this Hadith sends is that cleanliness is something desirable, good and reflects an act of necessity towards the environment. As such it is submitted that if cleanliness is something good, then it should be reflected everywhere.

Islam has thus created a bond between faith and cleanliness, rendering the latter as a part of faith. The Prophet’s sayings on this point illustrate that solid waste of any kind must not pollute the grounds that produce food or which forms parts of the dwellings. It is obvious that cleaning such places means, in this context, the removal of material obstacles or solid waste which constitutes a kind of pollution in contemporary perspectives of this matter.

The prohibition in such Hadiths is thus intended to prevent pollution. The direct human polluting activity presently is manifestly to extend to indirect sources of pollution as well, such as through sewers. The natural pollutants of any given time conceptually extended to include the chemical pollutants or other activity which is connected, for instance, with industrial production. The language of another Hadith which prohibits the pollution of water may further be cited to support the thesis just articulated by me that, in a contemporary context, pollution of any kind is impermissible in Islam. It is mandated that a Muslim should keep the channels of drinking water clean. We know already those chemicals such as pesticides, insecticides, or herbicides which are detrimental to the health of humans, and we know that much of these chemicals reach the reservoirs of drinking water. Analogical reasoning will justify, therefore, from the perspective of the Shraiah, that such activity be also prohibited and not allowed to be undertaken. 



The Shariah aims at protecting the environment, and while the individual is asked to help in this respect, the ultimate responsibility is in the hands of the state. When Abu Musa was sent to Al-Basrah as the new governor, he addressed the people saying:

"I was sent to you by 'Umar Ibn Al-Khattab in order to teach you the Book of your Lord [i.e. the Quran], the Sunnah of your prophet, and to clean your streets." [7]

The function of the governor who represents the authority of the state, in the narration about Abu Musa, tends to establish that keeping the environment clean is amongst the responsibilities of the Administration. This position should be highlighted, because it obligates the governments, as much as the Muslims themselves, to keep their civic environments and amenities clean and free of pollution.

Preserving Water

The above analysis would have already stressed the significance of water for various human needs. It is God's will that all living beings on earth are dependent for their existence on water:

"…We made from water every living thing…" Quran, 21:30

Furthermore, there are many verses in the Quran that reflect the direct involvement of the Divine Will whenever it rains. Following are typical of these verses from the Quran:

"And God sends down rain from the skies, and gives therewith life to the earth.” Quran:16:65

And again Quran mandates to Muslims: 


"…and He sends down rain from the sky and with it gives life to earth…" Quran: 30:24

Yet another instance of this philosophy this contained in this verse:


"And We send down from the sky rain charged with blessing, and We produce therewith gardens and grain for harvests." Quran: 50:9


In addition to the protection of water from pollution, the Sunnah emphasized the proper use of water without wasting it. One more Hadith regarding the protection of water is related to the use of clean still water. The Prophet said: "No one should bathe in still water, when he is junub (impure)" [8] In a Hadith that reflects the future scene regarding the said issue, the Prophet said according to Abu Dawud:

"There will be a people amongst this Ummah who will transgress in their supplication and ablution."

It is obvious that the transgressing in wasting eater even in ablution means the use of excessive amounts of water or it misuse even for an ostensibly laudable purpose and objective is disallowed by Islam. This is contrary to the Islamic ethos of maintaining the healthy balance between need and waste.

Preventing air pollution

Protecting the air from pollutants can be deduced from many sayings of the Prophet. There are many Hadiths that tell us that the Prophet , discouraged or prohibited activities that result in offensive smells and odors, from taking place in certain public places. 
Another Hadith aims at protecting the Muslim community from offensive smells that result from eating garlic or onion. The Prophet said:

"He who eats from this tree - meaning garlic - should not get close to our mosque." [9]

According to another Hadith:

"He who eats garlic or onion should stay away from us, or he said: "should stay away from our mosque and stay at his home." [10]

The period which one should stay away from the mosque is limited to the duration of the smell. This is understood from the Hadith narrated by Abu Dawaud :

"He who eats from this wicked plant, should not get close to our mosque, until its smell goes."

Al-Qaradawi refers to a religious ruling (fatwa) upon the fact that smoking is detrimental to the health of primary and secondary smokers. It is the harm that results from releasing anything into the air which forms the fundamental basis of al-Qaradawi's reference. By analogy, anything that pollutes the air and is detrimental to the health should be prohibited. This includes indirect harm such as in the case of CFC which depletes the ozone. Harmful fumes that cannot be prohibited all together, should be reduced and alternatives should be made popular. The emission of Carbon Monoxide would certainly be a target of this prohibition. A case is also made out to find out alternative sources of energy to ward off, if possible, the damage by way of global warming phenomenon by a continued use of fossil fuels.

Injunction against noise pollution

Islam took care of the human being and made sure that he should not be subjected to loud and annoying noises to prevent harm to him both physically and psychologically. There are multiple Hadith that point out that loud noise is tantamount to foolish conduct and is basically harmful. In the Quran, Luqman advised his son saying:

"…and lower thy voice; for the harshest of sounds without doubt is the braying of the ass." Quran, 31:19

The Islamic Shariah, it is interesting to note, does not contemplate loud voices or sounds being made even in the mosques. The right of others to pray peacefully, or to recite the Quran quietly on their own, during times other than the obligatory prayer, which is performed by all present at the same time together, should be respected. The argument in favor of preventing pollution by noise is that reciting of the Quran by voices is not encouraged because it may distract others from reflection; if this be the case then any other sources of noise pollution deserve the same evaluating criteria; they are all seemingly prohibited. It is established by modern medical sciences that if one is subjected to loud noise over a long period of time, it reduces the ability of a healthy person to react normally; such noise can adversely affect the hearing ability of some and possibly also result in psych-somatic problems.

Islamic objectives in environment protection

There are said to be five major aims (maqasid) of Islam in life. As mentioned many times by most scholars through out of its history of mankind the Shariah aims to:

(1) The protection of life,

(2) The protection of religion,

(3) The protection of the mind,

(4) The preservation of one’s offspring and progeny, and

(5) The protection of property.

A well known recent authority of the Islamic theology, Sheikh Muhammad Al-Tahir Ibn 'Ashur went beyond the original five and added another two objectives as aims of a good Muslims life:

(6) The maintenance of equality and (7) the right to remain and keep freedom in life. [11]

Quite clearly, the protection of Environment may be said to exist as a part of the quintessential nucleus of many such objectives. Indeed the right to life itself becomes a meaningful reality only if mankind’s environment is capable of living as we know of it presently and as known to us historically. I think I can refer with advantage to a well know case from the Supreme Court of India on pollution. In Sachidananda Pandey VS. State of West Bengal12 AIR 1987 SC 1109, in which Justice Reddy remarked on a public interest Petition against the construction of five star hotel next to the historical Calcutta Zoo by saying:

“How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land, or the life that goes along with it since long time? It is not a question of only buying or selling land; we have to see the totality of the ecology involved when the matter involves invasion of the nature by man’s desire to go on building”

The thesis presented in my address today is that protecting the environment and eco-systems of the earth are a major concern of the Islamic Faith. It is therefore a major aim of the Shariah. Hence it has rightful place as a norm of rule of jurisprudence for Muslims. If the situation of the environment keeps deteriorating at the present rate, there will ultimately be no life, no property and no religion left.

The environment encompasses, it is submitted, the totality of the other aims of the Shariah. The destruction of the environment prevents the human being from fulfilling the concept of vice regency on earth. Indeed, when the very existence of humanity is at stake here, as in the case of the destruction of the ozone layer, this phenomenon assumes special significance.

It is an established scientific fact that excessive pollution of the air might lead to serious deformities, abortion and chronic diseases. It is in evidence from advanced Western countries that highly polluted industrial cities might not have clear sunlight for days, resulting in deep depressions which affects a person's ability to rationalize properly. Certain radiation might also produce results that can affect adversely the quality of human and animal brain power. The attempt to protect any kind of property rights will also be in vain if, in the context of a highly polluted environment, the cities and dwelling places become uninhabitable. There are already many rivers and lakes that are considered dead with no marine life. This is a direct result of acid rain which also destroys forests. These forests and water sources form the natural habitat of many species; their death means the possible extinction of some of the signs of natural life that we presently know of.


To consider the protection of the environment as one of the major aims of the Shariah will, hopefully, enable the neo-model of Islamic civilization a chance to be advanced as an alternative to the already existing western model, which is the primary source of pollution. Adopting this position makes it imperative for the Muslim governments to establish laws for the protection of the environment and implement them. Internationally also, serious efforts are required by them to achieve these objectives.

End Notes

∗ D.Phil.; B A Juris, MA. M.Litt, (Oxon), DCL (Columbia), DIA (Harvard), Of Lincoln’s Inn, Barrister at Law, UK, Attorney at Law, US, Senior Advocate Supreme Court (QC) of Pakistan; David M. Kennedy Visiting Scholar & Professor of International Studies, Kennedy Center & Visiting Professor, Fellow, Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. The author has been Advisor to four Pakistani Prime Ministers on Foreign Affairs & Law, Member & Delegate to the UN Human Rights Commission, and the UN Sub Commission on Human Rights, Geneva. He has also represented Pakistan delegations to the UN GA and was the leader of Pakistan Delegation to the International Criminal Court (ICC); He is currently the UN Special Ambassador for Family, the President of the American Institute of South Asian Strategic Studies, Boston; President Pakistan Ecology Council and Chairman Pakistan Bar ‘s Committees on International Affairs and Environment, 2004-2005; he was awarded the highly prestigious King Faisal Memorial Award for 2002 by Saudi Arabia and in 2003 he received the International Professor of the Year of Human Rights Award in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia In 2004 he became the first Pakistani scholar to be appointed a distinguished Visiting Professor by JNU in Delhi, & to give Memorial Lectures at the Benaras Hindu University, University of Mumbai and at Ambadkar University in Auranagbad. In 2006 he was given the London World International Islamic Award for Family.

1 See: Proceedings, International Human Ecology Congress, Vienna, Austria, September 15-19, Present day Shortcomings of Environmental Law, Suggestions for Improvement, Dr. Farooq Hassan, pages 829-833, Georgi Publishing Company

2 See Muslim, Sahih

3 See See Fi Zilal al-Quran, Sayyid Qutub, 12th Edition (Dar al-Shuruq) Vol. 12, p. 1907

4 See: Al-Tirmidhi, # 5239

5 See: Al-Qaradawi, al-Sunnah Masdaran Lil-Ma'rifah wal-Hadarah, 143-144

6 Al-Tirmidhi # 2799

7 See: Al-Darimi, # 560

8 Narrated by Muslim

9 See Al-Lu'lu' wal-Marjan, # 331, 332

10 See Al-Lu'lu' wal-Marjan, # 333

11 See Isma'il Al-Hasani, Nazariyyat Al-Maqasid 'ind Al-Imam Muhammad Al-tahir Ibn 'Ashur, p. 16

12 AIR 1987 SC 1109

The Fifth Freedom

On January 6th, 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his famous Four Freedoms speech to congress. These freedoms are: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of every person to worship God in his [or her] own way, freedom from want and freedom from fear. Norman Rockwell produced a series of paintings representing these freedoms, and to me, it makes up an important view of America.

I’ve been thinking a lot about these freedoms recently. Yes, I wish to be free from the fear of a terrorist flying a plane into a building where I work, but there are other fears that seem a little more immediate right now. I want to be free from the fear of losing health insurance, or seeing the economy tank so badly that I lose my nest egg.

I want to be free from the fear that someone will come into my daughter’s school and start shooting. I want to be free from the fear that my child could become a victim of exploitation simply by expressing an idealistic love of our country and becoming a page in Congress. I want to know that our leaders will do everything in their power to prevent any future exploitation by holding perpetrators responsible.

Unfortunately, the current administration and congress in Washington is doing little to assuage my fears. They are doing little to make me believe that perpetrators of exploitation against the most vulnerable in our society will be held accountable and brought to justice.

In the most recent congressional scandal, the Republican leadership seems more interested in protecting their own, than in protecting the youth of America. The recent military tribunal legislation appears to be more of the same focusing on protecting members of the administration in the event that their procedures violate war crimes acts than in coming up with procedures that will bring swift justice in a way that restores America’s moral leadership.

So, perhaps there is a fifth fear, the fear that our most vulnerable will be exploited and the exploiters will not be held accountable. It’s a pretty real fear right now.

The liberal blogosphere as a village,

the question is, what sort of village.

Over on MyDD, Micah Sifry has posted his thoughts on the meeting former President Clinton had with a group of bloggers. Matt Stoller, who attended the meeting, has this post up talking about some of the impressive stuff another blogger, Jane Hamsher, who also attended the meeting is doing. In his post, he writes, Like Chris, I'm feeling bored by the political environment, and somewhat useless.

I mentioned this to a friend who wrote that he wasn’t worried about the post and went on to talk about new connections being forged.

Perhaps it is what is going on in my personal life that is fueling my worry. About two weeks ago, my wife’s face went numb. She rushed off to the hospital to make sure it wasn’t a stroke. It turned out to be Bell’s Palsy, a common symptom of Lyme disease.

Over the past two weeks, we’ve been dealing with this. The ability to detect and treat Lyme disease, like any other important medical advance has come as a result of people working together. As John DeStefano often says in his stump speech, none of us got to where we are by ourselves. We all stand on other people’s shoulders. We go to work on roads paved by others.

It has become more personal to me, as friends have brought food, have taken care of Fiona when I’ve had to take Kim to the doctors, have given me rides to take care of a broke down car, provide invaluable moral support, and so on. To borrow from the title of Hillary Clinton’s book, It Takes a Village. It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a village to care for a loved one.

So, I think it is useful to look at the liberal blogosphere as a special village, a global village of sorts, to borrow from McLuhan. Working with the Lamont campaign, I’ve seen the great things that can happen when nationally known bloggers work closely with local bloggers, and with people who haven’t even read a blog yet. So, when I read about Matt or Chris getting bored, I worry. They are important parts of our liberal global village. When I read about bloggers feeling left out, I worry, they too are important parts of our liberal global village.

I’m sorry to get all mushy on you and stuff like this, but this is really important. We need to find ways to work together to help our country rediscover a government, of, by, and for the people. a country where everyone’s voice is important. We need to uphold people like Matt and Chris. We need to connect with bloggers that aren’t feeling connected. We need to raise up a new generation of bloggers.

Jeffery Feldman has some good ideas on this, as does Terrance at The Republic of T. I want to thank them for what they are doing. I want to thank people standing by Matt and Chris, and especially I want to thank everyone who has stood by Kim and I while we battle her Lyme disease.

Blogging at 37

Back when I was in college, Jerry Rubin visited my campus as part of a book tour promoting his book, “Growing (up) at 37”. Some of my friends protested his visit with signs saying “Cashing in at 37”. I really didn’t pay close enough attention, so I have no opinion about whether he was growing up, cashing in, or a little of both.

Years later, during my cashing in period, I worked with a management consultant who pointed me to Joseph Campbell’s book, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”. During a particularly difficult period we talked about the return of the hero. After the hero’s life changing adventures, he returns to his town and teaches and helps those around him to learn from his experiences.

These provide a backdrop to part of my understanding of some of the larger issues embedded in the recent discussions about certain A-list bloggers meeting with former President Clinton.

Over the past few years, the community of progressive bloggers has grown stronger and more powerful. I have seen much of that power first hand with my work for the Lamont campaign. The power elite of bloggers that were invited to the Clinton meeting represent to many people the heroes of this new community, and the question that sits in many people’s minds is, will they be growing up at 37, and exhibiting the traits of the returned heroes, will they be cashing in at 37 taking from the community that has made them strong, or a little of both. It is my hope that most of them will wear the mantle of returned hero proudly and continue to help build the community and to nurture new bloggers.

Yet I’m not part of that group. Tens, if not hundreds of people read what I write. I hope my assorted posts around the blogosphere help a little bit here and there, but I don’t have the audience of the A-listers. I probably never will and that is okay.

But still, I too am driven by a desire to make this a better country, to promote progressive ideals, to get people to think and act in ways that Democrats should be proud of. So, what can I do?

What I think I do best is to help build bridges and to help train new bloggers. By building bridges, by exploring new online communities, by trying to help nurture them, I am doing the little I can. Terrence, of the Republic of T has a proposal for moving forward. It relates nice with Jeffrey Feldman’s proposal as well as a small amount of what I was driving at with this diary.

We can, and should, be looking at ways to build community, diversity and welcome new bloggers. Some of it may happen at YearlyKos 07. Some of it may happen at other events around the country. I just hope that all of us, from the mighty A-listers, to lowly bloggers like myself can work together to make this happen.

Detroit, New Orleans & Baltimore

Detroit has never recovered from the riots of 1967. What does it say about a nation that, after 39 years, it can not, or will not, heal such a wound? What does it say about the future of New Orleans?

As for Baltimore, I highly recommend a few hours watching HBO's The Wire. Although it is "fiction", it tells more truth than any "reality" TV show and is more relevant than the vast oceans of escapism that so define American television fare.

The question is this: If our house is not in order, as the evidence from too many of our cities suggests, why should we expect any other peoples to welcome the forced imposition of our imperfect model on them?

Secondly, if our model is imperfect, if not broken, why should we support politicians who can do no better than offer us more of the same old same old? Today, it seems that the leadership of the two largest political parties in America brag too loudly about how effectively they suck on the sugar teat of the corporate lobbyists. Do we really want politicians who are little more than the bitches of the lobbyists?

If we want an America that can do better by her people, an America that will lead the world in preserving a biosphere that we will be proud to pass on to our grandchildren, then we need to demand better of ourselves and our politicians.

Will we? Will we stand up to the Carbon Barons before their sequestered carbon has driven the biosphere into a seriously damaged state that bears little resemblance to the living conditions we have enjoyed in the past? Will we do it in the next 10 years?

Perhaps Al Gore's speech today at NYU Law School will help us get on a better path. It is an excellent speech I highly recommend to one and all.

60 Seconds to Steal an Election

This is a cross posting of a Marty Kaplan note posted originally on The Huffington Post.

09.14.2006
How to Hack a Diebold (Ivy League Edition)

Watch this video

Princeton computer scientists have figured out how to hack into a Diebold AccuVote [sic] TouchScreen voting machine. The subversion of democracy takes a coupla minutes, a screwdriver or paperclip, plus a floppy with the malware they've written.

This is no comedy video; it's a bone-chilling, blood-pressure-raising, citizen-outraging rebuttal to all the calming unctuous bromides you've heard about the safety of our voting technology.

The authors of this paper may be geeks, but they don't wear tinfoil hats. The P doesn't stand for Paranoia; it stands for Princeton.

I'd upload the Princeton video so you could watch it right here, but the Creative Commons non-commercial license it's copyrighted under precludes wrapping it in an ad. As long as you attribute it and don't profit from it, you can post the video on any site you'd like. If the hotlink to the video doesn't work for you, here's the URL:

http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/videos.html

The complete paper can be found here.

Had enough?

Once Upon a Time

"This is a story about the neo-conservative thought process. It is also an answer to the question in what world does George W. Bush live?"

Read the whole essay at Killing the Frog.

Aikido and the War on Terrorism

Submitted by M. D. McDonald

In the martial art of Aikido, an attacker's directed energy is used against them to take them down, while an individual or society that remains balanced -- remains protected in that balance. Some are concerned that the stands of preemptive war that have become so popular and vigorously supported in the United States since 9/11 and in Israel in recent days, make these societies particularly susceptible to enemies that can use our own imbalanced momentum against us. The U.S. and Israel now have no lack of enemies that would like to initiate, and would celebrate, our fall.

There is a concern that the "War on Terrorism" has such a blind momentum that a "patriot" can only follow in lock step -- no longer able to live by the broader principles upon which our democracy was founded. Some practitioners of Aikido believe that a society which would label those that speak of moderation and regaining thoughtful balance as being "cowards" is entering a very dangerous phase in its political trajectory. If those that are exercising freedom of speech to suggest alternatives, especially those that have demonstrated their heroism, are further labelled as "traitors," it may be wise to consider the possibility of significant danger ahead.

At a time when world opinion is now galvanizing against further atrocities catalyzed under the rubric of the war on terrorism, it may be wise for Americans and Israelis to recenter themselves. The underlying principles of Aikido would indicate that prudence would warrant a shift back to a more defendable and morally justified balance. It may be time to regain a broader situational awareness in a rapidly changing environment.

Perhaps, we should be considering the possibility that our recent string of counterproductive actions and reactions that have led to such destruction in Iraq and Lebanon may make us particularly susceptible to more devastating loss. If unwise actions remain unchecked by the broader principles of democracy and humanity, societies lost in their own martial aggression run the risk of becoming what they are fighting against.

Is this an appropriate time to consider the possibility that the concept of the "war on terrorism" may have become blindly counterproductive? Our enemies that stand balanced for the time being on the sidelines, are certainly hoping that we do not regain our balance. Otherwise, they may have to face us while we still have the strength, the will and the humanity to check their unilateral, imbalanced aggressions, when they decide to make their move.

End Game behind Lebanese War?

By: Dr. Farooq Hassan

Harvard University

A major puzzling question agitating many is how to evaluate the end game behind this huge military onslaught that is destroying Lebanon? On 3rd August the Senate Armed Services Committee gave the Defense Secretary a difficult time when he appeared in a public debate to explain the Administration’s stance on the war situation in Iraq and Lebanon.

These exchanges quintessentially centered on Rumsfeld’s earlier upbeat assessments and what has actually occurred. It was an ex post facto analysis of the recent past: the aim being to demonstrate the short sightedness of the US polices. Senator Hillary Clinton categorized the Administration’s policies in Iraq as faltering failures and their execution incompetent. Embarrassing for the Administration, its two top generals, who had been frequently describing American fortunes in Iraq’s war in reserved yet clearly platitudinous semantics, frankly admitted that Iraq was near enough a civil war. Manifestly the army’s think tanks have now come to adopt the same perception of events in Baghdad that the public has known for many months! For many months, with nearly a hundred deaths a day, there is little that any sophisticated spin of concepts could possibly otherwise accomplish.

What is, however, the ultimate goal of the current state of continued bombardment of Lebanon that clearly has Washington’s support? To realize this end game scenario a number of fundamental questions need to be raised. In pursing Hezbollah, why was the high degree of damage to Lebanon’s infrastructure and people acceptable to the US? Did Secretary of State’s repeated assertions that “sustainable peace” was the US goal, implicitly permit the devastating civil toll? If, for a moment, we accept the underlying rationale of this perspective on account of its possible strategic implications, we still are not told why this was a necessary element in this process. Hasn’t such a policy politically strengthened Hizbollah? If the aim was to destroy their military might this objective has failed. Indeed, this war, now in its fourth week, put an end to the myth of invincibility of Israel’s armed forces.

Alternatively, was this apparently destructive bombardment conducted with the aim of demoralizing the Lebanese government and the people? Or is it to use it as a prelude to attacking Iran? Is an attack on Syria similarly a possibility? And if Israel, hypothetically speaking, succeeds in all these aims, or one of them, how does that advance US interests when political loss of its standing in the Muslim world is obvious? The OIC Declaration in Kuala Lumpur on the same day, 3rd August, affirmatively said as much. What is the US role in the Lebanon War? Is she a party on Israel’s side, or is it neutral? If so, what credence can be given to such avocations by Washington that both Lebanon and Israel are its friends when the former is being physically wiped out of existence by the latter?

The war has not gone well for Israel. Even Hassan Nassullah, despite heavy bombing efforts, could not be prevented from appearing five times on public TV! On the 23rd day of this war, claims of down grading the military potential of Hizbollah were belied when over 200 rockets landed in northern Israel, killing 9 civilians besides four solders during combat. On the same day Beirut was fiercely hit by air attacks and the Lebanese Premier announced that over 900 civilians had been killed by these Israeli bombardments, about one third of the country’s structures demolished, many thousands injured, and over a million made refugees in their own country.

While discussing Lebanon, one should not over look the Iraqi situation. That war, despite worldwide opposition, was started at Washington’s urging to destroy WMD. When they were not found, it was canvassed that it was necessary to continue the military operations as democracy was at stake. As hostilities have still continued, it is now also said to be war against terrorism.

Why this transformation of semantics? Or is it a difference in concepts?

The most affirmative awareness of this phenomenon came recently through a speech delivered last week by premier Tony Blair in Los Angles. Signaling a clear break with American neo-conservatives, and arguably with President Bush, in this address there was no mention of there being in existence now a “war on terror” in Lebanon and possibly in Iraq. Blair remarked:

"We are fighting a war, but not just against terrorism but about how the world should govern itself in the early 21st Century, about global values. We will not win the battle against this global extremism unless we win it at the level of values as much as force, unless we show we are even-handed, fair and just in our application of those values to the world."

Tony Blair now seems to accept that some of the approaches have been wrong. He was not repudiating the war in Iraq but was saying that not enough emphasis has been put on solving underlying problems, like the Israel/Palestine issue for one. There is thus a muted and belated reference to causation and the need to address it on moral principles.

"Unless we re-appraise our strategy, unless we revitalize the broader global agenda on poverty, climate change, trade, and in respect of the Middle East, bend every sinew of our will to making peace between Israel and Palestine, we will not win. And this is a battle we must win,"

he said.

True neo-conservatives might consider that Tony Blair is going soft, especially in his call for the US not to use "unilateral action" as a "preference". But the time has come to ask seriously about the goals of the end game in Lebanon.

US & Lebanon: Unintended Power Shifts in Middle East?

By: Dr. Farooq Hassan

Harvard University

International events of a momentous nature in the past few years have proved that military solutions do not auger well for its users in this millennium. Since 9/11, despite overwhelming superiority of technology and armaments, it is beyond question that military over-kills have achieved little except physical demolition of structures, landscapes and of thousands of civilians. Indeed, there is incontrovertible evidence that it has generated a wave of nationalism seldom seen on the international scene since the beginning of the last century.

Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and now in Lebanon have effectively demolished the notion of invincibility of supposedly super trained armies against rag tag militias who are determined to undertake “liberation” of their locales - at least as they see it in non conventional warfare. History seems forgotten by those who are supposed to know it. Those wishing to learn may read the accounts of the British Afghan Wars of 1842 and 1843 to comprehend that the greatest Empire of that time at Westminster was ruthlessness brushed aside by a handful of Pathans.

Hezbollah is riding a wave of popularity on the Arab street. Not since it played a role in forcing Israel to withdraw from southern Lebanon in 2000 has it enjoyed such adulation. Its leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, is enjoying something akin to a personality cult. At a time when Arab governments are seen as largely powerless to influence events, Hezbollah is seen as taking on the Israelis - and behind the Israelis, the American superpower. This has put Arab governments - in particular those allied to the United States - and other Muslim leaders, such as Musharraf and Mubarak, in a difficult quandary.

When this crisis began three weeks ago, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan did not hide their view that Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers was "reckless adventurism". This was unusual enough, but they also openly directed their displeasure at the group's backers, Syria and Iran. Such publicly voiced stance manifestly pleased the Bush administration as such critiques, for what they are worth, were frequently quoted by the US leadership and by and by dozens of “experts” in the media. It is equally clear that it was routinely ignored [in the West] that such Muslim countries’ governments were roundly criticized at home. The Saudi media made much of the fact that the king and the crown prince made handsome personal donations. In addition, the Saudi state has given $1.5 billion (£800 million) to support the Lebanese pound and help rebuild the shattered country. It is not that these countries have changed their minds. They are only. as a part of the realpolitik of the situation, correctly evaluating the growing influence of Iran and Hezbollah. They believe the regional balance of power is shifting in Iran's favor.

Washington's Arab friends are pressing urgently for an immediate ceasefire. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has warned darkly of the danger of a wider regional war. Saudi television this past week organized a day long appeal - or "telethon" as the British called it - which raised some $29 million (£15.55 million) for Lebanon. It is not that these rulers have changed their minds. They can clearly perceive the growing influence of Iran and Hezbollah and, indeed, of impoverished Syria as well.

Indeed, if a not so subtle endorsement of this phenomenon was needed, it came through the Iraqi and Lebanese Prime Ministers who went out of their way to be critical of Israeli action and impliedly of the US. The comments of the Iraqi leadership were particularly poignant for US policy makers. They were issued in the US and, considering the billions spent by Washington to install the maker of these views as that nation's Premier, it must make such policymakers ponder of how wrong they may have been!

As such, howsoever they may be negatively viewed by Washington and London, the predominant view in the Middle East, and the wider Muslim world, is overwhelmingly supportive of Hezbollah. The hope of some Western analysts to see the sudden eruption of the Shia and Sunni divide is, in this case, utterly ill founded - as results have shown thus far. For most people, the Palestinian cause transcends sectarian differences. Even al-Qaeda, no friend of the Shia, has felt obliged to speak out. The group's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has issued a video saying no Muslim can stay silent in the face of events in Lebanon.

Israel's Lebanon adventures have coalesced the fundamental antagonists in a manner that famous Muslim thinkers like Iqbal & Rumi could not accomplish. Al-Qaeda’s declaration is thus, doctrinally, nothing short of, historically speaking in strategic terms, a startling phenomenon.

The U.S. evidently miscalculated the [cost of the] delay in supporting a ceasefire: A delay that resulted in the tragedy at Qana. It only underscores the awareness that there has occurred, as a result of such overall thinking in Washington, a manifest unintended shift in the balance of power in this region.

Killing the Frog: Notes on the Latest Middle East Crisis

By: Roger Hurwitz
Cambridge, MA

The killings and capture of its soldiers, first by Hamas and then by Hezbollah, gave Israel the need to respond, but left it the choice of how. Israel leaders took each case as an opportunity to destroy, dismantle or, at least, permanently cripple an enemy. On this view, the question is not whether Israel chose disproportionate force to coerce the return of its soldiers. Rather, can Israel achieve its larger ambitions and how much will civilians on all sides suffer for its attempts?

The Israel strategy is relatively simple: Degrade and deter the enemy through assassinations and bombing; make life hell for the other inhabitants, so they will turn on the enemy. In the meantime, no negotiations with anyone, but encouragement for people on the other side to start civil wars. In terms of a purely self-interested calculus, the first problem is that this strategy seldom works and sometimes backfires.

So far, the attacks on Hamas have not destroyed its capacity to launch its low grade, homemade rockets against Israel’s Negev. The attacks have sometimes missed their targets and instead wiped out innocent Palestinians. Such tragedies and their increased miseries have rallied almost all the Palestinians in Gaza to Hamas. Support has vanished for the more accommodating Abu Mazan, ironically confirming the Israelis’ earlier dismissal of him as politically impotent.

The present situation in Lebanon recalls the 1970s, when Israel repeatedly bombed that country to coerce its government to dismantle the “state within a state” that the Palestinians had created in southern Lebanon. From there the Palestinians launched attacks on Israel. The bombings, however, created several hundred thousand refugees, who poured into Beirut. The refugee problem overwhelmed the weak, laissez-faire government, undermined the shaky political system and aggravated other processes that were leading the country to civil war. When the war came, Israel hoped in vain for a victory by the Christian forces that would lead to the expulsion of Palestinians from Lebanon. Instead, in 1982 then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon saw a need for Israel to intervene in the war and do the job directly. Although Israel succeeded in expelling the Palestinian leadership and dismantling the Palestinian base, it found itself in a quagmire of low intensity conflict with Hezbollah. It took Israel eighteen years, several hundred dead soldiers and countless dollars to get out of Lebanon. By then Hezbollah had build its own state within a state and was ready to join the Lebanese political system.

Earlier outcomes like these prompted Levi Eshkol, an Israel Prime Minister of the 1960s, with a profound sense of irony, to call his country a “hapless Samson.” I think, however, they also reveal two fundamental flaws in Israel’s strategy: First, to coerce the other side to curb your enemy, someone there has to have the capability or will to act. Today, as before, Israel wants a weak Lebanese government to take strong action against Hezbollah, but it has neither accepted the weakness of that government or done anything to strengthen it. On the contrary, Israel’s bombings of civilians and Lebanese infrastructure can only further weaken that government. Similarly, Israel while wanting strong action from Abu Mazan, dismissed him as weak and offered him no payoff for such action. Second, to be deterred by threats, people must have something of value to lose. Unfortunately, Israel has not cared whether the Palestinians in the territories or the people of southern Lebanon have a quality of life they would want to protect by acting according to Israel’s wishes when Israel threatened it.

These lessons about the mixed motives and social relations of conflict, which Nobel Prize winner Thomas Schelling taught nearly fifty years ago, seem particularly lost on the present Israel government. Claiming the legacy of former Prime Minister Sharon, Ehud Olmert and Amir Peretz were already committed to unilateral courses of action, as if decisions about the future of Gaza and the West Bank can be made by Israel alone. As an editorial in The Forward just remarked, it seems for them war is the continuation of unilateral diplomacy by other means.

This is not to deny legitimacy in Israel’s use of force – even disproportionate force. By some objective standards and certainly in the eyes of most Israelis, the withdrawals from Lebanon and the Gaza Strip removed almost all the grounds for grievance of people there toward Israel. What right then do the sub-national groups, Hamas and Hezbollah, have to attack Israeli civilians and soldiers? Why did the governing authorities not stop them? How can the governing authorities deny responsibility if these groups are part of the governing authorities?

Yet in the Middle East legitimacy has helped nations less in getting what they wanted then have the intelligent use of force, some restraint and a little help from friends. In the past, the rapid escalations, like those we see today, did not entirely destroy the ongoing game. Before they spiraled into regional conflagration, they were capped with incremental gains and losses, by the intervention of the superpowers. Because the United States and the Soviet Union feared being dragged into direct confrontation by their clients, they set limits on what each client could lose or expect to gain. The situation is scarier today. There is only one superpower; its decision makers are distracted by the misadventure in Iraq and deluded by the idea that regional and global politics are zero-sum games. Linking everything to monolithic terrorism, George Bush looks forward to Israel putting Hezbollah out of the game and hopes to give it enough time. That would put Syria, Iran and more generally Islamic fundamentalism on notice.

Given the green light, Olmert and Peretz have lost no time in responding appropriately in word, as well as deed. In the Knesset today, Olmert identified Tehran, Damascus, Hezbollah and Hamas as an axis of evil. But what about the mid and long range effects of their decisions? Will they lead Israel to reoccupy the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon, when that has already proved unbearably costly for Israel? Will decapitation and destabilization of the other sides assure there is no one to talk with, when the United States finally says “enough.” Will there be no Israeli solution for Gaza and southern Lebanon other than emptying them of inhabitants and sowing the earth with salt?

Roger Hurwitz rhhu@csail.mit.edu

Opposite Sides of the Same Bad Coin

Remember the counter culture extremes of the '60's? Life without limits, restraints, controls or consequences. Free sex, free love, free drugs, and rock and roll with general disregard for the future. It may well have been a predictable reaction to both the 1950s with its McCarthyism as well as the technological and cultural determinism that lead to the travesty of the VietNam war. In the end, however, it was not very effective. It was a bad idea that promoted immature self-indulgence, greed and the I.Me over the We. It did not and could not work as envisioned. Perhaps because it was basically an unbalanced view of "reality".

Now, some 40 years latter, we have the business cultural extremes of the first decade of the 21st century -- last seen from 1890 - 1929. Free market capitalism without limits, restraints or controls and with the same general disregard for inconvenient consequences. It too is a bad idea that promotes immature self-indulgence, greed and the I.Me over the We. It is not working. It is showing us every day what a bad idea it is. Enron being but one example. It too is basically an unbalanced view of "reality".

Worse, the Bush team has now, with the internal logical consistency of their prior business excesses ala Cheney & Haliburton, brought this same no limits, no controls, no boundaries, no consequences dogma to our politics. This is producing yet more disasters. Iraq being chief amongst them. They will be remembered for the gift they are giving to the future.

Remember the Club of Rome Study: Limits to Growth? It was an arrow to the very heart of the business culture of no limits, restraints, controls or consequences. The very word "limits" was anathema. The Business community reacted to it, via the National Association of Manufactures et al, just the way they reacted to FDR's first Inaugural Address in 1933. FDR was reasserting the need for limits and controls after the country was put into a many year Depression by the excesses and zealotry of rampant free market capitalism without limits. This had to be countered by the NAM at any cost. So they hired Edward Bernays and hijacked the New York World's Fair of 1939 to trumpet the superiority of the Corporation. Bernays manipulated the Fair to give one message: The future would be brought to you by the almighty and benevolent corporation. And what a future they have created for us. See, for example, "An Inconvenient Truth".

For more on Bernays, The New York Worlds Fair, and much more, see the BBC series "The Century of the Self".

Abu Ghraib, torture, rendition, illegal spying, denial of science and global warming, etc are not anomalies. They are all of a piece. They are the logical approach of those who demand life, government and business without limits, restraints or controls with complete disregard for consequences. The triumph of the I and ME over all else at any cost.

The irony is the 60's extreme counter culture leaders and today's extreme business culture leaders hate each other while they embrace so many of the same values integral to a Life without limits, restraints, controls or consequences.

Is it any wonder that neither group has found a way to fix the war zone in Detroit? Much less address the impending global consequences of de-stabilizing the biosphere?

The Communications Commons

I have a few thoughts on the June 26th article in NY Times reported by Ken Belson: What if They Built an Urban Wireless Network and Hardly Anyone Used It?

The missing conversation on the policy side of the municipal wireless issue is whether or not it is important to preserve the hub and spoke organizational model for our communications paradigm in order to preserve "billing" by "providers". Of course this also reinforces the regrettable notion that we the people are merely unequal consumers locked into an asymmetrical relationship.

Or should we look at another policy option, namely that wireless communications should be seamless, always on Big Broadband publicly operated as an element of the commons in order improve public life, promote innovation and the efficient use of end user capital? In this case, billing is a mute point, just as billing for street lights, snow plowing, police services, fire services etc are not billable events. In this case, we are allowed to view we the people as all of citizens, producers, distributors, and consumers.

It is wise to remember that the very successful PC revolution was largely funded by end-user capital when we upgrade our PCs every few years for $3,000 an upgrade.

As I wrote earlier this month:

The issue is do we want a connectivity environment that takes full advantage of all of the things we have learned since the founding of the FCC in 1934?

Or do we insist on remaining locked into the 20th century Hub & Spoke architecture [Master/Slave] in order to preserve the "customer" model supported by "billing"? IE, do we want to invent the future looking in the rear view mirror?

If, on the other hand, we want a network of equals for the 21st century, a model congruent with our professed political values, then we need to not only allow sharing of connectivity, but to actively encourage it. This suggests that we need a completely new billing model. More accurately, a no billing model!

If we want a modern communications paradigm, it would appear that public entities are the best, perhaps ONLY, entities to run it. Why? Because they do not have requirements to bill every user every month for every bit. We are not individually billed for police and fire protection, nor for street lights, nor public education and so forth. Thus government, which generally DOES work, has an proven and existing model for public services, such as public access to the internet, that can only work if sharing is leveraged for cooperative gain, not billed for private gain.

From another pont of view, if I were a stock holder in one of today's incumbent connectivity providers, would I want my company to invest its scarce human and financial capital in very low margin bit hauling? Or would my investment be better served if my company invested in high margin, innovative, products and services delivered over commodity bits? Do I want the cost of bits to be a barrier to my high margin products and services?

The conversation has been distorted by the recent notion that everything should be a market function and the false premise that anything a government does automatically and unfairly competes with the "sacred" private sector. Rubbish.

The private sector loves externalities that allow them to shift costs to others. Bit hauling should be seen as an opportunity for a magnificent externality that allows them to re-allocate resources to more profitable operations. In this light, it is, in fact, in the self interest of the incumbents to work with the municipalities to create the very best possible bit hauling externality. Consider: Did the proponents of the market object to our tax dollars building the Eisenhower Interstate Highway system that has allowed them to externalize so many transportation costs? Or that out tax dollars subsidize airports that benefit the business traveller the most? Or that our tax dollar created the internet in the first place?

So the win win here is a robust publicly operated network of equals operated by municipalities. Such a network will allow the private sector to externalize low margin operations in order to improve their bottom lines while enabling an innovations commons to support our emerging 21st century world.

For perspective on the appropriate role of government, consider what Frank Rich wrote in the June 25th NY Times:

"Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, the very model of big government that the current administration vilifies, never would have trusted private contractors to run the show. Somehow that unwieldy, bloated government took less time to win World War II than George W. Bush's privatized government is taking to blow this one."

I suggest government has a significant and appropriate role in building wireless networks that are "free" from direct billing.

The only question is this: How long will it take creative citizens to invent applications that saturate the network? In Mongolia it took about 1 week. As long as the architecture of the network is scalable, this is not a problem. Consider that a modern fiber cable has 144 strands, each strand can carry 70 lamdas, each lambda is 10 gigabits. The backhaul capacity is available to support very big broadband -- if we enable it.

As James Burkes said:

"The other general thing to be said about how change comes about through innovation, and especially about the rate at which that changes occurs, is that the easier you communicate, the faster change happens."

James Burke. Connections series 1, program 10 at 19:00 into the show.

Finally, it is worth re-reading a few paragraphs from the March 4, 1933 First Inaugural Address of Franklin D. Roosevelt

... Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.

Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.

Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This Nation asks for action, and action now.

Bring on the publicly created municipal wireless projects. We need every bit of innovation we can get.

Right Turn on Green

Something is happening in English politics we should know about. Ode Magazine has published a very interesting essay by Jay Walljasper in their issue 34:

Right Turn on Green

Excerpt:

The rise of a political paradox brings hope for the world

Modern politics is notorious for the way it creates strange new meanings for familiar words. “National security,” for instance, now means attacking distant countries. “Choice,” in American electoral debates, is a secret code for abortion, and “family” signifies fierce opposition to gay rights. “Us,” in the minds of some European political candidates, refers exclusively to white people.

But the word that has undergone the most dramatic transformation at the hands of politicians is “conservative.” It once clearly described a political philosophy devoted to preserving tradition. But powerful leaders around the world now use the term to justify a complete reordering of society according to the wishes of global corporations and radical free-market economists. The merit of these policies is open to discussion, but it seems obvious that this kind of political agenda is anything but conservative.

“It’s no accident that ‘conservative’ and ‘conservation’ are almost the same word,” notes American environmentalist philosopher Bill McKibben. “But what we call conservative today has been captured by something else—the idea that we need economic growth at all costs. That can be ruinous to our environment and our communities.” That’s the great irony of politics today: The very idea of conservation—conserving the environment, natural resources, energy, a sense of community or anything else—is considered unnecessary, or even a dangerous obstacle to economic progress, by most so-called Conservatives. U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney summed up the prevailing right-wing view when he said, “Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis... for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.”

This is what makes the recent turn of events in British politics so fascinating. The Conservative Party, which earned the undying wrath of environmentalists when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, is now trumpeting green issues in an effort to unseat the ruling Labour Party. The new Conservative leader, David Cameron, who assumed power last fall, quotes Gandhi in urging people “to become the change we want to see in the world.” He can be seen riding his bike all over London and plans to add solar panels and a wind turbine to his home in the fashionable Notting Hill neighbourhood. He’s gone so far as to question the dominance of corporate power in the UK, declaring in a recent newspaper ad, “We should not just stand up for big business but to big business.”

While this might sound like some sort of political gimmick, there are signs that Cameron is sincere about pioneering a new brand of “green” conservativism—which could become as globally influential as Thatcher’s free-market policies were in the 1980s. If the environment ceases to become a divisive issue among parties of the left, right and centre around the world, we will see a new flowering of green initiatives.

Read the whole article at: Right Turn on Green

Thanks to Greater Democracy member Erika Keller Rogoff for bringing this to my attention.

Political Narratives, Dead Cats, Lame Ducks and the Expectation Game.

Columbia Journalism Review Daily Traces the Birth of a Narrative. They talk about how cable news reporters and pundits are questioning whether the tide is turning for Bush. They comment, “How are they answering themselves? It's a mixed bag. But if a question gets asked often enough in the media, the answer begins to (almost) not matter. And before long the question mark is dropped entirely and a narrative is born.”

They sum up the discussion with “And there it is, in the blink of an eye, so fast that you might have missed it: A narrative is born.”

I lived on a sailboat for several years and one thing you learn on a boat is that the tide changes four times a day.

Another phrase that people use is if Bush is experiencing a “bounce”. Here, I go back to my experiences on Wall Street. When a market has experienced a sharp decline, similar to how Bush’s approval has declined, everyone looks for any positive uptick. The question that always gets asked is if we are experiencing a market reversal, or if the uptick is merely a “dead cat bounce”.

This goes back to the old saying in investing that even a dead cat will bounce if dropped from high enough. When a market experiences a dead cat bounce, there is a brief respite from the downward trend, but the downward trend resumes before you know it.

Is Bush a dead cat? A lame duck? Perhaps the emergence of another narrative gives us a little insight into this. Staying with the Wall Street focus, today’s Wall Street Journal asks, Will 2006 Reprise 1994? This question keeps getting asked and as with the other narrative, ”the answer begins to (almost) not matter”

The narratives feed into another part of the political process, the expectations game. If Bush can claw his way back to only 40% perhaps, Republicans think, maybe they can change the other polls about a plurality of voters thinking we would be better off if Democrats controlled Congress. Of course this 40% is a low expectation compared to Clinton’s 48% approval rating in 1994.

Yet all of this still stays with the horse race narratives. We really need to be talking about narratives around how we will get back to having a government of, by, and for the people.

RFK Jr. on the 2004 Election

Speaking of the "the corruption of democracy, itself", as Tom Atlee does below, consider tnis:

Friend Bob Weber forwarded this note to me. It is very much worth reading. How will we counter election fraud, apparently a fundamental and essential tactic of the Bush administration, in 2006 and 2008? Election fraud is both necessary and sufficient for Bush to assure "victory".

If you read one thing this year, let it be the compelling article by RFK Jr. on the theft of the 2004 election.

And look at the accompanying 3 charts:

This one is going to be hard to ignore.

A House Divided will not Prevail

Jock Gill, Aldon Hynes, and Robert Steele

If the Republican party can be said to have fragmented into 1] an evangelical extremist wing aligned for convenience with unregulated corporatism and neo-liberal capitalism, and 2] the rest of the more moderate Republican party that has lost all semblance of influence within its own party, the Democrats can be said to be even further fragmented, to the point of ineffective incoherence.

In control is the “last gasp” of the 20th Century wing of the Democratic party, where big money displaced labor and the grassroots, the caring church, and the intellectuals to craft the Democratic leadership as “Republican Lite,” equally corrupt, but more inept than their counter-parts. They stand for nothing other than incumbency and the power of money over ideas.

As insurgents emergent, we have the Netroots that were first noticed for their support of Howard Dean. In 2003 and 2004, the Netroots wing experimented with “bonding” social capital and micro-cash campaign contributions, but were not able to organize themselves in time to stage a break-out and capture the flag. Although Dean is today the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, his loyalties appear to be split between the new Netroots and the traditional Democratic Grassroots. A house divided cannot stand. In addition, there is every expectation that he will be trumped by the bigger databases and larger bank accounts of the 20th Century wing of the party.

These two groups have left three core constituencies of the Democratic Party, Labor and the traditional Grassroots, the intellectual, and the caring church, grasping at straws and feeling powerless. Labor, the intellectuals, and the caring church have no one in the top ranks of the Democratic Party organization who will listen to them or help them contribute to a restoration of the power of the people.

In our view, the Democratic Party is headed directly for another disaster, as the New York 20th Century gang self-destructs on the twin rocks of financial and ideological warfare, where the Republican Party, under the control of its well-heeled extremists, excels.

The Democrats, however, could work to unite at least these 4 core elements: 1] The traditional grassroots; 2] the new netroots; 3] the intellectual/progressive wing, and, importantly, 4] the caring church. How? By recognizing that the party must nurture the formation of both forms of social capital: Bonding and Bridging. The Wikipedia has this to say:

Bonding and bridging

In his pioneering study, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster 2000), Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam wrote: "Henry Ward Beecher's advice a century ago to "multiply picnics" is not entirely ridiculous today. ...

Putnam speaks of two main components of the concept: bonding social capital and bridging social capital. The former refers to the value assigned to social networks between homogeneous groups of people and the latter to that of social networks between socially heterogeneous groups. Typical examples are that criminal gangs create bonding social capital, while choirs and bowling clubs (hence the title, as Putnam lamented their decline) create bridging social capital. Bridging social capital is argued to have a host of other benefits for societies, governments, individuals, and communities; Putnam likes to note that joining an organization cuts in half an individual's chance of dying within the next year.

The distinction is useful in highlighting how social capital may not always be beneficial for society as a whole (though it is always an asset for those individuals and groups involved). Horizontal networks of individual citizens and groups that enhance community productivity and cohesion are said to be positive social capital assets whereas self-serving exclusive gangs and hierarchical patronage systems that operate at cross purposes to societal interests can be thought of as negative social capital burdens on society.

The concept of social capital in a Chinese social context has been closely linked with the concept of guanxi.

There is one issue, one place, one foundation, where the neglected elements of the Democratic Party can make common cause with moderate Republicans, Libertarians, Greens, Reforms, and all others, and that place is Electoral Reform. Working together as a Citizens Party respecting dual political memberships, they can generate significant bridging capital. Together, they can re-vitalize the notion that we all have challenges we can overcome by working together, but not if we work alone.

Al Gore won the majority of the popular vote in 2000. John Kerry, for all his problems, won a significant portion of the vote in 2004. In our view, the combination of Al Gore and a governor with a nationally recognized track record, working with a Citizens Party, as a non-rival builder of bridging social capital, committed to Electoral Reform as the litmus test issue for every incumbent and challenger in 2006, is a winning proposition.

Who else is better positioned to run against Senator McCain, the Republican’s anti-Bush?

Citizen Participation Activities in Porto Alegre, Brazil

We the People decide our city budget - and other democratic innovations

A letter from Tom Atlee

Dear friends,

When I last wrote about citizen participation activities in Porto Alegre, Brazil, their democratic budgeting practices had "only" spread to 70 cities in Brazil. Now 200 cities in Brazil are using annual participatory budgeting and it is spreading to dozens of other cities in Europe, Latin America, and Africa, as well. Do you think this profoundly democratic practice might someday reach the U.S.?

Brazil's remarkable weaving of top-down and bottom-up participatory democracy into the field of budgeting serves to inspire all who work to invigorate democracy, whether we are public officials, political parties, civil society organizations, activist networks, or individual social change agents. One thing is certain: When we see The People competently controlling the government's purse strings, we are seeing a different kind of democracy...

Participatory budgeting is one of an expanding family of innovative practices and creative ideas to make democracy more sensible, creative, participatory, and collectively intelligent. To pursue these innovations, however, requires that we shift some of our focus -- and resources -- from candidates and issues to THE SYSTEMS WE USE TO DECIDE about candidates and issues. Until those systems are healthy, we will continue to have grotesque distortions of democracy and a painful inability to make any real sustained progress on the issues most people are most concerned about and most affected by.

Viewing democracy as a form of collective intelligence can help us think more clearly about its possibilities. Other perspectives can also help, including more established approaches like "deliberative democracy" (see and also -- and mind-opening democratic concepts like "transpartisanship" , which helps partisans step outside their partisan roles long enough to work together on issues where they DO agree, to which their partisanship may have blinded them. Many other approaches to democratic innovation are listed at Democracy Innovations (a site which could use some updating: Any volunteers?)

One of the most intriguing new ideas to come across my desk is a proposal by Robert Steele and Jock Gill for "a 'dual membership' party, the Citizens Party. This new party would not ask its members to leave their original party, but would, instead, serve as a second home, a unifying party, committed to one issue and one issue only: achieving electoral reform". Steele and Gill want to attract citizens who may be proud of the ideals and traditions of their primary party (be it Republican, Democrat, Green, or whatever) but who are unsatisfied with how that party is behaving in the current political system. A "dual membership" party could provide such partisans with common ground on which to work together to change the system so their traditional party and the whole partisan approach could better function to serve the whole country.

In my co-intelligent dreaming I like to envision a broader transpartisan version of such a "dual membership party": It would provide common ground for creative collaborative work on ALL issues. Such a party could sponsor citizen deliberative councils to discover what the informed, deliberative public -- a truly inclusive "We the People" -- wanted on various issues. (Such a deliberative process provides a much deeper understanding of what the public truly wants than can be discovered through polling. See "A Call to Move Beyond Public Opinion to Public Judgment".)

Once members of this party knew the "public judgment" on an issue, they would support solutions and policies that implemented that judgment. They would also propose -- and lobby for -- ways to embed empowered citizen deliberation in all aspects of government, including budgets, as we see being done in Porto Alegre (below). A voter or candidate could be both a Republican (or Democrat, or Libertarian, or Green) AND ALSO be a member of this dual membership party. When an issue was resolved into what we might call "a People's Policy" -- an inclusive "We the People" solution -- they would play a TRANSPARTISAN role, promoting that solution. For every other issue, they would play their normal PARTISAN role, acting as they ordinarily do in our system as it is. As more issues were deliberated, and as more deliberations were empowered as part of our system of governance, partisanship would shrink and collective intelligence would expand.

Individually and collectively, we may not be evolved enough yet to step so far beyond partisanship. But times are changing. If enough of us see that there is more to be gained, in the long run, by supporting systemic changes towards more inclusive collaboration and collective intelligence, we can influence how our societies respond to the coming crises that will be demonstrating -- with painful clarity -- that the systems we have now can't handle the complex, challenging, and rapidly changing conditions of the 21st century.

Well informed, well connected, and moving ahead with alert awareness, we can become agents of the conscious evolution of civilization towards greater sustainability, thrivability, inclusivity and wisdom.

And every moment, as we enjoy each other and this work, we might also enjoy the added thrill of waking up as part of the 14-billion-year unfolding of the Big Bang and stardust, showing up today as our rapidly evolving world, galaxy, universe... Because deep inside what we are trying to do, evolution is seeing if human consciousness can call forth a self-evolving wise democracy on Earth, as one more remarkable experiment of Life...

And now let's take a look at a special, inspiring step on that strangely courageous journey....

Coheartedly,
Tom

=======================

The Citizens of Porto Alegre
by Gianpaolo Baiocchi ; Boston Review

Marco is a self-employed handyman in his mid-30s who moved to the city of Porto Alegre from the Brazilian countryside eight years ago. A primary-school-educated son of a farmer, he'd had few opportunities in his small town and had heard about the city's generous social services. He borrowed money for bus fare and landed in Porto Alegre, where he found construction work. But when his wages wouldn't cover rent he headed for one of the squatter settlements on the outskirts of the city. He soon moved in with a companheira who sewed clothes and ironed from home. In time his life became more settled, with incremental improvements to the house, small but growing savings, and brisk business owing to his good reputation in the community. Marco's story of migration, squatting, and survival was unremarkable--until he attended a local meeting on how the city government should invest its money in the region.

Read the whole essay.

About Tom Atlee

Tom Atlee * The Co-Intelligence Institute * PO Box 493 * Eugene, OR 97440
http://www.co-intelligence.org * http://www.democracyinnovations.org
Read THE TAO OF DEMOCRACY
Tom Atlee's blog
Please support our work. * Your donations are fully tax-deductible.

Citizens Party, part II

Informed, Engaged, Democracy
Collective Public Intelligence

By: Robert D. Steele

Introduction

If we want an extraordinary future for all of our children, America and Americans must embrace reality. While, as a society, we may have recently found it comfortable to ignore reality, reality is most assuredly going forward, with or without us. What we have allowed to happen from 2000 to date can only be described as a national break-down. We the People failed to do our duty, to pay attention, to stay informed, to remain actively engaged and to keep our government honest.

Today, both the Republican and the Democratic Parties are “running on empty”. They cannot be trusted to represent the Republic within the current “winner take all” system. In addition, their exhausted 20th century solutions that got us to where we are today cannot be expected to get us to where we need to be tomorrow.

After a great deal of reflection, I have come to the conclusion that we need a Citizens Party, not to compete with the Democratic or Republican, or the other 60 plus parties, but to bring all of us together on the one big issue that really matters: Electoral Reform. If we are successful, a Democratic or Republican Presidential candidate willing to field a Vice President from the counterpart party, and a Coalition Cabinet, could win in 2008.

Citizens Party

I have three “big ideas” that I want to present for a “collective public intelligence” process.

Idea #1:

A Citizens Party (www.citizens-party.org) must be created. This new approach would be a party that is a “second home”, or alternative party, that respects every individual’s primary political affiliation, but offers them an opportunity to come together with citizens from other parties to keep government honest. It would NOT be a party set up to compete with all the other parties!

Moderate Republicans like me, for example, can join forces with those from other parties to beat back the extremist ideological and fundamentalist tendencies of the original Republican Party. We can all, as Paul Ray explores in his discussion of “The New Political Compass,” create coalitions across all issue areas. We can use the power of actively engaged citizens, networked, collective, public intelligence, to hold the Democratic and Republican parties in particular accountable for representing their individual members rather than special interests.

Idea #2:

There are actually two really big issues on which we can all come together as citizens in 2006 and again in 2008. They are: 1] Electoral Reform and 2] Energy/Environmental policy -- as discussed by Thomas Friedman. The reality is that our votes no longer count in the contrived monopoly that the Republicans and Democrats have established. Even if our candidate is elected, within weeks they have fallen prey to the corrupting combination of “the party line” which demands that they vote as they are told to vote by the party leadership; and special interests who bribe them to betray the people and favor specific corporations not acting in our interest.

Idea #3:

A Citizens Party can welcome immigrants enroute to citizenship as associate members who can use the Citizens Party as a neutral ground within which to both learn and practice their civic responsibilities, and be exposed to the many different parties that co-exist in America. A Citizens Party can offer generic civic instruction and opportunities for community service, and then once an individual becomes a citizen, they can be asked to declare a primary political affiliation, while retaining their “second home” in the Citizens Party. Membership cards for non-citizen immigrants should show where they are in their path toward citizenship, and be a source of pride and evidence of their commitment.

Discussion

The U.S. political process has been lost to monied special interests, including the most corrupt of those special interests the Republican and Democratic parties, who use party line control as a means of achieving outcomes that are NOT in the best interests of the public at large.

At the same time, the U.S. Government and the national infrastructures that it regulates, from education and health to water, energy, industry, finance, and telecommunications, have all become dysfunctional. Consider this summary drawn from Alvin and Heidi Toffler in Revolutionary Wealth:

Their first key focus is on TIME and its relation to space, knowledge, and effectiveness as translated into wealth. Innovative businesses are going 100 mph; civil collective groups at 90 mph; the US family at 60 mph, labor unions at 30 mph, government bureaucracies at 25 mph, education at 10 mph, non-governmental organizations including the United Nations at 5 mph, US politics and the participation process at 3 mph, and law enforcement and the law it enforces at 1 mph. This is really quite a helpful informed judgment as to the relative unfitness of all but two of the groups.

Now, keeping in mind—and Henry Kissinger has expressed similar concerns about the archaic slow processes of government and politics and law enforcement—the abysmally slow rating given by the Tofflers in relation to real life moving at 100 miles an hour, consider what this means when attempting to protect America and nurture American prosperity in the fact of global threats and in relation to global opportunities. Below is a threat table based on the report of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change (A more secure world: Our shared responsibility, United Nations, 2004) where LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft was the US representative. Note that poverty, infectious disease, and environmental degradation head the list, and that terrorism is next to last on the list. The percentages for the contribution of Open Source Intelligence [OSINT] to understanding and addressing the problem are my own informed judgment, but they are consistent with the “80-20” rule. I believe we can rely on the general point being made by this table, i.e. that we need to redirect at least half the secret intelligence budget toward open sources and all ten of these threats, instead of obsessing on secrecy and terrorism alone.

Threat to the Security & Prosperity of the USA           % Open Source

Threat #1:   Poverty  ............................................................... 95%
Threat #2:   Infectious Disease  ................................................. 99%
Threat #3:   Environmental Degradation  ..................................... 90%
Threat #4:   Inter-State Conflict  ................................................ 75%
Threat #5:   CivilWar  .............................................................. 80%
Threat #6:   Genocide  ............................................................. 95%
Threat #7:   Other Large-Scale Atrocities  .................................... 95%
Threat #8:   Nuclear, radiological, chemical, biological weapons  ..... 75%
Threat #9:   Terrorism  ............................................................. 80%
Threat #10:  Transnational organized crime  ................................. 80%

Average Importance of Open Source Intelligence       86.4%

We are spending close to $60 billion a year on secret sources, and less than $600 million on open sources of relevant national security information—on this alone the Bush Administration can be proven as derelict. At the same time, we are spending over $500 billion a year on a heavy-metal military, and next to nothing on waging peace or implementing what General Al Gray, then Commandant of the Marine Corps called for in 1988, “peaceful preventive measures.” We can still benefit immensely from the insights presented in May of 1966 by then Sec. of Defense Robert McNamara in his speech “Security in the Contemporary World”: In a modernizing society, security means development.

At the same time, because our secret intelligence community is so out of touch with reality, and our political system makes it easy to ignore secret intelligence, we have a federal budget that is catastrophically mis-managed, combined double deficits (debt and trade) with excessive entitlements and subsidies, and mis-directed expenditures that over-spend on a heavy metal military -- including missile defense and other unrealistic, or unnecessary capabilities, while severely neglecting “soft power” including cultural, diplomatic, economic, educational, and informational sources of national power. As McNamara said in 1966: The decisive factor for a powerful nation already adequately armed is the character of its relationships with the world.

Finally, because our political system is corrupt and our national counterintelligence and crime intelligence capabilities are virtually non-existent, we have failed to increase federal tax revenues by failing to demand that corporations pay a fair share of the federal revenue (they pay 6% down from a high of 32%, this needs to be brought back up to 25%), by failing to eliminate subsidies and other tax breaks illicitly obtained by special interests, and by failing to detect tax fraud. Taken together, these could produce an extra $500 billion a year.

A Citizens Party could utilize the National Budget Simulation, available online, to develop a balanced budget that clearly identifies the differing choices that each “wing” of the party makes, and puts before the larger public the specifics of the budget that demand resolution. Our budget is too important to be left to one party to manage without public oversight.

Here are a few more thoughts:

1. 2008 will not be 2000.

The Cheney-Bush Administration has radicalized America, everyone is now ready for decisive and reasoned leadership, and we can field a unity-reform team rather than a weak Democratic choice. America is ready to be brought back together. A winning and collaborative coalition of 20% of the Republican vote, 20% of the non-Democratic vote and a further 20% of the immigrant vote, as influenced by their relatives still in Latin America, China, India, Korea, and Viet-Nam, can make an important contribution to a Democratic victory in 2008, especially if we begin setting the stage in 2006 while campaigning for others. However, Democrats can only win if they adopt the Citizens Party platform.

2. One Dog-Catcher Issue.

The “dog-catcher” issue is now and will remain this: “does your vote count?” The answer to this question for most, including those that vote and then lose their Congressional representative to the party line and special interests, is no; consequently their concerns in other major issues are unheard and not represented. I believe that America will come together on our promise to reform the electoral process—everything else, including governance, policy, and budgetary reform, will follow from that. Making voting the first issue will set the stage for the second: Energy & the Environment. It is important to make voting the hinge issue, not the environment, or anything else, as the latter are “intangible” threats neither understood nor valued by a third of the electorate.

3. Citizens Party Breaks the Partisan Log-Jam.

Paul Ray knows what he is talking about when he discusses cross-over alliances on new progressive issues. I am a life-long moderate Republican who is also religious but in a practical rather than a fundamentalist sense. I have been giving speeches across the country and my sense is that we could begin the process of winning in 2008 by encouraging allies to start the Citizen Party in 2006. This new entity would be used to invite all Americans to consider a new concept: “dual political membership” in this new party that welcomes moderate Republicans, conservative Democrats, Independents, Libertarians, Greens, Reforms, and the members of the Dean set into a safe haven with one common cause: restoring the integrity of the electoral and representational processes. Further, it would also allow for the creation of an innovative Coalition Cabinet (next point). This party will, at a minimum, be committed to electoral reform that levels the playing field and isolates the extremists. This coalition party could well enable us to re-establish the core American values of integrity, vision and compassion for the greater public in America as well as our stewardship of the global environment. In the event the Democratic Party nomination goes to a polarizing candidate who cannot win the general election, this new party could be critical for the candidacy of a more generally acceptable Democratic candidate willing to choose a moderate Republican as their Vice President, and commit to a Coalition Cabinet to be announced in advance of the general election.

4. We Must Form a Coalition Cabinet now.

Such a cabinet, formed now as a shadow government, has several potential advantages for bringing citizens from disparate political groups together, especially since the Democratic traditionalists will not be willing to abandon the Master/Slave hierarchical and star-centered system. Coalition Cabinet members can serve as our outreach Ambassadors in building the big umbrella for decisively wresting power from the extreme right by recruiting “wings” from each party into the Citizens Party. Further, it could be used for developing, from 2006 to 2008, policies that make sense and pass the smell test. This will also allow us, in 2008, to articulate sound policies in detail—demonstrating the fruits of your innovative approaches—and to challenge the other candidates for President, in both the primaries and the final election, to identify their Cabinet choices. If they do not, we can mock them for not being able to pick a government, much less run one, and if they do, we challenge them to add selected Cabinet candidates (State, Defense, Justice) to the Presidential debates process. We win by showing that we have a balanced team, not a personality cult.

5. Peer-to-Peer Co-Intelligence.

There are creative resources, including Joe Trippi and the two authors of the new book on Crashing the Gate, as well as others, who have a lot to offer in the way of innovation in the peer-to-peer engaged democracy space. My friend Tom Atlee, for example, is at the forefront of the national Co-Intelligence or Collective Intelligence movement, and I believe that we are now at a point where Public Intelligence can both elect a coalition reform ticket, and drive sound Public Policy. We need votes, and contributions, but we also need a consensus of shared ideas.

6. Immigration & Catholic Social Justice.

I am in touch with the U.S. Council of (Catholic) Bishops on the matter of reducing poverty and increasing social justice among Latinos, who are inherently Catholic and more likely to be won over by a pro-immigration, pro-Catholic candidate (see point 9). This will be a big issue. Paul Ray’s help in dissecting this issue by voting base will be important. However, it will also be connected to foreign perceptions of America, and foreign influence on immigrants that vote—we need to promulgate our vision globally, in at least 15 languages. I believe that Michael Cudahy (a former Republican activists who worked on campaigns for G. H. W. Bush), Clyde Prestowitz, and a few other moderate Republicans can deliver 20% of that vote to Citizen Party candidates. I can find Citizen Party candidates another 20% bump in the voting immigrant pool. I am, incidentally, a white Latino, born in New York of a naturalized Colombian mother with Spanish ancestry and an American father of English and Scottish descent. This idea of a Citizens Party can, by the way, be migrated to all countries, and is not exclusive to our Nation.

7. Reality-Based Budgeting

This is a concept I have been working on for some time. I have been working with very senior former staffers from the Office of Management and Budget on developing this project. We are convinced that we could take the online National Budget Simulation and turn it into a tool for both establishing public consensus on revenue, spending; and for establishing a balanced budget at all levels of governance. We can make the budget process transparent and participatory, and we can really bring the power of the Open Source approach to help the voters understand where things now stand and are going at all levels of government and in the private sector.

8. Presidency.

I believe we should explore new concepts of governance in which the President focuses on the broad strategic issues, the really big picture and the really big alliances (both domestic and foreign), while the Vice President—ideally a former Governor with significant operational experience—serves as Chief Operations Officer with three Chiefs of Staff—one for policy, one for strategy, and one for treasury—ways and means.

9. Faith-Based Governance.

Finally, I believe that Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Left Hand of God and my friend David Johnston’s Faith-Based Diplomacy both have something to offer. If combined with due respect for the passion of the black church as identified by Bonhoeffer and represented in part by Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson, I believe we could find innovative ways of revitalizing the faith-based compassion of the Democratic Party, while opening doors to those of other faiths who have not found a haven where they feel they belong. Many Republicans of faith are beginning to see the hypocrisy of the extreme right fundamentalists. We cannot win the Latino vote, or the Korean vote, without showing that strong faith, loving faith and family values, are part of the proposition. America right now needs hope, and rational answers alone will fall flat. We need to offer pragmatic community-oriented faith versus nutty militant faith.

Conclusion

In 1994, Al Gore used the phrase “harnessing the distributed intelligence of the Whole Earth.” Now we have a clear and present emergence of networked “collective intelligence” or co-intelligence. It is clear today that the people in the aggregate can generate more campaign contributions, more votes, and more wisdom, than any collection of corporations or special interests. The Citizens Party is a non-rival means of taking back the power at the individual level, while respecting the unique concerns and insights of each of the traditional parties. That’s what I think. What do you all think?

A note on Mr. Steele

In the course of a twenty-five year national security career, Mr. Steele has served as a Marine Corps infantry officer and service-level plans officer; fulfilled clandestine, covert action, and technical collection duties; been responsible for programming funds for overhead reconnaissance capabilities, contributed to strategic signals intelligence operations, managed an offensive counterintelligence program, initiated an advanced information technology project; and been the senior civilian responsible for founding a new national intelligence production facility.

He was one of the first clandestine officers assigned the terrorist target on a full-time basis in the 1980's, and the first person, also in the 1980's, to devise advanced information technology applications relevant to clandestine operations.

As a government employee, he was a founding member of the Advanced Information Processing and Analysis Steering Group, a member of the Information Handling Committee, and a member of the Foreign Intelligence Capabilities and Priorities Committee, among others.

Mr. Steele, a political scientist liberally educated at Muhlenberg College, holds graduate degrees in international relations (Lehigh University) as well as public administration (University of Oklahoma), and certificates in intelligence policy (Harvard University) and defense studies (Naval War College).

He is an elected member of Pi Alpha Alpha, the honor society for public administration, and has received the Meritorious Honor Award (Group) from the U.S. Department of State; Certificates of Exceptional and Special Achievement from the Central Intelligence Agency (Operational), and a Certificate of Achievement from the Department of Defense.

The Citizens Party

“Had Enough? Vote Democratic!” Is NOT ENOUGH,
We Need a New Dual Membership Party

Robert David Steele Vivas

A few days ago I was discussing strategy with Jock Gill. Both of us tried to help Dean, Edwards, and then Kerry, in that order, with a concept for winning over non-Democrats like me (a moderate Republican). None of the staffs had sufficient gravitas to realize that we were absolutely right when we said, over and over, that the Democrats cannot beat the Republicans on base, issues, or leadership alone.

Last week, I conceptualized the concept of a “dual membership” party, the Citizens Party. This new party would not ask its members to leave their original party, but would, instead, serve as a second home, a unifying party, committed to one issue and one issue only: achieving electoral reform by electing a coalition government committed to the American Independence Act of 2007. Thereafter, the Party could serve as a second home for individuals, like myself, who are proud of what the Republican Party once stood for, but do not wish to consort with impeachable leaders or the extremists who have hijacked the party.

Today, I read with admiration a really superb Op-Ed by Tim Roemer in the New York Times (Saturday, 29 April 2006) entitled ‘Enough Already,’ that suggested that all the Democrats need to win in 2006 and 2008 is the simple slogan, “Had Enough? Vote Democratic!.” This worthy gentleman is half-right.

The Democrats, in my view, cannot beat the Republicans base-on-base or on the issues. Even a character debate will be a toss-up. There is, however, a major opportunity for a lasting revitalization of democracy if the Democrats will match up their most promising unity candidate with a new party, the American Independence Party, and a commitment to a Coalition Cabinet and Coalition Legislature committed to electoral reform.

This new party would be unique in history in that it would specifically foster the concept of “dual citizenship” and respect the original political allegiances of the moderate Republicans, the conservative Democrats, the Independents, Libertarians, Greens, Reforms, and the newly mobilized from both the Latin and Asian immigration pool as well as the survivors of the Dean revolution.

This new party would have ‘wings’ and leaders from all American political parties, and they would commit to support Democratic *and* Republican legislative incumbents or challengers who agree to dual citizenship in the American Independence Party, and its single reform focus: restoring the vote to *all* Americans.

Electoral reforms, including instant run-offs, the end of gerrymandering and even physical districts, restoration of multi-party debates, and voting on week-ends so the working poor have a shot at voting without losing work, all need to be part of an American Independence Act of 2007 that will have it greatest effect in 2008. In addition, we need to end “party line” voting that forbids our elected representatives from voting for their district instead of their party, and of course end campaign financing while introducing publicly funded campaigns and higher salaries for representatives, teachers, cops, firemen, and preventive health care professionals and other public servants.

Only one issue can unite all sensible Americans: ‘does your vote count?‘ The answer for most is a resounding ‘NO.’ If we were to establish a new party and an interim Coalition Cabinet now, even before a final candidate for President is chosen, and commit publicly to this single lasting “fix” on the system, everything else will fall into place -- including wiser foreign and domestic policy, an end to the double deficit, and a restoration of the moral legitimacy of the Republic. We must restore informed, engaged, democracy (collective intelligence), honest public policy, moral capitalism, and America the Good -- instead of America the Idiot Bully.

In 2006 we must demand that incumbents and challengers commit to this unification reform idea. In 2007 we pass the American Independence Act that implements sustainable electoral reform. In 2008 we elect a President and a Coalition Cabinet and Coalition Legislature that restores America the Good, an American Republic that is Of, By, and For We the People.

I have secured the domain name Citizens-Party.org. Shortly, we will open the web page, once we are as secure as possible. So I have a question for all of you: anyone interested in helping set this party up, register it in every state, and be ready to announce it on the 4th of July?

Warm regards to all,
Robert

10 Threats to the Public Interest & Security

Robert David Steele
04.18.06, 6:00 PM ET

Why Secret Intelligence is Bad

Director of National Intelligence [DNI] Covers 17.5%

In the Age of Information, when secret sources are less valuable and open sources are more essential in understanding reality and crafting responsible public policy, what are the ten greatest threats to the United States of America? What ten questions should the reformed and revitalized Director of National Intelligence (DNI) be able to answer for Congress and the public? This challenge has been answered generally by the Report of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, A more secure world, Our shared responsibility (United Nations, 2004), but nothing the DNI is doing today is helpful in actually addressing, in a substantive sustained way, each of these threats.

In the table below, the percentage of the relevant information available from open sources rather than secret sources is provided in the second column, to make the point that spending $50 billion a year on secrets and less than $500 million a year on open sources simply does not make sense and is therefore politically and economically irresponsible.

Clear & Present Danger to the Security & Prosperity of the USA

Threat #1: Poverty 95%
Threat #2: Infectious Disease 99%
Threat #3: Environmental Degradation 90%
Threat #4: Inter-State Conflict 75%
Threat #5 Civil War 80%
Threat #6: Genocide 95%
Threat #7: Other Large-Scale Atrocities 95%
Threat #8: Nuclear, radiological, chemical, biological weapons 75%
Threat #9: Terrorism 80%
Threat #10: Transnational organized crime 80%

Average Importance of Open Source Intelligence 82.5%

A proper national intelligence endeavor should be able to define the current and projected extent of the threat in the USA and elsewhere, specify the political, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, and natural-geographic costs and nuances associated with the threat, and recommend or at least benchmark a specific spending plan to eliminate the threat in the USA by 2015 and in the world by 2025. Only the President and the Cabinet can make policy, but they are largely uninformed and are not accountable because the intelligence baseline is not a public intelligence baseline.

U.S. Intelligence, like the Department of Defense, is a dinosaur from the Cold War, a direct outcome of allowing the military-industrial-congressional complex to specify how we spend the taxpayer dollar without regard to reality or proper intelligence. We have a special interests spy world and a special interests heavy-metal military. Both need draconian reform, and the fastest, cheapest way to benchmark public policy and the public budget is by creating an Open Source Agency that serves the public interest, publicly.

To be explicit: the $50 to 70 billion being charged to the U.S. taxpayer for secret intelligence is delivering no more than 20% of the relevant intelligence necessary to address the high-level threats to America and the civilized world. This is unacceptable and requires the generation of public outrage as a first step toward practical and honest intelligence reform. What we have now simply will not do.

An Open Source Agency would provide a national peer-to-peer network with public intelligence that is transparent, shareable, accountable, and sensible. Creating such an organization is one step toward sanity.

Islam, terrorism, democracy

The Nation 19 April 2006 , www.nation.com/pk

DR FAROOQ HASSAN

To learn of the bomb explosions in the famous Sankatmochan temple in Benaras and Varanasi Railway Station on 8th March was deeply shocking for me. Over a year ago I was highly honoured by Beneras Hindu University to give a Memorial lecture at their beautiful lush green campus.

During this memorable visit I saw the scared places of great religious significance for hundreds of millions of adherents of the Hindu and Buddhist Faiths. Apart from its many historic temples and places of worship, I had an opportunity to go over by boat on the magnificent Ganges River seeing at close hand how deeply felt centuries old sacred rites and rituals are performed. Regretfully these explosions jolted South Asia severely by bringing into focus the dreaded potential of the menace of communal lack of confidence between the followers of main religious persuasions in this region.

I am thus pained to note that those responsible for this tremendous act of senselessness are thought, or at least alleged to be, Muslims. According to contemporary Indian press reports, they have allegedly done so at the behest of, or urging by, Pakistan. The Indian Government's highest level statement on this matter came on 19th March, when the National Security Advisor to Prime Minister stated that the Beneras tragedy, resulting in 23 deaths, and the earlier one in Bangalore, emanated from a new strategy of the Jihadi camps or elements in Pakistan. It was explained that such elements available to the powers that may be have devised a new theory of producing communal riots or troubles in that country.

Blaming indirectly Pakistan for encouraging this highly provocative act of terrorism is a matter deserving serious notice. It could be said that this blame was conceivably rhetorical as is the case with Islamabad; every time it is unable to solve anything major in either the Frontier or Baluchistan it is said the "foreign" hands are involved. This veiled reference fools nobody as the accusation, inevitably without proof, is vis-à-vis India.

I was interviewed by the VOA hours after the statement of the Indian National Security Advisor hit the international wire services. My view was that this needed a response from the Pakistan's Foreign Office (which according to VOA had not been given to them despite a formal request). At any rate, whosoever they may be who had perpetrated such heinous acts, ought to be regarded as criminals against the lives of innocent people.

But, when asked further had Pakistan been levelling similar accusations against India, I responded that that was indeed the case. Blaming a "foreign hand" for all of the troubles that the government continuously faces in Baluchistan and in other places invariably arises where it is unable to handle a deteriorating domestic situation. Does it not reflect the presence of an inefficient administration which, when failing to perform its basic duty to protect the lives of its people, resorts to manifest subterfuges and excuses? Are such references to "foreign elements" intentionally left vague and undefined with a view to fill in the blanks when so required?

The credibility of the ipse dixit of the present regime in such matters is mostly suspect. After all, every time a high ranking US official is here we see escalation in military measures being deployed in the Waziristan region! Implicitly this is an admission that there is something going on there which Islamabad has not been able to remove or to lessen. It is maintained by many knowledgeable experts that the sustenance of this brand of terrorism lies embedded in this area. Both Afghani President Hamid Karzi and the Indian Premier had similar reservations on the Musharraf claims to the contrary on this point. Recent statements of no less than the US President in Islamabad tend to show that Pakistan failed to establish that it had indeed stopped the "infiltration" from within its borders to both these countries.

At the moment of writing, those responsible for such a chillingly mischievous action have thankfully not invoked Islam to provide a cover for their criminal deeds. However, the alleged involvement of Pakistan is seemingly present. The first putative source of causation has religious overtones, while the second one is intimately connected with political undertones of the Sub Continental politics.

It is immaterial, realistically speaking, which of the scenarios is correct. The question that bothers me, however, is why, whenever some action of this kind occurs anywhere, the first country related accusation is made against Pakistan? In analytical, thematic, identification of motivation of such deeds, it is all put down to the activists of Islamic extremists, term used by both Musharraf and Western commentators to refer to such groups. In the nomenclature in local parlance, the term utilized is "jihadis".

Some of them, while claiming responsibilities for such heinous acts, assume Arabic sounding names. Some even call themselves "mujahids" to pass their misdeeds as an act of jihad. It can deceive no one, least of all Muslims. In fact, these terrorists have their own political agenda. In promotion of this agenda, they do not mind involving the fair name of Islam to provide some grandeur to their misdeeds. Either consciously or unconsciously they are realistically only promoting the agenda of enemies of Islam.

The question of alleged Pakistani involvement in many such cases of terrorism has been admitted by General Musahharf himself. He has said many times that, regretfully, whether an alleged act of terrorism occurs in the West or the East, it is claimed by someone somewhere that Pakistan is connected or behind it. It does not mean that Pakistan is behind it, or that such an accusation is correct. Yet the perception, as General Musharraf points out, is that it is indeed so. The question that we must ponder over is why?

My own perception, without going into too may details, is that terrorism of this variety and lack of democracy have a direct connection. In areas and countries where the role and rule of law is replaced by the power of the gun, or by the will of a military commander, the resultant crisis becomes inextricably intertwined with the raw balance of actual power that protagonists can wield.

In Pakistan, the persistent supremacy of patent illegality and usurpation of constitutional power by military juntas has thus resulted in produced this truest basis for actual settlement of grievances through use of acts of brute force. If this force is used by those who control the instruments of state, it is said to be the "writ of government". If deployed by those who oppose such regimes, then it is often described to be terrorism in such surroundings and political milieu. All sides, through an Islamic cultural legacy, claim that normative Islam is on their side since this country was founded for Muslims!

I thus feel that Pakistan military crackdowns on such terrorists in Waziristan or elsewhere could fuel militancy instead of curbing it. Analysts maintain that this point requires a deeper analysis for an objective understanding. On the other hand, General Musharraf has warned foreign militants to leave Pakistan's tribal belt or die, but the crackdown has little chance of success and risks alienating, even radicalizing, local people. They have, after all, lived for centuries with their own traditional and historical ways and codes of honor and civility.

In late 2003, Pakistan deployed the first of the 80,000 troops who are presently now in the rugged zone bordering Afghanistan to tackle Taliban and Al-Qaeda rebels who fled across the frontier after US-led forces drove the regime from Kabul.

The fugitive rebels found support from devoutly Islamic local tribesmen and launched attacks on Pakistani forces in early 2004, leading to massive battles in the troubled tribal agency of South Waziristan. Pakistan's military ruler Musharraf, a key US ally, knows only the language based on direct or indirect reference to force, rather than diplomacy or political dialogue! The Pakistani forces have actually lost hundreds of soldiers in this combat. The government, with non existent political credentials of legitimacy, remains under increasing pressure from both Washington and Kabul to tackle insurgents who allegedly launch attacks in southern Afghanistan from bases in northwestern Pakistan.

I feel, finally, that the US has learned that it is democracy, and not dictatorship, that can prevent terrorism. This is more true where the population is essentially of Muslims. It has learned it the hard way, after mind boggling losses and damage in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

Dr. Farooq Hassan, D.Phil.;
BA (Juris),MA,M. LiTT (OXON);
DCL (Columbia),DIA(Harvard);
Sen.Adv.Sup.Ct. (Pakistan),
Barrister at Law (UK),Attorney at Law(US).

A post for Daily Kos

[I'll post this to my new diary on Daily Kos after my one week waiting period is up.]

To shape our politics we have to shape our communications.

Here is a little personal history about the Dean campaign and how communications shaped it.

In 2003 I was asked by Steve Grossman to go to Burlington to work with Joe Trippi’s team on creating the Dean campaign’s internet strategies. At one point we were discussing a new tool that would allow Dean supporters to find one another. The original idea was to find supporters with 1, 2, 5 or so miles from your location. After some energetic exchanges, I was able to persuade Zephyr that the most important Dean supporter I needed to find was the one who lived in my building or on my block. We could then begin the face-to-face relationship building that would allow us to support each other in over-coming our inhibitions and to swing into local, retail political action supporting Dean: leafleting, hosting events in our homes, visibilities, and so forth.

The key was that the Dean campaign, like the Clinton Gore campaign in 1992, trusted us to communicate amongst ourselves in a true, symmetrical, peer-to-peer model. As a result, both Clinton and Dean enjoyed powerful benefits created by their supporters. In contrast, the Kerry campaign did not.

I was subsequently asked in April 2004, by the then CTO of the Kerry campaign, to work with a very small team of online community organizers [DemTech/DemComm members] to develop a vibrant peer-to-peer social networking strategy for the Kerry team. A small sub-group, including Howard Rheingold, AOL's Director of Community Management, Nanci Meng and Jon Lebkowsky, were tasked to create and submitted a draft proposal to Kerry HQ. We never heard back. We could only watch as Kerry imposed a traditional, asymmetrical, industrial era Master/Slave broadcast communications organizing principal on his campaign. Kerry did not trust the voters to generally do the right thing most of the time. Thus he was basically unable to leverage cooperative gain created by the collective actions of his supporters at the edges of his campaign. Kerry only understood power as it is created by asymmetrical relationships. This lead him to treat his supporters as sheeple, not as citizen activists.

Dean, of course, also made some critical mistakes in his communications. Perhaps Dean's greatest error was his scream speech in Iowa. We know that Lincoln understood that his audience in the Lincoln - Douglas debates was NOT the people in the immediate audience, but rather the multitudes reading the telegraphed transcript in papers in distant parts. For this reason, Lincoln adopted a radically new telegraphic debating style. Or, more recently, my friend Dan Hurley was asked to address a Democratic convention some time ago. As he was getting ready, an old Kennedy hand came up to him and told him two things: 1] go to the beach the day before to relax, and 2; address the audience beyond the cameras, not the people in the room.

Unfortunately not only did Gov. Dean not know this when he went out on the stage that fateful night in Iowa, but he had also not been rehearsed in BOTH an acceptance speech and a concession speech. Thus he was totally unprepared to leverage the opportunity of addressing the millions beyond the many cameras focused on him on that Iowa stage. A perfect example of how his communications strategy, on that night it was pure and simple 'wing it', shaped his political fortunes.

All of this is a round about way of getting around to the point that we must understand how the dominant organizing principle our national communications infrastructure shapes and determines our politics. If we want a truly democratic politics, based on the notions of equality with justice and fairness for all, based upon truly symmetrical relationships, we will have to have a communications paradigm that supports that goal.

Currently we do not. The dominant organizing principal in American communications is one that is fundamentally asymmetrical “Master/Slave” in nature with limited ability for the average citizen to participate and dependent upon rigid control of the distribution process. Why else would the current beneficiaries of this organizing principal demand draconian Digital Rights Management, with Infinite Copyright, and go to such great extremes to vilify and demonize peer-to-peer approaches? Indeed, the current communications paradigm, as enforced by the FCC and thus the US government is, at its heart, anti-democratic in both principle and fact. In truth, our current communications concentrates power in the hands of a few, supports a politics of oligarchy, and rule by the wealthy 1%. One clear result is today’s dominant politics of money, with humanity working for Mammon. It requires that we be sheeple.

I invite you to read the blog posts below to see some of my views of how else we might organize our communications in a true, symmetrical, peer-to-peer model. This is the only model that incorporates and energizes the core values of a politics of democracy.

Daily Kos, with its support for lateral, symmetrical and peer-to-peer participation is a case in point. For another example, see “OhMyNews” a South Korean online news site written by its readers who now even pay each other as well. But now, if we want our democracy back, we must extend the symmetrical, peer-to-peer model to all modes of communications. We now have both the understanding and the means to do so. All we lack is the political will and the political power to make it so.

So what will we chose for our future: Master/Slave or Peer-to-Peer?

Here are links to four posts of mine that relate to this topic.

1] Master/ Slave or Peer-to-Peer

2] To Encourage or Stifle Wireless Economic Innovation?

3] Wireless Civic and Economic Development

4] Mammon, masquerading as "The Market", is a false prophet

Depleted Uranium or DU

The Open Source Intelligence site has posted this news item:

News Flash: Depleted Uranium Reaches England?

Depleted uranium from the Iraqi campaign has evidently reached England.

A repeat of Gulf War syndrome, which put over a quarter million US veterans on disability, appears to be joining the massive number of amputees.

Some of the coverage of this new finding is quasi-hysterical, but what we find very interesting is the combination of policy acceptance of depleted uranium impacts on both our own troops as well as our downwind allies, and the larger discussion of deliberate depopulation strategies including genetically modified corn.

The post includes an interesting list of links.

I note that a search of the NY Times for "depleted uranium" turns up 135 results, the most recent which is from December 20th, 2005:

THE REACH OF WAR: DETAINEES; 24 Ex-Hussein Officials Freed From U.S. Custody ... effects of the depleted uranium used in American bombs ...View free preview December 20, 2005 - By JOHN F. BURNS (NYT) - World - News - 1110 words

It is certainly true that, if the allegations contained in the story about DU reaching England are proven, then we will be unable to claim ignorance of what our government has been doing in our name as an excuse. We did not fight the current administrations policies of secrecy above all else and now we may rue the years and days we did not.

For, if the story is true, then the Bush administration has plumbed unknown depths of moral depravity while we stood silently by. Do we honestly believe that our ineffectual protests will atone for the consequences of our willful ignorance?

It is time to take stock. We are now a debtor nation and have put our children and their children in debt for the foreseeable future. We are creating enemies faster than we are creating friends. We are destroying our middle class and shifting the burdens of society to those who can least afford it -- simply in order to make the rich richer. We have allowed the the wealthy elite to impose the notion that humanity serves the market, putting Mammon ahead of people. We now have more people in hunger, without jobs, without health insurance, and with no retirement security. Our only earthly environment is at risk while our government refuses to confront the issue. Our economy and our foreign policy are held hostage by our unrelenting reliance and unquenchable demand for imported energy. And the list goes on.

How much longer can we afford to remain ignorant and passive?

Master/Slave or Peer-to-Peer?

Sheeple Consumers or Citizen Activists?

Language matters. When Municipal wireless projects talk in terms of the "last mile in" to the "customer", it pretty clearly indicates that they have opted to maintain the old industrial era "Master/Slave" metaphor for their municipal wireless solution -- And probably for their politics and businesses as well.

The other option, of course, is to adopt a modern, peer-to-peer, mesh network architecture in which ALL nodes on the network are active participants in the mesh. This is the only way a municipality can create a truly Extra-Ordinary outcome for its citizens. This also creates a "first mile out" solution. In turn, a peer-to-peer mesh solution has the added benefit of giving all participants an incentive to improve their local infrastructure to improve their personal conditions. In the past, this has been called "leveraging end-user capital." It is what financed so much of the PC revolution that so benefited the US innovation economy. It is what creates a virtuous cycle of improvements.

The question is simply: Why do municipalities chose today to abandon this proven engine for economic innovation and growth?

Of course, the current EULAs from the "incumbents", such as Comcast, Verizon, AT&T etc., all specifically forbid sharing of connectivity by, at or for the end points. Intended or otherwise, this has the result of making a true peer-to-peer mesh a forbidden fruit. But is it really a municipality's function to pick business plan winners? Or is it to provide the very best solutions for its citizens?

From the above, it is clear that, until Peer-to-Peer business models are adopted by the incumbents, only municipalities are able to create and sustain modern, peer-to-peer, mesh network architecture in which ALL nodes on the network are active participants. Today, only municipalities can create networks that enable a virtuous cycle of improvements financed largely by end-user investments.

If a municipality fails to develop a municipal wireless solution that allows it to benefit from leveraging end-user capital, and the resulting cooperative gain created by this edge capital, I predict that such a system will have a substantially higher risk of failure. If we treat our fellow citizens like sheeple, as in the Master/Slave model imbedded in WiMax technology, they have no incentive to spend their own money to make local improvements. Thus they can never realize the innovation economy benefits of a system with inherent cooperative gain.

So what, my fellow citizens, do we expect from our government leaders? Master/Slave or Peer-to-Peer? The past or the future?

Kite flyers defying writ of regime?

The Nation, 11 April 2006

DR FAROOQ HASSAN

The writ of the present regime is seen by some to be met with open defiance in the kite flying “revolt” by a section of the population in the province of Punjab. Through out the 11th and 12th of March, in the face of a total ban imposed by the Punjab Government, kite flyers indulged in this [kite fighting] pastime, which is menacing to the wellbeing of thousands of innocent people. So manifest was this act of “illegality” that the TV channels gave this news throughout these two days. However, neither the police nor the administration did precious little to enforce its own orders. In the process, more lives were lost as well as injury to many others.

Can one imagine NY City police, after denying the holding of a procession, watching silently for hours the same prohibited rally defiantly proceed, resulting in deaths? The local cable TV networks have been having plenty of talk shows on this defiance of the law, with the diversity of views being as striking as the fact of this open disobedience to the law. This act of defiance of law concerned the kite flying ban imposed by the Punjab Government on 9th of March, on the eve of the impending Basant day celebrations on all kite flying activity.

It is interesting to note that to seek a “dispensation” from a ban for an additional four days was a formal decision to this effect by the Punjab Government itself! It is most strange that the two formal legal actions were made by the same government one hundred eighty degrees at variance within span of days! First it prayed to the Supreme Court to extend the period for flying formally ending on the 11th to the 15th March. Then on its own accord it decided to end it all on the 9th March!

Clearly, its second move was forced by circumstances as in the intervening period a number of deaths of innocent children and infants had tragically occurred through the murderous cords used by the kite flying enthusiasts. But authoritarian states and their governments do not readily admit of their inadequacies so quickly for the fear to be perceived as feeble and dilly-dallying. Junta run regimes takes pride in exactitude of enforcement even be it to the genuine democrat foolhardy to so remain focused.

Pakistanis have become greatly used to the term of “writ of Government”. It is frequently used by General Musharraf whenever civil libertarians or those calling for a political acceptance of their rights as guaranteed under the nation’s frequently suspended Constitution demands. The most often usage of this term these days is visible while Administration talks of the critical loss of law and order situation in Baluchistan or in the Frontier Province region of Waziristan. So this loss of face by being unable to stop people from heavily indulging in kite flying and also causing many unfortunate deaths should be worrisome to the military junta? I doubt it really! That dozens of innocent people mostly under the age of seven got killed by the kite cords should have been deeply bemoaned.

I do not know how and why, but the Pakistani public and its government have seemingly become impervious to such rampant killings. This is terrible and deserves a great deal of thought by powers that might be.

While there are many points of interest in this whole affair, I intend to focus only on two points. First in an academic sense we shall briefly see this issue in the historical context from the perspectives of liability. In this overview I would provide the erudite readers the purely jurisprudential foundations of this topic which deals with the “escape of dangerous objects from someone’s custody”. Secondly we shall have an overview of the broader sociological cum political questions relating to the matter of erosion of the writ of an authoritarian regime.

Turning now to legal history of this point, there cannot be any cavil with the simple jurisprudential point that anyone who brings a dangerous activity to his premises or under has control is liable in toto for the resultant damaging consequences. Fundamentally if the state allows any activity, it is its duty to make certain that it does not result in the death of others. This much is clearly deducible from Article 9 of the Constitution. Throughout history a number of “games” that were greatly popular at one time became outlawed because of their potential danger or mischief to the public at large or in fixed localities.

Interesting illustrations of such matters are provided by King Henry 111 decision in 1270, at the request of the University of Cambridge, to forbid “obscene tournaments”, “jousting” or other “warlike games” within the University and in a five mile radius of the University. In 1382, King Richard 11 granted to the University of Cambridge the power to “inquire and take cognizance of forestallers and regulators and of putrid, corrupt, and unfit flesh and fish, in the town and suburbs, and to make punishments thereupon.” These were activities that were generally harmless but when it transpired that they were threatening the academic culture, or safety of the University people, the King’s permission was obtained for the local law enforcement to take appropriate action.

The Common law had always insisted that anyone continuing dangerous activity on his premises was liable and responsible for resultant loss or damage. The leading authority, which became the landmark case on this jurisprudence, was Rylands v. Fletcher (1866). The principle of Roman law invoked by English judges was that of sic utere tua ut alineum non laedas. It signified in simple terms that no one could use his rights to the detriment of others and if he did so he was totally responsible for the consequences. These principles were based on the common sense approach of any civil society where different segments or individuals may have diverse social preoccupations to follow. If transgression occurred, law inflicted a total penalty on the perpetrators.

As such, the continuing spate of deaths of usually poorer people of our society, particularly of the very young and of infants, is unbearable. It is indeed mind boggling how and why any government can allow any activity in which it is certainly foreseeable that death will result. No one can even pretend that any scientific system exits to save innocent or ignorant youngsters from falling from rooftops while running blindly to catch a drifting kite. The cords of these kites ruthlessly go through the throats of many a young person, no matter how well it may be regulated.

Only those who have lost their loved ones can tell the terrible and unspeakable suffering they are going through when a death occurs in the manner that really defies description. The well-known legal rules briefly articulated, a fortiori, [must] be given effect to and respected by State institutions.

Now let us turn our attention to the second point about the matter of “erosion” of state’s writ so openly after banning kite flying. The administration did nothing meaningful to arrest and stop the open defiance of its orders. Why a military run administration would ignore its own orders is very perplexing. But does it really represent a case of “erosion” of the “writ of authority” so called? Is it not merely a subterfuge, or a mock appearance, by a junta of being so “defied” as an excuse for potentially allowing holding of an activity that it did not want to prohibit anyway?

One can not be unmindful of the fact that there was a rising tide of severe criticism of the top leadership of the Administration that included General Musharraf for endorsing the celebration of Basant and kite flying. It had been, after all, announced that General himself was traveling to Lahore to participate in these festivities as he had done a year ago in great style. Those responsible for having him in Lahore had gone to tremendous lengths by inviting the best known film and entertainment personalities to provide the event with the necessary glamour befitting the top boss of the country.

This year too, like Nero, the regime was keen to play the fiddle while Rome may burn! The misfortune of the kite flyers of particularly Lahore and the regime’s essential leadership was that the country’s press boldly took up the matter. It reported the daily slashing of throats. It began to look really bad, even for a stubborn regime, to insist on a frolic of the nature of the kite festivities to go ahead on Basant.

Nevertheless, the Government did everything “legally” possible to accomplish this goal. An extension of a dispensation by four days of the ban to have the benefit of being involved in this event was materialised. To their chagrin, more deaths occurred even after this short extension. It was only then that it had to undertake a reluctant volte-face by again banning the activity itself, just a day before the Basant was to be normally observed.

We should thank the country’s apex court, which has done its best to stop these needless killing sprees, avoidable suffering and needless misery through this inherently dangerous activity. If it were not for the Supreme Court and the current Chief Justice, this dangerous flippancy would have continued unabated.

As for the writ of authoritarianism, it seems to be selectively availed of. When the government wants to prevent political rallies against it, all kinds of legal maneuverings are utilised to have its goals accomplished with rash impunity. But when it wants to do really nothing, it conveniently dons helplessness; as in this kite flying mania of the selected few, the junta regime allows such murderous activity to go ahead despite an overt ban to the contrary. This was evident as, even after the complete ban by the Court on the 17th, I saw parts of Lahore violating the ban, with no ostensible police action to stop it, on the 18th and 19th March under the rubric of “Mini-Basant”.

Dr. Farooq Hassan, D.Phil.;
BA (Juris),MA,M. LiTT (OXON);
DCL (Columbia),DIA(Harvard);
Sen.Adv.Sup.Ct. (Pakistan),
Barrister at Law (UK),Attorney at Law(US).

Wills on Religion & Politics

In today's New York Times, Garry Wills has written a very interesting analysis of the religion in politics question:

Christ Among the Partisans

By GARRY WILLS
Published: April 9, 2006

Chicago

THERE is no such thing as a "Christian politics." If it is a politics, it cannot be Christian. Jesus told Pilate: "My reign is not of this present order. If my reign were of this present order, my supporters would have fought against my being turned over to the Jews. But my reign is not here" (John 18:36). Jesus brought no political message or program.

This is a truth that needs emphasis at a time when some Democrats, fearing that the Republicans have advanced over them by the use of religion, want to respond with a claim that Jesus is really on their side. He is not. He avoided those who would trap him into taking sides for or against the Roman occupation of Judea. He paid his taxes to the occupying power but said only, "Let Caesar have what belongs to him, and God have what belongs to him" (Matthew 22:21). He was the original proponent of a separation of church and state.

Those who want the state to engage in public worship, or even to have prayer in schools, are defying his injunction: "When you pray, be not like the pretenders, who prefer to pray in the synagogues and in the public square, in the sight of others. In truth I tell you, that is all the profit they will have. But you, when you pray, go into your inner chamber and, locking the door, pray there in hiding to your Father, and your Father who sees you in hiding will reward you" (Matthew 6:5-6). He shocked people by his repeated violation of the external holiness code of his time, emphasizing that his religion was an internal matter of the heart.

But doesn't Jesus say to care for the poor? Repeatedly and insistently, but what he says goes far beyond politics and is of a different order. He declares that only one test will determine who will come into his reign: whether one has treated the poor, the hungry, the homeless and the imprisoned as one would Jesus himself. "Whenever you did these things to the lowliest of my brothers, you were doing it to me" (Matthew 25:40). No government can propose that as its program. Theocracy itself never went so far, nor could it.

.... Read the complete Op-Ed here.

What do you think?

Great Flying, Right Up to the Point Where They Crash and Burn

Book Review
Robert Steele
March 31, 2006

Crashing the Gate
Jerome Armstrong, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga

This is an absolutely superb book, one of the finest reviews, in a readable form, of all that ails this Nation. The authors are like fighter pilots, performing incredible feats of daring-do, right up to the point where they crash and burn by suggesting that the Democratic Party can win anything at all. 



I read a lot--almost exclusively non-fiction about information, intelligence, emerging threats, anti-Americanism, the lack of strategic culture, white collar crime, and the negative impact of US domestic political machinations on our national security and prosperity. This book is one of the single most extraordinary overviews I have ever seen, and if you buy and read only one book this year, this is the book. 



 I bought the book on faith, but for those who wish that the publisher had done a proper job of posting the table of contents, let me just post that information. 



American Reality covers corporate cons, theocons, neocons, and other losers 



This Ain't No Party starts with Divided We Fail and then discusses how each of the major movements (labor, environment, women) failed. 



The Gravy Train is about white-collar crime--the beltway mafia, the commission mafia, the media, propaganda against our own. 



Laying the Groundwork is best summed up by the quote from Mahatma Gandhi on the first flyleaf: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." We WILL win--there are not enough guns on the planet, or enough places for white collar crooks and crooked politicians to hide, to keep us down or avoid our justice. 



Civil War discusses the Dean machine and the path to "Netroots." 



The book concludes with Inside the Gate, which I have mixed feelings about--the authors have some thoughtful ideas on challenging every Republican, but they miss the boat completely in failing to understand that the Democratic political leadership is just as corrupt, slightly more stupid, and much less ruthless and effective. 



That leads to my two critiques that take away one star, but I certainly do consider this book a must read and the authors to be geniuses and thought leaders: on the Dean revolution (which failed--as did the more elect able Edwards). John Kerry was the epitaph of the Democratic Party, and Hillary Clinton will be its gravestone. 



1) Peter Peterson, in "Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It," does a much better job of laying out the prevailing mood across America, which is essentially, "a pox on both parties." They have both main-lined bribery, they both lack ethics, vision, strategy, and a commitment to the public interest, and neither party is suited for managing America. What the authors forget, perhaps because of their focus


2) The authors make the mistake, from the above starting point, of thinking this is about mobilizing a bigger Democratic base against the Republicans. That will not work. Base on base, the Republicans will win every time in this era; in part because the Democrats have given up faith (see my review of the utterly brilliant "Left Hand of God" by Rabbi Michael Lerner). As I tried to tell Dean, and then Edwards and then Kerry, you do not beat a bigger dog with another dog, you beat them with a dog-catcher. There is only ONE dog-catcher issue in this country, and it is this: does EVERYONE's vote count? The answer is no. Hence, I see the author's well-intentioned guidance going down the drain UNLESS they write a second book, which I eagerly encourage, that does two things this book does not do:


a) Show how an American Independence Party, to be launched on the 4th of July 2006, can have a federalist organization that includes conservative Democrats, moderate Republicans, Greens, Libertarians, Independents, and Couch Potatoes all as self-organized units that come together with one goal, and one goal only: crushing the extremist religious-corporate right, and restoring the concept of moral representative democracy to America. Any Congressman who fails to leave either the Republican or Democratic Party, who fails to join the new party, should be defeated in 2006.

b) The authors could write a handbook for organizing the people through a national budget simulation that brings out the issues and demonstrates what Paul Ray has known all along (see "Cultural Creatives" and "New Political Compass"): every issue can attract a mix of ideological views where consensus can be achieved. The problem with our two main parties today is that their corruption eliminates honest representations (see my review of "Breach of Trust" in which the author discusses how forcing Members to vote on the "party line" dishonors their obligation to represent their District).

I am prepared to contribute financially if these two authors will establish a web site where we can create a virtual coalition government, with all "wings" of the American Independence Party represented, and where we can use a national budget simulation ("it's not policy until its in the budget") to sort out our spending priorities inclusive of elimination of the double-deficit and a shift of $100B a year toward waging peace. Ralph Nader's book "Crashing the Party" has some good ideas-why can't we do this under the author's guidance, and also pick a coalition cabinet that challenges both Republican and Democratic candidates to do the same and participate in cabinet-level debates under the League of Women Voters?

This is a super book, but the authors repeat the mistake Joe Trippi made early on (see my review of "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"): the Internet will not save the Democratic Party. Using the Internet to create a new umbrella party will, however, save democracy. The two should not be confused. The Democratic Party today is Republican Lite, and not worth saving. Bring on book two-I'll buy the first 100 copies!


Implications of anti-blasphemy movement

By Dr Farooq Hassan

The Nation 8 March 06

The strategic implications of Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten's publication of the cartoons blaspheming holy Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) are spreading in several directions. It has caused great anger and hurt the Muslim world. One fundamental implication is clear. The public furore has assumed an antagonistic posture towards Western political interests and those of its supporters. Even Condoleezza Rice was constrained to note publicly that this "severe" Islamic condemnation of caricatures was getting out of hand and threatening to block "the progress that the US was endeavouring to achieve" on many international fronts.

As a result, worldwide agitation and protests have evidently become a terrifying prospect for policymakers of countries such as Pakistan where democracy has been held hostage by the army. So much is the government shaken that it had to vote for a condemnatory parliamentary resolution. A countrywide protest and strike resulted in severe destruction of public property. The government agreed to participate in the national anti-blasphemy protest on 3rd March, the day President Bush came to Islamabad.

The reason for the government's dilemma is obvious. It is petrified that if it supports even by lip service the Islamists' call, it gets doomed in the eyes of its Western benefactors including Washington. If it does what it wants to really do, it is doomed to an unceremonious ouster as it has no political base among the people. Besides, it loses credibility in Washington and elsewhere that he can turn the screw at will against fundamentalist forces.

Read the whole essay here.

Mammon, masquerading as "The Market", is a false prophet

Why have we not heard of the 300,000 to 500,000 people who demonstrated in Chicago on Friday?

"300,000 to 500,000 people marched in Chicago to protest The Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005."

Or this major development:

"Now comes the conservative American Bar Association--400,000 lawyers--whose House of Delegates has overwhelmingly approved a task force report accusing President Bush, in polite legal language, of violating both the Constitution and federal law. ABA President Michael S. Greco sent it to Mr. Bush with a cover letter dated February 13, 2006." -- Ralph Nader.

Why is the Mainstream Media [MSM] failing to report these stories? Google these stories and you will see that the MSM are missing in action. A conspiracy of silence.

Is it because they fear the restoration of the primacy of the people over Mammon's market?

It is clear once again that the proposition that the "market" is the best, if not only, solution for all problems is false. Just as in the “Roaring 20s,” Mammon'sMarket has, in fact, created one train wreck after another: healthcare, the environment, education, international relations, the middle class, justice as fairness, social equality, the rule of law, our Constitutional civil liberties, -- you name it. Our Civic and Economic viability and health are in deep trouble as a consequence.

The question is simply this: Is the market meant to serve humanity or is humanity meant to serve the market?

Mammon will always answer that we are the servants of the market. We have now tried Mammon's corporatist approach since 1980. After more than a quarter century, it is manifestly emerging as a massive failure, as it always has and always will.

A significant consequence of accepting Mammon's argument is that it replaces the functions of government with the operations, short time horizons, and metrics of the market. Dick Cheney's quip in the 2000 VP debate that "the government had nothing to do with his success" is a pure example of Mammon's value proposition. Government is incompetent and bad. The Market is supremely competent and good.

The British gave into Mammon even earlier: The policies of Margaret Thatcher, and earlier, in the 1960s, The Mayfair Set, including David Stirling, Jim Slater, James Goldsmith, and Tiny Rowland, rapacious take over con men who corrupted British political ethics and sold off England's Industrial assets for Mammon's short term profit imperative.

Until we once again assert the primacy of citizens over the market, and thus the validity of government's role in human affairs, we will remain in the thrall of Mammon's false prophecy. This can only lead to our demise, just as it did last century with the great market crash of Black Friday in 1929.

Can we afford another unregulated market inspired economic crash?

The false prophet Mammon sets up an equally false dichotomy: The Market or The Commons. From this, Mammon creates the tautological arguments that have powered the radical right and their corporatist paymasters for the past 25 years. At root, this is their attack on FDR's politics that clearly gave citizens primacy over the market. This attack on FDR was exactly the mission that the National Association of Manufacturers gave to Eddie Bernays in the 1930s. Bernays was Mammon's genius hand maiden. His successor and disciple, Karl Rove, is the same.

This is NOT to say that we do not need a market. We do. But one clearly and firmly dedicated to the service of all humanity: A market that respects and encourages the public good as its essential partner in sustaining both civic and economic well being.

When will the Democratic party wake up and reject Mammon? When will the Democrats declare the obvious: The market is not sufficient for civic and economic health and well being. It is necessary, but not sufficient.

The truth can only be found in the synthesis of and/both: The Commons and the Market: The citizens with primacy over the market but respectful of it, as they recognize and value its essential and necessary role.

I look forward to a political leader who will articulate this as the basis for claiming a brighter future for all of us: An extraordinary future full of promise, opportunity, and innovation.

Expulsion of Muslim foreign students

DR FAROOQ HASSAN

It has been widely reported in the press that all foreign students from Islamic countries have been expelled from their religious institutions in Pakistan as well as ordered to leave the country by the end of December 2005. Apparently this order applies to everyone in such a category irrespective of whether they are in possession of a valid visa and travel documents. This measure of the Musharraf government is to purportedly advance its role in the war against terrorism. The matter has been opposed by religious oriented political parties on the grounds of a major policy "tilt" towards anti-Islamic elements in the giving of such an order by the federal authorities.

However, irrespective of policy considerations about the respective stands the two protagonists the essence of which is by now well known, what needs to be examined is the constitutional and legal vires or justification of this decision. On what legal grounds is this action of the Pakistani Federal Government sustainable, if at all? Let us briefly examine those issues which are prima facie significant in such an analysis.

The jurisprudential rationale of the Musharraf decision patently suffers from a number of patent legal infirmities. First, without giving reasons which are legally sustainable, no action can be taken against anyone who is on Pakistani soil without due process of law. That is clearly the established law of the realm. Secondly, there is no conception in any civilised country's jurisprudence that allows the state to pass "omnibus" orders to be valid against individual people.

These are orders that not given in specific cases but against a "class". Such powers just do not exist and are utterly non-sustainable in a court of law. By the established norms of the legal philosophy of courts of major Anglo-American legal systems and of the Pakistani superior courts, any such administrative decision is presumptively steeped in "male fides". The US government did so against the people of Japanese origin during World War II which is to this day regretted by its successive administrations. However, Japan had attacked the US at Pearl Harbor; no Muslim country has attacked Pakistan to remotely even "morally" permit such a policy. International legal rules regarding travel and rights of ingress and egress or visiting other countries were theoretically laid down, inter alia, in the Helsinki Accords many years ago. Such law ensures at least legal doctrinal aspects of this matter. No country can discriminate in the grant of such facilities. Further once admitted, no prejudicial action can be taken without recourse to local law. Such local norms must be at least of the level of the minimum international standards. Pakistan, which is usually cited as amongst the worst offenders of the immigration laws of other countries, is usually at all mentionable international fora, the leader to stress that whether or not the person is in any foreign country, he should be afforded the complete procedural safeguards before being subject to an order of deportation.

Indirectly this is to defend its export of illegal manpower to other countries with the government's connivance or by a liaison of corruption between such illegal visitors and the border or airport government officials. As such it is highly strange that the government herself passes an order of omnibus expulsion (in law deportation) of nationals of other countries (in this case Muslims from Islamic states), without the least bit of trouble of following any legal formalities mandated by law. By "law" I mean here both domestic and international law. I will briefly examine both such norms to submit that the action of the present regime is at best the worst form of apologists' behaviour. At worst it represents a terrible and willful disregard of fundamental rights of foreign people lawfully on its soil.

Under international law, there exist many obstacles against the ethos of the Musharraf policy articulated above. Under several treaties comprising the International Bill of Rights there exists a number of direct provision that a foreigner within the territory of another state is legally due many safeguards including the right to be not deprived of his personal liberty, property or the right to movement.

As such is the case with the Treaty of Rome 1960 which although applicable in Europe, is nevertheless indicative of such a regime of law protecting citizens of other states who happen to be in a another country at any time. Recently when the US Administration began clamping down on illegal immigrants and hundred were deported, specific action was taken against all such deportees.

No omnibus order was effective against such deportees. In 2003 when six Pakistani nationals manifestly were sneaking through Greece and Macedonia to Europe and were killed in a police action, the Pakistan Government officially took up the plea that I have just outlined that no such actions possible with due process of law. No purpose is served by multiplying such illustrations as there is no question that under established international law, a state is under a legal duty to observe such formalities after it has admitted a foreigner on its soil.

Above all it is mandatory under the Vienna rules relating to diplomatic and consular protocols that every action against a foreigner must be preceded or accompanied by an intimation of the facts of each particular case to the concerned Embassy. I doubt if even single country was informed by the Pakistan Government of the action being taken against any student and for having committed what wrongdoing in Pakistan. Pakistan's Constitution is equally explicit. Under a conglomerate of provisions in Chapter 1 of Part 11 dealing with Fundamental Rights many articles prevents the government from doing that it has purportedly done. Since this matter hopefully may well be challenged one day in Court, I will not go over the specifics of such provisions. But this is clear that no government action is valid unless:

1. A specific notice is served upon the person outlining his delict or wrong doing.
2. He has given a hearing.
3. He has adequate time and opportunity to contest before a court the legality of the government's action.

This is deducible from an examination of Article 2, 4, 8, 9, 10, 14, 17, 20, 24 and 25.

In addition, the question that naturally arises is what had the Muslim students illegally done to invite such wrath of the authorities? Since when has it become crime to study Islam in the only country in the world solely created on the basis of Islam?

We must remember that under Pakistan's Constitution, Articles 31 and 40 say that:

1. The Pakistani Government is under a legal duty to enforce and observe Islamic way of Life in the Country;
2 That it is the constitutional duty of the Government to ensure the most cordial relations between Pakistan and Islamic states.

It is clear that such actions can hardly be germane to a betterment of such relations with other Islamic countries or for the implementation of an Islamic way of life in the country.

Before concluding let us also look at the broader scenario and questions raised by this patently unlawful decision of the Musharraf regime. If the theory is that by doing so, the Pakistani Government is endearing itself to Washington, then that may well so. But did the US itself expel a single Arab student after 9/11? After all 15 of the hijackers of the 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia and four presumably from Egypt. Conversely after 7/7/05 the men responsible for London bombing had overt Pakistani connects, did the UK expel all or any Pakistani students? Of course not.

Not only this logic is medieval in approach, the law of no county recognizes any concept of vicarious guilt by ethnic or nationality connections. As such, Musharraf regime's illogical and inhuman action in expelling foreign students and only from Muslim countries is legally perverse and indefensible. It appears that if a student came from the US or Australia or France to study here in a school he is acceptable but from Sudan or Egypt is not!

I hope therefore that one day this matter is challenged in court to test the validity of patently high-handed actions directed by our federal government against only Muslims students. In the end it is necessary to note that I regret the inaction of the religious political parties to contest such matters in the courts of the country. High sounding slogans by such parties of the county indulge freely in rhetoric and verbal protests against such decisions of the government; but none having the understanding or perhaps the moral courage and the needed logistical commitment to challenge these actions in a court where such tussle sure are rationally contested.

Dr. Farooq Hassan, D.Phil.;
BA (Juris),MA,M. LiTT (OXON);
DCL (Columbia),DIA(Harvard);
Sen.Adv.Sup.Ct. (Pakistan);
Barrister at Law (UK),Attorney at Law(US).

Rational or Irrational?

I hope you have seen Adam Curtis' "Happiness Machines", episode one of the 2002 BBC "The Century of the Self" series.

The arguments that Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss make, and to some extent Frued in his "Civilization and its Discontents", that humans are far too dangerously irrational and prone to chaotic barbarism to ever participate in a democracy of self governance, is both tautological and false. It is also powerfully self serving. But Eddie Bernays and the National Association of Manufacturers, and now Karl Rove and the Neocons, would certainly make you believe it was gospel.

They are past masters of playing to the emotional aspects of our imperfect rationality. Bernays' "Freedom Torches" as the name for cigarettes was brilliantly successful in getting women to smoke cigarettes -- much to their detriment.

We need to expose their cynical assumption, going back to President Hoover, that citizens can only be, must only be, passive consumers.

Fact: Their imperfect knowledge is clearly as imperfect as anyone else's -- just look at their record of horrific mistakes. Their claims to know better than the citizens how things should be done are purely self serving claims to power and the right to enforce the status quo to their advantage, status, and profit. That they claim to have more perfect knowledge is in itself proof of their ignorance.

Secondly, they create a false dichotomy when they reduce the argument to their terms: Is man rational or irrational? They then point to the far too many episodes of carnage in the last 100 years -- the first 100 years of transition to an era of Industrial Mass Production -- as proof that man is far too irrational and incompetent to rule himself. QED their conservative assertions on the nature of politics must be true. For them, politics is the ends and the ends do justify the means. Liberals who believe politics are the means are delusional and irrational.

A better explanation than Freud's 19th century constructs may simply be that the essential human condition of imperfect knowledge can lead to both good and bad outcomes. The new post-industrial world of the internet has examples of both: Amazon.com on the one hand vs child pornography rings on the other. It is how we address our imperfect knowledge that matters. The neocons' claim to more perfect knowledge is patently impossible and thus false.

We liberals have had a hard time with this tautology, as can be seen from our inability to respond effectively to the Bush take over of our government.

It is past time that we Democrats assert our belief that we all, neocons and liberals alike, have imperfect knowledge and thus are imperfectly rational. None-the-less, we believe that we the people are sufficiently rational, ala FDR and the Founders, to participate in the process of our own self governance. Liberals are the party of and for the engaged Citizens. The Neocons are the party of the passive Consumers. This distinction is sharp and hard. Yet we Liberals have been unable to make it. Why?

The neocons have contempt for we the people as they view us as irrational beings whose only role is to be consumers. This is deeply cynical. Note Bush telling us to go shopping in times of crisis. This is pure Eddie Bernays. It denies the very premise of the American revolution.

We must make this contrast in what we stand for, and believe in, starkly clear. Today, am not seeing it, or hearing it, from the leadership of the Democratic party.

I am reminded of the age old conflict between the Apollonian and Dionysian. The subject of Thomas Mann which he addressed in Death in Venice and resolved in Magic Mountain: the synthesis of the snow flake and the snow drift.

Likewise, we can see an approach and solution to this problem in B. Franklin and his Junto Club: Coming together for self improvement, the improvement of the commons, and, lastly, for gains in private wealth.

Franklin's synthesis of the conflict between private gain and strengthening the commons is one of the secrets of American Liberalism. On the other hand, DeToqville was convinced Franklin was wrong - that the conflict between the impulse for private gain and the impulse for community and the commons would tear America apart.

Today, we benefit from realizing that the old arguments about human nature and politics were rooted in the shared assumption that a central authority, either government or other large centralized orgnaizations, would naturally be the locus of power. Central planning by technocrats of one stripe or another, or, the opposite side of the same coin, total absence of planning, imposed by the demands of a single metric, free market capitalism, were the two polar opposites of this old false dichotomy.

We are now able to see that a world more in tune with the principles of internet architecture, an IP world view, with distributed solutions to distributed problems may offer a third way. What if the edges are as important as the center? Or more important? What if the edges are made up of millions of imperfectly rational citizens actively engaged in the world. What might emerge?

The Wikipedia is one answer. It is neither the product of central planners nor the product of unregulated free market capitalism. Is the product of a new view of the world with a new set of energies - more akin to spirit of Franklin’s Junta than anything else.

Our new synthesis, then, may well be imperfect rationality expressing itself at millions of actively engaged points on the edges.

Can we now re-affirm the genius of American Liberalism in the revolutionary era and restate it in terms appropriate for our era? We will never defeat the Neocons and their tautological arguments until we do.

Would a VC invest in the Democratic Party today?

A Venture Capitalist would look at things such as the Democrat's business plan, their key executive staff, their projected milestones, results to date, product development, brand integrity and so forth.

My VC response today would have to be: No.

I am not going to pour more money into a plan that has not worked, executives who can not execute, milestones that I can not see or find, same old same old unsatisfactory results, non existent new product development, and a very tattered and poorly managed brand identity.

This is why I was so annoyed today by John Kerry's gimme letter asking for support for action promised, hopefully, 9 months out! Frankly, I am tired of waiting.

I am not going to invest one penny more in a spineless Democratic party that seems utterly incapable of holding Bush to at least the standards that were demanded of President Clinton by the GOP.

So my response to your gimme letter, Senator Kerry, is: Find your backbone, sir. Show me some spine. Show me a Bill of Impeachment for all of President Bush's lies, lawlessness, deceptions, and utter disregard for the integrity of the office of President.

If you want me to invest in your party, show me a business plan that excites me and convince me you can execute it.

Convince me that you understand that the price of real freedom is not one cent for foreign oil.

Convince me that you have a plan that we can execute together that will get us to that goal in 10 years, creating a stronger, healthier and safer America for all.

Horrendous Publication

By: Dr. Farooq Hassan
Published in The Nation

Barely seven months ago a number of leading American TV evangelists had some highly derogatory comments about the Prophet of Islam (pbuh). A leading Republican Party supporter of this category, referred to the Prophet as a 'terrorist'. The Muslims, the world over, were deeply offended. The Islamic populations protested as did their governments but as expected in a most respectful manner. In the wake of 9/11 it was considered to let this perfidy pass. Even the Government of Pakistan, conceivably the most important Islamic country, did not seriously protest to any one. Emboldened by the muted reaction of the Islamic world to such heinous moral invasions of the Muslim Faith this new found technique of hurting the Muslims has now emanated from Europe. This time a Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten has done so again. It came out with posters depicting the Prophet of Islam in a light that is unspeakable in a shocking affront to any civilised decent person in the international civil society so called.

It is reported that both the OIC and the Arab League are holding some kind of Executive Session to chalk out some strategy to lodge protest with the Danish authorities. What that means I cannot foretell. But if all that is designed to accomplish is to merely apprise the Danish Authorities that such publications are deeply offensive to the Muslims feelings, I am afraid it misses the point. Such routine diplomatic rumblings are taken in stride and really accomplish nothing. Already worldwide demonstrations by the people at large in the Islamic world have made this point abundantly clear.

Read the full essay here.

Is a Democracy for, of, and by consumers possible?

Or is it an oxymoron?

Clearly, a democracy for, of and by corporations is an oxymoron.

How can we understand the Bush administration’s use of security agencies for internal spying, as well as the powers and rights they claim for the executive branch to create and enforce laws as they see fit, independent of the checks and balances of the other branches of government? One analysis is that it is an unintended result of their corporate view of the people as passive consumers, objects to be manipulated in an ethics free marketing zone, not as active citizens with Constitutional Rights. This view of the American people may be the consequence of a culture in the late stages of mass market consumerism.

The dominant market culture’s view of the people as fundamentally one dimensional consumers, not citizens, is also, sadly, deeply ingrained in the Democratic party as well. During the Clinton administration, the “Re-inventing Government” project focused on service to the “customer” [consumer].

Words matter. In the above analysis, the word “consumer” suggests a notion of a person reduced to the impoverished status of an passive and objectified target to be manipulated for power and profit. Targets clearly have less power, in any form, than the “shooters”. Further, such a view can create a relatively ethics free zone with respect to how that object is treated. Objects without power are ideal for an economy too dependent on mass market consumerism. Without the power of real choice, they are much more easily stimulated to behave as desired. In the end, how can a dynamic democracy be sustained and vigilantly maintained by passive targets?

For another view of persons who have been reduced to objects with diminished choice and power, watch the film “North Country”. Ask yourself how the men portrayed in the film could treat the women workers, who were members of their union, their culture and their community, literally their wives, sisters and daughters, so very badly? Now ask yourself how hard it would be for this abuse of objects to be extended, but with greater severity, to “other objects” who are of a different culture, skin color, religion, speaking a foreign language, and are also viewed as “enemy combatants”? Creating an ethics free zone around powerless objects is very dangerous indeed.

The word “Citizen”, however, conjures up a far different notion of a multi-dimensional person who has the power of choice to exercise a wide range of capabilities, some of which may even involve consumption, and who expects and demands fully ethical treatment. In return, a person is expected to be ethical in their behavior as well.

A curious question is whether corporations should be considered “people”? Should corporations be given all the legal rights and privileges of human beings? Or are corporations more accurately described as legal fictions, created by humans for their convenience, and thus subservient to humans? Since 1888, corporations have asserted claims to full personhood. In fact, late 20th century neoliberal trade treaties have forced all signatories to declare corporations legally people. Why? Is it to the advantage of we, the people, to make such grants of power, protection and privilege to corporations? Or should we, as we reassert our citizenship, also reassert our primacy over all corporations?

On a global scale, the conflict between the views of the nature of people, and their roles in society, economics, and governance, is made starkly manifest if we compare and contrast the corporate paradigm's annual World Economic Forum at Davos with the people paradigm's World Social Forum held in different cities around the world.

In the U.S., we can see this conflict between the views of the nature of we, the people, citizens vs consumers, playing out in a range of other domains. The short term consumer market metric of the 90 day time frame is inappropriately applied to many long term issues confronting people as citizens: healthcare, education, employment, retirement, and the environment all come to mind. Is this, in fact, a question of who has primacy, people or corporations?

We can also see this conflict in the birthing pains of the new communications model that is emerging as we switch from the old, centralized broadcast/telephony model to a new distributed communications solution based on internet technologies and architectures. If we, the people, use the power of the new IP Communication tools and model to reassert our natural power of communications, this will conflict with the claims of the legacy power structures in the center of the old networks. They have, after all, grown large, rich and powerful by controlling the power of communications to their benefit. Indeed, we have no further to look than American technology corporations who are at this very moment withholding the full and democratic power of communications from the people of China, but delivering it, in the name of profit, to the Chinese government.

This is exactly why President Bush’s domestic spying is such a bold grab for unlimited and unconstitutional power: it denies we, the people and citizens of America, the right to secure and unfettered free speech in our communications. President Bush would deny we, the people, the fundamental right that is required to secure and sustain democracy: Free Speech. President Bush’s illegal domestic spying, if allowed to stand, will reduce us to the status of the citizens of China with respect to their government. Is this what we want?

With respect to the democratic IP communications revolution emerging in America, three critical communication questions are:

1] Where is the power of choice located? In the nexus of centralized government and corporations or at the edges in we, the people?

2] Where is content produced and distributed? Only in the center by corporate entities or at the edges by we, the people for oursleves?

3] Are we Consumers or Citizens?

We can find hints of the new answers on, of all places, the .Mac home page on the web.

Clearly, Apple wants people, in their homes and offices, using their personal, ever lower cost and ever more powerful technology, to be full fledged producers of audio, video, text and graphic content, to be shared [distributed] over the internet to as few or as many other interested people as there may be.

If the message from Apple, and others such as DTV, the Sony Playstation Portable, and many others, wasn't clear enough last year, it is brain dead obvious this year. The home, the end point on the network, is the new locus of communications and rich multi-media productions for distribution on the internet. It is becoming a first mile out world. The power of choice will be in the home. The old 20th century last mile in from the center model is fading away, but not going gently into that good night either.

This is revolutionary. It turns the old media model upside down. And, from the point of view of the old model, it only get worse.

Take, for example, Apple’s 2005 deal with Disney to make broadcast TV programs available almost instantly on iTunes, advertisement free, for just two bucks, for convenient downloading and viewing on Apple’s mobile platform, the video iPod. This has triggered a value chain flattening tsunami that is the essence of a disruptive innovation.

The revolution will be mobile, wireless and broadcast by the people. It will give people the power of choice as to what they watch and when, where and how they watch it. The idea of having to be in a special place, sitting in front of a large, immobile object, at a fixed time, with a limited menu of choices is already becoming quaint. Unless we choose it for our own personal and social reasons.

The question is whether people with this level of power of choice, owning tools to be their own radio and TV producers / broadcasters will rediscover the meaning of being a full citizen as well as a consumer?

If we take a deeper look at this changing situation, we can see that the legacy cablecos and telecos will have great difficulty with at least these factors:

1] Wall Street's demand for compounded growth every quarter. -- Their capital base is so huge the compounding requirements are also ever higher barriers to meeting the Street's demands. Customer churn and defections to other options make this problem worse.

2] Customers who want it when, where, and how they want it will drive up the pressure to flatten the value chain in order to get closer to their goals. Middle Men are obstacles to customers.

3] Be closer to your customer than your competitor, or lose your customer. This forces suppliers to flatten the value chain to eliminate middlemen barriers that keep them distanced from their customers;

4] The mis-match between tax depreciation schedules and the Innovation cycle within the communications sector. How do you upgrade if you have not finished depreciating a huge capital plant? Lower cost and distributed 802.11n will trump Wi-Max with its high cost central nodes before it is even born, much less depreciated.

5] Only if you give the power of choice to the end user in a distributed and decentralized network can you benefit from the leverage of the end-user’s capital investments to create cooperative gain for the network. A centralized network, with its massive capital costs, but unable to make use of end user capital investments, simply can not compete with the more agile and radically more broadly capitalized new model.

6] Consumers want the power of choice to control their lives. Middle men want have the power of choice to maximize their profits. The customer will always win this fight in the end. This drive by the customer for the power of choice will also force the value chain to flatten.

This, then, is the powerful story of change driven by customers and suppliers. It is not driven by any particular technology. The incumbents are no more than old middle men obstructing the customers' wishes and putting barriers between the "content providers" and their customers. So it will be 2:1 against the middle man.

In the end, the real question facing us today is whether this IP communication revolution will revitalize our citizen driven democracy before we, the people, are reduced to the status of Chinese citizens. Will our fundamental human right to free speech, in the form of democratic and constitutionally protected rights of access to unfettered communications and unrestricted information, be denied to us? As we know, it is today being denied, with the complicity of American technology corporations, to the Chinese people. What must we do to escape the fate of the Chinese?

Democracies in Danger

Dr. Farooq Hassan [1]

Synopsis of a presentation given to
The Medford Democratic Meetup
Medford, MA at Lino Avellani’s
11 January, 2006.

I am very privileged to address this highly committed component of the Democratic Party to speak on a subject that is of immense concern to people. I will articulate tonight some thoughts on the future of democracies. I fear, despite the recent two “wars for democracies”, this new millennium does not auger too well for the concept of representative governments. This is not only manifestly evident from even a glimpse of the basic international realities that confront us presently, there is also much doctrine and history behind this phenomenon as well. This state of affairs, to my mind, is most visible in those communities that have a diverse composite character.

But before I do so, I am delighted to express my heartfelt thanks to Mr. Jock Gill who has kindly taken the initiative to be the Convener of this Meetup and to preside over this meeting. I thank Mr. Dan Hurley for having introduced me to this distinguished audience, amongst which I see my friend Dr. Bill Wood - whom I have known for sometime. The presence of so many committed Democrats ensured the lively discussion that followed my formal presentation.

Let me frankly admit that the U.S. has a patently crucial role to play in this process. If we wish to have a commitment towards the cherished ideals of Rawls or Lincoln in realizing a genuine democratization of the notion of representative governments, parts of this system direly need immediate attention. The current status quo, as internationally visible, however, does not give us much encouragement.

On 25h April 2000, President Clinton, after landing at the Islamabad airport, rightly in my submission, lambasted the military regime of the still current incumbent, General Musharraf. It is well to remember what he said about democracy. He had just arrived in Pakistan after spending four days in India, a great example of this system that we cherish. He categorically asserted what had been the US law. Washington cannot basically turn a blind eye to military takeovers under any pretexts. A military government is by any yardstick of doctrinal analysis, a dictatorial system. It is the boldest negation of rights of people by those who are paid servants of the people to defend them!

I refer to that address of the US President as it is both refreshing and reassuring that the world’s leader of political influence means business. After all, an army chief had then recently over thrown the nation’s Constitution and a popularly elected government in conceivably the most important Islamic country. Quite rightly, in accordance with the US laws dealing with foreign assistance contained in the 1961 legislation on this subject, in the face such massive disruption of the civil liberties protection in that county, all aid stood suspended to Islamabad. I have thus great administration for President Clinton for having taken the only possibly correct and prudent step to put an unelected and unaccountable administration on notice to mend its ways.

Then came 9/11. Not long before that monstrous tragedy took place, in an interview in Boston, President Bush did not even know, as it is well known, the name of General Musharraf, or whether he had come to power through a coup d’etat! After that, however, Musharraf acquired, by cleverly self-serving devices, the status of a close ally of this country in that region and also the privilege of being touted as a personal friend of President Bush. But, constitutionally and morally, he remains for the people of Pakistan a usurper of all authority of state.

I have started with Pakistan as in this country democracy had to be simply retained. As we shall see, in others, wars have been undertaken to establish one! In this process, what has occurred is so poignantly well known to those who genuinely think sincerely about long-term interests of this country and normative democracy that I need not say anything further.

Four years ago the U.S. landed in Afghanistan with a burning and avowed goal to hunt down Bin Laden, destroy the Taliban regime, and establish democracy. This mission is only partially accomplished. But it appears the U.S. is on its way out. The picture does not look very appealing! Bin Ladin is still at large, and Hamid Karzai is just holding on to Kabul with the aid of 20,000 foreign troops. The country is again going the way of its traditional regional warlord's fiefdoms with pro-Taliban leadership clearly emerging.

Incidentally two points may specially interest you! First, Hamid Karzai, before becoming the President of Afghanistan, or rather of Kabul, sold Afghani Kebabs in Cambridge - barely a mile from where we re meeting tonight! Secondly, with zero production of poppy crops during the previous regime, this country is again the top producer of this terrible menace to the world’s community.

The point I am making is manifest. If the U.S. has to create a setup which looks “democratic”, at least the credentials of the incumbents must be seen and perceived to be genuine! According its blessings to military people, or people with scant knowledge of the local political affairs, does not auger well for the ultimate success of the foreign policy of Washington. Please ensure, through an intelligent public debate on such issues, that those who make these policies for the U.S. that result in setups that cannot really succeed do not consult merely “TV experts”!

In Iraq too, the U.S. seems to be retreating, after following a similar trajectory of policies from its post invasion grandiose commitments. More importantly, no meaningful, tangible, help has come from any quarter and the financial burden of this undertaking seems ominous. I just read today that Columbia has come out with a projection that, by this year's end, the U.S. will have spent around two trillion dollars in Iraq. With over 2,200 killed in action, over 38,000 seriously injured and with no clear end in sight, I am certain that, despite public rhetoric to the contrary, the U.S. policymakers should be worried. Above all, no matter how elections are formulated in contemporary Iraq, the creation of another Iran is in the cards. Short of this, we have prospects of a persisting civil war.

The Russians can be seen to have learnt lots of lessons from their history. President Vladimir Putin has behaved since his incumbency between a Czar and a KGB chief. He has rolled back democracy with near impunity and remains impervious to all international criticism.

As such, what should have been truly an American century of tremendous influence, with no political power or ideology to really oppose it, has now developed a momentum towards uncertainty. I feel that unless sensible corrective actions and decisions are taken by the U.S., the quest for establishing democracies the world over remains a far off a distant dream. With respect, let me end by saying that it would helpful in this not too rosy a scenario if the US Administration consulted knowledgeable and scholarly Muslims from its vast population of over three hundred million people. I do not see a single person of stature from this faith in either the present governmental setup or the one that the Democrats may seemingly have in the next elections.

I thank you for giving me this time to address your Meetup. I hope that in the ensuing discussions we can analyze more specific points and issues that are significant to this subject.

End note

[1] The author has been a professor of law & foreign affairs at Harvard, advisor on Law and foreign policy to four Prime ministers of Pakistan in the last sixteen years and has studied at Oxford, Cambridge, Columbia and Harvard Universities. He has also been a diplomat, a member of the UN Human Rights Commission and Sub-Commission for protection of human rights and is currently a Special UN Ambassador for Family

Religion & Islamic Extremism: Impact in South Asia

Dr. Farooq Hassan [1]

Brief thematic synopsis of Address given to
The Center for Society & Secularism, the Vikas Adhyayan Kendra and
The Pius College Seminary
Mumbai 29 October 2005

Religion has been a dominant factor in determining the history of the people’s of South Asia. It still continues to be the case. Today this region has several countries representing a diversity of faiths. Out of these countries, Pakistan was created, at least in an historical context, on the solitary basis of religion. Yet, despite this fact pertaining to the doctrinaire basis of the country in 1971, it was torn asunder by the political aspirations of the people of East Pakistan. At the same time, India, the world’s largest successful democracy, has had to face up to this phenomenon numerous times - sometimes with tragic consequences. More recently, even in Bangladesh, created on solid secular foundations, there are signs of emergent nuances of Islamic extremism.

At times it is very hard to distinguish between seemingly ethnic conflicts and more deeply held religious controversies. Generally, the minorities have had to face the brunt of unpleasant implications. But this is not invariable. Both in India and Pakistan, Hindus and Muslims have respectively suffered the effects of sectarian turmoil at the hands of their own followers of the same faith. A question thus naturally arises: does religion assume a secondary role of importance if political necessities of a given time, as perceived, are considered more urgent for redressal even at its expense? This realization is based on empiricism. Effects of far reaching significance affecting the geo-strategic realities of this region have been witnessed to occur presumably on such a foundation. Or, conversely, is the real question that religion is primarily used initially as a cloak or cover for wider political aspirations of the “relevant” people? If it is indeed so, then the enormity of the dynamics of the religion factor is evident. In sum, whether or not religion per se is the initiator of change, it continues be to a major matter propelling alterations of the status quo.

Most of the major religions of the world are present in South Asia, including hundreds of millions of Hindus and Muslims; this region also has a very large numbers Christians, Buddhists and even Jewish people. In addition, there exist several scores of other faiths in the peripheral areas of the main land mass of this vast and diversified sub continent, each possessing hundreds of thousands of adherents. While Pakistan was created on the basis of providing home land for Muslims, there still remain more Muslims in India.

Amongst the followers of these regions, some have ardently advocated frequently certain perspectives held in high esteem by them with emphasis. For some the effects of such partisanship are confined to their own locales. For others, such effects are of much wider application. [2] The emphatic focus envisaging changes of the status quo by such religious activists is often at variance with the thoughts of those constituting a majority. But hard liners often have an ascendant position in such controversies.

Over centuries, despite these sociological cum political differences, there was generally an overt appearance of acceptance of each others perspectives. Absence of homogeneity in the basic dogmas of diverse faiths was not by itself a major insurmountable hurdle for creating a healthy society of a pluralistic nature. Indeed, there existed pari passu with such discordant avocations a great deal of harmony in the Indian society.

It is my view that, in the wake of different political currents of ideology emanating from essentially non Sub Continental European and Western powers during the last century, the seeds of communal discord gradually appeared in South Asia. The fact of a difference in religion amongst very extensive populations was played up by skillful, vested, interests. This resulted in the creation of still more acrimony as the last century moved gradually towards the present day international infrastructure of modern times. Not surprisingly, therefore, the two most populous countries of South Asia, India and Pakistan, have seen regrettable acrimony of religious intolerance even after they separated to become sovereign countries at great human costs.

In Pakistan, there has been indeed serious sectarian violence between different sects of Muslims themselves. In India, too, there has been witnessed intra-faith discord involving Hindus, Muslims and even Christians. This analysis attempts to point out the extent of the conceptual impact of such religious pursuits have with the corresponding affects on the body politic and the public philosophy of the day.

I have already advanced my major conclusions on the broader theme of this subject in my accompanying talk today to the Indian Center for Society and Secularism entitled: “Islam & Extremism” (Now available on the net on the Greater Democracy site). What remains to be examined with a sharper focus is the impact of this phenomenon in South Asia; given my own familiarity, I will focus basically on Islamic issues in this presentation.

This audience, I am particularly happy to note, is a gathering of truly an inter faith variety. I see that this function is being held in a Christian seminary of great antiquity in the historic city of Mumbai. Also present amongst the sponsors of this event are the members of the Vikas Adhyayan Kendra, which is dedicated to promote religious harmony based on egalitarian principles of democracy and tolerance. I thank its Executive Director, Mr. Ajit Muricken, who has written enormously on the subject of religious harmony in India for being here this afternoon. Finally, we have amongst us the supporters of the Indian Center of Society of and Secularism which aims to achieve in the multi-religious Indian environment the attainment of the goal of a dignified civil society through the process of secularism. Its esteemed Chairman, Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer, is presen. His scholarship in Islamic learning stands on a pedestal of its own in this country and abroad. [3]

I may add that “secularism” has been variously interpreted in constitutional terms vis-à-vis its political connotations. One of the main authors in this field in the Sub Continent, Dr. Engineer, who is present today at this function, has described [4] this as an “attitude of respect for other religions" and has been summarized in the often quoted Hindu maxims “sarva dharma samabhava.” For my present analysis, this description, rather than a definition of secularism would do - as it is not necessary presently to delve into a number of controversial aspects of what this concept really envisages in constitutional law and in sociology.

There is no gainsaying the fact that the most notable manifestation of the religious phenomenon in the Sub Continent is the political divide of this region when Pakistan was carved out of British India as an autonomous country. For the first time in modern history, a country was created on the basis of a religion alone. It was almost a year later, in 1948, that the State of Israel emerged as a Jewish homeland in the Middle East becoming the second country to be so created by conferences and international diplomacy.

Thus, long before the contemporary controversy regarding the place of religion in a modern state, or that of the concepts and contours of religious extremism arose in its present form, the British Government, by lending a helping hand in the creation of both Pakistan and Israel, had demonstrated what it felt on such crucial issues. The British thinking, initially contained in the Balfour Declaration of 1916, was further solidified in its basic thematic content by the Cabinet Mission to India and the Mountbatten Plan of 3 March, 1947 regarding the independence and eventual division of India. These political ideas were carried into effect by the British through the then international community, consisting of just 55 Member Nations of the UN, to endorse and adopt the creation of new countries on religious basis alone.

The breakup of Pakistan in 1971, leading to the creation of Bangladesh, establishes that religion was not sufficient by itself to maintain the homogeneity of the country. Indeed, within Pakistan, it is still unclear whether the establishment of a separate homeland for Muslims also signified the creation of an Islamic state. Furthermore, what exactly is an “Islamic State” is far from a settled question. [5]

Given the political realities of the present millennium, such precedents may not be repeated for decades to come in the history of the world. Such an attitudinal metamorphosis is now manifestly evident. Contemporary de facto bashing of such ideas by the foreign policies of the Western states that matter is now beyond question. It has clear implications that over-indulgence of religion in an international context is not something to be lightly countenanced in future by the policies of significant Western powers. [6]

The policy to which I refer has been heavily underscored by the recent events in Afghanistan and Iran. In the former case, the Taliban regime, based on purely Islamic postulates, was overthrown by the U.S. led war, while the political cum strategic tensions against the Islamic Republic of Iran underscore this perspective as an illustration of the latter scenario articulated above. It is possible that, fearing this kind of a resultant turmoil in Pakistan, General Musharraf keeps on harping upon “moderate Islam” being the policies of the Islamabad military regime. This rhetorical repetition is as much an act of self preservation for an unelected ruler as it is to placate his newly found Western friends. Be that as it may, it is clear that a State based entirely, or mainly, on religious avocations is not likely to have many supporters in any significant Western Capital.

In South Asia, not merely religion, but ethnic antagonism based on historical acrimony, have compounded the tensions that have sadly been the cause of much friction. In Sri Lanka as well as in former East Pakistan, for instance, it was ethnic diversity and apparent exploitation (both economic and political) of a large segment of the society, which produced consequences of far reaching significance. Similarly events which led to the storming of the Golden Temple in the early seventies were predicated on similar aspirations of those that felt “afflicted” by those in authority. Thus hegemonic treatment within a state by those who posses the de facto elements of power vis-à-vis the disprivileged ones is also a malaise capable of producing deadly consequences.

I am very familiar with this phenomenon. In 1980, I was amongst six international jurists selected by UNESCO to frame the Third Generation of human rights. The right I outlined, “the right to be different”, was officially recognized in Mexico City in 1980 by the UN. It deals specifically with this problem. [7]

The minimum conceptual consequence that clearly emerges from this reality is that willingly, or by device, the continued presence of a state of “injustice” to a community, often by the majority, is the catalyst for eventual violence for change. [8] Stretched further, the hegemonic policies of foreign powers, whether real or perceived, gives rise to acts of extremism and terrorism. [9] In a broader sense, this is as true, in my view, of domestic South Asian events that have been noted above, as much as it is for international matters of grave significance affecting this region. For instance, the East Pakistan embroiled situation in 1971, or the current insurgency in Afghanistan, or Iraq, are directly the result of such perceptions and feelings. “Nationalists” naturally contest the external controls placed on their “independence” by domestic elements, or by governments emanating from abroad, and dominating them by presenting such fiats of and from outsiders. There is little doubt in my mind that “democracies” produced by armies, whether domestic or foreign, cannot easily succeed.

In this charged atmosphere, nationalism has assumed tremendous force. It is axiomatic that the emergence of this basic characteristic throughout the world is an addendum to the Age of Industrialism and Western expansion that led to colonialism in the 19th century. All serious analysts must surely realize this simple fact of history. Just as the industrialized West needed colonial possessions for it successful existence, nationalism dictates that foreign imposed rulers, howsoever beneficial they may actually be, be prevented from now arising. It is equally a truism that to not expect opposition to such a status quo by the affected people is utterly unrealistic.

In South Asia in addition, we have at the Government level a remarkable spectrum of different practices. India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka possess, despite cultural and systemic difficulties, representative institutions. Pakistan and Nepal, on the other hand, demonstrate the existence of military or authoritarian regimes which have a token or face saving pretense of being democratic. When this perversity is examined in a particularly a religious environment, autocratic regimes have a great deal to lose. Fascism, as such, is truly and historically allergic to any Faith. It is thus not surprising that Communism was always averse to any religion. Notwithstanding the different systems of government in various counties of South Asia, the presence of religion as a factor of great strength, with a potential for decisive change in the society, remains in tact.

While the topic of religious extremism is evidently vast and important in countries of South Asia, I am mainly concerned today in this analysis with the effects pertaining to Islam and Muslims. This topic has been in the center of all reverberating news, and developments manifestly impacting the foreign policies of states of great significance since 9/11. But, as I have said enough on this theme in my other accompanying article, nothing further need be noted here except its impact in the South Asian context.

The relationship of reason and faith requires a close examination. In terms of human values, one really cannot be understood by itself, without reference to the other.  We should also understand that religion and faith are inseparable, as the former derives from it validity via a norm of acceptance and consequential obedience to its core fundamentals. But once the initial dogma part of faith is traveled, the rest must surely be supported by reason. As such, it is only prudent to suggest that, while faiths of all types need to be respected, reason too should be utilized more extensively whenever it is so felt. This would lead to an over all more tolerant society. The underlying troubles of a sociological nature arise from an inability of contemporary political leadership to grasp such conceptual and historical niceties.

While the institutional part of the Faith may be dogmatic, there is a large reservoir of human addendum to it which must be:-

(1) In harmony with the divine mandate of the relevant religion, and
(2) It must, a fortiori, admit of change according to evolution and development.

Every Faith has a system of values and each prospers according to this accepted characteristic as such. In this context, changing hegemonic relationships and information technology are defining elements. Large populations in the Third World, particularly those of the Muslims, find it increasingly difficult that this process of “modernization” is gradually eroding their identity. The comprehensive Western hegemony in the cultural domain is producing this identity crisis among religious and cultural communities in South Asia, and much more so among Muslim communities. Thus, lack of cultural affinity with contemporary movements is another reason for much of South Asian anxiety against the perceived hegemony of the West. The recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have, in the short term, heightened these fears and apprehensions rather than toning them down.

In South Asia, as elsewhere, the religious rituals observed by Muslims are usually influenced by both history and local customs. It is also important to note that, though values and rituals are common to all religions, the former are really the cultural expression of the communities in which Muslims have lived for generations. As rituals are essentially the product of local custom, it is not surprising that Muslims in South Asia are largely influenced by local norms of behaviour of the Hindus. For such similarities to be accepted gracefully requires an attitude which is difficult to locate nowadays in quarters it should be vested in order to create a religious and communally harmonious atmosphere.

On most social issues, Muslims in Pakistan, for instance, have more in common with the Indian populations, regardless of religion, than with the Arabs or with the North Africa Muslim communities. Indeed, some Hindu social observances are observed with greater passion in Pakistan than even in India! [10] Such actual practice of local cultural practices of the dominant, or historical majority, has become, of late, not unnaturally, the cause of some friction. Even observances of minority cultural or religious practices has not failed to arouse local disharmony. [11]

Conclusions

This brief thematic expose has focused on specific issues of religious extremism in South Asia. In Pakistan, there is visible strife between Islamic sects, leading often to bloodbaths in mosques, of all places. This strife is recently also seen to arise in Bangladesh as well. In India too, despite its many successes in being a successful representative society, since many decades of regrettably tragic events of a communal variety have surfaced. Communal disturbances associated with the demolition of the Babri Mosque, and the more recent riots in Ahmedabad, are typical illustrations of such religious and societal discord.

It establishes that misplaced and demonstrative religious zeal, at times resulting in violence, is not totally under control of any government in this region; rational elements, however, are working hard to avoid the eruption of tragedies of horrifying magnitude. All prudent elements, individuals and institutions, must work to avoid these consequences. Some sceptics even maintain that the governments at the relevant times in different countries are conceivably involved in such terrible occurrences. [12] I am of the view that, while some evidence is available to justify such fears, on the whole, saner institutions and wiser elements in the overall structure of administration are at work to avoid such tragedies from erupting.

In line with these articulations, it is equally evident that similar developments on the basis of religion are taking shape in the rest of the world as well. It is clear therefore, that, not only in the South Asian context, but the world over, there is clearly, per se, a renaissance of religion. The more fervent this renaissance, arguably the more pronounced are its consequences and implications, including a corresponding reaction by those who feel threatened.

This phenomenon, according to some particularly foreign experts of American policies, is also noticeable in the U.S. itself. The strong showing in the last presidential elections, and the polling patterns, have established the manifest Bible belt support that President Bush obtained, compared to voting in the major urban civic centres. As cities like Los Angles, Boston or New York are representative of liberal attitudes, it is not surprising that they are apparently against him on the point of his adoption of a strong pro-war foreign policy. [13]

The U.S. emerged as the solitary World Power after the disintegration of the USSR in the late eighties. It is axiomatic that any major decision that Washington takes has genuine transnational effects and implications. What worldwide implications are likely to arise as result of a pursuit of Bush administration policies is, not as yet, clear as the purest might wish for. What political and strategic goals and aims have been achieved by the U.S. thus far, however, are still to be objectively evaluated. I am not going to go into this question as I am only concerned in this address with the effects of religious extremism in the Sub-Continent. But this much is clear to me: If, despite the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington does not take steps to ensure the creation of “true democracy” in countries other than India in South Asia, much that President Bush went to war for will be lost .

Communal and religiously based political activity operates at different levels. Its objective is to destroy the basic foundations of a pluralistic society. Why? Since it itself derives its dynamics on the basis of a monolithic elite. In military regimes, this corps of elites exists in the combined vested interests of the army and the feudal. In religiously led societies, this elitist element is epitomized by Mullahs and other kind of priestly classes. Since this aim is not easy to realize expeditiously, the process to obtain these goals is by a slow percolation and propagation of the social norms which suit the relevant society. In some ways, this phenomenon is found in all South Asian cultures. The only positive way to challenge this process is by producing a genuine participatory democracy.

Let me end these submissions by referring briefly to the ultimate goal of all religions. A genuinely religious human being, irrespective of his precise faith, should be devoted to freedom of person, freedom of conscience and compassion for all needing his care and assistance. Such a religious person invariably strives for truth and justice. In this respect, my detailed reference to the Islamic concepts of iman and adl (Faith and Justice) in my longer presentation needs to be properly comprehended. 

All religions basically advocate morality, tolerance and decency. Without such traits, they could not have survived for centuries. Where events take a course other than that of peace and harmony is when supervening factors and events outlined in detail in my longer text occur. As Mahatma Ghandi said, there is no religion higher than truth. Let us pursue this objective as it assures ultimate righteousness of human conduct.

The religious leadership of diverse institutions and parties in all South Asian countries must be vigilant against such possibilities that can create and have, with increasing velocity, caused tremendous damage to the multi-ethnic and multi-religious culture of the Sub Continent. It is also a phenomenon of current political evolution that religious based political parties are becoming tangible national or regional forces in their respective environments and societies. The great rise to political power of MMA in Pakistan and of BJP in India are the best examples of this trend. The real and perceived political and social victimization of some religious elements has created “extremism”. This situation must be attended to at the earliest, with respect to its causation, to prevent the deterioration of the law and order situation in these societies.

In any pluralistic society, the attainment of democracy, based of consensus and accommodation, is, in my view, the real, and ultimate only, end which can produce the desired results. India’s success in realizing this goal is, without question, a formidable achievement. True, it has still many socio-religious troubles, as evident from attacks such as those on the Bhandarkar Institute in Pune. But the wider reservoir of goodwill contained in its major state instruments of resolution of disputes, such as its judiciary, are still the best surety to proceed further in this regards.

Let me end this talk by bringing to your notice a unique consequence in the Sub Continent with respect to pursuit of religious bigotry in political or social affairs. Whereas terrorism is the normal result in such scenarios elsewhere, in the Sub-Continent the threat is of straight forward vandalism. In all major occurrences of this nature there is evidence of large scale destruction by mobs or gangs of a particular persuasion to achieve their avowed aims. The time has come for policymakers to devise appropriate modalities to combat this menace.

Clearly, a manifest attempt to achieve inter communal harmony is presently required. In all societies possessing multi-faith populations such a healthy evolution of attitudes would be invaluable. In a visionary spirit of looking at such matters, if inter-faith deliberations can occur, so much the better. It is imperative that in such a cultural attitudinal metamorphosis, past inter se grievances have to be over looked and focus should be on future betterment of the religious diversity. In more ways than one, the South Asian experiences on this subject have a tremendous role model potential. We have been victims of extraordinary religious bigotry and intolerance over a long time. We know too well how this has led to the most baneful consequences. I can only hope that, with a growing awareness of the immense benefits of peace and harmony, the time has arrived for turning a new leaf of history.

In this context, I am particularly keen to express my highest appreciation for my hosts, each of whom have done their share in contributing to this message of mine. The Center for Society & Secularism and the Vikas Adhyayan Kendra are leaders in this field. They have, to their credit, both vast publications and many activities devoted towards this goal. The Pius College Seminary is, likewise, an institution with a tradition of creating the kind of harmony which distinguishes a culture of toleration.

Thank you all!

Endnotes:

[1] D.Phil.; B A Juris, MA. M.Litt, (Oxon), DCL (Columbia), DIA (Harvard), Of Lincoln’s Inn, Barrister at Law, UK, Attorney at Law, US, Senior Advocate Supreme Court (QC) of Pakistan; Affiliate & Visiting Professor of International Affairs, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, Special UN Ambassador for Family for the World Family Alliance, Advisor to four Prime Ministers of Pakistan on Law & Foreign Affairs; Delegate to the UN, NY, & to the Human Rights Commission on Human Rights & to the Sub-Commission on Human Rights, Geneva, Leader of Pakistan’s Delegation to the International Criminal Court Prep Coms., NY & Delegate to UN GA Sessions. Also, inter alia, on the Faculty of Law, Human Rights Program, Harvard University, Faculty of Political Science, Tufts University, the Secretary General, American Asian Institute of Strategic Studies, Boston. International Legal Counsel before transnational Tribunals & US Congress. David M Kennedy Scholar of International Studies, Kennedy Center, BYU 2003-4, distinguished Visiting Professor JNU, Memorial Lecturer at Benaras Hindu University, Mumbai University &Ambadkar Center, Auranagbad, 2004-5 ;President, Pakistan Family Forum, Chairman, Foreign Affairs Committee, Pakistan Bar Association at Lahore, 2003/4. Given King Faisal Memorial Award, 2002 and awarded in 2003 the International Professor of Human Rights Recognition from a galaxy of international professor by Saudi Arabia.

[2] The Islamic concept of Ummah connotes a world wide application of Muslim norms to all of Islamic peoples.

[3] Conferred the Right to Livelihood Awarded by Parliament of Sweden, 2004.

[4] See: Religion, State & Civil Society, p 2, 2005, Asghar Ali Engineer

[5] See the two works of the author: Farooq Hassan , The Islamic Republic, 1984 and The Concept of State in & Law in Islam , 1981 University Press of America, Washington DC.

[6] The policies of the Republican Present Reagan in supporting and eulogizing the Jihadist elements in Afghanistan against the USSR have been utterly reversed by another Republican President George W. Bush since 9/11.

[7] See UNSCO Doc.SS-80/CONF, 806/COL.7 (1980). Also Final Report SS-80/CONF. 806/COL.7 at 22 The Right to be Different., Dr. Farooq Hassan.

[8] Ironically, it was the East Pakistan majority province that felt afflicted by the minority Provinces of West Pakistan on account of the clear Establishment bias against it.

[9] According to one view that is what is in evidence in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

[10] For instance the kite flying festival of Basant announcing the arrival of Spring is observed with tremendous fanfare in Pakistan despite strong opposition to it from religious elements.

[11] In Pakistan where the majority is of the Sunni faith, the taking of Tazia, a practice of the minority Shiites to commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hussian, is not free from local disharmony or law and order situations.

[12] See e.g. Lessons from Gujarat, a Compilation of Essays, Mumbai, 2003,

[13] Engineer, op cit says: “Bush mainly relied on issues like danger of terrorism on the one hand, and Christian values and family values on the other” to push for “the propaganda that American right wing Christian politics (are needed) to enhance its security,” P 244-245.

 

How Bush is empowering the Muni Wifi IPcom Revolution

It is a great and delicious irony that the tax cuts Bush rammed through in his first term, for the benefit his wealthy benefactors and corporate sponsors, are one of the key driving forces behind the municipal wireless IPcom movement that is about to gore the protected oxen of the telecom incumbents. The unintended consequences will be revolutionary in ways none of us can yet imagine. How so, you ask?

Consider that the tax cuts for the top 5% of the population and the mega corporations, combined with other budget recklessness, have slashed the flow of federal dollars to the states and then from the states to their respective cities and towns. As a result, the budgets of a great many cities and towns, with their increasing expenses and falling revenues, are in dire straights. And they are finding it almost impossible to raise real estate taxes to bridge the gap. So what do do to escape from this trap between a rock and a hard place?

Now consider the Chambers of Commerce that are very unhappy at they way the telecom giants have been exploiting them while taking them for granted.

Both groups are eager for a real choice that will improve services they can benefit from and at the same time cut the costs of their communications budgets. Both groups are discovering the many advantages offered by modern IPcom when compared to last century's Telecom. Both groups are also discovering that their peers in other countries have wider and more attractive choices than we have here at home. And both groups are discovering that they can, in fact, implement an IPcom strategy quite easily on their own. They are also discovering that cost savings from moving from Telecom to IPcom can pay for a muni wireless project in a few short years.

Today, the choice between old Telecom and new IPcom is clear and real. And we the people, when given the democratic power to choose what is best for us as we see it, are overwhelmingly chosing IPcom -- as the Muni Wireless explosion clearly demonstrates. The peoples' choice, no longer controlled by the Telecom incumbents, terrifies them. Why? Because if we the people chose IPcom, all of the business models locked to the old Telecom model fail. Can the old Telecom buggy whip makers transform themselves into modern IPcom services and content providers?

What is also happening is that we are seeing, across many domains, the adoption of the first mile out from the home model replacing the old last mile in from the center. IPcom sees the home as being the point of origin and the locus of choice, and thus power radiating out from the home. The old Telecom model, with the control of choice resident in the center to maximize profits on products delivered to the target home at the end of the last mile, is failing.

To see this, consider a home owner who buys a big, flat screen, hi-def TV home theater system for several thousand dollars. The choice is now in the home as to when, where, and how to view "product", that may even be free, produced by anyone, anywhere, on any topic with out restrictions imposed by governments or corporations on content or language. The choice is now in the home as to how best to optimize the return on the investment in home media systems, both for production and for viewing. The choice can no longer be dictated and controlled by the old industrial era producer in the center. That business model is as good as dead.

So we see Sony try to secretly control choice with rootkits clandestinely installed on privately owned personal computers by music CDs. We see the MPAA and RIAA fight tooth and nail to use anti-democratic and anti-innovation contortions of copyright principles to protect the power and profit they once had from the control of choice. We see the movie theater business fading away as they no longer control viewing choices. We see broadcast TV scrambling to survive in the face of the power of choice slipping from their hands. We see the Main Stream Media, with readership declining, very substantially challenged for "authority and reputation" by the new choices offered by text, audio and video "blogs" created at the edges. We see the wheels coming off the Bush political machine and agenda as it becomes ever more apparent that they have lost control of choice and the ability to impose their "story" on the American people, who are now clearly choosing alternative stories.

We are learning that, in the Bush political world of the stern, dogmatic and all knowing father who always knows best, and must not be questioned, the "children" grow up to realize that their worlds are not the same as "father's" and that he actually does not know best about their worlds. The next step is the recognition that Father probably did not even know best about his own world -- in fact, we soon learn that, with our imperfect knowledge, nobody can know best. The humbling realization is that all we can do is do the best we can to know "good enough" to muddle through life's many vagaries, ambiguities, and surprising unknowns. This is why it makes more sense to start at the edge and work our way out in cooperation with our neighbors, our community, each of us dealing as best we can with our local realities. If you can not "know best", then, in the end, any attempt at controlling choice from the center is bound to fail.

As a result of all of this, we are now living through the political, economic, and cultural tumult of the necessary relocation, if we want to preserve our democracy, of the control of the power of choice from its old point of origin in the center of the Telecom world view to its new point of origin: The edge of the network nobody owns and the new IPcom distributed world view.

A Public Relations campaign

As much as I dislike thinking about political campaigns in terms of advertising, marketing, public relations and all that stuff, the P.R. aspect remains very important. Two recent blog entries have helped me rethink my relation to P.R. as it relates to political campaigns.

Richard Edelman asks �Is Public Relations Ready for Discontinous Change?� and Elizabeth Albrycht writes about how �Collaboration Requires Contribution�. Both posts bring up important issues for political campaigns that can help make the P.R. aspect of political campaigns more palatable to grassroots activists.

Edelman recommends that �PR should move away from �pitching the story� mentality. We can be part of conversations on line.� It should �Recognize the influence and credibility of blogs� and �Experiment�. As an example, he suggests �We should be working with video clips attached to press materials to make it easier for bloggers in consumer technology to create v-blogs.�

It seems as if this applies strongly to political campaigns. For the sake of our democracy, we must move away from politicians pitching their story to an environment where they become part of conversations. We must return to good old-fashioned �retail politics� and move away from the sound-byte.

Albrycht takes this even further. She says �Both the development of communities and social capital requires reciprocity - the willingness to both take AND give -- to contribute.� She asks, �What do we have to offer to the communities we want to join/build?� Her answer is �If your answer is only �information about our company and products� then you need to head back to the drawing board.� Again, this applies strongly to political campaigns. If the only reason for a campaign website or blog is to provide information about the candidate, then the campaign had better head back to the drawing board. We need to promote greater participation in democracy.

How do we do this? Albrycht goes on to cite McMillan and Chavis� work on �Sense of Community� [SOC]. �They define SOC as consisting of the following four characteristics: Feelings of membership; � Feelings of influence; � Integration and fulfillment of needs � ; and Shared emotional connection�.

Political campaigns need to learn from the P.R. community how to enter conversations and build community. Otherwise, we will see more emails like this one I received today from a friend who has become disillusioned with a campaign she has been volunteering for:

�I'm still working on the � campaign, although with far less enthusiasm than in the beginning. I look at the web site and wonder what the hell they are thinking. Just like the Kerry campaign, they just don't get it. They talk the talk but that's where it stops. I've given up giving feedback.�

The Internet is providing politicians a chance to re-engage the American people in the political process, and frightening as it may sound on the surface, they can probably learn a lot from forward thinking public relations experts.

Techno Utopians and the Revolt Against Science

After watching the films Connections [James Burke], Pandora's Box and The power of Nightmares [both by Curtis Adams for the BBC], as well as The Fog of War [Errol Morris], I have this strange feeling that what we are experiencing today in American politics is a deep and angry backlash at the failures and bill of goods sold to us by techno utopians who had the unbridled hubris to think they could be Masters of the Universe. It does not matter if they worked at Gosplan in the USSR or for RAND in the USA. Fundamentally they were all techno utopians who got it wrong at great cost.

As Irving Kristol says in Power of Nightmares, the Liberals have no explanation as to why President Johnson and RAND did not produce a Great Society and End Poverty. They also have no apologies for their failures.

Of course it should be noted that today’s Neoconservatives, who also can never be wrong and thus must presume that their knowledge is perfect, are making the exact same mistake. It is certain that they will reap the same whirlwind.

Until the Liberals and Democrats can first acknowledge these failures and apologize for them, the Right will run amok with its anti-science. What we need is some fresh thinking that is able to embrace science and technology with humility, respect for the impossibility of perfect knowledge, and an honest acceptance of the existence of mystery. It is past time to move beyond the approaches of FDR's years and the far right's Cold War use of FEAR as an organizing principal. We will only succeed if we stop looking in the rear view mirror and tackle the future head on. FDR is dead. The Cold War is over. Long live a new and confident Liberalism -- now to invent it.

I recommend viewing the films I cited above for a deeper and more detailed analysis of this history. One the curious things is that these films are not easy to find and view. Curtis Adams’ “The Power of Nightmares”, for example, was never broadcast in the US and the film version has never been distributed. Why?

You can also find more on my views on our need for more science in the post on Greater Democracy:

We need a lot more Science to Survive and Thrive

In today’s world, where long histories of human errors and ignorance compound and amplify the already difficult situations created by natural events, such as hurricanes, earth quakes, mud slides and so forth, what are we to do? Part of the answer is simply that we need a great deal MORE science, not less, if we want to survive and thrive in the 21st century.

Consider also that very many of us today share a yearning for a more satisfying "whole life". I suspect a majority of us are deeply dissatisfied with the empty life offered by hyper consumerism and celebrity madness required, it appears, by the processes of mass production with its dependence on mass markets. This dissatisfaction takes many forms. It also makes some of us very defensive and leads to lashing out and other regrettable behaviors, greed, looting and even terrorism of many sorts, for example.

------- snip

I can also recommend George Clooney’s new film on Edward R. Murrow: Good Night & Good Luck. Bracing and very timely. Note at the end of the film the footage of President Eisenhower defending habeas corpus as a fundamental building block of American democracy.

War Among the Democrats

By: Dana Blankenhorn

This is another one of my political analyses. Please go elsewhere for tech bloggie goodness.

Clueless Washington analysts feel that the Bush Administration’s fall from grace means we have to sit through years before we’re delivered anything interesting.

The real battle, in fact, starts now.

Democrats today are split much as Republicans were 40 years ago. Back then the split was between the “establishment” party which had fought a rear-guard action against the New Deal for a generation, and a new more aggressive “conservative movement,” symbolized first by Barry Goldwater and, after his defeat, by the actor Ronald Reagan, who had placed him in nomination. (Note that the movement was so far down in 1965 its spokesman wasn’t even an office-holder.)

But the fight on the right was really about money, and how to get it. The “establishment” got its money from Wall Street, and the Fortune 500. The “movement” got its money from individuals – some rich, some more Justin Dart and John Olin, the “New Right” leaned on a new technology, direct mail, and on direct mail’s black magician, Richard Viguerie.

The “establishment’ party dealt with interests, pushing back on behalf of industries allied with it – defense, banking, manufacturing -- trying to cobble together temporary majorities by seeking the political center. Eisenhower did it, and the Party of Washington felt this was the only way. Democrats have recently been through the same thing with Bill Clinton, an accomodationist decade led, if not by a war hero, then at least by a foot soldier in the war-against-the-war.

The GOP “movement” party of the 1960s dealt with issues, because that’s where its money came from. It wasn’t important to win, in fact the issue was more valuable than victory. Rhetoric meant more than results. The issue gave you someone to hate, a focus for your anger. It was the big donors, and their big causes (cut government, kill Communists) who came first.

Back to today. The Democratic “establishment” party is based in Washington, and it, too, gets its money from special interests. Trial lawyers, Hollywood, insurance companies, investment bankers.

Then there is a “movement” party, sometimes called the Netroots, born in the wake of the Iraq conflict around the candidacy of Howard Dean.

To many there aren’t real ideological differences between these parties. That’s the mistake.

As before, the difference starts with money. Dean operates from the bottom up, the “establishment” from the top-down.

And that’s where the establishment is now attacking Dean, through the money issue. Never mind that Dean now chairs the DNC. (Goldwater ran with GOP party chairman William Miller.) Loyalty to faction means more in American politics than loyalty to party. Lobbyist Vic Fazio, a former Congressman, complained to The Washington Post that the Democrats are being out fund-raised 2-1.

It would be a valid complaint but for two facts. First, Fazio conflates corporate soft money with hard money figures. Second, Dean’s fund-raising is in fact a record for the party – it’s just that the moneymen of Bush have gone to Caligulan heights lately. (It should also be noted that a million from 10,000 people brings you 10,000 votes, while