So, with addition at the end introducing ‘Corpaorate Reform’, let’s reintroduce the blog at its new home:
This blog seeks to open up three parallel topics for discussion.
“Global Domination” will focus on the current United States leadership: The Neocons and the Republican Party. This blog will contend that the “War on Terror” is a myopic, Cold War approach to a world that is more sophisticated than it was in 1980, that their policies have failed miserably in the current climate and that the United States needs a new direction for a new era. The first entry on this topic will focus on “Dick Cheneys Song Of America” which some of you will recognize from a recent e-mail blast titled ‘The Flat World vs. Global Domination’.
The second topic of this blog is a means to broaden the discussion of United States foreign affairs to a multi-lense topic of “Globalization”. Part of the Globalization segment will be looking at how Thomas Friedman defines the topic. In his book “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” he describes the process of Information Arbitrage— ‘Today, more than ever, the traditional boundaries between politics, culture, technology, finance, national security and ecology are disappearing. You often cannot explain one without referring to the others, and you cannot explain the whole without reference to them all.”
Shifting the focus to a broader topic of how the U.S. economy now depends heavily on our international neighbors stability and prosperity, we begin to offer plans on how to do better in this new climate. Topic three is “Sustainability”.
There will be a call for a federal mandate to infuse our roads with electric/gas hybrid automobiles over the next five years along with an initiative to create the infrastructure to support this shift. The United States needs to reclaim its pioneer spirit and shift its domestic and federal policies so that we create a society which cares for the worlds resources and the life that depends upon those resources.
Another item that will be discussed in this section will be the reform of corporations so that they are legally responsible to act better as ‘corporate citizens’ instead of simply being beholden to creating profits for their share holders. This is a bold assertion, I know. Let me explain by performing the trusty cut-n-paste about the documentary film ‘The Corporation’ released in 2004:
“An epic in length and breadth, this documentary aims at nothing less than a full-scale portrait of the most dominant institution on the planet Earth in our lifetime—a phenomenon all the more remarkable, if not downright frightening, when you consider that the corporation as we know it has been around for only about 150 years. It used to be that corporations were, by definition, short-lived and finite in agenda. If a town needed a bridge built, a corporation was set up to finance and complete the project; when the bridge was an accomplished fact, the corporation ceased to be. Then came the 19th-century robber barons, and the courts were prevailed upon to define corporations not as get-the-job-done mechanisms but as persons under the 14th Amendment with full civil rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (i.e., power and profit)—ad infinitum.
The Corporation defines this endlessly mutating life-form in exhaustive detail, measuring the many ways it has not only come to dominate but to deform our reality. The movie performs a running psychoanalysis of this entity with the characteristics of a prototypical psychopath: a callous unconcern for the feelings and safety of others, an incapacity to experience guilt, an ingrained habit of lying for profit, etc. We are swept away on a demented odyssey through an altered cosmos, in which artificial chemicals are created for profit and incidentally contribute to a cancer epidemic; in which the folks who brought us Agent Orange devise a milk-increasing drug for a world in which there is already a glut of milk; in which an American computer company leased its systems to the Nazis—and serviced them on a monthly basis—so that the Holocaust could go forward as an orderly process.
The movie goes on too long, circles too many points obsessively and redundantly, and risks preaching-to-the-choir reductiveness by calling on the usual talking-head suspects--Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Moore. And except for an endlessly receding tracking shot in an infinite patents archive, there’s scarcely an image worth recalling. Still, it maps the new reality. This is our world—welcome to it. --Richard T. Jameson (amazon.com)
Order the documentary ‘The Corporation’
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