Why Did the US Media Not Report this Article?

A woman was allowed to die in an Irish hospital because the doctors were not allowed by Irish law to perform an abortion. I did not know this story until I heard one of my favorite comedians report about it in one of his podcast monologues. First the story excerpted from the Guardian, here it is in stark terms: "The abortion ban came into international focus last month after an Indian woman, Savita Halappanavar, died in Galway university hospital during a miscarriage after she and her husband had repeatedly asked for a termination of her 19-week-old pregnancy. Her husband, Praveen, alleged that medical staff told them "this is a Catholic country" and that they would not carry out the termination." The only good thing to come out of this mess is that due to pressure from the European court there is a hope that a new law will be passed that will allow abortions to be allowed in "limited circumstances"to include where the life of the mother is threatened. Why is the US corporate controlled media not reporting this story?

Peace and Justice Message as We Close 2012

Landfill Harmonic film teaser from Landfill Harmonic on Vimeo.

My daughters' music teacher showed this to the kids. It made a great impression on my daughter so much so that she wanted to share it with me. There are some remarkable stories that never get told in our western media that would make our lives and worries about things like the fiscal cliff pale into insignificance. It is human nature not to pay much attention to the world beyond us except when it threatens us directly but we should all try harder in the coming new year to do just that. Pay attention to the small under reported stories. Now with the world wide web we can do that. We all know the sites that cover these stories and we should try harder to include them in our browsing and reading in the coming year. But we should not just stick to articles, this video shows more about the power of individual spirit to overcome even the most depressing of circumstances than any journalist can at least in the space of the few minutes it takes to view this footage. Clearly without stating as much it reminds us of our responsibilities here in the affluent west to help work for a more just and peaceful world. How is that for a great holiday message!

Adam Hochschild

I have been reading author and journalist Adam Hochschild recently and have been particularly  impressed with his story of the struggle for human rights in Britain, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves. The book impressed me so much that I wanted to interview the author and find out more about what attracted him to his subjects and the way he constructs the stories he tells. The result is a podcast I did with Kate Winchmann that I hope to turn into a series.

Disturbing News from Hungary

Hungary, a landlocked country of just over 10 million is frequently ignored by the media.  Some recent developments suggest attention must be paid in light of a rise of right wing extremism that has led to a public square in Budapest being named after infamous leader Admiral Horthy.  

Correcting The Harm Global Elites Do

In a brilliantly perceptive piece Chris Hayes wonders why elites are so incompetent. Why they always seemed to create messes of sometimes global proportions behind them. It is due to the tendency of all those in power whether they be left or right wing to leave the mechanics of governing to others.

 Hayes credits Robert Michels,a German social theorist for putting his finger on the mechanism involved.

"At first, he joined the Social Democratic Party, but he ultimately came to view it as too bureaucratic to achieve its stated aims. “Our workers’ organization has become an end in itself,” Michels declared, “a machine which is perfected for its own sake and not for the tasks which it could have performed.”
Any organization must delegate to the few professionals who must run the machine. Sooner or later the professionals become so expert in the machine they cut off conversation with the rest of us and believe that they have the magic solutions to solve complex problems. Meanwhile we cannot understand what they are talking about.

“Without wishing it,” Michels says, there grows up a great “gulf which divides the leaders from the masses.” The leaders now control the tools with which to manipulate the opinion of the masses and subvert the organization’s democratic process. “Thus the leaders, who were at first no more than the executive organs of the collective, will soon emancipate themselves from the mass and become independent of its control.”All this flows inexorably from the nature of organization itself, Michels concludes, and he calls it “The Iron Law of Oligarchy”: “It is organization which gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization says oligarchy.”

Within these governing organizations--elite financial, legal and other groups find ways to maintain their power and justify entrance through succeeding in the meritocracy. Intelligence becomes " a vitally necessary characteristic for those with powerful positions. But it isn’t just a celebration of smartness that characterizes the culture of meritocracy. It’s something more pernicious: a Cult of Smartness in which intelligence is the chief virtue, along with a conviction that smartness is rankable and that the hierarchy of intelligence, like the hierarchy of wealth, never plateaus. In a society as stratified as our own, this is a seductive conclusion to reach. Since there are people who make $500,000, $5 million and $5 billion all within the same elite, perhaps there are leaps equal to such orders of magnitude in cognitive ability as well."

Hayes focuses on the way that this cult of intelligence becomes divorced from morality through the example of the one man who was "behind many of the Bush administration’s most disastrous and destructive decisions"  David Addington, counsel and then chief of staff to Dick Cheney.

"Addington was called “Cheney’s Cheney” and “the most powerful man you’ve never heard of.” A former Bush White House lawyer told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer that the administration’s legal framework for the “war on terror”—from indefinite detention, to torture, to rejection of the 1949 Geneva Accords, to denial of habeas corpus—was “all Addington.” Addington’s defining trait, as portrayed in numerous profiles, is his hard-edged, ideologically focused intelligence. “The boy seemed terribly, terribly bright,” Addington’s high school history teacher told Mayer. “He was scornful of anyone who said anything that was naïve, or less than bright. His sneers were almost palpable.”

And Hayes gives other examples of how the "cult of smartness" ruined the financial industry with such serious consequences for the rest of the world. How to avoid the cult of smartness? How about, as a first step having ordinary people, at the table to ask that simple questions have intelligible answers. Additionally, how about clearer conflict of interest regulations that prevent all the elites thinking that important institutions like government and banks are there for career advantage rather than for a public good. Hayes refers to Janine Wedel's book, the Shadow Elite, about the new global ruling class, who "recalls visiting Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and finding the elites she met there—those at the center of building the new capitalist societies—toting an array of business cards that represented their various roles: one for their job as a member of parliament, another for the start-up business they were running (which was making its money off government contracts), and yet another for the NGO on the board of which they sat. Wedel writes that those “who adapted to the new environment with the most agility and creativity, who tried out novel ways of operating and got away with them, and sometimes were the most ethically challenged, were most rewarded with influence.”

My Interview with Global Change Agent, Hunter Lovins

Hunter Lovins is a person I found about on a TED talk. She gave a passionate lecture on why we it makes business sense to adopt sustainable practices. Lovins is a polymath who is able to communicate clearly and simply her knowledge and understanding of how we now have the technology to correct the environmental imbalances we just need business to understand that it is now in their best interests to adopt the eco-friendly practices.  This is not a religion she says. It just makes pure business sense. You wish you could clone her so every CEO and policy maker work together to save the planet. As she quotes someone saying--'you cannot do business on a dead planet.'

As we talked for about 35 minutes you can get a glimpse as to the range of her expertise.  One interesting topic was the so called "happiness index" that might replace the GDP as a measure of a society's success. She mentions when you interview people making more money is about 4th on the list of wishes, ahead is happiness and health. We also touched on the power of social networking and how she is now engaged in putting a course together which would help people understand the nuts and bolts of sustainable development so the next generation will be able to get it and take advantage of the opportunity to correct our mistakes. She reminds us also during the course of the interview that we don't have very long to correct the imbalances that exist. Maybe we have until 2030 when some strange dynamics kick in if we don't do something soon to correct ourselves. We clearly need to act if not now, very soon. She will be attending the climate change conference in Rio this summer and has a full load of speaking engagements across the planet. Let us wish her the best as she works with many others to change the tide of history.

Ross and Friedman DIscuss the Middle East

Tom Friedman and Dennis Ross are two friends who often speak together about their favorite topic Middle East politics. I attended one such recent event and jotted down some notes on their relaxed assessment of the issue du jour--whether Israel will bomb Iran. For Ross the calculation for the Iran Supreme Leader is whether the costs of the nuclear option are worth the economic sacrifice. Iran is currently losing one million barrels a day of oil it cannot sell. The only reason that the sanctions are so effective today is because Israel has made it clear they will not accept an Iranian nuclear threat. They view such a threat in existential terms and the world has to take them seriously on this point. There is much speculation whether the recent elections in Israel strengthens the chance of war with three former heads of the military in the government and a much strengthened majority. Ross felt it makes no difference. The only way to tell whether the Iranians are serious is whether they will agree to regular talks which so far have been sporadic. As far as Mid East peace--Ross said two state solution only solution but lack of belief that will work out. For example when questioned 78% of Israelis favor Clinton peace parameters that Ross helped negotiate but the same number don't think it can happen. What is needed is confidence building measures that would talk about the reality that the settlements are only 1.5% of the available land. Needs to be realistic talk about the peace settlement. Both sides have to own it. Friedman was concerned about the recent $1.3 billion dollar aid package for Egypt--essentially a gift to the Egyptian army when 56 percent of Egyptian women are illiterate and 25 percent of men. Friedman could imagine a better approach but did not spell this out. On the other hand he praised the Iraq democratic process as imperfect as it is and US role as "mid wife." His worry about Syria is that there is no midwife to bring that country to democratic government and that Egypt's spring will be similarly disabled because the immediate result of the Arab spring was to bring the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood to power and that whereas the other Islamic dictatorships had oil money to buy off the other interest groups --Egypt does not have that luxury. He saw the master narrative in the Middle East as Islam's need to come to terms with modernity. It was going to be a protracted struggle. Turkey is the only model out there to follow. In a question about China's role recent discoveries of natural gas makes us less dependent on foreign oil but China's needs for oil and to therefore cozy up to dictators will increase, question will they align themselves with democratic forces?