Tue 25 Aug 2009 |
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Systems Thinking with Regard to Slavery |
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This interview is compelling in and of itself, but I also want to capture an important element that happens to exhibit "systems thinking," which involves, among other things, understanding the role of feedback in dynamic systems. Systems thinking often reveals to us that our first impulses to "do good" have long-term, counter-intuitive results.
In this interview author Benjamin Skinner is talking about slavery around the world, and in this excerpt slavery in Haiti.
I went back last summer with Dan Harris of ABC Nightline. He was pretty incredulous of my claim. In fact, it ended up taking him 10 hours from ABC's offices in Manhattan, but by the end of those 10 hours, he'd negotiated with not one, but three traffickers who'd offered him three separate girls.
As he put it, the remarkable thing is not that you can get a child for $50, but that you can get a child for free. When you go up into these villages, you see such desperation on the parts of the parents.
I want to make clear, I never paid for human life; I never would pay for human life. I talked to too many individuals who run trafficking shelters and help slaves become survivors. They implored me, "Do not pay for human life. You will be giving rise to a trade in human misery, and as a journalist, you'll be projecting to the world that this is the way that you own the problem." If you were to buy all 300,000 child slaves in Haiti, next year, you'd have 600,000. [Emphasis added.] [Here's the interview.]
Given the condition of the lives of these girls in slavery, one's first impulse would be to buy their freedom. Traffickers recognized the destructive systemic impact that positive impulse could have.
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Excerpt:
So government is taking over our schools, our corporations, our healthcare, our personal liberties... Scary!
And while President Bush was the one who started the bailouts; nationalized an insurance company; added a seventeen trillion dollar prescription drug entitlement program; had a government-mandated public school initiative literally named "No Child Left Behind"; wiretapped citizens without warrants; created secret internment camps in international waters beyond the reach of our justice system; and allowed his Vice President to live in a netherworld between the executive and legislative branch; where his house did not exist on google earth...Only now with the advent of "Potato Day" has tyranny come to our shores.
Oh, let's see. Just off the top of my head, we also can add manipulating the Attorney General's office for political ends; privatizing military clandestine activity (Blackwater...); and top-down sanctioned torture.
There's no shortage of irony among Democrats these days, but they're not inciting home-grown terrorism; nor did Democrat leadership invite home-grown terrorism during Bush II's dismal administration; and they're not inviting "tyranny."
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Sun 23 Aug 2009 |
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House Rep praises right-wing terrorist |
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More violence prone belligerent right-wing leadership.
According to the Redding Record Searchlight, an incident broke out at a town hall at Simpson University in Redding on Tuesday when [US House Representative] Herger signaled encouragement to a 67-year-old town hall attendee, Bert Stead, who called himself a “proud right-wing terrorist.”
“Amen, God bless you,” Herger reportedly replied to the comment. “There is a great American.” [Here.]
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Thu 20 Aug 2009 |
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Corporate Grassroots to Corporate Profits |
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Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, here, elaborates on the topic of right wing tendencies toward violence.
But let's be honest about what this is about. The right -- the modern American right -- has a very troubled history with political violence. The ideological pattern is clear going back at least thirty years and arguably far longer. A simple review of the 1990s, particularly 1993, 1994, culminating in many respects in the tragic 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal building in April 1995 tells the tale. Mix in the militias, the thankfully inept attempt on President Clinton's life a few months before Oklahoma City (see Francisco Duran) and it's all really not a pretty picture.
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