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Tuesday, August 27, 2002
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Timothy Wilken writes: Upon returning to California from my 1983 meeting with Dr. Coulter, I had a new focus. I knew a lot about Capitalism most of which I had learned as a student of Andrew J. Galambos. I was very clear about hierarchy. But I was a novice when it came to heterarchy. I immediately set out to find out as much about heterarchy as I could. In the early 1980's, the best business organizations in the world were to be found in Japan. And, I soon discovered the secret of their success was their mastery of heterarchy. The major success of Japan, Inc. was serving to focus international attention on their ways of doing business. The Japanese were employing organizing strategies that produced the highest productivity and quality of work-life in the industrial world. Their success appeared to threaten the viability of many American corporations. This threat was leading to the careful examination of the Japanese way by numerous individuals. Their findings revealed the major focus of the Japanese was long-term and wholistic. This was in striking contrast to most American corporations where the focus was short-term and particulate. (08/27/02) | |
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Daniel Quinn speaking in 1997: In a recent semi-documentary film called Garbage, a toxic waste disposal engineer was asked how we can stop engulfing the world in our poisons. His answer was, "We'd have to remove everybody from the face of the earth, because humans GENERATE toxic waste, whether it be pathogenic organisms that we excrete from our bodies or whatever. We are toxic to the face of the earth." ... What is your gut reaction to this assessment? Please raise your hands if you agree that humans are inherently toxic. ... I understand that many representatives of the First Peoples are attending this conference. I hope there are many in this audience. Please raise your hand if you belong to an aboriginal people. Thank you. Now I'd like to ask you the same question I asked the whole group a moment ago. If you consult your traditional teachings, do you agree that humans are inherently toxic to the life of this planet? ... Those who know my work will know that you've just demonstrated one of my basic theses, that the people of my culture, whom I call Takers, have a fundamentally different mythology from the First Peoples, whom I call Leavers. In Taker mythology, humans are indeed viewed as inherently toxic to the world, as alien beings who were born to rule---and ultimately destroy---the world. As WE are currently ruling and destroying the world. In Leaver mythology, by contrast, the world is a sacred place, and humans are not perceived as alien to that sacred place but rather as belonging to it. In other words, in the Leaver worldview, people are no less a part of the sacred framework of the universe than scorpions or eagles or salmon or bears or daffodils. . . . (08/27/02) | |
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CNN -- Depite the fact that many recent news reports suggest that the Saudis are not our friends, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Saudi officials have sought to reassure the markets and U.S. officials that they have enough spare capacity and intend to step in and replace the flow of oil from Iraq is interrupted. Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan is set to meet President Bush at his Texas ranch Tuesday. ... The paper said that OPEC is signaling it is unwilling to increase production due to fears it could lead to sharply lower prices, but that it felt that concerns about war with Iraq, not market fundamentals, are responsible for the current price level. (08/27/02) | |
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Washington Post -- Bush aides say Iraq War needs no hill vote. Lawyers for President Bush have concluded he can launch an attack on Iraq without new approval from Congress, in part because they say permission remains in force from the 1991 resolution giving Bush's father authority to wage war in the Persian Gulf, according to administration officials. ... "We don't want to be in the legal position of asking Congress to authorize the use of force when the president already has that full authority," said a senior administration official involved in setting the strategy. "We don't want, in getting a resolution, to have conceded that one was constitutionally necessary." (08/27/02) | |
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National Post -- On Aug. 6, word leaked out that senior Defence Department officials had been recently advised that the "Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain," and represent "the kernel of evil, the prime mover [and] the most dangerous opponent" in the Middle East (as opposed to, say, Iraq). Nine days later, 600 relatives of Sept. 11 victims filed a US$1-trillion federal lawsuit against various Saudi princes, charities and banks, claiming they helped fund Osama Bin Laden and the World Trade Center massacre. This past week, more than 100 Saudi scholars issued a joint statement saying Israel and the United States were part of an "axis of evil." Then, on Wednesday, the Financial Times reported Saudis had withdrawn US$100-billion to US$200-billion worth of investment from the United States in the past year, in large part because of growing political tensions. ... To say the United States has an unusual relationship with Saudi Arabia is a pretty radical understatement. The country, as most of us have learned by now, has a quarter of the world's known oil reserves and three-quarters of the world's known Sept. 11 hijackers. Its homegrown Wahhabist Islam can be found in the soil anywhere al-Qaeda grows, yet the House of Saud lives in fear of Osama bin Laden. Even though Saudi Arabia has only 23 million people, the United States operates two regional consulates there, more than it maintains in much larger countries such as Indonesia (population 228 million), Bangladesh (131 million), Nigeria (127 million), Egypt (70 million), Spain (40 million) and more than a dozen others. Riyadh has conducted literally hundreds of billions of dollars worth of business with the United States, especially in sectors well known to the Bush administration and family: oil, construction and defence. (08/27/02) | |
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New York Times -- Secretary of State during Desert Storm, James A. Baker III writes: While there may be little evidence that Iraq has ties to Al Qaeda or to the attacks of Sept. 11, there is no question that its present government, under Saddam Hussein, is an outlaw regime, is in violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions, is embarked upon a program of developing weapons of mass destruction and is a threat to peace and stability, both in the Middle East and, because of the risk of proliferation of these weapons, in other parts of the globe. Peace-loving nations have a moral responsibility to fight against the development and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction by rogues like Saddam Hussein. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to do so, and leading that fight is, and must continue to be, an important foreign policy priority for America. ... The only realistic way to effect regime change in Iraq is through the application of military force, including sufficient ground troops to occupy the country (including Baghdad), depose the current leadership and install a successor government. Anyone who thinks we can effect regime change in Iraq with anything less than this is simply not realistic. It cannot be done on the cheap. It will require substantial forces and substantial time to put those forces in place to move. We had over 500,000 Americans, and more soldiers from our many allies, for the Persian Gulf war. There will be casualties, probably quite a few more than in that war, since the Iraqis will be fighting to defend their homeland. Sadly, there also will be civilian deaths. We will face the problem of how long to occupy and administer a big, fractious country and what type of government or administration should follow. Finding Saddam Hussein and his top associates will be difficult. It took us two weeks to locate Manuel Noriega in Panama, a small country where we had military bases. Unless we do it in the right way, there will be costs to other American foreign policy interests, including our relationships with practically all other Arab countries (and even many of our customary allies in Europe and elsewhere) and perhaps even to our top foreign policy priority, the war on terrorism. (08/27/02)
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REUTERS -- Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday laid out the White House's case for a pre-emptive strike on Iraq, citing mortal danger to the United States and labeling critics as guilty of "willful blindness." Cheney used a gathering of the Veterans of Foreign Wars to reject fears, expressed publicly by some senior members of his own Republican Party and others, that pre-emptive military action would undermine the global U.S. war on terrorism and mark a radical new departure for American foreign policy. ... "The risk of inaction is far greater than the risk of action," he said, in remarks clearly designed to win over public opinion at home and address skepticism abroad over military action to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. And the entire world must know that we will take whatever action is necessary to defend our freedom and our security." (08/27/02) | |
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New York Times -- For years, government and industry have failed to set reasonable fishing targets and to restrict fishing levels once targets were set. Notwithstanding industry claims that fish populations are rebounding, there are far fewer Georges Bank cod than there were a decade ago. As your accompanying chart showed, Georges Bank cod and haddock levels are at a fourth of the target sustainable-population level. (08/27/02) | |
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New York Times -- The smoke settles over the rickety shacks and shabby houses as soon as this city wakes. Thousands of poor people without electricity burn scraps of wood in rusty tin cans to keep warm. Others burn coal in old stoves that belch soot and fumes into the cold morning air. Poverty in crowded cities like this one and in sleepy villages as well is threatening the air, the waters and the forests of the developing world. On Monday, the United Nations' World Summit on Sustainable Development will be held here to try to focus the world's attention on the environment in these poor countries. ... In the 1990's, Africa had the world's highest rate of deforestation as poor people cleared trees for farmland and firewood. Acute respiratory infections, which often afflict families that rely on coal or firewood, kill or disable about 30 percent of sub-Saharan Africa's children each year, the United Nations says. Meanwhile, pollution is worsening as millions of Africans abandon rural villages for urban shantytowns. ... Environmentalists and advocates for the poor, who have poured into this city by the thousands, have already been holding marches to keep the link between poverty and environmental decay high on the agenda. Much of their anger is directed at President Bush, who will not attend. "The north/south dispute over money and trade is an old one, but it's particularly acute at the moment," Mark Malloch Brown, administrator of the United Nations Development Program, said in a telephone interview from New York. "There's distrust on both sides." (08/27/02) | |
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dailysummit.net -- The Daily Summit is the first port of call for anyone who wants to keep up to date with the World Summit on Sustainable Development (aka "WSSD," "the World Summit," and "Earth Summit 2"). Our site is fresh, updated many times every day. It's an unparalleled linker - directing you to all the other summit news on the web. And most importantly, it'll be coming to you live from Johannesburg from 23rd August to 5th September 2002. The Daily Summit is supported by the British Council, which aims to connect people worldwide with learning opportunities and creative ideas from the UK, and to build lasting relationships between the UK and other countries. The British Council Science Team is running this project. (08/26/02) | |
6:14:41 AM 
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© TrustMark
2002
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
9/3/2002; 6:03:35 AM.
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