Saturday, November 3, 2012

Romney unsuited for Oval Office; gov't is not a business

A few years ago, I was asked by a business owner/operator to explain what it would take to produce a newspaper that would approach the issues of municipal government on the same basis as a "business"...Of course, the newspaper was to operate on a for-profit basis; however, the man asking for input believed, as do many others, that there is no reason why a municipal council cannot and should not operate on the same principles as he does in his for-profit business.
The question seems somewhat relevant this morning, only three days before a presidential election in the U.S. in which one candidate is proposing the same question to the American people as the question I heard from my entrepreneur friend.
Why do the principles of for-profit business and those schooled in the implementation of those principles not "fit" the model of either the organization or the purpose of government?
New Yorkers have watched this week as Citigroup lights in their corporate tower have remained on, while much of Manhattan and the surrounding burroughs have remained dark. That is because Citigroup is interested in "itself" and in its provision of back-up services for its own tower, and for the working environment of its own workers, not to mention the ancillary benefit that such "leadership" might provide to polish its public image among a darkened and saddened wider community. While Citigroup workers may well have made significant efforts to provide humanitarian assistance to their plagued neighbours, as individuals, and perhaps even as a corporation, the provision of the power, including the back-up generators for that power to light their tower were arranged and installed by and for Citigroup as a for-profit corporation. Citigroup, and all other corporations play by the rules and on the playing field of their industry, in Citigroup's case, the financial services sector, whose interests are often completely at odds with the purposes and the role of government.
On the other hand, the disaster evoked by the name "Sandy" struck hundreds of thousands of individual, families, corporations and institutions like hospitals, schools, churches and universities. Their individual and collective immediate, medium-term and long-term needs, based on the losses suffered in the storm, are not the purview of any single corporation, nor should they be. Those needs fall to the government, federal, state and municipal, in some kind of co-ordinated effort and funding formula to meet them. And that requires a completely different perspective, philosophic base, and organizational metric to accomplish.
We have book stores that offer various titles under diverse topic divisions, for an equally diverse reading public, where the library provides access to written works for all people, in the "public interest" without suffering the scorn of the toxic appellation, "socialist".
We also have other services, including sewer, water, fire and rescue, education of the children of all parents, transportation, police protection, building inspection, land use planning, park design and development....all of these services co-ordinated in what has come to be known as "city hall"...in both the literal and the metaphoric sense of that word.
Those services, if they were left to the private sector, would simply not extend to the outermost reaches of the community because they would prove to be "not-profitable" and thereby either not extended or cut following extension. And if they were to be operated on a "for-profit" basis, many citizens simply would not have access to those services, because the cost would prohibit that access.
Furthermore, there are state and federal guidelines, sometimes regulations and often laws within which the municipalities must operate, and the civic leaders must comply with those regulations, based in most cases, on the best interests of the abstract "public good" and not designed to apply to a specific piece of land development, for example.
Governments and their operatives, the politicians and civil servants, are expected to see a single request from a single ratepayer through the multiple lenses of:--
  • what precedent is this setting?
  • how does this request comply or fail to comply with our municipal plan?
  • how does this request compare with similar requests in our archives?
  • does this request foreshadow more of the same nature, providing an opportunity for leadership and a change in direction from our previous policies and choices?
  • what kinds of responses have been generated in other jurisdictions when similar requests have been dealt with?
  • what are the various perspectives of the people voting on this issue and how can those perspectives be brought in to the concensus?
  • oh and by the way, what will granting this request cost the city?
Notice that there are many factors to be considered when attempting a political answer to any public request not the most important of which is "cash cost"...or even ROI, return on investment!
In fact, ROI, or cash cost, or even the reductionistic "what will this vote cost me in lost votes next election?" have to be near the bottom of the list of criteria for making most decisions, if one is to serve her community's best interests. While accounting recruiting commercial advertising likes to point to "the meaning behind the numbers" the politician has to see more than a single layer of meaning and implication in all of the decisions, including the legal implications, the impact on the neighbourhood, the public mood and sentiment for and against such a proposal, the media's tilt on the issue, the history and culture of the community, and the kind of legacy both the council and the individual alderman wishes to leave.
In addition to the abstractions of rules, regs, etc. there is also a significant difference in skill set, in perspective and in methodology between a corporate CEO and a political leader; the former can decide and implement, without having to 'win over' his executives, his board or his workers, whereas the latter never works in a vacuum, and must always negotiate with both allies and opponents to achieve a balanced compromise, just as the next president and the opposition in Congress will have to do, in the lame-duck and following, in order to avoid the proverbial "cliff" from rendering the U.S. economy "on life support" should they not reach a responsible and reasonable compromise.
All of the issues in play on the municipal level enter the national stage, but in larger dimensions. Nevertheless, the perspective of the "public good" which cannot and must not be measured exclusively, or even primarily in cash cost, or even in ROI, or in cost-benefit analyses, must be the focus of the political decision-makers, not the profit of the city, the state or the country.
In fact, the Romney experience is literally antithetical to the needs, skills and perspective of one who wishes to make the decisions that will come across the president's desk, given the private corporate sector's avowed, deliberate and acknowledged commitment to profit, and to the return on investment (ROI) of its shareholders.
Voters are much more than shareholders, as witnessed yesterday in the reversal of the decision by the New York Mayor, after having decided to hold the annual NY Marathon, only to have to back down and cancel it, after the public uprising of scorn and derision demanding that the resources needed for the marathon be dedicated to the relief of storm victims.
When I had completed a fairly comprehensive outline of the differences between the operation of a for-profit business and the city council, where my friend wanted to start-up a newspaper editorially committed to the business model for council, he quietly commented, "I can see that city government is much more complicated than running a for-profit business and I will have to re-think my idea of a newspaper dedicated to that proposition of running the city like a business."
That is not to say, however, that government can afford to turn a blind eye to inefficiencies, duplications, over-lapping authority and responsibility, conflicting departmental responsibilities, the clash of political ego's that cost taxpayers too many wasted dollars. In fact, there is a legitimate need for a public's responsibility to be ever vigilant along with the local media, on how the political establishment is spending their tax dollars, with a view to the same questions posed above for the political leaders, and not exclusively on a cash-cost, or a ROI basis.

Friday, November 2, 2012

"Critical parent" sucks 'fun' from coaching job for Pat Burns

The fun, he said, had gone out of his job in Montreal. “When you won, they didn’t like the style you played. When you won, it was because the other team was no good. If you lost, it was because you had no system. If a player didn’t score on certain nights, it was because you were holding him back. If he did score, you didn’t play him enough. It was a no-win situation.”
(From The Pat Burns Story, by Rosie Dimanno, excerpted in Toronto Star, November 2, 2012)
There is a kind of prophetic and visionary wisdom and insight in Burn's words.
It is as if the Canadian culture, not only the hockey culture of Montreal, could be accurately summed up for a visitor from outer space, in these words.
There is a kind of "never satisfied" false humility that accompanies too many organizations, institutions and, sadly, even persons, in this country. Canada, and for Burns, Montreal, has become a 'critical parent' whose idea of support is to find fault, and to find it obsessively and self-righteously and even relentlessly. The spectator who purchases the tickets for the game, is rightfully entitled to complain if the product on the ice is not performing. However, to continue to complain, even when the team is winning, is nothing short of a projection of the insecurities of the complainant.
It is a kind of reverse superiority, a kind of reverse snobbery.
Our team is so good, we can even complain when we lose, because that is what we do, and no one has the right to rob us of that right.
Focussing on the inadequacies of either the player or the coach, and often both, demonstrates a kind of malaise that speaks to a level of both denial and arrogance, serving as a comingled mask for both hubris and neurosis.
Driving Burns out of Montreal was a gift for Toronto hockey fans, and for Burns himself, given Toronto's starvation, since 1967, of the opportunity to celebrate a Stanley Cup.
Driving the "fun" out of the job of coaching the Montreal Canadiens, a job most hockey professionals would "die for" if offered the chance, is a dynamic we can see, not only in the Burns story about Montreal, but in too many of our Canadian cultural, academic, corporate, religious and athletic endeavours.
We think, believe, act as if, and even expect life to be deprived of "fun" in the widest and deepest senses of that word. I recall an educated professional woman telling her university graduate third daughter that she disapproved of the daughter's desire to cruise one of the local lakes with her friends during summer vacation, "because that is not what life is like, or is supposed to be like."
Of course, the daughter went and to the extent possible, enjoyed her cruise on the lake, ever conscious of her mother's 'superior and ironically tragi-comic directive'.
This country, and the Burn's recounting of the "fun" having left the Montreal coaching scene for him depicts it too painfully accurately, is more than dour, more than presbyterian, more than catholic, more than addicted to and obsessed with "getting it right" that we ought to conduct immigration classes in countries where people are eagerly waiting for permission to emigrate to Canada. We need to tell them, that as new-comers, they will not be welcomed here except perhaps by their own indigenous ethnicity, or their religious institution, unless, of course, they bring a letter of a job offer with the promise of an integral place in the corporate maze, dependent, of course, on their ability to generate profits for that new employer. They will be perpetual outsiders, because the small-town moat is so deep and so alligator infested that it will never be crossed, in a million years, except perhaps by a "star" outside who bring extraordinary honour and fame to his newly chosen country.
When we are not the least bit charitable to our own, how can anyone expect us to be warm and welcoming and supporting to outsiders, even outsiders who come from a different part of our own country.
The fun had gone out of Montreal coaching for Pat Burns, and how many others could sing the same song, if given the opportunity, in every town and city across the country?
With educational, religious, parental and institutional support, vaccuming the "fun" out of too many experiences is a form of national self-sabotage, a quality that infects too many individuals in Canada, who have to look elsewhere for the fun their Canadian experience considers "trivial"....just like the mother of that daughter above.
By Rosie DiManno, Coach, excerpted in Toronto Star, November 2, 2012
Excerpted from Coach: The Pat Burns Story. Copyright © 2012 Rosie DiManno. Published by Doubleday Canada, an imprint of the Doubleday Canada Publishing Group, which is a division of Random House of Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

He (Pat Burns) became only the second man in the annals of the NHL to coach both storied franchises, Dick Irvin being the other. But Burns had switched from a perennial contender, with whom he’d posted a .609 winning percentage in four seasons — the best mark in the NHL during that span — to a franchise that hadn’t finished over .500 since 1978–79. He had his hands full.
Asked what needed doing to transform a team that had missed the playoffs in three of the past four years, Burns said, “The players will have to learn what it takes to win, and I’ll be there every night to remind them.” Finally, after an absence of fifteen years and with the death of barmy owner Harold Ballard, there was a palpable sense of change in the air, something to fuel optimism. When a French-language reporter at the packed press conference asked Burns, “Quelques mots en français?” he retorted in faux exasperation: “I thought that was finished.”
The forty-year-old coach pulled on a Leaf jacket for photographs. “It’s a funny feeling, but I like the feeling.” The local media horde was excited, and so was Burns. “Coming to another hockey Mecca like Toronto makes you a better coach. I want to have fun again. I want to make it fun for everybody, and it’s fun when you win.” The fun, he said, had gone out of his job in Montreal. “When you won, they didn’t like the style you played. When you won, it was because the other team was no good. If you lost, it was because you had no system. If a player didn’t score on certain nights, it was because you were holding him back. If he did score, you didn’t play him enough. It was a no-win situation.”



Salutin: Universities not job training factories

Salutin: Universities are not job training factories
By Rick Salutin, Toronto Star, November 1, 2012
...
Universities didn’t create the economic mess or jobs “mismatch.” It was created by governments, think-tanks, opinion leaders and the business classes, who demanded globalization and used it to ship jobs to low-wage areas — not just in manufacturing but in “knowledge” work like call centres. They broke it, they should own it. It’s isn’t a role that universities were made for.

What is? Two things, I’d say, especially in the undergrad, liberal arts years. Students get to read widely and gain a sense of what human beings have been up to over the millennia. This expands their awareness and readies them to appreciate their own lives while contributing to enhancing the lives of others. Plus they learn to think critically, which is important to functioning as citizens rather than social cogs. Universities may not often achieve those ends but it is what they’re suited for, versus spitting out a customized workforce.
It’s true universities have expanded democratically in the past 50 years and become “mass” institutions — usually said with a sneer in the current debate. But what’s wrong with that? Why shouldn’t everyone gain access to a more fulfilling life and the kind of critical articulacy that lets them participate fully as citizens?
Meanwhile, who’ll deal with that jobs mismatch? Those best situated: governments, business, society at large. There are models, like apprenticeship programs, widespread in Germany, that get public support. Does this mean universities should pull back and cease being “mass” institutions? Not necessarily. Why can’t you have both: citizens with liberal arts training for its own value and who acquire real job skills, including crafts and trades. In Finland, for instance, people can switch between practical and academic streams during their student years. Doctors and lawyers get their years of liberal arts before their specialized training. Why shouldn’t plumbers or fashion designers?
OK, but how unreal and utopian is that in an economy where jobseekers are desperate? Well, consider this. Productivity continues to increase, through automation etc., while overall wealth expands, perhaps doubling in the last 30 years. Even without maldistributed income, it would make sense to shorten the work week, share jobs and expand most people’s leisure time. But you need an articulate population to discuss these matters, and an educated one to cope with the “free” time that would result. Expanded university roles make sense in such a light, versus the stupid, irrational patterns that now blight so many lives.
One more thing.
This society squanders tons of potential. Undergrad years are when the young can discover areas they mightn’t have known could exist for them: teaching, the arts, journalism, social work, entrepreneurialism. In the very limited university teaching I’ve done for decades, I’ve seen it often. A kid enrolled in commerce, science, whatever, happens to take a course in X and falls in love with it. One potential they sometimes stumble on is their own capacity for leadership. Kids of wealth usually know about this plethora of possibilities but others don’t. It’s immoral, irrational and dystopian not to allow everyone to discover these possibilities, for themselves, and for the sake of their society.
Salutin's argument, of course, not only makes sense, but pushes back on the public purse for release of more public funds for liberal arts courses, when the culture, including the political climate, is anally focussed on ROI (Return on Investment) as measured by the limiting numbers of both numbers of graduates and piles of student debt, linked to numbers of graduates who failed to find jobs of who had to learn job skills at a community college.
  • With such disclocation in the labour market, and with a public need for informed, articulate and engaged public citizens framing and debating public issues, most of them much more complicated than those our grandparents faced,
  • with more available information, research, links from file to file,
  • with politicians who are, increasingly in Canada, closed to public discussion and debate of the proposals they are considering inserting into legislation,
  • with a plethora of media obsessed with commercial ratings, advertising sales and multiple platforms for disseminating too much pablum in too few digital characters 
We need more than even the capacity for articulation, based on detailed reading and digesting and reflection, a capacity which seems likely only among those whose experience includes exposure to both books and the scholars who read and interpret them.
  • And when we hear Ottawa inside observers, like Paul Wells, being interviewed on CTV's Public Affairs program, recounting the words of senior civil servants currently serving in the Harper administration, "Just don't rock the boat!" as the mantra of that government,
  • and when we listen to Question Period and the vacuous responses from government ministers, memorized or read from prepared texts, extolling the virtues of the government while ridiculing the question and the opposition parties as "stupid" or ignorant for even asking the question,
  • and when we recall how few exchanges with the press were permitted by Harper in mid-campaign,
we know that the public dialogue that sustains the very processes of democracy is eroding through atrophy and lack of use, the very time when informed, and articulate and courageous citizens need to pay more attention to their opportunities for engagement.
A caller, yesterday on NPR's On Point with Tom Ashbrook, a recently graduated university student who has recently opened his own business, after serving in menial jobs for five years following graduation, chastised his peers for favouring Romney in the presidential election 'because he would make jobs more avaiable and accessible than Obama' as "selfish when there are so many other important issues as well as jobs that need public and government attention."
Such maturity and vision and selflessness in a young perspective can and will only come from those whose horizons have been expanded to include the larger picture, and we need more of them, to compete with the tsunami of narcissism and short-sighted myopic perspectives that are infesting our public debates.


Thursday, November 1, 2012

N.Y. Mayor Bloomberg endorses Obama..here in his own words

Michael Bloomberg’s endorsement of Barack Obama

By Michael Bloomberg, Bloomberg, November 1, 2012
Michael R. Bloomberg is mayor of New York and founder and majority owner of Bloomberg parent Bloomberg LP.

The devastation that Hurricane Sandy brought to New York City and much of the Northeast — in lost lives, lost homes and lost business — brought the stakes of Tuesday’s presidential election into sharp relief.

The floods and fires that swept through our city left a path of destruction that will require years of recovery and rebuilding work. And in the short term, our subway system remains partially shut down, and many city residents and businesses still have no power. In just 14 months, two hurricanes have forced us to evacuate neighbourhoods — something our city government had never done before. If this is a trend, it is simply not sustainable.
Our climate is changing. And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it might be — given this week’s devastation — should compel all elected leaders to take immediate action.
Here in New York, our comprehensive sustainability plan — PlaNYC — has helped allow us to cut our carbon footprint by 16 per cent in just five years, which is the equivalent of eliminating the carbon footprint of a city twice the size of Seattle. Through the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group — a partnership among many of the world’s largest cities — local governments are taking action where national governments are not.
But we can’t do it alone. We need leadership from the White House — and over the past four years, President Barack Obama has taken major steps to reduce our carbon consumption, including setting higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks. His administration also has adopted tighter controls on mercury emissions, which will help to close the dirtiest coal power plants (an effort I have supported through my philanthropy), which are estimated to kill 13,000 Americans a year.
Mitt Romney, too, has a history of tackling climate change. As governor of Massachusetts, he signed on to a regional cap-and-trade plan designed to reduce carbon emissions 10 per cent below 1990 levels. “The benefits (of that plan) will be long-lasting and enormous — benefits to our health, our economy, our quality of life, our very landscape. These are actions we can and must take now, if we are to have ‘no regrets’ when we transfer our temporary stewardship of this Earth to the next generation,” he wrote at the time.
He couldn’t have been more right. But since then, he has reversed course, abandoning the very cap-and-trade program he once supported. This issue is too important. We need determined leadership at the national level to move the nation and the world forward.
I believe Mitt Romney is a good and decent man, and he would bring valuable business experience to the Oval Office. He understands that America was built on the promise of equal opportunity, not equal results. In the past he has also taken sensible positions on immigration, illegal guns, abortion rights and health care. But he has reversed course on all of them, and is even running against the health-care model he signed into law in Massachusetts.
If the 1994 or 2003 version of Mitt Romney were running for president, I may well have voted for him because, like so many other independents, I have found the past four years to be, in a word, disappointing.
In 2008, Obama ran as a pragmatic problem-solver and consensus-builder. But as president, he devoted little time and effort to developing and sustaining a coalition of centrists, which doomed hope for any real progress on illegal guns, immigration, tax reform, job creation and deficit reduction. And rather than uniting the country around a message of shared sacrifice, he engaged in partisan attacks and has embraced a divisive populist agenda focused more on redistributing income than creating it.
Nevertheless, the president has achieved some important victories on issues that will help define our future. His Race to the Top education program — much of which was opposed by the teachers’ unions, a traditional Democratic Party constituency — has helped drive badly needed reform across the country, giving local districts leverage to strengthen accountability in the classroom and expand charter schools. His health-care law — for all its flaws — will provide insurance coverage to people who need it most and save lives.
When I step into the voting booth, I think about the world I want to leave my two daughters, and the values that are required to guide us there. The two parties’ nominees for president offer different visions of where they want to lead America.
One believes a woman’s right to choose should be protected for future generations; one does not. That difference, given the likelihood of Supreme Court vacancies, weighs heavily on my decision.
One recognizes marriage equality as consistent with America’s march of freedom; one does not. I want our president to be on the right side of history.
One sees climate change as an urgent problem that threatens our planet; one does not. I want our president to place scientific evidence and risk management above electoral politics.
Of course, neither candidate has specified what hard decisions he will make to get our economy back on track while also balancing the budget. But in the end, what matters most isn’t the shape of any particular proposal; it’s the work that must be done to bring members of Congress together to achieve bipartisan solutions.
Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan both found success while their parties were out of power in Congress — and President Obama can, too. If he listens to people on both sides of the aisle, and builds the trust of moderates, he can fulfil the hope he inspired four years ago and lead our country toward a better future for my children and yours. And that’s why I will be voting for him.
Michael R. Bloomberg is mayor of New York and founder and majority owner of Bloomberg parent Bloomberg LP.



Israeli Scholar: Israel: give up "nukes" to stop Iran

Why Israel should trade its nukes
Stop Iran's Centrifuges by Accepting a Nuclear-free Middle East
By Uri bar-Joseph, Foreign Affairs, October 25, 2012
URI BAR-JOSEPH teaches at the University of Haifa. He specializes in strategic and intelligence studies, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Israeli security policy
On September 19, to nobody’s surprise, Shaul Chorev, the director-general of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission, announced that his government would not attend an upcoming conference devoted to establishing a nuclear-free Middle East. The announcement reaffirmed Israel’s long-standing position that a nuclear-free zone can come about only as a consequence of a lasting regional peace. Until such a peace is achieved, Jerusalem will not take any tangible steps toward eliminating its nuclear weapons.

At least on the face of it, this stand is sensible. For 45 years, Israel has been the only nuclear power in the Middle East, enjoying a formidable strategic safety net against any existential threat. Since 1957, Israel has invested tremendous resources in building up a solid nuclear arsenal in Dimona. Today, according to various estimates, this stockpile comprises some 100–300 devices, including two-stage thermonuclear warheads and a variety of delivery systems, the most important of which are modern German-built submarines, which constitute the backbone of Israel’s second-strike capability. For Israel to give up these assets in the midst of an ongoing conflict strikes most Israelis as irrational.
This consensus, however, overlooks the fact that Israel’s nuclear capability has not played an important role in the country’s defense. Unlike other nuclear-armed states, Israel initiated its nuclear project not because of an opponent’s real or imagined nuclear capability but because of the worry that, in the long run, Arab conventional forces would outstrip the power of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). As early as the 1950s, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion sought to manage the threat of modernizing Arab armies, which were inspired by pan-Arab sentiment and backed by the Soviet Union, by developing the ultimate deterrent. Shimon Peres, the architect of Israel’s nuclear program and now Israel’s president, relentlessly argued in public speeches and writings that Israel needed to compensate for the large size of the Arab armies with “science” -- a code word for nuclear arms.
Israel’s nuclear capability has never been essential for the defense of the country, and it would become important only if Iran were to get its own nuclear weapon. But that dangerous outcome need not materialize. As it turned out, however, Arab conventional superiority never materialized. Ever since Israel crossed the nuclear threshold on the eve of the 1967 war, the qualitative gap between Israel’s conventional forces and those of its Arab neighbors has only grown. Today, particularly as the Syrian army slowly disintegrates, the IDF could decisively rout any combination of Arab (and Iranian) conventional forces. This advantage, combined with the United States’ support for Israel, is what has kept Arab countries from taking up arms against the Jewish state -- not the fear of nuclear retaliation.
If, of course, Iran were to obtain a nuclear weapon, the arsenal at Dimona would no longer be irrelevant; it would be an important hedge against Iran. But far from being a secure balance, as the international relations theorist Kenneth Waltz has argued, this state of affairs would be highly unstable, especially at first. The two states deeply distrust one another and lack any effective channels of communications. Since Iran would not have a second-strike capability and the Israelis often prefer preemption in conflicts, Jerusalem might be tempted to launch a nuclear first strike. Moreover, other nearby countries, such as Saudi Arabia, might themselves seek nuclear weapons, further destabilizing the region and raising the possibility of an unintentional nuclear exchange.
Fearing the prospect of living in the shadow of such terror, many Israeli officials have openly called for a military strike to halt Iran’s nuclear program. They are spurred by anxieties that are deeply rooted in Israeli culture, stemming from the trauma of the Holocaust and of two thousand years of perceived and real victimhood throughout the Jewish Diaspora. Israeli leaders, particularly Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, now evince a belief that the country can rely only on itself when it comes to ensuring its security and its existence.
The problem for Israel, however, is that a strike on Iran might carry grave consequences, especially since the IDF cannot completely destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure on its own. Israel can delay Iran’s nuclearization, but it cannot prevent it. Meanwhile, a military strike could provoke a great backlash, including missile and rocket attacks by Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas on Israeli population centers. Just as worrisome, a strike would provide the Iranian regime with a handy justification for its decision to go nuclear.
And so Israel finds itself in a strategic dilemma: it considers an Iranian bomb an existential threat, but it cannot stop Iran’s nuclearization by itself or without provoking an unpredictable backlash.
Fortunately, Israel has a way out of this strategic limbo: by agreeing to give up its nuclear arsenal. Instead of rejecting the calls for a region free of weapons of mass destruction, Jerusalem could participate in such an initiative -- joining in a similar sacrifice by all other regional actors, including Iran. The conventional wisdom is that this would be a bad bargain for Israel, giving up too much in exchange for too little. But such a bold move could set in motion a long-term process that might end the bitter stalemate over Iran’s nuclear program. Iran has been calling for a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East since 1974 and perceives the Israeli arsenal as a great threat, so it will have no choice but to support the initiative. And purely from a security perspective, Israel would be safer in a WMD-free region. It would maintain its conventional superiority and its ability to deter conventional challenges -- all the while eliminating the prospect of nonconventional threats, such as an Iranian nuclear bomb or Syrian chemical weapons.

Of course, Israel is not likely to actually abandon its own nuclear arsenal anytime soon, and, even if it did, it would not lose the know-how and the capability to produce nuclear arms in the future. But a change in policy that started Israel in this direction would at the very least increase the pressure on Iran to give up its own nuclear project.
Several developments might eventually encourage Jerusalem to take the plunge. As Iran inches its way to a bomb, the status quo of the last 45 years, during which Israel succeeded in maintaining its regional nuclear monopoly with hardly any external pressures, is becoming increasingly untenable. If Israel does ultimately resort to the unilateral use of military force against Iran, international pressure will build for Israel to give up its strategy of nuclear opacity, to come clean about its own arsenal, and to take tangible steps toward establishing a nuclear-free Middle East. After all, the logic of using force to secure a nuclear monopoly flies in the face of international norms. The same pressure might come about if the international sanctions against Iran prove to be successful and Tehran agrees to limit the country’s nuclear development, or if an American-led coalition destroys Iran’s nuclear facilities. Moving toward a nuclear-free Middle East may be the price that Jerusalem will be asked to pay for the efforts taken by the international community to bail Israel out of a threatening situation. On the other hand, if Iran does become a nuclear state, Israeli voters may pressure their government to give up the country’s nuclear weapons in exchange for Iran doing the same. According to a 2011 survey conducted by Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland, 65 percent of Israeli Jews prefer that neither Iran nor Israel have nuclear weapons.
Israel’s nuclear capability has never been essential for the defense of the country, and it would become important only if Iran were to get its own nuclear weapon. But that dangerous outcome, especially for a one-bomb state like Israel, need not materialize. If Israel commits to a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction, offering up its own nuclear capability as a bargaining chip, it may finally make good use of its most controversial strategic asset.

Perfectionism and faith...an oxymoronic marriage

I just spent a little while listening to a conversation about perfectionism on NPR's On Point with Tom Ashbrook.
The conversation started me thinking...oh!oh! not again!
Thoughts tumbled, pictures formed and reformed in a kaleidoscope of images of my own experience as a perfectionist, and of others who, too, demonstrated many of the attitudes and behaviours associated with perfectionism.
It was Marion Woodman's excellent work, Addiction to Perfection, that first opened my eyes to the kind of restrictions that are concomitant with perfectionism. In fact, her subtitle is "The Unravished Bride"...and the pages within are dedicated to many of her Jungian clients, most of the women, who suffered from anorexia, bulimia and the symptoms associated with those conditions. Being, or at least believing oneself to be, unable to accept the archetype in between the most beautiful and the most ugly, the real, seems to be one approach to this condition, a condition that seems to affect many more people, especially young people, today than I was consciously aware of when I was growing up.
However, while there are millions of manifestations of what people call perfectionism, including obsessing over dirt, obsession over weight, over imperfect negative performance(s), over parenting a young child, over the lack of X (whatever that X might be), there is a danger of a kind of perfectionism that is attached to the activities, attitudes, beliefs and judgements that abound in christian churches, (if not those of other faiths as well) that smells like perfectionism, sounds like perfectionism, walks and talks like perfectionism and calls itself "the expression of deep faith"....
My question, whenever I meet those smells, sounds, walks and talks of perfectionism, is,"Are you expressing deep faith or profound fear?
There is a quality of the insurance policy that accompanies many pursuing a faith, an insurance policy that perhaps, just might, keep me on the road to heaven, so they think and believe.
And since it is impossible to provide empirical evidence to support or to refute such a perception, they are permitted to continue, with both immunity and impunity, whether or not their walk is toward a deep, and a deeply satisfying relationship with God.
Fear, as 'awe,' given the Greek translation of the New Testament "fear," is quite different from the kind of fear that stalks a person terrified of not being "good enough" for entry into heaven. Falling short, forever obsessing about not being good enough, fearing that one falls short no matter what one does, or how one does it, seems anathema to a healthy faith in a healthy God; yet that fear stalks many church pews and the people who sit in those pews, and from this vantage point, I suspect makes God weep.
If God created us in "his image" (imago dei) and if God truly did come that we might have life and have it more abundantly, then how and why have we "pretzelized" our bodies, our minds and our spirits into some deformed shape, as our expression of our belief in, and discipleship of God....and then, turned our deformed identities into gluttonous consumers of the drugs, many of them narcotics, that are marketed to "make us feel good"?
In so doing, we have abdicated our own agency, and our own identity, as we lie prostrate at the altar of the pill and the pharmaceutical industry that has seduced us into such acquisitions, legal or illegal.
Have we turned perfectionism into the standard of our "inadequacy" and permitted ourselves to be defined as "perfectly inadequate" as our capitulation to the seduction of false humility? Certainly, those people like Kevin O'Leary, who parade into our living rooms on CBC's Dragon's Den, and I'm told other shows, trumpeting the magnificence of their own ego's, will, if they have no done so already, generate a booming industry for the millions who feel "less than" when encountering his bravado.
His narcissistic and twisted ego, larger by half than the norm, only demonstrates his empty, hollow core, at least from the perspective of this couch.
God does not need, and does not want a perfectly folded altar linen, as a demonstration of our "religiosity" as a surrogate for authentic discipleship.
God does not need, and does not want a perfectly balanced cheque book, among the many women's groups within the church, especially when there are mouths begging to be fed, children needing to be bathed and bedded, and elderly needing to be befriended.
God does not need, and does not want a million-dollar investment account,in a church in a plutocratic section of the city, as an expression of "good stewardship," when there are people sleeping on the church steps, in the alcoves, where the wind will pass them by, leaving them alone in their body heat and in their cardboard box-tent-bed.
God does not need a religiously deposited envelope on a plate every Sunday morning, as a hedge against purgatory or damnation, given our capacity for both, and our leaning over in the wind of our fears.
Standing up straight, owning both our talents and our weaknesses, in places where we know we are safe, with others who have courage to stand with us listening to our full stories, as we listen to their's, whether such a "community" exists within the walls of a sanctuary, a synagogue, a mosque or a basement of a house, trumps all our outward show of our own perfection, as we define it, demonstrating our unconscious becoming our own God, drunk on our own illusion, worshipping at the altar to our own pomposity....and that, folks, is neither perfection nor faith!
And yet, it seems that most of the social, personal and religious judgements and invectives come from the church pews (and pulpits), where those sitting or standing there have immunized themselves, and their fellow dupes, to the staggering insult that they might just be failing to acknowledge the plank in their own eye, while they exaggerate the speck in the other's eye.
I have struggled with the perfection of a parent's punishment, when I failed to meet unreasonable standards for perfection, even being beaten following a piano recital during which my suit jacket sleeve ticked a note in mid performance, and have never been able to reconcile the punishment and the "crime."
I have struggled with the punishment of a teacher (the strap) following a friendly poke on my friend's shoulder as he passed my desk in grade four, once again not being able to reconcile the punishment and the "crime".
I have struggled with the judgement of establishments in both education and the church, for behaviours that warranted attention and reconciliation, where only I had to bear responsibility, the "establishment" having neither volunteered nor acknowledged its responsibility.
I have also struggled as I witnessed the ostracising of the less fortunate by those rich and smug christians whose contempt for the less fortunate trumped any commitment they might make to their own spiritual growth or the amelioration of the circumstances of those less fortunate among them.
I have struggled, as did Luther, with the rich and sumptuous tomb-stone edifices to the ego's of the hierarchy of the church, built on the pennies of the poor, demonstrating a "perfect" commitment to their own "heroic" discipleship, masking their own fears of inadequacy.
I have struggled with the unwarranted, uninformed judgements of men and women who refused to do their own spiritual and emotional "work" as part of their religious discipleship, while they projected their own emptiness onto others in public and vilifying ways.
There has to be some connection between the human addiction to perfection and the pursuit of a relationship with God, no matter what form or gender or history of that God was the one of  choice. And that connection requires further study, further disclosure and much more analysis, before I will venture into full participation in a faith community.
Perhaps, I seek a more unsullied and unvarnished and unpretentious relationship with God, who, for me, has never been either pretentious or needy and I will continue to seek such a relationship, whenever and wherever I can find it.

Every town needs an Ann Golden rarely pulling punches

Ann Golden's stern warning of growing rich-poor gap
By Bob Hepburn, Toronto Star, October 31, 2012
Anne Golden rarely pulls her punches.

So it shouldn’t have been a huge surprise when she took advantage of a dinner held in her honour to deliver a stern warning to a roomful of corporate bosses about the widening gap between the rich and poor in Toronto.
Just as firmly, Golden told the business leaders that they’d better step up and do their part to help deal with the fast-growing gap or Toronto could face even greater problems in the coming years.
For many executives, dire talk of pending doom for Toronto surely is familiar and they tune it out.
But when Anne Golden speaks, they listen.
That’s because Golden is someone they respect, a civic activist and city-builder with a well-deserved reputation for excellence, fairness, determination — and for tackling the tough issues.
Toronto is facing major problems, the biggest being the shrinking of the city’s middle class and the “pulling apart of rich and poor,” Golden said at a dinner last week where she was formally named an honorary associate of the Conference Board of Canada, the independent research group’s highest honour.
It was the latest in a string of awards for Golden, who retired in June after serving since 2001 as president of the Conference Board. Before that, she spent 14 years as president of the United Way of Greater Toronto. She is now serving a two-year appointment at Ryerson University as a visiting scholar and adviser.
Golden’s roots as a civic activist are deep. She became involved with the urban reform movement in Toronto in the 1960s and 1970s, joined the fight to stop the Spadina Expressway and gained national prominence for spearheading major reports on the Greater Toronto Area and homelessness.
For some time now, Golden has focused on the rich-poor gap, which is bad for social cohesion, hard to justify and which is rising faster in Canada than in the United States.
But it took guts to turn the acceptance speech, which for many award-winners is a tepid collection of reminiscences, into an all-out plea for the corporate elite to stop sitting on the sidelines when it comes to growing social inequalities in Toronto.
To back up her concerns, she cites statistics showing that in 1970 some two-thirds of the city’s neighbourhoods were middle class. By 2025, only one in five neighbourhoods is expected to be middle class.
At the same time, both poor and rich neighbourhoods are predicted to multiply greatly.
Golden says this widening chasm merits attention because a measure of equality is an important factor in sustaining economic growth and because the overall quality of life, in such areas as health, education and general well-being, is better for everyone in more equal societies.
Inequality also weakens the sense of community and social cohesion and contributes to more violence and crime, she adds.
“Do we want a Canada, and a Toronto, in which the majority of the population falls farther and farther behind, and a small group of Canadians enjoys most of the increase in national wealth?” she asked the business crowd.
Such a scenario is fundamentally unfair, which is why Golden wants business leaders to work together to improve overall equality and prosperity.
As Golden sees it, social cohesion is a cornerstone of metropolitan success.
And she quickly dismisses critics who question the link between social cohesion and prosperity, arguing that “cities are most successful when citizens of all backgrounds and abilities are included in their economic, political and social institutions.”
In recent years, a growing number of CEOs has become involved in civic causes, notably through fundraising and philanthropy.
But more executives must become actively involved and not leave the social policy field open only to “the usual suspects.”
As Golden rightly says, when business leaders “take action on the social agenda, people sit up and take notice” and policy messages “are more surprising and often more effective.”
When she was finished speaking, the CEOs gave Golden a standing ovation.
Golden was pleased, but she would happier if some executives in the room actually listened and took her warning about the rich-poor gap to heart. If they did, they could have a profound and positive impact on this city.