Snob Zones: gatekeeping by the rich to exclude all others...the poor, and other ethnicities

By Lisa Prevost, Snob Zones (product description) From Amazon.ca website, June 7, 2013
An exploration of the corrosive effects of overpriced housing, exclusionary zoning, and the flight of the younger population in the Northeast

Towns with strict zoning are the best towns, aren't they? They're all about preserving local "character," protecting the natural environment, an dmaintaining attractive neighborhoods. Right?
In this bold challenge to conventional wisdom, Lisa Prevost strips away the quaint façades of these desirable towns to reveal the uglier impulses behind their proud allegiance to local control. These eye-opening stories illustrate the outrageous lengths to which town leaders and affluent residents will go to prohibit housing that might attract the “wrong” sort of people. Prevost takes readers to a rural second-home community that is so restrictive that its celebrity residents may soon outnumber its children, to a struggling fishing village as it rises up against farmworker housing open to Latino immigrants, and to a northern lake community that brazenly deems itself out of bounds to apartment dwellers. From the blueberry barrens of Down East to the Gold Coast of Connecticut, these stories show how communities have seemingly cast aside the all-American credo of “opportunity for all” in favor of “I was here first.”
Prevost links this “every town for itself” mentality to a host of regional afflictions, including a shrinking population of young adults, ugly sprawl, unbearable highway congestion, and widening disparities in income and educational achievement. Snob Zones warns that this pattern of exclusion is unsustainable and raises thought-provoking questions about what it means to be a community in post-recession America.
Gate-keeping, as an exercise in the preservation of "the known" to keep out the unknown or the outsiders, has been a feature of all churches for centuries. Those on the inside strive, as a measure of their loyalty and commitment to the "purity and the sanctity" of their comfort zone, including only those who were here first, or come from a family who was 'here first' or....make the occasional exception depending on the wealth and breeding of those who might "apply" for admission.
In a place like Darien Connecticutt, where all the homes are valued at more than one million dollars, any attempt to introduce modest-priced seniors housing "would destroy the character of Darien" as the argument goes from those opposed to the change. In other centres, apartments are out of bounds.
All of this NIMBY-ism has been around for a long time, and in a recession, those with the most money are able to "buy" their snobism, using many of the tricks of the trade of land use planning.
Politicians, of course, are a integral "component" of any community, and if they are the least bit interested in preserving their political pulpit, then they have to comply with the "wishes" of the community they represent. Otherwise, they are a mere footnote to the history of that community.
Exclusion as a social policy takes many forms, including racism, and moneyism..."we are fine with those who ahve money but we don't want poor people contaminating our neighbourhood."
As one of the participants in NPR's On Point with Tom Ashbrook put it when Ms Prevost was a guest, yesterday, "We are only interested in looking at how individuals deal with situations, no longer are we interested in how communities deal with any situations. We have lost the concept of 'community' as it has given way to individualism."
North America has been, for well over a decade, awash in the language and culture of run-away capitalism, entrepreneurism, profitism, and the abandonment of "my brother's keeper" attitudes that accompany, indeed, undergird and sustain, all attempts at providing a hand-up to those whose lives are less "successful" than those of the achievers. In fact, only achievers have any value....and that means that the young ( who have not had their opportunity to fully achieve) the elderly (who have passed their most productive years) the uneducated and undereducated (whose family or personal circumstances played some part in their failing to cross the threshold(s) of higher education and the jobs that used to accompany that "right of passage") are left behind, without a glimmer of guilt, or even anxiety.
Clearly, for those driving BMW's, we are not all in this together!
Clearly, the "have's" do not either need or want to be associated with the "have-not's"...their poor cousins from the other side of the tracks.
And, as one called to the On Point program asked, "What is the authority of the gated-community's private police force over a citizen who is not a member of the gated community?"
We are living in a world whose snob attitudes, behaviours, beliefs and social consciences have become the norm, while the seismic shift is couched in political talk of the "rise of conservatism"...
These upper-class gatekeepeers do not give a fig for their poor cousins, and while it may have been the theme of sit-coms on television in previous decades, it is no longer a theme fit for comedic entertainment.
It is a social, political, and cultural tragedy that is playing out in too many communities across the U.S., as Ms Prevost documents in Snob Zones, mostly in the northeast, but it is also a growing reality in towns and cities across North America.

Allan Rock: President of U. of Ottawa confronts criticisms of universities, especially liberal arts grads

We are not simply a farm team for big league business, nor a feeder system for the Fortune 500.
Universities are not, indeed, trade schools, nor mere instruments in someone’s economic tool kit. And when it comes to our students and their future, our concern is as much for the person they will become as it is with the work that they will do. (from ‘A mind that is all logic is like a knife that is all blade’ by Allan Rock, Globe and Mail, June 5, 2013, below)

Bank recruiters  extolling the praises of liberal arts graduates, a university president highlighting the critical thinking that accompanies the search through the lines of Canterbury Tales, looking for patterns in Chaucer's thought and emotions from his delightful narrative...and then confronting head-on, in words that every reader of every respectable newspaper can not only understand but also appreciate, "we are not simply a farm team for big league business, nor a feeder system for the Fortune 500" ...both of which have become the pop culture's holy grail for visions of the over-hyped opportunities for young people. These are words that need to be delivered not only to the Canadian Club, but also to the Annual General Meetings of those very Fortune 500 companies, as well as to the conferences of high school guidance counsellors, and to the parents of all high school students across the country.
This speech by the president of the University of Ottawa is so striking in its insight, so courageous in its perspective, and so prophetic in its vision that it could serve as the university president's state of the union address to the board of governors of the university he has the honour and the privilege to serve.
A former Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations, a former Justice Minister, and also a youthful prankster who introduced John Lennon to Pierre Trudeau in one of his many 'former lives'...Allan Rock speaks for millions of us who have become jaundiced about the constant barrage of public chatter in all media, turning workers into 'tools' and labour unions into pariahs, turning citizens into sources of tax revenue, or alternatively 'burdens' on the government, turning highly successful social programs into  yesterday's pipedreams, turning CEO bonuses into the epitome of personal greed and narcissism, turning government's into bookkeepers without any responsibility for the nations culture in both the narrow and the panoramic dimensions, turning immigrants into abused, under-paid worker pawns feeding corporate greed and opportunism.....
Let's mark this speech with an asterisk, on our calendars, as the day when the narrowing, constricting and sabotaging culture of profits and dominance was finally and convincingly confronted in a pragmatic, humane, compassionate, erudite and articulate address by one of Canada's most in-touch thought leaders...
If this speech does not generate millions of alumni donations to the University of Ottawa (I graduated in 1972) then I do not know what would.
Congratulations, Mr. President...you have done your office and your students and faculty proud, without in anyway denigrating the technical learning that is also necessary here and across the globe.


‘A mind that is all logic is like a knife that is all blade’ ...(it makes the hand bleed that uses it...Tagore)
By Allan Rock, The Globe and Mail, June 5, 2013

Allan Rock is president of the University of Ottawa. This is an excerpt from a speech he gave to the Canadian Club last month.

Judging by the popular press and recent public pronouncements, universities have fallen out of favour. Hardly a week goes by that universities are not accused of being “out of touch” with economic reality and unresponsive to current job market needs.
Some have encouraged a systematic effort to direct high-school students away from the irrelevant university and toward community colleges – so they will at least have a fighting chance to find employment and live a useful life.
Meanwhile, the federal government and some provincial actors have pointedly provided or proposed additional funding recently for community colleges, but not for universities, signalling their view that the market-oriented colleges are the better investment.
The practical value of our professional faculties is rarely challenged: Medicine, Health Sciences, Engineering, Law, Education and the Telfer School of Management.
What about the Faculty of Science? Our critics may be prepared to concede that the skills of our chemists, mathematicians, biologists and physicists match usefully with contemporary needs.
That leaves the social sciences, arts and the humanities.
And now we are getting into grey areas…
How do graduates of our Social Sciences Faculty contribute? Well, psychologists are in high demand. Criminologists help us understand how to manage some of society’s most challenging issues. Some economists have gone on to rewarding careers—one of them even serves as Prime Minister of Canada!
And then we get to our Faculty of Arts.
Well then, there is the heart of the problem, you say. Our 7,500 students in that faculty are at high risk of irrelevance you insist.
But is that so?
The faculty’s departments offer courses in 43 disciplines. Many have a direct connection to careers in high demand. Geography graduates probe the effects of climate change and help plan effective land use. Those skilled in modern languages hold the key to global learning, and how best to acquire a second or third language. The communications department, by far our largest, prepares students for careers in growth areas like new media, public relations and communications strategy.
But what about the rest? English literature? History? Philosophy?
I can hear the critics now: quaint, narrow and entirely beside the present point, they say. In some circles, it makes matters even worse that they are described as “the liberal arts.”
Let’s look at the argument against the humanities and liberal arts – because that’s where the thrust of the criticism seems to land.
Let’s examine what these students are learning, how they are learning it, and what happens to them after graduation.
First, what are our liberal arts students learning? I would argue they are learning skills that will never go out of style – to be analytical, to weigh competing options and to communicate effectively. These are skills that will make them valuable, adaptable employees.
When an English professor sets an essay question on Chaucer, students are asked to mount and defend an argument, to sift through facts and analyze and interpret them. They are being taught to think critically.
This capacity for interpretation, analysis, and critical thought is at the heart of a liberal arts education and fundamental to the humanities.
It is important to individual students, but also to our society. The Internet has made information of every kind readily accessible. But we sometimes seem to be drowning in information even as we thirst for knowledge. A mind educated in the arts and humanities has learned how to sift and to sort, to scan and to scope, bringing judgment to bear on undifferentiated information. In short, to help us in understanding what we see and read.
To quote Harvard President Drew Faust: “Human beings need meaning, understanding and perspective as well as jobs. The question should not be whether we can afford to believe in such purposes in these times, but whether we can afford not to.”
It may surprise you to know that educators in India and China are turning to universities in Canada for assistance in adding liberal arts and the humanities to their curricula. They’ve built strong technical institutes, to be sure, and universities with world-class curricula in the sciences. But they want graduates who can exercise independent judgement, based not just on the rote learning that they have perfected, but also on critical thinking.
They know what the Indian poet and philosopher Tagore said so well:
“A mind that is all logic is like a knife that is all blade: it makes the hand bleed that uses it.”
At recent meetings the University of Ottawa had with some of the big banks, we talked about recruitment, assuming that they were primarily interested in graduates from our Bachelor of Commerce program.
But they told us that some of their best people come from the Faculty of Arts. They are looking for employees with basic, adaptable skills: emotional intelligence, good decision making, the ability to work as part of a team and strong written and oral communication skills: the very attributes of our Arts grads. Proof positive of market-based value!
But preparing our students for the job market is only one of our roles.
Let’s never forget that universities are important to society for reasons that can’t be measured on a tax return: they are independent sources of reflective thought. Their unique value to an open society is that they offer safe places for free inquiry, encouraging challenges to the status quo.
We are not simply a farm team for big league business, nor a feeder system for the Fortune 500.
Universities are not, indeed, trade schools, nor mere instruments in someone’s economic tool kit. And when it comes to our students and their future, our concern is as much for the person they will become as it is with the work that they will do.
And if we maintain that focus and produce graduates with the values and the insight to build a stronger society and a better country, we will surely have succeeded in our most important task.

Boomers taking their own lives at spiking rates....

Baby boomers, on the other hand, have struggled more with existential questions of purpose and meaning. Growing up in a post-Freudian society, they were raised with a new vocabulary of emotional awareness and an emphasis on self-actualization. (from "Baby boomers are killing themselves at an alarming rate. Why?" by Tara Bahrampour The Washington Post, in Toronto Star, June 4, 2013, excerpted below)
We learned a new vocabulary, learned a new perception about how to take responsibility for our own meaning and purpose. In an oral examination in a graduate program in education, I was asked to define the existential moment: that moment in which an individual becomes consciously aware of his/her own meaninglessness...and thereby must take responsibility for seeking and finding that meaning and purpose.
Responsibility for meaning included, at least in my case, responsibility for any degree of authenticity, integrity, a searching through reflection for whatever might be hidden behind the appearances in the fullness of the reality underneath... and that all was enabled and enhanced through the exercise of both reading and writing. Did the fact that I had a golden opportunity for such exploration each day of the week in an English classroom of adolescents between 16 and 19? Of course!
Did the fact that I also had an opportunity to conduct face-to-face interviews with local, provincial and national political leaders as a free-lance journalist provide additional insight into the motives and the various perceptions of those thought leaders?  Of course.
Did the fact that after twenty-plus years of teaching and coaching, I was afforded the opportunity to enrol in a seminary to prepare for the role of a cleric offer additional interactions, reflections, readings, papers and internships provide additional insights into both my own inner reality and glimpses of the emotional lives of many others, in real time? Of course.
Did the opportunity to work in both urban and rural environments in both Canada and the United States, as an intern, a counselling student, and as a neophyte cleric provide additional glimpses into how the institutional church operates in both countries? Of course.
And did the time line that links these experiences also link a developing self-awareness plus a self-confidence that was almost totally missing when the journey began, and parallels a growing sense of outrage both at my early compliance and conformity with all the many dumb impositions of authority by supervisors, bosses, even the occasional professor and also at the many absurdities and incongruities that parade before our eyes, ears, noses and consciousness daily? Or course.

Yamaha V-Star-950

That is part of the reason that within the last twelve months, I have taken up a new 'sport' of motorcycling, in which I am required to focus on the situation in which I am riding with an intensity that seemed never before to be required or accepted or expected. Every line in the pavement, every pothole, every wandering squirrel, chipmunk and swooping hawk, as well as every dusting of dirt from the tires of farmers' tractors that covers the asphalt....these are all part of the ride, not to mention every gust of wind, every drop of rain and every other vehicle, and the driving habits of every other driver....it is a full-time, fully magnetizing experience in which one loses all consciousness of whatever it was that bent the mind or the heart prior to turning the engine on....and I am so grateful for this new opportunity, that my wife and I can explore the rural regions of our province and others, when we are ready...in a manner foreign to our "cabin-ed" travel of previous years.
Writing, reading, interacting with others about things that neither of us might have considered previously...and riding...these are some of the ways I have found to occupy my time, in the hope that I might retain some connection with those activities to which I have grown familiar and comfortable, even though the experiences themselves need not be without challenge or some discomfort.
Each of us has our own road and our own story about entering the seventh decade of life on this planet....that is a minuscule part of mine...in the hope that others will take the many opportunities that do not cost an arm and a leg and continue to live a robust, vital and engaging life making those contributions where invited and offering those insights where opportunities emerge....
As others have said so often, "This getting old is not for the faint-of-heart!"

Baby boomers are killing themselves at an alarming rate. Why?

The highest rates were among white and Native American and Alaskan men. In recent years, deaths by suicide has surpassed deaths by motor vehicle crashes.

By Tara Bahrampour The Washington Post, in Toronto Star, June 4, 2013

To those growing up in the 1950s and '60s, America seemed to promise a limitless array of possibilities. The Great Depression and World War II were over; medical innovations such as the polio vaccine and antibiotics appeared to wipe out disease and disability; the birth-control pill sparked a sexual revolution. The economy was thriving, and as they came of age, boomers embraced new ways of living — as civil rights activists, as hippies, as feminists, as war protesters.

"There was a sense of rebelliousness, of 'I don't want to live the way my parents did or their parents did,' " said Patrick Arbore, director and founder of the Center for Elderly Suicide Prevention at San Francisco's Institute on Aging. "There was a lot of movement to different parts of the country. With that came a lot of freedom, but there also came a loss of connections. It was not uncommon to see people married three or four times."
How did a generation that started out with so much going for it end up so despondent in midlife? It could be that those very advantages made it harder to cope with setbacks, said Barry Jacobs, director of behavioral sciences at the Crozer-Keystone Family Medicine Residency Program in Pennsylvania.
"There was an illusion of choice — where people thought they'd be able to re-create themselves again and again," he said. "These people feel a greater sense of disappointment because their expectations of leading glorious lives didn't come to fruition."
Instead, compared with their parents' generation, boomers have higher rates of obesity, prescription and illicit drug abuse, alcoholism, divorce, depression and mental disorders. As they age, many add to that list chronic illness, disabilities and the strains of caring for their parents and for adult children who still depend on them financially.....

Baby boomers, on the other hand, have struggled more with existential questions of purpose and meaning. Growing up in a post-Freudian society, they were raised with a new vocabulary of emotional awareness and an emphasis on self-actualization. But that did not necessarily translate into an increased ability to cope with difficult emotions — especially among men.
Women tend to be better connected socially and share their feelings more freely — protective factors when looking at their risk for suicide. And African-Americans and Hispanics tend to have lower rates of suicide than whites, possibly because of stronger community connections, or because of different expectations.
Combine high expectations with a faltering economy, and the risk goes up.
"We know that what men want to do is work — that's a very strong ethic for them," Arbore said. "When their jobs are being threatened, they see themselves as still needing to be in that role; they feel ashamed when they're not able to find another job, or when their home is being foreclosed on. . . . The idea that so many of us in this country have been brought up with — that you work hard, you get your house, you get your American dream, everything is rosy — it hasn't worked out. A lot of these boomers aren't going to earn as much money as their parents did. They aren't going to be as secure as their parents were. And that's quite troubling for the boomers."

(2) Time to abolish military and quasi-military organizational structures

To argue for their elimination, is not to argue for anarchy.
It is rather to propose a system of decision-making that includes all people in the organization, on all issues, for all departments all of the time. The proposal would not only lop the CEO head off the top, along with the mega-bucks that CEO's have come to grab, but it  would also start with a different premise: one that begins with the notion that all people, given the full amount of information available and the trust that they can make sense out of that information, including both the organization's history and culture as well as the precedents that have preceded the current decision-making points. It assumes that there are very few "guru's" and that organizations dependent on the kind of CEO that Steve Jobs has come to represent are extremely rare, and that their unique mind set are more appropriate for research laboratories, and certainly not for managing organizations.
With the almost complete demise of the labour movement, at least in North America, it is time to rein in the galloping "eliteism" that is threatening to ruin, those organizations that are built on the premise that the "chief" knows best, whether that 'chief' is a man or a woman, thereby literally and metaphorically infantilizing all the underlings to serfs, in the feudal model. Furthermore, the workers have little if any input into the company's direction, given that those large decisions are in the hands of another elite, the investors, whose only claim to fame and power is the possession of their accumulated wealth.
We have to separate wealth from brains, from power and return the power to the ordinary workers, whose expertise has never been more acute, more fully developed and more underdeployed.
Not only do we have an unemployment crisis that is threatening to twist the leading national economies as well as the global economy into another virulent serfdom, or worse, as the rates of poverty, hunger, disease and violence continue to climb exponentially, we also have an underemployment crisis that threatens to, if it has not already completed this mission, rendering workers into robotic 'tools' useful so long as they are producing a profit that is measureable, and disposable like the used tissue in the waste can, following a single sneeze.
We are in danger of letting the elites in every organization, and in every country's government and in every country's civil service and military turn the world into their plaything, leaving the rest of us both gagged and cut off from the very wealth that our efforts are generating.
Governments no longer speak and act for their constituents; corporations no longer, in general, care about the future of the planet and the politicians responsible for making laws that would protect just the environment, to take only one example, are so deeply 'in the pockets' of those same corporations who spend billions lobbying against the very regulations and laws that would make them accountable for their 'carbon footprint' and their careless about both their workers and their workers' planet.
Decision-making, left to an elite individual, or a group of people who consider themselves "superior" is the medicine that has poisoned the very system we now have to take back. And we have to take it back in every corner of our respective cultures.
Replacing 'executive power' with worker power is nothing less than a political revolution; it need not be a violent revolution, so long as those in power do not physically, legally or fiscally resist. And that is a very tall expectation, perhaps in too many cases, a pipe dream.
Nevertheless, if schools can and do take the time and the cost to train their students to serve as peer tribunals in the case of student discipline, as a workable alternative to suspensions and expulsions, then surely our organizations can begin to train and to deploy all levels of workers in all levels of decision-making. The initial costs may be somewhat troubling; however, the long-term impact of such approaches as 'restorative justice' throughout our daily lives far outweighs the initial costs.
Turning our best and brightest people into "truly our best asset" means that those best and brightest people are not only permitted to taste power, anecdotally and incidentally, but on a regular basis. They have to be put in positions where they share responsibility for decisions, in decision-making circles, akin to juries of the common people, with others from different departments, on a regular basis. The learning organization, if we can borrow a phrase from Peter Senge et al, must lead the way in developing cultures of inquiry, of information sharing rather than hoarding, of circles of decision-making, submitted for sober reflection to other circles of decision-making, and a system of concensus has to guide the organization's eventual moves, not some hidden arguments in either the executive suites or the investors annual meetings. All workers have to become investors, as part of their remuneration, and workers everywhere have to resist the latest 'fantasy' from the Harvard Busines Review, dubbed "tours of duty" in which the authors propose that workers are hired for a specific project, with detailed objectives to meet, but with no commitment on the part of the corporation beyond the termination of tht project. The time frame could extend from two, or three or perhaps four years, after which both worker and corporation would be free of any obligation to each other, and depending on the 'track record' of the worker, an option to return for another project might be offered.
The theory of the proposal is that the best workers are really entrepreneurs, ambitious, eager to perform and eager to seek and to find the best opportunities. The writers of the proposal have emerged from their caves in silicone valley, where people have been reduced to digits, dancing on the screens of other digits, for so long as there company is afloat. The issues of benefits, including health and pensions, in their words, as guests on NPR's On Point with Tom Ashbrook, have not been reckoned with as yet.
And when confronted with the concept of two-tiers of workers, they agree that not all workers are really equal, that some perform more effectively than others already, that companies can no longer afford to make long-term commitments, given the volatility in the global market place.
However, it is precisely at the time when global volatility is so volcanic, erupting and subsiding with tsunamis of human greed, human abuse of power, human irresponsibility and human unsouciance, that excludes the pawns from participating in the chess game that is owned by the rich, that stability and mutual commitment are most in demand. Quality work, with quality incentives, including sharing of the power of decision-making within each organization, the dissemination of all relevant information for the purpose of those specific decisions, is not only more feasible but it is more sustainable premised on the notion of inclusion rather than the concept of exclusion.
Native peoples have been developing and deploying the 'circle' for decision-making for centuries; their experience and their willingness to share their wisdom are a community resource everywhere from whom the business community, including the political community, can learn many valuable lessons.
Not only do Native Peoples have respect for each other, they also have an abiding reverence for the planet, something that the rest of us have to learn, if we are to survive the next several decades.
Our capacity to seek and to adopt new structures, based on different foundational premises, starting with inclusion and power-sharing would go a long way towards reinventing our attitudes to each other and to our attitudes to our land, water, air and the growth and development of active, engaged, fully participating workers, citizens, learners and teachers.
We have to put the human being back into the centrality of our social planning, our governments' perspectives, our corporations strategic plans, our schools, colleges and universities, and replace the pursuit of dollars, and all the associated costs of such a reductionism, with that human focus, if we are to regain the power over our very institutional life, including our relationships with those institutions.
This is a very small "boat" beset by very stormy winds on seas that are increasingly contaminated, even to the point of the decimation of hundreds of species...and unless and until we are all pulling on the oars, with a more inclusive, universal and compassionate and mutually accepted goal of helping to do our part to make this planet a more 'user-friendly' place, including our work places, our community organizations, our universities and colleges, and our dying religious places and opportunities of worship, our tiny buffeted skiff is going to run aground, dumping all of us into an unforgiving watery tomb.....and that kind of rhetoric is no longer apocalyptic!

(1)Time to abolish the military and quasi-military organizational structure in public and private organizations

This is going to ruffle some feathers, especially among the power elite in various organizations, in both public and private sectors. We are all extremely conscious of the obsolescence that is built into too many of the products we all buy. It is a marketing, and a business model calculated to generate more sales when the product wears out, breaks, falls apart or merely loses "fashion".
What we are not generally as conscious of is the obsolescence of the kind of organizational structure that permeates our western culture, that of the hierarchy, the military, quasi-military, pseudo-military, and hybrid-military organizational structure.
It is time to bury all the evidence of its long and checkered history in the museums that are dedicated to the relics of western culture. And if that means we have to create more museums for the purpose, then so be it.
Consolidating power in a single person, or a small group of people, may be highly efficient in terms of simplifying the decisions that must be made, in order to facilitate the operation of the organization. However, we have learned too much about human nature, about the capacity to contribute when offered the opportunity, about the capacity to learn and to observe in whatever unique manner we each bring to the situation, and about the failures of the "military" model to continue to subscribe to its continuing deployment.
The local mechanic, operating his/her own shop in a small village, for example, is almost invariably endowed with a kind of insight missing from most organizations, given their addiction to the hiring of the slotted "experts" whose titles appear on the organizational chart. We have thrown this baby of common sense out with the bathwater of the generalist whose capacity to express both innovative and edgy or risky recommendations in practically all organizational situations. And, in so doing, we have lost the capacity for trust, and the capacity for most organizations to communicate with their various constituencies.
A former White House and Hillary Clinton speech-writer, Jon Lovitt, in addressing the graduates of Pitzer College in Claremont CA, (from NPR's On Point with Tom Ashbrook website, June 3, 2013) touched on one aspect of this issue of obsolete organizations when he urged graduates to speak up even if and when they were wrong, so that they would more likely grow a deeper discernment for judging when to ignore their inexperience whether they were 'right' or 'wrong' in their view of the situation.His counsel was so refreshing as to be verging on the absurd in a politically correct straight-jacketed culture.
It is the military organizational structure that demands a level of obedience, verging also on the absurd, in the light of the dominance of the "organization's command structure" over the personnel who serve in that structure. Those in power are right, absolutely, always, in all circumstances, and their power and authority is never to be questioned by those "underlings" who serve under them. That is a political, sociological, cognitive and common sense disconnect that renders both those in power out of touch with both a wider reality and the full reality of those who serve under them, and those "under" to a form of infantilism. Following orders, as is the expected response for all serving in such organizations (and most have adopted this model to a greater or lesser degree) when such orders conflict with the individual's conscience, belief system, larger knowledge of the context in which those orders are being disseminated and even when to do so will inflict irreparable harm on innocents, is about as absurd as the kind of cover-up that ensues when some inevitable "casualty" of stupidity, ignorance, lack of discipline or attentiveness on the part of the person(s) in charge. The organization simply must never be seen to be "wrong" or to have made a mistake, or to have broken some wider and more cogent set of rules under which the whole of society operates, and those in power will and do go to great lengths to white-wash, to cover up, to throw under the bus, or under the carpet anyone or any report that indicates the organization has failed to accept what common sense would indicate is its responsibility.
A cogent example of such a situation (documented in another place in these 'pages') is found in  Dr. Scott Peck's search through the Pentagon for the individual or group of individuals who were responsible for the Mi Lai massacre. He recounts, in his book, People of the Lie, that he could and did find no one, and no group, who was responsible, and yet we all know, as did Peck, that someone had to issue the order to conduct that debacle.
Ford Motor Company, just today, issued a recall on several thousand vehicles, indicating that a malfunction could result in fire in the vehicle, although reports indicate that "no fires have been reported". It is called "damage control" if and when a situation emerges in a military or quasi-military organization and the "damage control experts" are rushed into the situation to 'manage the message'. After all millions of Ford owners, investors, bankers and employees are counting on this recall not to devastate the company's reputation. There were likely dozens or more reports from various sources indicating that trouble was emerging from these vehicles months or even years before today when Ford could no longer "contain" the story, without the recall.
Let's go a little further in unpacking this Ford story. In a military operation, there are shop foremen and women, inspectors and line workers, designers and engineers all of them performing a designated task, and all of them "dedicated to quality as job #1" as the Ford sell line used to say. However, as each of these segments of the car's development are discreet, separate from each other, except when the whole comes out the finishing end of the assembly line, there is little likelihood that the whole car's design, construction, part composition, positional relationship to other components, sequencing of the assembly so as to provide opportunity to examine in detail the potential 'hot spots' that might emerge, that previously have not been in the files. There is also little likelihood that any single person, or department is or will be held responsible for whatever the glitches are that have led to this most recent recall. In short, while the public face of the company is in damage control, the plants in which the vehicles were designed and assembled, continue much as before, with the possible exception that some tweeking will result in one or more segments of the assembly.
Of course, there will likely be a "Suggestion Box" of some level of significance in the plant, and there will also likely be an incentivized program to generate enhancements, and some workers may have actually participated. However, it is also highly likely that such upward communication, except on working conditions, is capped for many reasons, most of them having to do with efficiency, productivity cost-benefit analyses, expert opinions sought and required from those with both training and a history with the company and the line of authority which dictates where responsibility and authority intersect, "where the buck stops" in other words.
The problem is that "where the buck stops" is merely another of those top-down decisions that flow from the executive suite, linked to the salary grid, and the lines of authority/responsibility that will hopefully parallel each other, and, depending on the political relationship of each executive to the power structure, that "buck-stops-here" sign moves to accommodate the hidden political alliances.
So,within the military structure, there are really at least two "organizations, the formal and the informal, and whoever chooses to work within must become intimately acquainted with both.
Oh, I hear the howls of protest, "How can you even contemplate an industrial, or even an informational organization that is not operating as a military hierarchy? Someone has to be "in charge"....
To which I say, it is not adequate any longer for a single person to assume such authority and responsibility given the complexity and the pace and the multiple factors in the calculus of any organization, including the largest and the medium and even the smaller organizations. Organizations operating in the military-model, with a top commander, are guaranteed to self-sabotage, because there is too little oxygen and blood, that is honest and complete information, flowing into a single office, board room, or executive committee. The potential obstructions to the legitimate, necessary and full flow of both formal and informal information into a single "hub" are legion, and are never really fully unblocked, providing a full disclosure of the detailed contextual realities from which the various decisions of each department and the organization as a whole emerge.
Individual motives of all those who wear the company logo, as employees, overlaid with the expectations of supervisors, peers, competing individuals and departments,  the culture within that has  set guidelines for what is appropriate to talk about and what not to mention for both the formal and the informal operation of the organization, not to mention the latest curves in organizational performance...these all play a role in shaping the quantitative and the qualitative flow of  internal 'big data' on which decisions have to be based. Cutting through that maze, without a literal machete as if slogging through a jungle, is impossible and that makes whatever does flow 'to the top' suspect.
Ironically, every person in the culture, both those working inside the organization and those not employed by it, is (at least metaphorically) hooked to a communication device that makes it possible for everyone to know what a specific group of people thinks about a particular issue.
That technology, at least conceptually, makes it possible for an organization to mine the thoughts, observations, visions, fears and 'danger signs' from every device throughout the organization. And such mining exercise is not only available through formal surveys, like political plebiscites, but also through conversations across all department and organizational boxes, as an integral part of the organization's modus operandi.
Just a few moments ago, we received a phone message inviting us to attend a 'town hall' conducted by a non-profit, with the opportunity for a Q & A to specific leadership...on a national, as well as a provincial basis. Such opportunities have been available for some time, but their costs have dropped and the ease with which they are accomplished has risen significantly.
I recall, from another life-time, being asked to 'vote' on the question of whether or not to name a senior student to an end-of-year secondary school committee in order to make the student's input available to planners for the following school year. The vote had to be held at least six times, before a majority of the 75+ faculty finally agreed. Tokenism, then, can and must be replaced now by authentic listening to all constituents in all organizations, as an expectation and a right of inclusion.
In the private sector, workers have almost completely lost their worker protections, including their collective bargaining rights, as corporations race to the bottom of wages and employee benefits, even to moving millions of jobs to the third world, where neither wages nor benefits are negotiated or monitored and where working conditions are usually deplorable. And yet, it is possible, given the kinds of communication technology that is available, for those third world workers to "report" their abuses to legitimate information collection and dissemination agencies, in the locations of the head offices of those companies, in order to bring to light the abuses under which too many have to work.
The International Labour Organization could initiate a project to enlist the names of all workers, the conditions of their work, including their health benefits, and provide opportunities for those workers to submit their real-time stories, without fear of firing, or other forms of punishment.
Inside major organizations, too, the ILO could provide an information line, documenting working conditions, benefits, etc. of workers in all sectors, and then make that information available to the media where both head offices and major groups of shareholders reside, in order to bring public attention to the plight of those workers.
Further, each organization, following a major shift in leadership training on all continents, in all graduate schools producing future organizational leaders, could being to adopt an approach that would ensure the regular and incentivized opportunity for all workers to contribute to the most wide-ranging and most micro-details of the organization's goals and objectives.
It is time for the inclusion of all, in the organizations that wish to generate profit or public service, in order that their methods of operation and their internal formal and informal communications reflect a more complex, and less plastic and protective veneer of mascara and perfection...in the pursuit of both healthy workers and healthy workplaces.

Ignatius: China-U.S. meeting truly "historic"

U.S. officials say they are looking for a strategic discussion rather than a “deliverable.” (from "Xi Jingping and Barack Obama: A summit worthy of the name" by David Ignatius, Washington Post, in Toronto Star, June 3, 2013, excerpted below)

Relationships, at least the healthy mutually supportive and beneficial ones, take time, diligence and persistence. "Deliverables" are required by those who see everything in short-term transactional terms..."you scratch my back and I'll scratch your's".
Sovereignty over islands in dispute with Japan is not an issue in which the U.S. wishes to become involved, although the treaty with Japan could force their hand.
Athorough discussion on macroeconomics, however, is something both countries have a huge vested interest in conducting, and perhaps even drawing some pencil outlines for futher consideration. However, with China acquiring resource industries in the west, including pork in the U.S. and natural gas in Canada, as well as 8% of the U.S. Treasury Bills, there is a growing imbalance yielding to China in global economic power. The U.S. has squandered too many dollars and far too many lives in military conflict over the last decade-plus, with very little to show for their expenditures putting Mr. Obama in a severely secondary position when it comes to macroeconomics, notwithstanding the veneer of recovery that includes a galloping stock market and rising housing prices, but still lacks the kind of employment recovery that is sustainable.
However, it is on the cyber-war-front that the U.S. has both demands and a solid position of strength from which to negotiate...it has been China that has committed the hacking-bullying of military and corporate "systems" in their obsession with winning the "race to the top" of world supremacy against the U.S. And it is the American military superiority that has for too long been the chief jewel in the crown of U.S. hegemony around the world. Now that the Chinese have infiltrated and even brazenly stolen many of the U.S. secrets systems, Obama has no option but to secure a commitment from China to "cease and desist" on this front.
With many more people, a controlled central government, a burgeoning industrial capacity, an expanded interest in trading with the rest of the world, China is, without doubt, the emerging country on the world's stage, seeking parity with or even eventually dominance over the U.S.....and that is where Obama has to be most cautious. He cannot return to Washington from this conference empty-handed even though "deliverables" are not the primary purpose of the meeting.
The U.S. media, fixated on and addicted to both conflict and immediate "deliverables" will put considerable pressure on the administration to "bring home the bacon" from this conference, and that pressure could be enough to sabotage the entire meeting, given the need for some immediate results in what is a multi-century-long relationship, both past and future.
There are two different time-frames: the U.S. in nano-seconds, for deliverables and the Chinese, in centuries for long-term supremacy....guess who is more worthy of a successful bet?


Xi Jingping and Barack Obama: A summit worthy of the name


The next week will test whether Chinese President Xi Jinping intends to play a more engaged role with America and the world.

By David Ignatius, Washington Post, in Toronto Star, June 3, 2013 ....
The Chinese also want a partnership in managing the global economy. Vice-Premier Wang Yang told visiting U.S. national security adviser Thomas Donilon that the two nations should “strengthen macroeconomic policy co-ordination, and jointly promote world economic recovery and growth.”

Beijing has come a long way from its skepticism during the depth of the Great Recession, when American capitalism seemed like the god that had failed. In a speech at the 2009 World Economic Forum in Davos, then-prime minister Wen Jiabao chided “inappropriate macroeconomic policies” and greedy banks, and called the American model “unsustainable.” The Chinese have changed their tune, thanks to solid economic measures by the Obama administration. Now they want even more free-market policies, on the American model.
The toughest nut will be cyber issues. Here, Chinese behaviour has been egregious, stealing hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. technology over the last decade, including many of the most secret U.S. weapons systems. Donilon said in March that the U.S. wants three things: a Chinese recognition that this is a real and urgent problem; a Chinese commitment to investigate; and agreement to co-operate on a framework for cyber protection. That will be the agenda at Sunnylands, but U.S. officials say they are looking for a strategic discussion rather than a “deliverable.”
The U.S.-China relationship is the biggest play on the board of international relations. This is an area where Donilon’s hyper-organized approach, which sometimes annoys his colleagues, has paid dividends. The U.S. has been building the groundwork for a new relationship with Xi for more than a year, and Donilon rightly says it could be Obama’s “signature achievement.”
U.S. officials stress in every speech about China the paramount need for military-to-military dialogue. Perhaps history would have been different if Spartan and Athenian commanders had been friendly, though I’m not sure. But given the stakes, this week’s summit meeting between Obama and Xi actually deserves the term “historic.”
David Ignatius is a Washington Post columnist. davidignatius@washpost.com

Access to water MUST be a PUBLIC RIGHT....not if Nestle gets its way

From SumOfUs, a world-wide movement of people like you, working together to hold corporations accountable for their actions and forge a new, sustainable path for our global economy, June 2, 2013

Nestlé's Chairman and former CEO once infamously declared that "access to water should not be a public right." And now his company is putting into practice its belief that every resource should be commodified and sold off. Nestlé is sucking up water from a Canadian watershed during drought conditions -- to bottle and sell it off.


Nestlé has won a permit to drain an Ontario aquifer whenever it likes. Meanwhile, the surrounding communities which rely on the aquifer have by-laws to restrict their access to their own water during dry conditions in the summer. This just isn’t right, and Maude Barlow, the Council of Canadians, and Ecojustice are fighting back against Nestlé and the Ontario government office that handed out its permit. It shouldn’t take a legal proceeding to force Nestlé to do the right thing. Let’s tell Nestlé that a community’s access to its own water supply is more important than any company's profits.

Tell Nestlé: Stop bottling Ontario’s water source during drought conditions.

Currently, Nestlé has a permit through 2017 to take about 1.1 million litres of water per day from Hillsburgh, Ontario for its bottling operations in nearby Aberfoyle -- even during drought conditions while there are by-laws on water use for households. A number of groups are fighting back. “Ontario must prioritize communities’ right to water above a private company’s thirst for profit,” says Maude Barlow, National Chairperson for the Council of Canadians.

Nestlé has been in the news a lot lately for attempting to profit from our natural resources. Last month, over 220,000 SumOfUs.org supporters signed our petition against Nestlé's greedy effort to patent the fennel flower, a cure-all medicinal remedy for millions of people in impoverished communities across the Middle East and Asia. Several days after we sent out our petition, a video emerged showing Nestlé’s Chairman claiming that the idea that water is a human right comes from “extremist” NGOs and that water should have a market value. Nestlé has dealt with NGOs and lost before -- the years-long boycott over Nestlé's dirty tactics to get mothers to stop breastfeeding and use baby formula -- which resulted in thousands of infant deaths from water-born illnesses -- was a historic success in corporate campaigning.

Nestlé’s appetite to commodify water and natural remedies is a recurring strategy by a corporation with a pattern of seeking to privatize and profit from traditional knowledge and our natural resources. By speaking out against the draining of our watersheds, you will be taking a stand against Nestlé’s strategy to profit off everything in nature.

Demand that Nestlé stop commodifying everything in nature. Stop draining Ontario's watershed to bottle water.

More information:

Council of Canadians raises climate change and drought concerns in Nestlé case. Council of Canadians, Apr. 23rd, 2013

The Privatization of Water: Nestlé Denies that Water is a Fundamental Human Right. Global Research, Apr. 20th, 2013