Q2 Newsletter Published

The Risk and Opportunity Q2 newsletter, "The End of an Era" is finally out. This is always a major effort for me, but helpful to assess and bring into focus the broad scope of influences playing out in our world, and hopefully also helpful for my readers.

This letter reviews the recent publication, "End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation" by Barry C. Lynn. This is an important work that our policy makers need to be aware of, and I hope this letter helps spread the word.

Window Into Insanity

Our mainstream media covers the war while generally shielding us from the reality of war. The truth is that most of us don't want to know. Testimony last Saturday by Marine Corporal Saul Lopezromo in the murder trial of Corporal Trent Thomas, which received fairly broad coverage, opened a small window into the brutality and insanity of war.

Lopezromo didn't hold back, and pretty much summed things up while testifying about their orders to "crank up the violence level" and the practice of dead-checking.

"If somebody is worth shooting once, they're worth shooting twice."

This is hands down winner of quote of the day for July 14th, 2007 and should be a finalist for quote of the year.

The Consequences of Non-Truth

America is facing severe and intransigent problems on a variety of fronts that simply are not being addressed (e.g. trade deficit, health care, income disparity, foreign wars). In July '05 William Greider published a piece in the NY Times entitled "America's Truth Deficit." Greider's piece begins as follows:

"DURING the cold war, as the Soviet economic system slowly unraveled, internal reform was impossible because highly placed officials who recognized the systemic disorders could not talk about them honestly. The United States is now in an equivalent predicament. Its weakening position in the global trading system is obvious and ominous, yet leaders in politics, business, finance and the news media are not willing to discuss candidly what is happening and why. Instead, they recycle the usual bromides about the benefits of free trade and assurances that everything will work out for the best."

The refusal to deal with the real issues extends not only to global trade, but to every issue we face; health care, war, etc. Nothing has changed since he wrote those words except that the decay has progressed, the intransigence has become even more deeply entrenched, and the foundations of our system have been weakened even further.

We have no problems that we are not fully capable of solving, and in short order, but it is not possible to solve a problem if you refuse to acknowledge that you have one. This is the first step in AA and the first step that we need to embrace before we can address our problems in a meaningful way. The primary problem we have that underlies all the others is our truth deficit. When non-truth (spin) becomes the verbal currency of the realm then there is no possibility of bringing the light of reality to any issue or solution to any problem.

If we want to contribute to the solutions of our problems, the re-vitalization of America, and to a peaceful and equitable world, we can first and foremost demand truth from our leaders and from the press. We can refuse to accept the spin that comes to us daily from Washington and is carried uncritically by the media...and we can turn a deaf ear to the partisan rant brigades who constantly make dishonest appeals to base emotion, encouraging anger, mistrust, hatred, vengeance and violence. These things are the fruit of non-truth and they do not serve us.

The Partisan Disease

I have come to the conclusion that partisanship is a mental illness. I first became aware of this in the early '90's while observing the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the savage wars that were fought there. I especially remember an interview with a Serbian man who was asked about the atrocities the Serbian forces had perpetrated on Bosnian Muslims in Sarajevo. The man refused to acknowledge that any such thing had been done by any Serb, and accused the Bosnians of doing all the things that the Serbs had in fact done.

I was troubled by the obvious insanity of the man. More troubling, however, is that I have since noticed the same pattern in our politicians and in their partisan supporters. Politicians have always been a slippery bunch. But the unreality that they are promoting these days has come to be something disturbing and I think, dangerous.

It is clear to me that partisanship is an unbalanced condition rooted in unreality and non-truth; a mental dis-ease characterized by self-aggrandizement and projection of all things undesirable onto the "others." And the truly disturbing thing about it is that with the steadily increasing polarization of our political process the leadership of our nation is increasingly in the hands of mentally ill people.

A person who is committed to unreality is pitiful. But such a person who is determined that everyone around them should acknowledge their unreality as truth is a menace. A group of such people banded together to force their unreality on society is a disaster.