“Humanity is on the threshold of a true global community–in the midst of this cultural convergence we have the historic opportunity to compose evolutionary principles for a more sustainable expression of civilization, a government of life and for all life.” ~ Global Peace Solution (2004)

A teardrop of water fell from the ceiling sky landing in the ceremonial pool below slowly sending ripples and rings outward to the installation’s coping.  Eleven Tears is a memorial work of art to 9/11 victims at the World Financial Center building overlooking the ongoing One World Trade Center construction site. On Sunday, May Day, I visited Ground Zero for the first time. It was a somber pilgrimage–and little did I realize–while there, the attack on Osama Bin Laden’s compound was taking place.

Like for so many others, 9/11 had been a life shattering, and ultimately, life transforming event for me–hearing of Bin Laden’s death brought up conflicting emotions of elation and sadness. All the trauma and travail of the last ten years came rushing forward. A sudden attack on home soil, 3000 dead, the absolute determined brutality of the hijackers-being rid of the individual who inspired multiple acts of mass murder was a relief–but how could the healing begin?

9/11 fundamentally changed our way of life, the way we travel, it instigated wars leading to hundreds of thousands of dead, wounded, displaced; we’ve wiretapped without warrant, tortured, and sent the drones in. Protected civil liberties have been sacrificed for security.

The war on terror has brought our nation to an existential precipice upon which we stare down into an abyss of overreaching militarism and secrecy–both enemies of republican democracy–which would forever be left behind should we now succumb to the gravity of fear.

With the leader of Al Qaeda now dead, we have come to a crossroads in which our nation’s larger priorities can, and should be, examined.

Taking Inventory

“Life carries us hither and thither and destiny moves us from one place to another. We see not save the obstacle set in our path; neither do we hear, save a voice that makes us to fear.” ~ Kahlil Gibran

A friend of mine once gave sage advice. People do what’s important to them. This axiom can equally be applied to nations–as America proceeds into the 21st century, examining some of our outstanding attributes and what makes us unique in the eyes of others, can help better equip us to deal with an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world.

President Calvin Coolidge’s famous aphorism-the business of America is business-is an apt description of a particular American mindset, but certainly an attitude found in many other countries. When compared to the rest of the world, the United States does have a noteworthy emblematic pursuit, not merely business, but the business of war.

Business of War

Discussing the pros and cons of globalization–whether the triple-bottom line, inequitable economic policies, or trends toward “enlightened capitalism”–is a topic I’ll save for later. But the Pentagon, as a corporate-handled global military hegemon, or leader, is chief among unique characteristics of our national enterprise. We currently maintain, at an exorbitant expense, military superiority over much of the planet with 7000 bases (6000 here, 1000 abroad), and U.S. troops stationed in a shocking 77% of Earth’s nations. The United States military spending exceeds the next 45 highest spending countries in the world, combined. Totaling over $1.5 trillion dollars per annum.

Some lesser well-known facts to consider about the U.S. global system of war:

* U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is the worst polluter on the planet, producing more hazardous waste than the five largest U.S. chemical corporations combined

* DoD is the largest employer in the United States, with over 1.4 million men and women on active duty, and 718,000 civilian personnel

* Half of all Federal tax dollars go to military spending: base budget, emergency supplemental funding for Iraq and Af-Pak wars, veteran benefits, classified “black” ops, and interest on past war debt

The World as a Neighborhood

“The 2011 military budget, by the way, is the largest in history, not just in actual dollars, but in inflation-adjusted dollars, exceeding even the spending in World War II, when the nation was on an all-out military footing.” ~ Dave Lindorff, Your Tax Dollars at War

To put current U.S. military spending into perspective, as a thought experiment, imagine for a moment that our world community is a suburban neighborhood of about twenty homes.

Many homes in the neighborhood are little wooden shacks without electricity, running water, or basic sanitation. About five of the twenty have green lawns and internet access. The United States, with nearly 5% of the global population, is one of these homes–but it doesn’t look anything like the others in the neighborhood.

While some homes may have a curbed sidewalk or white picket fence bordering them, ours is a sprawling compound surrounded by a 20-foot concrete security wall topped with coiled razor wire. Turrets and watchtowers frame every corner with carbon-arc searchlights and guards manning machine gun nests. But it doesn’t stop there.

Remote control aerial drones with CCD cameras venture forth from our property patrolling the neighborhood to keep an eye on potential or “emerging” burglars; an assortment of motor vehicles ranging from electric golf carts to up-armored Chevy Suburbans with dark tinted windows tool around the subdivision, street-by-street, armed with rent-a-cops ready to fight or carry out “preventive missions”. To top it off at any given moment at least two manned hot air balloons fly thousands of feet in the air over the entire neighborhood to provide extra surveillance 24/7.

If you weren’t a “citizen of the compound”, how would you feel about the people that lived there?

Maybe a little freaked out?

Hyper-Vigilance to the Point of Overreach

“We cannot wait for the final proof-the smoking gun-that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” ~ George Bush, in run-up to the Iraq War (Oct 7, 2002)

Uber-skeptic Michael Shermer recently wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed about why prophecies of doom are so commonplace in human history. He explains that this propensity to see catastrophe everywhere is directly linked to the evolution of the human brain as a “pattern-seeking belief engine”.

Simply put, if our ancestors did not heed the rustling in the grass just beyond sight as being made by a dangerous predator, sometimes, they became lunch. Our thinking and survival strategies eventually evolved to respond to all imagined threats as real danger.

When this tendency toward hyper-vigilance is exploited through politics of fear–and then combined with backdoor alliances between Wall Street, Washington, and the defense industry–a perfect storm in runaway militarism is created.

Military “Empire” as Fait Accompli

I don’t mean to m
inimize the importance of successful strategies for defense, or the service provided by our Armed Forces. In fact, the military superiority that the United States maintains over the planet could even be rationalized as being the unavoidable product of a constitutional mandate.

Essentially, what we know as the Manhattan Project, the top-secret race to develop the world’s first working atomic weapons, never ended. The United States emerged from WWII with its industrial base intact and was the only nation to possess the atomic bomb. But when the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear weapon in 1949, the threat of nuclear conflagration became real.

This triggered a comprehensive arms race to maintain military and technological superiority to guarantee survival, as our Constitution’s preamble commands, “…provide for the common defence…and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…”.

George Friedman explains the spoils of military superiority in The Next 100 Years,

“…every ship in the world moves under the eyes of American satellites in space and its movement is guaranteed-or denied-at will by the U.S. Navy… This has never happened before in human history…This has meant that the United States could invade other countries-but never be invaded. It has meant in the final analysis the United States controls international trade. It has become the foundation of American security and American wealth.”

Global military empire has been a constitutional fait accompli; and the price tag, trillions upon trillions. But there have been long-term costs-cultural, environmental, and spiritual-for our nation to have constructed, maintain, and continue to expand the most massive military machine ever assembled in the history of humankind. Of all the trillions spent, think about the missed investment opportunities to better our schools, health care, or modernize our infrastructure here at home.

In 2011, we are still playing out the World War II / Cold War narrative–but it’s quickly coming to a close. As we move forward, re-tooling our national security apparatus for the 21st century starts with re-examining the best way to achieve long-term security-simply, we have to find other, more creative and innovative ways to, “secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.”

Transforming the New World Order

The liberal international order that emerged after World War II was lead by the United States. This system has been framed by post-war agreements, and institutions like the United Nations, G-8 & G-20, WTO, etc. It is characterized by Westphalian principles of sovereignty, rule of law, territorial integrity, and noninterference. But this world order is changing, and nation’s roles shifting. As America moved the international order forward in the latter half of the 20th century, now, she can take on a more reserved leadership position sharing responsibilities with rising economic powerhouses like Brazil, China, and India. However, this movement should not only apply to changing economic roles, but also to security responsibilities as well.  

Embracing this shift from economic globalization to global community should also include spreading out the security responsibilities currently shouldered by the United States Department of Defense and the American people. An interdependent and shared international security infrastructure will bring a more robust and deeper sense of security. This is already occurring in the martial sphere with the continued expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). NATO recently deployed troops from 45 nations under one command in Afghanistan-the most ever in history-as reported by Global Research in “Afghan War: NATO Builds History’s First Global Army”.

Largely, the American people are still saddled with the financial obligations of building this international security network, protecting its shipping lanes for trade, and therefore, guaranteeing the stability of the global economic system. This stability translates into massive profits for transnational interests, and although these benefits due not accrue to everyday Americans directly, in some cynical way, our military commitment protecting the global system does satisfy the axiom, “the business of America is business.” Nevertheless, it is not sustainable to continue to burden one nation’s citizens with the responsibility of securing, maintaining, and expanding the transnational corporatocracy-something must give.

Old Skool Systems Analysis

“The struggles of the present age require new modes of thought for new ideas-not old wineskins. New forms and expressions of an interconnected human consciousness demand the transcendence of the boundaries of the past.” ~ Terrence E. Paupp, Exodus from Empire

Finding solutions to new problems starts with challenging previously held assumptions in order to begin to find the quintessential “right question”. Shaking up the status quo isn’t as revolutionary as it sounds because there have been organizations doing just that advising U.S. policy for decades. “Systems analysis” is a methodology developed after World War II by the think-tank RAND Corporation to tackle large, complex dilemmas. Solutions are sought by empirically breaking down problems into individual components and statistics, and then through a multi-disciplinary approach, arriving at the right answers.

Alex Abella’s book about RAND, Soldiers of Reason, describes systems analysis as being “American to the core” and refusing “to be constrained by existing reality…the crux of systems analysis lies in a careful examination of the assumptions that gird the so-called right question, for the moment of greatest danger in a project is when unexamined criteria define the answers we want to extract.”

In a world moving beyond 9/11, we need to scrutinize old premises to find the new questions and answers to succeed in our objective of national and global security. Many in the left, or anti-war/peace movement, talk about dismantling the U.S system of war and oppose it in the same manner-through direct opposition–that that system itself has mastered–an exceedingly difficult task.

A different question for the anti-war movement might be: how do we transform a global system of war toward a community-based system of interconnected, cooperative security?

Changing the trajectory of a system that feeds off the mastery of direct confrontation has to involve an evolved, inverse expression of power; composing solutions on a new field of battle so-to-speak, and not fighting on old terrain.

Joshua Cooper Ramo in The Age of the Unthinkable relates this idea through a 1974 Nobel speech by Austrian economist Friedrich August Von Hayek,

“Politicians and thinkers would be wise not to try to bend history as “the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner a gardener does for his plants.” To see the world this way, as a ceaselessly complex and adaptive system, requires a revolution. It involves changing the role we imagine for ourselves, from architects of a system we can control and manage to gardeners in a living, shifting ecosystem.”

Seeds of peace sown at all levels of political, social, and corporate power-throughout global civil society-will be the connective tissue filling any vacuum of power created by re-tooling our national security infrastructure. The exponential growth of non-governmental organizations (it is said that 90 per cent of all NGOs were created in the last ten years) will provide th
e organizational vehicles engaging people to participate in moving civilization to higher levels of consciousness.

For example, this is the vision of the Euphrates Institute’s upcoming Warriors for Peace program; inviting “individuals who are not afraid of taking on today’s biggest challenges–who get that overcoming divides, ending conflict, and ameliorating the globe’s environmental challenges require relentless energy and a new set of weapons and strategies.”

Deeper Security through Shared Destiny

“Treat those who are good with goodness, and also treat those who are not good with goodness. Thus goodness is attained. Be honest to those who are honest, and be also honest to those who are not honest. Thus honesty is attained.” ~ Lao Tzu

In a former life as a recording engineer and producer, we would spend hours mixing hundreds of elements together to make one singular, coherent expression of music. A good mix begins with building a sound stage from the bottom-up and through additive synthesis, making adjustments on the fly to reach harmonious balance. It’s not unlike tending a garden-and it provides some insight into how to bring balance to our national priorities. We may not know the exact ratio of hard and soft power to invest in, but knowing which knobs to “tweak-up” and which to “tweak-down” to make a solid mix is pretty obvious.  

Francois Rabelais said, “Nature abhors a vacuum”, and in this light, seeking a higher degree of diversification and balance for the way we ensure domestic security would be wise. With overreaching military spending on the traditional accoutrements of power-bullets, bombs, tanks, planes-and falling victim to the classic blunder of preparing for the “last war”, we need to turn-down military overreach and turn-up new modes of dynamic diplomacy and engagement.

Simply put, meeting force with force alone, responding to violence with more violence, is only half of a balanced security portfolio-to wit, you can fight fire with fire, but you also can fight fire with water; squelching the flames of conflict before they ignite. The “water” in this case means amplifying a particular worldview-increasing the number of people who look through an intercultural lens of shared destiny to thwart conflict.

Throughout human history, the co-mingling of destinies for neighboring peoples has proven to be a successful peacemaking tool, either through intermarriage, trade or co-habitation. Directing a portion of our current enormous defense spending toward building bridges of peace, connection, and creating a common narrative of “shared destiny” will be a more effective national strategy delivering a deeper, resilient form of security for our world beyond 9/11.

In a recent interview I conducted with Rabbi Michael Lerner at J Street he laid out the purpose of shared destiny,

“…to help people get away from the fantasy that the way to get homeland security is through domination and control of other people, when in fact, the only way we can really be secure as a nation in the United States is through a policy of generosity and caring for others. In the 21st century we need to recognize that our well-being depends upon the well-being of everyone else on the planet, and that the only possibility of survival is for us to come together as a global community and address the tremendous damage we’ve done to the environment and work in environmental districts to develop ways to compensate and repair the damage we’ve done-both to the planet-and each other.”

Many observers have attempted to articulate the Copernican shift that’s taking place around the world moving from military Empire and “dominance-over” toward global community, interdependence, and cooperation. It is transformation hastened by people-to-people communication tools as interlaced networks of people spring up all around the world. The idea of the United States’ security being directly dependent upon the security of everyone on the planet seems to defy conventional logic, as does quantum mechanics or concepts like chaos theory. But the simple fact is finding safety for others will bring a more lasting and deeper security for us.

Joshua Cooper Ramo explores an idea called “Deep Security” as an attempt to frame a new grand strategy taking into account a world of increasing complexity and inter-conductivity. Old mechanistic models for organizing civilization with rigid inputs and outputs like that of a factory assembly line are giving way to more adaptive models that mirror the only examples of true sustainability we know of: natural ecosystems.

Ramo echoes this idea of mirroring natural systems,

“What we need now, both for our world and in each of our lives, is a way of living that resembles nothing so much as a global immune system: always ready, capable of dealing with the unexpected, as dynamic as the world itself. An immune system can’t prevent the existence of a disease, but without one even the slightest of germs have deadly implications.”

Deep Security embodies a philosophical and political shape-shift from a classic Newtonian and mechanistic view of the world, to the deeper universe of the Quanta, where the impossible not only becomes possible, but probable; it morphs the politic of leading from the center, left, or right, toward leading from below. It pops a third dimension into what currently is a very two-dimensional political world.

Preparing for Peace

“Success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure.” ~ Kung Fu-tzu (Confucius)

I remember hearing a story evangelizing about the promise of President Eisenhower’s 1950s Interstate Highway System: “If you’re in the middle of nowhere in the plains of Kansas paving another lonely mile-don’t think you’re wasting your time.”

Certainly laying the asphalt and concrete of the U.S. Interstate Highway, foot-by-foot, mile-by-mile, was an act of perseverance and vision that, in sum, materialized as the largest public works program in history, facilitating an era of prosperity and advancement.

The incremental work of building cultural bridges of peace-one person at a time-may seem like laying pitch in the middle of the desert, but don’t think it’s a waste of time. It will be these connections between individuals who make global peace and sustainability their personal business, which will save civilization. The relationships that are developed today will pay peace dividends tomorrow by sending ripples and rings out into the world like the Eleven Tears install at Ground Zero.

“Nitzahon la shalom tze lechem l’chaim”-the victory of peace is the bread of life.

(“Our World Beyond 9/11” by Byron DeLear, Progressive Examiner, as published on Examiner.com)

“….So, again, none of you have to agree with my view of the world. But if you don’t, you darn sure need your own and it needs to be based on facts. Evidence and the aspirations of ordinary people work way more than anybody’s ideology here….”

Former President Bill Clinton spoke at graduate commencement on Friday evening, May 6, 2011 on the campus of the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg. The university had worked with the Clinton Climate Initiative in its $32 million sustainable energy and building retrofit project. Former President Clinton was awarded an honorary doctorate at the commencement ceremony.

Former President Bill Clinton (D) spoke at graduate commencement on Friday, May 6, 2011 on the campus of the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg. Photo courtesy of the University of Central Missouri.

The transcript:

Former President Bill Clinton (D): ….[applause] Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.  Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, President Ambrose, faculty, staff, Board of Governors, students, families, friends, thank you very much for the wonderful welcome. Thank you [student] Manny Abarca for the introduction. I was thinking maybe someday I’d get to vote for you. [laughter] You did a terrific job. I thank you very much for that. I, uh, [applause] I want to thank Dr. Ambrose and Dr. Betty Roberts and Chris Wellman and a number, uh, another of your students, Amber Flores for giving me a tour of the administration building and the work you’ve been doing in energy efficiency which I’ll say more about in a minute. And I want to thank you for mentioning that I am the first president or former president to visit here since Harry Truman. And arguably [applause] , arguably he shouldn’t get a lot of credit, after all, he was from Missouri, right? [laughter] But then you can deny me a lot of credit since I’m from Arkansas. But, anyway, I’m honored to be here…

…And, I want to say, uh, I, I must have told twenty people in New York this week, I got to work in the city on some of the things I was in, I must have told twenty people I was coming here. And they said, well how do you get to the University of Central Missouri? I said, well, I have to, I’m flying to St. Louis to have lunch with some friends and then I’m going to Sedalia, and then I’m going to drive from there. There weren’t many people in New York that knew where that was. [laughter] And then I said, if I were you I wouldn’t be laughing because this campus is the place that is creating the possibilities of the future with the training programs, with the advances in energy efficiency, with all the things that they are thinking about and doing.

And so, I know this is a happy time for the graduates and I know the families just want to cheer, but I want you to take just a few minutes to try to think about what this degree ceremony means, what your futures mean in terms of what’s going on in America and the world today. I mean, we’ve had a busy week after nearly a decade of effort, uh, United States military found Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan and I know [applause, cheers] we all are proud of that. But, and it happened at a time when more and more there’s a movement toward Democracy in the Muslim world, more and more people are renouncing terror and embracing a constructive future. But still, people looking for opportunities we had in New York City just a few months ago, a young man who came to the United States, got two university degrees, married a young woman from the Middle East, or from Pakistan, with a university degree and then, like a lot of people in this terrible economy he lost his home, he lost his job, he went back to Pakistan, learned how to make a bomb, and came back and tried to set one off in Times Square in New York City.

What are we to make of a world where there is so much good, where you can be out here in the middle of the heartland of America, and because of the Internet and other technologies, know just as much about how most efficiently to produce and consume energy as anybody on Earth, how you can imagine how to organize other things and create a modern economy for America, take advantage of all these things, how you can be alive at a time when ten year olds can get on the Internet and learn in thirty seconds stuff I had to go to university to learn, in my, back in the dark ages? All these great things are going on. The Human Genome Project has already told us how to guard against the prospect of women who have a genetic predisposition to it ever getting breast cancer and having to serve, suffer a mastectomy. We’re getting very close on seeing people who have a predisposition to Parkinson’s and how to head that off. By the time that the graduates here are old enough to have children in elementary school, except for the older graduates, you’ll probably be able to go in and take an annual physical exam just by standing in a tube and having it scan you up and down. And because of nano technology you may able to find tumors that are presently undetectable so that almost a hundred percent of malignancies will be manageable. And you can recover from it.

It’s an amazing time. But, even though we felt pride in what happened this week, and for those of us live in and around New York and remember that awful day of nine eleven two thousand one, a certain grim understanding that what happened had to come to pass, it still is frustrating to see so many apparently contradictory things going on. We can learn all this stuff about the economy but, why are we having such a terrible time getting out of this mess we’re in? Even before the financial meltdown in two thousand eight the economy only produced two and a half million jobs in this decade. There were real problems there.

How are you supposed to make sense of all this stuff that’s going on and what does your degree have to do with it no matter what it comes, in what area it comes? That’s what I want you to take just a few minutes to think about. You live in the most interdependent age in history. If you never left the borders of the State of Missouri you would still be affected by things that are happening half a world away.

You got how much land flooded out now in the southern part of this state? And I don’t know, those of you who are a certain age remember in nineteen ninety-four we had a huge flood on the Mississippi River and we were told, I was, that it was a five hundred year flood. We wouldn’t have another one like it for five hundred years. And all I had to do to protect people was to move people and we moved whole communities in nineteen ninety-four beyond the hundred year flood plain and we’d all be fine. Guess what? We turned out not to all be fine in Missouri, didn’t we. All these unbelievable things are happening in the climate as it changes. What does all this mean? It means that even if you never leave the borders of Missouri what you do here will affect people half a world away and what they do will affect you.

It means that the walls that we used to call borders look a lot more like nets than walls today. We live in an interdependent age where we cannot escape each other. Interdependence can be good or bad or both. Human nature being what it is, interdependence is both. It’s good and it’s bad. For example, the fact that we live in a borderless world enables you to find out things on the Internet in a hurry. To move around the world at lightning speed and get information. And also facilitates terrorists and the transfer of technology and money. The fact that we can travel means that people how never’s, parents or grandparents never could have dreamed going half a world away can go. It also means people you wouldn’t dream of letting you get very close to you can come. It’s a part of the world we live in. So, no matter what your training is, if you want to make the most of your life you h
ave to face this interdependent world with its positives and its negatives. And you have to ask yourself some simple questions.

Question number one. What would I like the world to look like when my children are my age? Or, in my case, when my grandchildren are my daughter’s age. I know what the answer is for me. I would like to live, I would like them to live in a world where opportunity is equally shared. And where we share the responsibilities as well as the blessings of the earth. Where we celebrate our differences, our religious, racial, ethnic and all other differences, but we think our common humanity matters more. That’s the world I’d like to live in. That’s the world I’d like for my children and the grandchildren I hope to have to live in. That’s what I want. You got to be able to answer that question. Then once you answer it you have to say, well, how would you build that kind of world? My answer is, to build a world of shared opportunities and responsibilities you have to build up the positive and reduce the negative forces of our interdependence. That’s what I spend my life trying to do. It’s what I tried to do when I was president, what I try to do now.

That brings me to the next question. What are the most important negative forces of interdependence? You know what the positive ones are. You wouldn’t be in these chairs if you didn’t. The world’s a wonderful place, but it has three huge problems. Number one, it’s highly unstable. That means we worry about terrorism, attacks from people who don’t live here, but can come here. It means that a financial crisis which started in America could spread instantaneously to the United Kingdom, to Ireland, to Iceland, then, then all over the world. Now, not all instability is bad. If there’s no play in the system, if there’s no uncertainty then we all kind of deadened and creativity is driven out. But if there’s too much people just can’t live with it. There’s just too much worry, too much anxiety. So we have to reduce the instability in the modern world.

There’s too much inequality in the modern world. Within and among countries. I spend most of my time working in really poor places. Before the earthquake in Haiti two thirds of the people lived on less than two dollars a day. Before the earthquake eighty-five percent of the people had no electricity in their home. There was no sanitation system. That’s what really caused the cholera outbreak. There was no sanitation system.

All over the world I see people who are just as smart as I am and work harder, but who don’t have opportunities, where their kids can’t go to school or there’s no health care, and there’s no structure of jobs, and they may not even have houses. So there’s inequality there. Then within countries we have it. Except for my second term of all the wealthy countries on earth the United States has the biggest increase in income inequality since nineteen eighty-one of any country on earth, of any wealthy country. I think it’s because we’ve embraced some bad ideas, we’ve gone from being a country that believes that companies should be run for all the stakeholders, the customers, the employees, the communities, and the shareholders to believing that only the shareholders matter. That doesn’t give you a very good result. And pretty soon you wind up with a financial meltdown we had on Wall Street.

We also have spent too much time arguing that the government is always the problem and would mess up a two car parade. Uh, when the only successful country’s in this interdependent world, the really successful ones, have both a strong private economy and an effective government. And increasingly, a good non, not for profit sector, a nongovernmental sector. But, from World War Two to nineteen eighty-one the bottom ninety percent of Americans earned sixty-five percent of the income. Top ten percent earned thirty-five percent. That’s quite a lot of inequality, enough to keep us working harder to be rewarded. Top one percent had nine percent of the income. The average CEO of a corporation earned forty percent, forty times what the average worker did. From nineteen forty-six to nineteen eighty-one.

Since nineteen eighty-one here’s what’s happened. The bottom ninety percent’s share of income has dropped from sixty-five to fifty-two, the bot, the top ten percent’s gone from thirty-five to forty-eight, the top one percent’s gone from nine to twenty-two, and the average CEO now earns more than two hundred times the average employee in accompany. No one can say that this is because of productivity or economic success, it is a deliberate increasing of inequality as we have come to emphasize money more than ideas, production, and people [applause] to become more of a shareholder than a stakeholder society. And I say this, this is not a Republican or a Democratic argument, it’s the new radicalism that I never saw before. In nineteen eighty-seven Sam Walton, then the richest man in America, and an Arkansan, and a Republican who I don’t think ever voted for me [laughter], although I don’t think his wife ever voted against me, so they cancelled each other out [laughter], but anyway, Sam and I were working on an education thing and he was in my office in nineteen eighty-seven when the stock market collapsed. So, he went out and called New York. I said, how much money did you lose today? He said, just me, my family and I? I said, yeah. He said a billion dollars. Now, in nineteen eighty-seven a billion dollars was real money. [laughter] Why do I tell you this? I said, how do you feel? He said, let me tell you something. He said, tomorrow morning I’m gonna get up and get in my airplane. Now, Sam Walton’s airplane was a Cesna single engine or a Piper Cub, I can’t remember which, that he flew. He said, I’m gonna fly over to west Tennessee to the newest store and I’m gonna buzz the parking lot. And if there are pickups in the parking lot I don’t give a rip what the stock price is, I’m in this for the long haul for my company. Now, you don’t hear people say that today.

Give you another example. We have, in northeast Arkansas, near Missouri, we had a company that I recruited called Nucor, founded by another Republican from North Carolina named Ken Iverson. Nucor paid a weekly bonus, their average wage was about half what the steelworkers made, they made steel from recycled materials. But they paid a weekly bonus and they gave every employee in the mid eighties fifteen hundred dollars a child for every child they had in college. This is, that’d be like four thousand today. Okay? Every one. There was a guy in South Carolina that sent eight kids to college working for Nucor. So, in one year in the eighties Nucor lost money ’cause all manufacturing lost money in America. I still have a copy in my personal files of a letter that Ken Iverson, who is now passed away, but I don’t believe he voted for me when I ran for president, he was a good Republican, but he wrote this to his employees, including all of my friends in Arkansas that worked in that plant. He said, well, we lost twenty percent of our revenues this year. And you know we have a strict lay off policy, so everybody’s gonna take a twenty percent pay cut ’cause nobody’s losing their job. What I want you to know is this is not your fault. You did everything I asked you to do. He said I do consider it my fault. I should have been smart enough to figure out how we could be the only company in the world not caught up in this. Therefore, while your pay is going down twenty percent I decided to cut mine sixty percent. And he didn’t have any stock options on the sly, they had corporate headquarters, no corporate jet, no nothing. Straight sixty percent cut in his compensation. Those guys would have jumped into the molten steel  for this man. Why? Because we were all in it together.

Look, folks, on health care, on energy, on economic policy, on trade, on balancing the budget, on a lot of things there is a legitimate, basically a little more conservative or basically a little more liberal argument you can make here, but if you don’t think we’re all in this together we are toast. That is
the fundamental decision you all have to make. [applause]

So, if you ask me a question about anything, and I want all of you to think about it, what’s your position on x, y, or z? I will immediately ask myself, will this make the world less unequal and less unstable? If it will, I’m for it.

But there is one last problem which you have answered about as well as anyone in America, here at this university. The model that has taken us this far is also not sustainable because of the way we produce and consume energy. Global warming is real. Above the Arctic Circle this year all the plants bloomed fifteen days early. Soon you’ll be able to take a ship across the North Pole in the summertime. That’s the good news. The bad news is when that happens the ice on top of Greenland will start to melt like crazy and if it all flows into the North Sea, that’s eight percent of all the fresh water on earth, it could block the Gulf Stream and make northern Europe, northern Canada so cold they won’t be inhabitable in the wintertime and those are some of the most powerful economies on earth.

And there are lots of other things that are happening. You go down to Australia. There’s a huge liberal conservative debate in Australia on climate change, but it’s not about whether it’s real or not. It’s about what to do about it. ‘Cause they know it’s real. They’re getting killed by it.

So, the final thing I say is, most people for most of the last twenty years in America have said, okay, this is either not real or it is real but, alas, we can’t do anything about it because the only way for a country to be rich and get richer is to burn more stuff and put more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And, if you get a university degree one of the things you’re supposed to do with it is to be able to think about new things and take information and process it and then share it with your family and friends and communities. I believe that changing the way we produce and consume energy is the single most significant thing we can do to put America back to work again, to create new jobs, to create new businesses, to create new technologies, to bring manufacturing back to America, to get us going again. [applause] That’s what I believe.

And, I believe that based on work that I have been doing all over the world. We’re trying to close landfills in Mexico City, in Lagos, Nigeria, in New Delhi, India. We’re trying to convert public transportation units to clean natural gas buses in Lima and Sao Paulo. We’re trying to retrofit hundreds of schools in South America and Europe. We’re trying to reforest massive acreage in Africa and South America. I’m trying to take the Caribbean from having the most expensive electric rates in the world to being completely economically self sufficient. I do this for a living now. That’s one of the things my foundation does. And I am telling you America could go great guns. And I have just this for evidence. I don’t know if you remember this, ’cause I was president so long ago. But, in nineteen ninety-seven Al Gore and I made a deal with a bunch of other countries in Kyoto in Japan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And forty-four countries signed that agreement and ratified it and they were weal, a hundred  and seventy countries signed it, but forty-four of ’em were wealthy enough so that they had to actually reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by a fixed amount. United States did not sign it because the U.S. Senate voted against the Kyoto agreement ninety-five to zero before I sent it to ’em. The only time I ever lost a bill in Congress before I sent it to ’em. ‘Cause they thought it was a terrible plot to bring America to an end.

But these other countries did. Now here’s the interesting thing. They had ’til twenty-twelve to meet these targets, forty-four countries. Only four countries, here we are in twenty eleven, are for sure gonna meet these targets. Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the U.K., the United Kingdom. In the last decade they have all been lead by both center right and center left political parties, that is, their equivalent to Republicans and Democrats. And they have full, chosen different ways to reduce their emissions. But here’s what you need to know. Before the financial meltdown in two thousand eight all four of these countries had lower unemployment rates than the United States, faster job growth rate, faster business growth rate, and less income inequality than we did because they changed the way they produced and consumed energy.

So, you tell people, come to the University of Central Missouri and look what they did to retrofit their buildings. Ask them how many people got jobs out of it. Ask them about the new training programs that came out of it. Ask them what they have learned about using energy more efficiently that will help America to come back. That’s a big part of building a future of shared opportunities and it’s right here [emphasized] on your campus. You should feel [applause] very, very proud of it.

The American college and universities, uh, have a committee on, it’s called their climate commitment, and I was asked to work with them, my foundation was. So we worked on this. Dr. [Betty] Roberts was calling the names of the young people who work in the Clinton Climate Initiative who were working with you on this. And it’s been a real honor. But when the, when the economic crisis hit in two thousand eight the only two colleges in the whole country that were working on this that decided to stay the course and not delay were a little college called Lee College in Houston, Texas and the University of Central Missouri. You said, I don’t think I will wait. [applause] I think we still should be [applause, cheers] creating the future. You should be really proud of that.

And I want to thank the Bank of America for working out the financing on this. Because the real problem when you go around, ask the people here about it, ask them how they use geothermal energy, ask them how they changed the duct system and the heating and air conditioning and the windows and the lighting and how many people came to work here. The real problem with doing this is financing. If you decided you wanted to build a coal fired power plant on this campus and you got permission to do it, twenty year financing, no problem. If you wanted to build a nuclear power plant, poof, thirty year financing, no problem. Do you want fifteen year financing to build a new future that employs far more people for the money you spend and anything else you can do in the energy area? They say. I’m sorry, it’s not available. Bank of America and the university administrators, they found a way to do it. and so I want to thank them, too.

And I want you to just think about this as a metaphor even if you’re not interested in this topic. Here you had a university, some traditional students and some nontraditional students, some visionary administrators and some people who didn’t mind having to think about more than one thing at a time. Who, in the, where I grew up, in the vernacular, who could walk and chew gum at the same time. [laughter] And they decided it be a really good thing to put a lot of people to work and put this university on the forefront of energy efficiency in a way that would take a building that goes back way over a century and put it way into the twenty-first century and make this university a model. And, in the process, learn some things about training programs and software and other things that would really make you more powerful. This is about sharing the future in terms of its opportunities.

So, again, none of you have to agree with my view of the world. But if you don’t, you darn sure need your own and it needs to be based on facts. Evidence and the aspirations of ordinary people work way more than anybody’s ideology here. And I just think that [applause] this is a, I just think that this is a wonderful , wonderful thing that has been done. So, when you leave here, somebody says, what’d you get your degree in? What are you gonna do? What do you think the world’s gonna be like in ten years? What’s the meaning of th
e Osama Bin Laden thing? What’s the meaning of the retrofit that you did? Anything.  The way I think about it is, does this event reduce the negative or increase the positive forces of our interdependence? If this event does, if it makes us less unequal, less unstable, less unsustainable, more equal , more stable, more sustainable. If it builds hope and reduces fear I am for that. Because we have to create a future we can all share. Believe it or not, we been through, you know, some very bleak years these last three or four years economically. And when people look around America for a place that refused to just retreat into a shell and kept looking for a way to move into the future they’re gonna stumble right on to you. Because of what you did on this energy issue. And you will always look like, to those of us who care about this energy thing, the little engine that could. So, I ask you [applause], I ask you when you go out of here and you think about the rest of the world to carry this in your heart. Look, most of my life’s been lived. I’ve had a great run. I just want everybody else to have the same life chances I did. And I don’t believe you can have ’em if we don’t have a world of shared opportunities and shared responsibilities where we know we have differences, where we know are differences matter, but where we know our common humanity matters more than our interesting differences. [applause]

And we can never afford to live in a world where we stop thinking and where we can’t stand to be around somebody that disagrees with us. I just read a fascinating book, ’bout a year ago, called The Big Sort, s o r t, by a guy named Bill Bishop who lived in Austin and he was a Democrat and one of his most important neighbors was a Republican and they lived in a Democrat neighborhood and the Republican moved out because the neigh, the other neighbors were mean to the guy. And he moved from a neighborhood that was overwhelmingly Democratic to one that was overwhelmingly Republican and he said, Bishop’s book said, both our neighborhoods were poorer, both our neighborhood were poorer.

We have gotten to where we are, over our racial, our religious, our gender discrimination, we just don’t want to be around anybody that disagrees with us. We’re all a little like that, aren’t we? We’ve got to share the future. A metaphor of that is this campus and this energy project. Thank you for doing that. Thank you for giving my foundation a chance to work on it. Don’t forget it when you leave here. And look for other ways to do your version of what your alma mater did with energy in a very, very tough time.

Good luck and God bless you all. [applause]

University of Central Missouri (UCM) Board of Governors President Walt Hicklin (left) presents the honorary doctorate to Bill Clinton while UCM President Chuck Ambrose (right) reads the citation. Photo courtesy of the University of Central Missouri.

We usually cover these kind of events from the media area, but due to the requirements of my day job I had one of the best seats in the house. Unfortunately I couldn’t bring a camera with me on the platform (decorum, as if that’s ever stopped me before). If I had a camera I would have had some fantastic photos from my vantage point. From what I observed throughout his speech former President Clinton had a few notes, but spoke extemporaneously. His speech was approximately thirty-two minutes long.

It is our practice here at Show Me Progress to include all of the “ums” and “uhs” in our transcriptions. Even when it’s us. We continue that practice in this transcript. You’ll note that there are very few “ums” or “uhs” in Bill Clinton’s speech. This is as it occurred.

Yes, I shook his hand. Twice. Photo by Joan Ferguson.

( – promoted by Clark)

Every now and again, an idea or concept or product comes along, spreads out all over the place and sets a new standard. Take, for example, ATM machines or UPC Barcode or even the internet; looking back, it’s hard to imagine those innovations not being ubiquitous and ever-present. We just accept them today as being an integral part of the modern landscape, like wallpaper or furniture, cars.

“Energy efficiency” is quickly becoming the latest standard centering around new retrofit construction techniques reducing the energy consumption of homes, offices and buildings.

Energy efficiency generates multiple benefits:

* Massive job creation and domestic economic stimulus

* Homeowners save money on energy bills

* Increase American energy independence

* First step in diversifying the US energy sector; renewable energy and smart grid rollout

* Good for the environment

Last week, Efficiency First organized over a 100 small business contractors from across the nation to travel to Washington DC to champion the Home Star Energy Retrofit Act in the US Senate, which had previously passed the US House with bi-partisan support. Home Star is a jobs bill, but it doesn’t stop there. It also supports the development of smart energy strategies and jump starts the energy efficiency industry. Home Star has sometimes been called “Cash for Caulkers” loosely named after the well-known “Cash for Clunkers” program. But whereas Cash for Clunkers often went to purchase foreign cars, just about Home Star’s whole kit-and-caboodle stays in the US.

Congressman Peter Welch (D-VT.), who had authored the US House version of Home Star, addressed the contractors, saying,

“We want to build up manufacturing in this country and 90% of the materials that are used in this work are manufactured in this country — so even without the whole debate about ‘buy American’ — it will be bought in America. This work will be done in America.”

Representing Missouri as chair of the Missouri Association of Accredited Energy Professionals (MAAEP), I advocated with other efficiency business owners to the offices of eight US Senators, including personal exchanges with Missouri’s Sen. Claire McCaskill and Sen. Sam Brownback of neighboring state Kansas. I applauded Senator Brownback on recent Kansas City successes with the number of energy efficiency retrofits leading the Midwest, including Kansas City Missouri’s Green Impact Zone.

Sen. Brownback indicated his support for Home Star, and said,

“Let’s try to find a way to get this done.”

Many potential solutions to get Home Star passed were talked about in the offices of Senators Tom Coburn (R-OK.), Tom Harkin (D-IA.), Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX.), Kit Bond (R-MO.) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL.) , to name a few our group visited (there were 8 Efficiency First groups).

Matt Golden, President of Recurve, Inc. and policy chair of Efficiency First had a lot to say about the struggling construction trades; how Home Star acts as a ‘shot in the arm’ building up a new industry that puts underemployed workers back on the job.

“For hundreds of thousands of American construction and manufacturing workers who have been sidelined by the recession, the proposed Home Star program – which now awaits Senate approval – represents a lifeline to good jobs with living wages in a growing 21st-century industry. While much of our economy appears to be on the road to recovery, the outlook for American construction workers is truly grim. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 2 million construction jobs dried up between December 2007 and January 2010, leaving around one in five experienced construction workers unemployed. And with demand for new buildings stalled at historically low levels, there’s little hope that these workers will be rehired in traditional construction jobs any time soon.”

This is where Home Star comes in.

Slated to begin creating 168,000 jobs the moment President Obama signs into law, Home Star is not just throwing money at a wall to see what sticks, it builds a market-driven rebate model that rewards home owners who reach higher levels of efficiency performance, which is good for our nation as a whole. Home Star also leverages private investment giving more bang for the buck. Home Star is a $6 billion program, so a state like Missouri is pro-rated to receive a potential $120 million dollars.

For details on the Home Star rebate program click here.

As I’ve said in the past, I believe in less than ten years, an energy audit and retrofit for an existing home or office will become as commonplace as the safety and emissions test for your car. It will be a new standard and this is a new industry taking hold the nation. Efficiency is about jobs, and domestically manufactured products like weather-strip, insulation and caulking. Estimates fly around about the size of this national revolution of retrofits, from 1 trillion dollars of economic activity to a recent figure I heard from the Department of Energy roadshow in Kansas City, a gargantuan 6 trillion dollars coast-to-coast! (presumably including commercial Real Estate)

In an era of incessant dismantling of entire legacy industries stateside, all Americans should lower their shoulders to help launch the energy efficiency industry into the mainstream–and all Americans can participate in its rollout. These jobs are quality American jobs that are insulated from outsourcing and as job creation is the prevailing social issue of the day, our collective support of this emerging new standard becomes the moral, patriotic and smart thing to do.

From the recent events unfolding off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico, it now becomes clearer that pursuing dirty forms of energy, fossil fuels, increasingly more difficult and dangerous to bring to market, should be a practice that we, as a nation, need to leave behind.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday,

“Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen said their worst fear is that the well could leak at 100,000 barrels a day, if the well head breaks. Friday, industry experts estimate the spill rate at 20,000 barrels a day to 25,000 barrels a day. If those rates are accurate, the spill could already rival the 11-million gallon Valdez (Exxon) slick that economically and environmentally devastated part of Alaska.”

This moment is a clarion call to ramp-up the immediate diversification of America’s energy portfolio.

Energy efficiency, wind, solar, geo power are clean and smart. This energy revolution will create millions of jobs, foster US energy independence, be environmentally friendly, reduce our national trade deficit–the justifications are legion. We now need the collective will to move past looking to the ground for our brighter future when its above our heads. I advocate for natural nuclear power — the nuclear fusion reactor that’s 93 million miles away, it’s called the Sun.

In 2004, I wrote a scathing article on BP’s marketing plan to reform their dirty fossil fuel image by concocting a more clean and sustainable rubric from which they would do business: BP became “Beyond Petroleum” instead of British Petroleum.  In this era of rampant green washing, it is high time to put real teeth into holding our energy corporations accountable towards moving our nation and world forward into what we need our future energy sector to be. ~ Byron

Public, Propaganda and Profit — The History of PR (Byron DeLear / 2004)

So I’m reading in Foreign Affairs about how out of the 20,000 oversea storage containers coming into American ports daily, only 400 are inspected by federal authorities – and if all 400 contained shielded nuclear weapons – only 40 of them would be detected. This “10% rate of detection” would not include the 19,600 containers not even looked at. If we are to believe Bush’s portrayal of a “decades long global war on terrorism”, spending Billions over in Iraq to defend Billion dollar Halliburton contracts seems like it’s missing the point a little doesn’t it?

It’s National Security, stupid.

Course what kind of security are we paying for? So I’m considering all these obvious signs of the interests of the people not being served, and I come across an ad by British Petroleum – you know, “BP.” Well it turns out that BP – British Petroleum – is no longer British Petroleum – it’s “Beyond Petroleum”. Beyond Petroleum? The same British Petroleum that re-infested Iran in 1953 following a CIA-sponsored coup d’tat?

Yep, that one.

Well, what are we to understand from this face change right before our ad-laden eyes? If we take the advertisement’s word for it, “The world’s energy needs aren’t diminishing. But at BP, we see a future that can be cleaner, brighter and more powerful than ever. It’s a start.”

Now, if I hadn’t worked in media and the entertainment industry for twenty years, I just might think, “Wow, look at that, a multi-national conglomerate with a conscience…”

But I know better.

I know better because only living things have a conscience, and the corporate entity that has arisen in the midst of civilization – having been brought to monolithic stature by its legal definition of having all the rights of a live person – is not alive. And its undead-like rapacious appetite for profits has every living system on Earth in decline.

Every living system.

I know that BP’s renaming itself is not true corporate reform – it’s just an example of a PR campaign at work – I know that someone or some team has been paid money to re-form public opinion about oil — to reeducate the public as to the mighty conglomerate’s benign influence and vision of, “…a future that can be cleaner, brighter and more powerful than ever”

Give me a break — “Beyond Petroleum”

Let’s take a little ride into history to see the origins of the modern PR campaign to illuminate just what is behind the designs of this light and sound show we all almost constantly bathe in.

Here’s a quote: “It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas in disguise.”

Sounds a little like a innocent word game, “British Petroleum” becoming “Beyond Petroleum”, doesn’t it?

Well it ain’t no word game – PR is thought control and propaganda and that quote was from Joseph Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister of Nazi Germany.

Again, “It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas in disguise.”

Hitler’s “Genocide” became “solution” – is this too harsh an indictment against BP?

Not considering the genocide being methodically conducted against every living system on this planet.

Our solutions need to be more than just mere words.

Where did this media-method of controlling public opinion come from?

Newspaper mogul Randolph Hearst was delighted to wield American public opinion and lead popular support for the Spanish-American war through the unfounded accusation against Spain after the US warship Maine exploded and sunk. Hearst proclaimed to newspaper illustrator Frederic Remington, “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war. President McKinley got his, “Splendid little war” – as the ambassador to England, Teddy Roosevelt called it — and the public turned bloodthirsty through Hearst’s “yellow journalism” made it all the easier. It soon became apparent that in a democracy the controlling interests need “thought control” — because they couldn’t take what they wanted by force.

A few years later this “control of the thought of the world” through media reached new heights during WWI in America, when reported tales of the German “Huns” committing atrocities like tearing off the arms of Belgian babies – or the illustrations of impaled and bayoneted babies — again turned the pacifist populace into raving warmongers–through propaganda.

Noam Chomsky explains to us that, “Hitler was very impressed with the successes of Anglo-American propaganda during World War I and felt, not without reason, that partly explained why Germany lost the war (WWI).”

The WWI propaganda machine of England was called “The Ministry of Information” – in America it was the “Committee on Public Information”. One of its members was Edward Bernays, founder of the Public Relations industry – Also known as PR.

It was called Propaganda back then, but I guess “propaganda” became a dirty word – for the obvious nefarious reasons – but it was just a “mere” word, wasn’t it?

So “propaganda” is now euphemistically reformed…Voila!

“Public Relations” – sounds cozy, huh. Like a distant branch of the family tree you never knew. Kissin’ cousins.

Edward Bernay’s pivotal book was simply called, “Propaganda” and as the father of PR, he reveals the technology to regiment “the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers.”

Fast forward to today and we see how this PR technology has evolved to become the chief component in a system of control — the ability for the Governments of the world to control their citizens, for Corporations to create their consumers, and for the Establishment to manufacture public opinion like a product rolling off an assembly line.

So next time you see that touchy-feely BP ad with sun-drenched yellow and life-giving green, think twice about who got paid and
why to bring this “corporate transformation” before your eyes.

This is BP – but it’s not “Beyond Petroleum”…

It’s “Beyond Propaganda”.

It’s time to take BP, nay, the entire fossil fuel industry to task, and move our planet beyond petroleum. A decent and survivable future demands us to fundamentally transform the way we power our global economy. You can do your part by joining the chorus of sane voices calling for this Copernican shift to build a truly brighter reality for a more sustainable expression of civilization.