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07 Jul 09

Finally, A CEO Speaks Up on How to Renew America - HBR Editors' Blog - Harvard Business Review

Timely.
QUOTE
Immelt exhorted Americans to give up the notion that the U.S. can make it as a services-led, consumption-based economy, where "a mortgage broker is pulling down $5 million a year while a Ph.D. chemist is earning $100,000."

The country must refocus on manufacturing and R&D and must strive to be a leading exporter, he said. He announced that GE was opening an advanced manufacturing and software technology center outside of Detroit near the headquarters of Visteon, the auto parts maker that recently sought bankruptcy protection.

Coincidentally, "Restoring American Competitiveness," an article in the July-August special issue of the Harvard Business Review makes the same case about the importance of manufacturing. It warns that the erosion of the U.S. manufacturing base is seriously undermining the country's ability to innovate. (So much for the idea that we can succeed by letting other countries manufacture the products we invent!)

In his speech, Immelt offered a vision for how the business and government together can revive the economy and solve grand challenges such as clean energy and affordable health care. "We should welcome the government as a catalyst for leadership and change," he said, calling for a "real public-private partnership." (This from a self-described "Republican and free market guy.")
UNQUOTE

This article fits nicely with Konrad Yakabuski Globe & Mail article, "Canada's Innovation Gap." http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/commentary/canadas-innovation-gap/article1203108/

blogs.harvardbusiness.org/...ly_a_ceo_speaks_up_on_how.html - Preview

harvard_business steve_prokesch america economy renewal innovation manufacturing video

24 Dec 07

Hoover Planned Mass Jailing in 1950 - New York Times

The title says it all. I'm an American citizen, and Hoover's ilk just makes me sick. What an unbelievable pig he was, and how shockingly he treated American citizenship... Today we have Bush Jr and his cronies following in Hoover's wake: "Habeas corpus, the right to seek relief from illegal detention, has been a fundamental principle of law for seven centuries. The Bush administration’s decision to hold suspects for years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has made habeas corpus a contentious issue for Congress and the Supreme Court today." Pfui, J. Edgar Hoover, and pfui to all your ilk.

www.nytimes.com/...23habeas.html - Preview

america civil_rights democracy fascist_tendencies fbi j_edgar_hoover liberty

The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.
“In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” it said.
Habeas corpus, the right to seek relief from illegal detention, has been a fundamental principle of law for seven centuries. The Bush administration’s decision to hold suspects for years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has made habeas corpus a contentious issue for Congress and the Supreme Court today.
- - 7 centuries of civilization, swept away by Hoover's paranoia & bigotry. Great. (not) - on 2007-12-24
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- After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush issued an order that effectively allowed the United States to hold suspects indefinitely without a hearing, a lawyer, or formal charges. In September 2006, Congress passed a law suspending habeas corpus for anyone deemed an “unlawful enemy combatant.”
  - - g-d fascist, he's the one who doesn't deserve citizenship, doesn't know what it means - on 2007-12-24
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- But the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the right of American citizens to seek a writ of habeas corpus. This month the court heard arguments on whether about 300 foreigners held at Guantánamo Bay had the same rights. It is expected to rule by next summer.
- Hoover’s plan called for “the permanent detention” of the roughly 12,000 suspects at military bases as well as in federal prisons. The F.B.I., he said, had found that the arrests it proposed in New York and California would cause the prisons there to overflow.
  So the bureau had arranged for “detention in military facilities of the individuals apprehended” in those states, he wrote.
- The prisoners eventually would have had a right to a hearing under the Hoover plan. The hearing board would have been a panel made up of one judge and two citizens. But the hearings “will not be bound by the rules of evidence,” his letter noted.
  - - ha! A kangaroo court, in other words! Brilliant (not) - on 2007-12-24
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28 Feb 07

Reviewing "Reality" (March-April 2007)

www.harvardmagazine.com/...reviewing-reality.html - Preview

america frank_rich media politics socialtheory theater

Image wins out over reality more and more in the battle for attention and belief. Virtually every public event now arrives filtered through a lens, laptop computer, or recording device, and hence nearly all our daily news has been “produced” and woven into some kind of narrative. Old-fashioned, relatively unmediated reality at times appears obsolete.
Though his own political leanings are generally liberal, Rich is equally eager to expose hypocrisy, dissimulation, and phony images emanating from the political left; he’s a muckraker at heart. “If there was a day that Kerry lost the election, it may have come in August [2004], when he took reporters’ questions while posing against the macho landscape of the Grand Canyon,” writes Rich in The Greatest Story Ever Sold. “Asked if he still would have voted to authorize the use of force against Saddam Hussein if he knew then that there were no weapons of mass destruction, Kerry answered yes. Would Kerry have also answered that a Senator should have voted to authorize the Vietnam War even if he knew that the Johnson administration had hyped North Vietnamese attacks on American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin? Hardly. His answer about Iraq was a moment of supreme intellectual dishonesty that sullied his own Vietnam past as surely as the sleazy Swift Boat character assassins had.”
5 more annotations...
- “Al Gore…may be the first public figure in history who has gone overnight from having the personality of a tree to that of a chainsaw mowing down anything in its path.”
- Today, any aspiring politician must successfully exploit the icon-generating machinery of mass culture, less to articulate specific positions on issues than to project image and character. “Right before George W. Bush runs for president, he buys a ranch—one that isn’t really a ranch—to establish the image that he is a red-state shit-kicker rather than the scion of one of the most aristocratic families in the United States, a graduate of Andover, Yale, and Harvard. In the 2004 campaign, you have another Yale aristocrat, John Kerry, driving a Harley Davidson onto the set of the Jay Leno show. That’s just like Bush clearing brush on his ranch. All of us need to question this level of cultural manipulation.”
- The rush for the brush and the motorcycles grows from an increasing awareness of how powerful visual images have become in forming perceptions. Yet images can cut both ways. “Politicians are going nuts about it,” says Rich. “They are very chastened now by what happened to [former Virginia] Senator George Allen, who was caught on video insulting a young man by calling him ‘macaca’ or [former Montana] Senator Conrad Burns, caught dozing off during a hearing. Any video can be slapped up there and come back to haunt them. The Bush White House, which was so masterful at controlling imagery, using the Statue of Liberty and the aircraft carrier as a backdrop for Bush, has really lost its mojo. One example is the hanging of Saddam Hussein—that video has done the Iraqi government, and the Bush White House, enormous damage. Another is Bush’s speech announcing the troop surge in Iraq: he looked scared, very anxious, and was in the strange setting of the White House library instead of the Oval Office. Bush did not look in command.
- In addition, the alternative world of “guerrilla media”—like blogs and the on-line video available at YouTube—“have the effect of loosening the establishment’s grip on the control and shaping of information,” Rich says, citing the example of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney: YouTube has been flooded with viewers seeking the video of his debate with Senator Edward M. Kennedy during a 1994 senatorial campaign in Massachusetts, in which Romney expressed views diametrically opposed to his current positions. “Spin can now be deflected very, very quickly,” says Rich, “not by counter-spin, but by documentary evidence that can be disseminated so quickly and vividly in the new digital world.”
- If such grassroots media are restoring balance to the marketplace of information, it may be not a moment too soon, because images and the meanings they evoke have become so dominant as to seed the culture with vast distortions, Rich charges. “It’s a cultural pattern now: empirical reality doesn’t penetrate as well as it should,” he says. “I have to hope that given the price we’ve paid in Iraq, as a society we’re going to learn something from this. With the world a more dangerous place than ever, and after the wreckage of the Bush years, America has got to get its act together and address these problems. If we can’t agree on what the facts are, then we have no hope. We need to distinguish between facts and showmanship, facts and propaganda. If you can’t agree on the fact that the house is burning down, you can’t put out the fire.”