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Edward Mokurai Cherlin (Cupertino, CA)

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Barack Obama has pledged to seek a doubling of US foreign aid, including a $2 billion Global Education Fund. This would bring us up to half of what every President since Kennedy has pledged, and none has delivered. Keith Ellison has introduced a Global Marshall Plan bill, asking for much higher contributions, with the aim of putting an end to the fundamental economic imbalances in the world, and enabling global peace and prosperity. We can do better than either of these plans. The topic of this blog is research and planning currently underway to overfulfill the Millennium Development Goals and the Global Marshall Plan, combining One Laptop Per Child, electricity and Internet even for the poorest and most remote villages, and microfinance for this infrastructure and for the new businesses that they enable. We already know how to do it more effectively than the politicians, at lower cost to get started, and at a profit all around within a few years. Would you care to join us? * Bring the whole world into the conversation about our future * End poverty at a profit for all * Obliterate the Digital Divide, don't just bridge it * End poverty, don't just reduce it * Remove the motives for terrorism, don't just try to capture and kill terrorists * Prevent the next global pandemic, don't just keep it confined among the poor Your idea here.

Obama and ideology

By Edward Mokurai Cherlin - Nov 9th, 2008 at 2:20 pm EST

Also listed in: 10 groups

From a story about Obama's days at Harvard Law from Politico.com:
...
> In the end, though, Obama's time on the Review mirrored other aspects of his
> life. Even in the staunchly liberal milieus in which he has spent his entire
> adult life, Obama has managed to lead without leaving a clear ideological
> stamp, and to respect--and even, at times, to embrace--opposing views. To
> his critics, that's a sign of a lack of core beliefs. To his admirers, it's
> the root of his appeal.
>
> "To understand what someone else is trying to say isn't just an editorial
> skill," said McConnell. "It's a life skill.²

The whole point is that Obama's politics, indeed his whole life, is
about respect for people and ideas. It isn't about ideology. Being
able to understand what someone else is trying to say is more than a
life skill. It is what distinguishes genuine leaders such as Gandhi,
King, and Mandela from politicians and demagogues.

This immediately causes trouble from those who believe that their own
ideology trumps thinking, facts, anybody else's ideology, or anything
else, whether on the Loony Left or the Religious/Rapacious Right,
terrorists, former revolutionaries still clinging to power, or
whatever.

The force of ideologies comes from a combination of genuine grievances
or desires and genuine fears with a plausible but fundamentally insane
program for dealing with them. As H. L. Mencken said, "For every
problem, there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong." The
movement's followers can think, "If he's right about the problem, he's
probably right about the solution," a clear fallacy but a case where
logic is easily trumped by emotion.

Karl Marx was spot on about the problems of workers under Scroogian
Social Darwinism. His Communist economic and political theories are
supported only by the outrage about those problems, not by anything
else. This says nothing about the merits of European Social Democratic
policies, which have essentially nothing to do with Communism other
than a concern for humanity.

The Religious Right is correct that abortion is usually, in their
terminology, the sin of murder. However, their proposed solutions only
make the matter worse, just like the Inquisition before them.

Most of the rich are under a compulsion (explained by Thorstein Veblen
in The Theory of the Leisure Class) to demonstrate that they are
richer than others. These leads to the notion that the proper purpose
of politics and economics is to make the rich even richer, and keep
everybody else down. "All for ourselves, and nothing for other people,
seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the
masters of mankind."--Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

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It's not over 'til it's *all* over

By Edward Mokurai Cherlin - Nov 5th, 2008 at 8:04 pm EST

Also listed in: 9 groups

The people (speaking charitably) behind the ultra-sleaze smear campaign, claiming that Vietnam veteran and triple amputee Max Cleland was a friend of Osama bin Laden, are at it again. Through the well-worn techniques of Republican vote suppression (http://www.gregpalast.com/the-steal-you-wont-see), Saxby Chandliss, winner of that "election", is ahead in this year's Georgia Senate race against Democrat Jim Martin.

But not enough ahead. He has fallen short of 50%, with the result that this contest is going to a runoff on Dec. 2. I don't know whether that is enough time to reregister those who were illegally thrown off the rolls, or to get a court to reinstate them, as in other states this year. I mean to find out, because Chandliss may well be the final obstacle to Democrats getting over 60 votes in the Senate and a filibuster-proof majority without Joe Lieberman.

This is where you come in. Just as we phonebanked all of the swing states in the Presidential election, now we have a new task:

Phonebanking Georgia

Bring the good ol' iPod folks! We'll sing another song,
Sing it with a spirit that will start the world along,
Sing it like we used to sing a hundred thousand strong,
While we were phonebacking Georgia

Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee.
Hurrah! Hurrah! The ballot makes you free,
So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea,
While we were phonebacking Georgia.

"Barack's all-inclusive crew will never make the coast!"
So the saucy sleazeballs said and 'twas a handsome boast
Had they not forgot, alas! to reckon with the Host
While we were phonebanking Georgia.

So we made a thoroughfare for freedom and her train,
Sixty miles of latitude, three hundred to the main;
Oppression fled before us, for resistance was in vain
While we were phonebanking Georgia.

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On the Rights of Unnatural Persons

By Edward Mokurai Cherlin - Sep 16th, 2008 at 6:05 pm EDT

Also listed in: 10 groups

I just heard about this.

> I've been infuriated by the European Union (UK) proposal to have an
> extension to copyright which will make copyright on any sound recording from
> the now 50 odd years to 95 years.
>
> I believe, that if this proposal , if approved would make changes in many
> places . Is it right, not right I don't know I just felt angry .

The theory of copyright is that rewarding artists and authors with temporary monopoly rights is of benefit to society as a whole, because it increases our collective Intellectual Property (part of our CommonWealth) when works pass into the Public Domain. Of late, however, governments have been listening to corporate interests rather than the public, and have greatly overrated the advantages to the economy of corporate profits, and greatly underestimated the value to the public of ending copyrights sooner.

Actually, I should say that politicians greatly overrate the importance of their own reelections, and shirk the common good at every turn, except where there are no large corporations seeking profit at the expense of the commonwealth.

The only remedy is for the public to gather together to enforce its own rights and the obligations of others. Nobody gives you your rights if you cannot defend them, especially if there is money to be made or power to be acquired in denying them.

I think that a large part of what we need to do to in order to get public control of our government and our economy is to end corporate personhood. Corporations have by law too many rights and not enough responsibilities. They are in law equal to natural persons (human beings), but that means that in practice they become far more equal.

I have been considering this problem, and come to the conclusion that corporate personhood is unconscionable, as a form of slavery. No other persons may be owned. No other persons may be told what to do, without having a right to their own opinions on the matter. No other persons may be held to a legal standard that forbids them to consider any motive to action other than shareholder profit, and by extension forbids any of their employees to consider any other motive. We have created a class of legal persons that by law may not have consciences, and given the majority of the population up to their direct control in the workplace, and indirect control through their undue influence in government.

Now, I don't propose simple emancipation for corporations, and I certainly don't propose extending US Fourteenth Amendment protections, written to help human ex-slaves, to them. If nobody owned the corporations, who would own or control their profits? What would they do for governance? Owners in principle elect the Boards of Directors of corporations, which in turn appoint top management, which then hires and manages everybody else. (In reality, boards have worked out how to become self-perpetuating.)

What to do, then? Well, I don't know for sure. We could repeal personhood, but then we have to write all-new charters for corporations, specifying their rights and duties by some other means. We could keep a form of personhood, but legislate away the requirement to consider only profit. At any rate, we could establish the principle that these fictional persons do not have the rights of real persons, only more so. Maybe someone can come up with a better idea.

I am now imagining Michael Moore at GM headquarters, this time not demanding to see top management, but to interview the corporation in person. Legally there is such a person, but how do you talk to...Him? Her? It? Them?

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To all Democratic worrywarts

By Edward Mokurai Cherlin - Sep 15th, 2008 at 5:33 pm EDT

Also listed in: Citizen Strategy Think Tank | Impeachers for Obama | Muslims 4 Obama

Is it better to curse the darkness, or to teach people to make candles?

Here is my idea of what we should be doing. Would you care to join me?

I just submitted an earlier form of this ad idea to DFA at https://democracyforamerica.com/contribution_pages/67-video-ideas/contributions.

Why don't you send them an idea, and maybe a contribution at the same time?

[Video: jobless workers waiting in lines. Church food and job training programs.]

Voice over: Barack Obama took a job on the South Side of Chicago, working with the churches there. He saw the problems that the community faced first-hand, when steel mills closed and thousands lost their jobs. He did something about it then, and in the Illinois legislature and the Senate. He is ready to do much more about it today, if we support him doing it. But some people don't want us to do that.

[Video: Rudy Giuliani at Republican Convention]

Giuliani: He was a community organizer. (laughs) What's that?

[Video: Delegates pumping fists and jeering]

Republican delegates: Ze-ro! Ze-ro!

[Video: Obama bio, selections]

Voice over: Senator Obama has indeed been a community organizer, like millions of other Americans concerned about their communities and their country. He was a practicing lawyer, a professor of Constitutional law, and a State senator, too, before he was elected Senator from Illinois.

[Video: Giuliani scandal headlines, "rich get richer, poor get poorer" headlines, cutting veterans' benefits and vetoing children's programs, Katrina,...]

Voice over: The Constitution, the community, and the country. Those are jokes to former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the Republican party's elite. When they laugh and jeer at Senator Barack Obama's record, they are making fun of you, your friends, and your neighbors. They have no interest in your hopes and aspirations for yourself and your children. They don't want you to know this, but they just said, out loud in public, that they aren't going to give people in your community a shot at the American Dream.

You figure it out.

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Logistics, Strategy, and Tactics

By Edward Mokurai Cherlin - Sep 3rd, 2008 at 7:08 pm EDT

Also listed in: 6 groups

A good question, one that deserves discussion on the list.

On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 11:55 AM, Eric C <esoteric103@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Edward,
>
> Thanks for the response;
[private communication removed]

> Could you clarify how you differentiate "strategy" and "tactics"? I believe they go hand in hand, but am curious to know how you conceptualize them. Maybe you could provide a rough breakdown of topics or keywords that fall under "strategy" so I have some examples to keep in mind moving forward.

In military matters, they are fairly clearly distinguished conceptually, but they are always intertwined. We can distinguish among troops, equipment and supplies in a similar way, but each is heavily dependent on the availability of both others. Infantry needs combat weapons (rifles, grenades, machine guns...), artillery and air support, and of course food and ammo. Tanks need crews, ammo, and fuel. And so on. Ammo, fuel, spare parts, tools and the rest require transport, which requires more men and more fuel, air cover and ground support, and so on again. Everybody depends on engineers to build camps, roads, and bridges; cooks; medics; and mathematicians (to break codes and solve the Operations Research problems about the most efficient use of resources).

Strategy is about what we want to accomplish on the battlefield in order to win the war, and what resources to apply. Tactics is the detailed Howto for the fighting. In particular, tactics is about making adjustments when strategy meets battleground reality. Logistics is how to supply the needed resources, including the supplies (food, fuel, ammo) to support the main resources (troops, equipment). Logistics, strategy, and tactics all feed back into the issues of keeping supply lines open and having sufficient materiel and transport capability to achieve the logistical goals determined by the overall strategy and the tactical situations that result.

Robert E. Lee had a strategy of not confronting Northern forces head on, except when the North suicidally attacked fortified positions. He made a major error at Gettysburg, when he ordered Pickett's Charge in violation of that strategy. The South had the masters of cavalry tactics, but Southern cavalry leaders sometimes made major tactical errors, such as losing contact with Lee too long.

There is overlap when new technology or new methods of organization enables tactics that in turn enable new strategies and invalidate old ones. Hitler's blitzkrieg strategy using tanks and other highly mobile forces was based on the tactic of bypassing the French Maginot Line, designed on the basis of WW I strategic thinking. Tactics based on Operations Research enabled a major strategic realignment in anti-submarine warfare in WW II.

Tank strategy and tactics are always dependent on the logistics of supplying fuel, ammunition, and other materiel. Patton had to hold up his rapid drive toward Germany when supply lines became stretched, or when fuel was diverted to Monty's forces. Some German tank units ran out of fuel completely and had to surrender during the Battle of the Bulge, when Patton's forces closed the supply lines behind them. The first great failure of Hitler's Russian campaign was that the strategy of gaining the Caucasus oil fields in a blitzkrieg ran up against the sheer size of the Russian forces long enough for the Russian winter to take control of logistics, strategy, and tactics. So in addition to German soldiers freezing and starving to death, there was not enough fuel for the German tanks.

Strategy also depends on production logistics. It was hard for the public to tell in the early years of WW II, but the Allies were winning both the air and sea wars against Germany, in spite of heavy losses. The British were able to shoot down German planes and sink German submarines faster than the Germans could replace them, while the US was able to build ships and planes to send to Europe faster than the Germans could destroy them, even before the US officially entered the war.

One of the great Chinese generals of antiquity was running out of arrows. This is normally a logistical problem of supply. This general looked at it as a strategic problem instead, and came up with a tactical solution. He arranged for a number of boats to travel at night during a heavy fog, up and down the river separating the forces, loaded with hay. The enemy fired all night, and in the morning the general's troops collected the arrows from the hay and returned to their previous strategy, well-supplied.

This strategy is to get the enemy to supply you. The tactics have to do with boats, hay, fog, gloom of night, and so on. Also what Terry Pratchett calls "headology".

In our political campaign, logistics has to do with matters such as state-by-state organization, shoes on the ground, phone banks, signs, and continued fundraising. Obama is far ahead of McCain on all of these.

Strategy has to do largely with message, including overt messages (platform issues, speeches, position papers) and the messages sent by behavior.

Strategy also has to do with which states to target, based on closeness in the polls and on other information. Thus FL, NC, OH, VA are large tossup states, but we do not neglect smaller tossup states, nor do we neglect states that lean toward Obama, but with thin margins, like MI and PA, or even the reddest of red states. (Howard Dean is quite right in his insistence on a 50-state strategy for the party overall.)

Tactics have to do with delivering the message to specific target audiences, and staying on message. Speechwriting, scheduling events, ad buys, rapid response to attacks...Encouraging Joe Biden to answer Yes or No more often, as he has been, and not to launch into unnecessarily detailed explanations.

Tactically, Obama is unsurpassed in turning attacks back on the attacker.

The question here is not how the base perceives these matters, but how many new voters the campaigns can bring in, and how many swing voters they can bring over to our side. The Obama campaign is unequaled on registering new voters and recruiting them as campaign activists, while McCain has turned off many in the Christian Right and the Center both, and can't find anything new that will please both groups. The Christian Right loves Palin, but the Center doesn't.

Obama is well ahead with the swing voters, but this is where the remaining uncertainty lies. Some people are worried about a Bradley effect, where white voters lie to black pollsters about their intentions in an upcoming election, while others predict a "reverse Bradley effect" because the pollsters can't contact young people who have only mobile phones. History will be made, one way or the other, as we wait to see how much Obama wins by, and how many Senators we can pick up. In the meantime, we need to continue think strategically and execute our well-planned tactics, and don't sweat the small-minded stuff from McCain & Co.

The analyses of the polls show Obama leading by 32-107 (averaging to about 60) in the Electoral College in the last week, and by 6-10% in the popular vote in all but one poll, Zogby at +2%. The average of the results of the last five days summarized at

http://3bluedudes.com/ProjectDatabase.htm

show

Obama 285
McCain 216
Tossup 37

Obama is up significantly from the week before.

Democrats and Republicans are both subject to rumor. But the Republican party leadership and the Rovists in the McCain campaign encourage scurrilous rumors (OK, smears) about the opposition as a matter of overt strategy (Obama is a Muslim, the AntiChrist, a supporter of the terrorists, the most liberal member of the Senate, a flip-flopper, a demagogic partisan, an elitist, too Black, not Black enough, too much of a celebrity...), while the Democratic party and campaign leadership scuttle them (Sarah Palin's Down syndrome baby is not her daughter's [actually unborn] baby, and in fact ad hominem attacks on Palin's family are "off limits",...). You will notice also that there are many fewer scurrilous rumors about McCain and Palin to begin with, because they arise as real rumors, not as campaign dirty tricks. Some on the Right will seize on these numbers to use against Obama, but they are not getting traction in the Center.

> Eric C.
>
>
> --- On Mon, 9/1/08, Edward Cherlin <echerlin@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> From: Edward Cherlin <echerlin@gmail.com>
>> Subject: Strategy and Logistics (was Re: [CitizenStrategyThinkTank] Re: Re: ADMIN: Enough about Sarah Palin rumors...)
>> To: esoteric103@yahoo.com
>> Cc: "Citizen Strategy Think Tank" <CitizenStrategyThinkTank@groups.barackobama.com>
>> Date: Monday, September 1, 2008, 9:03 PM
>> On Mon, Sep 1, 2008 at 3:39 PM, Eric C
>> <esoteric103@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> > A little late to the game here, but I completely agree
>> that remaining focused on tactics
>>
>> Officially, it's strategy, on this list, but I have no
>> complaint about
>> discussing real tactics. However, there are a number of
>> versions of
>> the following saying:
>>
>> http://www.mackenzieinstitute.com/2004/terror030304.htm
>> Military officers have a saying: "Amateurs talk about
>> strategy,
>> dilettantes talk about tactics, and professionals talk
>> about logistics."
>>
>> I first heard it as "Amateurs talk about tactics,
>> dilettantes talk
>> about strategy, and professionals talk about
>> logistics," but never
>> mind.
>>
>> The Obama campaign has had the logistics down for well over
>> a year,
>> having absorbed the lessons of the Howard Dean campaign
>> four years ago
>> as well as the lessons of Chicago and Illinois politics.
>> This includes
>> sufficient shoes on the ground as well as interstate
>> phone-banking,
>> excellent Internet resources, and fund-raising.

--
Silent Thunder [ 默雷 / शब्दगर्ज / شبدگر ج ] is my name,
And Children are my nation.
The Six Worlds are my dwelling place,
And Truth my destination.

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