Winning the hearts and minds of the people ...American, that is

Retired Management Consultant, Chuck Kelly, gives an overview here of how we got to the place we find ourselves today --a place where business reigns supreme while labor is left to suck pond water.

"American capitalism was on a roll in 1962 when I started my management-consulting career," he says. "Our country had overcome a major depression, won and paid for a world war, created outstanding colleges and universities, financed advanced educations for millions of GIs, and built a huge number of effective corporations."

"Corporations were beginning to have a sense of moral responsibility. Progressive managers believed that loyalty meant something, and that it was earned and owed, by both employee and owner. Executives all across the country shifted their management strategy away from brute force, threats and intimidation, toward improving the quality of work life."

Then what happened? Check out the rest of the story (originally run in the Charlotte Observer) at opednews.com.

And...the liberalism-is-bad lie

And, while we're on the subject, you ought to check this out too (also by Mr. Kelly): How to Change Voter's Bias Against Liberals.

Although Howard Dean expressed it clumsily many observers have pointed out that his reasoning is correct: that if Democrats don't counter Republican-Big Business inroads into the southern working-class with the truth of their situation, Democrats will not win. Chuck Kelly is one of these observers.

What Democrats should be hammering home, says Kelly, is that though Democrats were responsible for the civil-rights legislation which angered many southerners, "What voters ...still don’t appreciate, is that the Democrats who historically supported minority rights are also the ones who have always supported the interests of America’s workers. And Republicans have historically, and still do, represent the interests of big landowners, investors, corporations and the wealthy—at the direct expense of workers."

This is what Howard Dean is trying to get across, and he's right in doing so.

Chuck Kelly is a retired management consultant living in Tega Cay, S.C., and author of "The Destructive Achiever; Power and Ethics in the American Corporation" and "Class War in America." Write him at kellycm@kellysite.net

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See No Evil, Hear No Evil... thinking from one side of the brain

Slowly, slowly oozing from the wound that is Iraq..., no, the wound that is the Bush Administration, is the truth.

Oozing here is news from British government sources that Dick Cheney and the Pentagon studiously ignored sound advice from allies (duh).

"British warnings that America was failing before the war to prepare properly for a crumbling security situation in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was ousted were ignored by Vice President Dick Cheney and the Pentagon," says the Guardian.

The Guardian reports that ambassador, Sir Chrisopher Meyer, reveals that in a series of meetings between British and American officials before the start of the war, "The British regularly raised their concerns about how much planning was going on to secure the country after Saddam, but the issue was largely ignored."

The Guardian report exposes a little regarded coincidence about the Vice President. Apparently Dick Cheney not only literally speaks out of one side of his mouth, he thinks out of one side of his brain.

As ambassador Meyers puts it, "The problem was that bureaucratically there is a tendency in Washington to be able to focus on only one big issue at a time.

"I think they were consumed in the contingency planning for war."

He thinks, he thinks! That's sure being gentlemanly.

If competence rather that ideology was the criteria for high political position in the Republican party its candidates might actually be worthy of votes. These days America seems to prefer incompetence and ideology.

If incompetence and ideology were protections against dissolution, the Soviet Union might still be alive.

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11/15/03 Saturday

War Toll

Sgt. Maj. Cornell Gilmore of Stafford, Va., killed in Iraq, was buried Friday in Arlington National Cemetery. (AP)

Judge Moore's Icon of the Ten Commandments

Time for Democrats to shoot steroids?

I wonder what we'd do without war and sports metaphors? Everywhere you turn the world is reduced to Us and Them. And it's gotten as bad here at home. It seems as if we can't even think along other lines. Is this the curse of Adam? The mark of Cain?

We saw it again yesterday and the day before in the debates staged by senate Republicans. Vituperation flew from side to side --posturing, accusations, blaming. As Rodney King (that famous kicking and punching bag of the LAPD) said, "Can't we all just get along?" Apparently not.

In todays paper, NY Times columnist David Brooks takes a look at where he thinks we're heading if Democrats go the way they seem to be going. But I'm not sure his solution is an effective way of dealing with the assault by the right-wing on our system of governence.

Brooks doesn't like what the leading Democratic candidate is selling. As he says in the mock speech he's written for any Democrat willing to give it, "Howard Dean is liberal aggression, and none of us have ever taken that on until today. But now I am relaunching my campaign around one simple slogan: Stop the (partisan political) War."

But with Republican opponents as determined and reckless as Al Qaeda, how do you do that without leading your party into political oblivion? In any two-way confrontation the one with the power has to back off first, otherwise the only other options are capitulation or revolution. If King George of Great Britain had been more accomodating maybe Prime Minister, Tony Blair, would be leading us today.

In the speech Brooks proposes be delivered by one of the Democratic candidates he states that "If we nominate Dean, it will be bad for our party and bad for our country. It will be bad for our party because 40 percent of the voters in this nation call themselves moderates.

"If we nominate Dean, George Bush will have a good shot at winning a large chunk of those votes. That's disgraceful after the partisan way George Bush has led this country. But it will be our fault because we nominated someone just as partisan on the other side."

But it's also possible that having suffered and survived the 4-year reign of Incurious (I-Don't-Read-The-Papers) George, that moderate 40 percent will figure they couldn't do worse with Dean. Maybe they'd figure the scales must be tipped the other way before it's too late. After all, life on a see-saw beats taking a slide to utter catastrophe.

As Brooks himself recalls, "Remember when George Bush used to say he was going to change the tone in Washington? He lied about that. He couldn't even reach out to Jim Jeffords, a moderate in his own party. He was never going to reach out to Democrats. He is too intellectually insecure. He can't handle people who disagree with him, so he retreats into the cocoon of the like-minded."

Maybe it's time for a little liberal aggression. Hell you can't make a touchdown if it's forth and ten and the quarterback bolts out of the trenches toward the wrong goal while the whole line packs up its tanks and artillery and heads for the dugout. Maybe it's time for Democrats to shoot steroids or suck up testosterone drips like their opponents.



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Judge Judged

Judge Roy Moore, once chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, has been pink-slipped by unanimous decision of the state's Court of the Judiciary according to this editorial in today's NY Times. Judge More was ousted for not obeying the law, obviously a prime requisit for a judge. Defying an order by the Alabama court to remove a religious symbol the size of a washing machine he had placed in his court's lobby, his fellow judges judged him out of line.

For those of us who want to steer clear of governments controlled by "god-directed" men like Judge Moore this is good news. The near east is filled "god-directed" men, for instance.

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