Damary Bonilla
July 3rd 2022 6:29 PM
to me
Hi Peter, it was great seeing you at Saw Creek Committee day last Saturday. I'm sorry I didn't get back to the tent to talk with you. Let's reconnect as I appreciate your support of my 2016 State Representative campaign in the 189th District.
Damary Bonilla
From Peter Burgess
July 4th 2022 11:16 AM
to Damary Bonilla
Apologies ... Happy 4th ... Monday is normally a working day, and I find myself at a loose end ... so this quick note turned into a very long rant ............ I hope you don't mind !!!!!!!!!
I am going to be a lot more careful on July 4th than I was on the Saw Creek Community Day when our paths crossed briefly. It was great to see you again and learn a tiny bit of your onward journey.
My daughter (Philippa) and I both got a touch of sunstroke that day. I told Philippa that I was going to head home after talking to you, but when you didn't get back to the Men's Club tent I amused myself eating, drinking and talking ... and the time passed. Meanwhile Philippa made her way to the parking area and finding my car still there got into some concern because in theory I should have been long gone. She knew I was 'light headed' from the heat and reported this to the Saw Creek Security folk who set out to 'find me' as well as giving Philippa a place to cool off herself. It was quite a while before they found me comfortably situated in the Men's Club tent, but before they had me as a 'missing person'. I don't think they mobilized the Pike County deep water search and rescue team but everyone else seemed to know I was missing. When I got home, I expected Philippa to be already there, but she wasn't. I had a short period of new panic before she turned up and was able to put the whole little saga together. It was more than a little gratifying to see how seriously everyone concerned had taken my disappearance and how fast things can move when a lot of people are pulling together ... it was actually Jessica who found me ... making me feel a lot like a naughty well loved 6 year old !!!!!!!!
As to completing the second half of the meeting we never had ... there is a lot to talk about. As you know, I am not well versed in local politics and not really local anything. When I was 'working' it was mainly international and very different from the US in almost every way. I have not travelled in a long time, but continue to think about how we need to do the management analysis of economics, society and the environment in a coherent, comprehensive and relatively simple way. I have been calling this TrueValueMetrics.org for quite a long time ... before that I called in Multi Dimension Impact Accounting ... and before that I used it in my international consulting work without it having any name!
My son is not very impressed with my career because nothing I did seemed to play out well ... and in some ways he is absolutely right. I got to work in many of the hot spots around the world and know something of how bad life can be when society gets to be run by the military and corrupt politicians often with the passive cooperation of the wealthy business elite. Democracy and the ballot box is a great inconvenience for those who want to own positions of power ... and the United States is a lot more fragile and closer to becoming a 'failed' state than I ever expected when I chose to come here more than 60 years ago.
These are some of the places I have done consulting assignments over the years: many countries in West Africa: Liberia, Cote-d;Ivoire, Benin, Ghana. Nigeria, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Guinea (Conakry), Guinea Bissau, Gambia, Senegal, Mauretania, Mali, Niger ... other countries in Africa: Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan, Uganda, Burundi, Malawi, Namibia, South Africa. Lesotho, Mozambique, ... some countries in the Middle East and South Asia: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman. Yemen. Afghanistan, Pakistan. India, Mauritius, La Reunion, Madagascar, Burma (Myanmar), Thailand, Laos, Hong Kong ... some countries in the Caribbean / Latin America: Jamaica, Haiti, Barbados, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guyane Francaise, Surinam, Brazil, ... and some countries in the former Soviet Union: ... Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine. While I worked for a good number of years in the US corporate world, when I started doing work as an independent consultant I only got international work. I did not do consulting assignments in Europe, nor mainland China and the famous Asian Tigers ... Japan and South Korea.
With respect to the upcoming 2022 US elections ... I am very worried.
My core position is that progressive democrats stand for policies that are very good for at least 80% of the population of the United States. The idea that the democrats are struggling to get 50% of the vote suggests to me that the democrats are doing terrible messaging which is then amplified by the GOP's mastery of social media misinformation.
Quite often I listen in to the 4 pm Sunday afternoon ZOOM meeting of the Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) which gives me a bit of an idea what is going on around the USA. Mostly these are people with a lot more experience in Democratic politics than I have, but the way in which they give comfort to non-Democrats by setting up different part of the Democrat leadership including the President annoys me because it is rarely coupled with sad reality that the Democrats can hardly get a majority in the House and the Senate ... they scraped in with about 50% of the votes when an effective Democrat party should be getting at least 80% of the votes.
Democrats should be taking a victory lap right now because of what has been accomplished post-Trump by the Biden administration ... which is far from insignificant. In fact, the socio-economic performance of the USA in the past 18 months has been very strong, though you would not know it from the way in which Democrats talk about it ... I am in the process of building my own list of Biden accomplishments that have been implemented, those that Biden would like to get legislated but cannot because of the tiny (and essentially unworkable) majority ... much of which is also buried in the omnibus Build Back Better draft legislation.
Getting out of Afghanistan has become a Biden failure ... really???????????? What about th 20+ years of foolish US foreign policy that got the country stuck in that part of the world for ever and now it is ALL Biden's fault. Actually, much of the post Soviet US foreign policy weakness can be traced back to President Bush senior in the early 90s. I experienced this first hand myself when I was doing work in Afghanistan, and I recently listened to an interview with Jeffrey Sachs (Columbia University) who had an almost identical experience with his work around the same time in Moscow. While the US departure from Afghanistan was messy and repeated over and over on TV, it was also amazingly successful and at a pretty substantial scale. It should have been done better but it calls into question the competence of the operational levels of the States Department and the Department of Defense much more than the competence of President Biden. For those of use who have had to interact with the US overseas, it comes as no surprise that almost everything that could go wrong with the exit from Afghanistan did happen ... while at the same time, the pure power of the military in evacuation mode was impressive ... and again the mess that got left behind is also distressing ... but not the President' fault but rather a manifestation of US systemic international incompetence
Meanwhile Biden is not getting that much credit for the amazing rehabilitation of NATO in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the way in which the EU has come together together with others including the UK and Canada.in support of Ukraine. The sanctions regime now being imposed on Russia is tough and holding, in no small part because of the US and especially Biden's leadership in this matter.
And I don't see much credit being given to Biden for what is going on with the January 6th Hearings. To his credit, Biden is not weighing in on every move of the Committee. As I listen to the proceedings myself, I am impressed by how well Biden has picked up the pieces of a completely broken Presidency
I find it difficult to explain how anyone can be a supporter of Donald Trump ... but I know that there are a lot of people who think he is a genius. I met two of them at the Top of the World in Saw Creek a few days ago. I think they now live in Saw Creek, but during their working career they worked in construction on Trump projects in Manhattan. They made very good money, and they did very good work. They were unionized and New York City was on a very positive trajectory. Quite reasonably, they give Donald Trump, the developer, credit for their success. From my perspective this is a reasonable conclusion with respect to their personal experience and the New York City ecosystem. In most parts of the United States union power is long gone and good jobs in the trades have been replaced by much lower paid jobs in distribution, retail and food service. These two guys did not include in their thinking anything to do with Trump's impact on all the other dimensions of America's socio-enviro-economic system. Not their fault ... the messaging from the Democrats has been incomprehensible, and the fact that they are not at all convinced is not unsurprising.
I talk about 80% of the people in the United States getting benefit from a strong progressice portfolio of programs ... but what about the other 20%? The answer to that is pretty clear to me, though quite difficult to describe. There is a huge amount of money wealth locked up in the ownership of very few people and companies in the modern world. Much of this 'big number' is a result of stock market appreciation, and in some ways this is a completely phony component of global wealth. The number will go down as the stock market goes down. For very rich people and companies this won't change anything but a number on a piece of paper. For more ordinary folk who have decided to ride the stock market, this has real world consequences ... and will impact voter behavior come November.
A big part of the top 20% are not ultra super wealthy ... but are very comfortably off and not in any hurry to put their comfort at risk. They go along with everything to do with maintaining the financial performance of the economy and all its components ... and oppose most everything to do with social progress as well as profit-reducing environmental initiatives. At some level they realize that active involvement in progressive programs will put them at risk and perhaps set in motion a slippery slide that is difficult to arrest. Trump and other parts of the GOP have shown that they are not nice to people and organizations that do not tow the line.
I see the modern media as a serious problem that needs to be handled. Most media is owned by the wealthy elite ...and even the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) is beholden to a dangerous extent on wealthy donors. The flow of information that used to be carefully curated before circulation now goes from origination to huge social circulation almost instantly ... a marvelous example of technology, but a serious degradation of the media ecosystem. One has to wonder 'What would Walter Cronkite do?' in the current media mess where serious curation covers only a tiny part of the information that is easily accessible. Much of the mainstream media seems to be paying careful attention to content to make sure that owners and donors are not upset by the content which translates to a certain level of throttling of progressive content !!!!!!!
I also see most modern activism as ineffective ... more an excuse for a street party than anything else. Trying to replicate the 1960s' movements in the 2020s is not going to work, though there are things to learn from earlier movements. Modern communications should get used to link ultra local community activism with state level and national level programming and coordination. The local level is where we all live and have our 'kitchen tables' ... and most important ,,, get to vote. The State and the National Levels (and to some extent also the local level) are where we should get to hold those who get elected to account. With the proper organization, the important progressive policies that have support all the way up and down the hierarchy can be put in front of legislators so that they have useful things to do.
I should stop ... thanks for giving me the opportunity to put some of this into writing. It is not super-coherent but more a stream of conscience ... and perhaps I can use it in the future ... sooner rather than later ... to get my thinking more organized and coherent
Best for the 4th ... and best for the future. There is an awful lot at stake !!!!!!!!!!!
Best
PeterB
_____________________________
Peter Burgess ... Founder and CEO
TrueValueMetrics ... Meaningful Metrics for a Smart Society
http://www.truevaluemetrics.org
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/peterburgess1/
Telephone: 570 202 1739
Email: peterbnyc@gmail.com
Skype: peterbinbushkill
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