Moderate Muslims Are the World's Swing Voters
Posted: 3 February 2009 - Huffington Post. Moderate Muslims should be seen as the world's swing voters. The Obama administration should think carefully about the lessons of the past eight years, indeed the past 80 years. There are hundreds of millions of moderate Muslims in the world, and they are waiting for an American partner that is cognizant of its role in a long, difficult history of colonialism and imperialist interventions. They, too, are looking for a "new deal." A president with the name of Barack Hussein Obama presents an opportunity, but the opening may not last long.
In Canada, Regular Folks Are Put to Work on Reforms
San Jose Mercury News, by Steven Hill, 17 November 2004. One of the solutions may lie across the border in Canada. It's called a Citizens' Assembly, and it was on display last year in the province of British Columbia. The government there turned over to the people the task of basic political reform, and by doing so took the partisanship out of the process, something California badly needs.
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Captain Nemo’s Dream: How Europe Draws Power
From the Sea
Article: 23 February 2010 - The Globalist. While wind and solar power are the most common forms of renewable energy deployed in Europe, other energy forms are gradually being utilized and show impressive potential. One of these is power derived from the sea. Hill discusses how the EU is developing this unconventional alternative energy source. Europe is experimenting with all sorts of renewable energy and transportation options that previously had limited appeal. They are viewing this as a new industrial revolution.
There's No Place Like Europe: Steven Hill on
Medical House Calls, Multiparty Politics, and
Other American Fantasies
Interview: 18 October 2010 - host Alissa Bohling for Truthout. Some of Europe's governments have managed to keep special interest groups at bay thus facilitating the use of carbon trading markets to lower greenhouse emissions. Another political advantage for Europeans is that they have proportional representation. So they can have a Green Party that gets elected and is in the legislature, pushing their agenda, to the point where environmental policy put forward by the Greens ten and 15 years ago is now mainstream German or Swedish or French or whatever politics.
Europe Needs a Public Relations Makeover
Article: 16 July 2010 - Social Europe Journal. Hill suggests that Europe should start bragging about itself because there is much to brag about. Europe is the leading innovator in preparing for global warming. Jobs are not pitted against the environment! There is widespread deployment of conservation practices and “green design” in everything from automobiles, buildings, light bulbs and toilets that help Europeans reduce their ecological footprint. Additionally, Europe’s green industry of windmills, solar panels and trains, has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs and is exporting its innovations to the world.
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China’s Political Development at a Crossroad.
Article: 25 May 2012 - China-US Focus.
This past year has been the worst of times and the best of times for China’s political development. Less than a year before China’s decennial transfer of power among its top leadership, that elite world was rattled by a disturbing episode of scandal, corruption and political murder in one of China’s largest cities.
My Lunch at the European Commission: ‘Why is Europe Losing the Public Relations Battle to China?'
Article: 22 December 2010 – Social Europe. Hill explains that the media fall back on lazy journalism and inadequate research methodologies casting America as the existing superpower and China as the up-and-coming superpower even though Europe is vastly superior in just about every way we count these things when compared to China. He points out that Europe is losing the public relations battle to China because the EU hasn’t created its own public relations apparatus to help explain the importance of Europe to the world.
The China Superpower Hoax
Article: 23 September 2010 published on Truthdig AlterNet. China must have the best public relations maestros in the world. How else would a country with a lower per capita income than Iran, Mexico and Kazakhstan, one of the worst environmental records of any major nation, endemic corruption, jails stuffed with dissenters, and a dictatorship, besides, be hailed by so many as the next global superpower?
China's Robber-Baron Ways
Article: 23 September 2008 - New York Times. In its march to modernity, Beijing's ruling Communist Party took off the economic shackles of the Mao years and relaunched the country as a capitalist-communist state - a real oddball coupling, if ever there was one. Part of this process involved the radical devolution of economic power to over 30 provinces, fostering a kind of anarchic federalism.
China and the Long Road Ahead
Posted: 6 September
2008 - World Policy Blog. During the Olympics, China showed the world that it can throw a heck of a coming out party. But traveling here afterward, one sees the many complexities and challenges facing this vast and ancient land.
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ICANN: the Secret Government of the Internet?
Article: April, 2001 - Labornet viewpoints: Global online communication for a democratic, independent labor movement. Also posted at: In These Times, 15 May 2000. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a little-known international body that oversees crucial Internet functions. Depending on whose description you read, it is either an innocuous non-profit with a narrow technical mandate, or the first step in corralling the Internet for commercial and other purposes. Despite the centrality of it's role in the online world, there has been almost no media coverage of ICANN. The question of who should control this new form of global communication requires an answer.
WTO Dissent In the Streets, Instead Of In the Legislature?
Article: 26 April 2000 - Labornet viewpoints: Global online communication for a democratic, independent labor movement. As the clouds of tear gas dispersed over the streets of Seattle, one couldn't help but wonder where all this dissent over the World Trade Organization came from. Certainly in booming economic times we have not heard much vocal opposition in our state and federal legislatures.
WTO Problems Underscores Need
for U.S. Labor Party
Article: 12 December 1999 - Albion Monitor. No matter which political party has been at the helm, Democrats or Republicans, the U.S. government and corporations have been the world's primary boosters for the World Trade Organization and globalization. Unfortunately, the heat of debate usually has reduced the complexities of the issue to simplistic slogans and sound bites.
An Antidote to GATT: Stakeholders vs. Stockholders
Article: 2000, in Labornet viewpoints: Global online communication for a democratic, independent labor movement. Also posted at: The Humanist, March-April, 1995. With NAFTA behind us and GATT in front of us, it's a sane response for working people to start feeling surrounded. There seems to be little to stop these steamrollers from running us over, as the workers of the world prepare to unite finally -- in the unemployment line. But, Hill points out, there are stubborn pockets of resistance to free trade that have sprung up over the last few years.
Stakeholders vs. Stockholders
Article: 2000, in Labornet viewpoints: Global online communication for a democratic, independent labor movement. Hill looks at the enduring legacy of the Pennsylvania law that protects the rights of stakeholders, as opposed to the rights of the stockholders with respect to corporate-community relations. States and communities seeking new strategies to cope with job losses and corporate disinvestment associated with global free trade would do well to understand the opportunities provided by a legal framework solidifying stakeholder rights.
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