postal service

Under Article 1, sec. 8 of the US constitution, Congress has the power and duty to make the following uniform throughout the United States, the only public service duty in our Constitution:

...To establish Post Offices and post Roads;...

competition is unfair

COMPETITION IS UNFAIR
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
September 13, 2011
I’ve just been listening to a BBC segment on how among bicyclists blood doping competes with new tests for whether cyclists are corrupted by the practice of giving themselves blood transfusions before they race.
I wonder at the idea that competition, also known as real growth, let alone its representation in sport (today’s Western Roman circus?) Are you a more real competitor if you avoid blood transfusions or advantages of birth in political and economic life? Alfie Kohn’s 1986 book No Competition has long informed my opinion that compassion for the suffering of those closest to us works better than attention to who wins on the football field or on any stock market. It’s time to reframe rhetoric. Those among us who are suffering, and those of us who profit in the process, need a NEW DEAL in our thinking, for all our human sakes. Love and peace--hal

2 steps at a time please

2 STEPS AT A TIME, PLEASE
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
September 12, 2011
On BBC, I’ve just heard an international plea that if women from the global south get cell phones, fewer of them and their children will die. Are we doing “those people” a favor? Will mothers and children be guaranteed the care that keeping them alive obliges us? I am frustrated that we consider only what will save lives in the moment without taking into account apparent consequences of our actions. If pregnant women in the global south (my mother and hence myself are rooted in the US south) and their children survive, who has planned to take care of this wave of children and their care for their parents in emerging generations? We advise and work on how to transform each other’s lives one step at a time. Suppose we take one step further at any political moment? Taking a step further in aggressive action is based in all the right rhetorical distinctions, from good and evil to care and callousness. I feel responsible for calculating the next step of any action in which I participate. CIA-speak for this phenomenon is now called pushback. Let’s think 2 steps before we socially engineer. I think we’re grown up enough to be personally and corporately accountable for calculating pushback when we push. Speaking as an American, may you in Afghanistan forgive us for dropping cluster bombs in your fields among your children as a way of dealing with the phenomenon now known as 9/11. As a US citizen, I apologize for the prevailing US reaction. It doesn’t represent me and many others. Love and peace, hal

memo to npr on 9/11

In New York, the WORLD trade center, the preeminent symbol of global for-profit capitalism, was the target, where people from half the world's nations died. That day, 6,000 civilian non-combatants were reported to have been killed outside the US. I can see that the attack on the Pentagon was an attack on US imperialism, but in New York, it is chauvinist to think the attack was an attack on US rather than a reaction against the world being globally corporatized.





Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com, 209 St. Pierre St., Worthington, OH 43085-2262, 1-614-433-7386

on terror

Sent: Wednesday, September 07, 2011 11:37 AM
To: allsides@wosu.org
Attachments:



I was getting ready for a criminal justice class on social control systems when the planes were hitting the World Trade Center. My first reaction was oh shoot, the terrorists have won, now the US government will overreact out of fear, and attack somewhere like Afghanistan, where we will by retaliation help terrorists recruitment in hardening enmity against us, and the military industrial complex will be served, doing what the Project for a New American Century called for in 1999: creating a new Pearl Harbor to re-forge national unity. Whoever brought off 9/11 (notice the play on our emergency phone number, how clever) must have cheered at the results they got.





Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com, 209 St. Pierre St., Worthington, OH 43085-2262, 1-614-433-7386

sent to worldhaveyoursay@bbc.com: austerity or growth?

The major part of the gross domestic product index of growth is consumer spending--the most sacred "job creator." Now I hear defense of government austerity on grounds that governments should save as middle-class people must now do. But as we follow the advice to be prudent and cut down on expenses, we by definition buy less and hence retard growth and employment. It's a pure contradiction. Please ask your commentators to explain how "recovery" from "recession" reconciles these two demands.





Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com, 209 St. Pierre St., Worthington, OH 43085-2262, 1-614-433-7386