popular logistics

During the Depression, Henry Ford kept his factories running. Similarly Thomas J. Watson, hired salesmen at IBM. Both knew they were investing for the future.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980’s, Cuba found itself in similar, if not worse, conditions. During the Soviet era, Cubans exported most of their main crop - sugar - and imported most of their food and virtually all of their meat. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, they had no export market for overpriced sugar, and thanks to U. S. foreign policy, no way to import food, fertilizer or pesticides.

According to Bill McKibben, in “Deep Economy,” rather than give up, they invested for the future. They planned, they planted crops, and while they lost weight, they succeeded. Their agricultural practices have become a model for sustainable and largely organic agriculture - they don’t use artificial fertilizer or pesticides.

Like the Cubans, the Palestinians have become orphaned children of the Soviet Union. They lost all aid from the USSR. And with the influx of immigrants to Israel from Russia, Ukraine, and other former Soviet Republics, they lost their jobs - why should Israelis hire people who want to kill them when they can hire people who want to join them? Unlike the Cubans, the Palestinians were adopted by Europe and the U. S., who showered money and other aid on them.

But money is a medium of exchange; it is only valuable when it can buy stuff. Thanks, perhaps in large part, to the Arafat’s thievery, the Palestinians have nothing.

Arafat stole every penny he could – to the tune of millions of dollars. He’s gone, but the self-proclaimed “holy men” in Hamas, Hizbollah, Iran and Syria blame the Jews for all their problems. With leadership like this they are doomed. The Palestinians need a leader like Henry Ford, Thomas J. Watson, or even Fidel Castro.

From Irwin Redlener’s Americans at Risk:

Even if the nation’s intelligence capacity is substantially strengthened and homeland security better assured, these systems will never be perfect. An American city could conceivably experience the nightmare of a nuclear detonation. The essential point is that the quality and extent of survival and recovery, even from a nuclear bomb, are affected by the success of our preparedness and mitigation programs.

The current presidential administration is, of course, now well-known for its argument that it “didn’t want the smoking gun to become a mushroom cloud.” Implicit - by omission - was that the strategy of pre-empting the (hypothetical or fictional) threat of nuclear attack by Iraq would so likely to succeed that it wasn’t necessary to take steps to mitigate or prepare for the effects of a nuclear attack.

We didn’t say current GOP President.

Eisenhower’s Chance for Peace Speech

Address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower “The Chance for Peace” delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16,1953. A CROSS OF IRON…Seeking some concrete way to dramatize the futility of the Cold War, President Eisenhower hit upon the idea of comparing peaceful expenditures with the expenditures both the United States and the Soviet Union were making for armaments. Then he capped the comparison with a brilliant allusion to William Jennings Bryan’s famous phrase “a cross of gold”.

In this spring of 1953 the free world weighs one question above all others: the chance for a just peace for all peoples.