Rebuilding

Since Sep­tem­ber 11th, life hasn’t been the same. At the final count, I’ve lost 7 close friends and another 5 acquain­tances. This has shaken me and I have felt a lit­tle help­less since. How­ever, in my sor­row, I have found a new need for action.

Beyond giv­ing money, blood and sup­plies, I’ve been talk­ing to peo­ple about what to do to avoid a repeat of those events. While I usu­ally cover tech­nol­ogy in this newslet­ter, I believe that the fol­low­ing is impor­tant because it does require tech­nol­ogy but also goes beyond that. Here are my thoughts on how we might be able to erad­i­cate ter­ror­ism in the long run.

Why did it happen?

Like many, I’ve been left to won­der why ter­ror­ism hap­pens. Is it because of our lifestyle? Is it because they con­sider us “cor­rupt”? Is it because we are dif­fer­ent? Or is inter­na­tional ter­ror­ism inher­ent to globalization?

As it stands, I’ve con­cluded that the best way to fight ter­ror­ism is to force peo­ple to ques­tion the motives of mad­men like Osama Bin Laden. How do you do this? By giv­ing peo­ple sup­port. By help­ing raise them out of poverty. By show­ing them that we are not bar­bar­ians. By show­ing them that our sys­tem can work for them. By show­ing them that we are tol­er­ant and that our cher­ished free­doms are some­thing we are will­ing to share.

A war on poverty

As a result, I am pre­sent­ing a plan to erad­i­cate ter­ror­ism by wag­ing war on global poverty. It is not an easy fight. It is not one that is pos­si­ble to win overnight. It is not a fight that will result in a bet­ter way of life for us. But it is a fight that will lower the chance of another ter­ror­ist attack. After all, it is eas­ier to rea­son with a per­son who has some­thing to lose than it is to do with a madman.

Com­pul­sory Social Duty

The first step in fight­ing the war against poverty would be through the estab­lish­ment of a social duty corp. Sim­i­lar in nature to the Amer­i­can Peace Corps, this group would be built out of engi­neers, edu­ca­tors, doc­tors, lawyers, financiers, con­struc­tion work­ers, etc, all jobs that are essen­tial to the build­ing of a cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety and of democracies.

This duty would be for a period of two years, prefer­ably right after col­lege. Peo­ple drop­ping out of high school would have to join this ser­vice imme­di­ately. The only dis­pen­sa­tion that would exist for this pro­gram would be to join the military.

The goal of this army would be to build an econ­omy within under­de­vel­oped coun­tries and trans­fer that knowl­edge to local peo­ple. The idea here is to start work­ing as a force for change, help­ing develop an inter­nal eco­nomic sys­tem and work on the estab­lish­ment of democ­ra­cies around the world.

This army of good will would be a global force, and would get in a coun­try at the invi­ta­tion of the exist­ing peo­ple or after agree­ment of the major­ity of U.N. mem­bers. The work period of those peo­ple would be divided into two parts: the first one would be one of edu­ca­tion, before get­ting straight to work. Through that edu­ca­tion work, one would be taught some rudi­ments related to cus­toms, lan­guage, and gen­eral cul­ture within the country.

Dur­ing the ini­tial month of a new member’s ini­ti­a­tion, that train­ing would rep­re­sent a 7 days work-week. Dur­ing the next two months, every­one would work on the front lines to help with feed­ing the hun­gry, and pol­ish off some of the lessons learned in class with some real street training.

After that ini­tial quar­ter, the trainee would be pointed to a work area, based on their skills. Lawyers would work with the local author­i­ties on estab­lish­ing legal frame­works for the coun­try. Financiers would work on estab­lish­ing and reg­u­lat­ing finan­cial trans­ac­tions for new local busi­nesses. Teach­ers would teach schools and recruit from the other groups to estab­lish cur­ric­u­lae in busi­ness, polit­i­cal sci­ence, law, med­i­cine, etc… Doc­tors would run hos­pi­tals. Elec­tri­cians, build­ing work­ers, etc… would work on estab­lish­ing an infra­struc­ture to allow all this to happen.

Each mem­ber would be shad­owed by a local per­son and work on trans­fer­ring their skills to that per­son. It would work, in a way, as a spon­sor model. Dur­ing that period, work­ers would also be hosted in the equiv­a­lent of dorms, where half the peo­ple would be natives and half would be com­ing from the outside.

One could decide to con­tinue beyond their tour of duty and in exchange, would receive ben­e­fits sim­i­lar to those in the military.

This force would be sup­ported by the mil­i­tary to ensure their security.

The tech­nol­ogy

Of course, this effort should take advan­tage of advances in tech­nol­ogy. Since Sep­tem­ber 11th, some groups have orga­nized great web sites to man­age vol­un­teers in the New York area. A sim­i­lar effort could be put in place for the effort I’m describ­ing. Using best of breed Inter­net and intranet tech­nol­ogy, we could develop some tools to help man­age this effort and reduce redun­dan­cies. How­ever, tech­no­log­i­cal efforts in under­de­vel­oped coun­tries are not some­thing that is as easy to do as it is in devel­oped ones.

For starters, there is no infra­struc­ture to speak of: a lot of places have no elec­tric­ity, no run­ning water, no roads, and no phones. In order to use tech­nol­ogy in those efforts, new infra­struc­ture would have to be built. In the ini­tial phase of the effort, these infra­struc­ture would not exist.

As a result, the devel­op­ment of irri­ga­tion sys­tems, elec­tri­cal sup­plies, and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion sup­plies would have to be high on the list (but still below some even more basic needs like food and vaccination.)

In a way, the under­de­vel­oped coun­tries that would be the focus of this effort could become the launch­ing pad for a num­ber of new infra­struc­ture, pri­mar­ily wire­less ones to over­come some of the heav­ier costs of installing a lot of cop­per or fiber optic cables in areas where such solu­tions could not sur­vive harsh weather (trop­i­cal and desert coun­tries) or where other forces of nature are at hand (moun­tains, heavy forests).

In terms of elec­tri­cal sup­plies, we could look at clean tech­nolo­gies like solar power or wind power, which could help gen­er­ate elec­tric­ity in remote areas with­out hav­ing to develop national grids. In terms of tele­phony, wire­less solu­tions could also help over­come obsta­cles. Water sup­plies, how­ever, would prob­a­bly have to be taken care of using the old fash­ioned way (big pipes) and we might want to look at the con­ve­nience of dig­ging up multi­use canals that would allow to not only dis­trib­ute water but also pass on infor­ma­tion through fiber-optics channels.

The one per­cent solution

The war on poverty is one that will take money and man­power. In order to raise money, I sug­gest the pos­si­bil­ity of rais­ing a tax of up to one per­cent on the top median of net worth in devel­oped coun­tries. As a result, a large amount of money would be raised in the devel­oped world to cre­ate a global fund to erad­i­cate poverty.

That money would not be sent directly to the coun­try as hard cur­rency but would be dealt out as sup­plies and as a way to pay for the effort. Only a small part of the money should go to pay­ing for gen­eral admin­is­tra­tion of this program.

Other forms of payment

Cur­rently, in parts of the west­ern world, entires crops are destroyed to sus­tain global prices on food goods. Instead of destroy­ing those goods, they should be shipped away as part of this global effort to end poverty.

Com­pa­nies would also be able to dis­trib­ute inven­tory of tech­nol­ogy needed for this effort in exchange for some tax advan­tage. Using web tech­nol­ogy, a list of needed sup­plies would be avail­able over the web at all time and be updated in real-time. A new dona­tion would be routed using such sys­tem and once the dona­tion has reached its des­ti­na­tion, it would dis­ap­pear from the database.

Using a sys­tem sim­i­lar to the ones used by FedEx and UPS, com­pa­nies would be able to track their ship­ment all the way to its des­ti­na­tion (all ship­ping costs would have to be incurred by the com­pany and it would be fully tax deductible). They would also have access to a com­pany account, which would list the goods they had sent, their value, the price of ship­ping, and other goods they could pro­vide along the same line (for exam­ple, if a com­pany sends out a mil­lion miles of fiber optic cables and there’s a need for a mil­lion more, a request would pop up on their per­son­al­ized screen.)

Using such a sys­tem, com­pa­nies could decide what they need to donate, when they need to donate it, and see how much ben­e­fit they will get out of their donation.

What makes a devel­oped country?

When I talk about devel­oped coun­try, I am talk­ing about coun­tries which have an econ­omy that is suf­fi­cient to sup­ply its res­i­dents with jobs, food, and shel­ter. It is an econ­omy that either is rich enough for every­one to get an oppor­tu­nity, or one that is rich enough to main­tain a strong social net.

Even­tu­ally, the suc­cess of these oper­a­tions will be mea­sured by how many new devel­oped coun­tries are created.

Why do this?

It seems ridicu­lous to ask for an effort like this. After all, why should we care? Well, for starters, let’s look at the Man­hat­tan sky­line. See any­thing miss­ing? My point is sim­ple, if we work to help peo­ple around the world develop sys­tems that allow them to rebuild their coun­try, restore their dig­nity, and allow them to become self-sufficient, they will not look to destroy us. For his­tor­i­cal prece­dents, take a look at the Mar­shall Plan after World War II and see how Ger­many and Japan are now strong demo­c­ra­tic and cap­i­tal­is­tic soci­ety with no intent to bomb the U.S. They are now play­ers because we all worked together to rebuild them. Let’s do the same for the rest of the world.

The other advan­tage is that it will fos­ter more under­stand­ing among nations. Once you’ve trav­eled to a for­eign coun­try and have been exposed to its cul­ture, you become a more open per­son. It’s that sim­ple: reach­ing out to other peo­ple is open­ing your eyes to a new world of possibilities.

What next?

I am for­ward­ing this con­cept to a num­ber of politi­cians in the hope that one of them will con­sider it a pos­si­bil­ity and may look into flesh­ing it out more.

I do real­ize there are a num­ber of holes to be filled up and I hope you will join the con­ver­sa­tion and help me fill them up. Together, we can all make a dif­fer­ence, and maybe, just maybe, the events of Sep­tem­ber 11th will be seen as the start­ing point of a new world, one where the world went through hell and came out stronger. It is my hope that together, we will do that.

As a side note, I started think­ing about this and dis­cussing it with a num­ber of peo­ple after the attack and before we started to bomb Afghanistan. I don’t know if the war will change the dynam­ics (the orig­i­nal name for this newslet­ter was a Mar­shall plan with­out the war) but I dare hope that we will all come out of this OK.