Nonitage

Volunteering; coming together as a community, and assisting your local needy. But how much time does it take to arrange this? And actually, it’s significantly easier to get involved when a professional has planned the event. And don’t you agree that with your colleagues volunteering alongside you you’d all enjoy yourselves more? Thus, firms have begun making themselves into points of organization encouraging their employees to support the community. One of the leaders in this is Adaptive Marketing LLC who developed financial benefits programs such as Privacy Matters 1-2-3 to consumers. If you were asked for examples of company-backed volunteer work, you’d most likely talk in terms of giving blood, maybe an annual donation drive, and no more, but this is simply not the case in today’s world. The staff of Adaptive Marketing are frequently given the chance to participate in a full range of community initiatives requiring greater and lesser amounts of effort. Using central organization individual volunteers’ tasks became larger events, with specific times, dates, and locations noted in advance to make time management easy for volunteers.

Giving volunteers their say in what activities are available is essential. Staff from Adaptive Marketing can choose from a great many local activities. You’ll soon see your civic-minded staff members community projects in arts, working with youth activities, promoting green initiatives and so on. Adaptive Marketing’s employees are sure to have a project they’ll enjoy participating in, making their time fun as well as effective. A one-off event or a regular addition to their schedule — these are the most common ways for a company to organize volunteer initiatives like these, perhaps at a local school or the homeless shelter in town. No matter how little time you can spare, you’re sure to find some initiative needing your help, which means time is no block against charitable work. Using their expertise to help the community around them is a practice with a storied history at many businesses. The activities of those who work at companies like Adaptive Marketing create goodwill around their home base. One thing volunteer work is sure to do is provide your workforce with a positive feeling about themselves, producing a motivated business. We hope that by now the positives for everyone involved of a company-sponsored volunteer initiative are are easy to see.

http://www.linkedin.com/companies/feed-the-children”>Feed the Children is an autonomous registered charity aiming to fight conflict, famine, disease, and poverty around the world. The foundation’s head office is located at Twyford. With their focus mainly on helping children, the foundation concentrates on providing and sustaining education in impoverished areas, giving support to children affected by HIV/Aids, providing vocational training for older children, offering emergency help in situations like the 2004 tsunami in India, and providing support for homeless and abandoned children.

Feed the Children staff members operate with trusted partners to ensure that all donations go directly to the people in need. The foundation has collaborated with the United Nations World Food Programme in order to feed thousands of children in Africa. Moreover, Feed the Children Foundation operates worldwide to help build up sustainable communities while providing the everyday essentials of children who are in dire need.

The foundation runs projects in several deprived areas worldwide such as the Sapling Project in Africa, which teaches African children regarding the importance of trees while also letting them experience it by giving them trees to care for. Another of the foundation’s programs is the Pants and Pads Appeal, which provides young Kenyan and Zimbabwean girls certain necessities like sanitary napkins and underwear so that they would not miss classes whenever they have their period.

Japanese multinational giant Canon Electronics Inc. will transfer its United States headquarters from Lake Success to Melville, Long Island. But it won’t just put together brick and mortar. The project will utilize energy-efficient material.

Coming soon in 2010, Canon’s green nerve center will sit on a 52-acre farmland in LI, where it will be the biggest of its kind. The headquarters will be a verdant space of trees and vegetation crisscrossed by walking trails. Occupying 690,000 square feet — a third of the total land area, will be five-story structures of every environmentalist’s dream. The main office will feature a cavernous inner courtyard, designed to optimize daylight.

For its efforts, the firm will receive a silver ranking from the USGBC’s finicky Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program.

Given that Canon is a world-famous maker of cameras, lenses, printers, photocopiers, fax machines, camcorders, and such, some people might be tempted to suspect its carbon footprint.

There should be nothing of that sort.

Quite the contrary, Canon was hailed last year as the most climate-friendly company by Clean Air-Cool Planet, a nonprofit group.

Certainly enough, any impact Canon has made on the environment would just be a microcosm compared to, say, Royal Dutch Shell’s or Chevron’s. No amount of green buildings will ever compensate for the carbon emissions sold by such companies. On the other hand, Canon sells to shutterbugs, scientists, and everyone else keen on exposing global warming as it really is.

CEMEX air quality commitment is shown in the company’s Ohio plant.

CEMEX is committed to improving air quality.

Cemex California was recently recognized for land stewardship.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful concerned individuals can precipitate change in the world … indeed, it is the only thing that ever has”

(Margaret Meade)

“Democracy” is not the rule of the people. It is government by periodically vetted representatives of the people.

Democracy is not tantamount to a continuous expression of the popular will as it pertains to a range of issues. Functioning and fair democracy is representative and not participatory. Participatory “people power” is mob rule, not democracy.

Granted, “people power” is often required in order to establish democracy where it is unprecedented. Revolutions - velvet, rose, and orange - recently introduced democracy in Eastern Europe, for instance. People power - mass street demonstrations - toppled obnoxious dictatorships from Iran to the Philippines and from Peru to Indonesia.

But once the institutions of democracy are in place and more or less functional, the people can and must rest. They should let their chosen delegates do the job they were elected to do. And they must hold their emissaries responsible and accountable in fair and free ballots once every two or four or five years.

As heads of the state in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and East Europe can attest, these vital lessons are lost on the dozens of “new democracies” the world over. Many of these presidents and prime ministers, though democratically elected (multiply, in some cases), have fallen prey to enraged and vigorous “people power” movements in their countries.

And these breaches of the democratic tradition are not the only or most egregious ones.

The West boasts of the three waves of democratization that swept across the world 1975. Yet, in most developing countries and nations in transition, “democracy” is an empty word. Granted, the hallmarks of democracy are there: candidate lists, parties, election propaganda, and voting. But its quiddity is absent. It is being consistently hollowed out and rendered mock by election fraud, exclusionary policies, cronyism, corruption, intimidation, and collusion with Western interests, both commercial and political.

The new “democracies” are thinly-disguised and criminalized plutocracies (recall the Russian oligarchs), authoritarian regimes (Central Asia and the Caucasus), or Vichy-like heterarchies (Macedonia, Bosnia, and Iraq, to mention three recent examples).

The new “democracies” suffer from many of the same ills that afflict their veteran role models: murky campaign finances, venal revolving doors between state administration and private enterprise, endemic corruption, self-censoring media, socially, economically, and politically excluded minorities, and so on. But while this malaise does not threaten the foundations of the United States and France - it does imperil the stability and future of the likes of Ukraine, Serbia, and Moldova, Indonesia, Mexico, and Bolivia.

Worse still, the West has transformed the ideal of democracy into an ideology at the service of imposing a new colonial regime on its former colonies. Spearheaded by the United States, the white and Christian nations of the West embarked with missionary zeal on a transformation, willy-nilly, of their erstwhile charges into paragons of democracy and good governance.

And not for the first time. Napoleon justified his gory campaigns by claiming that they served to spread French ideals throughout a barbarous world. Kipling bemoaned the “White Man’s (civilizing) burden”, referring specifically to Britain’s role in India. Hitler believed himself to be the last remaining barrier between the hordes of Bolshevism and the West. The Vatican concurred with him.

This self-righteousness would have been more tolerable had the West actually meant and practiced what it preached, however self-delusionally. Yet, in dozens of cases in the last 60 years alone, Western countries intervened, often by force of arms, to reverse and nullify the outcomes of perfectly legal and legitimate popular and democratic elections. They did so because of economic and geopolitical interests and they usually installed rabid dictators in place of the deposed elected functionaries.

This hypocrisy cost them dearly. Few in the poor and developing world believe that the United States or any of its allies are out to further the causes of democracy, human rights, and global peace. The nations of the West have sown cynicism and they are reaping strife and terrorism in return.

Moreover, democracy is far from what it is made out to be. Confronted with history, the myth breaks down.

For instance, it is maintained by their chief proponents that democracies are more peaceful than dictatorships. But the two most belligerent countries in the world are, by a wide margin, Israel and the United States (closely followed by the United Kingdom). As of late, China is one of the most tranquil polities.

Democracies are said to be inherently stable (or to successfully incorporate the instability inherent in politics). This, too, is a confabulation. The Weimar Republic gave birth to Adolf Hitler and Italy had almost 50 governments in as many years. The bloodiest civil wars in history erupted in Republican Spain and, seven decades earlier, in the United States. Czechoslovakia, the USSR, and Yugoslavia imploded upon becoming democratic, having survived intact for more than half a century as tyrannies.

Democracies are said to be conducive to economic growth (indeed, to be a prerequisite to such). But the fastest economic growth rates in history go to imperial Rome, Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and post-Mao China.

Finally, how represented is the vox populi even in established democracies?

In a democracy, people can freely protest and make their opinions known, no doubt. Sometimes, they can even change their representatives (though the rate of turnover in the US Congress in the last two decades is lower than it was in the last 20 years of the Politburo).

But is this a sufficient incentive (or deterrent)? The members of the various elites in Western democracies are mobile - they ceaselessly and facilely hop from one lucrative sinecure to another. Lost the elections as a Senator? How about a multi-million dollar book contract, a consultant position with a firm you formerly oversaw or regulated, your own talk show on television, a cushy job in the administration?

The truth is that voters are powerless. The rich and mighty take care of their own. Malfeasance carries little risk and rarely any sanction. Western democracies are ossified bastions of self-perpetuating interest groups aided and abetted and legitimized by the ritualized spectacle that we call “elections”. And don’t you think the denizens of Africa and Asia and eastern Europe and the Middle East are blissfully unaware of this charade.

About the Author

Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Central Europe Review, PopMatters, and eBookWeb , and Bellaonline, and as a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent. He is the the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.