Those who take meat from the table
teach contentment.
Those for whom the taxes are destined
demand sacrifice.
Those whose bellies are full
speak to the poor / of wonderful times to come.
Those who lead the nation into the abyss
call ruling too difficult / for ordinary people!

Bertolt Brecht (German poet, 1898 - 1956)

We Americans are the ultimate innocents.
We are forever desperate to believe
that this time the government is telling us the truth.

Sydney Schanberg (1991)

Brecht's satiric poem (above) aptly characterizes the world situation. The question is how to fix it.

Between individuals' private lives and the activity of official governments, public interest groups (a/k/a "nongovernmental organizations") organize to improve the quality of their lives. The social space where they are active may be called "civil society."

Some scholars define civil society culturally, that is, in terms of "social capital." Others in the European tradition define civil society "structurally" and "processually," that is, in terms of conflict. Despite differences in emphasis and perhaps like a dysfunctional family, neither of these approaches can survive long without the other. Each provides essential insights.

On the present website, policy refers to explicit and inferrable preferences of government officials. It also denotes preferences of individuals and public interest groups.

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• Do your online research efficiently. Begin with Hawai‘i Voyager or the online catalog at your college, university or public library. Take the time to learn how to do Library of Congress (LC) subject heading searches in "Hawai‘i Voyager"! A subject heading search in an online library catalog links the user with every book, journal, video, DVD, map, music and unpublished manuscript classified under the same heading.

• Instead of fumbling and guessing at keywords, doubters are invited to read two reports by Thomas Mann, reference librarian at the U.S. Library of Congress:

"Why LC Subject Headings Are More Important Than Ever: The Solution to Some of Researchers' Biggest Problems is Staring Us Right in Our Faces," American Libraries, vol. 34, no. 9 (October 2003), pp. 52-54.

"Will Google's Keyword Searching Eliminate the Need for LC Cataloging and Classification?" paper delivered to AFSCME 2910 (Library of Congress Professional Guild); last updated, 16 August 2005.

• For information on over 120 countries, go to Area Studies or to BBC Monitoring Country Profiles.

• For other crossnational and country-specific data, consult the Index to Comparative/Foreign Governments (archival site; last updated by Iza Laponce, University of British Columbia Library on 22 February 2005).

• Do you need basic political, demographic and geographic data for a specific country? World Factbook country files from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency are usually up-to-date.

• Download resources for studying and teaching The Power of Place.

• The basic law of official governments is usually called a "constitution." Access the full text of constitutions of most countries.

• The Citizendium is a peer-edited "citizen's compendium of everything." Unlike Wikipedia's tolerance for writers who avoid responsibility by hiding behind a cloak of anonymity, it uses "gentle expert oversight" while "requiring contributors to use their real names."

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• Get the latest vote totals from CNN's World News: Election Watch

• The ACE Electoral Knowledge Network provides a rich if uneven store of election-related materials from many different countries.

• Is it worth risking the presidential form of representative democracy?

• Country-specific contributions in the H-Net Discussion Logs Center are usually high-quality expert advice. Many of the linked e-mail groups are closed and vetted.

• For economic intelligence from 1996 to the present, access the EIU Online from anywhere if you are affiliated with the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. "This database provides online access to Economist Intelligence Unit publications analyzing and forecasting the economic, political and business environments of almost 200 countries." If you are not a UH-Mānoa student, you still may access EIU Online on computers at Hamilton or Sinclair Library. Others should try accessing this source through your college's or university's online library system.

• Access Internet sites with cartographic information, courtesy of The Joseph Regenstein Library, The University of Chicago.

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• The World Bank's GenderStats is a worldwide database of individual country gender statistics.

• United Nations' Statistics and indicators on women and men underline gendered trends.

• Search the Women in Politics bibliographic database for citations to books and articles.

• The Women's Intercultural network highlights gendered limitations of democracies.

• "Bowling alone"? In a longitudinal study of shrinking social networks in the U.S., women were reported "not significantly less likely than men to be social isolates." Sometimes also called "diachronous" or "historical" study, a longitudinal study covers a period stretching over several — sometimes many — years. See "Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades," American Sociological Review, vol. 71 [June 2006], pp. 353-375.

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• "The rate of sexual assault in the United States is the highest of any industrialized nation in the world." For data supporting this statement and related sexual assault issues, visit Women of Substance

• To understand U.S. law on sexual orientation, see Daniel R. Pinello's Adjudicating Lesbian and Gay Rights Cases. This edited collection indexes 153 U.S. appellate court cases by the name of the, the court of final jurisdiction, subject of the case, and the year in which the case was decided. Also, one link on Pinello's website takes you to a summary of his prizewinning book that discusses 313 additional cases.

• Learn about the Women's Studies Program at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

• And visit the Barnard Center for Research on Women [Macromedia Flash Player, pdf].

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• Utilize media, government and online library resources to study U.S. foreign policy.

• Since the 1980s, The National Security Archive at The George Washington University has been requesting declassificationn of secret U.S. government documents.

• International Security Resources is a directory of scholars' and institutions' websites (last updated, 12 February 2005).

• The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II is edited by William Burr of the National Security Archive. Its print and photographic documents provide background for understanding the U.S. decision to drop atomic bombs on the Japanese populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 August 1945 and 9 August 1945, respectively.

• Defining security in purely military terms is misleading. As an alternative, economic, political, social, cultural, biological and environmental statistics are arranged by by region, issue area and regional or global intergovernmental organization in the Country Indicators for Foreign Policy.

• Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) threaten the national security of many countries.

• The Commonwealth Institute's Project on Defense Alternatives is an international security gateway.

• Under the aegis of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, data on "over 5000 think tanks from 150 countries" have been collected by the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program. Summaries of research by these groups are accessible online.

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The "Not In Our Name" and "World Can't Wait" organizations emphasize unity with all people and oppose the continuing occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

• Deaths of U.S. service members in Afghanistan and Iraq continue.

• Pro-war politicians and military recruiters ask us not to dwell on endless images of coffins returning soldiers, sailors and pilots home for burial. Click here and then on the "Gallery Photos from Dover Air Force Base" link. Or take a closer look at soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. And view Pete Chamberlain's U.S. map showing state-by-state clusters of Iraq War fatalities (Source: iCasualties.org).

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• How much has the U.S. occupation of Iraq co$t your family? To find out, compare up-to-date cumulative estimates of minute-to-minute costs of the invasion and occupation with what the same amount of money would pay for in pre-school education, later public education, children's health, college scholarships, energy independence and public housing. If actual Congressional appropriations for the Iraq War to date are the standard of measurement, these otherwise useful estimates understate the total of past, present and likely future Iraq War-related expenditures. According to Harvard economist and budget expert Joseph Stiglitz, the cost is likely to be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion (Jamie Wilson, "Iraq war could cost US over $2 trillion, says Nobel prize-winning economist," [dateline: Washington, D.C], Internet edition, 7 January 2006).

• Using Stiglitz's low-end estimate ($1 trillion) as the base, the cost of the Iraq War per person will be $3,373.70 and $9,480.46 per household (BoxerDave [pseudonym], "We Owe What?!?!? Our per state cost of the Iraq War [poll]," Daily Kos, 22 October 2006 at 02:15:06 p.m. PST).

• The American Friends Service Committee's Wage Peace Campaign is sharing an e-mailable page on The Cost of War. This includes a video and facts and figures documenting costs cited in the video.

• For one of many stories of overt military resistance to the War in Iraq, learn about the case of Marine Corps reservist Stephen Funk. He refused to participate in the Second Gulf War (2003- ). Mr. Funk was released from imprisonment in the brig on 15 February 2005.

• From inside the U.S. Armed Forces, the anti-war Appeal for Redress petition was signed by some 1,300 active-duty soldiers, sailors, pilots and marines by mid-December 2006. And it appeared in The New York Times. In part, the Appeal for Redress asserts, "Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for U.S. troops to come home."

• Anti-war U.S. soldiers, sailors and pilots have certain rights and may exercise them. If they do not insist on these rights, they will lose them.

• On 5 February 2007, the "Tacoma Puppetistas" mocked the pro-war U.S. Congress and its partners in the executive branch — Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld (forced into retirement after the November 2006 Elections) in this Associated Press photo.

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• Take Back the Media uses text, video, polls and online discussion to expose and offset the effects of government corruption and drugging of the mass communications news media. To access some content on this website, first you must register. (It's free.)

• Crooks and liars are prominent on the television news.

• Community access television (public, educational and governmental) can be an alternative to crooks and liars. For information on what you can do to preserve this resource from corporate grabs, see the Alliance for Community Media and also the Save Access network.

• Also from Pollard's website, try links to influential U.S. newspaper search engines.

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• Visit Stanford's Comparative Democratization Project.

• Learn about the programs of major democratic leftist and socialist parties in representative democracies.

• Compare these with surveys, announcements and alerts from the World Movement for Democracy.

• The Democracies Online Newswire analyzes online trends in governance, civil society and media.

• For comparative indicators of political rights and civil liberties, visit Freedom House for information as far back as 1973 on some countries. And if you challenge ratings for specific countries and years, simply adjust the ratings.

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• For texts and interpretations, visit American Constitutional Law: Sources on the Internet. Among other essential documents are The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787. That is Madison's journal — a virtual transcript — of the constitutional convention in Philadelphia. It was kept secret for about fifty years before being published.

• FirstGov is a portal to resources on 27,000,000 federal agency web pages. American FactFinder provides Census 2000 data. Or try the Federal Interagency Council on Statistical Policy's FedStats gateway.

• The stated purpose of the Social Statistics Briefing Room "is to provide easy access to current Federal social statistics." The webmaster works for the President of the United States.

• Try State-level data resources with data on energy, crime, race, gender, health and the economy in the U.S.

• Access local, national and international government documents through the Hawai‘i Voyager catalog.

• Or consult law librarians at the William S. Richardson School of Law Library, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

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• Explore Congress Link to learn how the national legislature works.

• Created by Adrian Holovaty and Derek Willis, the U.S. Congress Votes Database is a record of every vote in the United States Congress since the 102nd Congress (1991). Browse congressional votes in the aggregate (totals). Or search by individual members of Congress to see how they voted.

• For pending legislation and roll call votes, check the Library of Congress with access to the Congressional Record, committee homepages and e-mail addresses for elected officials.

• The online Congressional Record has been indexed since 1994.

• Download the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Appropriations primer.

• Search the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress by name, state, year or Congressional session — for any year from 1774 until today.

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The "Karoshi" comic strip satirizes racially targeted military recruitment. © 2005; the cartoon strip is used here with permission from Casey Ishitani. Disclaimer: The artist does not necessarily endorse the contents of the present website.

• In the final years of his life, African American civil rights leader Malcolm X (1925-1965) emphasized race and class as ways of understanding how American society works.

• From late 1966 until 4 April 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,'s writing, speeches and other public activity linked domestic U.S. poverty and racism with international affairs. King (1929-1968) severely criticized U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson's Vietnam War policy for the deaths of Americans — especially African Americans — and Vietnamese. Also, visit The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.

• Yale University's Avalon Project provides full texts of Treaties between the United States and Native Americans.

• The "First People" Native American Resources index connects you to the "Native American Calendar" and websites by or about Native American tribes.

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• Drugs are a serious problem. But an ineffective U.S. War on Drugs has created new problems. To the extent that this "war" disproportionately targets African Americans and other non-Caucasian racial and ethnic minorities, its impact also is racist.

• Note and react to the cumulative daily list of U.S. military deaths in Iraq.

• Visit The Center for Public Integrity for "investigative journalism in the public interest."

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• The National Council for Science and the Environment has organized a National Library for the Environment.

• Among alternative energy resources is Renewables Virtual Library.

• Visit Climate Change: The Environment Network [pdf].

• Earth Day Climate: Electronic Resources [with .pdf, needs Macromedia Flash Player].

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• Public Agenda offers "issues links" on abortion, the global role of the U.S.A., crime, terrorism the economy, education, the environment, family, gay rights, federal budget, gambling, health care, legal and illegal drugs, immigration, Internet free speech/privacy, Medicare, race and ethnicity, right-to-die, Social Security, terrorism and welfare.

• For a global perspective on government surveillance, consult Privacy International. This "is a human rights group formed in 1990 as a watchdog on surveillance and privacy invasions by governments and corporations."

• Project Vote Smart attempts to stay on top of 50 controversial domestic and international issues.

• Gun control debates do not have to deadlock between irreconcilably opposed factions.

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• The Human Security Gateway goes beyond militarized definitions of security.

• The State of the Media reports on concentrations of ownership in American newspapers and television stations.

• Hunger Notes Online provides global and country information and perspectives on nutrition.

• Democide refers to non-wartime deaths resulting — directly or indirectly— from government policies. While including killings classified under the imprecisely used notion of genocide, other types of domestic government-caused killings also count as democide. For worldwide totals (1900-1987), consider the exent to which power kills. Consider a response to documented democide in The Sudan.

• As a cautionary note for the future, government-sanctioned murders of five and a half million Jews and six million other people — ethnic minorities, gays, lesbians, physically and cognitively challenged, and political opponents — in Hitler's Nazi Germany (1933-1945) are documented in The Holocaust Chronicle and in a database of victims' names.

• An archive of concentration camp files on 50,000,000 prisoners of the Nazis supervised by International Tracing Service (ITS) at Bad Arolsen, Germany, will be open to researchers in 2007 or sooner.

• Read or listen to six personal accounts in Life After: Stories of Holocaust Survivors After The War.

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• For links to documentation of the Nanjing (Nanking) Massacre of 1937, visit the "Imperialism, civil war, revolution" section of theChina page of this website.

• See also Kevin Sites's Portraits of Pain on democide in Cambodia.

• The European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia "brings together different views on the issue: NGOs, representatives of different religious communities, and media experts explain how they think hate speech can be tackled, and how freedom of speech should be applied in our societies."

• Human rights reports are available for other countries.

• The "People's Under Threat" genocide vulnerability index is maintained by the World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples for "about 700 minorities/indigenous peoples" in "200 of the world's countries and dependent territories."

• Along with thousands of documents, the Policy Library has links to think tanks in the U.S. and other countries.

• Or browse the Alternative Press Center's Online Directory.

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• For data on family incomes, taxes, wages, unemployment, wealth, and poverty, see The State of Working America.

• The Democracies Online Newswire is a searchable web archive of facts and issues.

• See telephone and online links to pollsters and political consultants (last updated, 7 February 2005).

• The Florida Ballots Project highlights chads, dimples, butterflies, undervotes and overvotes from the 2000 Presidential Election. That media circus should not distract you from the larger vote fraud — racially motivated disenfranchisement of thousands of African American voters in Florida that year!

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• Which candidates ran for which public offices in the most recent State & Congressional elections?

• If you thought the 2004 Presidential campaign was expensive, wait till 2008!

• Which politicians are taking money in State politics? Which large corporations cover their bets by contributing to Democrats and Republicans? What is the Campaign Finance Institute reporting?

• Names of individual donors contributing $200.00 or more and names of candidates receiving these contributions are available from the Federal Election Commission. This database begins with the 1980 election cycle. However, "A political committee may submit 10 pseudonyms on each report filed in order to protect against illegal use of names and addresses of contributors, provided such committee attaches a list of such pseudonyms to the appropriate report. The Secretary or the Commission shall exclude these lists from the public record."

• At the national and state level, the U.S. electoral system is dominated by a Republican-Democratic duopoly — rule by two parties to the near-total exclusion of others. In each State legislature, Republicans and Democrats diligently write laws to restrict the influence of over 200 other political parties in the U.S. As a result, ballot access by smaller political parties is limited.

• Are you frustrated with one-sided winner-take-all elections? For an alternative, visit the Proportional Representation Library.

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On Pollard's website, also visit relevant sections of the following pages:

Multiple futures.

Cartoons, movies.

Violence reduction.

Asia, comparatively.

Hawai‘i politics WWW VL.

Globalizations, international law, organization.

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Last modified, 16 March 2008.

© 1999-2008, Vincent K. Pollard.
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