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"A communitarian ethic increasingly governs health care in the U.S. It places a greater value on the health of the community, on society as a whole, than on the health of particular individuals. Public health officials have put together a vaccination schedule designed to eliminate infectious diseases to which the population is prey. "Officials recognize that these vaccines will harm a small percentage of (genetically susceptible) individuals, but it is for the common good. The communitarian code posits that it is morally acceptable, if necessary, to sacrifice a few for the good of the many. Or as one observer more bluntly puts it, "Individual sheep can be sheared and slaughtered if it is for the welfare of their flock." This information is provided by Mercola.com, the world's most visited and trusted natural health website. |
| "The argument advanced here presumes that it is neither necessary nor prudent to attempt to end nationalism by head-on attacks on the legitimacy of the nation-state or by favoring its demise.[3] The vision of replacing the nation-state by regional governments and ultimately by a world government (as UN enthusiasts dream), or envisioning a state that acts as a mere framework for the interactions of groups of people of different cultures but commands no loyalty and involvement of its own, is normatively dubious and unnecessarily threatening. Nationalism can be and is best ended by a much more moderate approach." On Ending Nationalism* by Amitai Etzioni, Politik und Gesellschaft Online, International Politics and Society 2001 |
| "Global governance has been criticized for many reasons, some of which are more compelling than others. For instance, it is said that such governance violates old-fashioned notions of national sovereignty,9 which Professor Dinh defines well. However, the notion of national sovereignty is neither God-given nor part of human nature. Instead, as Professor Dinh correctly points out, global governance was something concocted in the seventeenth century to stop religious wars, which entailed the intervention of one ruler in the internal affairs of other communities." by Amitai Etzioni, pdf file at GWU, On the Need For More Transnational Capacity . |
| "THERE is no doubt that the philosophical outlook called communitarianism has influenced politics in the West. Some of its major tenets have been advanced by Bill Clinton in America and Tony Blair in Britain. Described by its promoters as a "movement" (it's not: it has no popular support or mass membership), communitarianism is a public philosophy developed by a small coterie of academics who have attempted to recast American liberal-Left and European social-democratic ideologies into a new "centrist" mold." The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society. - book reviews National Review, March 10, 1997 by John Fonte. |
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"Bush's inaugural address," said George Washington University professor Amitai Etzioni, a communitarian thinker, "was a communitarian text, full of words like 'civility,' 'responsibility' and 'community.' That's no accident. Bush's advisers consulted on the speech with Putnam." Washington Post Staff Writer Dana Milbank, February 01, 2001 "Needed: Catchword for Bush Ideology, 'Communitarianism' Finds Favor" |
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"There is potential for Communities of Character to be a four-year project for the White House that helps define the presidency. There seems to be a consensus that a renewal of shared values in this country is needed... [He quotes Amitai Etzioni saying] The project is built on the communitarian philosophy." Mike Allen, Washington Post, July 29, 2001 "Bush Plans Values-Based Initiative to Rev Up Agenda." |
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"When I check my thesaurus to find synonyms for sovereignty, the terms "king," "lord," "dominant" and "absolute" pop up. No wonder we are so reluctant to allow inroads into our right to self-government. Who wants to be lorded over by others, let alone dominated by foreigners? After all, the ability to control our fate is the reason we formed these United States in the first place. Yet, we are increasingly driven to recognize that we are entering an age in which our much-cherished sovereignty may have to be curtailed to serve global economic and humanitarian goals... "Critics argued that we should not have been involved in either conflict, or we should have acted unilaterally. But we have learned that by acting in unison with other nations, we avoid being perceived as a global bully. Still, putting our armed forces, even in a limited and temporary way, under a supranational command is a significant step toward a new world order, indeed one that may require amending our Constitution." Amitai Etzioni, 319. "When Does Global Good Outweigh Our Own Sovereignty?" USA Today, (December 8, 1999), page 31A. |
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"Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros and White House domestic adviser William Galston have come out in favor of the communitarian agenda, and Sen. Bill Bradley goes so far as to say that communitarianism "promises to shape a new political era in much the way progressivism reshaped our nation a century ago..... As a consequence, people are beginning to think critically about what it means to translate such fuzzy, feel-good rhetoric into action. "This is the Clinton administration's version of 'family values,' something vague and moralistic that everyone supports but no one seems to be able to define," says Professor Walker. "I suspect that what the communitarians, and especially Etzioni, really want is to be influential with the White House. If that's an accomplishment, then they may already be achieving something."I or We?, by Michael D'Antonio, Mother Jones, May-June 1994 [emphasis added] |
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"We believe American citizenship entails responsibilities as well as rights. And we mean to ask our citizens to give something back to their communities and their country. I believe that, and if you do, we've got a great future. (Applause.) Now, this is what I want to say to you: You have to decide what your mission is in this new world, because the truth is, we are already making a difference in the new Democratic Party. In the last two years, despite the atmosphere of contentiousness and all the difficulty, more of the DLC agenda was enacted into law and will make a difference in the lives of the American people than almost any political movement in any similar time period in the history of the United States. And you ought to be proud of that. President Bill Clinton's 1994 speech before the Third Way-communitarian Democratic Leadership Council |
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"During the Soviet period, the state was represented as a benign complex furthering egalitarian and communitarian ideology with citizens encouraged towards self-sacrifice in the name of supreme national interests." From RUSSIAN GEOPOLITICAL CULTURE IN THE POST-9/11 ERA: THE MASKS OF PROTEUS REVISITED* by John O'Loughlin, Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, Gearóid Ó Tuathail (Gerard Toal) Government and International Affairs, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Alexandria Centre, Virginia, and Vladimir Kolossov Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. " *This research is supported by a grant, number 0203087, from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Geography and Regional Science Program. |
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"Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Dr. Etzioni. Thank you for that introduction and for the inspiration that your work has given to me and so many others, for your wonderful book, "The Spirit of Community," and for working on this as hard as you have. I'd like to say a special word of thanks to one of the cofounders of this network-- he's been a member of the White House staff since I became president-- Bill Galston, for his constant inspiration and prodding me. I'd like to thank the Secretary of Education and Tom Payzant, the Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education, for what they have done to try to promote character education as a part of the larger strategy toward a new communitarian vision for our country." President Bill Clinton, May 20, 1995 praising Etzioni's works during Remarks at the White House Conference of Character Building for a Civil and Democratic Society |
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"What is required is a fundamental change in civic culture, policy making, and legal doctrines. We need a paradigm that treats privacy as an individual right that must be balanced with concerns for the common good (or as one good among others), without a priori privileging any of them." Professor Amitai Etzioni, former Israeli revolutionary and founder of the American Communitarian Studies Program at George Washington University. www.gwu.edu/~ccps/lop.html [Besides the ACL, there are no Anti-communitarian Studies Programs in the United States. We are the only dedicated anti-communitarian studies website in the world. Isn't that amazing?] |
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"In Israel, he said, there are three agencies that oversee public safety - the military, the police, and intelligence - while there are 37 different police departments in Hennepin County alone. Because of the way it is organized in Israel, the sharing of information is rapid, and the lines of responsibility are very clear. The issue that needs to be looked at in Minnesota, said McGowan, is which organization has authority in the event of an emergency. "With the goal to prevent and disrupt terrorist attacks in Israel, the country has put much importance on the gathering of information. The country's intelligence system is one of the most sophisticated in the world, and they rely heavily on human intelligence. The same level of surveillance would meet with strong resistance in the United States, said McGowan. But in Israel, where violence is such a frequent fact of life, that is the only way they can protect themselves. "McGowan has brought back new ideas from Israel on how to protect the United States from future terrorist attacks. "We have to be prepared for all types of things," he said. "It's an extremely expensive endeavor. But how can we not afford to invest in it when the future of our country is at stake?" Kathy Hara, Sun Newspapers, 2/19/04. |
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"A key lesson of September the 11th, 2001, is that America's intelligence agencies must work together as a single, unified enterprise," he said at a ceremony at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, the same hall where President Harry S. Truman signed the treaty creating NATO in 1949. Bush added, "The many reforms in this act have a single goal: to ensure that the people in government responsible for defending America have the best possible information to make the best possible decision." President George Bush and the "new" Intelligence Bill in the Washington Post on December 17, 2004. liberals and conservatives, or between capitalists and socialists. It is between libertarians and communitarians." E.J. Dionne, columnist in The Washington Post, May 19, 2003 |
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"To summarize, the hostility of modern individualists toward anti-modern communitarians stems in large part from the fact that the Enlightenment's assertion of atomistic individualism is predicated on a polemic against the twin terrors of tradition and authority. Thus individualists will assert that they are the only legitimate defenders of justice and human dignity despite communitarians' equal (if not greater) claims to that role, not so much because there are fundamental differences in their respective outlooks on these matters but because ascribing legitimacy to communitarianism undermines their polemic and thus the basis for their religion-free public sphere." Religion, Culture, and Globalization by Douglas Johnston
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[Communitarianism] "kept the declaration from becoming either a highly collectivist or a highly individualistic document." Harvard Law Professor Mary Ann Glendon, in an interview with National Public Radio in the summer of 2001, discussing the role communitarian thinking played in helping draft the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights |
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"Communitarianism champions more effective subordination of the working class to the capitalist class, Communitarianism is extremely racist and ethnocentric, Communitarianism, notwithstanding disclaimers, is extremely sexist, Communitarianism significantly contributes to the growth of fascism in the U.S." American Sociological Association members speak out against Etzioni and communitarian values, 1995, while Etzioni was ASA President |
| Communitarian philosophy provides a value-centered guide to defining society's common goals. Communitarian philosophy holds a centrist position on the social order that mediates between totalitarianism and libertarianism. Totalitarianism argues that the collectivity in the form of the nation state has superior needs and objectives and that individuals exist only to serve these collective needs. Libertarianism argues that the autonomous individual stands at the center of the philosophic universe and the larger community can make no legitimate demands on the individual except those necessary to maintain civil order. Communitarians seek to mediate the tension between these two forces of extreme autonomy and extreme centralized authority based upon their understanding that societies remain healthy only so long as they effectively provide a balance between the centrifugal forces of autonomy and the centripetal force of centralized authority. George Washington University Institute for Communitarian Studies presents Communitarian Economics by Norton Garfinkle |
| "Sometimes the little complaints say it all, such as the ones from Iraqis bitter that the United States has shown no intention of investing in their small businesses. One wonders: What in God's name made them think that we would? The answer is that we have made repeated statements that we will rebuild the Iraqi economy - a monumental task after more than a decade in which the economy was robbed to buy weapons, build scores of presidential palaces and fatten Swiss bank accounts. Only if we walk away from our inflated promises and greatly narrow our mission and ambition is there a hope that Iraqis will do what they need to do: pull themselves up by their own bootstraps." Bush adviser, Israeli communitarian Amitai Etzioni, USA Today on 8/26/03. |
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"Since 1992, the U.S. has offered Israel an additional $2 billion annually in loan guarantees. Congressional researchers have disclosed that between 1974 and 1989, $16.4 billion in U.S. military loans were converted to grants and that this was the understanding from the beginning. Indeed, all past U.S. loans to Israel have eventually been forgiven by Congress, which has undoubtedly helped Israel's often-touted claim that they have never defaulted on a U.S. government loan. U.S. policy since 1984 has been that economic assistance to Israel must equal or exceed Israel's annual debt repayment to the United States. Unlike other countries, which receive aid in quarterly installments, aid to Israel since 1982 has been given in a lump sum at the beginning of the fiscal year, leaving the U.S. government to borrow from future revenues. Israel even lends some of this money back through U.S. treasury bills and collects the additional interest.
In addition, there is the more than $1.5 billion in private U.S. funds that go to Israel annually in the form of $1 billion in private tax-deductible donations and $500 million in Israeli bonds. The ability of Americans to make what amounts to tax-deductible contributions to a foreign government, made possible through a number of Jewish charities, does not exist with any other country. Nor do these figures include short- and long-term commercial loans from U.S. banks, which have been as high as $1 billion annually in recent years.
Total U.S. aid to Israel is approximately one-third of the American foreign-aid budget, even though Israel comprises just .001 percent of the world's population and already has one of the world's higher per capita incomes. Indeed, Israel's GNP is higher than the combined GNP of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza. With a per capita income of about $14,000, Israel ranks as the sixteenth wealthiest country in the world; Israelis enjoy a higher per capita income than oil-rich Saudi Arabia and are only slightly less well-off than most Western European countries.
AID does not term economic aid to Israel as development assistance, but instead uses the term "economic support funding." Given Israel's relative prosperity, U.S. aid to Israel is becoming increasingly controversial. In 1994, Yossi Beilen, deputy foreign minister of Israel and a Knesset member, told the Women's International Zionist organization, "If our economic situation is better than in many of your countries, how can we go on asking for your charity?" THE STRATEGIC FUNCTIONS OF U.S. AID TO ISRAEL By Stephen Zunes. (Dr. Zunes is an assistant professor in the Department of Politics at the University of San Francisco.) |
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"My call tonight, is for every American to commit at least two years -- 4,000 hours over the rest of your lifetime -- to the service of your neighbors and your nation." President George W. Bush State of the Union Address January 29, 2002. |
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The Volunteer Service Program is a valuable asset
to the Police Department and is designed to afford
citizens an opportunity to be involved in the
workings of, and make meaningful contributions to,
the department. The volunteer roster consists of 20 dedicated individuals who donate their time in all areas of the department by performing tasks such as data entry, general office duties, researching newspapers, domestic violence and juvenile offender studies, gathering crime statistics and more. One volunteer is conducting an ongoing twice a week class in Spanish for interested officers. Another contacts persons with outstanding warrants and attempts to persuade those individuals to come to City Hall and address the problem. Several members serve as part of the Citizen Radar and Code Enforcement Patrols. The Radar Patrol consists of volunteers trained to do radar studies in various locations in the City of Golden. The Code Enforcement Patrol observes sections of the city and reports possible code violations to the Code Enforcement officers for follow-up. To compliment our regular volunteers, there are other citizens who volunteer for larger special events, such as National Night Out and the Scoot & Ride Rodeo. Our regular and special event volunteers donated 1301 hours of time to the department during 2003. The Points of Light Foundation in their annual literature for National Volunteer Week quotes the dollar value of volunteer time $15.39 per hour. That would place an impressive value of $20,022 to our volunteer's time. Many of the police department's programs and studies would not be possible without the unselfish help of these valuable volunteers, and every minute of their time is greatly appreciated by the Golden Police Department."A Message from Golden, Colorado's new Chief of Police who brought a new emphasis to Colorado in 2003. |
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Our goal is to engage everyone in volunteering from every walk of life. We also believe that "people in need" should also volunteer as a way to learn how to reconnect themselves to their society and its resources. Ultimately, we want volunteering to become a way of life for every citizen; for people to believe that volunteering isn't just nice to do, but necessary. 1000 Points of Light mission statement |
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When virtue meets virtue -- how better describe the experience of intuitive recognition? Perhaps this may explain, in part at least, the global awakening now taking place, where thousands of men and women of varying interests and backgrounds, knowingly or unknowingly, are on the same wavelength: they are fired with the urgency to do all in their power to help turn humanity from senseless self-destruction to thoughtful self-regeneration. They labor for the safeguarding of human dignity and self-worth, for the protection of our planet, and for the building of a new type of civilization founded on the brotherhood of all life and the joyous collaboration of peoples and races for the benefit of the whole of humanity. To Light a Thousand Lamps- A Theosophic Vision By Grace F. Knoche 2001 A Sunrise Library Book. |
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The rapidly expanding grassroots service movement led to the passage of the National and Community Service Act of 1990. This legislation, signed by President George H.W. Bush, created both a private, nonprofit organization -- the Points of Light Foundation, and a new independent federal agency, the Commission on National and Community Service. Through grants and national coordination, the Commission supported four streams of service: service-learning programs for school-aged youth, higher-education service programs, youth corps, and national service demonstration models. In 1992, a bipartisan group of Senators, working with the Bush Administration, drafted legislation to create the National Civilian Community Corps as a demonstration program to explore the possibility of using post-Cold War military resources to help solve problems here at home. The NCCC, enacted as part of the 1993 Defense Authorization Act, is a residential service program modeled on the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps and the United States military. The NCCC became a part of a network of national service programs when the National and Community Service Trust Act of 1993 was signed into law. The National and Community Service Trust Act was drafted by the Clinton administration with the assistance of Congress and introduced by a bipartisan coalition of Members of Congress in June of 1993. The bill passed nine months later and was signed into law on September 21, 1993. The legislation created the Corporation for National and Community Service to administer AmeriCorps, Learn and Serve America, and the other national service programs. President George W. Bush, in his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, called on all Americans to serve their country for the equivalent of two years and announced the creation of USA Freedom Corps. He proposed more service opportunities through AmeriCorps and Senior Corps, programs of the federal Corporation for National and Community Service. In April of 2002 the President unveiled the Principles and Reforms for a Citizen Service Act to reform and enhance AmeriCorps, Senior Corps and other programs administered by the Corporation for National and Community Service. From Corporation for National & Community Service. |
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"The market economics of the Right and the government bureaucracies of the Left have weakened society's connectedness. They have not been effective forums for collective action. For Right-wing politics, this is not much of an issue. It has always believed in the supremacy of individual freedom and individual action. For the Left, however, it is a huge problem...The old ideologies positioned politics as a struggle for ownership, the historic battle between socialism and capitalism. The Third Way, by contrast, sees politics as an exercise in communitarianism: rebuilding the relationships and social capital between people. It aims to put the social back into social justice. This is an important strategy for combating individualism and generating a sense of collective responsibility in society. " Australian Fabian Society, Re-inventing Collectivism: The new Social Democracy by Mark Latham, Member for Werriwa Third Way Conference, Centre for Applied Economic Research, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 12 July 2001 |
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Starting in 1960, the doctrine of the movement, "National-European Communitarism" whose social character was affirmed from the beginning, derived from national-communist positions. After the definitive elimination of the right-wing sector of the organization in 1964, Thiriart would lead Young Europe in a direction in which two general orientations dominate: on one hand, radical anti-Americanism and, on the other, a progressive approach to national-communist positions. Thiriart sees Communitarism as surpassing communism and not as its opponent, this is a typical national-Bolshevik posture. In 1965, he defined Communitarism as "national-European socialism" and he added that "in the mid century, communism will become, wanting it or not, Communitarism" (19). In this, history has had to agree with him given that before the fall of the Soviet block, the economic reforms that were introduced in Hungary and Romania took communist economy towards Communitarism (20)." Jean Thiriart's doctrinal works of the early eighties and those developed in the same period by the P.C.N., assume this last tendency. For this purpose, this party presents Communitarism as an "ideology of synthesis that wishes to fuse Marxist-Leninist ideologies and national-revolutionary ones into a synthesis of doctrinal offensive: the socialism of the XXI century" (47). From MARXISM-LENINISM AND NATIONAL-BOLSHEVISM. Bolsheviks.org [emphasis added] |
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"In a passage that is notable for its vagueness, Azevedo says that the CEBs should be the basis for a new communitarianism that rejects the two "bankrupt" models and systems "that are now polarizing the world," capitalism and Marxist socialism. This communitarianism is to be "a dialectical synthesis, a new creation, superimposing itself on thesis and antithesis rather than retrieving them." The passage illustrates the controversy in Latin American Catholicism between those who continue to endorse the "third-position-ism" (tercerismo) of Catholic social teaching and those (including all liberation theologians that I know of) who believe that only socialism can be in accord with Christian values." Theology Today-Basic Ecclesial Communities in Brazil: The Challenge of a New Way of Being Church By Marcello deC. Azevedo, S.J.Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press, 1987. 304 Pp.
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"Commercial immorality indeed. This is the recognizable universe of our own time where the rich, capital, markets, and profit are still all attacked in the fashionable press, academia, and art by people educated in Marxist Sixties radicalism but completely ignorant or uncomprehending of the most elementary principles of free market economics. The full force of Hegel's statism, whether today it is called "communitarianism," the "politics of meaning," or something else, thus descends on property. And when any kind of private action becomes a matter of money, employment, children, weapons, or political activity (in someone's definition), then the state continues on in, police (which may be Hegel's own neologism, by the way), prosecutors, prisons, and all. Hegel, indeed, would be proud." Dr. Kelly Ross, Ph.d. |