NOSTALGIA TUESDAY: My First Huffington Post Article

On Tuesdays, this blog site reaches back to the past and brings back an old posting to review and update.  I wrote more than a hundred articles for the Huffington Post, so I won't be doing this for all of them.  Over the coming Tuesdays I'll pick the most relevant ones only.

First of all, what is The Huffington Post?

• In May, celebrated 20 years of groundbreaking digital-first journalism.
• The Huffington Post was founded in May of 2005 by Arianna Huffington and others as a progressive alternative to conservative news websites, such as the Drudge Report.
• 
  In the early days, most of the news reports for the Huffington Post came from unpaid bloggers like me.  I don't quite remember how I got recruited, but my contributions began in 2008.  SIMPLE SOLUTION ESSAYS is a compilation of the first 75 papers.
• The company was acquired by AOL in 2011 for $313 million.

• 
  Also in 2011, Jonathan Tasini on behalf of bloggers filed a lawsuit to get paid.  Back in 2006, he ran against Hillary Rodham Clinton in New York for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate.  The court dismissed with prejudice the case.   
• My final article for the Huffington Post was on 11January2012.  I stopped because this took too much time.  There were numerous comments, and I made it a point to respond to all of them.  In 2020, this site stopped including comments, and deleted older ones.  Too bad, for this interchange was good for the public.
• In 2012 became the first U.S. digital media enterprise to win a Pulitzer Prize.

• 
  Verizon Communications acquired AOL in 2015 for $4.4 billion.
• Changed name to HuffPost in 2017.
• In 2021, BuzzFeed acquired HuffPost and laid off 70 of the staff.
• You can access all of my articles HERE.

Among the unpaid contributors to the Huffington Post was Barack Obama.  Just coincidentally, my very first article for the Huffington Post was, Well, Barack, We have a Problem...  This posting is thus my nostalgic contribution this week.

• My article with that title was published on 29May2008, when he was in a hot race with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Presidential nomination.
• The first line of my essay was a continuation of the title:  ...and only you will have the power to provide a solution.  Followed by:  

Why you? The United States is the most powerful nation, ever. Today, and for the next generation, no other country will be anywhere close to our military and economic dominance. You will have a once in a millennium opportunity to accomplish something monumentally extraordinary, while ameliorating the global economic mega-depression that some say will soon loom from the combined hammer of Peak Oil and Global Warming.

• 
  Of course, he first had to win that nomination, but I assured him that he would prevail, and I was right. 

• Our society seems to have a fatal flaw: we can't expeditiously act to prevent potential cataclysms like Peak Oil and Global Warming (let's call this PO/GW). Yes, of course, we will eventually prevail, but, by my reckoning, only after decades of agony and turmoil. There has to be a better way. 
• 
  Miracle of miracles. It turns out, ironically, that PO/GW is just the catalyst you need to empower you to take those remarkable steps. There are innumerable great things you can attempt to accomplish as the POTUS. What about something so supreme as ending wars...forever?

• 
  I indicated that we will probably be spending a trillion dollars over the next few years for our wars in Iraq and the Middle East.  Turns out that these wars cost $4 trillion to $6 trillion.
• So where could he find those kinds of dollars for ending wars?  In the Defense budget.

You go to your very first G8 Nations Summit, by your declared emergency to be held at United Nations headquarters in New York City, and pronounce a Gorbachev-like bombshell: our country will reduce military spending by 10% this year, and will continue to do so for the next eight years.   At this stage, keep quiet about the "ending wars forever" part, as then, no one will take you too seriously.

• 
  Likely response?

China's knee-jerk reaction might well be, what, cut defense spending? We haven't had a chance yet to attain your level of capability. But, on afterthought, they will realize that they will only need to decrease their spending by $6 billion in Year One while the U.S. takes a $60 billion hit. Ten percent of the worldwide $1.2 trillion/year for war means that at least $120 billion/year will suddenly become available in the first year to overcome Peak Oil and Global Warming.

• 
  By Year 12, the world defense budget will have been reduced to $34 billion, in comparison, a little more than 5% our current DOD budget.  Thus:

The so-called military-industrial complex will shift their effort to mass-producing more efficient wind energy conversion systems, developing the hydrogen jetliner, in time converting the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to methanol and otherwise insuring for the development of the sustainable infrastructure and necessary clean energy. Military personnel can initially be maintained to handle the few thousand terrorists, take on environmental tasks and the like. By 2020 there should be one U.S. security force not more than 5% our current size.

• 
  I later wrote in HuffPo that this was the 10% solution to world peace.

Alas, President Obama ignored my plea, and war funds have subsequently skyrocketed since 2008.  Worse, defense spending by the USA now accounts for nearly 40% of all military expenditures by all other countries.  Can you believe that we spend just about a trillion dollars/year on war, which is more than the NEXT NINE COUNTRIES COMBINED?

This is such a beautiful day that I took a photo and video of my view from 15 Craigside.

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