1. What is the NSP Version of the Global Marshall Plan?
The NSP is seeking to have the advanced industrial countries of the world use their resources to eliminate once and for all global poverty, homelessness, and hunger; provide quality education and health care for all; and repair the global environment. As an initial commitment, we want the U.S. to donate at least 1-2% of its Gross Domestic Product each year for the next twenty (though the amount may be less if other countries join in the effort, more if they do not).
Here are the indispensable parts of the NSP version of the Plan:
A. The Global Marshall Plan will not be one more aid plan that uses the concept of "generosity" as a savvy cover for the pursuit of self- and national interest. All elements of the Global Marshall Plan will be administered in ways that not only are consistent with love, kindness, generosity, compassion, ecological sensitivity, and nonviolence, but actually foster in all involved parties the ability to act on those values. The Global Marshall Plan must embody generosity in such a way that it inspires open-heartedness and love, as well as ethical aliveness and deep ecological sensitivity.
B. The monies will be given to an international agency set up for this purpose and governed by an international board composed of cultural, religious, spiritual, social justice and environmental activist leaders who have a proven history of commitment to peace, social justice and the elimination of poverty. This agency will then hire economists, sociologists, environmentalists, lawyers, public health care activists, educational reform activists, and other professional experts who share a strong commitment to empowerment of local people, social justice, peace, and respect for local cultural and religious traditions. This team will develop plans to be presented to the international board.
C. The international board will work with national boards similarly composed of cultural, religious, spiritual, NGO and local social justice and environmental activist leaders who can develop national plans that would be submitted to the international board for approval and funding.
D. All previously negotiated international trade agreements shaped by the advanced industrial societies will be re-conceptualized and amended in ways to ensure that they work in the best interests of underdeveloped countries and not primarily to serve the multinational corporations or the interests of the developed world. For example, new trade agreements will seek to promote local farmers throughout the world rather than providing special benefits for the farmers of the European Union and the United States, and rather than assisting the corporate farming model that has emerged in the West at the expense of small family farms. Similarly, such agreements will favor the needs of the global environment and workers' rights to organize and secure a living wage in the industries both of the developed and the emerging societies.
E. All plans approved by the board must be rigorously screened to ensure that they meet the following criteria: they are environmentally sound and enhance sustainability; they value "growth" only insofar as the growth is consistent with environmental needs of the planet and of the local area and consistent with love, generosity, kindness, compassion, and nonviolence; they enhance the ability of people to value each other and to recognize and support diversity, generosity, and cooperation.
F. All parts of this plan must be delivered in a spirit of generosity, but also in a spirit of humility and repentance: humility, because the NSP version of the GMP recognizes that the West's superior economic status does not imply a higher level of consciousness or moral worth, and repentance because we deeply regret the destruction and impoverishment caused by advanced industrial societies in countries like Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, and much of Africa and Central and South America. The values of materialism and selfishness that have often predominated in Western countries in the past thousand years has led to huge destruction of human life through wars and colonial and imperial economic and political arrangements. Having more material goods has had a very good side, in reducing some of the suffering and discomfort in daily life, and science has opened up huge amounts of knowledge that has the potential of being used for the wellbeing of everyone on the planet and of the planet itself. Yet we also recognize that the actual use of science and technology has often served to make mass murder more frequent and more effective, to produce in ways that have been destructive to the environmental survival of the planet, and to enrich some while impoverishing many others. So the NSP version of the GMP insists on humility. Moreover, that humility recognizes that many countries that are economically impoverished (in part by policies imposed by advanced industrial countries and their trade agreements) are nevertheless homes to flourishing spiritual and ethical wisdom that needs to be learned by people in the advanced industrial societies. At the same time, we resist the tendency to exoticize "oppressed" peoples as necessarily wiser or more virtuous than others-a mistake that has led to many failures on the part of social change movements of the past.
G. An International Generosity Corps will be recruited from all around the world to dedicate two years of their lives to providing help and assistance in the implementation of the Global Marshall Plan. To ensure that we attract people at a variety of levels of expertise and experience, we would seek to provide funding for such volunteers in accord with the average level of pay in their home country received by people at their level of competence and experience, but not more than three times the average income of all people in their home country. Only volunteers who can demonstrate a high level of humility, commitment to social justice, non-violence, peace and the philosophy of generosity would be admitted to the training program for the Generosity Corps.
2. Why do you call this a "Marshall Plan?"
George Marshall was Secretary of State when he convinced the U.S. to launch a plan to rebuild Europe after the Second World War, a plan that is widely credited with having stimulated European economies so that they became successful and could eventually stand on their own without direct aid from the U.S. The Marshall Plan thus stands as a reminder that government financed plans can, if run with smarts and sensitivity, be successful in alleviating suffering and stimulating economic well-being.
We are aware that a subtext of the older Marshall Plan was to advance American economic domination and to overcome the potential socialist leanings of many in post WWII Europe. We do not share those goals, so we are not using the term for that reason, and would gladly endorse another name for it that actually conveyed as much of the substance and hooked in to the positive feelings generated by Global Marshall Plan, but we do not know of such a name.
3. Haven't plans to aid the poor failed in the past-what makes this any different?
There has never been a serious attempt to eliminate poverty either in the US or around the world. Rather, poverty programs from the New Deal to the One Campaign have sought to reduce the level of poverty and to free people from some of the worst impacts of the "free market" by providing social supports or by reducing or forgiving some elements of debt.
While some of the worst aspects of material suffering have been reduced by these programs, they have never been funded at a level that could even possibly create an economic infrastructure sufficient to provide for lifting the majority of the world's poor to economic well-being.
Because these plans didn't succeed in doing what they actually never set out to do, people paying taxes to these programs have seen their taxes rise year after year, without a corresponding end to poverty. This has generated a great deal of frustration as people feel that their tax monies are being sunk into a bottomless pit. And they are not wrong, because the programs they fund have never actually sought to eliminate the poverty but mostly only to buffer its worst impacts.
Moreover all these programs have been delivered in the form of "objective caring" (namely, money) but not subjective caring. In other words, the benefits have been delivered without any serious attempt to give a priority to affirming caring bonds between human beings or affirming the value of generosity and caring for others as a central value that motivates the program and motivates the people who are delivering it. Anyone who has been on the receiving end of these programs can report on the humanly insensitive and sometimes even outrageously boorish ways that domestic welfare or foreign aid has been delivered. In the absence of any real caring, some recipients have exploited the system, further aggravating the frustrations of tax payers.
To remedy this problem, one of the central charges to the governing bodies of this program is to develop within the process of delivering aid a New Bottom Line consciousness in which the fostering of an ethos of solidarity is central in the kinds of programs that it will fund, the way the programs will be administered, and the hiring, retention and promotion of people who will work for this program.
4. Past programs have often ended up providing money for the infrastructure needed for big capital and the global multinationals, but this rarely helps the poor, although it does facilitate the development of a small but growing middle class that then too often identifies with the rich and their interests and ignores the needs of the poor. What makes this different?
Our program will explicitly seek to avoid this dynamic by funding infrastructure (including schools, hospitals, energy sources, and homes) for the poor and the homeless and for rural farmers and rural business.
One major difference between the NSP version of the Global Marshall Plan and other versions is that we insist that the funding decisions be made not by governmental authorities nor by corporate interests or the "free marketplace," but rather by a board for each country composed of cultural and religious/spiritual figures, social change activists, environmentalists, NGOs, and grass roots activists, who will have as an explicit mandate to focus on ways to ensure that the help really is directed to the well-being of the poor and the transformation of their condition. The plan rejects the theory that the best way to serve the poor is to serve the interests of the powerful or the corporations which in turn will allow some of their profits to trickle down to the rest of the society.
5. Many countries in the world are governed by elites that are dictatorial or do not really care about the well being of their poorest citizens. They would not be willing to have agencies like the GMP work independently of the government, and would seek through the government to siphon off the funds to their allies, and would use language like "democratic control by our own society" to justify the undemocratic outcome of how the funds are being used. If there were an independent local board of spiritual leaders, cultural leaders, and democratic local leaders, it would be subverted or replaced by the local government. How can you get around the reality that many states will not cooperate in your well-intentioned GMP except to overtly or covertly subvert it?
We do not envision a need to start by funding projects in every country in the world. This is not a program that has to spend all its money right away or be perceived as having "failed." So, we will start with those countries where the government really is well-intentioned and not corrupt, and make the success of those programs an incentive for other countries to join in our plan in a full-hearted way. If we in fact live up to our mission to act out of a spirit of generosity, and caring for others, we will play a major role in breaking through the culture of me-firstism that dominates the world.
Today, people think in terms of getting as much for themselves as possible, because they believe that that is what everyone else is doing. The collective impact of that way of behaving is a world being quickly destroyed by selfishness and materialism.
But most human beings wish to live in a very different kind of world in which generosity, mutual recognition between human beings, real love and caring, gratitude, mutual forgiveness and open-heartedness, awe and wonder, and social responsibility predominate-but they don't believe it's possible. And their cynical pessimism about what is possible leads them to then believe that the only "rational" way to be is to follow the logic of the capitalist marketplace and its not-so-hidden message that people should get as much for themselves as they possibly can as quickly as they can. Governments that are corrupt are often led by people who have been infused with this kind of reasoning. They don't see themselves as "stealing" so much as being "rational"-which is to help one's friends and those who will eventually help you, and to ignore the interests of others since they won't care about you so much either.
The strategy of generosity behind the Global Marshall Plan has the capacity to challenge this way of thinking and being in the world. So as the GMP starts to be perceived as a genuine act of generosity, it will have major ripple effects which will make it easier to challenge the selfishness in government and make it easier to get into power people who are honest enough to make the GMP a plausible partner for them in developing their own country. Until that happens, we will not work with those governments, but instead work through NGOs that can directly connect with the people in need of the aid. And what happens if even those NGOs get corrupted by this same dynamic? Well, we don't have to work with any country's NGOs or others represented in our local governing board until we are assured that both the aid and the message of generosity and caring will truly reach the poor and empower them. Unil then, the GMP programs will function only in countries where there is a reasonable chance of its doing the task it set out to do.
6. How can you eliminate poverty without creating jobs or some form of employment-and isn't that the task of the private sector?
We will work with micro-financing projects that economically empower people to start very small entrepreneurial enterprises, as well as small and medium size businesses that can demonstrate how the funds they receive will translate into ongoing employment for poor people. We will also fund new forms of work, including those that involve collective living, collective sharing of finances, community control of energy and utilities and larger economic ventures like the production of steel, and mass transportation.
The goal of this program is to put in place housing, food supplies, ecological understanding, skills training, infrastructure, and the requisites of an economy such that after the twenty-year period is finished there will be local people with enough expertise that they can continue to fund and implement the IGC.
We may also need to fund the creation of socially responsible corporations that are formed around the concept of the New Bottom Line and provide employment for people in a given society or trans-nationally. These corporations would have to produce products that are actually needed and operate according to ecologically sustainable policies that foster caring and generosity among employees and community members. Such corporations would be set up with boards of directors that represent both the investors and also representatives elected yearly by the workers of that corporation and representatives of the communities in which the corporation functions (in the broadest sense, the "stakeholders").
We recognize that in a global capitalist system any corporation trying to function under the requisites of "the New Bottom Line" will be at a disadvantage, because they will be unable to use the ruthless techniques of global capital (e.g. threatening to move or close the plant if workers strike for reasonable wages, producing goods that are profitable even though environmentally destructive, inattention to the needs of the communities in which they operate, etc.). And while part of this plan then requires that the GMP continue to support these GMP-sponsored corporations, we know that this disadvantage will continue after the GMP no longer functions. For that reason, the NSP version of the GMP will simultaneously fund and support the creation of movements seeking constitutional changes in all the countries of the planet (whether or not they are part of the GMP) that would establish the Social Responsibility clause for all large corporations: that they must prove to a jury of ordinary citizens a satisfactory level of social responsibility (including fostering the values of the New Bottom Line)in order to maintain their charters.
But this is not intending to be a first aid for capitalism, either. We will work with a variety of different economic systems and seek to foster public sector economic growth, economic programs that are rooted in or supervised by the public sector, and mixed public-private cooperation. The NSP version of the GMP is neutral about whether to describe what we want as "capitalist, " socialist" or any other name, but we are not neutral about the kind of decision making we seek to foster, viz. one that gives priority of place to attempts to replace an ethos of selfishness and materialism with an ethos of generosity and caring for others.
7. How can you claim that further "development" of any sort is good for the planet, when development has caused many of the environmental hazards the planet faces today?
We believe that a certain level of economic development is necessary in order to provide environmental justice which is the prerequisite for environmental sanity. As long as we live in a world in which millions of people die each year of malnutrition or diseases that could have been cured by fairer distribution of the world's health resources, it is unrealistic to believe that people in the underdeveloped world will preserve the world's resources and environment rather than use them in accord with their immediate needs (like cutting down the Amazon forests so that they can plant grass to sustain cattle that will be bought by middle class city dwellers at prices that will make it possible for the poor to buy enough food to not starve to death) unless the rest of us find them other ways to provide enough food and sustenance for their families. So a fairer distribution of the world's resources and material well being is necessary in order to begin to involve everyone in the highest priority of the 21st century: saving the planet from environmental destruction.
We do not accept the notion that "first we raise the standard of living of the world: then we worry about the environment." There is no "later"-saving the environment is an immediate and global necessity and the GMP must work in tandem with that priority and believes that its plan will actually make it easier to achieve the global support necessary to do that.
8. How is the NSP-version of the GMP related to more immediate problems facing the U.S. like illegal immigration and domestic poverty?
These are all the same problem.
Illegal immigration would be dramatically reduced if the millions of people seeking work in the U.S. were able to find comparable employment in their home countries. If people can have a reasonable standard of living in their home countries, they will not risk death or imprisonment in some other country.
As to domestic poverty-the NSP-version of the GMP provides that part of its focus must be to wipe out domestic poverty as well as international poverty.
9. What is an International Generosity Corps (IGC)?
This will function as the Global Marshall Plan's hands-on division for volunteers to dedicate a part of their lives to helping in repairing the damage done to the world by the various episodes of Western colonialism and imperialism. Although the International Generosity Corps (IGC) will be empowered to work out private arrangements to encourage needed personnel for short-term stints in the underdeveloped world, or short-term education trips to share specific skills, the normal commitment would be for a two year period in which each volunteer will learn the language and culture and then spend time teaching his/her skills to some relevant constituency in poor communities around the world, or simply working on a project that had been funded by the Global Marshall Plan.
IGC members will have their food and lodging and necessary equipment paid for by the Global Marshall Plan. They will also receive partial salary based on their income lost by volunteering in this program, which will be paid to their families or to a fund which they would have access to AFTER the completion of the terms of their service.
IGC members will also participate in a global communication project in which they report on what they are actually doing "on the ground" in the recipient countries. The goal of this part of the NSP version of the Global Marshall Plan aims to provide reassurance to people who are funding the GMP that they really know what is being done with their monies, as well as to foster more generosity as people recognize its effects.
Because IGC members will be perceived as representatives of the international good will being extended to those in need around the world, volunteers will be carefully screened to ensure that we are not only getting the most technically efficient, but also those who are genuinely caring, loving, generous, and gentle people whose very being can convey the notion that the peoples of the world care about each other and want to take care of each other. They will be provided supervision by local and international spiritual/religious leaders, psychotherapists, and teachers, as well as by experts in the fields in which the volunteer is offering services. The experience of being in the International Generosity Corps will provide opportunities weekly to meet with other volunteers and receive teaching and training in an on-going manner, as well as emotional and spiritual supervision and support, along with opportunities to make new friendships and relationships with people from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds.
IGC salaries and support will be paid by the Global Marshall Plan.
The last three months of service in the IGC will be dedicated to sharing with fellow citizens in their country of origin what the IGC member has learned and what changes that might suggest for life in the home country of origin.
10. How much will all this cost and who will pay for it?
Before the twenty years of full-scale funding there will be a 5 year start up period in which detailed plans will be developed in each participating country (both donors and recipients) and submitted to the international board. In this period the phase-in plans will be fully worked out. We will start with countries that are most open to this kind of generosity. The cost in this initial period will be considerably less than once the program gets fully off the ground with countries in need, some of whom will by this point have less resistance because they understand that the donor countries are giving support not out of a desire to exercise control or domination, but out of genuine generosity.
In its fullest and most-likely-to-succeed version, this program will cost two trillion dollars a year, once all the G8 countries are involved in financially supporting it. It is estimated that the world will save more than that amount from decreases in military spending
We propose that the cost be paid by a Generosity Tax that is progressive (that is, it takes a higher percentage of income from rich people than from poor people) and by a tax on international financial transactions. Some economists estimate that a 1% tax on international financial transactions would yield enough monies to fund this project for its first ten years.
11. What is the relationship of the NSP-version of the GMP to other versions, such as those coming out of Europe?
We seek to work collaboratively with every organization or group that wishes to move toward a global marshall plan, even when we have significant differences with other groups, as long as they don't fall into obvious political traps in terms of extremist rhetoric or anti-American or extreme Leftist rhetoric. We will join coalitions and work to make them successful. At the same time, we will keep the autonomy of the NSP intact, and will continue to promote the NSP version, and will do our best when working in coalition with others to advance the specificity of the NSP version to the extent that we believe that our formulations will be helpful in developing greater support for the GMP idea.
So we will have a two track approach: 1. supporting and working with larger coalitions promoting and 2. supporting our own activities and vision, educating people to it, and building campaigns around it that we think may at specific historical moments be the most effective way to build support for The New Bottom Line and the strategy of generosity.
Some spiritual progressives in Europe have told us that the GMP discourse there is so completely identified with social democratic reformist language and the political style of the economistic social democratic forms of the past century as to render them useless if one hopes to build mass support. We still intend to use the GMP language, but to infuse it with a deep spiritual vision, one that emphasizes the human need to be needed, the centrality of developing a sense of awe, wonder and radical amazement at the incredible grandeur and mystery of the universe, the need for transcendent meaning and purpose to life, the need for love and human connection that cannot be fulfilled by buying yet more things. Because fostering love, generosity, caring for others, ecological sensitivity, and ethical aliveness, are equally part of our goals, we will not abandon our NSP version of the GMP and will modify it only in ways that make it clearer, more workable, and more in accord with our fundamental goals of building a global campaign for the New Bottom Line.
12. Aren't there areas of this plan that need to be more worked out before you put this into the political arena?
No. The plan has enough details for people to decide how they relate to it. It will need far more details once there is a majority support for the NSP version of the GMP. But for the moment, we have enough of a conception to start building public support.
However, that doesn't mean that we don't need advice, carefully worked on elaborations, models, financing proposals, and refinements, as well as initial ideas about who should be on the international governing body (yes, we know that it should include the Dalai Lama and former President Jimmy Carter and Nelson Mandela, but we also need less famous people who nevertheless meet our criteria-who are they, why do you think they should be on the board, who are you, and how do we get in touch with them to start talking about the idea!).
So your suggestions, carefully thought out, are very welcome. If you'd like to be part of the NSP activist GMP conference call, send us your email: to Nichola@tikkun.org.
This is for people who are willing to give time to writing letters to media and policy people and Congressional people, who are willing to leaflet or demonstrate on behalf of the NSP's version of the GMP, and who have no reluctance about insisting that this is a spiritual program whose center is the Strategy of Generosity. So before you email us, please read all the relevant materials at www.spiritualprogressives.org.
Most immediately we need funds to start the project, to hire organizers, to print materials, and to develop longer and more detailed brochures. So, if you have financial contacts, help us. If you have the skill of writing a grant proposal, identify the places you'd think to approach (particularly foundations and corporate giving sources). If you can write the grant proposal, please do so, but don't submit it before clearing it with us. If you have a contact on the board of a foundation or corporation, approach them with these ideas, and if they are interested, let us know the next steps. Or if you'd like to run a local fund-raising event for the GMP, please do so and send the tax-deductible contributions to us at the NSP so we can use it to help hire organizers.
If you have other relevant skills (e.g. you can organize a large event in your area to promote the GMP but need one of us to come there and be the speaker, let us know; if you can film a weekly YouTube appearance for RabbiLerner or Nichola Torbett, let us know; if you can get us invited to a large conference where we'd have plenty of time to present these ideas, let us know; if you'd like to come to volunteer time at our Berkeley California office, or if you would like to make outreach calls or do data entry from your home, we could surely use your assistance). If you have other ideas about how you could help us, please let us know.
13. How do you envision the NSP version of the Global Marshall Plan getting adopted in the Western world and in the U.S. in particular which has such a strongly organized opposition to any such plans and opposition to the use of the government to help promote large-scale programs of social engineering?
Opposition to large scale government programs is often rational. Many of those programs have been implemented more from the standpoint of advancing the interests of ruling elites than from the standpoint of exercising genuine generosity toward others. If that were the way our program eventually came into prominence, we'd oppose it too!
We envision a mass movement building around the Network of Spiritual Progressives which endorses the New Bottom Line and its commitment to love and kindness, generosity and caring, and supports the Spiritual Covenant with America. The Global Marshall Plan is part of plank no. 7 of the Spiritual Covenant-the plank on generosity as the best path toward homeland security, as well as the best foreign policy commensurate with our growing recognition that our well-being depends on the well-being of everyone alive on the planet as well as on the well being of the planet itself.
Our strategy is to build popular support for the idea of generosity as an alternative to militarist or even economic/diplomatic domination of the countries of the world. Here are some of the steps:
Local NSP activists seek endorsement and involvement of clergy and their congregations, union leaders, political party activists and candidates, elected officials, media columnists and reporters, NGOs and their activists, and civic groups like the Rotary Clubs, etc. Individuals should also be encouraged to sign the endorsement of the NSP version of the GMP on our website www.spiritualprogressives.org
Local NSP activists lead a campaign to get endorsement of the GMP by local city councils, state legislatures, and the U.S. Congress, or to put the GMP endorsement on local or state ballots.
GMP enthusiasts start to run for office on the platform of the Spiritual Covenant with special emphasis on the GMP, and many get elected even though they have very little money backing them. Others run as delegates to the state and national conventions of their political parties, and both in running and in being at those conventions, they use every possible opportunity to spread our GMP brochures and to talk about the substance of the ideas.
We seek to create a spiritual progressive network in every political party, so that we can advance the ideas of a Global Marshall Plan and the rest of the Spiritual Covenant with America. To do this, you can join the political party that most appeals to you. Start going to meetings and talking about the New Bottom Line and the Spiritual Covenant, emphasizing the need for a spiritual progressive perspective and for the Strategy of Generosity and the Global Marshall Plan.
Build relationships with those who seem interested in these ideas. These are people who likely share some of our spiritual progressive ideals, even if they are nervous about expressing them publicly (or even shy to acknowledge to themselves and their closest friends that they really have a strong idealistic, spiritual and ethical consciousness that underlies their thinking). Invite them to NSP events, including those on the Generosity Strategy to end the war in Iraq and build a different kind of world. Then, the next time you wish to bring up the topic of endorsing the GMP in the party, ask for their support.
Eventually, political parties endorse the idea and presidential candidates compete as to who is most truly dedicated to generosity. Then, one of them wins election, and uses her or his mandate to mobilize national support to push the GMP through the Congress. In the meanwhile, Congress has already created committees to explore the version of the GMP they would endorse, and they've already made contact with similar campaigns in other advanced industrial societies to further the thinking and planning and the forms of legislation that will be needed to make the plans more detailed.
14. So apart from the tasks described above, are there any other things ordinary citizens can do while waiting for this political strategy to work?
YES. EMBODY GENEROSITY AND TALK ABOUT IT.
Here are a few ideas; send us yours!
At your local NSP meeting, show that there is no shortage of love, caring, kindness and generosity toward others. Try the following:
Make it a practice to start every meeting with everyone giving a hug to everyone else who is receptive and does not feel invaded by that practice. Also, line everyone up in a circle, have them face each other's backs, and each person take 5 minutes to give the other a massage of their neck and back (except for people who are unwilling to do this). Then, go around and have every person "check in" with a one minute report on where they are in their lives this week, what challenges they have faced, and particularly to share an experience in which they acted generously, or in which they could have but didn't but now wish they had.
At the end of each meeting, have each person put forward a request for prayer or support from the others in the group for some positive outcome in their lives,
Actively collect lists of needs that each person has, and list of skills or time that they would be willing to offer to other members of the chapter (including those who signed up originally but are no longer coming).
Simultaneously, ask each person to volunteer to offer others in the group some time to a. teach a skill b. offer a service ("I can fix your toilet or help you shovel your snow or paint your house or provide childcare for four hours so that you can go out to a movie or dinner or party or teach your child some skill like a sport or a musical instrument or computer skills or creative writing or art or sewing or cooking or exercise or ...whatever").
Whatever part of this you adopt, terrific. Many blessings for all that you can and will do to promote the Generosity approach!
--Written by Rabbi Michael Lerner
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