Eric Ehrmann
Encyclopedia
Eric Wayne Ehrmann is an expatriate American author, polemic columnist and essayist who resides in Brazil. His critiques of globalism argue that healthy state infrastructures as advocated by French philosopher Raymond Aron
, Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and Canadian author John Ralston Saul, need to be maintained in order to countervail efforts by predatory factions within the globalist movement who act in concert to reduce the influence of nation-states and eliminate the social contract between governments and citizens. The result, Ehrmann contends, in columns and essays, reduces the human condition from people being human beings to being human capital
. He is one of the early contributors to Rolling Stone magazine. During the 1980s and 90s, in columns published by The Christian Science Monitor, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, and USA Today, he focused on international security issues, including dual-use technology moving between South America and the Middle East. In 1995 he was writer-in-residence at the University of New Mexico. He also writes on the burgeoning relationship between professional and amateur sports, legal and illegal gaming and online gambling and the blurred distinction between competition and entertainment and how they enable the growth of the modern day bread and circuses model of social organization. A social media contrarian, Ehrmann has been cited by O'Dwyers PR Newsletter for generating one of the largest flashmobs in the history of the internet for calling out a major online game organization for ambiguities in its funding policy connected to fundraising for aid to Haiti that appeared on Facebook, a major social utility. He is a member of PEN and is a contributor to The Huffington Post
and to Le Post-Le Monde interactif.
in 1944, a massive fuel air explosion, which killed hundreds. Robert (called "Bob")was a member of the Jewish War Veterans organization and buried accordingly. His paternal grandfather, Sam, was born in the US with antecedents from the Austrian, Russian and German empires. Sam worked as a printers devil and then as a union pressman on the Cleveland News and after moving to Chicago became a specialist in the Roto-Gravure color printing process while employed by the Cuneo Press.
Eric was graduated in 1964 from Shaker High School in Shaker Heights, Ohio and was confirmed in the Reform Judaism movement by Rabbi Arthur J. Lelyveld
at Fairmount Temple (Congregation Anshe Hesed). He also was mentored in the politics of modern Judaism and Reform Judaism by another prominent Reform Judaism movement figure, Rabbi Albert A. Goldman of the Issac Mayer Wise Synagogue in Cincinnati, Ohio, who was a professor at the Hebrew Union College
-Jewish Institute of Religion. Rabbi Goldman was a friend of his father Robert, who was the first Jew to hold elected office in Plumbers Local 55 (AFL-CIO) in Cleveland, Ohio; Goldman presided over Robert´s funeral in 1967 after the union official's sudden death at age 50 attributed to a myocardial infarction, but no autopsy performed by the Cuyahoga County Coroner, to confirm this.
At Shaker, Ehrmann was mentored in writing by his english professor, Jim Snavely, a Yale University graduate, who doubled as coach of the tennis team that won several state titles. As a college student, Eric Ehrmann earned part of his college tuitition working at summer jobs, including the bar mill at Republic Steel in the Flats of Clevleland and he was a member of the United Steelworkers of America (AFL-CIO)at that time. An accomplished cornetist, he studied with Louis Davidson at the Cleveland Institute of Music and in 1965 and 1966 worked in bands in the Flats area of Cleveland along the polluted Cuyahoga River- before it was immortalized by songster Randy Newman- at venues including The Beacon House. There, he made purely social connections with underworld figures including Danny Greene
and Chris Nardi.
from his fraternity house while still a columnist for The Miami Student, the student newspaper at Miami University of Ohio. At Miami he pledged the Kappa DKE chapter and was initiated into the Delta Kappa Epsilon
fraternity. As a Miami Deke, he developed a friendship with author P.J. O'Rourke, who signed the Deke pledgebook at Kappa but never completed the program, that continues today.http://www.jannswenner.com/Press/Revolutionary_Wild_Unpredictable.aspx. He subsequently dropped out of Miami University. He studied French in an intensive summer program at Harvard University and attended the French civilization institute at the Sorbonne and was in Paris during the Summer of 1968. As one of the early contributors to "Rolling Stone" working under founder Jann S. Wenner. His controversial January 1969 Rolling Stone cover story on the Detroit/Ann Arbor political rock band MC-5 was selected by editors as one of the "great stories" in the history of the publication and subsequently featured in the magazine's http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00067NB3K 25th anniversary edition, and anthologized in a Rolling Stone/Doubleday book. And his November, 1969 coverage of the funeral of beat generation icon Jack Kerouac
was anthologized in the successful Rolling Stone Book of The Beats, published by Hyperion and edited by Holly George-Warren. http://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/toc/0786885424. He participated in meetings with the likes of the dearly departed Dr Hunter S. Thomson, photographer Annie Liebowitz, and other icons of the period but in a professional not social sense. His social acquaintances in Babylon-by-the-Bay at that time included Berkeley Barb founding publisher and editor Max Scherr
, San Francisco Chronicle writer Maitland Zane, and Arlene Elster, a close friend of singer Janis Joplin, also from Port Arthur, TX. He participated in literary salons at the home of San Francisco architect John Carl Warnecke
, and his wife, writer Grace Kennan Warnecke, which featured prominent literary figures of the time like Norman Mailer
, and others, who would discuss political and social issues of the day.
With the promise of a contributing editorship ahead of him Ehrmann split with Wenner largely over classic writer-publisher money issues. Wenner and his wife owned "his and hers" Porsches that they would park behind the Rolling Stone offices at 3rd and Brannan, while Jann Wenner was paying writers just $50 for a cover story. Wenner's passion for Porsches and the high life figured into the Janis Joplin Mercedes Benz (song) with the line "my friends all drive Porches, I must make amends..." After Ehrmann's departure, Wenner brought in another Cleveland writer, Joe Eszterhas
, with his strong newspaper background from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who had written for that newspaper articles about Kent State massacre.
and wrote a book on that subject. He worked during this Heidelberg period at the infamous Building 28, a center for the computerization and analysis of human intelligence data, holding top secret and special intelligence security clearances. Building 28 which was the first US facility to be blown up by terrorists- the Baader-Meinhof group- in Europe. The group was a precursor of the Red Army Faction. It took the US government over 25 years to put up a small plaque to mark the event that came down at the top secret facility.
Returning to the US in 1980 Ehrmann worked as a corporate writer for Peat Marwick, now KPMG
, where he was mentored by Edward B. McEnerney, a retired US diplomat, and Jerry Bowles, the biographer of TV pioneer Ed Sullivan. At Peat Marwick he did ghostwriting assignments for prominent world figures including productivity expert W. Edwards Deming
, French publisher Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, Manfred Rommel, futurist Herman Kahn
, and astronaut and airline executive Frank Borman
, among others. He also worked with the firm's German practice, collaborating with partner Godehard Pueckler, who as the vertrauenswürdige Wirtschaftsprüfer of the Christian Democratic party, was looking into developments surrounding the Banco Ambrosiano
and Banco Ambrosiano Andino in South America.
In 1981, at the invitation of Ed Daly, owner of World Airways
and a client of his employer Peat Marwick, Ehrmann travelled to Mogadishu, Somalia to assist in preparation of a study regarding the refugee situation and conflict in the poorly defined region disputed by Somalia and Ethiopa known as the Ogaden.
With Daly, who was battling cancer at that time, he landed in the first Boeing 747 to touch down at the airport in Mogadishu carrying a small survey team and 250,000 lbs of medical supplies and portable hospital equipment. He subsequently traveled to Belet-Uene in a small Cessna aircraft and discussed the refugee situation in a long session over Papastratos cigarettes with Lino Bordin an Italian diplomat who was a representative of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees(UNHCR)in the disputed border region at that time. The sprawling cloth hut camps, occupied by over 100,000 refugees from the Ogaden war, lacked adequate health care and sanitary facilities and served as a breeding ground for young males who would become extremists a decade later creating the chaos and terror that was depicted in the Hollywood film Black Hawk Down.
He also worked in public relations, at the Edelman
firm, developing and supervising programs for DATAR a French government economic development organization, the Ministry of Foreign Trade of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), and the government of Mexico and was registered as such with official US organizations as per legal requirements. He was mentored by John Scanlon, who worked for the Edelmans at that time, and by Richard Edelman
himself.
, The Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, The Journal of Commerce, The Journal of Defense and Diplomacy, among others. Through participation in events conducted mainly by the Council of the Americas
his social network included journalist James Brooke, who wrote for the Miami Herald and the New York Times, and Journal of Commerce columnist Adolfo Aguilar Zinser
, who would become national security adviser to the government of Mexico under president Vicente Fox, and David Unger, who continues on the editorial board at The New York Times, and Robin Dilks then of the BBC World Service Latin America bureau. Ehrmann was a consultant on the
1988 computer simulation game
Hidden Agenda that was a forerunner of the "games for change" movement.
and Howard's refusal to testify against White, and his mentoring a young treasury official Paul Volcker
, who would later tell Ehrmann in an off-the-record 1990 interview that "Doc bailed me out on gold deals a couple times." Through Howard's good offices, Ehrmann, as a non-virtual fly on the wall, was able to gain perspectives on the privitization of the former Soviet economy through coupons and other schemes, attending meetings on the Lawn at the University of Virginia that featured Russian Central Bank Director-to-be Viktor Geraschenko and other prominent financial world personalities, which provided him with background for the preparation of his columns.
Ehrmann was involved also at this time in mentoring and sponsorship of two foreign nationals who became citizens of the United States of America through naturalization. Djamel Darradji, an Algerian who had served in the diplomatic service of his country, and a second individual from Egypt, who holds a PhD from a major east coast university and is a policy analyst in the Washington, DC area. Ceremonies in one instance were held at Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia, and attended by members of the US congress and other officials.
Ehrmann's commentary in the Spring 1992 issue of Orbis, published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, represents one of few the attempts to call into question the low threat potential of Saddam Hussein's nuclear and guided missile programs that were concocted by US expert and then-Carnegie Fellow Leonard S. Spector in his book "Nuclear Ambitions," and were accepted as the gold standard by some US agencies, planners and most NGOs. This information was sourced during 1980s and in no way was associated with threat potential lies propagated by Iraqi intelligence fabricator Curveball, and subsequently used by then US Secretary of State Colin Powell to build support for Iraq war.
In 1995 he was named writer in residence at the University of New Mexico Department of Communication and Journalism by Associate Provost David E. Stuart. His class on writing to scale for magazines featured talks and round-table discussions with media personalities, including 1994 Pulitzer Prize
for National Reporting winner Eileen Welsome
the only person known to have won the prize for herself and not as a writer on behalf of a newspaper.
Eric Ehrmann also did radio political commentary for KUNM, the National Public Radio affiliate at the University of New Mexico and maintained a working relationship with the news director of the oranization at that time, Marcos Martinez.
In July of 1995 year he was diagnosed with colon cancer, which was staged as Dukes 3-C, and agreed to surgery and one year of weekly chemotherapy. Doctors gave him a 23% chance of living five years. He retired from writing to focus on dealing with cancer and subsequently beat the odds. He is a fifteen year colon cancer survivor. He subsequently took a hiatus from writing for of several years, during which time he learned, with the use of some cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, and other methods, to manage Cold War PTSD without the use of mood drugs like the SSRI zoloft, which, he believed, stepped on his creative energies although it appeared to help him helping manage what doctors generally call end-of-life issues associated with the cancer diagnosis he received. He was advised by his psychiatrist, Dr Leo Kreuz, a Washington D.C.-area practitioner who had come West to be a professor at the University of New Mexico, not to take a medicine holiday or stop taking the SSRI drug. But he did it anyway. He also served as a volunteer citizenship mentor and trainee in a progam conducted at that time by Catholic Social Services of Albuquerque, New Mexico. He helped individuals whose first language was other than English develop know how to pass the written test that is required to become a naturalized citizen. Most of the students in the program were from Latin American nations.
After a period of restlessness and anomie
, Eric Ehrmann got active writing on the web in 2009, doing columns on The Huffington Post in English and at Le Post-Le Monde Interactif.' Also known for writing the song "Ask Me If I Care", one of the best songs recorded by the rock band Lemon Pipers on their million selling "Green Tambourine" album in 1968.
In late August 2011 Eric was unfriended on Facebook by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales after disagreeing with Jimmy's position on internet freedom (called digital democracy by some), as the comment on this Huffington Post article explains.
Eric Ehrmann is a digital nomad, holds US citizenship, and permanent residency status in Brazil. He is a lifelong fan of the Cleveland Browns. His personal motto is "god is my co-pilot, football is my religion."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-ehrmann/free-linux-software-bridg_b_221910.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-ehrmann/drug-wars-brazils-amazon_b_254348.html
Raymond Aron
Raymond-Claude-Ferdinand Aron was a French philosopher, sociologist, journalist and political scientist.He is best known for his 1955 book The Opium of the Intellectuals, the title of which inverts Karl Marx's claim that religion was the opium of the people -- in contrast, Aron argued that in...
, Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and Canadian author John Ralston Saul, need to be maintained in order to countervail efforts by predatory factions within the globalist movement who act in concert to reduce the influence of nation-states and eliminate the social contract between governments and citizens. The result, Ehrmann contends, in columns and essays, reduces the human condition from people being human beings to being human capital
Human capital
Human capitalis the stock of competencies, knowledge and personality attributes embodied in the ability to perform labor so as to produce economic value. It is the attributes gained by a worker through education and experience...
. He is one of the early contributors to Rolling Stone magazine. During the 1980s and 90s, in columns published by The Christian Science Monitor, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, and USA Today, he focused on international security issues, including dual-use technology moving between South America and the Middle East. In 1995 he was writer-in-residence at the University of New Mexico. He also writes on the burgeoning relationship between professional and amateur sports, legal and illegal gaming and online gambling and the blurred distinction between competition and entertainment and how they enable the growth of the modern day bread and circuses model of social organization. A social media contrarian, Ehrmann has been cited by O'Dwyers PR Newsletter for generating one of the largest flashmobs in the history of the internet for calling out a major online game organization for ambiguities in its funding policy connected to fundraising for aid to Haiti that appeared on Facebook, a major social utility. He is a member of PEN and is a contributor to The Huffington Post
The Huffington Post
The Huffington Post is an American news website and content-aggregating blog founded by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer, and Jonah Peretti, featuring liberal minded columnists and various news sources. The site offers coverage of politics, theology, media, business, entertainment, living, style,...
and to Le Post-Le Monde interactif.
Family Antecedents and Early Years
Eric Ehrmann was delivered into the world by Dr S. B. Abrams at Mount Sinai Hospital on East 105th Street in Cleveland, Ohio. His mother, Hannah Friedland, descended from Bohemian Jews, some of whom were buried in the Bohemian Jewish Cemetery a location not far from today's Jacobs Field baseball park, and from a town in the old Russian Empire (now Belarus) called Puchhof, not far from the city of Pinsk. His maternal grandfather, Emmanuel Friedland was a ward heeler in the old Cleveland Democratic Party machine, worked in pari-mutual operations at a thoroughbred race track in North Randall, Ohio and was a 32nd degree Mason. His maternal uncle, Sheldon B. Friedland, served in the US Army during World War II with the famous Ghost Army the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops tactical deception and false flag operations unit in France and Luxembourg and retired from the Cleveland Police Force as a sergeant. He was also a 32nd degree Mason. Sanford B. Friedland, another maternal uncle was a combat infantryman in the Pacific Theatre, with the 81st Infantry Division fighting battles on Pelilau, and Truk Atoll. Eric's father, Robert, was honorably discharged from the US Army prior to World War II and served in the US Coast Guard Reserve during that war and was involved in security operations following the Cleveland East Ohio Gas ExplosionCleveland East Ohio Gas Explosion
Cleveland East Ohio Gas Explosion occurred on the afternoon of Friday, October 20, 1944. The resulting gas leak, explosion and fires killed 130 people and destroyed a one square mile area on Cleveland, Ohio's east side.-The disaster:At 2:30 p.m...
in 1944, a massive fuel air explosion, which killed hundreds. Robert (called "Bob")was a member of the Jewish War Veterans organization and buried accordingly. His paternal grandfather, Sam, was born in the US with antecedents from the Austrian, Russian and German empires. Sam worked as a printers devil and then as a union pressman on the Cleveland News and after moving to Chicago became a specialist in the Roto-Gravure color printing process while employed by the Cuneo Press.
Eric was graduated in 1964 from Shaker High School in Shaker Heights, Ohio and was confirmed in the Reform Judaism movement by Rabbi Arthur J. Lelyveld
Arthur Lelyveld
Rabbi Arthur J. Lelyveld was a rabbi within the movement of Reform Judaism. As well as being a prominent rabbi he also embraced social activism in many forms....
at Fairmount Temple (Congregation Anshe Hesed). He also was mentored in the politics of modern Judaism and Reform Judaism by another prominent Reform Judaism movement figure, Rabbi Albert A. Goldman of the Issac Mayer Wise Synagogue in Cincinnati, Ohio, who was a professor at the Hebrew Union College
Hebrew Union College
The Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion is the oldest extant Jewish seminary in the Americas and the main seminary for training rabbis, cantors, educators and communal workers in Reform Judaism.HUC-JIR has campuses in Cincinnati, New York, Los Angeles and Jerusalem.The Jerusalem...
-Jewish Institute of Religion. Rabbi Goldman was a friend of his father Robert, who was the first Jew to hold elected office in Plumbers Local 55 (AFL-CIO) in Cleveland, Ohio; Goldman presided over Robert´s funeral in 1967 after the union official's sudden death at age 50 attributed to a myocardial infarction, but no autopsy performed by the Cuyahoga County Coroner, to confirm this.
At Shaker, Ehrmann was mentored in writing by his english professor, Jim Snavely, a Yale University graduate, who doubled as coach of the tennis team that won several state titles. As a college student, Eric Ehrmann earned part of his college tuitition working at summer jobs, including the bar mill at Republic Steel in the Flats of Clevleland and he was a member of the United Steelworkers of America (AFL-CIO)at that time. An accomplished cornetist, he studied with Louis Davidson at the Cleveland Institute of Music and in 1965 and 1966 worked in bands in the Flats area of Cleveland along the polluted Cuyahoga River- before it was immortalized by songster Randy Newman- at venues including The Beacon House. There, he made purely social connections with underworld figures including Danny Greene
Danny Greene
Daniel "Danny" J. Patrick Greene was an Irish American mobster and associate of Cleveland mobster John Nardi during the gang war for the city's criminal operations during the 1970s. Competing gangsters set off more than 35 bombs, most attached to cars in murder attempts, many successful...
and Chris Nardi.
Early Days at Rolling Stone
According to the website of Rolling Stone founder Jann S. Wenner, Eric Ehrmann began writing for Rolling StoneRolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
from his fraternity house while still a columnist for The Miami Student, the student newspaper at Miami University of Ohio. At Miami he pledged the Kappa DKE chapter and was initiated into the Delta Kappa Epsilon
Delta Kappa Epsilon
Delta Kappa Epsilon is a fraternity founded at Yale College in 1844 by 15 men of the sophomore class who had not been invited to join the two existing societies...
fraternity. As a Miami Deke, he developed a friendship with author P.J. O'Rourke, who signed the Deke pledgebook at Kappa but never completed the program, that continues today.http://www.jannswenner.com/Press/Revolutionary_Wild_Unpredictable.aspx. He subsequently dropped out of Miami University. He studied French in an intensive summer program at Harvard University and attended the French civilization institute at the Sorbonne and was in Paris during the Summer of 1968. As one of the early contributors to "Rolling Stone" working under founder Jann S. Wenner. His controversial January 1969 Rolling Stone cover story on the Detroit/Ann Arbor political rock band MC-5 was selected by editors as one of the "great stories" in the history of the publication and subsequently featured in the magazine's http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00067NB3K 25th anniversary edition, and anthologized in a Rolling Stone/Doubleday book. And his November, 1969 coverage of the funeral of beat generation icon Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
was anthologized in the successful Rolling Stone Book of The Beats, published by Hyperion and edited by Holly George-Warren. http://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/toc/0786885424. He participated in meetings with the likes of the dearly departed Dr Hunter S. Thomson, photographer Annie Liebowitz, and other icons of the period but in a professional not social sense. His social acquaintances in Babylon-by-the-Bay at that time included Berkeley Barb founding publisher and editor Max Scherr
Max Scherr
Max Scherr was an American underground newspaper editor and publisher known for his iconoclastic 1960s weekly, the Berkeley Barb....
, San Francisco Chronicle writer Maitland Zane, and Arlene Elster, a close friend of singer Janis Joplin, also from Port Arthur, TX. He participated in literary salons at the home of San Francisco architect John Carl Warnecke
John Carl Warnecke
John Carl Warnecke was an architect based in San Francisco, California, who designed numerous notable monuments and structures in the Modernist, Bauhaus, and other similar styles. He was an early proponent of contextual architecture. Among his more notable buildings and projects are the Hawaii...
, and his wife, writer Grace Kennan Warnecke, which featured prominent literary figures of the time like Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...
, and others, who would discuss political and social issues of the day.
With the promise of a contributing editorship ahead of him Ehrmann split with Wenner largely over classic writer-publisher money issues. Wenner and his wife owned "his and hers" Porsches that they would park behind the Rolling Stone offices at 3rd and Brannan, while Jann Wenner was paying writers just $50 for a cover story. Wenner's passion for Porsches and the high life figured into the Janis Joplin Mercedes Benz (song) with the line "my friends all drive Porches, I must make amends..." After Ehrmann's departure, Wenner brought in another Cleveland writer, Joe Eszterhas
Joe Eszterhas
József A. "Joe" Eszterhas is a Hungarian-American writer, best known for his work on the pulp erotic films Basic Instinct and Showgirls. He has also written several non-fiction books, including an autobiography entitled Hollywood Animal.-Early life:Eszterhas was born in Csákánydoroszló, Hungary,...
, with his strong newspaper background from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who had written for that newspaper articles about Kent State massacre.
Free Lance Expatriate in Europe
During the 1970s he lived in Europe, in Heidelberg, and in Paris, writing about politics, and cultural freedom. At the suggestion of George Bailey, a senior executive at publisher, Springer-Ullstein and biographer of Soviet Nobel Laureate Andrei Sakharov, Ehrmann researched the popular collector movement associated with Hummel figurinesHummel figurines
Hummel figurines are a series of porcelain figurines based on the drawings of Sister Maria Innocentia Hummel, O.S.F.-History:...
and wrote a book on that subject. He worked during this Heidelberg period at the infamous Building 28, a center for the computerization and analysis of human intelligence data, holding top secret and special intelligence security clearances. Building 28 which was the first US facility to be blown up by terrorists- the Baader-Meinhof group- in Europe. The group was a precursor of the Red Army Faction. It took the US government over 25 years to put up a small plaque to mark the event that came down at the top secret facility.
Returning to the US in 1980 Ehrmann worked as a corporate writer for Peat Marwick, now KPMG
KPMG
KPMG is one of the largest professional services networks in the world and one of the Big Four auditors, along with Deloitte, Ernst & Young and PwC. Its global headquarters is located in Amstelveen, Netherlands....
, where he was mentored by Edward B. McEnerney, a retired US diplomat, and Jerry Bowles, the biographer of TV pioneer Ed Sullivan. At Peat Marwick he did ghostwriting assignments for prominent world figures including productivity expert W. Edwards Deming
W. Edwards Deming
William Edwards Deming was an American statistician, professor, author, lecturer and consultant. He is perhaps best known for his work in Japan...
, French publisher Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, Manfred Rommel, futurist Herman Kahn
Herman Kahn
Herman Kahn was one of the preeminent futurists of the latter third of the twentieth century. In the early 1970s he predicted the rise of Japan as a major world power. He was a founder of the Hudson Institute think tank and originally came to prominence as a military strategist and systems...
, and astronaut and airline executive Frank Borman
Frank Borman
Frank Frederick Borman, II is a retired NASA astronaut and engineer, best remembered as the Commander of Apollo 8, the first mission to fly around the Moon, making him, along with fellow crew mates Jim Lovell and Bill Anders, the first of only 24 humans to do so...
, among others. He also worked with the firm's German practice, collaborating with partner Godehard Pueckler, who as the vertrauenswürdige Wirtschaftsprüfer of the Christian Democratic party, was looking into developments surrounding the Banco Ambrosiano
Banco Ambrosiano
Banco Ambrosiano was an Italian bank which collapsed in 1982. At the centre of the bank's failure was its chairman, Roberto Calvi and his membership in the illegal Masonic Lodge Propaganda Due...
and Banco Ambrosiano Andino in South America.
In 1981, at the invitation of Ed Daly, owner of World Airways
World Airways
World Airways, Inc. is an American airline headquartered at the HLH Building in Peachtree City, Georgia. For the most part, the company operates non-scheduled services. Its main aircraft and maintenance base is Tampa International Airport.-History:...
and a client of his employer Peat Marwick, Ehrmann travelled to Mogadishu, Somalia to assist in preparation of a study regarding the refugee situation and conflict in the poorly defined region disputed by Somalia and Ethiopa known as the Ogaden.
Ogaden War
The Ogaden War was a conventional conflict between Somalia and Ethiopia in 1977 and 1978 over the Ogaden region of Ethiopia. In a notable illustration of the nature of Cold War alliances, the Soviet Union switched from supplying aid to Somalia to supporting Ethiopia, which had previously been...
With Daly, who was battling cancer at that time, he landed in the first Boeing 747 to touch down at the airport in Mogadishu carrying a small survey team and 250,000 lbs of medical supplies and portable hospital equipment. He subsequently traveled to Belet-Uene in a small Cessna aircraft and discussed the refugee situation in a long session over Papastratos cigarettes with Lino Bordin an Italian diplomat who was a representative of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees(UNHCR)in the disputed border region at that time. The sprawling cloth hut camps, occupied by over 100,000 refugees from the Ogaden war, lacked adequate health care and sanitary facilities and served as a breeding ground for young males who would become extremists a decade later creating the chaos and terror that was depicted in the Hollywood film Black Hawk Down.
He also worked in public relations, at the Edelman
Edelman
Edelman is a surname and may refer to:* David Louis Edelman , American science fiction author* Gregg Edelman , American movie, television and theatre actor* Edmund D. Edelman, Los Angeles, California politician* Eric S. Edelman, U.S...
firm, developing and supervising programs for DATAR a French government economic development organization, the Ministry of Foreign Trade of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), and the government of Mexico and was registered as such with official US organizations as per legal requirements. He was mentored by John Scanlon, who worked for the Edelmans at that time, and by Richard Edelman
Richard Edelman
Richard Winston Edelman is the President & Chief Executive Officer of the Edelman public relations company, a position he has held since September 1996...
himself.
South America and the Buenos Aires Herald
Ehrmann lived during the mid-1980s in Buenos Aires when Argentina was transitioning from dictatorship to democracy and wrote columns for The Buenos Aires Herald, working with editors Dan Newland, Ronald Hansen and Michael Soltys. He also spent considerable time in Montevideo, where his diplomatic contacts included nuclear affairs expert and foreign minister Hector Gros Espielland Enrique V. Iglesias. Eric Ehrmann and wrote political commentary on South American affairs for US publications including National ReviewNational Review
National Review is a biweekly magazine founded by the late author William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955 and based in New York City. It describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for conservative news, commentary, and opinion."Although the print version of the...
, The Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, The Journal of Commerce, The Journal of Defense and Diplomacy, among others. Through participation in events conducted mainly by the Council of the Americas
Council of the Americas
Council of the Americas is an American business organization whose goal is promoting free trade, democracy and open markets throughout the Americas. This includes Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean, as well as South America. Its members share a common commitment to economic and social development,...
his social network included journalist James Brooke, who wrote for the Miami Herald and the New York Times, and Journal of Commerce columnist Adolfo Aguilar Zinser
Adolfo Aguilar Zínser
Adolfo Aguilar Zínser was a Mexican scholar, diplomat and politician who served as a National Security Advisor to President Vicente Fox and as a UN Security Council Ambassador in the midst of the US invasion of Iraq....
, who would become national security adviser to the government of Mexico under president Vicente Fox, and David Unger, who continues on the editorial board at The New York Times, and Robin Dilks then of the BBC World Service Latin America bureau. Ehrmann was a consultant on the
1988 computer simulation game
Hidden Agenda that was a forerunner of the "games for change" movement.
1990–2010: Charlottesville, The University of New Mexico, Colon Cancer and the Web
Returning to the US in 1990 he continued writing and publishing, collaborating with Christopher Barton at the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia. During this Charlottesville period he developed a friendship with a neighbor, retired Assistant Treasury Secretary Frank Leland "Doc" Howard, a New Deal Democrat from Kentucky and saved Howard's life by getting him to the Martha Jefferson Hospital as fast as possible, reducing the risk of a fatal stroke. The student-professor style friendship included Howard discussing how he sorted out post World War 2 Nazi gold issues working with Treasury official Harry Dexter WhiteHarry Dexter White
Harry Dexter White was an American economist, and senior U.S. Treasury department official, participating in the Bretton Woods conference...
and Howard's refusal to testify against White, and his mentoring a young treasury official Paul Volcker
Paul Volcker
Paul Adolph Volcker, Jr. is an American economist. He was the Chairman of the Federal Reserve under United States Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan from August 1979 to August 1987. He is widely credited with ending the high levels of inflation seen in the United States in the 1970s and...
, who would later tell Ehrmann in an off-the-record 1990 interview that "Doc bailed me out on gold deals a couple times." Through Howard's good offices, Ehrmann, as a non-virtual fly on the wall, was able to gain perspectives on the privitization of the former Soviet economy through coupons and other schemes, attending meetings on the Lawn at the University of Virginia that featured Russian Central Bank Director-to-be Viktor Geraschenko and other prominent financial world personalities, which provided him with background for the preparation of his columns.
Ehrmann was involved also at this time in mentoring and sponsorship of two foreign nationals who became citizens of the United States of America through naturalization. Djamel Darradji, an Algerian who had served in the diplomatic service of his country, and a second individual from Egypt, who holds a PhD from a major east coast university and is a policy analyst in the Washington, DC area. Ceremonies in one instance were held at Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia, and attended by members of the US congress and other officials.
Ehrmann's commentary in the Spring 1992 issue of Orbis, published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, represents one of few the attempts to call into question the low threat potential of Saddam Hussein's nuclear and guided missile programs that were concocted by US expert and then-Carnegie Fellow Leonard S. Spector in his book "Nuclear Ambitions," and were accepted as the gold standard by some US agencies, planners and most NGOs. This information was sourced during 1980s and in no way was associated with threat potential lies propagated by Iraqi intelligence fabricator Curveball, and subsequently used by then US Secretary of State Colin Powell to build support for Iraq war.
In 1995 he was named writer in residence at the University of New Mexico Department of Communication and Journalism by Associate Provost David E. Stuart. His class on writing to scale for magazines featured talks and round-table discussions with media personalities, including 1994 Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
for National Reporting winner Eileen Welsome
Eileen Welsome
Eileen Welsome is an American journalist. She received a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1994 while a reporter for The Albuquerque Tribune. She was awarded the prize for her articles about the government's human radiation experiments conducted on unwilling and unknowing Americans during...
the only person known to have won the prize for herself and not as a writer on behalf of a newspaper.
Eric Ehrmann also did radio political commentary for KUNM, the National Public Radio affiliate at the University of New Mexico and maintained a working relationship with the news director of the oranization at that time, Marcos Martinez.
In July of 1995 year he was diagnosed with colon cancer, which was staged as Dukes 3-C, and agreed to surgery and one year of weekly chemotherapy. Doctors gave him a 23% chance of living five years. He retired from writing to focus on dealing with cancer and subsequently beat the odds. He is a fifteen year colon cancer survivor. He subsequently took a hiatus from writing for of several years, during which time he learned, with the use of some cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, and other methods, to manage Cold War PTSD without the use of mood drugs like the SSRI zoloft, which, he believed, stepped on his creative energies although it appeared to help him helping manage what doctors generally call end-of-life issues associated with the cancer diagnosis he received. He was advised by his psychiatrist, Dr Leo Kreuz, a Washington D.C.-area practitioner who had come West to be a professor at the University of New Mexico, not to take a medicine holiday or stop taking the SSRI drug. But he did it anyway. He also served as a volunteer citizenship mentor and trainee in a progam conducted at that time by Catholic Social Services of Albuquerque, New Mexico. He helped individuals whose first language was other than English develop know how to pass the written test that is required to become a naturalized citizen. Most of the students in the program were from Latin American nations.
After a period of restlessness and anomie
Anomie
Anomie is a term meaning "without Law" to describe a lack of social norms; "normlessness". It describes the breakdown of social bonds between an individual and their community ties, with fragmentation of social identity and rejection of self-regulatory values. It was popularized by French...
, Eric Ehrmann got active writing on the web in 2009, doing columns on The Huffington Post in English and at Le Post-Le Monde Interactif.' Also known for writing the song "Ask Me If I Care", one of the best songs recorded by the rock band Lemon Pipers on their million selling "Green Tambourine" album in 1968.
In late August 2011 Eric was unfriended on Facebook by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales after disagreeing with Jimmy's position on internet freedom (called digital democracy by some), as the comment on this Huffington Post article explains.
Eric Ehrmann is a digital nomad, holds US citizenship, and permanent residency status in Brazil. He is a lifelong fan of the Cleveland Browns. His personal motto is "god is my co-pilot, football is my religion."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-ehrmann/free-linux-software-bridg_b_221910.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-ehrmann/drug-wars-brazils-amazon_b_254348.html