Ellen John Sirleaf: A Controversial Laureate?
President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Photo credit: Alex Majoli / Magnum for Newsweek
*This piece was first published on Real Clear World on Tuesday October 11th, 2011 in the Morning Update and then published again on Al Jazeera Opinion on Wednesday October 12th.
**For those who have already this piece, here is an older post reflecting on my field work experiences in Liberia and The Vice Guide’s show about the country. And while I’m at it, here are two posts on some fascinating studies on gender inequality. The first one is about work done by Duflo et al. and India’s reservation policy. The second post is on the research of Noordewier et al. and the economic effects of using married vs. maiden names. Enjoy!
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Widely admired and celebrated abroad, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has an international profile that is the envy of many a public figure. Awarding her the Nobel Peace Prize has only cemented her celebrity status on the political circuit. Yet unlike her fellow co-winners Leymah Gbowee (also of Liberia) and Tawakkul Karman (Yemen), “Ma Ellen” has a past linking her to a violent rebel movement, and since 2006 she has led an administration plagued by corruption. Even though she has been received with adulation overseas since she was first elected, she has always gotten a much tougher reception at home. These contrasts will be brought into sharp relief on Tuesday as Liberians return to the polls for national elections and Sirleaf fights for her political life.
In Liberia, people on the street used to call Sirleaf a “warlord,” citing her association with Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia who is now on trial at The Hague for war crimes in Sierra Leone. This was because Sirleaf was once the International Coordinator for the rebel group National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), raising money to oust former strongman Samuel Doe from power. During the civil war, NPFL fighters perpetrated horrific atrocities and staged violent spectacles, the aftershocks of which are still felt today.
This is important because the Nobel Committee’s citation specifically mentioned “non-violent struggle” and “peace-building work.” Even though this commendation was referring to her support of women’s rights during her tenure as president, her past links to Charles Taylor and the violence perpetrated by the NPFL should not be glossed over in the post-Nobel period.
Sirleaf’s administration has also been consumed by one corruption scandal after another during her six years in office. Twenty-one members of her government have had to resign for corrupt behavior, and still others have been accused but kept their jobs. Problems with corruption are not in themselves surprising, as corruption runs deep in Liberia’s political system. It permeates the police force, the courts, the business community and even the education system.
As president, Sirleaf has very publicly made the fight against corruption a top priority, but in doing so, she has had to work against the grain of her society’s institutions. Although it may be difficult for a Western audience to appreciate this, the fact that she has not been rocked by a corruption scandal herself is remarkable in itself. This is a marked change from every single one of her presidential predecessors. In the context of Liberian politics, remaining corruption- and scandal-free is itself a significant achievement.
Just as important is the fact that Sirleaf has allowed a culture of open political discussion to emerge. It is now possible to publicly criticize the president and her administration without fear of reprisal. She has even passed a law to protect whistleblowers. These are remarkable changes, shifting the post-war dynamic of the country away from violence and toward dialogue (rancorous though it may be).
This is not to say that Sirleaf’s record on transparency and accountability is spotless. She has parted company with Auditor-General John Morlu, the strongest and most competent anti-corruption advocate that Liberia has ever seen. And she has appointed four members of her own family into executive positions and broken her own promise to remain a one-term president. These decisions do not bode well for her next presidential term, should she be re-elected in Tuesday’s election.
Still, none of these experiences take away from her advocacy efforts on behalf of Liberian women. Her focus on women’s rights began on day one of her presidency when she discussed the taboo issue of rape in her inauguration speech. Although a significant proportion of women had been sexually assaulted during the civil war, rape was still seen as a private matter. Confronting this problem so frankly and starkly on such an important occasion placed women at the center of her presidency.
Sirleaf subsequently set up special courts to prosecute sexual assault cases, hoping to encourage victims to press charges against rapists in a country where $2 is often enough to buy a woman’s silence. Not surprisingly, these courts have not been successful in prosecuting rape cases. But Sirleaf still deserves credit for laying the foundation for a change in attitudes towards women. The fact that the president herself has admitted to being a victim of attempted rape and a survivor of domestic abuse has opened up a space for dialogue where none existed before.
So despite her complicated past and the significant problems of her administration, Ellen, as she is referred to in Liberia, has still had an extraordinary first term as president. When she was elected in 2005, she inherited a broken and violent society, a crushing debt burden and a devastated infrastructure. Since 2005, society’s wounds have slowly been healing, the debt has been virtually eliminated and the country has been gradually rebuilding from the ground up. Substantial challenges still remain, especially with extreme poverty and a youth unemployment rate of 70-80 percent.
Is she a saint? No. Did she deserve the Nobel Prize? Absolutely.
In the words of fellow Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu, “She’s brought stability to a place that was going to hell.”
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I was interviewed on BBC News Channel about Liberia’s Nobel Prize winners on Friday, October 7th, 2011.
I was also interviewed by Radio France Interationale about the inclusion of Winton Tubman in Ellen’s cabinet on Tuesday, January 17th. The discussion begins at 8.30.
Bob Dechert and Shi Rong: Affairs of the Heart or Affairs of the State?
“You are so beautiful. I really like that picture of you by the water with your cheeks puffed. That look is so cute. I love it when you do that. Now, I miss you even more.”
“I will smile at you. I miss you. Love, Bob.”
“I enjoyed the drive by thinking of you.”
“I miss you. Love, Bob,”
“I love you too. See you soon.”
"I love you too. See you Soon." Credit Glen McGregor.
The Backstory
A few days ago, a cache of personal emails were sent to a large number of media organizations and politicians. They alleged an affair between Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs Bob Dechert and Shi Rong, a reporter for China’s state news agency, Xinhua.
She says that they were sent by her husband as part of a domestic dispute. Dechert claims that the relationship was “innocent”.
Here are a few thoughts on the Bob Dechert – Shi Rong affair:
1) Love or friendship?
In his statement to the press, Bob Dechert says: “These e-mails are flirtatious, but the friendship remained innocent and simply that – a friendship. I apologize for any harm caused to anyone by this situation.”
Despite Dechert’s protestations, the emails speak for themselves. We’re not idiots.
But even if they had an affair, who cares? Some might think that this is a personal matter between him, his wife and Shi Rong. In most cases, I’d say that an affair between consenting adults, even if there are politicians involved, is not public business. This case is an exception for several reasons.
2) Should this be treated as a private affair?
No. Dechert is the Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs. Rong works for Xinhua, a news agency that Western counterintelligence agencies liken to an intelligence agency. In other words, there is a good chance that she is a Chinese spy.
It is not the fact that Dechert was (or is) having an affair outside of his marriage. It is who he has chosen to have this relationship with that makes this a matter of Canadian national security.
Michel Juneau-Katsuya, a former senior intelligence official with CSIS, has this to say about Xinhua:
“Basically, it’s a cover,” said Michel Juneau-Katsuya, who now heads a private corporate security company.
“We’re not talking about just people collaborating with the intelligence services. We’re talking about people trained as intelligence officers to operate in foreign countries.”
Put another way by The Globe:
Xinhua, experts say, exists somewhere on a continuum between a legitimate Chinese journalistic organization and an arms-length extension of Beijing’s security apparatus. There is no doubt that the agency provides valuable insights into the world as China sees it. There is also no doubt that Beijing closely picks the brains of Xinhua reporters who’ve been sent abroad to find out what they know.
We already know that the Chinese are spying heavily on Canada because Richard Fadden, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, told the CBC last year that “several municipal politicians in British Columbia and in at least two provinces there are ministers of the Crown who we think are under at least the general influence of a foreign government.”
We also know that the Chinese have mastered the art of cyber-spying, “having infected more than 1,295 computers in 103 countries.” The attacks had targets in 72 countries and includedgovernments companies, and organizations in Canada, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Switzerland and Britain
And remember that Haiyan Zhang, a former “a rising star in Ottawa’s civil service” was fired from the Privy Council Office because she used to work for Xinhua and because she continued to maintain personal contacts with her former colleagues. Now, if she was fired for maintaining friendships, then the intimate nature of Dechert’s relationship with Rong leaves little room for anything but his resignation from cabinet.
3) What if Shi Rong isn’t a spy?
For argument’s sake, let’s just say that a full investigation by CSIS concludes that Shi Rong is not a spy and has never been a spy, and that any information gleaned from their “affair” did not get passed back to the Chinese government. The nature of a private conversation posted by Glen McGregor and translated by @I_Am_Chinadian that Shi Rong had with a reporter friend, Qu Jing suggests that this is a possibility.
This is probably the best case scenario that the Canadian public can hope for. If so, then maybe the damage to our actual security has been limited.
Yet even if this is a purely an affair of the heart and not an affair of the state, it is impossible to prove that Shi Rong is not a spy. How will we ever know that he didn’t give away state secrets, or that she didn’t read his emails over his shoulder, or that she didn’t have access to his classifed briefing notes?
Irrespective of Shi Rong’s spy status, the biggest problem here is that Dechert has shown such a lack of judgment that he now suffers from a deficit of credibility. Even if Rong didn’t pass on state secrets (assuming that these secrets that the Chinese don’t already have), the point is that she easily could have and he should have known better.
For the government and CSIS, it’s even more embarassing given that the Maxime Bernier affair from a few years back led to the institution of regular security checks that seemed to have failed to catch the Dechert-Rong relationship. This whole incident is a real shame because every indication suggests that Dechert was competent in his duties and that he took a genuine interest in improving Canada’s relationships with China.
For all we know, Dechert, in his relationship with Rong, may have done more good than bad for Canadians by learning about Chinese politics and the Chinese economy from an insider like Rong. Maybe his relationship with Rong helped him to do his job better, leading to recently improved relations between China and Canada. Maybe, just maybe, Dechert was a better “spy” than Rong was.
Who knows what the real story is? If we learn anything from this incident, it is that we need to take these types of security threats more seriously. At the same time, we shouldn’t let paranoia overshadow the great potential offered by closer relations with the world’s other great superpower.
Last night, as I was following the Oslo and Utoya coverage on Twitter, I tried to make sense of why it was happening in Norway. Almost every news site, blog, and expert said it was al Qaeda. If, like me, you turn to the media when you’re looking for breaking news, it would have been hard to reach any other conclusion. The tone of a lot of the coverage left little room for doubt- at least, this was true in the pieces that I read. And few attempts were made to qualify the claims that were circulating. What I found on Twitter largely reinforced this.
And so I fell prey to the spell: Was it authorized by al Qaeda leaders or was it al Qaeda-inspired, like the Fort Hood shooting was? What, exactly, was the motivation? Were the terrorists “homegrown”? Well, it turns out that the terrorist was homegrown all right: a lone white male, Norwegian, right-wing Christian.
Today, I’m wondering how I jumped so easily to the al Qaeda conclusion. A couple of thoughts:
1) I rely heavily on the media for accurate information and I read from many different credible sources to make sure that the facts of a story are consistent. In this case, they were. The problem was that speculation was mixed in with fact without any effort to distinguish between them. The claims, especially by the media, about al Qaeda were rarely qualified, and they should have been. To provide a contrast, I remember early coverage of the Madrid train bombings: at the time, there was also good reason to believe that it was al Qaeda, but it could also have been ETA. The press was more cautious with its conclusions and the story developed in a much more restrained way. This was not the case with the Oslo and Utoya attacks.
2) I rely on a host of experts to vet and filter information for me. I trust that the information that they share or post or write about has passed a host of independent “sniff tests”. In this case, the problem was that everyone, myself included, seemed to suffer from the effects of GroupThink, Stereotyping, Recency Bias, and Confirmation Bias.
Groupthink: The fact that there was widespread agreement in the media and amongst experts that it was al Qaeda raised the bar for public disagreement.
Stereotyping: in the past decade, successful large-scale attacks (especially bombings) that have targeted the West or Westerners that were not al Qaeda-approved or -inspired have been rare. Given these past experiences, the mental shortcut that most of us take when we hear of a terrorist attack against a Western target is, not surprisingly, to make al Qaeda the default perpetrator.
Recency Bias: This is when recent events play a much stronger in influencing our judgment. We regularly hear about al Qaeda-inspired attacks regularly, as well as those of linked Islamic extremists. For example, another suicide bomb attack in Aden, Yemen on July 24. This NY Times story suggests that a whole spate of bombings were perpetrated by a group linked to al Qaeda (but leaves open the possibility that the government might be responsible). These sorts of stories have bombarded media outlets for a decade.
Confirmation Bias: In this case, we sought information to confirm our existing beliefs. For example, when I looked for reasons as to why Norway was targeted, I found a few that seemed to make sense. Evidence that didn’t fit- for example, why it happened on the Friday of a holiday weekend with no one in the office- was discarded.
It was only when I found out that he was white that I realized that it was possible that everyone, including the experts that I trusted, had gotten it wrong.
I bring up all of this because I think there is a lot to be learned from the way in which this story first broke and developed. And it is important to reflect on how most of us (but not all) got it so wrong.
Twitter, I believe, played an especially important role. Of late, Twitter has turned into an important source of information for journalists and experts. But as a Twitter newbie, I’ve also noticed that journalists and experts don’t typically qualify their information when it’s sketchy or unconfirmed. Ironically, Will Mc Cants was actually one of the ones who did qualify his comments. (“Could just be forum user blowing hot air. forum members also confused abt who this guy is”). Because I’m used to getting accurate information these sources under normal circumstances, I assumed that what was being tweeted last night was of similar quality. Poor assumption.
The point is that while events are still in progress, we need to clearly distinguish between fact and speculation. Twitter fuels both. When a story is still breaking, those of us who tweet need to remember that the quality of information is much more variable and to retweet accordingly. Rushing to judgment can lead to mistakes that are not only embarrassing (like the cover of the Sun), but that alter the course of history (See Controversial Issues). Brett Blake (papacinek) makes a similar argument. And as Isobel J pointed out in responding to my earlier post,
One of the results of the inevitable assumption that it was al Qaeda was mosques being targeted for hate crimes in retribution. Although individuals could have assumed al Qaeda to be responsible, the number of news reports and journalistic opinions encouraging that view probably did not help…
While I haven’t seen evidence of such a backlash as yet in this case, this is certainly possible and perhaps likely. Clearly, the Norwegian government recognized the possibility or retaliatory attacks. PM Jens Stoltenberg and the Norwegian police were very cautious in their tone. There is fallout from speculating, especially when it turns out to be wrong. Speculators are not the ones who suffer the consequences of opinions formed in haste. In The Huffington Post, Hina P. Ansari notes that:
Labour Party member and Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store who visited the youth camp just the day before, expressed that mistakes need not be repeated in this tragic instance: “We’ve seen in Europe in recent years that politicians have been jumping to conclusions about suspects before investigations have been conducted, and we will not commit that error.”
The development of this story is a lesson for all of us. And Norway, as usual, has something to teach the rest of us.
Update: A commentary from Martijn de Koning on violence and ideology, arguing that Breivik, may have been a lone gunman, but that his ideas are grounded in a political movement. (I made a similar argument about Jared Loughner after the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords in January 2011.) A discussion of Breivik’s manifesto by Blake Hounshell on Foreign Policy reveals him to be a right-wing extremist, but a relatively rational one.
Morten Holm, AP via The Washington Post
I originally wrote this post late last night [Friday] as the story was breaking based on the assumption that the Oslo/Utoya attacks were linked to al Qaeda. But then I took it down as more information came out and it became clear that the gunman-bomber was Anders Behring Breivik, a white conservative Christian Norwegian. His Facebook profile is here. And info on his manifesto here. The information was no longer relevant and even seemed irresponsible.
But upon reading today’s [Saturday's] take on the Oslo/Utoya media coverage, I’ve decided to re-post it for two reasons: 1) It provides a not unreasonable rationale for why people jumped to the conclusion that it was an al Qaeda attack, and 2) I think Will McCants has been treated unfairly for the role that he played. More here. Many of those who were, I would argue, more responsible, have already melted away into the background.
[Added on Monday July 25] For some thoughts on jumping to conclusions, I wrote a subsequent post that contextualizes this one. The two of them should be read together, but I think it is the other post, not this one, that is more important.
I had a suspicion that when I put this up that I would be opening myself up to criticism (though I didn’t realize how much). But I also think that it’s important that we learn from our mistakes and to think carefully about why we think the way we do. There should be some room for a constructive dialogue about the media coverage without being publicly attacked. If we can’t admit to being wrong once in a while and reflecting back on it, then how do we learn?
For a taste of the Norway coverage from Western media outlets and a sharp commentary on who is and is not a terrorist, see Glen Greenwald’s article in Salon as well as Maz Hussain’s blog post. In my case, I don’t think it was racism or Islamophobia that drove me to these conclusions, but al Qaeda was my default perpetrator. It was also the default perpetrator for for Al Jazeera (English) which was on my twitter feed on Friday night- jihadists were also their prime suspects as well- with no mention of other possibilities in the early coverage. You can check out their live coverage of the story. Go right right back to the very beginning, and in particular, watch the news clips and pay attention to the language.
This clip by security analyst Justin Crump was also shown on al Jazeera as the story was breaking. If al Jazeera was reporting that it’s a jihadist plot, it suggests to me that the reason why the story developed as it did could not be due purely to Islamophobia in the media. (I’m leaving that issue aside entirely.)
If there is one thing that I should be accused of, it’s “terrorist profiling”. Based on a pattern of similar events in the past and limited knowledge on Saturday evning/night (GMT), I drew certain conclusions. What I failed to consider is that every terrorist event should be treated as unique until proven otherwise.
Consider racial profiling. Based on certain superficial similarities and limited knowledge about an individual, we draw certain assumptions based on our existing ideas and frameworks- these are mental heuristics. This is normal. But when these heuristics are used in law enforcement, then we get racial profiling. Whether or not racial profiling leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy is another interesting question. In the US, racial profiling helps explain why someone like Amadou Diallo was shot by the New York Police Department. In the UK, this kind of stereotyping explains why someone yelled “Chee-chee chong-chong” at me on the street yesterday.
In this instance, I jumped to a conclusion about al Qaeda doing something that it did not do. Without sarcasm, I offer my apologies to al Qaeda. They may have done many horrible atrocious things around the world, but they were not responsible for this one.
Sat 23 July. [BEFORE knowing anything about the suspect.]
Why would al Qaeda attack Norway? Current commentary (Robert Zeliger in Foreign Policy, James Dorsey in al Arabiya, Thomas Hegghammer and Dominic Tierney in The Atlantic last year, David Crawford’s piece in the Wall Street Journal) suggests the most likely reasons are: 1) anger for re-publishing the Danish cartoons 2) participation in the conflict in Afghanistan and Libya 3) Iraqi Kurdish Islamist Mulla Krekar 4) Norway is a soft target relative to US, UK.
The cartoon thesis and the Afghanistan thesis seemed to get some early support from an early statement issued by the terrorist organization, Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami (Helpers of the Global Jihad), which originally claimed responsibility for the attack. But later, they retracted this claim and said that the world needs to wait for the official claim. For those who read Arabic, this claim was re-posted by Will McCants, an expert on terrorism at CNA.
These attacks led me to wonder about my own country, Canada, and whether we would be the next successful target. I remembered that Canada had been named as one of al Qaeda’s of target countries. And many of the news articles referred to the fact that Norway “was one of several countries named by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of Al Qaeda, as potential targets for attack.” I had a vague memory of hearing about this list when it came out in 2006, but I had to search pretty hard for it. For those who are looking for it, Free Republic provides a summary of a purported (but not verified) al Zawahiri interview:
AQ / OBL 03/04/06 A recording believed to be Al-Qaeda’s deputy leader has urged Muslims to attack the West over the cartoon row. Ayman al-Zawahri called for strikes similar to attacks in recent years on New York, Washington, Madrid and London, according to an audio tape posted on the Internet. The speaker on a the tape, who sounded like Zawahri also urged Muslims to boycott Denmark, Norway, France and Germany over cartoons deemed offensive to Prophet Muhammad, referring to cartoons first published in a Danish newspaper. – snip – The tape said: “(Muslims have to) inflict losses on the crusader West, especially to its economic infrastructure with strikes that would make it bleed for years. “We have to prevent the crusader West from stealing the Muslims’ oil which is being drained in the biggest robbery in history,” he added.
It turns out that Ayman al-Zawahiri also conducted a public Q & A that was helpfully translated and reposted here by the Nine Eleven Finding Answers Foundation (NEFA) [Emphasis added]:
Q.) “In 2004, you threatened Norway and other countries because of their aid to America in her war against you, and because of their forces being present in Afghanistan and fighting against you. Don’t you think that these kinds of threats against Norway and Europe will only increase the pressure on Muslims living here, most of who came seeking a peaceful life and to flee the autocracy of the majority of regimes in the Middle East? Furthermore, why are the Scandinavian countries, such as Norway and Denmark, considered as targets by Al-Qaida Organization?”
A.) “We have threatened Norway and every other country that participated in the war against the Muslims as part of the defense of our ideology, nation, ourselves, and our sacred rites. Denmark has done her utmost to demonstrate her hostility towards the Muslims by repeatedly dishonoring our Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him salvation. I admonish and incite every Muslim who is able to do so to cause damage to Denmark in order to show your support for our Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him salvation, and to defend his esteemed honor. We prefer to live underground [i.e. dead] rather than accepting the limited response of boycotting Danish dairy products and goods. Denmark keeps on dishonoring the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him salvation, even though these criminals are unable to attack the Jews or raise any doubts about the Nazi Holocaust, even though it was the result of a Christian war… As for Muslims living in the West, they are forbidden to live permanently under the laws of the infidels unless it is a necessity. They ought to participate in the individual duty [of jihad] in order to defend the lands of Islam against those who are assaulting them.”
Bear in mind that in 2008, a couple of years after al Zawahri was interviewed, the Danish Embassy in Islamabad was hit by a suicide bomber. And Jyllands-Posten, the Danish paper that first published the cartoons, was targeted in a failed plot, and the cartoonists themselves have also been targeted.
While I was glad to see that Canada wasn’t mentioned here, I subsequently found a 2006 piece entitled Canadian Targets On al-Qaeda Hit List on National Terror Alert. And it reminded me that, oh yes, we were on the al Qaeda hit list too and that the question was likely When, not If:
Canadian targets — either at home or abroad — are particularly attractive because the country has not been hit yet by a terrorist attack, Mr. McDonell [then-head of the RCMP’s national-security branch] told CTV’s Question Period. “I believe that the fact we have not been hit makes the attack upon Canada a symbolic attack” that would be a highly prized achievement for al-Qaeda terrorists, he said.
Mr. McDonell noted that Canada alone of the five countries cited as enemies by the al-Qaeda leadership has not yet been attacked by the terrorist group. The other four countries mentioned by al-Qaeda were the United States, Britain, Spain and Australia.
We live in dangerous times.
Happy Canada Day!
Last week, Eric Reguly wrote an interesting article for The Globe and Mail on why Canada has so few of the world’s top companies. Out of Canada’s Top 1000 companies, more than 30 of them had profits of $1 billion+ in 2010- this sounds pretty impressive given the state of the global economy last year.
But Reguly’s lament centred around the fact that so few of our top 100 were global leaders. Reguly listed as his criteria:
a) Able to “compete in the international big leagues”;
b) Brand recognition outside Canada; and
c) In the news.
He came up with three definites and a few maybes:
They are: Research In Motion, Thomson Reuters, Bombardier and perhaps Royal Bank or Barrick Gold. A few years ago, I would have put Manulife among that group, but its image has waned in the post-Dominic D’Alessandro years.
And he argued that much smaller countries have just as many global giants as we do:
Australia: BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Macquarie Group
Switzerland: Nestlé, Syngenta, Glencore, UBS, Novartis, Xstrata
Netherlands: Shell, ING, Philips
Sweden: Volvo, Ericsson, Ikea
You could quibble with his list and add TD, SunLife, and BNS. But the argument stands: we really should have more world-beaters. Reguly argues that the reason for this is not that our taxes are too high, or that our labour force isn’t up to snuff, or that there is too much regulation (or not enough). He says it’s because of “epic Canadian investor greed”.
From 1997 to 2007, I felt all I did was chronicle the eradication of corporate Canada as investors, and CEOs who encouraged them, hit the sell button. Here are just a few of the companies I no longer write about: Inco, Falconbridge, Dofasco, Stelco, Algoma Steel, MacMillan-Bloedel, Molson, Alcan, Ipsco, Gulf Canada, Newbridge Networks, Poco Petroleums and Masonite. The sellout continues…Last year, Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan almost became another hollowing-out victim.
Reguly calls this greed. And greed may well be part of the problem- especially “if you consider that senior management of the target firms often stand to make a lot of money through unexercised options and a very lucrative severance package,” says Canadian business leader Stephen Gross. Clearly, there is a conflict of interest in recommending a deal to shareholders.
And yet seen from another angle, this example of “greed” is simply prudent investing.
When someone offers you a substantial premium over the share price, common sense tells you to take the money and run. You can use that money and then invest elsewhere and hope to repeat the process. As Richard Ruback and Michael Jensen pointed out in their 1983 paper on corporate takeovers, it is the shareholders in a target firm that benefit most. In the words of Scott Sharabura, fellow ex-pat and strategy consultant at Booz & Company, “most acquisitions are way overpriced by the buyers”. Smart investors know this and act accordingly. A more charitable view of Reguly’s experiences would simply conclude that Canadian investors are more conservative in their strategies.
But Reguly goes on to offer a real nugget of insight:
Canadian investors would rather take even a meagre payout today than stick with a company for years to create a world-beater… When Ralph Robins was CEO of Rolls-Royce in the 1990s, he earned no love from British investors and analysts by investing fortunes in jet-engine technology that wouldn’t pay off for years, if at all. But Sir Ralph refused to cave in to the gimme-returns-now mob. Today Rolls is one of the world’s top manufacturers and tech innovators.
This is much closer to the real problem. If there aren’t enough Cdn investors who are brave enough to risk it big (instead of locking in their gains), then in the aggregate, this means that we will have fewer world-class firms than we should given all of our other economic and geographical advantages.
Individually, our sell-out companies probably did right by their investors, but as a group, a few of them probably would have become global giants and substantially strengthened the Canadian economy. You can’t win if you don’t play.
Consider the technology sector. If you follow the prudent logic of the Canadian investor, then Mark Zuckerberg should have sold Facebook ages ago, Jim Balsillie and Mike Laziridis should have sold Research in Motion (RIM) before it ever went public, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin should have taken one of the many lucrative offers that they must have received for Google when they were still operating out of a rented garage. Take the millions and run!
But they had bigger (some would have said delusional) dreams for their companies and their products. I don’t even think they were necessarily holding out for more money. Their investors and shareholders must have also shared their vision or else there would have been huge pressure to take one of the many buyouts that surely came their way.
Yet to be the kind of person who will hold out for something bigger, you need to have massive ambitions- and also be ready for failure. In poker terms, you’ve got to be willing to go “all-in”. You have to see more potential in your firm than any rational investor ever would. You have to dream big.
And that is where Canadian companies fall down.
In Canada, we regularly complain about our southern neighbours. But when it comes to dreaming big, we really should be ripping a page out of their playbook. There is something in the American cultural DNA that encourages their leaders to go for broke. They always want to be the best, not just in America, but in the world. This kind of vision and hunger does exist in Canada at companies like RIM and Thomson Reuters, but fundamentally, we just don’t have enough of it.
Our problem is not that we are greedy (or prudent investors), but that we lack the kind of grand ambition that pushes us to be the best in the world.
I can see that more of this type of ambition would require a shift in our national character. I’ll leave the tricky bit of how that can be achieved for someone else, but I also want to argue that this willingness to dream big is a change that Canada must make if it doesn’t want to drown in the global economy.
Businessman Stephen Gross put it like this:
There is a big cost to Canada with these sellouts. The issue relates to head offices, because it is the head office where real value is created: R&D is centred there, this is where decisions are made regarding the location of new investments and jobs, high-paying and creative jobs are there, and there is the energy that goes with a head office. This is not just a question of trading one dollar for another.
Agreed, Stephen, agreed.
* This piece came out of a Facebook discussion after I posted Eric Reguly’s article on my wall. Thanks to Chris Mak, Scott Sharabura, and Stephen Gross for inspiration.
Kofi Annan and a Tale of Two Africas
Kofi Annan speaking at Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre (Photo credit: The Kofi Annan Foundation)
This February, I had the chance to meet Kofi Annan during his visit to Oxford. He had been invited to help celebrate my college’s 700th anniversity. As one of the two politics fellows at Exeter, I had the pleasure of dining with him. (Twice!)
To mark his visit, I was asked to write an article about the talk that he gave at the Sheldonian Theatre for Exon, Exeter College’s alumni magazine.
* * *
When most Westerners think of Africa, the images most likely to spring to mind are those of child soldiers, malnourished children, blood diamonds, pirates, and dictators who have been unwilling to give up power. From colonialism to the Rwandan genocide to the spread of AIDS to the exploitation of the continent’s vast mineral resources, the story of Africa that has been told in the West has usually been one of victimization and despair.
This is a narrative that Kofi Annan, a native of Ghana, has long been familiar with. In his speech at Oxford’s Sheldonian theatre, Annan presented a different Africa: one of economic success and optimism. He made a convincing case that Africa should be seen as “a continent of opportunity— the last emerging investment frontier”.
As an African, you might think that Annan is predisposed to seeing his continent favourably, but here is some compelling evidence (taken directly from his speech) to buttress his case:
- Real GDP [in Africa] grew by nearly 5% annually between 2000 and 2008 – twice the level of the previous two decades;
- According to the African Development Bank, 6 African countries are forecast to enjoy growth this year above seven per cent; 15 countries above five per cent; and 27 countries above three per cent;
- Direct foreign investment has soared from $9 billion in 2000 to $52 billion in 2011;
- The IMF [predicts] the continent will have as many as seven of the ten fastest-growing economies in the world over the next decade.
These statistics suggest fantastic levels of economic growth spread across the continent.
Annan is not the only one who believes that Africa offers enormous substantial investment opportunities. Stephen Jennings, the CEO of Renaissance Capital, recently gave an insightful talk at Oxford where he pointed out that: “Detailed analysis by the World Bank, IMF, global investment banks and, most recently, McKinsey and Company, means that there is now little debate on the speed, breadth and other key dimensions of Africa’s economic renaissance thus far.”
Yet even as Annan was giving his speech on African’s future of prosperity, the headlines from the continent at the time focused on then-president Laurent Gbagbo of Côte d’Ivoire and his refusal to cede power to his rival Alassane Outtara. That country was subsequently plunged back into a brief, but very bloody civil war. For the citizens of Côte d’Ivoire, Annan’s optimism would have looked wildly misplaced.
And yet these two Africas clearly co-exist. How can the narrative of the optimistic and soon-to-be prosperous Africa be reconciled with that of the dangerous and dysfunctional Africa? Let me offer two possibilities.
The first one comes directly from Annan’s speech: there is enormous variation across Africa’s 53 (soon to be 54) nations. Botswana, with its stable democracy and four decades of impressive economic growth rates receives scant media attention as compared to the Democratic Republic of Congo with its stories of mass rape, coltan looting, and recurring civil war. One problem is that stereotypical news stories about “problems in one country infect opinions of the continent as a whole. Curiously, the reverse is rarely true.” The fact that good news does not make the headlines contributes to our skewed perspective of what Africa is like and how dramatically it has changed, even in the past decade.
But there is also a second explanation that may prove to be more useful for understanding this supposed dichotomy— corruption. Even as the continent has benefited from huge gains in GDP, the distribution of that wealth has accrued disproportionately to African political elites. In many (but not all) cases, these elites abused their political power and made themselves and their family members very rich.
It is these kinds of abuses of power that sow the seeds of future discontent among the young men (and some women) who might consider taking up arms against the government. The utter failure of the state to care for its citizens even while others have grown obscenely wealthy has only perpetuated political instability and insecurity in some cases.
Nigeria is a case in point. It has experienced sustained real GDP growth for at least a decade, but those gains have not been equitably distributed across society. Indeed, a recent New York Times article has suggested that about $22 billion of government oil revenues has vanished into thin air. In the meantime, this fight for resources has led to persistent low-level conflict between well-armed local militia groups and the government in the Niger Delta region.
With new investment coming from China and other high-growth economies, a worldwide commodities boom, and increased political stability, there is ample opportunity for all Africans to benefit from this newfound prosperity. However, the question of whether Africa will ultimately fulfill its potential is best summed up by Annan:
Wherever people live, they want their voice to be heard, their rights respected, and to have a say in how they are governed. They yearn for decent jobs, opportunity and a secure future for their children. They believe that the rule of law must apply to everyone, no matter how powerful… It is this generation – their dynamism, their determination and ambitions – which is, I believe, the major reason for confidence in Africa.
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What Osama bin Laden taught me
It has been a week of reflection for me. The academic in me has many things to say about the death of Osama bin Laden and its implications for international relations. But I am going to resist that impulse and instead share with you an email that I sent to my dear friend Veronica back in 2003 on the day that the US declared that it would invade Iraq.
I’m posting this email as a legacy of how Osama bin Laden affected my life as a New Yorker (ok, as a quasi-New Yorker who lived across the river in New Jersey).
—–Original Message—–
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2003 5:24 PM
To: Veronica
It’s the eve of war and the weather is sunshining-blue skies beautiful. I can’t help but be reminded that it was just as beautiful on Sept 11, 2001.
Last time, I had no idea what was about to happen. This time, I am assured of it, and I am terrified.
Here in New York, we have been told we should expect a terrorist attack of some kind. The only question is how successful it will be.
The person that I love works for a financial corporation that symbolizes American power. He reassures me that cement-filled vehicles have been stationed outside his building to prevent truck bombs from blowing up the trading floor.
I work for the World Bank, another symbol of American dominance and Western hegemony. Every day, I open my email and check the World Bank Intranet. Every day, there is another notice on security threats, or an email on evacuation plans. Most of the time, I try not to think about my colleagues being terrorist targets. Up to now, this has not been too difficult in the unsettling, but quiet peace of post-9/11 life.
Normally, I work from home, in the protected suburb of West New York, across the river from NYC. Next week however, I will be in the World Bank buildings, and I will struggle for normalcy in my day-to-day tasks. On Monday and Tuesday, I will be attending a seminar on post-conflict situations. The irony is not lost on me.
You are probably wondering why I don’t leave this godforsaken city. And I don’t have an answer. All I know is that it is hard to just pick up and go. I didn’t really understand this sense of inertia before, but now that I am experiencing it, it just seems to be so very human. We like our jobs. We love this city. And we just keep hoping that nothing will happen tomorrow. No dirty bombs. No anthrax. No subway attacks. No poisoning of the water system.
But is it worth it?
I keep asking myself this over and over.
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In the years since 9/11, New Yorkers have regained their sense of safety, but I think it is important to remember what the after effects of terrorism look and feel like. I remember showing up at Ground Zero on Sept 13 2001 and speaking to the firefighters and watching 7 World Trade Center continue to burn. I remember the thin coat of ash that covered everything in the financial district. I remember the acrid smell. I remember walking into Grey Dog cafe on Carmine St and finding its normally lively atmosphere completely somber. Strangers shared coffee and stories with me. We cried. The city was in mourning.
A year or two later, I started making my then-boyfriend-now-husband carry a bar of soap and a towel to work everyday (as suggested by some government pamphlet) just in case there was a biological weapons attack. It sounds silly now (especially since the soap would probably have been utterly useless), but the fear was very real. It was all over the news that one of his firm’s buildings had been scoped out for an attack.
Osama bin Laden may be dead, but the attack of 9/11 made me realize how precious life is. And how it can all change in an instant.
Justice and Gaddafi’s Fight to the Death
This is a longer version of a piece that was first published in the Wall Street Journal on April 6th, 2011.
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The violence in the Ivory Coast that has left more than 1,300 dead since last November’s presidential election may soon be coming to an end. Incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo, who refused to cede power after losing in the polls to Alassane Ouattara, is reportedly negotiating the terms of his surrender after a week-long offensive by pro-Ouattara forces. What is puzzling about this conflict is why Gbagbo did not leave sooner, especially after African Union leaders had offered him immunity several times as long as he agreed to go into exile in South Africa.
Yet what looks at first glance like an irrational response was probably a carefully considered decision. Indeed, reflecting on Gbagbo’s decision to fight to the end could help us better understand the current military impasse in Libya and the mindset of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.
President Gbagbo has always been judged a savvy, if wily, leader with acute political senses. With eighty per cent of Ivorian territory taken by pro-Ouattara forces in just five days and mass defections from the army and police, he is certain to have known that his regime was on its last legs. Yet patriotic though he might be, Gbagbo’s decision not to leave for South Africa probably had more to do with the fact that the option of exile currently has a credibility problem amongst Africa’s leaders—especially those who have committed atrocities against their own citizens.
In the past, Africa’s deposed heads of state could always take up a comfortable exile in a friendly country. With a handshake deal and a quick departure, despotic leaders could be secure in the knowledge that they had immunity from prosecution.
But once the Rome Statute came into effect in 2002, those rulers who had committed war crimes or gross human rights violations found that their exile options had dramatically shrunk. Consequently, for both Gbagbo and Gaddafi, the question of how secure they would be from prosecution by the International Criminal Court must have been a critical part of the exile discussion.
In cases like Côte d’Ivoire and Libya, where war crimes have already been committed but violence is certain to continue, exiling a leader may be the least worst option. The problem is that exile has been somewhat discredited by former Nigerian President Obasanjo’s controversial handling of Charles Taylor’s exile.
After Nigeria offered the former Liberian president de facto protection from prosecution in 2003 to help bring a speedy end to the Liberian civil war, Obasanjo later went back on his word and repatriated a surprised Charles Taylor back to Liberia in 2006. Taylor was then put into the custody of the Special Court of Sierra Leone where he has been on trial for the past three and a half years.
Taylor’s experience set an important precedent. It suggested that promises of immunity from prosecution would be subjected to extreme pressure. Further, Western powers in particular could selectively bring their influence to bear on those countries hosting individuals on the ICC’s most-wanted list. The end result is that guarantees of protection from international prosecution now look unreliable.
Consequently, Gbagbo and Gaddafi are probably wondering: if Nigeria was unable to keep its promise to Charles Taylor, how can I be sure that they will keep their promise to me?
Without the option of exile, as soon as the first war crime is committed, a ruler has no exit options. Once this threshold is crossed, committing further war crimes will still lead to the same long and humiliating trial which will almost certainly be followed by life in jail. Gbagbo and Gaddafi both know this. As they see it, the thousands of people who will die as a consequence of their decision to fight to the end is regrettable but necessary.
Part of the rationale in establishing the ICC was to deter those in power from committing atrocities. The threat of prosecution was expected to make rulers think twice before massacring innocent civilians. But as Gbagbo, Gaddafi, and other leaders have shown, ICC prosecution has not always been enough of a threat when the survival of a regime is at stake.
Ultimately, eliminating the exile option for those who commit war crimes is a progressive step forward. In the long run, standards of behaviour for all leaders will align with the standards set by the ICC. But this evolution will take time.
In the meantime, as long as heads of state keep killing their civilian populations, an exit option is still needed. One possibility is to offer exile in conjunction with a fixed period of ironclad immunity: freedom years.
Depending on the severity of the atrocities already committed and the health of the ruler, a head of state could negotiate a number of freedom years before facing ICC prosecution. The number of freedom years would need to strike a balance between satisfying a population’s thirst for justice and providing enough incentive to entice a violent leader into thinking that a few years of freedom is worth the certainty of being humilitated and prosecuted in the future. Once the freedom years are up, the host state would be responsible for handing over the individual to the ICC. Over time, as the norms of the ICC gradually take root, the period of negotiated immunity will decline, shrinking to months and days.
Based on what has been reported in the media about the sorts of war crimes that Gaddafi and Gbagbo may have committed, the international community might offer them two to five freedom years. If endorsed and guaranteed by the ICC, the UN Security Council, or other powerful states, this form of temporary exile could provide a credible exit option for leaders like Gbago and Gaddafi who already have blood on their hands. Such an alternative has its limitations, but it may be the only way left to prevent further mass casualties.
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I’m also interviewed about this issue on BBC World Service’s World Update on April 8, 2011. Most of the interview starts at about minute 28. It will be available online until April 15.
Here is a related op-ed that I wrote on power-sharing in Libya on March 30th, 2011.
The Pitfalls of Power-sharing in Libya
This was first posted as Power-Sharing Not the Answer for Libya on Real Clear World on their Afternoon Update for Wednesday March 30, 2011.
President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe. Photo: Open Parachute
Colonel Gaddafi. Photo: Juda Ngwenya, Reuters.
For weeks, the African Union (AU) has quietly been working behind the scenes to bring a diplomatic end to the violence in Libya. Last Friday, the first glimmer of a potential political settlement appeared as Colonel Gaddafi’s representatives met with African and international leaders for negotiations at AU headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
This meeting is the start of what will almost certainly be a long process of talks to determine Libya’s post-war political landscape. No matter which side emerges victorious on the battlefield, negotiations are inevitable. The real question is what a political settlement will look like.
Knowing that negotiations will be part of the political endgame, it seems surprising that rebel representatives did not show up for the first round of talks. Their pre-condition for attending was that Gaddafi relinquish power and leave the country. On the surface, such a threshold for attending might seem unreasonable. But on closer inspection, the rebels have little practical choice but to hold out for Gaddafi’s exile.
Given the current military impasse, and the AU’s past record of intervention, African leaders will likely try to broker a power-sharing deal between Gaddafi and rebel leaders. The problem is that even if the AU eventually succeeds in putting together a settlement, any power-sharing agreement that emerges will still be laden with considerable pitfalls.
In theory, power-sharing looks like a win-win-win solution to the current impasse: rebels receive cabinet positions and the promise of reforms to the political system; Gaddafi gets the chance to regroup his forces and lick his wounds, and the international community gets to claim credit for bringing an end to the killing of civilians.
Unfortunately, the reality of power-sharing is not so straightforward. The recent experience of Zimbabwe, where a deal was brokered by the African Union, illustrates why.
After the violent 2008 elections, Zimbabwe saw a power-sharing arrangement negotiated between President Robert Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai. In spite of the celebrations that followed, Mugabe resumed his campaign of intimidation against journalists and activists once international pressure had subsided. Even though the position of prime minister was expressly created for Tsvangirai, Mugabe still clung to control over the military and the police.
In Libya, any power-sharing deal will likely see Gaddafi’s supporters retain de facto control over the military and the police, while rebel leaders will be given cabinet positions with little actual influence over how the country is governed.
Zimbabwe’s experience suggests that if a leader is so desperate to cling to power that he is willing to use lethal force on opposition members, then power-sharing is unlikely to lead to true democratic reforms.
Indeed, the failure of power-sharing in Zimbabwe should not be surprising. Having led the country for 28 years, Mugabe clearly had the upper hand. Gaddafi, having ruled for nearly 42 years, wields just as much influence, if not more. Consequently, the rebels know that as soon as the international spotlight shifts away from Libya, Gaddafi will quietly re-cement control over security forces and gradually eliminate key political opponents.
In the end, even if the AU succeeds in having its demands met (a ceasefire, humanitarian assistance, protection for civilians, political change) over the negotiating table, implementation will depend on the threat of force – if Gaddafi remains in the country. Further, any attempt by the international community to monitor power-sharing outcomes will run into substantial difficulty. Not only is there little political will on behalf of Western powers to become involved in Libya’s domestic politics, but Western intervention will only reinforce Gaddafi’s anti-imperialist rhetoric.
Finally, the wider consequences of having the African Union reward violence by awarding power-sharing deals should not be overlooked. In recent years, AU leaders have consistently advocated power-sharing when influential incumbent leaders refused to leave office. This has happened time and again wherever there has been political strife on the continent, not just in Zimbabwe, but also in Liberia, the Democratic of Congo, Kenya and most recently in the post-election standoff between Laurent Gbagbo and Alassane Ouattara in Côte d’Ivoire.
What was once an ad hoc approach to dealing with intransigent heads of state has now become a norm. One unfortunate consequence of this norm is that it has emboldened leaders with authoritarian tendencies to use violence against the opposition with the hope of achieving a power-sharing “compromise” – facilitated and legitimated by the AU.
In the end, the kind of power-sharing deal that the African Union will push for is unlikely to achieve the desired outcome: easing out a leader who is largely viewed as illegitimate by his own people and by the international community. Gaddafi knows that if he leaves office, his next stop is likely to be the International Criminal Court. As a result, he sees no alternative except to fight on.
For their part, the rebels know that if Gaddafi remains in Libya, they will eventually suffer the consequences of standing up to his regime. So they too feel that they have no choice but to fight on.
This leaves two possibilities for minimizing bloodshed. The first is to have a friendly third country like Angola or Mauritania make a credible offer of exile to Gaddafi that will include keeping him safe from the ICC. The problem with this option is that it has been discredited because Nigeria allowed Charles Taylor to be handed over to the ICC after promising him exile.
The remaining possibility is much more controversial: allow Gaddafi to stay in office through a power-sharing deal while sending in an AU or UN peacekeeping mission to robustly monitor the agreement and to ensure that violence does not escalate. Neither of these options is particularly attractive to the international community, but then again, neither is the alternative of a drawn-out civil war.
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Photo source: Canadian University Press
This post is in honour of International Women’s Day (March 8th).
Recent events at my alma mater, the University of Waterloo, have left a bad taste in my mouth. In mid-February, in the middle of student government elections, someone covered up the posters of female candidates with an image of Marie Curie, a nuclear explosion and the following slogan “The brightest woman this Earth ever created was Marie Curie, The mother of the nuclear bomb. You tell me if the plan of women leading men is still a good idea!” A poster with the same image was also put up with similarly alarming text: “Kill 250 000 innocent Japanese in WW2 and is given 2 Nobel Prizes. Expose the defective Moral Intelligence of Womankind and it is called Sexism“. It had the caption: “Marie Curie = evil”.
Later on, this person sent out a fake email purporting to be Feridun Hamdullahpur, the University of Waterloo’s President. In this mass email, the message railed against “against women in leadership and women attending university“.
The Giffords Shooting, the Making of Jared Loughner, and the Danger of Political Rhetoric
Rep Gabrielle Giffords at a Congress On Your Corner event, much like the one where she was shot
Two seemingly unrelated events from last night: the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords and Derren Brown’s The Heist was on TV in the UK. Let me tie them together.
First, for those who aren’t familiar with Derren Brown, he is a brilliant magician, illusionist, hypnotist, and “mind reader”. If you watch his shows, you’ll see that he is a master of psychological techniques. On The Heist, the show that I watched last night, he did something quite extraordinary: he got three middle-class professionals to commit armed robbery– voluntarily. Well, a simulation of an armed robbery anyway. If you haven’t seen Derren Brown, you’re probably thinking that he used actors or accomplices. I don’t think that this was the case. They were mid-level consultants and managerial types. No criminal records. Decent folk. They were probably most unusual in that they were more suggestible than the average person and were quite deferential to authority. All in all, not armed robbery kind of people. Pretty ordinary, in fact.
What was extraordinary was what Derren Brown did with them. In a word, he brainwashed them.
Over the course of just two weeks, he implanted a series of signals and messages to program these people into doing something they never would have imagined. The whole thing started off disguised as a motivational seminar for a large group of carefully chosen individuals. During the seminar, he planted certain triggers in their heads that would subconsciously prime them for the big event; he subtly linked together colours, music, words, and symbols with different emotional states. He eventually whittled down the group to four people to do the experiment and continued to work with them to develop something within them to overcome several important social norms: you don’t shoot people and you don’t steal. In the end , three of the four committed armed robbery.
Right after I finished watching the show, I read about the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords. I couldn’t help but think that the way in which Derren Brown had “programmed” his subjects into committing armed robbery was not dissimilar from the inflamed political atmosphere that seems to have overtaken American politics these days. Colours, moods, code words, symbols (like Sarah Palin’s infamous crosshairs map)– all were employed to turn the “other” political party into an enemy. Us vs. Them. Leaders of ethnic parties in new democracies do it all the time to consolidate their support- sometimes, the result is civil war.
In simple terms, Republicans have “programmed” their supporters into thinking that the Democrats are evil. And Democrats have done the same, though perhaps not quite as fervently, or as successfully. Matt Bai gives us some of these examples in his NY Times article:
Consider the comments of Sharron Angle, the Tea Party favorite who unsuccessfully ran against Harry Reid for the Senate in Nevada last year. She talked about “domestic enemies” in the Congress and said, “I hope we’re not getting to Second Amendment remedies.” Then there’s Rick Barber, a Republican who lost his primary in a Congressional race in Alabama, but not before airing an ad in which someone dressed as George Washington listened to an attack on the Obama agenda and gravely proclaimed, “Gather your armies.”
Here is a political ad from Rep Giffords’ opponent in the last election, Jesse Kelly. I do *not* think that he intended anything violent by it, but it says a lot about how uncivil American politics has become.
Sheriff Charles Dupnik of Pima County, Arizona (where the shooting took place) had this to say:
I think it’s time as a country we need to do a little soul searching because I think that the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from the people in the radio business, and some people in the T.V. business, and what we see on T.V. and how are youngsters are being raised. It may be free speech but it does not come without consequences. Arizona has become the Mecca of prejudice and bigotry.
He then goes on to name Sharron Angle and Sarah Palin for contributing to the “political vitriol”.
In an interview with MSNBC in March 2010, Representative Gabrielle Giffords reacts to having the front window of her constituency office smashed or shot out. She sounds calm, measured, and resilient. She responds exactly how I would have hoped for her to respond: with levity, appealing for dialogue, and by pointing out that violence is not the answer.
With hindsight, she sounds prophetic:
We’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list, but the thing is the way that she has it depicted has the cross hairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realize there’s consequences to that.
Some will try and chalk this up as isolated incident, the work of one teenager with serious mental health problems. I would argue that the this shooting has been a decade in the making. The utter polarization of American political life has gone on now for a good ten years, ever since the Bush-Gore election. In the two years since Obama has been in power, the situation has definitely gotten worse. But you can’t create these kinds of explosive political conditions and then act surprised when someone who is mentally unbalanced seizes your message and totally goes off the rails. How many other mentally ill people are there out there who are willing to act out their delusional fantasies and are being primed to do so? Politicians and powerful media personalities just don’t seem to realize that what they say can have a powerful effect- especially in the aggregate.
Remember that one of the most powerful things that the Interhamwe did in the lead-up to the Rwandan genocide was to use propaganda (for example, via the Milles Collines radio station) to insult them, degrade them, accuse them of crimes they had not committed, and generally, to blame everything on them and dehumanize them in the process. This message of hate tapped into real historical grievances and had been cultivated by the Hutu elite for years, with a particular intensity in the months leading up to the genocide. When the time came to begin killing, many Hutus picked up their machetes willingly and hacked their neighbours to death. Not all of them, but enough of them to kill 800,000 fellow citizens.
The lesson here is this: political rhetoric is a powerful thing.
And it has become even more so in the age of 24-7 news, Facebook, Twitter, and instant communications. Individuals no longer have to confront the truths of the other side because it is possible to live in a bubble where everyone around you sees the world in exactly the same way as you do. Even the hyper-radical can look online for affirmation of their views of the world. And perhaps that is how Jared Loughner chose to live. Given that he has invokedhis Fifth Amendment rights, it’s hard to say right now. What we know about Jared Loughner suggests that he was mentally unbalanced, that he used to be a left-wing radical,that his current beliefs are consistent with a strand of Tea Party thinking, and that he was paranoid about the government. At this moment, it looks like he chose to act on his political beliefs. Maybe he even thought that he was doing his country a favour.
But what I learned from watching Derren Brown is that Jared Loughner might be less of an exception than we all would like to think. If three of four upstanding British citizens can be brainwashed into voluntarily committing armed robbery in two weeks of “motivational therapy” sessions, then what has been the impact of years and years of escalating invective on the American political sphere? Given that people have been primed to think the worst about those on the other side of the political spectrum, it is no wonder that there is Congressional deadlock. But is there the potential for further extreme political violence? Absolutely.
There is only one way out of this mess: Republicans and Democrats need to show each other some respect.
They do not need to agree with other, but they need to learn how to respectfully disagree with each other. They can no longer afford to demonize each other in the name of political expdiency. If they forget, they need to remind themselves of what Gabrielle Giffords herself said:
Our democracy is a light, a beacon, around the world because we affect change at the ballot box and not because of these… outbursts of violence in certain cases.
There is a fine line between peaceful protest and freedom of expression. All of us missed the warning signs that American political rhetoric had begun to spiral out of control. Now that line has clearly been crossed. The time has come for a new politics.
Update Jan 11: Ailes Tells Fox Anchors to ‘Tone it Down’;
Also, see David Brooks’ commentary, as well as this retort by George Jackson, a reader.
Update Jan 15 2011: This column by Frank Rich in the NY Times is similar to this post in its conclusions.
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While the secrets and lies unleashed by WikiLeaks have kept me enthralled over the past couple of week, another story with game-changing potential has also broken: China, in its international debut on the educational testing stage, has trounced all other countries in reading, math and science. According to an internationally respected (and rigorously administered) test, students from Shanghai outperformed students from the rest of the world by a substantial margin.
From the PISA press release: “More than one-quarter of Shanghai’s 15-year-olds demonstrated advanced mathematical thinking skills to solve complex problems, compared to an OECD average of just 3%.”
I have cut and paste the results so that you can see for yourselves how Shanghai students dominated in each of the three major categories. While their reading scores were respectably higher than those of South Korea, their test scores in math and science left their next closest competitors (Hong Kong, Finland, Singapore) eating dust. The full table is available here.
For those who are shaking their heads with incredulity, you should know that you are in good company. The officials at the OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) were also taken aback by the results. Apparently, the methodology of the test could not be faulted, and further, “international testing experts have investigated them to vouch for their accuracy, expecting that they would produce astonishment in many Western countries.”
This test has always been a big deal, especially amongst developed nations. But this year’s results have been received fretfully by the West because they have underscored a gradual, but undeniable shift in global power and influence eastwards. If China is besting us at the secondary school level today, does that mean that in a few decades we will be working for them? (Remember the rise of Japanese economic power back in the 1980s?)
While it will still be a while (at least 30-40 years?) before China can even hope to overtake the US as the most important and powerful country in the world, recent events have revealed chinks in the American armor— the meltdown of the American financial system and all of the Western economies that were linked to it (except for Canada!), the shift from the G8 to the G20, the audacity of the Chinese in suggesting a move away from using the US dollar as the global reserve currency… and now this.
It’s true that the results were drawn only from Shanghai— a city that attracts the most entrepreneurial and hard-working citizens in the country— so the results are likely to be stronger than that of China as a whole. The students were also told that doing well on the test was important to China’s international prestige, so they were all motivated to do their very best. But these are minor quibbles. The fact of the matter is, they excelled at these tests, not only in the ways that they might have been expected to (“rote” learning), but also in ways that were unexpected (creative problem-solving).
As hinted at earlier, what is genuinely worrying about these results is that Western countries seem to be losing whatever was left of any competitive edge we might have felt secure in. The last of that illusion was just crushed by this study. Let me explain what I mean.
When the manufacturing jobs moved to China in the 1980s and 1990s, I remember the general economic discourse went something like this: Let them have the blue collar jobs. We can create a service economy. Let’s keep all of the “superjobs” (finance, high tech, R&D, entertainment) for ourselves— those that require an educated population. They can have the rest (call centres, low-wage manufacturing). And for a while there, that model seemed to make sense. The textile manufacturers moved to China, and then to Vietnam and Cambodia, and the call centres moved to Mumbai. But the West also got to celebrate as Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Canary Wharf exploded in global importance. The problem was that it soon became clear the West could not monopolize those lucrative service jobs— everyone, including the Chinese, wanted them and wanted them badly. And gradually, we have seen a trickle of these superjobs move eastward.
Still, the superjobs have largely remained tethered to Western economies. As long as there remained a viable model for how Western economies could triumph over Eastern ones, then it was possible for us to ignore all of the other warning signs of our decline. We could still pretend that our “knowledge economy” would continue to dominate over their low-skilled manufacturing economy.
But the PISA results shatter that illusion. They demonstrate that the Chinese are more than capable of beating us at our own game. (The irony of my comment and being Chinese-Canadian has not slipped past me. Suffice it to say that I consider myself on the Western side of this divide.) If their 15-year-olds are trouncing the West academically, then any hope of us monopolizing information and services in the future seems to be a moot point. That dream of monopoly is now firmly dead. Forget domination, we will be lucky if the West does not decline into oblivion in these sectors.
For example, I was sitting next to an eminent scientist at Exeter’s Christmas dinner and I was told quite matter-of-factly that this decline was inevitable. “Christine,” he said, “I have been watching the British empire decline for as long as I can remember. I have seen it reflected in my own discipline as the number of British scientists giving keynotes at international meetings has fallen. Mostly, it was Americans who took our place. And now, increasingly, we are seeing more and more faces from Asia. I am now in my eighties and let me tell you, there is no fighting it.”
He then went on to remind me that the best advantage that we had is that smart people like to be around other smart people. A reputation for attracting brilliant minds is the best method for actually attracting brilliant minds. It’s true— I have seen that principle at work time and again. He suggested that this was the one thing that would allow a place like Oxford (or any other world-class university in the West) to cling on to any remaining competitive edge we might have over China for just a little while longer. But I know this won’t be enough. And it worries me— because that means there is no clear model for the West’s or Canada’s continued success.
So here is the take home message from this post: We are getting creamed. If we don’t work harder and smarter, we will no longer be competitive. It’s as simple as that.
Update Jan 15 2011: Nicholas Kristof at the NY Times draws broadly the same conclusion as I do in this column.
Canada’s Bid for the UN Security Council: A Post-Mortem
Last week, I sat at the computer, with my fingers crossed, waiting to hear the election results for the UN Security Council’s non-permanent seats. This was my country’s once-every-decade shot at a 2-year membership on the most important body in international affairs.
Canada was in a tight race against Germany and Portugal. Three countries, two seats. Everyone knew that Germany was a sure bet. The other seat was up for grabs. We wanted it.
Canada's Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon (bottom left) at the UN in New York on October 12, 2010. Courtesy of: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images
But as many of you already know, Canada lost to Portugal.
It was a humiliating defeat given that we expected to win. But it was also humiliating because we see ourselves as good global citizens. We belong up there. In fact, I think that was partly why this loss stung so badly. Canadians have a certain view of our place in the world and in the Security Council election post-mortem that followed, many of us had to face up to how Canada is now perceived on the international stage and the decline in our world standing. It quickly became apparent that our foreign policies were unpopular, our PM was quite disengaged from the UN, and that other countries were wondering where we had disappeared to in the past seven years.
For a variety of reasons, I think we felt entitled to that Security Council seat. We are indeed much more active on the international stage than Portugal is— this is difficult to dispute. Consider our contributions to Afghanistan, our consistent leadership in Haiti pre- and post-earthquake, the financial contributions that we make to international aid, our recent efforts on maternal health, etc. etc. And of course, we have just finished hosting the newly convened G8/G20 summit and the Vancouver Winter Olympics. Did I mention that we also have our fiscal house in order?
These are some pretty compelling reasons for why that seat should have been ours and not Portugal’s. We merited the win, if you will… at least, relative to Portugal. As Betty Plewes and Hunter McGill point out in their article, we may be a shadow of our former selves when it comes to doing good on the world stage, but I still think it’s fair to say that we are contributing more than Portugal. After all, the UN Charter lays out the criteria for election as being “the contribution…. to the maintenance of international peace and security and to the other purposes of the Organization, and also to equitable geographical distribution.”
You can compare how Canada’s strengths stacked up against Germany’s and Portugal’s, as laid out by Security Council Report:
- Canada stresses its long-standing commitment to multilateralism and peacekeeping, and the positive feedback it has consistently received for its previous service on the Council. In addition, Canada views its global involvement (including its recent hosting of the G8 and G20) as key indicators of its commitment in terms of security, economic and cultural ties, and highlights its status as a bilingual anglophone and francophone nation.
- Germany stresses that its commitment to peacekeeping missions over the last twenty years is serious (Germany’s first participation in a peace mission, to Namibia, occurred in 1989). Germany also recognises a wide approach to international security including threats which cannot be addressed with primarily military means.
- Portugal stresses the value for medium and small-sized countries to be represented on the Council in order to foster inclusiveness and transparency, as well as its ongoing involvement in numerous peacekeeping missions. It also highlights its role as a maritime nation and as a lusophone leader, participating actively in the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries.
The Post-Mortem
Having said all that, I want to provide my own post-mortem on why we didn’t get that coveted seat. There are two sides to every story, in this case, ours and Portugal’s. On our end, there were two types of problems that contributed to our loss: Policy and Tactics.
Our Foreign Policy
Our unflinching support for Israel hurt us substantially with Arab countries. From the New York Sun: “While blocs that included the African and Latin American countries were largely thought to have split their vote on the contested seat, the Arab countries and the OIC were largely believed to have voted en-bloc to bar Canada entry to the council.” Which brings me to another group of countries that were swayed by our policies: Africa.
If Canada really wanted that Security Council seat, it should have thought harder about alienating the largest bloc of voters (52 seats) with cuts in bilateral development aid. Lee-Anne Goodman writes: “African ambassadors, in particular, pointed to a series of Canadian stances on issues ranging from African debt relief to the Conservative government cutting funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and accusing it of having terrorist links.” Not all African countries voted against Canada, but whereas many of these countries were solidly in our corner in years past, the same could certainly not be said this time around
Add to this the visa fiasco with Mexico and the Czech Republic (which nearly resulted in a visa war with the EU) and the blow-up with the UAE at the most inopportune moment. Never mind the numerous other problems with our foreign policy that have slowly tarnished our international reputation (as pointed out by Haroon Siddiqui). With such poorly received policies, former UN ambassador Robert Fowler says, “The world doesn’t need more of the Canada it has been getting.”
Our Tactical Mistakes
Poor Leadership: Our biggest tactical error was a simple one: we just didn’t want it badly enough. A Western European diplomat said that he would like to see Canada succeed, “But you can’t take it for granted. You have to want something. That’s what we find a bit lacking.”
Others have already pointed out that Prime Minister Harper was insufficiently engaged with international affairs, paid little attention to the UN, did not step up for peacekeeping missions (as with the Congo), and most notably, skipped out on a UN General Assembly meeting for a Tim Horton’s opening in Oakville. (While I am sure that Tim Horton’s was not the *only* reason that the PM stayed home, it sure makes for some bad PR after the fact.)
To emphasize this point further, Mike Blanchfield, writing for The Canadian Press, summarized the view of a Western European Diplomat on our UN SC campaign:
[The diplomat] cites the fact that Canada entered the race late, and that Harper has made only one speech to the UN General Assembly, in 2006. His foreign ministers, Maxime Bernier and Cannon, filled in for him in 2007 and 2009 but the diplomat said giving the job to an unelected bureaucrat, Foreign Affairs Deputy Minister Len Edwards, in 2008 “speaks for itself.” (the Prime Ministers Office noted Friday that the government was embroiled in a federal election in September 2008).
A Slow Start: In addition to bad optics, there was also bad organization. The reality was that we got off to a slow start with our campaign. Former US Ambassador to the UN Sichan Siv tells us that the US would typically begin lobbying 2-3 years in advance of an important election. In our case, the Harper government didn’t throw its full effort behind the enterprise until much much later than that. From what I can gather, our big push began only in the year leading up to the election.
Lee Berthiaume’s insightful article (written a full year before the vote) lays out what we needed to do to win. With hindsight, his article makes it clear that there was a failure in Cabinet leadership, especially with respect to tactics:
“Your public stance in the year running up to the election has to take into account the fact that you are a candidate, without sacrificing your fundamental values and principles,” the [retired senior diplomatic] official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“You have to bear in mind that you’re going to be judged by your peers in the next couple of years, and every single decision that you make is going to have an impact.”
Wheeling and Dealing: And then there is all of the horse-trading that goes on. The soft power and the quid pro quos deals that are all about bilateral relationships. In the words of the retired senior diplomat:
“It’s part of a complicated diplomatic process where a lot of it has to do with trading votes. ‘I’ll vote for you in this or that election if you vote for me on the Security Council.’ It builds on bilateral relations…. You tug on the heart strings and remind them of all the great things you’ve done with them. You try to identify issues on which you share similar points of view. You commit yourself to consulting. That’s how you win.”
We have experience in this department. We know how to do it well. And yet somehow we messed that up too. It comes down to our unusually high “burn rate”. In other words, we were double-crossed. Countries that had promised to vote for us (with signed, but not binding support) went back on their promises. It was on the basis of these 135 written promises + 15 verbal promises that Minister Cannon thought we had it in the bag. We needed 128 votes (2/3 of 192 votes). We got 114 of these votes in the first round, so the “rotten lying bastards” factor did play a role— but would our burn rate have been so high if our foreign policy wasn’t so distasteful? I doubt it.
To win a UN SC seat, members keep voting until the 2/3 threshold is reached. Candidates horse-trade for votes, but these promises only apply for the first round of voting. After that, all bets are off and countries do as they wish. This is where the depth of our support became critical. In Round 2, we received 78 votes to Portugal’s 113. In this second round, our foreign policy choices didn’t just hurt us, they humiliated us. Freed from their original promises, states flocked to Portugal.
Lack of US support: Our closest ally, and normally, one of our staunchest supporters, did not go to bat for us this time around. Former American diplomat Richard Grenell details how the US not only “didn’t campaign for Canada’s election but instructed American diplomats to not get involved in the weeks leading up to the heated contest.” Compare that to previous our previous bids for the Security Council when American diplomats directly supported our bid as part of their diplomatic dealings. (In the same way that Brazil strongly supported Portugal’s bid this time around.)
Portugal’s Successful Campaign
EU Support: Undoubtedly the biggest advantage that Portugal had over Canada was that it had the full unqualified backing of the EU. As David Frum notes in his piece on the intricacies of Security Council nominations, “the EU countries have been negotiating these UN nominations among themselves first. They decide that they want Germany and Portugal — and then they muscle their way through the rest of the bloc onto the UN floor.” Which is absolutely true— at the nomination stage. But all the muscling does is simply force an election— whereby the EU nominees have a 27-31 vote head start. This was not what did us in.
The EU’s Attractive Power: The final nail in the coffin was what my DFAIT friend (who prefers to remain anonymous) referred to as the EU’s willingness to use its attractive power (not just re: potential membership, but also for trade deals or other incentives) to pull in the votes.
Portugal and the EU as a whole wanted that seat much more badly than we did. After all, the advantages to the EU are enormous. In the 2011 Security Council, Europe will have control over *five* of the 15 seats (UK, France, Germany, Portugal, Bosnia). That is an enormous amount of influence on a Security Council loaded with power players. It certainly means that Europe will be extremely influential in setting the agenda.
Our 2020 Bid
This loss hurt. But as with all stumbles, we pick ourselves up and keep going. The McLeod Group laid out a coherent set of policies that we could have pursued if we had in fact been elected. Nothing is stopping us from moving forward with this agenda.
What we definitely should *not* do is sulk in a corner and withdraw further from UN engagement. In another ten years, the government will have another crack at that rotating seat. Hopefully, the next around, we will be better prepared.
In the meantime, we need to show the world that it made a mistake in failing to elect Canada to the UN Security Council.
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Rationality vs. Optics- Why David Cameron Avoided the Chartered Jet and Flew Commercial
PM travels on the cheap. Photo credit: Photo by Stefan Rousseau-Pool, Getty Images.
British PM David Cameron just did something very interesting– aside from promising to slash the UK budget by 25% that is. That was expected, so no, that’s not it. The surprise for me has been his decision to include his own budget in the cuts. You see, I’m more used to politicians cutting everyone else’s budgets except for their own. I’m sure you’ve noticed this too: politicians have a tendency to protect, say, their own staffing levels and their personal travel budgets from any austerity measures. Well, I’m happy to report that PM David Cameron has chosen to be the exception to this rule.
Andrew Grice from The Independent reported that David Cameron and his accompanying staff took a commercial flight to Washington on British Airways instead of chartering a jet like British PMs normally do. To the further amazement of the Americans, he took an Amtrak train from Washington to New York. As far as head-of-state travel standards go, this is the equivalent of doing your laundry by hand. The last time I read a story like this, it was about how the then-Governor of the Bank of Canada (I think it was David Dodge) chose to regularly fly in economy instead of in first class. And he regularly stayed with friends instead of in fancy hotels.
But I guess things are different when it comes to presidents and prime ministers. Apparently, the US media was “bemused” and “perplexed” at the idea that the David Cameron’s visit would need to be scheduled around the departure of his Amtrak train.
I have to admit that I really like the fact that the PM is trying to set an example by starting with changes in how he himself does business. It drives home to people how serious the situation is. When the British PM is not only flying commercial, but not even first class at that, well, then things must be really bad. Contrast this trip with the fact that last year at this time, the Foreign Office (under David Miliband) had put out a tender for a chartered luxury jet service. That story is right up there with the US $440,000 corporate retreat taken by AIG executives days after the government bailed out the firm with $85 billion of taxpayers’ money.
A few years ago, nobody would have batted an eyelash at either of these stories, but the economic crisis has taken its toll. In both cases, it wasn’t just about the money– $440,000 is a drop in the ocean for a firm like AIG, and similarly, the Foreign Office contract would not have been worth more than a few million quid. These are not big amounts in the bigger scheme of things. At the same time, it’s enough money to matter when benefits are being cut, the unemployment rate is high, and houses are being foreclosed left, right, and centre. What these two stories were really about was how politicians and rich executives were completely out-of-touch with normal people. They were so insulated from their own citizens (in the case of David Miliband) and from their employees and their financial saviours (in the case of the AIG executives) that they could no longer see how their actions might be perceived from outside their bubble. It seems like David Cameron has learned from those mistakes.
It’s true that spending £ 200,000 on a private jet for the PM and his entourage might have been a very good use of taxpayer money. After all, there is only one British PM and the whole point of the chartered jet is to maximize his productivity by making sure that his time (and his staff’s) is not wasted– for example, this time around, he was delayed for 48 minutes at Heathrow while his BA flight was stuck on the runway. This is not to mention that any savings would have seemed pretty hollow if the PM had shown-up for his meetings with President Obama jetlagged and poorly-rested because he didn’t sleep properly on the plane the night before.
As a rational taxpayer, it probably would have made more sense for him to have chartered the jet, but then spent the time that had been saved in meetings with American business leaders who could have boosted the UK economy– thus making back the £200,000 and more. That is probably what Tim Ferriss (of 4-hour work week fame) would have told him to do.
But this is The Age of Austerity, and as a politician, optics matter.
Did Cameron do more with less vis à vis his US tour? Probably not. But the deeply ingrained cheapskate in me still admires the symbolism of this (admittedly superficial) change. I think (and hope) what he was really trying to say was: Just because you’ve always done it that way doesn’t mean that you can’t try a new way.
The big experiment continues.
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Joe, age 4, orphaned by the Port-au-Prince earthquake in Jan 2010. Photo credit Olav A. Saltbones/ Norwegian Red Cross.
If you have ever made a donation to Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), CARE, Oxfam or any other organization that focuses on helping people overseas, you’ve probably wondered what these organizations do with your money. For those who have read William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden or Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid, you’re probably convinced that a substantial amount of your money has ended up in the wrong hands or is doing more harm than good to your intended recipients. On the other hand, if you’ve read Jeff Sachs’ The End of Poverty, then you probably think that your donation is helping to save the world.
Easterly, Moyo, and Sachs are all right. Yes, our aid money is often misspent, misdirected, and ends up fueling corruption. But yes, our aid money has also contributed to some enormous improvements in the standard of living in some of the world’s poorest countries. On the face of it, these perspectives seem contradictory, but they really are not. International development is complex and multi-layered. A recent episode of This American Life on the situation in Haiti underscores some of these complexities, contradictions, and paradoxes. But it does so in typical Ira Glass fashion– by telling you some unforgettable stories.
The episode, entitled “Island Time“, is about the situation in Haiti in the aftermath of the massive earthquake that hit Port-au-Prince back in 2010. (For those interested in international development, it is more than worth the $0.99 download price.)
There were two stories in particular that speak to why, more often than not, development aid does not achieve the intended results. The first one is about mangoes and it comes from the fabulous Planet Money folks. It’s about why it’s so hard to get aid money to do what it’s supposed to do. The second story is about the concept of “capacity-building”. (This post refers to the mango story, but the capacity-building story is another development parable that is worth noting.)
Dreaming of Plastic Crates in Haiti (Listen here)
The Elusive Canal
This is a story about mangoes. It turns out that Haiti has the perfect climate for growing mangoes. So a natural way for the country to develop its economy would be for it to export its mangoes to the American market. The first part of the story is about a farmer who has two mango trees, but has the potential to grow 100+ mango trees but can’t because she lacks irrigation– even though her farm is right next to a gushing river. It turns out that she needs a canal which would cost $2000 to build. The problem is that she has no way of getting a hold of the $2000– even though the income from the additional mango trees would easily cover the cost of the investment in one year (each tree produces about $300/year).
There is clearly a need here that the international community could easily fill, but how does the aid community in Haiti find out about someone like her? Who is it that she should get in touch with from the international community to build her canal? How would she even get this person to pay attention to her?
Why is it that with billions of dollars going to Haiti, this farmer cannot get this canal built– even though it would vastly improve her standard of living and increase local employment opportunities (more trees=more pickers)?
Plastic Crates
The second part of the program is the story of local businessman Jean Maurice (aka Mango Man). He is a wholesaler, buying locally and then selling his mangoes to suppliers in the U.S. It turns out that there is great demand for Haitian mangoes and that he could easily sell more of them. If only he could increase his supply…. which he can do quite easily! It turns out that quite a lot of the mangoes are bruised in storage and often end up rotten or bug-infested because people were storing them in random places (e.g., under their beds) until Jean Maurice came around to buy them.
Enter the plastic crates. All he had to do was make sure that the farmers stored the mangoes in the crates. His yield would increase and the farmers would receive more income. A win-win situation for all. So Mango Man bought the plastic crates and distributed them to the farmers. For free.
But something got lost in translation. Instead of using the crates to store mangoes, people ended up using them as tables, chairs, bookcases… They were probably wondering, why would anyone waste a perfectly good crate to store mangoes when you could easily store them under the bed? Who cares if the mangoes are a bit bruised? They taste just as good– why does it matter? From their point of view, it’s hard to conceive of the North American consumer who is only willing to buy a perfect unblemished mango.
Enter the NGO
At this point, Jean Maurice decided he needed some help in implementing his scheme. He was not a fan of NGOs, but he set aside his skepticism and engaged the help of one that he trusted. This NGO had been around for a while and were funded by USAID.
Mango Man’s NGO friend tells him that he needs to create a local depot in the area to distribute crates and provide training. He would need to set up a local site. Further, the depot land must be on neutral territory, so the land would have to be donated. They find an appropriate site, but it turned out that the land is communally owned by a family of 60 people. Amazingly, they managed to get the consent of this group to use the land for the project anyway.
But now they needed proof that the land was theirs before they could begin building the depot. An official deed was needed to prove title. No one was sure what had happened to it so they would have to track it down. They finally find the deed in the basement of a Haitian ex-pat living in New York. At last, they took all of the paperwork and filed it with the government. It was touch and go for a while, but at that stage, the prognosis was good.
Then the earthquake hit. Their application was destroyed in the rubble.
And in spite of the billions of dollars of aid money coming into the country, the local NGO that was working on the Mango Crates project had their funding cut by USAID.
Aid is hard to do right
Perhaps Mango Man could have approached the whole thing more efficiently, as alluded to in this comment on the story. But this criticism misses the point: it’s hard to get the outcome you want, even when a project seems pretty straightforward.
In the case of the mango crates, each individual step in the project seemed semi-reasonable– if perhaps overly cautious and needlessly bureaucratic. A depot provided a physical space to store the crates and a place to do the training. A neutral plot of land eliminated potential ownership or favouritism issues. A deed provided security for the NGO so that the project couldn’t be closed down on a whim. Yet the end result was a bureaucratic red-tape nightmare.
Now if Jean Maurice and his local NGO friend– who are both Haitian– are having such a hard time getting some mango crates to farmers and getting them to use them appropriately, then can you imagine the challenges of say, trying to halve a country’s maternal mortality rate? Or keeping Africa’s girls in school?
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For more on Haiti’s mango industry, see Jacqueline Charles’ article in The Miami Herald.
On how international development assistance (in the form of food aid) has messed up the incentives for local farmer to grow rice: see NPR’s Planet Money, How Foreign Aid Hurts Haitian farmers.
Here are some interesting posts from other bloggers:
Laura Freschi provides her take on the episode at William Easterly’s Aid Watch site. Be sure to read the comments that follow.
Biodork provides a detailed plot summary in her post.
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100% Pure Squeezed Orange Juice + Other Chemicals
There is something delicious about a glass of Tropicana orange juice– it always tastes so sweet, and so perfect, and so, well, so perfect. No matter where you are in the world, it always tastes the same. Hmmmmm…. I had always wondered how they managed to achieve that– but I just chalked it up to modern transportation. I guess if I had really thought about it, I would have realized that it wouldn’t make any sense to airfreight orange juice around the world, but I have to say that I didn’t think much about it. I just assumed that somehow, they made it work.
After all, the label was pretty clear about what was inside the carton: 100% Pure Squeezed Orange Juice. Not from concentrate. That doesn’t leave much room for anything else. Or so you would think.
Well, it turns out that our tasty glass of Tropicana orange juice is not all that it appears to be. Alissa Hamilton let the cat out of the bag with her book, Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice.
What they don’t tell us on the carton is that Tropicana actually uses “flavor packs” in its “100% pure squeezed orange juice” in order to achieve its consistently yummy taste.
The Making of OJ and Flavor Packs
Making OJ should be pretty simple. Pick oranges. Squeeze them. Put the juice in a carton and voilà!
But actually, there is an important stage in between that is an open secret in the OJ industry. After the oranges are squeezed, the juice is stored in giant holding tanks and, critically, the oxygen is removed from them. That essentially allows the liquid to keep (for up to a year) without spoiling– but that liquid that we think of as orange juice tastes nothing like the Tropicana OJ that comes out of the carton. To bring the flavor back in, the company adds “flavor packs“:
When the juice is stripped of oxygen it is also stripped of flavor providing chemicals. Juice companies therefore hire flavor and fragrance companies, the same ones that formulate perfumes for Dior and Calvin Klein, to engineer flavor packs to add back to the juice to make it taste fresh. Flavor packs aren’t listed as an ingredient on the label because technically they are derived from orange essence and oil. Yet those in the industry will tell you that the flavor packs, whether made for reconstituted or pasteurized orange juice, resemble nothing found in nature. The packs added to juice earmarked for the North American market tend to contain high amounts of ethyl butyrate, a chemical in the fragrance of fresh squeezed orange juice that, juice companies have discovered, Americans favor. Mexicans and Brazilians have a different palate. Flavor packs fabricated for juice geared to these markets therefore highlight different chemicals, the decanals say, or terpene compounds such as valencine.
What about that distinctive Tropicana taste?
Well, it turns out that it is entirely engineered. It tastes more or less the same around the world because it’s chemically created.
The formulas vary to give a brand’s trademark taste. If you’re discerning you may have noticed Minute Maid has a candy like orange flavor. That’s largely due to the flavor pack Coca-Cola has chosen for it. Some companies have even been known to request a flavor pack that mimics the taste of a popular competitor, creating a “hall of mirrors” of flavor packs. Despite the multiple interpretations of a freshly squeezed orange on the market, most flavor packs have a shared source of inspiration: a Florida Valencia orange in spring.
Why does it cost more?
So if “Not from concentrate” OJ isn’t a superior product, then why is it more expensive? Alissa gives an answer here for Civil Eats.
In fact, “not from concentrate,” a.k.a pasteurized orange juice, is not more expensive than “from concentrate” because it is closer to fresh squeezed. Rather, it is because storing full strength pasteurized orange juice is more costly and elaborate than storing the space saving concentrate from which “from concentrate” is made. The technology of choice at the moment is aseptic storage, which involves stripping the juice of oxygen, a process known as “deaeration,” so it doesn’t oxidize in the million gallon tanks in which it can be kept for upwards of a year.
Food Industry Power
If this is all true, then the question remains: Why doesn’t it say anything about this on the carton? And just as importantly, how can they get away with “100% Pure Squeezed Orange Juice” on their carton?
The answer to these befuddling questions is that the food industry doesn’t have to say anything about it because the flavor packs are made from orange by-products– even though these “by-products” are so chemically manipulated that they hardly qualify as “by-products” any more. In any case, it turns out that manipulative labelling of this sort is not high on the FDA’s list of priorities.
We, the public, are being duped. If Tropicana (owned by PepsiCo) and all of the other “not from concentrate” companies can get away with claiming that flavor-packed orange juice is “100% pure squeezed orange juice”, then we really need to ask ourselves: What else is the food industry misleading us about?
Update: A previous version of this post used stronger language, but given the ridiculousness of UK libel laws, I have been advised to tone down the language to avoid the possibility of financial ruin. More on UK libel laws later.
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Married vs. Maiden Names: What the Research Says
Growing up, I had always assumed that I would take my husband’s name when I got married. Doing anything else just seemed weird. When I was younger, I don’t think I came into contact with even one married woman who had chosen to keep her maiden name, either in hyphenated form or on its own. Even amongst my classmates, I have only ever known one person with a hyphenated last name, and certainly, no one that I knew had ever taken on their mom’s maiden name instead of their dad’s name.
But when I finally did get married in 2004, the idea of changing my last name just seemed unnecessary. I thought carefully about the various possibilities mentioned in this article for new brides: hyphenation, keeping my maiden name as a middle name, etc. It wasn’t just that getting new documents and ID cards would be a huge pain or that keeping my maiden name made more professional sense. There was something else that I couldn’t quite put my finger on that made me want to stay Christine Cheng instead of becoming Christine Scott.
(At this point, I should mention that the blog is entitled christinescottcheng.wordpress.com because christinecheng.wordpress.com was already taken. Most of the time though, I just go by Christine Cheng.)
Looking back, there were lots of reasons why I decided to keep my maiden name– all of them entwined with one another. The first reason was that I wasn’t ready to give up such a critical part of my identity. Wrapped up in that identity was having my last name reflect my appearance: given that I am a Chinese-Canadian, there would have been some cognitive dissonance between what I looked like and what my last name suggested I looked like. At the same time, I think I was also trying to find a way of asserting my continued independence, in spite of being married. To me, getting married did not mean becoming Mrs. Housewife. I was looking for a way to express these feelings more publicly; keeping my maiden name was my way of articulating these values without saying a word. In the same way that some people wear Gucci sunglasses and others dye their hair pink, I think that I was doing something similar by keeping my maiden name– even if I wasn’t totally conscious of my motivations at the time.
What I found interesting was that most, but not all, of my friends had chosen to keep their maiden names in one form or another. Many of them took on their husbands’ names as middle names, formally or informally; others opted to hyphenate; some made up new blended names which husband and wife both used. Some stuck with tradition and took their husbands’ names, and a few of my male friends even took on their wives’ last names. In my social circle, the norm around married vs. maiden has become a free-for-all: anything goes. What a contrast with my parents’ generation!
I started thinking about all of this recently when I read this article on why married women should keep their maiden names.
The article refers to a series of studies conducted by psychologists at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. There were two sets of interesting findings from this study that were highlighted by the article. The first one is that:
Dutch women who adopted their partner’s name actually possessed different characteristics than those who kept their own, supporting previous U.S. research. On average, those who had changed their name were older, had lower educational levels, had more children and held more conservative family values. And although they tended to display a stronger work ethic, they also worked fewer hours per week and earned a lower salary than those who did not change their names.
The second set of findings have to do with others’ perceptions of women who take their husband’s name. Here is the abstract of their paper, What’s in a Name?
A woman who took her partner’s name or a hyphenated name was judged as more caring, more dependent, less intelligent, more emotional, less competent, and less ambitious in comparison with a woman who kept her own name. A woman with her own name, on the other hand, was judged as less caring, more independent, more ambitious, more intelligent, and more competent, which was similar to an unmarried woman living together or a man. Finally, a job applicant who took her partner’s name, in comparison with one with her own name, was less likely to be hired for a job and her monthly salary was estimated €861,21 lower (calculated to a working life, €361.708,20).
The way the experiments themselves were set up are interesting in themselves:
…the researchers asked 90 participants to imagine they were invited to a party where they were introduced either to a married couple named Peter Bosboom and Helga Kuipers, who had kept her maiden name, or to a married couple named Peter and Helga Kuipers, Helga having taken her husband’s name.
When Helga shared her partner’s last name, both male and female participants perceived her as more caring, more dependent, less intelligent, more emotional and less competent – that is, the researchers say, more aligned with female stereotypes.
Similarly, when 113 other participants were asked to form an impression of a female character in an ambiguous story, they judged her, again, as more “stereotypically female” if they were told she had taken her partner’s name, or had a hyphenated last name.
In the final part of the study, 50 other participants were asked to judge a female job applicant, for a human-resources-manager position, based on an e-mail. They were also asked to estimate her potential salary. The participants considered her less likely to be hired if they knew she had taken her partner’s name. Moreover, they estimated she would earn €861 (about $1,150) per month less than a woman who kept her own name.
Keep in mind that Dutch society is, by most measures, one of the more egalitarian cultures in the world. If these are the results for the Netherlands, then on balance, it’s reasonable to expect similar results in other Western countries.
It seems unfair that married women are judged in this way when married men aren’t. It’s a no-win situation for married women– you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Those who keep their maiden name reap the professional benefits but may have to put up with social judgement being passed on them– often from other women. On the other hand, for those who choose to take on their husband’s name, it’s clear that there is a professional penalty to be paid.
We’ve come a long way baby, but we’ve still got a long way to go.
Photo credit: Lel4nd.
Update: It looks like this issue has been a longstanding one in Japan where couples must register under the same last name when they get married. See Women’s Surnames a Hot-Button Topic.
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Should Canada’s Next Peacekeeping Mission be in the Congo?
There are strong indications that Canada is going to be involved in the UN peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Recent articles in several major Canadian newspapers suggest that that Lieutenant-General Andrew Leslie will soon be heading up the mission and consequently, Canada will have a greater role to play in this conflict.
See The Globe’s article on the Congo mission, their coverage of Michaelle Jean’s visit to the Congo, as well as op-eds by Gerald Caplan, Jack Granatstein, Chris Selley and an editorial by The Montreal Gazette. In the blogospere, check out the posts from The Torch: A UN Congo mission for the CF? Local realities, Afstan, Congo, R2P, and Congo no go? On the conflict itself, steel yourself and watch Rape of a Nation or read the International Crisis Group’s latest report.
On the Appointment of Andrew Leslie
It is certainly an honour for Andrew Leslie and for Canada to be asked to head the peacekeeping mission, especially in light of the fact that it is the world’s largest peacekeeping mission at the moment. This is a diplomatic coup and the Harper government should be congratulated for securing this opportunity—and I don’t say this lightly. The question though is whether Leslie’s appointment will lead to a greater commitment to Congo vis à vis future peacekeeping troops, development assistance, and political involvement.
First off, it needs to be underscored that Leslie’s potential appointment in and of itself is undoubtedly good thing. It speaks to Canada’s aspirations on the international stage and our desire to punch above our weight. It justifies why we belong in the new G20. It says that we care about a country that has long been forsaken by everyone else.
From a more practical standpoint, Leslie’s new success or failure in his new role, presumably as the Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG), will not be tied to Canada’s reputation. If he takes on this role, Andrew Leslie will be working for the UN— not the Canadian government. (If you know otherwise then I am happy to be corrected on this point.) How he performs in this job will mostly be a reflection on him as an individual, not on Canada.
Of course, the more Canada becomes invested in the mission as a result of Leslie’s appointment, the more of a stake we will have in its success or failure. I doubt that anyone realistically expects Leslie to turn the Congo situation around. It is as The Gazette points out, an absolute quagmire so expectations are pretty low. If he leaves the situation better than it it currently stands, then I think those are grounds for success. Given the low expectations, it seems like there is only upside for our involvement. If Leslie succeeds, then Canada gets some of the credit. If he doesn’t succeed, then he can easily argue that the deck was stacked against him to begin with. Which is absolutely true.
So I definitely support Andrew Leslie’s appointment—that seems like a no-brainer to me. And I would also lend my support for having 250-500 troops and/or civilian support staff. I think the current concerns about having 50-150 troops support Leslie are completely overblown and an overreaction to all that Canada has been through in Afghanistan. Those in the Canadian Forces are understandably wary of another large ill-defined mission. And they should be. But the troop levels that are currently being debated sound limited and reasonable.
Further, Congo is not Afghanistan. Yes, it is dangerous. It is messy. It is ugly. It is corrupt. And peacekeepers are engaged in combat. But compare the casualty rates. Since the mission was authorized in 2000, 81 peacekeepers have died in the Congo— this is for all troops in the entire mission over ten years. Over roughly the same period, there have been 1,735 coalition deaths in Afghanistan.
Having said that, I do have deep reservations about seeing a limited engagement grow into a much larger one without a thorough examination of the potential consequences. It would be naïve to think that more would not be expected of us from the UN over time. As someone who researches peacekeeping in Africa, I’m of mixed minds about Canada getting more involved.
After weighing the pros and cons, I think I would reluctantly support such an intervention. Let me take you through my thinking on this.
A Complex Conflict
There is good reason why the Congo war has been labelled Africa’s World War: taken together, the past 15 years of on-again-off-again conflict in the DRC looks more like eight related conflicts than a single coherent one. It is deeply complex and multi-layered involving ethnic tensions, natural resources, interstate dealings and double-crossings, and regional rivalries. Even for Congo country experts, I suspect that it has been difficult to keep track of it all. Try skimming the Political section of any of the UN Panel of Experts reports on the Congo and you will see what I mean.
It does not help that Canada has very limited expertise on the Congo. This is not to say that we can’t build up our expertise, as we have with Afghanistan and Haiti, but at this moment, we don’t have the depth of understanding within the government bureaucracy (or outside of it) to really get a grip on the political dynamics. Remember, it took several years before the West fully understood the Afghanistan-Pakistan connection and we are still paying the price for our inability to grasp this link until it was too late.
Concerns
Jack Granatstein’s op-ed laid out some of my reservations about our potential involvement, though at the time he wrote his piece (April 6, 2010), a larger mission may have been envisioned:
1) President Kabila wants the UN mission (MONUC) out by 2011;
2) MONUC is underfinanced; and
3) Muddy vision of Canada’s potential contribution to the mission
More concerns have since been expressed by Major-General Lewis Mackenzie, who led UN troops in Sarajevo in 1992:
The UN force in Congo finds itself supporting a shaky government, pursuing rebels in the jungle, killing people who have raped and murdered their way through villages…The UN has extreme difficulty commanding and controlling those types of operations…My only recommendation would be, ‘don’t touch it with a 10-foot pole.’
It’s also clear that we also don’t really have much of a national interest in Congo itself aside from some (not insubstantial) mining sites. And of course, as Gerald Caplan has pointed out, we may be getting involved for the wrong reasons (Security Council seat), and thus supply the requisite troops but not fully engage politically.
To intervene or not to intervene?
So far, there is a general consensus out there that Canada’s next peacekeeping mission should not be in the Congo.
While I share all of the concerns that have been expressed and quite a few more, I also feel that Canada is uniquely positioned to play a decisive role in this conflict. It may be a huge stretch for us and I realize that I am expressing something of a pipe dream, but maybe, just maybe, Canadians could help bring a decisive end to the Congo conflict. It’s a big risk and more likely than not, we will fail. But 5.4 million people are estimated to have died as a result of this conflict. To put this in perspective, 6 million died in the Holocaust.
For too long, the Congo has been neglected—Western donors keep saying that they care, but they have not been willing to invest and risk real political capital into changing the situation. Perhaps this is because the situation looks so hopeless. No government wants to take up a failed state and suffer casualties in a faraway place where there are no national interests at stake. But if the West took even 5% of the financial and political resources that it has spent on terrorism or the Middle East conflict and spent it the Congolese conflict, I bet that this conflict would have ended long ago. As it stands, we are all sorry about the Rwandan genocide, but unwilling to do anything about the ensuing spillover into the Congo. Why bother advocating the Responsibility to Protect when we are not willing to practice what we preach? This is Canada’s chance to make good.
And success is possible. Turn back the clock to our very short but extremely productive term on the UN Security Council under Lloyd Axworthy’s guidance. During that 1999-2000 period, Canada’s ambassador to the UN, Robert Fowler used his position on the UN Security Council to publish the Fowler report on Angola’s conflict diamonds. This report changed the political landscape and effectively led to the end of a 27 year war. It looked like an impossible goal for Canada given our two-year term. But what Fowler and Canadian diplomats like David Angell were able to achieve during that very short tenure was nothing short of miraculous in the eyes of the international community.
Can history repeat itself? Well, we have a few things working in our favour.
Canadian advantages
We do not have a colonial past as other major powers do. We have a relatively positive reputation on the continent. We have an experienced pool of experts who have been hardened by experiences in Afghanistan and Haiti. We have limited (but not insignificant) economic interests in the country (mostly in mining). We speak French. All of this may not sound like much, but it is a very strong start for establishing trust—which is more than most other countries who have been involved can say.
Of course, shepherding a political process for ending a conflict does not necessarily require boots on the ground. It is possible for us to deploy a substantial contingent of Canadian civilian staff through the UN mission (MONUC), our embassy, CIDA, and Canadian NGOs. We can support MONUC without the need for more troops. This would certainly be less controversial. But I would argue that having boots on the ground, as part of the whole-of-government approach, along with a substantial long-term development program, substantially increases political leverage.
The bottom line
We have here an opportunity to distinguish ourselves on the international stage by bring an end to the deadliest war in recent memory. In spite of all my reservations, I think Canadians have the potential to make a positive difference in the Congo. We should support Andrew Leslie’s appointment. We should send him off with 250-500 troops.
And if, but only if, there is a constructive role for Canada’s troops to play in resolving the conflict in the Congo, then we should also support a more substantial deployment of peacekeepers after 2012.
Update: Insiders say that after the Congo visit by the Governor-General, the government had firmly decided that a substantial peacekeeping mission was off the table. Ultimately, even the Andrew Leslie appointment was turned down, which I found quite surprising.
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My apologies for the long hiatus. I’ve been slacking off since I submitted my dissertation and have spent my spare time cleaning the house instead of blogging. The good news is that the chaos of our house has been contained– for the moment anyway.
I’m now ready to resume with a multi-part series on women in politics. It seems like the time is now ripe given that India’s upper house of parliament (Rajya Sabha) recently passed a historic bill (Mar 9 2010) that will reserve one-third of seats in India’s lower house of parliament and its state legislative assemblies for women. If all goes as planned in the lower house (Lok Sabha), the bill will make it through parliament sometime soon. Then, it will have just one more hurdle to clear: 15 of India’s 28 states will need to pass it before it officially becomes law. If it passes– and I hope it will– then the number of women in the lower house of parliament will go from 59 to 181 (out of 545 seats). In the upper house, the number of women (21 out of 245) would not change because these seats are elected by the state assemblies. The assignment of which seats will be reserved for women will be done by random assignment. Each seat will be reserved for women once every three elections.
The story has caught the world’s attention. It’s one thing when Sweden– the poster child country for social equality and all things good— establishes gender quotas. It signals something else altogether when India, a developing country and potential future superpower, has made gender such a high priority. We are even starting to see spillover effects: Sri Lanka has been inspired to bring in a quota for female parliamentarians.
Several big media outlets covered the story: The Guardian, The New York Times, The Independent, and the BBC (with video clip), but the most detailed news article about the nitty gritty politics comes from the Inter Press Service (IPS).
A couple of months ago, I mentioned the research of Esther Duflo in one of my posts. This is the perfect place to say more about her research. She and her colleagues (at the MIT Poverty Lab) have been conducting field experiments and examining data on natural experiments– the results of which have been both academically interesting and also policy relevant. But first, a few words on experiments. Read more…
Teacher Training and the Multi-Billion Dollar Question
It seems like the question of how to produce good teachers has not only been covered by the NY Times, but also by The Atlantic in their Jan/Feb 2010 issue. In light of my recent post on Doug Lemov’s teaching techniques, this article is aptly entitled: What Makes a Great Teacher?
In her take on this question, Amanda Ripley, poses a similar puzzle to that in Elizabeth Green’s article on Building a Better Teacher:
[Teach for America's] founder, Wendy Kopp, had begun to notice something puzzling when she visited classrooms: many Teach for America teachers were doing good work. But a small number were getting phenomenal results—and it was not clear why.
Kopp made it a priority to find out what was going on.
[Steven] Farr was tasked with finding out. Starting in 2002, Teach for America began using student test-score progress data to put teachers into one of three categories: those who move their students one and a half or more years ahead in one year; those who achieve one to one and a half years of growth; and those who yield less than one year of gains.
Six Important Characteristics jumped out at him from the data about the best of the Teach for America teachers. Read more…
Lemov’s 49 Techniques: Transforming Student Outcomes
I discovered something new a few months ago: my toddler, Miles, responds *extremely* well to praise. He would do all sorts of things to get us to praise him. My husband and I found out that the term “little helper” is a really neat trick for teaching your child to control his own behaviour. I originally picked this up from an article on “training your husband” the same way you would train an exotic animal.
But I just read that this particular technique works really well in classrooms as well. For teachers, this is one of the tricks of the trade. Interestingly, little techniques like these have the potential to transform the entire education system– in a cost-effective manner to boot!
In an NY Times Magazine article, Building a Better Teacher, Elizabeth Green provides a concrete critique of a basic flaw in the existing American education system– teacher training– and recommends a very solid solution. This article is insightful and practical. It should be read by everyone who cares about education policy– I would even go so far as to say that this is useful for all teachers everywhere, not only in the US, but in all countries. It is so good that I’m offering the Coles’ Notes version in this post, with a small thought from me (at the end) on taking the conclusions forward into the policy arena.
Here is the puzzle that Green lays out:
When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to. Some teachers could regularly lift their students’ test scores above the average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others’ students left with below-average results year after year. William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years… Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, found that while the top 5 percent of teachers were able to impart a year and a half’s worth of learning to students in one school year, as judged by standardized tests, the weakest 5 percent advanced their students only half a year of material each year.
So what is it that accounts for these good teachers being so good, and how can we produce more of them? Read more…
I wrote about the Tea Party a couple of weeks ago, remarking upon its newfound dynamism and the fact that it is attracting “regular” people in addition to those who would be considered radical right-wing extremists. Well, it looks like another social movement has sprung up in response to the Tea Partiers– we now have the Coffee Party.
Differences
In contrast to the T.E.A. Partiers (Taxed Enough Already), the Coffee Party does not believe that the solution to today’s economic problems is to dismantle the federal government. Indeed, the Coffee Party feels that the federal government has to be part of the solution. I guess I was a member of the Coffee Party and I did not even know it!
An excerpt from one of the Coffee Party’s notes:
We believe that the federal government–despite its many shortcomings–MUST get its act together, and start solving the enormous problems we face as a nation. It’s not because we LOVE the federal government. It’s just that it’s the ONLY apparatus that we have at our disposal to counter the special interests and multi-national corporations that wield way too much power over a government that was intended to be of the people, by the people, and for the people.
We cannot solve the health care crisis at the state level. If the insurance corporations’ were limited to state borders, then perhaps. But these are national and multi-national companies that have been gaming the system for decades. As consumers, we have been abused. We all know it. These corporate practices are literally making us sick and killing us. They have no shame. We cannot allow this to continue. No way. We cannot take the abuse anymore!
In terms of ideological leanings, this is definitely a centre-left/Democrats movement. There does not seem to be the fringe elements from the extreme left– it is unlike the Tea Party in this respect. For the most part, these are frustrated Democrats who are upset about how the economic crisis has played out, but believe that the Tea Party’s approach is counterproductive. It also seems to have its roots in the Obama campaign. This is pretty clear. But where people like William Jacobson have questioned whether this is a genuine grassroots movement or just astroturf, it looks to me, on balance, to be the real deal.
A Brief Tangent: Consider briefly what grassroots stands for: emerging from the citizenry itself. Annabel Park, one of the founders of the Coffee Party, may have worked for the Obama campaign, but she did not start the Coffee Party as an outpost of the Obama campaign. As far as I can see, the Coffee Party is not receiving support of any kind– financial or otherwise– from the Democrats or anyone else. Unless you believe in conspiracy theories (and many Tea Partiers do), it also does not look like the Coffee Party is receiving any political direction from the Democratic Party or individual Democratic politicians. Using these basic criteria– the accusation of astroturf should be thrown out.
Of course, this does not mean that the same grassroots movement that swept Obama into power will not be reinvigorated by the Coffee Party and choose to get involved again– but previous involvement in a political campaign should not preclude it from being considered a genuine grassroots movement.
On to the Similarities
What is also remarkable about the Coffee Party is the similarities that it shares with its Tea Party brethen. There are three fundamental overlapping interests.
1. Both movements are upset about how dysfunctional Congress has become– clearly, they are sick of political posturing for its own sake. Then again, it’s hard to think of anyone who wouldn’t be.
2. The federal government needs to be fiscally responsible. Spending needs to be reined in.
3. At heart, they are both anti-corporate movements. Both movements are sick of Wall Street Welfare and cannot comprehend why politicians cannot find the cojones to stand up for the public interest.
A recent Financial Times Op-Ed by William Galston speaks to the dangers posed by a lack of trust in government. One of the key statistics that jumped out at me while reading this piece was this: “78 per cent believed the government to be run by a few big interests, not for the benefit of the people.” This stat underscores how precarious the situation is. It’s easy to understand the anger– and indeed, this is how a lot of people feel about their government in some of the world’s more corrupt countries.
These three strands of thought are woven directly into the Coffee Party platform. This is an excerpt of a Note from the Coffee Party’s pages entitled: Our Message to Congress: Get to Work or Get Out:
You work for us, not for corporations. We hired you and we get to fire you. We pay you and give you great health insurance. Now get to work serving the interests of the American people, or get out.
Anyone who wants our government to function in the interest of ordinary Americans, not corporations, is welcome to join this movement.
We believe that the majority of Americans are regular folks like us, and some of us have been misled into thinking that the federal government is the cause of our struggles, our anxiety and our fear. In short, our government has been presented to us as our enemy.
Another way of putting it is this: we have a democracy with a loophole. The most active, most well-funded, and most organized interests can dominate the process. And for many years, corporations have dominated our democratic process because they can afford to hire thousands of lobbyists to reside in Washington DC and actively influence the direction of our government. Yes, the corporations have a lot of money. But we have the power of the vote. They may attempt to influence us, but our vote belongs to us and us alone, and herein lies our power.
Also of note is a link to a clip of Elizabeth Warren in conversation with Jon Stewart, Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to monitor TARP (the federal bailout package for banks). From a review of that interview:
Warren has been the TARP oversight chair since November 2008, and Stewart asked her why the system hasn’t been fixed yet.
“Well, these guys really do get it.” Warren told Stewart — the CEOs, bankers, and people in power — “They get it. And they work best behind closed doors.” If the decisions are in their hands, she said, “Nothing, nothing will change. You know, I want to turn to these guys sometimes, and I want to say: what part of ‘we bailed you out’ do you not get? These are people who would not have their jobs because they would not have their companies.”
“The chips are all on the table,” Warren added. “We are going to write what the American economy looks like for 50 years going forward. And right now the CEOs have any real change bottled up in the Senate.”
If you consider the two movements in aggregate, it pretty much encompasses the entire US polity. Just about every American is upset with the dysfunctionality of Congress and feels that the Banks and Wall Street got away with murder– at the taxpayer’s expense. Half the population thinks that since it was Congress that messed it up, the solution is to minimize the powers of Congress– to prevent further screw-ups. The other half of the population thinks that even though Congress messed it up, Congress is still the only institution that can improve the situation.
As far as I can tell then, just about everybody philsophically belongs to either the Tea Party or the Coffee Party– and they agree on 3 important things: corporate power is too great, Congress is dysfunctional, fiscal responsibility is paramount.
I think that even members of Congress would probably agree with these fundamental problems!
Crossing Party Lines: Campaign Finance Reform
If there is agreement on these basic problems, then there is one obvious issue that both the Tea Party and the Coffee Party should be working on together: Campaign Finance Reform. This might seem like a strange thing to emphasize given the massive economic problems confronting the US right now, but it lies at the very heart of the problem.
Until American politicians stop feeling beholden to the corporate interests that are financing their campaigns, it will not be possible for them to truly act in the public interest. I have written about how recent actions by the Supreme Court have placed an albatross around the neck of American democracy. Transparency measures like the ones being put forth by Senator Schumer and Rep Van Hollen will help, but these are band-aid measures and do not address the core problem. The system is, in its own sophisticated and legalized way, absolutely and utterly corrupt.
What is clearly needed is a Campaign Finance Law that is not riddled with loopholes like the McCain-Feingold Act– even before large chunks of it were struck down. As unappetizing as this sounds, one way to even out the playing field is to provide public financing; another way is to set limits on how much money can be spent. Currently, the two parties have the equivalent of a nuclear arms race going on in terms of campaign expenditures. Parties spent $5.3 billion on the 2008 election. $2.4 billion of that was spent on the presidential election alone.
If Coffee Party members and Tea Party members are as genuinely fed up with the political system as they appear to be, then what they need to do is change it– from the inside out and starting with its financial structures.
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That $1.4 billion is ours! Corruption and Democracy in Thailand
Former Thai PM Thaksin Shinawatra is at the centre of what is undoubtedly one of the biggest and most important cases of political corruption that the world has ever seen. He and his family have been accused of becoming suspiciously rich during his tenure as PM.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was when he sold his 49.6% stake in Shin Corp. (the country’s telecom giant) to the Singapore government’s investment arm (Temasek Holdings). So a foreign entity now has a very large stake in a the crown jewel of Thai companies. Then, to top it all off, Thaksin and his family did not pay a penny in capital gains taxes on this $1.87 billion deal. Not illegal, just unethical. And not setting a very good standard as leader. (This is the pot calling the kettle black considering our poor regulation of banking bonuses.) Here is an interesting discussion of the issue on the Time Magazine site.
Well, today was judgment day. Out of Thaksin’s US$2.3 billion of frozen assets, $1.4 billion was confiscated by the Thai Supreme Court. Here is The Guardian’s summary of the court’s decision:
The court ruled that Thaksin illegally concealed his ownership of stock in Shin Corp, the family’s telecommunications empire, and abused his authority by crafting government policies to benefit Shin Corp’s businesses.
The court addressed five cases of alleged “policy corruption” and ruled that in four of the five Thaksin was guilty of abusing his authority during his 2001-2006 tenure as prime minister.
One of the most prominent cases involved a $127m low-interest government loan to Burma in 2004, which the court ruled Thaksin had endorsed with the intention of securing its purchase of satellite services from Shin Satellite, then controlled by Thaksin’s family.
Thaksin’s government billed the loan as a way to help the impoverished military-run country finance telecommunications projects.
The court ruled that Thaksin’s government set domestic satellite policies that benefited his businesses.
It also ruled that a policy to convert part of a telecommunications concession fee into an excise tax favoured Shin Corp at the expense of the state.
Now you would think that Thaksin’s efforts to escape the courts would earn him the wrath of his people, but no! He has a massive following and remains hugely popular in rural areas (mostly the North). His supporters are still extremely loyal to him because of the successful and popular policies that he put in place to reduce poverty. These included “the country’s first universal healthcare program, the 30-baht scheme [a health insurance program], as well as a controversial but highly popular drug suppression campaign.”
His supporters are crying after today’s announcement. Can you imagine weeping openly in public if this had happened to Stephen Harper or Gordon Brown or Barack Obama? Ok, maybe Barack Obama.
The man is invincible. And it’s easy to see why…. he is the rare politician who has given voice to the poor and then implemented real policy changes to make their lives better. From their perspective, he was actually able to make a substantive difference to their quality of life– that makes him worth fighting for.
Still, what does all of this mean for the state of Thai democracy? Here is a quick summary of the mess that the country is in:
Mr. Thaksin sold Shin to the Singaporean holding company Temasek in January 2006, a transaction that evaded taxes and aroused anger and prompted street demonstrations that set the stage for the coup nine months later.
When the generals relinquished power in a new election a little more than a year later, a party backing Mr. Thaksin was overwhelmingly elected.
Protests resumed, and in August 2008, thousands of anti-Thaksin demonstrators, known as yellow shirts, barricaded the prime minister’s compound, setting up a tent city and demanding that the government be dissolved. In late November they took over Bangkok’s two airports for a week, stranding thousands of passengers.
They ended their protests in December when a court found the pro-Thaksin governing party guilty of electoral fraud, forcing its dissolution. The current government, led by Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, took office in a parliamentary vote.
Since then, it has been the pro- Thaksin protesters who have been demanding the dissolution of what they call an unelected government.
I guess this is what they mean when they say that new democracies experience some pretty substantial growing pains. This is a polarizing divide, largely along class lines– and it’s only going to get worse. The demonstrations have gotten violent before and this judgment is only going to add fuel to the fire. Thaksin’s red shirt movement is expanding and restructuring.
It seems like Thai democracy has been able to withstand these destabilizing moments in the past because of the military and the monarchy– these two institutions have provided the necessary anchor to prevent things from getting out of hand.
This makes me look at both of these institutions in a new light– particularly the military– as a stabilizing force rather than a destabilizing force as has often been the case in Africa (for example, see the post on Guinea). It also makes me wonder if the Queen (and the monarchy) might be worth keeping for that reason… as a form of destabilization insurance.
All in all, it looks like it’s been a good day in the fight against corruption.
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Democracy in West Africa: Niger’s Good Coup? (Part 3)
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Adding to recent drama in West Africa, the military in Niger decided that enough was enough and took control of the Presidential Palace during a cabinet meeting last Thursday (Feb 18 2010).
Ten people died during the coup, but the Supreme Council for the Restoration of Democracy (CSRD) claims that President Mamadou Tandja remains safe. Rumour has it that he is being in the military barracks in the capital Niamey. The new head of state is Colonel Salou Djibo.
There has been widespread dissatisfaction with Tandja since August 2009 when he rewrote the constitution so that he could have more powers and stay beyond the term limits. His parliament and the country’s supreme court tried to block the move, but their efforts failed. Tandja then held a referendum ratifying this power grab—the problem was that it attracted such a low turnout that most people felt it was illegitimate. After dissolving the National Assembly, he declared that he would rule by decree.
Members of the opposition have been protesting ever since and the country has been stuck in political deadlock for the past six months.
Gratitude
What is interesting is not so much that a coup occurred, but the fact that people seem to be grateful for it. In fact, thousands of people marched in the street to show their support for the military takeover. Some people have even wondered why it took the military so long to step in:
“The soldiers were late. We are waiting for the soldiers to clean out our house because it is dirty,” said shopkeeper Mamadou Illa, referring to the months of wrangling between Tandja and opposition parties that preceded the coup. Full story.
And it’s not just the people on the street that are happy about the coup, but even diplomats have cautiously expressed optimism:
the coup… was officially criticized but, in private, diplomats say may have created an opening…. Over the weekend, diplomats swept into the heavily fortified junta headquarters, where soldiers in armored vehicles and battle-wagons stood guard, and emerged from talks impressed by promises they were given for a planned return to civilian rule.
This kind of comment says a lot about the state of democracy in Niger, and to a lesser extent, about democracy in West Africa. These are the same diplomats who have publicly condemned the coup– because they have to. But at the same time, they need to be pragmatic: Tandja was not going to give up power willingly and the opposition was not going to let him get away with staying with power. Everyone is glad that he is gone, but no one in the international community is willing to condone the methods by which it was done.
A good coup?
All of this leads to the question of whether there can ever be such a thing as a good coup d’état. Certainly, on occasion, there have been good outcomes resulting from a coup. Witness the coup that took down President Traoré of Mali— elections followed in a year’s time. Similarly, in Mauritania, the coup in 2005 also led to free elections—even if the new democratic regime only lasted for a year.
So good outcomes are possible.
The problem is the “good” version is a pretty rare occurrence when it comes to military coups. And West Africa has got a particularly bad track record. Those who seize power often appear to start out with good intentions, but find that once they are in power, they actually quite like it and don’t want to give it up. In the words of Lord Acton:
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by full authority. There is no worse heresy than the fact that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
If you want to take Niger’s new military junta on their word, they have promised “democracy and good governance” and they have also promised to solve the problems of “poverty, deception and corruption”. These words have a familiar ring… we heard similar expressions of faith in Guinea from Captain Camara in December 2008 as he took over the country. These words were then repeated again by his #2 when Captain Camara was shot in the head by the leader of his Presidential Guard (to be fair, it looks like his #2 who is now president did not have anything to do with it).
The point is that talk is cheap. Colonel Djibo may have every intention of restoring civilian rule at this moment, but he may feel very differently about it in a year or two when it really is time to give up the throne. Being a Big Man in West Africa is very important, and it’s easy to see how being the Biggest Man in the country would be difficult to give up.
Now let’s give Colonal Djibo the benefit of the doubt and assume that this coup will lead to a good outcome—as one of the rare exceptions to the rule. Could this be a “good” coup? Well, in the short run, possibly. The problem is the long run– that a successful coup effectively says to potential coup leaders in the future that:
a) the head of state is always vulnerable
b) if we don’t like our leader, we can always depose her using violence
In essence, this is a recipe for political instability. Coups change the rules of the game; why bother with elections when it is so much easier to take a few weapons and storm the presidential palace with a few guards? Once you stop respecting the electoral rules, then there is really no end to how those rules can be manipulated. Not only does the ruler of the day lose her legitimacy with the people, but the institution of democracy is also tainted, and so is the institution of government. Consider that Tandja himself also participated in a coup to come to power— to what extent did his coup lead to his own undoing? From a research perspective, does each individual coup increase the likelihood of a future one occurring, and to what extent?
There is no such thing as a good coup.
Recipe for holding onto power
If you are the head of state in a small country that powerful countries don’t care too much about, there are very clear instructions for staying in power. Below I’ve paraphrased and embellished John Peter Pham’s recipe:
1) Hold elections once in a while (fraud is ok, but don’t be too blatant about it)
2) Don’t commit war crimes or genocide
3) Don’t arbitrarily rewrite important commercial contracts
4) Don’t go to war with your neighbours
Basically, if heads of state can stick to these rules, then they are golden. And many West African heads of state have been pretty good at following this recipe. For example, President Biya has ruled for 27 years in Cameroon and Omar Bongo was president for 41 years in Gabon before he finally passed away.
How can this cycle be stopped?
There is no easy answer to this. Part of the answer is going to have to lie in alternation: that is, a changing of the guard. Term limits are supposed to do exactly this, but they are clearly inadequate since all sorts of leaders have managed to find their way around this particular check in the system. The peaceful handover of power from one leader to the next somehow needs to be instilled as a norm. Exactly how this is to be achieved lies in the hands of West Africans themselves.
MORE:
Part 1: Democracy in West Africa– Yar’Adua’s Disappearing Act
Part 2: Democracy in West Africa– In Guinea, Darkness, then Hope?
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Democracy in West Africa: In Guinea, Darkness, then Hope? (Part 2)
Lately, it seems that West Africa has been a little on the unstable side. With the resolution of the wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and a peaceful stalemate in Côte d’Ivoire, maybe things seemed to be going a little too well…? In any case, recent events have once again led to questions about the viability of democracy in the region. I’m happy to report though that along with some of the bad news that has emanated from the region, there is also good news.
Guinea, a country that has long suffered in silence, looks like it *might* have the opportunity to remake itself.
Part 2: Guinea
After 24 years of authoritarian rule, Lansana Conté died in December 2008. Within hours of his death being publicly announced, a coup d’état occurred and a military junta took power. It was led by Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, an unknown military officer who broke into the state TV station with a group of officers and publicly announced that the new junta was taking over. He promised to fight corruption and return the country to civilian rule after the army cleaned house.
But he was not the only military leader who wanted to take over the country. A rival faction led by Lieutenant-Colonel Sékouba Konaté demanded control from Camara.
So what to do when two of you want something that only one of you can have? Well, I would tell my toddler that he needs to share, but as it stands, Camara and Konaté chose to flip a coin. Sort of. Actually, if you can believe Rukmini Callimachi from the Associated Press, these guys actually drew lots from a mayonnaise jar. If you saw it on TV, it might make for a pretty good joke: let’s draw straws for the presidency. Ha ha. But this was no joke.
So, Camara, Konaté and a third officer each hoped to draw the piece of paper with the word Président written on it. Camara got lucky. Twice. This was how he became president. He took power with Konaté close by his side as his number two. Condemnation from the international community followed; development aid dried up; and the AU froze Guinea’s membership. It was all pretty standard fare for a coup response.
Following the December coup, Camara captivated Guineans with his one-man corruption hearings on TV. Again, he seemed to be stealing a page from the standard coup d’état script. In fact, I think I’ve seen this exact episode before… remember Samuel Doe and the People’s Redemption Council in Liberia in 1980? And of course, there are many variations on this theme: take your pick of African military dictatorships.
Still, Camara seemed to have temporarily enthralled his fellow citizens:
He told his countrymen that he was born in a hut, just like many of them. He vowed that money holds no power over him.
The audits began on TV last month. The former chief of protocol was accused of embezzling $40 million from Kuwait. The former minister of finance was interrogated for allegedly taking money intended for festivities marking the country’s independence. More than a dozen high-ranking officials were arrested for drug crimes, including the use of the country’s security forces to assure safe passage for convoys of cocaine-loaded trucks.
In one session, Camara lost his temper with Bakary Thermite, the former head of the country’s anti-drug unit.
“These drugs that you seized, did you resell them?” Camara asked – and then exploded when Thermite tried to duck. “It’s simple. Answer me! If not, I think we’re going to pass the whole night here … I am allergic to lies!”
These outbursts are lapped up by the people of Guinea, population 10 million. Housewives say they prefer watching Camara to their favorite soap opera. Even top Western diplomats say they can’t unglue themselves from the “Dadis Show.”
“It’s as if you’re at the theater. It’s astonishing,” says a veteran European diplomat. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Darkness: The Stadium Massacre
Through the summer of 2009, the political situation deteriorated. On September 28, the opposition held a rally in Conakry’s major stadium, the Stade du 28 Septembre. They were peacefully protesting because Camara was reneging on his promise to step down– and surprise surprise– he wanted to run for president.
In the middle of the rally, the Presidential Guard surrounded the stadium, blocked off the exits and emptied their weapons into the stands.
According to Mr Bouckaert, 50,000 opposition supporters were inside the stadium, listening to speeches given by their leaders, when the elite presidential guard, the ‘red berets’, surrounded the stadium, blocked the exits and fired at point blank range at the crowds until they ran out of bullets. Then they attacked the survivors with knives and machetes. He says that dozens of women were also raped outside the stadium by the same elite guard. Full story.
The UN reported at least 157 dead. Details from the Human Rights Watch report sound horrific. This was not a conflict. This was a massacre.
The report includes chilling witness accounts describing how members of Guinea’s security forces burst into the stadium and opened fire on tens of thousands of opposition supporters who had gathered to demand a return to civilian rule. As soldiers advanced, firing down the stadium’s playing field, they left a trail of wounded and dead. Witnesses described how bodies were strewn across the field, crushed against half-opened gates, and draped over walls. Others told how the panicked demonstrators were gunned down as they tried to scale the stadium walls; shot point blank after being caught hiding in tunnels, bathrooms, and under seats; and mowed down after being drawn out by soldiers who were pretending to offer safe passage.
Dozens of women described being subjected to individual and gang rape and sexual assault with objects such as sticks, rifle butts, and bayonets, while other witnesses described seeing at least four women murdered during or immediately after being raped; one shot with a rifle through her vagina while laying face up on the stadium’s field begging for her life…
Victims also described how many women were taken by members of the Presidential Guard from the stadium and, in one case, from a medical clinic where a group of women were awaiting treatment, to private residences where they endured days of gang rape….
The Human Rights Watch report also details scores of abuses by soldiers and civilian militiamen in the hours and days after the stadium violence – including murder, rape, and pillage – in neighborhoods where most rally participants lived. The security forces also arbitrarily detained scores of men as they fled the stadium and during the neighborhood attacks that followed. The 13 men among them interviewed by Human Rights Watch described being subjected to frequent beatings, whipping, forced nudity, stress positions, and mock executions.
According to early reports from the Human Rights Watch investigation into the massacre, the killings were deliberate and targeted. There was little ambiguity that Camara and his officers had to have sanctioned the plan. We find out later from Diakité, the leader of the massacre, that this was indeed the case.
[HRW] Emergencies Director Peter Boucknaert… and [h]is four member team interviewed more than 150 people who were in the stadium at the time of the shootings. He told Radio Netherlands that the witness testimonies clearly indicated the violence was both organised and premeditated.
Following the massacre, the international community imposes more sanctions– this time directly targeting the junta leadership. The EU implemented an arms embargo, asset freezes and travel bans on the 42 junta members; the African Union soon followed suit. The subsequent diplomatic pressure on Guinea has been intense.
Camara’s excuse for the massacre is that the security forces simply lost control of the situation and people were trampled to death as they tried to leave the stadium. This is patently false and there has been plenty of evidence to show that he is lying. Indeed, the individual whose name has been most directly linked with the Stadium Massacre is Abubakar “Toumba” Diakité, and he has confirmed that the massacre was planned. Diakité is the head of the Presidential Guard.
Then, on December 3rd, 2009, Diakité shot Camara. In the head. Camara survives, but is deposed in the process. Konaté, the #2 takes power. Reportedly, the reason that Diakité tried to kill Camara was that he felt betrayed: Camara was pinning making him scapegoat for the massacre. Since this sounds a bit weak, rumours have been flying around about “external” involvement in Camara’s removal. France, anyone??
Resources
Then there is the back story to all of this and it has to do with Guinea’s natural resources.
There are three big prizes that are up for grabs in Guinea. How the prizes get divvied up depends on who ends up in power. This may have something to do with why Camara was shot– he upset *a lot* of important people when he decided to renegotiate many of the concessions agreements for mineral resources.
1. The world’s largest unexplored deposit of iron ore
2. Untapped offshore oil deposits.
3. Bauxite (used to make aluminum)
Followed by Hope?
So Camara has been shot and Konaté, also a military man, ends up in charge. But now we get a twist in the story. Konaté surprises everyone and allows the opposition to choose a Prime Minister. They chose Jean-Marie Doré, a veteran politician from the opposition who survived the stadium massacre. Doré was sworn in at the end of January. He has promised to hold real elections within one year.
But Konaté is still in charge and there is still plenty of time for him to decide that he likes the taste of power and wants to hold onto it.
Diplomats here say General Konaté, the junta’s ailing former defense minister, appears uninterested in political power. Unlike other senior officers, he was not implicated in the massacre, and he has publicly warned about the dangers of isolation and upbraided troops over extortion against civilians.
“What we have from Konaté now is different,” said Mr. Touré, the opposition leader, referring to the tradition of political meddling by the military. “There is a sincerity there.”
Mr. Doré, 71, is something of an unknown as well, despite a long presence on Guinea’s political scene. He is from the same region, Guinea’s forests, as Captain Camara, which helped secure him the position of intermediary between opposition forces and the junta. Full story.
Right now, the tone in Guinea is one of cautious optimism. They’ve had 52 years of authoritarian rule. If the country does manage to hold free and peaceful elections, this will be a huge accomplishment. But even if Guinea succeeds in this endeavour, successful elections will only be the beginning. This is one of the poorest countries in the world– in spite of its great natural resource wealth. The real work will come later when the new president actually has to improve the lot of the people. That will be a much harder task.
After five decades of poor leadership, it seems like Guinea is finally headed for greener pastures.
MORE: Part 1: Nigeria. Democracy in West Africa: Yar’Adua’s Disappearing Act.
Democracy in West Africa: Yar’Adua’s Disappearing Act (Part 1)
*What* is going on in West Africa these days? First it’s Guinea, then Nigeria, then Guinea again, and now a coup in Niger. When they say truth is stranger than fiction, they’re clearly referring to political goings-on in West Africa.
Part 1: Nigeria
Nigeria’s president Umaru Yar’Adua has been MIA for almost three months now, fuelling speculation that he:
A) Is Dead
B) In a Coma
C) Has Been Kidnapped
The official story is that he is has an inflammation in the lining of the heart and he has been taken to Saudi Arabia for treatment. The last that his country has heard from him was on the BBC on January 12th. He gave a 3 minute interview where he said that he was recuperating well. What he did *not* say was that he was stepping down.
Turmoil continues for several more weeks as government business grinds to a halt. On Febuary 5th, we hear that the president is finally going to hand over power to his Vice President Goodluck Jonathan. But the precarious political balance between the Muslim North (where Yar’Adua is from) and the Christian South (where Jonathan is from) has long rested on a rotation of the presidency between the two areas. This is most likely why Yar’Adua did not hand over to Jonathan when he left for Saudi Arabia– the cabal of officials around him has everything to lose, including their jobs. (Bear in mind that politics can be a money-making enterprise for some officials.)
As the Yar’Adua loyalists see it, it’s not the South’s turn yet– we’ve still got another 2 years! Who cares if the country goes to hell in a handbasket?!
The problem is not that Yar’Adua has been sick– the problem is the cover-up that has ensued. You can’t run a country with a massive power vacuum in your leadership and expect for there to be no consequences. Three months is a long time to go without a functioning head of state. The speculation and rumours that have ensued have damaged Nigerian democracy immeasurably. Indeed, it sounds like the Americans have been quietly urging for a handover to take place– before the military has the chance to to do so. Given the country’s past history with military dictatorships, it is easy to see why the West (with its oil interests) is worried about political upheaval.
How can Nigerians trust the institution of democracy when it simply leads to chaos like this? A well-functioning democracy relies, to some extent, on the foresight of politicians to the public good ahead of their own private interests. Checks and balances are put in place to ensure that politicians don’t step out of line– but it’s impossible for rules and regulations to anticipate everything that could go wrong– sometimes you just have to trust politicians to do what is right. Even if they end up disappointing.
For their part, Yar’Adua and his party need to put the public good ahead of their own interests. Jonathan and his supporters should appease Yar’Adua loyalists by allowing most senior officials to keep their jobs and hold off on a patronage binge. Some reassurance to the country’s Muslims would also help to tamp down religious tensions. But I guess all of this is easier said then done.
For background, see the story from Time.
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Tea and Patriots
I’ve been mulling over the TEA Party movement lately. It’s hard to appreciate the chord that it has struck with Americans because I have been watching the birth of the movement from abroad. And yet many of the sentiments reflected in this grassroots movement resonate with the average citizen not only in the US, but also in the UK, and even to a lesser extent, in Canada.
Consider the name: T.E.A. stands for Taxed Enough Already.
This is a social movement through and through. It is a manifestation of people’s anger with the system and it has succeeded in attracting people who are pretty middle-of-the-road in terms of their political beliefs. This NY Times article on the Tea Party puts the movement and its politics into perspective:
Pam Stout has not always lived in fear of her government. She remembers her years working in federal housing programs, watching government lift struggling families with job training and education. She beams at the memory of helping a Vietnamese woman get into junior college.
But all that was before the Great Recession and the bank bailouts, before Barack Obama took the White House by promising sweeping change on multiple fronts, before her son lost his job and his house. Mrs. Stout said she awoke to see Washington as a threat, a place where crisis is manipulated — even manufactured — by both parties to grab power.
She was happily retired, and had never been active politically. But last April, she went to her first Tea Party rally, then to a meeting of the Sandpoint Tea Party Patriots. She did not know a soul, yet when they began electing board members, she stood up, swallowed hard, and nominated herself for president. “I was like, ‘Did I really just do that?’ ” she recalled.
… Mrs. Stout said she felt as if she had been handed a road map to rebellion. Members of her family, she said, think she has disappeared down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. But Mrs. Stout said she has never felt so engaged.
The Tea Party movement has become a platform for conservative populist discontent…But it is also about the profound private transformation of people like Mrs. Stout, people who not long ago were not especially interested in politics, yet now say they are bracing for tyranny.
In the same way that Barack Obama ignited the left in the US and succeeded in getting all sorts of disenfranchised people to participate in the political process, the Tea Party has now succeeded in firing up people like Mrs.Stout who would not have previously thought of themselves as being on the far right. In many ways, this new engagement is a good thing: having more people involved in the political process strengthens democracy. These are people who are clearly angry with Government– not just Barack Obama’s government– but governments that came before as well as the institution of government.
This anger is not a new phenomenon. I have argued in an earlier post that there is an American streak that does not like big government. Think New Hampshire. And this libertarian streak is now resonating with people that it was unable to reach before when the good times made it easy to ignore the failings of government. Alongside the libertarians are the militia groups and the anti-immigration crowd. Together, they make up the Patriot movement– the ideological heart of the TEA Party.
If you take a look at what the Patriot movement purports to stand for, you can see why it would sound appealing to someone who is trying to understand why we are bailing out Wall Street Banks AND why some of these banks are simultaneously giving out massive bonuses to the bankers who caused this mess. Meanwhile, unemployment has soared, property values have plummeted, we are in the midst of a global recession, and the US has record deficits.
In times like these, you want to have someone to blame, but to do that, you need an explanation.
Most of us accept the conventional explanation for the economic crisis: Poor understanding of derivatives. Failure to regulate these instruments by the Federal Reserve. Greedy bankers and mortgage brokers. Greedy homeowners who took on more debt than they could manage. Banks that were too big to fail. Two successive administrations that bailed out the banks without asking for anything in return on behalf of the taxpayer. More greedy bankers. Governments who are too politically scared to tax the greedy bankers.
Clearly, this is a complicated mess with lots of moving parts.
The Patriot movement and the Tea Party offers answers that are simpler. From the NY Times article, “Mr. Obama and many of his predecessors (including George W. Bush) have deliberately undermined the Constitution and free enterprise for the benefit of a shadowy international network of wealthy elites.”
Here are some more examples from the Original Intent website (presumably a cornerstone in the Patriot Movement):
Federal Reserve Opponents – These Citizens feel that the creation of the Federal Reserve, and the delegation of our national monetary policy to a group of private bankers is fundamentally unconstitutional as well as injurious to The People of this nation. They also feel that since Federal Reserve Notes (which is what most Americans call “money”) were “de-monetized” (i.e. removed from the gold standard) they are worthless and our currency has been debauched.
Judicial Reformers – These Citizens feel that the courts in America no longer dispense much justice, but consistently rule in favor of those who hold the political and/or financial power, essentially disenfranchising the average American from his own court systems. This group feels that the best way to resolve the problem is to hold judges accountable for the decisions they make that are plainly incorrect and unlawful. No effective system of accountability exists today.
Right to Keep and Bear Arms Advocates – These Citizens believe that our unalienable right to keep and bear arms is slowly, and intentionally, being eroded by the government. Given the proliferation of gun control laws in the last 30 years, it would difficult to argue against their perspective. These Citizens agree with Thomas Jefferson when he said, “The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government”, and with George Washington who said, “Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American people’s liberty teeth and keystone under independence”. Given that this site is dedicated to revitalizing this nation’s sense of liberty by educating The People about the egregious, immoral, and at times unlawful conduct of our government, it is easy to see why many Citizens still see Mr. Jefferson’s and Mr. Washington’s remarks as compelling truths that cannot be ignored.
There are two key themes that are consistent throughout this site.
1. Fear of government tyranny
2. Elite power
While I personally don’t fear government tyranny, I do agree that elite power is a real problem and has been a real problem for a long time. Supreme Court rulings like the recent one allowing unlimited corporate influence into the political system only affirms what Tea Party activists think about the system. Once you adopt this view, it is always possible to marshal up evidence to support it. (Conspiracy theories are everywhere: Consider that 9/11 is viewed by many in Middle East as being orchestrated by the US itself as a guise to take over the region. People have martyred themselves in part because they believed this to be true.)
At this juncture, the US has polarized its politics so deeply that it is impossible to imagine how it will ever come together again. By consistently demonizing the other side (e.g., publicly lampooning Sarah Palin), both Democrats and Republicans have painted themselves into a corner where co-operation effectively becomes political suicide:
During a recent meeting with Congressional Republicans, Mr. Obama acknowledged the potency of these attacks when he complained that depicting him as a would-be despot was complicating efforts to find bipartisan solutions.
“The fact of the matter is that many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable in your own base, in your own party,” Mr. Obama said. “You’ve given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion because what you’ve been telling your constituents is, ‘This guy’s doing all kinds of crazy stuff that is going to destroy America.’ ”
I’ve presented a rational view of why the Tea Party has unexpectedly resonated with people– but there is no mistaking that the movement was considered “fringe” for a long time. Along with the moderate conservatives who call themselves Patriots are those who are firmly in the right-wing nut camp.
If the Republican party is going to encourage this movement and fund it as a political instrument for taking back power in Congress and the White House, then it should also be prepared to face some unintended consequences. You can’t ignite a movement like this and expect the fire to burn nicely in the fireplace. No– if they are not careful, this movement is going to burn down the living room, then it is going to burn down the house, and soon the street will be on fire.
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Synthetic Biology and the BioBricks Revolution
If I had to do it all over again, political science might still be the choice, but there would definitely be two other serious contenders for an alternate career choice: Home Renovator/Property Developer OR Research Biologist. After reading this article on how it is possible for university students (or anyone really) to genetically engineer new life forms, I think Research Biologist has got a slight edge.
The first thing to understand about the new science of synthetic biology is that it’s not really a new science; it’s a brazen call to conduct an existing one much more ambitiously. For almost 40 years, genetic engineers have been decoding DNA and transplanting individual genes from one organism into another…. They want to write brand-new genetic code, pulling together specific genes or portions of genes plucked from a wide range of organisms — or even constructed from scratch in a lab — and methodically lacing them into a single set of genetic instructions. Implant that new code into an organism, and you should be able to make its cells do and produce things that nothing in nature has ever done or produced before.
This is basically genetic modification made easy.
We have already seen glimpses of a world where genetic modification is commonplace; there are two competing vision of that world. The first is altruistic, envisioning how synthetic biology (aka genetic modification) can be used to make the world a better place. (See the fuss over Golden Rice– Vitamin A enhanced rice.) The second is a frightening dystopia where we produce crops, creatures, and situations that we lose control of. (Now see the critiques of Golden Rice.) Proponents of synthetic biology definitely sit in the optimistic camp:
As commercial applications for this kind of science materialize and venture capitalists cut checks, the hope is that synthetic biologists can engineer new, living tools to address our most pressing problems. Already, for example, one of the field’s leading start-ups, a Bay Area company called LS9, has remade the inner workings of a sugar-eating bacterium so that its cells secrete a chemical compound that is almost identical to diesel fuel. The company calls it a “renewable petroleum.” Another firm, Amyris Biotechnologies, has similarly tricked out yeast to produce an antimalarial drug.
What is new and interesting about synthetic biology though is not just what it is able ot produce it, but the way in which it is being produced. The key word here is BioBricks.
[Drew] Endy… is focused on building up basic tools to make this process faster, cheaper and less research intensive, so that even the most sophisticated custom-built life forms can be assembled from a catalog of standardized parts: namely, connectable pieces of DNA called BioBrick parts, which snap together like Legos. Ideally you wouldn’t even need to know anything about DNA to manipulate it, just as a 5-year-old doesn’t need to understand the chemical composition of the plastic in his Legos to build a fortress on the living-room carpet…
Over the past five years, iGEM teams have been collaboratively amassing a centralized, open-source genetic library of more than 5,000 BioBricks, called the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Each year teams use these pieces of DNA to build their projects and also contribute new BioBricks as needed. BioBricks in the registry range from those that kill cells to one that makes cells smell like bananas. The composition and function of each DNA fragment is cataloged in an online wiki, which iGEM’s director calls “the Williams-Sonoma catalog of synthetic biology.” Copies of the actual DNA are stored in a freezer at M.I.T., and BioBricks are mailed to teams as red smudges of dehydrated DNA.
This is amazing. This catalogue of BioBricks is going to change the world. It is levelling the playing field for creating new genetically modified organisms, and consequently, it is going to allow creations that have only existed in our imaginations up to this point. And yet, we haven’t really had a proper conversation about what this means in moral and ethical terms.The science seems to have outpaced public policy on this issue.
Over time, this type of technology is going to become more and more common. The equipment will get cheaper. The number of BioBricks in the catalogue is going to explode. The number of people able to create new BioBricks will also explode. Many of them will want to use the technology for good. But not all of these people will have benevolent aims. The problem is, this is a distributed technology– the strength of synthetic biology lies in its openness. Does this remind you of another technology that also grew like gangbusters?
As with the Internet, it’s clear that synthetic biology is a neutral technology– it’s up to humans to decide how it is used.
The rise of synthetic biology only intensifies ethical and environmental concerns raised by earlier forms of genetic engineering, many of which remain unsettled. Given synthetic biology’s open-source ethic, critics cite the possibility of bioterror: the malicious use of DNA sequences posted on the Internet to engineer a new virus or more devastating biological weapons. ETC Group, an international watchdog that has raised complicated questions about synthetic biology since its earliest days, also warns of the potential for “bio-error”: what unintended and unimaginable consequences might result from deploying all these freely reproducing, totally novel organisms into the world? What if those living machines don’t work exactly as planned?
“This absolutely requires a public and political discussion,” Thomas told me. “It’s going to change the alignments between very large corporations. It’s going to change the ownership and patenting of life forms. The field is growing at such a speed and industrial money is flowing into it at such a speed…
The amazing thing about synthetic biology is that it has clearly inspired a generation of new scientists. They are on the cutting edge of science. That is something that very few undergraduates could lay claim to, so I can understand their enthusiasm. I think the opportunities here are tremendous for young scientific entrepreneurs.
Still, the real legacy of iGEM may end up being the future synthetic biologists it is inspiring…. IGEM has been grooming an entire generation of the world’s brightest scientific minds to embrace synthetic biology’s vision — without anyone really noticing, before the public debates and regulations that typically place checks on such risky and ethically controversial new technologies have even started.
There is basically the equivalent of an internet boom that is just waiting to happen in synthetic biology. In a decade or so, maybe even less, you can say that you read it here first.
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How Big Was David Cameron’s Big Idea?
I’ve just come back from a TED event in London. It was billed as a “secret” coming out party for David Cameron, the leader of the UK’s Conservative Party and the PM-in-waiting. I had never heard of TED before and honestly, when I received the invitation in my inbox, my first thought was that it was a scam to get my credit card details.
This invitation has gone out to 250 carefully selected individuals. It is not transferable and is for you alone. [My interpretation: You sucker. Let's see if appealing to your ego will make you fall for this scam.]
Please RSVP at your earliest convenience by filling in this form. [My thoughts: Click on the link provided so we can steal your credit card details.]
The exact location in central London and practical details will be sent to registered attendees a few days before the event.... Finally, please note that David Cameron's planned presence at TED is a secret and we want to keep it that way. [My thoughts: a secret speaker and a secret location-- I bet you want my secret PIN number too!]
Please keep this invitation strictly private. Do not forward, blog, publish or tweet! [My thoughts: You don't want the police involved.]
I admit that I may be overcautious about what shows up in my inbox, but when unsolicited email arrives from a strange looking address, my first thought is SPAM. Probably from Nigeria. But this time, in spite of myself, I read the email carefully and checked out the organization. The whole thing began to look more legit. (I.e., there were no serious grammatical errors) I recognized some of the other speakers: Daniel Kahneman was a professor of mine at Princeton, and Esther Duflo, is an experimental economist whose work I admire.
A few google searches later, I decided to click on the link– even though I still did not know how they would have gotten my name. When they didn’t ask me for my credit card information, I decided to sign myself up- after all, how often does one get to be part of the chosen few?
The Program:
Daniel Kahneman (by satellite in Long Beach, CA)
David Cameron (at our secret location in London) followed by Q&A
Esther Duflo (in Long Beach)
Michael Shermer (in Long Beach)
For me, Esther Duflo gave the best talk. Hands down. In a future post, I’ll write more about the research she does and why I think she and her colleagues will probably win the Nobel Prize for Economics one day.
But right now, I’m going to resist the lure of writing about research I’m passionate about and focus instead on what David Cameron had to say. I expect him to be the next British PM so it seems important to evaluate his remarks.
First, for those who don’t follow UK politics, it’s important to remember that even though the Conservatives are considered right wing here, they look nothing like the Republican Party in the US. Labour and the Conservatives share the political centre, but what is considered centre here is really the Left in the US. In other words, the UK Conservative Party probably has more in common with the Democrats than they do with the Republican Party. To make the Canadian comparison, I’d say that Cameron is slightly left of Harper, but not much.
More caveats: In spite of the organizers’ best efforts, it was still a political speech; he danced around the questions during the Q & A, as politicians are apt to do.
Here is the Coles’ Notes version of Cameron’s talk– this is not exactly as he presented it, but it’s what you need to know:
How do we make things better without spending money?
Use technology to empower individuals in 3 ways.
1. Improve Transparency. E.g., make budget figures public and accessible
2. Provide Choice. E.g. Give patients control over their health records so that they choose which doctor to see.
3. Facilitate Accountability. E.g. Produce crime maps and stats so that individuals can hold the police to account
As an Oxford tutor, I would have given him an A- for delivery (he’s slick, but no Obama) and a B- for substance. And this is coming from someone who believes that fiscal belt-tightening can create the space for much-needed change. Where was your originality David?? (As an aside, several audience members that I spoke to afterwards said that Gordon Brown’s TED speech was much better.)
The one thing that he said that surprised me was that his concern with intergenerational poverty in the UK; he felt that this was an issue that deserved attention. Now, the emphasis he put on solving the problem was not surprising: create more jobs (and while he didn’t say this, I presume this means coddling corporations in some way).
But I still want him to answer these questions for us. Without the BS.
1. Do you support the Tobin Tax (a.k.a the Robin Hood Tax)?
2. Given that there is an income threshold below which well-being clearly suffers, do you support heavier taxes on the rich to support the poor?
3. Do you have concrete policies for eliminating intergenerational poverty? Are you willing to devote real money on the problem? [Esther Duflo would then ask: how do you know if you are choosing the most effective way for that money to be spent?]
4. Will you support the Stiglitz Commission’s recommendations to reevaluate GDP (in a way that accounts for environmental externalities)?
5. Give us the straight story on the deficit– your recent waffling has left us confused. Cuts or no cuts? If cuts, how deep? Focused on what areas? What is sacred?
For those of you who were at the talk with me, I’d love to know what you would have asked him if the Q & A was allowed to continue.
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Civilian Casualties and the Ethics of Drones
BBC4 recently broadcast Robo Wars, an interesting series on the use of drones in war. (Drones are planes without pilots.)
It turns out the US alone has 7,000 drones– a number I initially found quite surprising. The companies making drones cannot keep up with the demand for them.
Once you stop and think about it, it makes complete sense. Given the US ‘s interests in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the reluctance of the public to accept the casualties that come with war, it’s no wonder that the Pentagon decided that drones would be the future of warfare. It seems after all, like a no-brainer: precise, high-tech protection for the boots on the ground without the need to risk another soldier’s life. That looks like a pretty good deal if your only goal is to protect your own troops.
Now consider this:
Mark Jenkins is an experienced RAF pilot, flying combat missions over Afghanistan. But he works from an airbase in Nevada, 8,000 miles away. “I’ve got a 45-minute drive home. And then by the time I’m home, I’m kind of straight into family life.”
Mark is completely detached from the people that he is killing. And this is the point of the program– the implication is that a person who has to put his or her own life at risk will be more careful before pulling the trigger. She can assess the situation better if she is there herself. She may think twice if there are civilians at risk. Former CIA lawyer Vicki Divoll said it best:
“When the controls are manned by someone in a suburb of Washington rather than by someone in the field you become so detached that there’s no cost, there’s no limitation on you.”
The whole thing starts looking like a video game. And it turns out that this assessment is not too far from reality:
The US is already recruiting drone pilots from among young men skilled at computer games. Instead of flying into danger they may never need to leave the security of a cabin full of computer screens on home soil.
What does it mean for warfare when killing people takes on the form of the virtual and the soldier never has to face the consequences of her actions? She will never see the family members’ suffering. She will not go to their house and pay compensation and apologize for causing “collateral damage”. She will never realize that she has sown the seeds of hatred for America and for the West in that one fleeting instant when she pressed a button and obliterated a real live human being. And because it is such a new phenomenon and there is no law in place as yet, if she chooses to kill an extra civilian or two, she will not necessarily be held to account.
Such is the secrecy surrounding CIA operations that there are no clear rules of engagement. There is “no accountability after the fact” says Philip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extra-judicial executions.
From a research perspective, there are some really interesting questions that we need to be thinking about.
1. Do pilots behave differently when flying drones than when they are flying their jets in the war theatre? Are they more detached from the “enemy”? What about the civilians?
2. Are they less reluctant to kill?
3. Does training matter? Do computer game recruits who have never had to put their lives in danger fire more indiscriminately than those who have fought in battle?
The answers to these questions have some very important implications. If, as people like Vicki Divoll suspect, it is easier to kill because the pilots are more detached from the situation, then it is likely that we are seeing many more civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq than would otherwise have been the case if they had not used drones, but traditional fighter jets.
By trying to protect their soldiers from harm, is the US inadvertently harming its own long term interests by sowing the seeds of anger and opposition by killing many more Afghan and Iraqi civilians than would otherwise have been the case?
