- People make choices about politics, consumer goods, and religion with their hearts, not their heads.
- Successful leaders touch people at a gut level by projecting basic American values that seem lacking in modern institutions and missing from day-to-day life experiences.
- The most important Gut Values today are community and authenticity. People are desperate to connect with one another and be part of a cause greater than themselves. They’re tired of spin and sloganeering from political, business, and religious institutions that constantly fail them.
- A person’s lifestyle choices can be used to predict how he or she will vote, shop, and practice their religion. The authors reveal exclusive new details about the best “LifeTargeting” strategies.
- In this age of skepticism and media diversification, people are abandoning traditional opinion leaders for “Navigators.” These otherwise average Americans help their family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers negotiate the swift currents of change in twenty-first-century America.
- Winning leaders ignore conventional wisdom and its many myths, including these false assumptions: Voters only act in their self interests; Republicans rule exurbia; and technology drives people apart. Wrong, wrong, and wrong.
-
Once you squander a Gut Values Connection, you may never get it back. Bush learned that hard lesson within a year of winning reelection.
Values are what Americans want to see in a candidate, corporation, or church before they’re even willing to consider their policies and products. The choices people make about politics, consumer goods, and religion are driven by emotions rather than by intellect. That’s why we call President Bush’s tenacity, President Clinton’s empathy, and the sense of community and purpose of Hill and Warren Gut Values . Hill wasn’t just selling burgers. The presidents weren’t just peddling policies. Warren wasn’t just pitching the word of God. They were making Gut Values Connections .
With rare exceptions, Gut Values Connections don’t just happen. They are built. Chapters 1 to 3 (starting with politics, then turning to businesses and megachurches) explore the common routes taken by Presidents Bush and Clinton, and Hill and Warren, to establish Gut Values Connections and the new tools and technologies they have used to communicate them. First, they adapted to a changing public in ways that existing political, corporate, and religious institutions had not. Second, they found and targeted their audiences through strategies that predict voting/buying/church habits based on people’s lifestyle choices. Who are their friends? Where do they get their information? Who do they turn to for advice? What are their hobbies? What magazines do they read? Where do they live? What car do they drive? Where and how do they shop? What do they do for vacation? What angers them? What makes them happy? What do they do for a living? These and thousands of other lifestyle questions form a vast constellation of data points that Presidents Bush and Clinton, and Hill and Warren, used to make and maintain Gut Values Connections. Each man had his own name for what Bush’s team called “microtargeting.” We give this critical tool a new name — LifeTargeting — because the strategy tracks people based on their lifestyles. We also reveal new details about how Presidents Bush and Clinton, and Hill and Warren used the targeting strategy. Third, they said the right things to the right people in the right ways. Great Connectors use every available communications channel and new technology to push out their messages. We’ll share their marketing strategies, including one that is as old as mankind and more powerful than ever.
Consider what we’ve seen in just one generation:
- Women flooding the workforce, reshaping the American family
- Vast immigration, migration, and exurban sprawl
- The rise of a global economy
- The dawning of the infotechnology era
- The worldwide war against terrorism
In chapter 4, we’ll explain how this crush of events has changed Americans. Tired of chasing careers and cash, many Americans entered the twenty-first century determined to rebalance their priorities and find a higher meaning in their existences. The September 11, 2001, attacks intensified these feelings. People spent more time with family and friends, took longer vacations, and sought jobs with flexible hours. They spent more time praying and volunteering.
The meaning of life changed in America, or at least the meanings of money and success changed. The first years of the twenty-first century saw a rise in the number of people who said cash could do more than bring them pleasure; it could help them contribute to society, leave something to their heirs, or otherwise help their children. A growing number of Americans told pollsters that being a good parent or spouse defined success for them. GfK, a leading market research and consulting firm that has tracked public attitudes for decades in its Roper Reports consumer trends research, called this era of transformation a “recentering” of the American public. “Whatever” became “whatever matters.” And “getting by” wasn’t good enough when “getting a life” was possible. The “Me Generation” has given way to the era of “us.”
Yet life continues to grow more complicated. Global competition is forcing jobs overseas and cutting salaries, pensions, and other benefits that had defined the twentieth-century middle class, producing the first generation of Americans who fear their children will fair worse than they did. The dot-com bust wiped out the savings of middle-class Americans who had finally thought they were getting ahead. No longer are Americans’ perception of the health of the economy and their consumer confidence driven by macro factors like the unemployment rate, the inflation rate, and Gross Domestic Product growth. They have become untethered to those factors as they change jobs multiple times and worry about pensions and health care. The coarsening of popular culture has fueled the belief of many people, particularly parents, that their values are out of sync with the elite. New technologies both improve and complicate the way Americans live.
“Life is changing too damn fast,” Cindy Moran told us one day at an Applebee’s restaurant in Howell, Michigan. A single mother of two, Moran was one of the dozens of people we interviewed for this book to gauge the mood of the country. “It’s not easy being the kind of mother I want to be,” she said, carving a high-calorie path through a bowl of spinach dip while her daughter begged for more, “not with life stuck on fast-forward.”
Buffeted by change, people like Moran crave the comfort of community. They want to know their neighbors and meet people like themselves no matter where they live. They want to help improve their neighborhoods and their country. They want to belong. Chapter 5 explores how Americans are redefining the meaning of community and finding new ways to connect in an Internet-fueled expansion of civic engagement that political, business, and religious leaders are just learning to exploit. Building communities on the Internet is a potent new trend.
People continue to lose faith in politicians, corporate executives, religious leaders, and the media, all of whom used to be society’s public opinion leaders. In this age of skepticism and media diversification, Americans are turning to people they know for advice and direction. We call these new opinion leaders Navigators : they’re otherwise average Americans who help their family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers navigate the swift currents of change.
Twentieth-century technologies gave rise to the television era, and for five decades mass media had an outsized influence on the American public. New technologies are breeding niche media — cable TV, podcasting, wireless messaging, etc. — and returning us to a pre-TV environment in which word-of-mouth communication is the most credible and efficient way to transmit a message. With their large social networks, Navigators rule the word-of-mouth world. In chapter 6 we tell you who the Navigators are and why they’re so important to political, business, and church marketers.
Americans are not just changing how they live. Many are changing where they live, and the implications are enormous for would-be Great Connectors. Chapter 7 explores the impact of an increasingly self-polarizing society. The mobility, technology, and relative affluence we enjoy allow us to pick up stakes and move to communities of like-minded people. And so we see middle-class minorities and immigrants moving from cities to inner-ring suburbs; suburban white families to new exurbs; and young singles and empty nesters circling back to cities, where they’re gentrifying decayed neighborhoods. Ironically, as the nation is becoming increasingly multiracial, the American people seem to be seeking more homogeneity in their lifestyle choices. It’s as if life were a pickup basketball game and Americans are choosing teams. Actually, they’re bigger than teams; they’re tribes.
In the final chapter, we sum up and look to the future. How will the country change in the next few years? How will the next generation of Great Connectors be created? Chapter 8 profiles “Generation 9/11,” led by the young men and women who were in high school or college when terrorists struck New York and Washington. They are generally more civic-minded, politically active, and optimistic about the nation’s future than Americans in general. Indeed, they put their baby-boomer parents to shame and remind us in more ways than one of the so-called Greatest Generation, men and women who came of age during World War II. A college student today has more in common with his or her grandparents than parents. These future leaders are off to a promising start. Their attitudes about diversity, social mobility, women in leadership, technology, institutions, and spirituality portend big change for the next wave of Great Connectors.
Any leader hoping to draw lessons from this book should start first by jettisoning any preconceived notions about how to connect with voters, consumers, and churchgoers, ignoring conventional wisdom and the false assumptions of pundits. This book debunks their many myths. Our findings include:
Myth 1: A company’s product, a candidate’s policies, or a pastor’s sermons are the main appeal for most people.
Reality: People are looking first for a Gut Values Connection.
Myth 2: September 11, 2001, changed Americans.
Reality: The attacks did hasten change, but Americans had been transforming their values and lifestyles since the mid-1990s.
Myth 3: Technology has created a more disconnected nation.
Reality: Americans are using new technologies to build new forms of community and civic engagement.
Myth 4: The glut of information has made people more independent and less reliant on one another.
Reality: The Information Age and fragmented media have caused people to turn more often to peers for advice, giving rise to Navigators.
Myth 5: A vast majority of megachurch worshipers are antigay, antiabortion conservative Republicans.
Reality: Few megachurches are politically active because they don’t want to turn off a single potential customer. A surprisingly large portion of megachurch worshipers are Democrats and independents.
Myth 6: The electorate is divided into Republican “red states” and Democratic “blue states.”
Reality: Americans are highly mobile and self-polarizing, so it makes more sense to categorize them by their lifestyle choices rather than arbitrary geographic boundaries. We call them Red Tribes, Blue Tribes , and Tipping Tribes .
Myth 7: Republicans have a lock on exurban America, as shown by the fact that because Bush won 96 out of 100 of the fast-growing counties in 2004.
Reality: Democrats can win exurbia because voters in these new, fast-growing areas are driven by their lifestyle choices and values, not partisanship.
Myth 8: Americans slavishly vote their self-interest.
Reality: Their idea of self-interest is more selfless than most politicians realize. Voters will turn to a candidate who reflects their Gut Values over one who sides with them on policies.
Myth 9: The best indicator of how a person will vote is his voting history or views on abortion, taxes, and other issues.
Reality: The key to predicting how a person will vote (or shop and worship, for that matter) is his or her lifestyle choices. To borrow and bastardize a phrase from President Clinton’s 1992 campaign — It’s the Lifestyles, Stupid.
Is all this change good or bad for America? The truth is, we don’t know. But we do know it’s inevitable. It is no time to ignore the lessons of success from Presidents Bush and Clinton, and Hill and Warren — four imperfect men who nonetheless understood the value of community, connections, and purpose in this new social order. Great eras of change seem to occur about every seven or eight decades (a long life span) and follow a war or crises. In this post-9/11 world, the nation’s leaders should pay heed to the words of Abraham Lincoln, who called on his generation to have the courage and foresight to change. “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present,” Lincoln said. “The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.”
This book will help twenty-first-century American leaders think anew about the people they serve. We hope the people they serve will find comfort in knowing that there are new ways to connect, create community, and navigate change.
Advance Praise for Applebee’s America
Named to Harvard Business Review’s 2006 Reading List
“’Timely’ might be the most overused adjective in book endorsements, but it is hard to recall anything else written in recent times more deserving of the description than Applebee’s America. Two eminent political strategists and one of the best political reporters in the country have combined their considerable expertise and intelligence to explain how Americans are responding to broad and unsettling changes in our society with a renewed appreciation for the virtues of home and community, and how foresighted religious, business and political leaders have identified with the public’s desire for meaning beyond materialism.In a lucid and engaging narrative, the authors offer an insightful account of modern America that should interest Americans of all political, religious and social affiliations, and prove invaluable to those who presume to lead them.”
—Senator John McCain
“I believe that success is not an entitlement, and that we need to earn our customers’ trust every day. At Starbucks, we earn that trust in part by creating a Third Place environment between home and work—in essence, a new type of community. Applebee’s America captures the ever-evolving sense of community in America, and offers incredibly valuable insights into the way leaders can connect with the American public.”
—Howard Schultz, Chairman, Starbucks Coffee Company
“For anyone interested in how Americans make connections and build community in the 21 st century, this book is a must read.Whether your interest is in the political world or the business world, Applebee’s America explains how community and shared values can determine how we vote, where we worship, and even where we dine. Whether you manage a restaurant or a political organization, there are certain consistencies that matter to people: community, communication, and authenticity.This book examines current trends and provides fresh thinking and new ideas and strategies for anyone interested in influencing large groups of people.”
—Senator Hillary Clinton
“Applebee’s America is a goldmine of insight into the forces shaping and energizing today’s American culture.”
—Dr. Robert Lewis, Pastor, Fellowship Bible Church, Little Rock, Board of Directors, Leadership Network
“Dowd, Sosnik and Fournier deliver an insightful look at the essential humanity shaping Americans today in our increasingly complicated and fragmented world … especially the growing desire to lead more genuine, purposeful, values-based lives. The implications this author-trio underscores, and the ideas they propose in response, offer valuable lessons for leaders everywhere in all walks of life. The reality is, in a dynamic era when so many people are determined to contribute and be part of something larger and more meaningful than their individual self, Applebee’s America deserves close attention by leaders and followers alike.”
— Steve Reinemund, Chairman, PepsiCo
“The megachurches that have grown 57% in the last five years were the last major organization discovered by management expert, Peter Drucker.The three super-savvy political analysts who have written Applebee’s America provide what may be the most compelling and accurate description of this powerful new source of community, purpose, and authenticity—what Drucker felt was the most important social event of the late twentieth century and one still little understood.A must read from cover to cover.”
—Bob Buford, Founding Chairman, Leadership Network, Author, Halftime and Finishing Well
“An insiders’ view on the ultimate question in marketing today: how to create ‘gut-level connections’ with those influential consumers who will carry your message to others. That this book is from experts who have done just that on the most high-profile stage around—two U.S. presidential campaigns—makes its insights all the more important and relevant.”
—Ed Keller and Jon Berry, authors of The Influentials
“A lively introduction to the new world of marketing ‘connections’ and ‘Gut Values’ to an America in search of community and meaning, this book should win a wide audience.”
—Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone
“Applebee’s America is aspecial bookco-authored by threefascinating individuals who havecombined their talent, insight and experience tohelp us understand boththe science andart of “connecting.” Itis a wonderful, relevantresourceforthosewho aspire to be successfulleaders.This book isa riveting, behind the sceneslook at how real-worldleaders haveeffectively reachedand persuaded the ever-changing consumer to successfully achieve their goals.”
— David Brandon, Chairman & CEO, Domino’s Pizza
“ Applebee’s America is likely to become the playbook for every candidate for public office, every CEO, every marketer, and every person who wants to have their finger on the pulse of community and nation. It also can help us to connect to one another — citizen to citizen, community to community — at a time when our country needs those connections most. After a 30 year decline in our social connectedness and civic health, we are seeing some important signs of civic recovery. Applebee’s America may be the ready-made-meal to help restore our civic vibrancy.”
— John Bridgeland , Former Assistant to the President of the United States & Director, White House Domestic Policy Council & USA Freedom Corps
Critical Praise for Applebee’s America
From Publishers Weekly
Anyone wondering what that “values” buzz after the 2004 election was about, and what it means for business, religion and politics, will find solid answers in this analysis by a former Clinton aide, one of the masterminds behind the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign and a senior Associated Press political correspondent. In a unified, third-person voice, the three declare their intention to “help twenty-first-century American leaders think anew about the people they serve—a people that, despite an increasingly multiracial society, “seem to be seeking more homogeneity in their lifestyle choices.” Since the 1990s, they argue, the key to winning the hearts, dollars and votes of the American public and its leaders is appealing to “the three C’s, connections, community, and civic engagement.” Drawing on interviews with the middle class “exurb” residents who eat at Applebee’s restaurants, as well as their own inside knowledge, the authors declare that the pattern holds across the greater part of the American spectrum. Though their narrow interview sample is a weakness, they draw conclusions about the political arena, where lifelong Democrats voted for Bush in 2004 on “gut instinct”; the business world, where customers at the more than 1,700 Applebee’s restaurants deem it “a second home”; and in megachurches, which fulfill Americans “need for belonging and purpose in a new century.” Illus. (Sept.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Pasted from <http://www.applebeesamerica.com/reviews.html>
And another, The Way to win by Mark Halprin and John Harris.
Kansas City Star: “By the time the nation’s 44th president is inaugurated in January 2009, American politics will have been dominated for two decades by two families. Dispensing with invective or polemics, and focusing instead on analysis, the co-authors explain why the Bushes, then the Clintons, then the Bushes (and possibly the Clintons again) have been so successful in holding power. Halperin, creator of “The Note” on abcnews.com, and Harris, national political editor at the Washington Post, have written the most sensible political book of the 2000s.”
Pasted from <http://www.thewaytowin2008.com/>
In The Way to Win, two of the country’s most accomplished political reporters explain what separates the victors from the victims in the unforgiving environment of modern presidential campaigns.
Mark Halperin, political director of ABC News, and John F. Harris, the national politics editor of the Washington Post, tell the story of how two families-the Bushes and the Clintons-have held the White House for nearly a generation and examine Hillary Clinton’s prospects for extending this record in 2008. Based on years of research, including private campaign memos and White House communications, The Way to Win reveals the surprising details of how the Bushes and Clintons have closely studied each the other’s successes and failures and used these lessons to shape their own strategies for winning elections and wielding power.
In the case of George W. Bush, the strategic genius is Karl C. Rove, arguably the most influential White House aide in history. For the first time, Halperin and Harris cut through the myths and controversies surrounding Rove to illuminate in brilliant, behind-the-scenes detail what he actually does-his Trade Secrets for winning elections.
In the case of the Clintons, the chief strategist is Bill Clinton himself.
Drawing on their fifteen years reporting on and interviewing him, Halperin and Harris deconstruct and decipher the Clinton style, identifying the methods that all candidates can use in their pursuit of the White House.
The Way to Win takes a lively and irreverent approach, but Halperin and Harris also show the disturbing ways that American politics has become a Freak Show-their name for a political culture that provides incentives for candidates, activists, interest groups, and the news media to emphasize ideological extremism and personal attack. For the first time, Halperin and Harris describe how Freak Show campaigns orchestrated by the likes of Internet pioneer Matt Drudge forced Al Gore and John Kerry to lose control of their public images (with considerable help from the candidates’ own ineptitude) and lose the White House.
On the brink of what will be one of the most intense, most exciting presidential elections in American history, The Way to Win is the book that armchair political junkies have been waiting for. Filled with peerless analysis and eye-opening revelations from the trenches, it is a must read for everyone who follows American politics.
What Hillary Clinton and Karl Rove Know About the Way to Win the White House in 2008
- Long before the campaign gets underway, hire someone who is tough, fearless, assertive discreet, and of unquestioned competence to do opposition research—on yourself.
- It’s never too early to have your allies say negative things about the people who might someday run against you; strangle challengers in the crib.
- In polarized America, base voters care greatly about general election electability, so from the beginning of your nomination campaign, find ways to convey that you can win 270 electoral votes.
- If you have a relative who has been president, determine how to leverage the upside and limit the downside.
- Co-opt your opponent’s strengths. For example, if your rival has a positive image as a reformer, you should cast yourself as a “reformer with results.”
- Run on the same message in the nomination fight that you plan to run on in the general election.
- Relentlessly sell long-term and short-term narratives about your life that reflect your personal biography and political agenda.
- Figure out what the press and public like about you (Note: the press won’t like much of anything about you, unless your last name is “McCain”) and emphasize the events and statements that exhibit those positive traits.
- Figure out what the press and public don’t like about you and minimize the number of events and statements that exhibit those negative traits.
- When you are attacked, respond to the accusations that are false and over-reaching, so you don’t have to address the true ones.
- Be ready to answer the incessant and inevitable media questions about controversial topics with an immaculate version of the exact same rehearsed response, every time.
- But don’t seem too rehearsed.
- Reporters are not your friends; steel yourself to illusions to the contrary.
- You can’t know too many rich people.
- You can’t have too much staff loyalty.
- Senior staff friction within your campaign will happen; keep it in the family, and out of the press.
- Compile a mental enemies list of people who have crossed you. Never write it down. Make sure people are afraid to be put on the list, and even more afraid when they are on it.
- Never lose control of your public image.
Pasted from <http://www.thewaytowin2008.com/excerpt.html>
A review of Jacob Hacker’s The Great Risk Shift.
Poor-Mouthing Prosperity
Does today’s free market create too much insecurity?
BY BRINK LINDSEY
Out of the stagflation and malaise of the 1970s emerged a new and improved American economic system–less regulated and unionized, more globalized and entrepreneurial than the old triumvirate of Big Government, Big Business and Big Labor that preceded it. And ever since, a considerable portion of the political left’s intellectual energy has been spent in poor-mouthing the ensuing prosperity.
DC: we certainly have bigger government more remte, bigger corporations with narrower ownership, and abor is in migrants and thirdworld coutries. Meanwhile…
Next, look at the two main indicators of middle-class status: a home of one’s own and a college degree. Between 1970 and 2004, the homeownership rate climbed to 69% from 63%, even as the physical size of the median new home grew by nearly 60%. Back in 1970, 11% of Americans 25 years of age or older had a college or higher degree. By 2004, the figure had risen to 28%.
As to consumer possessions, the following comparison should suffice to make the point. In 1971, 45% of American households had clothes dryers, 19% had dishwashers, 83% had refrigerators, 32% had air conditioning, and 43% had color televisions. By the mid-1990s all of these ownership rates were exceeded even by Americans below the poverty line.
Dc: the slight of hand is making much of the rabbt in the foxx’s jaws. Thw writing of intentionaly tendentious articles is a curious challenge.
Pasted from <http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110008971>
and
From Salon, you have no right to vote: The Constitution doesn’t guarantee it, the Republicans know it, and real democratic values in our country are under assault.
Sep 22]
a review of
Expression and Self-Knowledge
by Dorit Bar-On
Oxford University Press, 2005
The main thought in the book is that we speak our minds — when we avow that things are such and such with us, we express ourselves, we give voice to our inner workings. This is a kind of expressivism, somewhat inspired by Wittgenstein, but the author takes great care to avoid the usual difficulties with an expressivist view of avowals (mainly variations of the Geach-Frege point about assertions). Ordinary expressivism will not have Semantic Continuity for avowals, but Bar-On’s theory will, so the term neo-expressivism is no misnomer. I express myself by avowing that things are thus-and-so with me.
Dc: got it?
Bar-On closes the book with the following words:
Speaking my mind is something I am in a unique position to do. Only I can express, or give voice to, my own present states of mind. And it is only states of my mind that I can express, or give voice to. Bodily conditions such as having high blood pressure, a raised arm, or a weak heart are not conditions one can speak from. I can speak my mind, but I cannot speak my body.
DC: Why is it important? I am not sure if this book is, but the underlying issue for me is the size of the interior mind, and my experience today of talking with a frend with Alzheimer’s who can think clearly he says, but talk muddled. I tried some anticipations of his speech and he knew as quick as possible if it fit his inner thought or not.
Pasted from <http://mentalhelp.net/books/books.php?type=de&id=3310>
and
The Philosophy Behind the Matrix Trilogy
by Matt Lawrence
Blackwell, 2004
As a general introduction to the standard themes in philosophy for a non-philosopher, Like a Splinter in Your Mind is a reasonable if not profound read. The basics are covered: Cartesian dualism, materialism, compatibilism and the varieties of free will, knowledge versus experience, subjectively versus objectively defined morality: who decides what’s morally “right”? For persons interested in mental health issues, it presents the standard philosophical arguments over the nature of reality that go to the heart of how we define sanity as participation in a socially shared reality. For fans of the Matrix films, it attempts a consistent explanation of all the pop philosophy in the films, in a manner reminiscent of discussions among truly committed fans of any cult film or TV series who are determined to have an explanation for everything even when it goes far beyond what the writers could possibly have had in mind.
That said, if thought-provoking is what you’re after, there are much better books out there: Philosophers Explore the Matrix, featuring essays by some of the best-known names in philosophy, comes to mind.
DC: I’ll trust him on it.
Materialism (generally equated with physicalism, though philosophers mean slightly different thing by each) is, of course, the metaphysical position that matter — physical “stuff” — is the only kind of “stuff” that really exists. Cartesian dualism (named after Rene Descartes of cogito ergo sum fame) holds, in contrast, that “mental stuff” and “physical stuff” are fundamentally different and irreconcilable things. So for the dualist, mind and brain are different things, and each could exist, in principle, without the other; whereas for the committed materialist, mind simply is brain.
DC: The pattern on the chess board. Its status?
(Interesting footnote: Cornell West, the prominent Princeton philosopher on issues of race, appears in the films as Zion’s Councilor West.)
Pasted from <http://mentalhelp.net/books/books.php?type=de&id=3308>
And
immigrant children perform as well or better than their same-race, American-born counterparts.
FSU Sociology Professor Kathryn Harker Tillman found that first- and second- generation children are no more likely than their third-generation peers to have to repeat a grade despite the many social and economic disadvantages they face. The finding is true for immigrant youth of all racial and ethnic backgrounds or countries of origin. The study, co-authored by colleagues Guang Guo and Kathleen Mullan Harris from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was published in the journal Social Science Research.
“Immigrant children are more successful navigating the educational system than would be expected,” Tillman said. “Against the odds, these children are performing as well as or better than their same-race, third-generation peers.”
The researchers theorized that immigrant children may benefit from factors such as higher than average levels of ambition and motivation, high parental expectations, strong beliefs in the importance of education, and/or high levels of family and community support for educational achievement.
Although other researchers have found that immigrant children generally do as well as non-immigrants in school, this is the first nationally representative study to show that it is not achieved at the cost of additional years of schooling because of grade failure or policies that hold back students who are adjusting to a new language and culture, she said. Instead, immigrant students succeed while keeping pace with their American-born peers.
About one-fifth of the children in this country are either immigrants or the children of immigrants. This group is expected to account for more than 50 percent of the growth in the school-aged population between 1990 and 2010.
Pasted from <http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-09/fsu-mtg091906.php>
and
Clever red-necks: it’s not just the economy that is booming in Alberta; schools are too.
Many educators acknowledge that over the past 30 years Alberta has quietly built the finest public education system in Canada. The curriculum has been revised, stressing core subjects (English, science, mathematics), school facilities and the training of teachers have been improved, clear achievement goals have been set and a rigorous province-wide testing programme for grades three (aged 7-8), six (10-11), nine (13-14) and twelve (16-17) has been established to ensure they are met.
Another litmus test is the extent to which Edmonton’s ideas are being studied by educators from elsewhere (mostly the United States, but some also from Ontario and British Columbia) and are now being emulated. Pilot projects on the Edmonton model have already been launched by school boards in Colorado Springs, Oakland and New York City.
All this is not to say that they have all the answers in Alberta. Their rigorous measurement scheme has revealed that schools still need to do a lot better teaching aboriginal and immigrant children and ensuring that more students finish high school. At present, about 30% of students drop out early, compared with 25% for the country as a whole. That, Alberta’s educators admit, is an embarrassing statistic. But in the province’s red-hot economy, a 17-year-old with a driver’s licence can drop out and easily make C$60,000 ($53,300) a year driving a lorry serving an oil-drilling camp. That’s tough competition.
Pasted from <http://www.economist.com/world/la/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7945805>
And
An article on learning how to read slowly again.
In “Reading Like a Writer” the novelist Francine Prose shows how to do it. She forces the act of slow reading by singling out excerpts from her favorite writers and zeroing in on single words, then sentences, then paragraphs, teasing out the specifics that transmute raw language into style and an artistically meaningful form. She has a notion, quite correct in my experience, that all readers start out slow, savoring individual syllables and words. Gradually, under pressure, they speed up, consuming more but enjoying and absorbing less.
HOW TO READ A NOVEL: A USER’S GUIDE, by John Sutherland; St. Martin’s Press; 260 pages. $21.95. Available in November.
READING LIKE A WRITER: A GUIDE FOR PEOPLE WHO LOVE BOOKS AND FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO WRITE THEM, by Francine Prose; HarperCollins, 273 pages. $23.95.
THE THINGS THAT MATTER: WHAT SEVEN CLASSIC NOVELS HAVE TO SAY ABOUT THE STAGES OF LIFE, by Edward Mendelson; Pantheon, 260 pages. $23.
Pasted from <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/22/books/22read.html>
and
From Slate, Stephen Metcalf to: Ron Rosenbaum debate The Shakespeare Wars.
I have the impression that the impulse to write a Shakespeare book was surprisingly similar to your impulse to write a Hitler book. The same question haunts both men: Are they on a continuum with other men, or are Hitler, for his capacity for evil, and Shakespeare, for his genius, sui generis? You quote Peter Brook as saying,
I think [Shakespeare] is a unique case and I think his uniqueness inheres in his generosity. I think there’s no one else who manages to insert himself so totally in such a wide range of human beings. To be such a highly developed, highly acute servant of other people’s truths is unique.
Pasted from <http://www.slate.com/id/2150012/entry/2150017/>
And A review of Philosophy of New Music by Theodor Adorno. Important to me because of Fromm’s participation in the Frankfrt school.
But what it boils down to is this: Theodor Adorno took a long, critical look at society and culture in the mid-20th century and concluded that it was a giant, vacuous hole of despair and hopelessness. A member of what has become known as the Frankfurt School, Adorno was among a handful of German social philosophers who evacuated Germany during the rise of fascism in the 1930s and came to the United States as exiles. The language of Marxism had already come to dominate European philosophy, but by the ‘30s the academic elite had seen alienation lead not to benevolent revolution, but Stalinism in the East and fascism in the West. It was, understandably, a time of profound disillusionment and, for Adorno particularly, deep-rooted pessimism. Thusly influenced, Adorno and his fellows developed a system that broadly came to be known as Critical Theory—the most famous discourses of which are Walter Benjamin’s critique of mass production, and Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s joint critique of the Enlightenment, which later crystallized in Adorno’s doctrine of negative dialectics.
For Adorno, the opiate of the masses in late capitalism was not religion, but culture, and mass-produced culture was little more than a drug that served no other capacity than the reification and perpetuation of the dominance of capital—culture as product that could only produce more product as culture. Only art, in a pure, non-commercialized form, is of any value as a means of intellectual resistance.
What is often overlooked in the general analysis of Adorno’s body of work is that he was also a great student of art, in particular music. Like Benjamin, himself a literary critic and student of history, Adorno’s philosophy was mediated as much by his analysis of the arts as it was the social processes unfolding around him.
While today we would deem Adorno’s interests as scholarship in “classical” music, for Adorno it was the only music. An aesthete of incredibly shrewd analysis, Adorno’s tendency to elevate the finite possible good and savagely condemn the pervasively bad was not tempered by music, but was rather incensed by it. Among his more well-known critiques of the culture industry was the vociferous disgust he felt towards “jazz”, though here again history obscures the context—while a canonical genre today, the term “jazz” was a catch-all for all pop music in Adorno’s time, and he is reacting in particular to the popular swing music of the ‘30s and ‘40s, the precursors to today’s pop, and not necessarily the revered instrumental and compositional form that we know as “jazz” today. Having said this, Adorno did not recant his opinion or use of the term in the face of the musical developments of Miles Davis or Sonny Rollins, having seemingly as little use for these pioneers as he did for Cole Porter or Bennie Goodman—all music outside of the Western symphonic composer tradition that developed from Beethoven towards modernity was de facto a banal perversion.
Adorno makes this point plainly himself in the introduction to Philosophy of New Music:
Not only are people’s ears so inundated with light music that other music reaches them only the congealed opposite of the former, as “classical” music, and not only is the capacity to listen so blunted by the omnipresent hit tune that the concentration for serious listening is unattainable and infused with stupid refrains, but also the sacrosanct traditional music has itself been assimilated to commercial mass production in the character of its performance and as its function in the life of the listener.
For Adorno, only dedicated listening that struggles with the nuance of music in both its historical context and its formal content is listening at all. But what Adorno sees instead is that mass production and consumption of music has relegated even Beethoven (a composer that Adorno values perhaps more than any other) to “objects of consumption for home decoration.”
Pasted from <http://www.popmatters.com/pm/books/reviews/5435/philosophy-of-new-music-by-theodor-adorno-translated-by-robert-hullot-kento/>
and
From Der Spiegel, the world’s largest seed collection is under the permafrost on the Arctic Sea island of Spitzbergen. The tens of thousands of varieties of wheat, corn and beans stored there could even survive a nuclear war.
In a project funded by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), this inhospitable place is gradually becoming a repository for the seeds of the world’s most important food crop plants. When finished, the site — located on the Arctic Sea island of Spitzbergen — will contain up to three million samples from tens of thousands of different varieties from around the world. Whether wheat, sorghum, peas or feed corn, the project’s sponsors hope that the seeds being stored in this tunnel 400 meters below the surface in Spitzbergen’s permafrost will remain preserved for centuries to come — possibly even surviving mankind itself.
The situation in Iraq is even worse. The country’s seed bank used to be located in Abu Ghraib, a Baghdad suburb that gained notoriety through the American prisoner torture scandal. “It was particularly important, because agriculture was first developed in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) more than 10,000 years ago,” says Fowler. When looters raided the Abu Ghraib facility after the American invasion in 2003, they made off with the items they considered valuable: the glass containers. “They just poured the seeds onto the ground,” says Fowler.
Once valuable genetic material is destroyed, it can never be reconstructed. “It’s as if one were to burn down a library filled with books that no one has read yet,” says Fowler.
Pasted from <http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,438336,00.html>
and
How climate change became a burning issue: A review of books. A review of The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock. More on global warming and the world’s vineyards.
By Fiona Harvey
Published: September 22 2006 12:43 | Last updated: September 22 2006 12:43
It is a story worthy of Greek drama. Humanity discovers the secret elixir that will bring us prosperity on an unimagined scale, enabling the construction of fabulous cities, travel faster than the speed of sound, communications at the speed of light and the means to bring forth bounty from barren land. But just as we raise ourselves to these god-like levels, we discover that the potion is poisoned. By drinking it, we are upsetting the natural workings of the world in a way that will soon destroy the very basis of our civilisation.
The premise is simple. In the two decades or so since climate change began to be taken seriously, it has been regarded as something that would happen slowly and gradually. A steady rise in temperatures would end up melting the poles and raising sea levels in 60 to 100 years or so. Wrong, says Pearce. The earth’s complex systems of climate, ocean circulation, weather systems and chemical reactions are not so lightly defied. They are extremely sensitive to even slight changes.
The complacent like to quote the 0.6øC rise in temperatures that has taken place since the Industrial Revolution, taking it as proof that we can cope with more warming. Pearce argues that even minor meddling with the climate will have dire results, which will bear down upon us as soon as the next decade or so rather than comfortably ambling up in a century’s time. The Last Generation of the title is us, we who are adults today.
Climate changes have never happened gradually in the past, Pearce says, but in wild swings and lurches from ice age to warmth. There is no reason to suppose human-wrought climate change will be any different, so prepare for a bumpy ride. Pearce quotes one expert who compares the earth to a drunk – stable while sleeping but if woken given to random violence. We are now poking the drunk with a stick, he warns. Pearce piles theories and evidence to show that we are in danger of pushing the world through various tipping points of temperature and greenhouse-gas concentration. These make runaway climate change with devastating consequences all but inevitable, he says, from inundation to desertification, including the failure of the Asian monsoon and the transformation of the Amazon to a desert – even if we stopped burning fossil fuels immediately, we may already have passed the point of no return.
The business reader may have more luck with Daniel C. Esty and Andrew S. Winston’s Green to Gold (Yale University Press, $25), a manual on how to turn your company into an eco-success, catching the current wave of consumer and government interest in saving the world from environmental catastrophe.
Pasted from <http://www.ft.com/cms/s/3b06b3d8-46af-11db-ac52-0000779e2340,dwp_uuid=10a38770-51d6-11da-9ca0-0000779e2340,print=yes.html>
and
And father of American environmentalism John Muir had God, and other man-eaters, on his mind
On this December day, it is a comfortable sixty-five degrees in the shade and there are alligators to think about. How, exactly, do such man-eating creatures fit into the divine scheme of things according to God? Muir has seen only one alligator, but has heard numerous stories of the thick-skinned beasts rising from the water to steal away a pet or escape with an appendage. Muir could not accept the explanations of his Calvinist father or most of the men of his time: that these fiendish animals resided on man’s green earth because a certain woman took a bite of a certain fruit and doomed humanity to a life outside of the Garden. Muir saw the Garden all around him. It was everywhere, alive and well and within it were creatures that not only offered no practical purpose for humans, but were actually capable of committing much harm to them. He thought this was very fine.
So what was the reasoning behind the Creator’s creation of “those man-eating animals — lions, tigers, alligators — which smack their lips over raw man?” What about the insects that feed on man’s rich blood, the waters of the earth that drown him, the poisonous plants and minerals? “Why,” Muir asked, “is the lord of creation subjected to the same laws of life as his subjects?”
The botanizer’s answer, so foreign to his time, was this: “Nature’s object in making animals and plants might possibly be first of all the happiness of each one of them, not the creation of all for the happiness of one. Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?” Without using the words inherent worth or intrinsic value, Muir writes in the journal at his side, “Though alligators, snakes, etc. naturally repel us, they are not mysterious evils. They dwell happily in these flowery wilds, are part of God’s family, unfallen, undepraved, and cared for with the same species of tenderness and love as is bestowed on angels in heaven or saints on earth.”
More than a hundred years later, Arne Ness, Norwegian philosopher and mountain climber, would build upon Muir’s concept and label it Deep Ecology. It was a synthesis of a century of naturalist thought: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and later Aldo Leopold, although unlike Muir, Emerson refused to sleep under the stars and Thoreau eschewed conservation politics. Ness developed eight tenets of Deep Ecology; the first echoed Muir’s 1867 journal musings, though lacks the poetic prose: “The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves. These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.” Copernicuses and Galileos of a post-modern era, they believed that it was time to admit that the world did not revolve around the precocious bipeds with opposable thumbs.
Muir’s answer to his own question, infused with humility and wonder both, was that “the universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge.”
Pasted from <http://www.killingthebuddha.com/dogma/johnmuir.htm>
And
From Mongolia, the second country to embrace Communism in the 20th century is having a hard time shaking it off in the 21st.
and
Robert Kaplan on how the furor over Kim Jong Il’s missile tests and nuclear brinksmanship obscures the real threat: the prospect of North Korea’s catastrophic collapse.
The abbreviation for North Korea used by American military officers says it all: KFR, the Kim Family Regime. It is a regime whose demonization by the American media and policy makers has obscured some vital facts. North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung, was not merely a dreary Stalinist tyrant. As defectors from his country will tell you, he was also a popular anti-Japanese guerrilla leader in the mold of Enver Hoxha, the Stalinist tyrant of Albania who led his countrymen in a successful insurgency against the Nazis. Nor is his son Kim Jong Il anything like the childish psychopath parodied in the film Team America: World Police. It’s true that Kim Jong Il was once a playboy. But he has evolved into a canny operator. Andrei Lankov, a professor of history at South Korea’s Kookmin University, in Seoul, says that under different circumstances Kim might have actually become the successful Hollywood film producer that regime propaganda claims he already is.
Dc: nothing is as we are told. We are told fairy stories rather than mature drama.
Yet for all Kim’s canniness, there is evidence that he may be losing his edge. And that may be reason to worry: totalitarian regimes close to demise are apt to get panicky and do rash things. The weaker North Korea gets, the more dangerous it becomes. The question that should be of greatest concern to the U.S. military in the Pacific—and the question that will likely determine the global balance of power in Asia for generations—is, What happens when North Korea collapses?
The Seven Stages of Collapse
Kim Jong Il’s compulsion to demonstrate his missile prowess is a sign of his weakness. Contrary to popular perception in the United States, Kim doesn’t stay up at night worrying about what the Americans might do to him; it’s not North Korea’s weakness relative to the United States that preoccupies him. Rather, if he does stay up late worrying, it’s about China. He knows the Chinese have always had a greater interest in North Korea’s geography—with its additional outlets to the sea close to Russia—than they have in the long-term survival of his regime. (Like us, even as they want the regime to survive, the Chinese have plans for the northern half of the Korean peninsula that do not include the “Dear Leader.”) One of Kim’s main goals in so aggressively displaying North Korea’s missile capacity is to compel the United States to deal directly with him, thereby making his otherwise weakening state seem stronger. And the stronger Pyongyang appears to be, the better off it is in its crucial dealings with Beijing, which are what really matter to Kim.
should concentrate the minds of American strategists is not Kim’s missiles per se but rather what his decision to launch them says about the stability of his regime. Middle- and upper-middle-level U.S. officers based in South Korea and Japan are planning for a meltdown of North Korea that, within days or even hours of its occurrence, could present the world—meaning, really, the American military—with the greatest stabilization operation since the end of World War II. “It could be the mother of all humanitarian relief operations,” Army Special Forces Colonel David Maxwell told me. On one day, a semi-starving population of 23 million people would be Kim Jong Il’s responsibility; on the next, it would be the U.S. military’s, which would have to work out an arrangement with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (among others) about how to manage the crisis.
Fortunately, the demise of North Korea is more likely to be drawn out. Robert Collins, a retired Army master sergeant and now a civilian area expert for the American military in South Korea, outlined for me seven phases of collapse in the North:
Phase One: resource depletion;
Phase Two: the failure to maintain infrastructure around the country because of resource depletion;
Phase Three: the rise of independent fiefs informally controlled by local party apparatchiks or warlords, along with widespread corruption to circumvent a failing central government;
Phase Four: the attempted suppression of these fiefs by the KFR once it feels that they have become powerful enough;
Phase Five: active resistance against the central government;
Phase Six: the fracture of the regime; and
Phase Seven: the formation of new national leadership.
Dc: the seen stages parallel my view that local mafia’s would be the result of breakdown in, say the United States.
In order to prevent a debacle of the sort that occurred in Iraq—but with potentially deadlier consequences, because of the free-floating WMD—a successful relief operation would require making contacts with KFR generals and various factions of the former North Korean military, who would be vying for control in different regions. If the generals were not absorbed into the operational command structure of the occupying force, Maxwell says, they might form the basis of an insurgency. The Chinese, who have connections inside the North Korean military, would be best positioned to make these contacts—but the role of U.S. Army Special Forces in this effort might be substantial. Green Berets and the CIA would be among the first in, much like in Afghanistan in 2001.
Whereas Japan’s strategic position would be dramatically weakened by a collapsed North Korean state, China would eventually benefit. A post-KFR Korean peninsula could be more or less under Seoul’s control—and China is now South Korea’s biggest trading partner. Driving along the coast, all I saw at South Korean ports were Chinese ships.
Other factors also work in Beijing’s favor. China harbors thousands of North Korean defectors that it would send back after a collapse, in order to build a favorable political base for China’s gradual economic takeover of the Tumen River region—the northeast Asian river valley where China, Russia, and North Korea intersect, with good port facilities on the Pacific. De facto control of a future Tumen Prosperity Sphere would bolster China’s fiscal strength, helping it to do economic battle with the United States and Japan. If China’s troops could carve out a buffer zone in the part of North Korea near Manchuria—where China is now developing massive infrastructure projects, such as roads and ports—Beijing might then sanction the installation of an international coalition elsewhere in the North.
Dc: this continues with lots of detail worth reading. More. Must read.
Pasted from <http://www.rjkoehler.com/2006/09/07/kaplan-on-when-n-korea-collapses/>
And
From Asia Times, a look at why a rising China can’t dominate Asia; an article on the new global populism;
Why a rising China can’t dominate Asia
By Robert Sutter
“The United States has nothing to fear from China’s emergence as a global economic power … We want you to succeed … The tasks faced by Beijing are so daunting that the biggest risk we face is not that China will overtake the US, but that China won’t move ahead with the reforms necessary to sustain its growth and to address the very serious problems facing the nation.”
- US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who is due in Beijing for two days of talks with Chinese officials next week.
“China can’t dominate Asia; there are too many governments in Asia.” This comment by a senior Chinese official during a recent
interview in Beijing reflects realities of power that make Chinese leadership in Asia unlikely under foreseeable circumstances.
The findings of private interviews and discussions with 75 officials in China and seven other Asian governments about China’s rise, the balance of influence in Asia, and Asian regional dynamics contradict much public discourse that depicts a powerful China coming to the leading position in Asia at a time of US decline.
Although prevailing commentaries focus on Chinese strengths and US weaknesses, government officials in Asia privately show an equal awareness of Chinese weaknesses and US strengths
Chinese economic competitiveness means that Asian manufacturers often cannot compete directly with China. In response, Asian entrepreneurs increasingly invest in and integrate their businesses with China, but Asian workers cannot move to China and often suffer. Investment in Asian economies declines and Chinese investment and foreign assistance in Asia remain very small and do not offset these negative implications.
Dc: part of my view that elites run globalization for their own benefit. Which limits the benfis of “globalization.”
China’s “win-win diplomacy” focuses on common ground, which receives great positive publicity but does little to resolve differences or deal with issues. With few exceptions, China does not do hard things; it carefully avoids major international commitments or risks.
Dc: seems smart.
US weaknesses dominate public discourse on the United States in most of Asia. They center on the decline in the US image amid widespread criticism of the US war in Iraq, the US position on North Korea, unilateral US actions on significant international issues, and perceived inattentive US policies regarding the economic development and other concerns in Asia.
Nevertheless, Asian government officials were almost uniform in emphasizing the importance of the US role as Asia’s security guarantor and vital economic partner. The main exceptions were a Communist Party of India (Marxist) official and, to a degree, some Chinese officials, who criticized the US security role in Asia.
He nonetheless went on to advise that China’s influence in the region would grow as China’s “weight” would become increasing important to the governments in the region and China would have increasing success in reassuring Asian governments of Chinese intentions.
Robert Sutter (sutterr@georgetown.edu) is professor of Asian Studies, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University.
Pasted from <http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/HI15Ad02.html>
and
and a review of Democracy in Iran.
The state versus society in Iran
Democracy in Iran by Ali Gheissari and Vali Nasr
Reviewed by Sreeram Chaulia
Iran is unique in the Middle East for possessing social ingredients that portend evolution of genuine democracy. The 1979 revolution’s zeal for an idealized Islamic order made Iran an improbable candidate for the flowering of democracy, but over the past three decades, Iranians participated in elections, believed in
the efficacy of their votes to affect politics, and grew to understand the fundamental logic of democracy. Yet with sovereignty vested in God and the supreme leader remaining unelected, Iran is not quite a democratic state.
Iran’s vulnerability to foreign intervention since the 19th century motivated the Qajar and Pahlavi dynasties as well as the ayatollahs to justify sacrificing civil liberties and democratic rights to deal with external enemies. The goals of national integration and development were pursued by successive regimes by means of dictating to society.
The other roadblock to opening up the political system was ideology – leftist and Islamic fundamentalist – of which Iranians have progressively become wary. The realization since 1997 that “Islam is part of the problem and not the solution” (p 9) yielded slogans for simple democracy in place of “Islamic democracy”. More Iranians today want a plain republic instead of an Islamic republic
Arbitrary rule and political decay, coinciding with British and Russian designs to dominate Iran’s economy, led to the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 and the country’s first parliamentary system. The ideals of that revolution were enunciated by intellectuals in secret societies, but acquired broad support among ordinary people through the medium of the ulama (clerics) who were troubled with threats to the Shi’ite realm.
Outbreaks of tribal insurgencies and weakness to forestall foreign penetration reflected the plight of the constitutional order from 1911-21. Disintegrative challenges and chaos shifted attention from democracy to state consolidation. The 1921 coup by Brigadier Reza Khan (later Shah Pahlavi) stepped into the political vacuum and sought to shift the balance of power within the constitution from the legislature to the executive. A broad segment of Iran’s population accepted the sequence of “first order and progress, then democracy” (p 38)
The Pahlavi state subsumed the desire for democracy under the drive for national development. Kemalism – state control over economy, politics and culture – rather than constitutional monarchy was the new model of government. Reza Pahlavi conceived himself as an agent of modernization and concentrated on “developmentalism” by fostering a bureaucratic state and industrial economy in lieu of the rule of law. “Reza Shah served only the demand for stability and progress, ignoring justice and democracy” (p 43). Iran warded off decay, but unbridled empowerment of the executive culminated in authoritarianism that inevitably reintroduced the ideal of democracy into circulation.
After Reza Shah’s British-imposed abdication in 1941 in favor of his son, political forces suppressed by the erstwhile king – merchants, liberals, religious activists and communists – returned to center stage along with the parliament. During the democratic interlude (1941-53), the pro-Soviet Tudeh Party mobilized Iranians in the name of justice, but its “totalitarian addiction” helped to later restore monarchical autocracy.
Mohammed Mosaddeq’s National Front came to symbolize democratic ideals in the face of state power, though he did not advocate individual rights as understood in today’s parlance. Militant ulama, particularly ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the Fedayeen-e-Islam, put forward ideological resistance to Pahlavi rule by inciting disruptions and tensions, forcing the monarchy “to rely on foreign support for its consolidation of power” (p 50).
Concerted action by an alliance among the monarchy, the Iranian military, the United States and Britain toppled Mosaddeq’s government in 1953 on the pretext of an imminent communist takeover. Shah Mohammed Pahlavi and his allies resented Mosaddeq’s insistence that parliament was supreme and that the monarch was bound by constitutional restrictions.
From 1954, democracy was reduced to a dead letter. Relying on US aid, the shah banned political parties, weakened civil society and curtailed the parliament. As a reprise, “democracy and development came to be viewed as mutually exclusive, and the former would have to be kept at bay as state-building proceeded” (p 55).
The White Revolution reforms of 1963 expanded the size of the Iranian middle class, who ironically showed little support for the monarchy. The religious establishment gravitated en masse to an anti-Pahlavi stance as modernization went on, thanks to Khomeini’s rulings that enfranchisement of women and land reforms were “un-Islamic”. Radicalization of the opposition and state use of violence in suppressing it increased the power of the security apparatuses in the late 1960s.
The oil boom of the 1970s converted Iran into a rentier state, relieving government of accountability to society and further eroding the shah’s legitimacy. The regime compelled Iranians to join the new one-party system, but urban dissidents used the networks created by this opening to escalate opposition. Khomeini skillfully avoided discussion of his theory of an Islamic state and trained the attention of the disparate anti-state elements on the Pahlavi monarchy. The tilt toward religion in the revolutionary coalition did not bode well for the prospects of democracy after the 1979 overthrow of the shah.
The revolution ultimately shored up state power and expanded its reach into society. The “Islamic Leviathan” of Iran fit the model of post-revolutionary authoritarianism in Russia and China by empowering militant actors and downgrading liberal democratic values. The new constitution provided for elections “because the more sizable lower and lower middle classes favored the fundamentalists” (p 92).
The modern middle classes, who were the social base of the pro-democracy forces, were silenced or crushed with a heavy hand. Khomeini used the US Embassy hostage crisis and the war with Iraq to portray pro-democracy forces as stooges of Western imperialism stoking internal disunity in Iran.
Ali-Akbar Rafsanjani’s two presidential terms (1989-97) were periods of significant “developmentalist” state-building with parallels to the Pahlavi era. When faced with conservative pressure from the revolutionary old guard, Rafsanjani compromised and even undertook policies counter to the demands of development. Clerics resistant to full-fledged privatization of the economy attacked the government on ideological grounds and constrained Rafsanjani’s streamlining efforts. Mercantile capitalism staged a comeback in these years and the middle class again expanded in number, engendering a renewed interest in democracy.
The government strengthened higher education to meet the need for skilled personnel, but the leap in size of university student communities laid the ground for an important vehicle of democracy debates. Abdol-Karim Soroush and his intellectual followers formulated a critique of theocracy and the prominence of the ulama in state affairs.
Devolution of power to provincial and municipal authorities changed the balance in relations between the center and the periphery and encouraged greater pluralism. Greater reliance on tax income compelled the state to negotiate with society over representation and political participation. Private-sector growth shaped a new urban political culture that rebelled against repressive Islamic moral codes. The values of the secular social stratum moved to the forefront of political dissent.
Mohammed Khatami’s election as president in 1997 inaugurated a pro-democracy movement with official sanction for the first time in Iranian history and raised the tantalizing possibility of power being shared with civil society. Relaxations on freedom of press, speech and expression reshaped the style and content of Iranian politics.
Conservative backlash via the supreme leader, Seyyed Ali Khamenei, quickly put paid to hopes of a long Prague Spring. Between 1997 and January 2004, the Guardian Council vetoed 111 of Khatami’s 297 bills. Persecution of reformists and intellectuals went into full gear, and Khatami was forced to concede that “Islam cannot be separated from Iranian politics” (p 139).
By 2004, a “New Conservatism” emerged on the platforms of strong government to improve the condition of the economy. It wove relationships of patronage with the private sector and entrenched itself in decision-making circles. Positing Reza Shah and East Asian guided democracies as prototypes, “the demand for democracy was resisted with emphasis on good governance and development” (p 143).
The 2005 presidential election brought to power the hardline conservative populist Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who rode on socio-economic grievances of the lower classes and disadvantaged provinces. Reformist candidates ignored the poor and targeted the urban middle classes with the carrots of cultural freedoms, civil-society activism and improvement of women’s status. Ahmadinejad’s promises of wealth distribution, maintenance of state subsidies, militant Islamic socialism and a “Third Worldist foreign policy” won the day.
The verdict of the 2005 election was, for the umpteenth time, to strengthen the state at the expense of society. However, authors Ali Gheissari and Vali Nasr point that since votes from small towns and poorer provinces determined the electoral outcome, it underscored increasing decentralization of Iranian politics. The challenge before the pro-democracy forces in the future is to relate the social pressures for socio-economic deliverance with the traditional liberal agenda of individual rights, or “in other words, to build bridges between the middle and lower classes” (p 158).
The authors of this dense work of political analysis do not prescribe any specific policy line for the international community toward promoting Iran’s home-bred democratic movement. One cannot help concluding from a panoramic distillation of history that the more threats and coercive tactics Iran faces on account of the current nuclear standoff, the stronger will be the weight of state superiority over society. Keeping hands off Iran may be the best bet for the US administration’s professed aim of “democratizing” the Middle East.
Democracy in Iran: History and the Quest for Liberty by Ali Gheissari and Vali Nasr. Oxford University Press, New York, 2006. ISBN: 0-19-518967-1. Price: US$29.95; 214 pages.
Pasted from <http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HI23Ak01.html>
Dc: I quoted most of the review, it is such a good historical perspective. Reform was weakened by Bush giving the conservatives an edge, a leverage, in state control.
Pasted from <http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HI23Ak01.html>
And, since saddham was the tito of Iraq…
A review of Tito.
As Yugoslavia’s Communist-era leader, Josip Broz Tito was known for two innovations.
At home he introduced workers’ self-management as a socialist Yugoslav alternative to Stalinist central planning. And abroad, he co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement as an alternative to the Cold War divide between East and West.
For most of Yugoslavia’s work force, self-management didn’t really bring the promised emancipation, but instead produced multiple layers of bureaucracy that tied the hands of managers seeking to modernize the country’s economy. Likewise, the Non-Aligned Movement, a grouping of mostly former colonies in the Third World, did little to boost Yugoslavia’s international standing. Despite Tito’s bold independent pose, Yugoslavia remained dependent on the West for vital loans, on the Western European labor market to soak up its unemployed, and on trade with the uncompetitive Soviet-run Comecon.
But perhaps the ultimate contradiction in Tito’s career – and certainly the one most relevant today – is the fact that someone so powerful in his lifetime was unable to produce a durable system of governance that would prolong the lifespan of his greatest success: holding together the ethnically diverse federal state of Yugoslavia.
By the time Tito died in May 1980, just three days before his 88th birthday, there was nobody left in the Yugoslav elite with either the authority or charisma to take over.
After 35 years in power, Tito had outlived his closest collaborators and most obvious heirs apparent, most importantly Edvard Kardelj. Other potential successors, like Milovan Djilas or Aleksandar Rankovic, had long been purged from the elite over policy disagreements.
Moreover, due to Tito’s commitment to the communist movement and the centralized one-party rule that it required, a genuine democratic opening was impossible in his lifetime. He also feared, correctly as it turned out, that given a democratic choice, Yugoslavia’s voters would choose candidates advocating independence for the federation’s ethnic republics, thus unleashing a violent conflict and the end of Yugoslavia.
Gabriel Partos is the Southeast Europe analyst for the BBC World Service.
Pasted from <http://www.tol.cz/look/TOL/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=4&NrIssue=185&NrSection=2&NrArticle=17557>
And
From New Statesman, Anthony Giddens assesses the best ideas on offer in Europe;
It is time to move on, to look more towards Europe, instead of the US, where there is much hostility to “big government” and where large inequalities are tolerated.
and
like Thatcher and Blair before him, David Cameron is emerging as the politician most in tune with his time. Can Gordon Brown catch him?
New Labour has been deficient in two ideological areas: it has failed to develop a robust definition of the public sphere and of the essential importance of citizenship. Labour has not found a persuasive enough vocabulary to express the difference between citizen and consumer. Consequently, it has been too vulnerable to the charge that it is only a slightly more human version of Thatcherism, fond of markets and privatisation.
DC: we haven’t even tried this discussion in the US.
The most successful countries in Europe are the Nordic ones – Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland. What distinguishes them is a willingness to reform and modernise. They have learned how to become competitive in the global market place. Finland, for instance, has several times been ranked as the world’s top country in which to do business. The Finns have reformed their labour markets, introducing greater flexibility; decentralised their education and health systems; and introduced greater choice into core public services. But they have shown how such an orientation can coincide with a strong idea of the public realm and social justice. High taxes, as such, do not have much to do with these successes. They come mainly from social policy, and from acceptance of the role of active government.
Cameron is tapping into a growing unease about the state of our communities and the still-tattered state of our social fabric. He is making all the right noises about work/life balance, well-being, corporate power and the environment. People do not generally feel that their problem is poverty, or lack of individual freedom. Their problem is that, despite all our advances and advantages, neither market-driven growth nor state-funded public services seem to be delivering better communities and better lives.
Best of Dave
It’s time we admitted that there’s more to life than money, and it’s time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB – general well-being.
Speech to the Google Zeitgeist Europe, 22 May 2006
The fact that there is so much to celebrate in the new South Africa is not in spite of Mandela and the ANC, it is because of them – and we Conservatives should say so clearly today.
Comment piece in the Observer, 27 August 2006
There’s been a danger that the Conservative Party has been seen too much as just standing for whatever big business wants. I didn’t go into politics to be the mouthpiece for big business.
Observer interview, 18 December 2005
What we need now is green growth. That means harnessing existing and developing technologies in energy and transport; it means putting a price on carbon emissions and ensuring that the polluter pays.
Pasted from <http://www.newstatesman.com/200609250016>
And
From The Globalist, an excerpt from Joseph Ratzinger’s Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam;
Following the global controversy over the Pope’s recent remarks on Islam, we present Benedict XVI’s “Without Roots,” today’s Globalist Bookshelf selection. In it, the Pope argues that the West should let religion play a greater role in public life — and become as fervent about Christianity as the Middle East is about Islam.
Pasted from <http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=5653>
At the hour of its greatest success, Europe seems hollow, as if it were internally paralyzed by a failure of its circulatory system that is endangering its life, subjecting it to transplants that erase its identity.
At the same time as its sustaining spiritual forces have collapsed, a growing decline in its ethnicity is also taking place.
Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future. Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present, as if they were taking something away from our lives.
In its final days, Rome still functioned as a great historical framework, but in practice it was already subsisting on models that were destined to fail. Its vital energy had been depleted.
Toynbee emphasized the difference between technological-material progress and true progress, which he defined as spiritualization.
He recognized that the Western world was indeed undergoing a crisis, which he attributed to the abandonment of religion for the cult of technology, nationalism and militarism. For him this crisis had a name — secularism.
To put it more simply, what can still promise, today and tomorrow,
to offer human dignity to life?
The unresolved issue of Marxism lives on — the crumbling of man’s original uncertain ties about God, himself and the universe. The decline of a moral conscience grounded in absolute values is still our problem today.
Left untreated, it could lead to the self-destruction of the European conscience, which we must begin to consider as a real danger — above and beyond the decline predicted by Spengler.
DC It might be a correct, butnhlpful, as the spiritual has moved from the authoritarian god outside t the spiritual god (s) within.
And an excerpt from The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations by Paul Kennedy. I trust him, from previous writing.
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How do we handle our collective human impact on the environment — with its rising sea levels, collapsing glaciers and massive weather turbulences — without multinational work?
An international challenge
How do we manage global fiscal and trading dislocations without strengthening present UN instruments or creating new ones?
How do we push for the advancement of human rights and the displacement of awful dictatorships except through the summoning of world opinion, pressure and Security Council sanctions?
Don’t give up
So the only answer, as far as I see it, is by trying — by repairing weaknesses, coaxing reluctant governments to accept change, understanding what works best and where international organization has problems — or even should not be involved at all — and not giving up.
Adapted from the book “The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations” by Paul Kennedy, copyright © 2006.
Pasted from <http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=5525>
And looking at news, Billmon writes, sadly, he being the best,(can’t sb write him a check?)
Between Sets
As I have occasionally noted before, I have a life — complete with family responsibilities and a rather large mortgage, both funded by my soulless, meaningless corporate day job.
However, the last few months have been somewhat less than fully productive at the office, thanks to this blog and the potentially insignificant distractions discussed herein.
Now it’s time to catch up (and also get ready for the big move up to the Arctic Circle). Which means posts are likely to be few and far between — or just plain absent — for the indefinite future.
So, if you’re one of those people who’ve e-mailed to tell me that you check every day to see if I’ve posted something new, you should stop now. You’ll only be disappointed.
Pasted from <http://www.billmon.org/> You coud do wrse than spend an evening re-reading much of the last year at his site.
And
From The Economist, an article on a better way to help America’s jobless, and a look at how boosting unions won’t do much for America’s workers.
Research by Erica Groshen and Simon Potter, of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, suggests that whereas temporary lay-offs explained much of the jumps in unemployment during the recessions of the 1970s and early 1980s, nowadays structural job losses dominate. People who are unemployed because their job has gone permanently need to find new lines of work. It takes them longer to find a job and, when they do, they are often paid considerably less than before.
Jeffrey Kling, an economist at the Brookings Institution, argues that the unemployment-benefit system ought to distinguish those who are temporarily out of a job but may find similar, or higher-paid work, and those who face permanently lower income. In a paper for the Hamilton Project, a research programme at Brookings that seeks new policies for America’s centre-left, Mr Kling suggests that the dole should become less like a handout from the government and more like an insurance policy that individual workers finance themselves.
The idea is to give every worker an account, unsnappily called a “temporary earnings replacement account” or TERA. While in work, people could set aside money in these accounts. Those who lose their jobs could take cash out. The level and duration of withdrawals would be set by the government and would be the same as under today’s unemployment system.
Dc: as presented, terrible. You chose to pay into insurance, the weakest workers? Center-left, you’e got to be kidding. Part of the move of political language is to call the old left outrageous, the center the left left, the middle right the center, and.. Well, read the rest.
Pasted from <http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7942235>
From juan cole
Bush’s own church, the United Methodists, has urged an immediate withdrawal of US troops.
Patrick Cockburn does a highly courageous and clear-eyed report on the situation of Diyala province northeast of Baghdad. He quotes the head of the provincial council as saying that 100 Iraqis are killed every week in Diyala. That is 14 or so a day. We don’t see those statistics in the deaths reported daily by the wire services. At most a handful of people from Diyala are reported dead several times a week.
The more I look into it, the more I think this sort of thing may be the underlying reason for which Cheney launched the Iraq War:
‘Iraq is planning to tap the small Ahdab oil field, in central southern Iraq, with development work starting soon, reported TradeArabia. Initial output would be about 30,000 bpd, rising to 90,000 bpd within two years. The field had previously been awarded to the China National Petroleum Corporation and the Chinese arms manufacturer Norinco by Saddam Hussein but an Iraqi official said the contract could be renegotiated. ‘
The question during the next 50 years is who would get the good propriety oil and gas contracts in the Persian Gulf region. If it China and India and to a lesser extent Russia, then the 21st century looks one way. If it is the US, it looks another.
See also his analysis of the Clinton Interview and Wallace’sord with the other principles.
Pasted from <http://www.juancole
And, Army Warns Rumsfeld It’s Billions Short
An extraordinary action by the chief of staff sends a message: The Pentagon must increase the budget or reduce commitments in Iraq and elsewhere.
and
By Peter Spiegel
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 25, 2006
Schwarzenegger foe wants National Guard out of Iraq:
In a pair of speeches on Tuesday, Democrat Phil Angelides plans to say that on his first day as governor he would call for all California National Guardsmen to return to the Golden State.
If implemented, the Angelides proposal would almost certainly provoke a legal challenge.
Angelides maintains, however, that under Perpich v. Department of Defense, a 1990 Supreme Court case, a governor retains the right to refuse to deploy his or her state’s National Guard if deploying the troops “were to interfere with the State Guard’s capacity to respond to local emergencies.”
The Sacramento Bee reported on Sunday that not only would Angelides push to return California’s National Guardsmen from Iraq, he would also: “work to mobilize other governors so that the National Guard can be used once again for its intended purposes, not to prop up the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld failed war policy.” LINK
Pasted from <http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/TheNote/story?id=156238&page=2>
And
In the Weekend Edition of the Wall Street Journal, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) penned an op-ed arguing that “pocketbook conservatives” who “face the very real economic challenges of earning a living, paying the mortgage and raising their children to be productive members of society” are being neglected by both parties. LINK
Pasted from <http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/TheNote/story?id=156238&page=3>
and
WASHINGTON The Army’s top officer withheld a required 2008 budget plan from Pentagon leaders last month after protesting to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that the service could not maintain its current level of activity in Iraq plus its other global commitments without billions in additional funding.
The decision by Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army’s chief of staff, is believed to be unprecedented and signals a widespread belief within the Army that in the absence of significant troop withdrawals from Iraq, funding assumptions must be completely reworked, say current and former Pentagon officials.
“This is unusual, but hell, we’re in unusual times,” said a senior Pentagon official involved in the budget discussions.
Schoomaker failed to submit the budget plan by an Aug. 15 deadline. The protest followed a series of cuts in the service’s funding requests by both the White House and Congress over the last four months.
.com/>
And, Book review
Applebee’s America,
I’ll quote a lt of this because f its relevance to 80%..
and
A VERY LONG EMERGENCY….The LA Times reports today that the Army is engaged in a sort of sit-down strike, refusing to submit a budget until it gets more money:
The decision by Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army’s chief of staff, is believed to be unprecedented and signals a widespread belief within the Army that in the absence of significant troop withdrawals from Iraq, funding assumptions must be completely reworked, say current and former Pentagon officials.
….According to a senior Army official involved in budget talks, Schoomaker is now seeking $138.8 billion in 2008, nearly $25 billion above budget limits originally set by Rumsfeld. The Army’s budget this year is $98.2 billion, making Schoomaker’s request a 41% increase over current levels.
“It’s incredibly huge,” said the Army official, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity when commenting on internal deliberations. “These are just incredible numbers.”
Pasted from <http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/>
And
Charles Kaiser writes in the Los Angeles Times about why 43 retired generals and admirals publicly stated their opposition to Bush’s interrogation policies. For instance:
“Retired Brig. Gen. James P. Cullen was chief judge of the U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals. ‘I grew up in an Army where the rules were very clear and where serviceman and women had no question about what their obligations and responsibilities were under both the Geneva Convention and our domestic law,’ he said. ‘When you have a winking-and-nodding policy [as was the case at Abu Ghraib], that just brings about the consequences that we came to view at [the prison].’
Pasted from <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100879.html>
And
Bush got the report in April. Here he is in August : “You know, I’ve heard this theory about everything was just fine until we arrived, and kind of ‘we’re going to stir up the hornet’s nest’ theory. It just doesn’t hold water, as far as I’m concerned. The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East.”
Pasted from <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100879.html>
And
A new Gallup Poll finds that an astonishing 42 percent of Americans believe that the Bush administration has deliberately manipulated the price of gasoline so that it would decrease before this fall’s elections.
But whether this has happened or not should not be a matter of idle speculation. As a determinable fact, it should be the object of some reporting.
How ’bout it, colleagues?
Pasted from <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100879.html>
