Just how much has economic liberalization moved China toward democracy?

Seymour Martin Lipset famously wrote:

[T]he more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy. From Aristotle down to the present, men have argued that only in a wealthy society in which relatively few citizens lived in real poverty could a situation exist in which the mass of the population could intelligently participate in politics and could develop the self-restraint necessary to avoid succumbing to the appeals of irresponsible demagogues.

Much of the democratic world’s relations with China is driven by Lipset’s notion that economic growth will provide the conditions under which democracy is most likely to occur. I’d like to briefly examine two cases of recent noteworthiness that point out the weaknesses in Lipset’s theory.

The first ”the Chinese government’s reaction to the scandal involving the exportation of pet food, medicine, and toothpaste tainted by counterfeited chemicals reveals a great deal. China’s decision to make global its rampant food and drug tainting problems after it was discovered to be the source of the tainted products reveals that unlike its handling of the SARS incident a couple years ago, the Chinese government, finally realizes that a measure of transparency is required in dealing with its trading partners (many of which are democratic and expect transparency). In a way, then, though the ordered executions of several of its top food and drug safety officials does not seem very democratic, the Chinese government has been compelled, through outside economic incentives provided by global trading, to be a little more transparent, and people within China’s borders more or less benefit from that increased transparency and information.

But lest optimists carry on with glowing predictions of a democratic China, a recent incident ”one in which economic stakes were present ”indicates that China, bound by capitalist motives, still tightly controls the levels of political dissidence it will allow. The Financial Times reports that China’s push to strip away online anonymity and require the authors of web posts to be identified by their real names is an effort to quell the political protests that have been organized through online activism. The article suggests that the Chinese government is putting a lid on political expression because it feels that economic growth is being undermined by political dissidence.

China’s normalization toward international democratic standards of disseminating information to the outside world or creating safe and marketable products to the outside world certainly benefit the people that are not living in China but may benefit the Chinese people very little. If China steps up food and drug regulations to make sure its products are safe, most likely, in an effort to maximize economic growth with the least effort and resources diverted to the task of revamping food and drug safety protocols, China will only make sure that products marketed to the outside world are safe. Products made by Chinese factories for Chinese-only consumption will slip through the cracks of inadequate safety regulations and ineffective enforcement mechanisms.

And the goal of economic dominance, itself, is beginning to be used with more and more frequency to justify the government’s attempts to curb free speech and peaceful protests. Capitalism and economic growth may indeed, as Lipset theorized, bring about the wealth a country needs in order for its citizens to be educated and informed, but in China, the fact remains that informed and active citizens still will not get anywhere so long as certain measures are taken to prevent citizens from affecting political outcomes.

The London terror plot and the Scotland car bomb attack of the past few days are clearly the top stories for the weekend, as the media plays on the fear of Americans and reminds us that terrorism is still a threat in the US. But that’s not all. Fox News and top Republican presidential candidates have reminded us what UK terror is really about: immigration.

The self-proclaimed terrorism expert Rudy Giuliani has already jumped on the UK incidents as an indication of the need for tighter national security in the US, including the obligatory pouring of even more resources into the patrol efforts on the US-Mexico border. One might recall the days when Giuliani enjoyed the contributions of undocumented immigrants in NYC, and prohibited police officers from questioning about immigration status.

This morning on Fox & Friends, a fair and balanced debate was held about the UK terror plot/attack. When a political analyst suggested that both Giuliani and Hillary Clinton could use these incidents to their political advantage, the other guest, a Newsday columnist, quickly responded that Hillary and her fellow proponents of amnesty, multilingualism, and multiculturalism, are essentially the reason why terror happens, a very misguided argument in my view.

At this point, the Republicans will do just about anything to conflate immigration with terrorism. Perhaps the most irrational of these arguments thus far has come from likely Republican candidate Fred Thompson, who has even found a way to bring a Latino group under the banner of potential terrorists.

Thompson spoke about undocumented immigration through the Mexican border at a campaign stop last week, strangely focusing on Cuban exiles as cause for alarm, despite the fact that Cubans who arrive in the United States, under the law, are not undocumented. He said,

If they’re coming from Cuba, where else are they coming from? And I don’t imagine they’re coming here to bring greetings from Castro. We’re living in the era of the suitcase bomb. We can’t be talking seriously about national security while that’s going on. (Watch here.)

Who is next? Under this view, Venezuelan immigrants would surely be viewed in the same way. What about Chinese immigrants? Or will migrants from any left-learning, Islamic or otherwise enemy nation be viewed as spies and terrorists before they are treated as refugees?

The assumption that Cuban exiles are coming to attack the United States, rather than to flee Castro’s rule is actually counterproductive to the Republican ideology regarding Cuba, which first generation Cuban Americans overwhelmingly support.

Hillary smartly condemned his comments. Let’s hope Miami does as well. Although Cuban Americans have a history of rejecting new arrivals from the island, let alone from elsewhere in Latin America, hopefully they will recognize the systematic efforts by Republicans to bring a criminal and now even terrorist association with being a Latino immigrant in the United States.

In 2006, Human Rights Watch named Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft as three of the worst offenders of freedom of speech for their role in helping to censor Chinese internet content. Google.cn (Google in China) censors the Tank Man image from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest from its search engine so that Chinese citizens searching for Tiananmen Square bring up fairly innocuous images and descriptions of Tiananmen Square and Microsoft has offered a blog tool that generates an error rejecting ˜profanity’ when a user includes the word ˜democracy’ in the title of a blog, according to Jonathan Zittrain and John Palfrey of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. Most deplorable has been Yahoo!’s compliance with the Chinese government in implicating several Chinese journalists for their participation in either voicing online dissent or using the internet as a means of communicating to people outside the country about the conditions they find wanting.

The study of international politics often leaves little reason to have faith in international norms and principles ”international norms and principles like the Declaration of Human Rights and the Kyoto Protocol which have a relatively weak ability to coerce signatory countries to uphold their agreements and to create real costs for nonsignatory countries to remain outside the bandwagon of signatory states. Privacy principles, established under the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD) in 1980, fail to be upheld in the modern-day, by the governments of member countries because the OECD guidelines, while well-meaning, are constructed too broadly and vaguely for there to be a clear demarcation between violating those principles and carrying out those principles while bearing other national interests in mind. And even if someone, like Human Rights Watch, could decry that a country conducting internet surveillance on its citizens was violating the OECD Privacy Guidelines, what would come of it? There exists no organ to enforce compliance with international standards like the OECD Privacy Principles.

Added to the problem of enforcement is the amorphous and quickly changing scope of cyber law, where privacy acts and precedents in communications and electronics regulations can be either ignored, discarded, or blurred because the internet is the new frontier of communications and technology, where new challenges and opportunities to interpret ”or misinterpret ”the law and prior norms abounds.

In light of all of international governance’s prior failures, I do acknowledge that in the absence of real enforcement mechanisms, the simple act of signing onto an international agreement may create reputational costs in an iterated game theory scenario that would induce a country to comply with norms and standards:

For example, if Country A were to default from an international standard that a group of other countries adhered to, Country A could be blackballed out of important trading deals that are important to its economy. Thus, there would be a strong economic incentive to stick with the agreement. This is generally how the World Trade Organization (WTO) is supposed to work. And in general, this method of using economic incentives to induce good behavior ”or democratization ”has been painted in the West as a success of neoliberalism.

But despite the iota of faith in international law that I have, I think that the strength and potential in neoliberalism lies not within the construct of international laws developed by state governments banding together in economic arrangements like the OECD or the WTO. The new frontier for international governance and the creation of new norms for good behavior, in my opinion, lies within multinational corporations. Multinational corporations span more publics than can traditional state governments and can infiltrate many more close-off societies than well-meaning non-profit humanitarian agencies that are barred access by authoritarian governments fearful of the private agendas that humanitarian agencies bring with them through the pervasive arm of market forces.

One project that I think holds particular promise is the principles project being developed under the advice of the Berkman Center of Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. By the end of 2007, several large corporations with stakes in cyber law and internet governance, including Google, Microsoft, Vodafone, and Yahoo! met with groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights in China, and Reporters Without Borders to discuss how to draft a framework intended to adjudicate the two interests that have been traditionally opposed ”generating profit and adhering to human rights.

The project is intended to follow the footsteps of Leon Sullivan, one of the fathers of the concept of corporate social responsibility who published the Sullivan Principles in 1977 to ensure nondiscrimination and the protection of human rights by companies.

Following the publication of the Sullivan Principles, the world saw a rise of corporations rising to the challenge of adopting the Sullivan Principles in the attempt to more clearly define their responsibilities to their stakeholders and their workers, and as companies bandwagoned to adopt these principles, it became a reputational cost for those companies that did not adopt the principles to be seen as legitimate by their shareholders.

I think that developing web principles is a step in the right direction for the amorphous state of internet governance. If enough major internet corporations go on board to adhere to principles that prohibit corporate complicity with internet censorship, deciding not to do business with closed information societies in China and other countries, it becomes clear that in the end, state governments will be the ones to buckle. Governments will not be able to afford the economic costs of having inferior technology and communications networks, and they will have to make significant concessions to the corporate ideologies of the companies providing technology and communications services.

This is the new frontier of internet governance ”governance by major corporations. But this is not a hegemonic rule of the Googles and the Microsofts, but governance scheme largely tempered by the democratic-minded markets which they serve. Most of the impetus for creating a principles framework came from the public backlash from stakeholders to Yahoo!’s and Google’s efforts to censor the internet in China. As human rights remains a significant concern for many stakeholders, it is clear that the market forces of neoliberalism will continue to give economic incentives for companies to adopt more socially responsible means of conducting business.

Protectionism is a threat to the U.S. economy. Saving globalization requires that its gains are spread more widely. The best way: redistribute income, or at least so says Kenneth F. Scheve and Matthew J. Slaughter in the current foreign affairs.

Globalization has brought huge overall benefits, but earnings for most U.S. workers ” even those with college degrees ” have been falling recently; inequality is greater now than at any other time in the last 70 years. Whatever the cause, the result has been a surge in protectionism. To save globalization, policymakers must spread its gains more widely. The best way to do that is by redistributing income.

They claim that there is greater support for engagement with the world economy in countries that spend more on programs for dislocated workers. I am little unsure about this claim, since France, for example, has very generous social programs and they have a very negative view of globalization.

More to the point, there is another side of the opinion poles, which is that politicians both react to them, but can also affect them. Many people blame globalization for their situation in great part because government officials often say that globalization is to blame for the unpopular policies that they implement. Similarly, corporations regularly say that they have no choice but to cut wages or offshore their operations to make it in today’s global economy. Further, some democratic politicians reenforce that idea in the minds of their constituents. Globalization is the perfect scapegoat. This political reality would have been a potentially illuminated area to engage.

Having said that it is a a great article. The basic idea is that the vast majority of American are not enjoying a rise in income through globalization although it is crucial to continued growth. The public has an increasingly negative view of globalization and move to protectionism, despite their apparent understanding of the benefits. Their solution, which is worth quoting in full, is something new to consider.

Recall that $500 billion is a common estimate of the annual income gain the United States enjoys today from earlier decades of trade and investment liberalization and also of the additional annual income it would enjoy as a result global free trade in goods and services. These aggregate gains, past and prospective, are immense and therefore immensely important to secure. But the imbalance in recent income growth suggests that the number of Americans not directly sharing in these aggregate gains may now be very large.

Truly expanding the political support for open borders requires a radical change in fiscal policy. This does not, however, mean making the personal income tax more progressive, as is often suggested. U.S. taxation of personal income is already quite progressive. Instead, policymakers should remember that workers do not pay only income taxes; they also pay the FICA (Federal Insurance Contributions Act) payroll tax for social insurance. This tax offers the best way to redistribute income.

The payroll tax contains a Social Security portion and a Medicare portion, each of which is paid half by the worker and half by the employer. The overall payroll tax is a flat tax of 15.3 percent on the first $94,200 of gross income for every worker, with an ongoing 2.9 percent flat tax for the Medicare portion beyond that. Because it is a flat-rate tax on a (largely) capped base, it is a regressive tax — that is, it tends to reinforce rather than offset pretax inequality. At $760 billion in 2005, the regressive payroll tax was nearly as big as the progressive income tax ($1.1 trillion). Because it is large and regressive, the payroll tax is an obvious candidate for meaningful income redistribution linked to globalization.

A New Deal for globalization would combine further trade and investment liberalization with eliminating the full payroll tax for all workers earning below the national median. In 2005, the median total money earnings of all workers was $32,140, and there were about 67 million workers at or below this level. Assuming a mean labor income for this group of about $25,000, these 67 million workers would receive a tax cut of about $3,800 each. Because the economic burden of this tax falls largely on workers, this tax cut would be a direct gain in after-tax real income for them. With a total price tag of about $256 billion, the proposal could be paid for by raising the cap of $94,200, raising payroll tax rates (for progressivity, rates could escalate as they do with the income tax), or some combination of the two. This is, of course, only an outline of the needed policy reform, and there would be many implementation details to address. For example, rather than a single on-off point for this tax cut, a phase-in of it (like with the earned-income tax credit) would avoid incentive-distorting jumps in effective tax rates.

This may sound like a radical proposal. But keep in mind the figure of $500 billion: the annual U.S. income gain from trade and investment liberalization to date and the additional U.S. gain a successful Doha Round could deliver. Redistribution on this scale may be required to overcome the labor-market concerns driving the protectionist drift. Determining the right scale and structure of redistribution requires a thoughtful national discussion among all stakeholders. Policymakers must also consider how exactly to link such redistribution to further liberalization. But this should not obscure the essential idea: to be politically viable, efforts for further trade and investment liberalization will need to be explicitly linked to fundamental fiscal reform aimed at distributing globalization’s aggregate gains more broadly.

A more distributive fiscal policy and fairer rules will undoubtedly make globalization more politically viable and sustainable.

The article also makes me think about developing countries. I’m a sucker (perhaps knowing so much economics) for political liberty following from economic liberty. It’s breathtaking what’s happened in the last 20 years or less. It’s as though the whole world has changed its mind. Everywhere — in India, China, Asia, Latin America, Europe, North America, and above all in the communist world — governments have retreated from “the commanding heights of the economy.” The old debates were about what the role of the market was, what was the role of the state. I think it’s now generally appreciated that it’s the market that harnesses people’s initiative best. And the real focus of progressive thinking is not how to oppose and suppress market forces but how to use market forces to achieve progressive objectives. The article raised the same old argument against globalization: does it really work for lower class workers?

Last week, the State Department released its annual Trafficking in Persons Report. This report, among other things, classifies countries according to their efforts to halt the slave trade. There are now 32 countries in the State Department’s “Tier 2 watch list,” a list of those governments that are making efforts to comply with antislavery treaties but where compliance is still weak, which includes China, India and Russia. Another 16 countries are placed on the “Tier 3″ list, a list of those governments that are making little or no effort to halt the slave trade.

The State Department claims to have taken a global lead on combating the modern slave trade and much of the press coverage will implicitly praise our name and shame policy. What few people realize is that we rarely punish countries for failing to act. The law that authorizes the TIP report, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, also requires that the US government impose economic sanctions by blocking economic and military aid to tier three countries, unless national interests are at risk.

In September, President Bush will sign a memo outlining the sanctions that each country will face due to their status in the report. If history is any lesson, Bush will sign off on as many as half the tier three countries getting an exception from some or all the sanctions. Some are oil producers, like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, or key allies in Washington’s war on terror, like Uzbekistan. The President has historically exempted other countries, like Iran, Sudan, Syria, and Venezuela, from part of the sanctions.

National security provisions are important, especially during the war on terror. But the State department and the President need to do more than pressure and threaten small governments across the developing world about their compliance, many of whom are on the tier 2 list. We must hold are allies to an even higher standard, no matter our reliance on their oil or geographic position. The Bush administration should remember that governments that allow this scourge to thrive are unlikely to be reliable allies when it comes to other problems that concern the United States. The TIP report describes unspeakable crimes and human rights abuses and come September, the President should do more than pat himself on the back for publishing a report, and should take direct action against all of the countries who are doing nothing to alleviate this problem.

This morning, the world learned that al-Qaeda’s man in Iraq, Zarqawi’s murderous tenure as “Prince of Iraq” ended at the hands of a precision United States Air Force strike. For a moment, we breathe a sigh of relief that one of the most reviled terrorists our troops have had to face has been stricken from this earth.

However, his death, two hours later, does little to stem the violence.

The painful, familiar beat resumed just two hours after the announcement of Mr. Zarqawi’s death when five young women waiting outside a university were gunned down in a drive-by shooting, a witness said. Four bombs killed as many as 30 people in largely Shiite areas of Baghdad, The Associated Press reported.

Yet now comes the painful reminder, that Zarqawi is only a man. Men live and die, but ideas go on forever. The ideas that Zarqawi and his followers preached, ideas that have brought Iraq to its knees in civil war, devastated by a fierce insurgency that considers all but its followers to be enemies. These ideas live on, despite the death of Zarqawi. He now becomes immortalized and remembered as a martyr, stricken by the devil of America.

I am not saying, that we should not have killed him. I would have loved a chance to capture him, and have him executed before our armed forces in Iraq. However, his death is only the continued rallying cry for increased violence. Now, more than ever, it is important for the United States to consider how we are approaching this war.

For this post, I am going to leave arguments for or against withdraw out, despite one’s feelings on them, we can assume that at least for the time being our troops will continue to be in harms way. It is thus incumbent upon us to decide how America will act to destroy this enemy. For the right, the only way is to insist upon the inherent rightness of America, our superiority as a nation, and our ability to do no wrong. It is this attitude though, which most hampers our efforts battling against jihadism.

There is no question that the principles of democracy and freedom far outshine jihadism. It’s not a question of moral relativity, but of right and wrong. But this is why it is so important for us to behave in the true tradition of freedom and democracy. Only the most foolish think that America can never do any wrong. It is this insistence of such a foolish thought that allows more of our enemies to bring more young people to their side. In Iraq and the Middle East young, angry, impressionable men watch stories of Abu Gharib or the slaughter at Haditha, and they become enraged. Then, our government, instead of stepping forward and truly punishing those responsible in the chain of command dismiss many of the cases.

It is only by demonstrating the true measure of justice that we will be able to prevail in an ongoing war against jihadism. Failure to demonstrate our justice, while maintaining military force where necessary, Iraq not being necessary; will only result in ongoing battles with jihadism.

The death of Zarqawi provides a time for questions as to where America needs to move now in fighting off the insurgency and gaining any semblance of stability in Iraq, if such a thing is possible. Regardless, it also remains a chance to witness first hand the power of an idea created by an ordinary man who now lies dead. And should afford us the rare opportunity to examine how to win this war, a war that can only be one with justice. Inflicting justice upon those who have attacked us, those who would seek to destroy us, and executing justice upon our own who seek to undermine justice abroad.

One of my great discoveries over break was that fifty-three Frontline reports are online.

These I watched over break and suggest:
The Persuaders

ANNOUNCER: It’s everywhere you look.
BOB GARFIELD, Columnist, Advertising Age: You cannot walk down the street without being bombarded.
ANNOUNCER: They call it a “clutter crisis.”
NAOMI KLEIN, Author, No Logo: Consumers are like roaches. You spray them and spray them, and after a while, it doesn’t work anymore. We develop immunities.
ANNOUNCER: And the multi-billion-dollar advertising industry is in a desperate struggle to break through.
JOHN HAYES, Chief Marketing Officer, American Express: We don’t just come forward with what we want to sell, we engage you with things that you want.
ANNOUNCER: Advertisers have blurred the line between programming and product.
SCOTT DONATON, Editor-in-Chief, Advertising Age: It’s advertising that people not only will tolerate but will actually go in search of.
ACTRESS: ["Sex and the City"] The way God and Madison Avenue intended.
ANNOUNCER: But how is advertising affecting our lives and the world around us?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER, New York University: Once a culture becomes entirely advertising-friendly, it ceases to be a culture at all.
ANNOUNCER: Tonight on FRONTLINE “
DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF, FRONTLINE Correspondent: “ask me this all the time. What about the environment?
ANNOUNCER: Correspondent Douglas Rushkoff takes you inside the changing world of The Persuaders.

Is Walmart Good for America?

ANNOUNCER: There’s never been a company like it.
Prof. GARY GEREFFI, Duke University: Wal-Mart is probably the broadest and most powerful company in U.S. business history.
ANNOUNCER: Its everyday low prices benefit millions of Americans.
BRUCE BARTLETT, National Center for Policy Analysis: Wal-Mart has really given an increase in income to every American.
ANNOUNCER: But some say it’s a bad bargain.
STEVE RATCLIFF: It’s putting people out of work, that’s what it’s doing.
ANNOUNCER: Tonight, correspondent Hedrick Smith investigates how Wal-Mart is changing the American economy “
HEDRICK SMITH, FRONTLINE Correspondent: The Chinese guys bought the big machine?
ANNOUNCER: “following the trail of low prices in America to low-cost production in China “
DONALD HAY, Entrepreneur: I said, “Hold it. Hold it. Hold it. The next one’s China. I got to get here.”
ANNOUNCER: “tracking the nation’s growing trade deficit “
YVONNE SMITH, Port of Long Beach: Wal-Mart’s our number one customer.
HEDRICK SMITH: Wal-Mart’s your number one customer?
YVONNE SMITH: Number one customer.
ANNOUNCER: “and examining the growing controversy over the Wal-Mart way.
ALAN TONELSON, U.S. Business & Industry Council: The lowest prices have to lead to the lowest wages and to job loss and to lower living standards.
ANNOUNCER: Tonight on FRONTLINE, Is Wal-Mart Good for America?

Secret History of the Credit Card

ANNOUNCER: Tonight on FRONTLINE: The average American family has eight.
JIM MUELLER: “Zero percent for life on transfer balances” ”
ANNOUNCER: Credit cards, plastic money, have become both a necessity and a ticket to a better life.
[television commercial]
ACTOR AND ACTRESS: Hawaii!
BEN STEIN, Actor/Author: A credit card is an extraordinary, unbelievably great convenience for the consumer.
ANNOUNCER: But the credit card industry plays by its own rules.
Prof. ELIZABETH WARREN, Harvard Law School: I don’t know any merchant in America who can change the price after you’ve bought the item, except a credit card company.
ANNOUNCER: Credit card banks earn record profits.
LOWELL BERGMAN, FRONTLINE Correspondent: MBNA’s profits last year ” one-and-a-half times that of McDonald’s.
EDWARD YINGLING, American Bankers Association: Well, McDonald’s didn’t do too well last year.
ANNOUNCER: But the profits come at a price.
ANDREW GUILE, Consumer: Now they’ve raised my rate to 19.98, and I have not been late ever.
PAT WALLACE, Bay Area Better Business Bureau: There are irritated, unhappy, dissatisfied customers in this industry.
Prof. ELIZABETH WARREN: They are the new loan sharks in America.
DUNCAN MacDONALD, Fmr. Citibank General Counsel: I certainly didn’t imagine that someday we might have ended up creating a Frankenstein.
LOWELL BERGMAN: Frankenstein? What do you mean, Frankenstein?
ANNOUNCER: Tonight, FRONTLINE correspondent Lowell Bergman and The New York Times investigate the secrets of your credit card
.

Karl Rove– The Architect

ANNOUNCER: Tonight on FRONTLINE: Karl Rove had a master plan.
MIKE ALLEN, The Washington Post: He was the architect. His hand was in all of it.
ANNOUNCER: It took 40 years, but he changed the political landscape.
POLITICAL OBSERVER: Karl Rove came to town with one goal, and that was this massive Republican realignment.
ANNOUNCER: How did he do it? And what does it mean for America?
POLITICAL OBSERVER: Karl Rove wants a permanent Republican majority.
POLITICAL OBSERVER: He’s the God inside the machine.
ANNOUNCER: Tonight, FRONTLINE and The Washington Post examine Karl Rove: The Architect.

The Torture Question

ANONYMOUS INTERVIEWEE: There was a lot of soldiers that had digital cameras at Abu Ghraib, and they would take pictures of literally everything that they would do.
ANNOUNCER: Tonight on FRONTLINE, the story about what really happened in cell block 1A.
Spc. ANTHONY LAGOURANIS, Interrogator, US Army, 2001-’05: Part of it is, they were trying to get information, but part of it is also just pure sadism.
ANONYMOUS INTERVIEWEE: They felt righteous in doing it, and that’s what made it really dangerous and diabolical.
ANNOUNCER: With exclusive interviews ”
ANONYMOUS INTERVIEWEE: And this escalated all the way to make them fear that rape could be performed on prisoners.
ANNOUNCER: ”and never before seen footage.
GI: [home video] We’re all mad! We’re all mad!
ANNOUNCER: How high did it reach?
Gen. JANIS KARPINSKI, Cmdr., 800th MP Brigade, 2003-’04: General Sanchez put his finger in Colonel Pappas’s chest and told him he wanted the information.
ANNOUNCER: And what does it reveal?
Gen. RICHARD MYERS, Joint Chiefs Chairman: We’ve dealt with that. If it was only the night shift at Abu Ghraib, it’s a pretty good clue that it wasn’t a more widespread problem.
Sen. JOHN McCAIN (R), Arizona: This isn’t about who they are, this is about who we are.
ANNOUNCER: Where else did it spread?
Spc. ANTHONY LAGOURANIS: It’s not at Abu Ghraib, it’s all over Iraq. The infantry units are torturing people in their homes.
ANNOUNCER: FRONTLINE exposes the dark secrets behind “The Torture Question.”

A Slate Article about the boring world of logistics. I would say they hit gold here, if Thomas Friedman did not dedicate whole chapters to this idea in his book, The World is Flat.

Since we are on the subject, I read the World is Flat last summer and might be the only person in the world who was disappointed. I enjoy Friendman’s op-eds. His genius lies in finding a compelling anecdote. This book, on the whole, could allows him the space and time to make a stronger case for his arguments, which can be weak in his columns, but he just really fails to do so. Instead of one anecdote, we get many, but neither amounts to extrapolated arguments in a good social science sense. Some of his anecdotes, such as his discussion of UPS, are very strong. Friedman has written is an excellent primer for the uninitiated to the world in which technology rewrites rules but little more.

By reading his book you would think cities like Bangalore are paradises. With empowered citizens basking in the modern economy. How many Indians speak English? Use PCs? Can afford a Dell? Want to answer phones for the rest of their life? Yes, Friedman acknowledges, there are problems: poverty, illiteracy, disease, and so on. Exactly how these problems interact with his glorious vision is hard to say. Friedman is so focused on India, China, Eastern Europe and the US that he forgets the rest of the world. Africa gets a brief acknowledgment, and no more. I don’t recall reading anything about South America. Actors in the global economy need to be thinking about interactions beyond those countries that are becoming technology havens. We need to think about a world where a rising tide truly raises all boats, not just the ones we care to think about this half-century.

The First Lady began her trip to Africa today, and began her trip expressing disappointment in those who criticize the Bush AIDS plan for Africa. From the article:

Opponents contend that money under the Bush program is often siphoned off to faith-based groups that preach abstinence, but supporters say in Africa promoting the use of condoms has failed to halt the disease.

“I’m always a little bit irritated when I hear the criticism of abstinence, because abstinence is absolutely 100 percent effective in eradicating a sexually transmitted disease,” Bush said.

Actually from my semester spent working in an AIDS clinic, I got the crazy impression that the way to eradicate a disease like AIDS, was abstinence/safe-sex and also treatment. Treatment being the biggest lacking factor in US aid to Africa. The article also says that Bush is asking for a $15 billion emergency plan. This is the same plan he mentioned in the 2003 State of the Union address, of course it seems to have fallen off the radar as he’s about to give another SOTU in 2006.

We can only hope that a real commitment to eradicating AIDS through African will someday be made by the nations of the world with the financial and moral might to do so, but as long as we continue to talk about a $15 billion emergency plan that hasn’t happened and insist that abstinence alone is how to eradicate the disease, we’re hopeless.

Hit the wires nearly an hour ago, Kuwait’s Emir has died.

For the first time since Kuwait gained independence from Britain in 1961, the emir in 2003 split the posts of crown prince and prime minister which had been held by the ailing crown prince Sheikh Saad al-Abdullah al-Sabah since 1978, naming Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, his half-brother, as premier.

Under the Kuwaiti constitution, crown prince Sheikh Saad, who has been ill since undergoing colon surgery in 1997, will automatically become emir of the Gulf Arab state, an
OPEC member which pumps around 2.6 million barrels of oil a day.

Monday’s Slate featured an article called “GI Schmo” by Fred Kaplan describing the Army loosening it’s restrictions on the recruitment of what are known as Category IV recruits.

In response to the tightening trends, on Sept. 20, 2005, the Defense Department released DoD Instruction 1145.01, which allows 4 percent of each year’s recruits to be Category IV applicants ”up from the 2 percent limit that had been in place since the mid-1980s. Even so, in October, the Army had such a hard time filling its slots that the floodgates had to be opened; 12 percent of that month’s active-duty recruits were Category IV. November was another disastrous month; Army officials won’t even say how many Cat IV applicants they took in, except to acknowledge that the percentage was in “double digits.”

What’s worse is that one would think with training and proper education most average Americans could be made into infantry fighters or military support staff. However, as Kaplan continues a study by the RAND corporation done for the DoD suggests otherwise, and even more frighteningly the increase in Category IV can have an overall net negative affect on the military as affects can be seen in individual units.

The same study of signal battalions took soldiers who had just taken advanced individual training courses and asked them to troubleshoot a faulty piece of communications gear. They passed if they were able to identify at least two technical problems. Smarts trumped training. Among those who had scored Category I on the aptitude test (in the 93-99 percentile), 97 percent passed. Among those who’d scored Category II (in the 65-92 percentile), 78 percent passed. Category IIIA: 60 percent passed. Category IIIB: 43 percent passed. Category IV: a mere 25 percent passed.

The pattern is clear: The higher the score on the aptitude test, the better the performance in the field. This is true for individual soldiers and for units. Moreover, the study showed that adding one high-scoring soldier to a three-man signals team boosted its chance of success by 8 percent (meaning that adding one low-scoring soldier boosts its chance of failure by a similar margin).

Kaplan continues to note that the study also shows that better units make fewer mistakes and in turn are cheaper. Absent a sudden surge in recruitment the evidence is pretty frightening. Of course has casualties mount and we remain without an exit strategy there is little reason to believe that recruitment will be on the upswing. And we’re left with a crucial question is pulling out also beneficial to maintain our army as an elite, well trained, and intelligent fighting force?

http://balkin.blogspot.com/2005/12/curious-word-honor.html

You should read this post at Balkinization–it’s brilliant. In particular, it brings to the forefront one of the largest unspoken dilemmas of modern politics and philosophy: pragmatism vs. aspiration. As John McCain is quoted in the above as saying, “It’s not about who they are; it’s about who we are.” Whether or not you think torture is permissible, how we approach the problem speaks volumes about our qualities as a nation and a culture. See my previous post for more on this.