Why doesn’t people’s suffering translate into freedom?

"My grandmother saw so many changes during her own life" the visitor from Europe said.  The grandmother lived through Hitler's maniacal swallowing up of the Sudetenland and the big war after that, the Soviet tanks rolling in, and the barbed wire fencing and the guard dogs to make sure nobody could leave.  Fortunately, she lived a life long enough to also experience freedom after the fall of the Communist Bloc.

I remember the excitement when the Berlin Wall fell.  To this day, I am amazed at how the experts never saw that coming.  History just happens, more often than not.  The man who was behind that historic collapse, Mikhail Gorbachev, has authored a new book, which provides the context for this NY Times report:

In his twilight years, Mr. Gorbachev has become an isolated figure. Most of his contemporaries are dead. He is just critical enough about the lack of democracy under Mr. Putin that state-run television channels avoid him. His death has been announced more than once.

A once tremendously powerful and feared man is now "an isolated figure."  

Mr. Gorbachev enjoys no immunity from prosecution, and hence like many government critics, feels increasingly uneasy as the Kremlin chips away at civil liberties. He said he feared being declared a “foreign agent,” a revived Stalinist label that basically means “spy,” and that is now being used to shutter dozens of civil society organizations.
“There are quite a few reactionary-minded people in this country who are already declaring me a foreign agent — they think that I am working for someone,” he said. It is quite a statement from a man, who if he had changed nothing, might still be the supreme leader of the Soviet Union, as previous leaders tended to rule for life.

And here in the US we are very close to electing America's Putin as the President!

Svetlana Alexievich, whose Secondhand Time is one of books that I have ordered for this summer's reading, has an interesting observation about Putin:

“In the West, people demonize Putin,” Ms. Alexievich, who turns 68 later this month, said in a recent interview here, speaking Russian through a translator after a conference on her work at the University of Gothenburg. “They do not understand that there is a collective Putin, consisting of some millions of people who do not want to be humiliated by the West, ” she added. “There is a little piece of Putin in everyone.”

Apparently there is a little piece of Putin within quite a few million Americans too :(

Alexievich "has never considered writing fiction."  Why?

Life is much more interesting.

I am sure the European visitor's late grandmother, too, would have agreed with that. 

Hey, at least capitalism helps us wipe our shit!

The last time I blogged about Venezuela, which was less than a hundred days ago, I wrote:

As in the old Soviet Union, Chavez and Maduro have no understanding of price.  All they know is the empty flame-throwing rhetoric attacking "capitalism," whatever that means to whoever listens to them! 

The comparison with the Soviet Union seems like an eternal gift that keeps on giving.  Writing at Cato (yes, the libertarian think-tank, in case any of my faculty union "comrades" are reading this!) David Boaz notes (ht):

In 1990 I went to a Cato Institute conference in what was then still the Soviet Union. We were told to bring our own toilet paper, which was in fact useful advice. Now, after only 16 years of Chavista rule, Venezuela has demonstrated that “Socialism of the 21st Century” is pretty much like socialism in the 20th century

Yes, toilet paper.

What happened, you ask?

 “For over a year we haven’t had toilet paper, soap, any kind of milk, coffee or sugar. So we have to tell our guests to come prepared.”…

Boaz comments:

But what I never understood is this: Why toilet paper? How hard is it to make toilet paper? I can understand a socialist economy having trouble producing decent cars or computers. But toilet paper?

Chavez's "Bolivarian Socialism" gift to the people!

But, of course, one can always pay a high price in the black market, thanks to bachaqueros.  Who are they, you ask?

Often moving in motorized packs, bachaqueros specialize in ferreting out what items are available and where they can be found among the various government-sponsored food outlets and privately run stores. The bachaqueros depend on inside informants and satiated buyers who tip them off before word gets out to most people.
Purchasing the goods with cash, they resell them through informally arranged delivery networks set up through social media. They sell milk powder, chicken and disposable diapers at outrageous markups, counting on Venezuelans to pay premiums to avoid the hassles of la cola, which means standing in line but which has become a synonym for the act of shopping itself.

Maduro, the heir selected by Chavez himself, is making sure that when he is done, the country will be FUBAR.  What is FUBAR, you ask?  Fucked Up Beyond All Repair!

So, how does Maduro respond?

President Maduro blames Washington and "imperialism."

Saint Chavez can't be wrong, and neither can his anointed one, right?

But, Maduro does not stop with that.  No sir.  He is one hell of a nutcase.

President Nicolas Maduro is drumming up a petition, to be signed by Venezuelans opposed to the measure, to hand Obama in person at the Summit of the Americas in Panama April 10-11.

But, that is only a few more days to go.  How can Maduro get this done, you ask?

Well, he began last week by ordering all Venezuelan schools to hold an "anti-imperialist day" against "U.S. meddling" in the oil-rich but bitterly divided nation's internal affairs.
Activities would include — you guessed it — the "collection of the signatures of the students, and teaching, administrative, maintenance and cooking personnel."
Maduro's next step, according to the opposition and human rights groups, was to order state workers to join in, or be sacked.

Ah, yes, will make Hugo Chavez smile from that socialist heaven!

Discussing his petition this week, he said: "I believe that the threat from Obama has awoken the greatest love for what we are doing for the fatherland."
"History books will recall him, President Obama, as the one who attempted to threaten a people and what he did was lift up their national, patriotic and Bolivarian spirit."

There is not enough toilet paper to wipe the shit that comes out of Maduro's mouth!

God does not care for Venezuela!

There is one huge problem that I end up with after traveling to a country--I end up worrying about that country, too.  As a kid, life was simpler for the only reason--in this context--that all I worried about was, well, India, though I was fascinated by other countries also.  Then, from the moment I landed in Los Angeles, my worries about the US began.

The first on this list of my "special" countries--other than the old country and the adopted one--was Venezuela.  In the summer after the first year of graduate school in Los Angeles, I went to Venezuela with a group of fellow graduate students.  As I have blogged more than once, I have warm memories of that country and its people, and how that experience was even a part of my growing up in so many different ways.

It pains me--and such empathy is no good for my heart--when I read about the chaos there, thanks to the resource-curse and the dirty rotten scoundrels who have governed Venezuela.  I don't know enough about its history to figure out whether Hugo Chavez was the worst of them all, but I bet he is up there in the hall of shame.

“I’ve always been a Chavista,” said Ms. Noriega, using a term for a loyal Chávez supporter. But “the other day, I found a Chávez T-shirt I’d kept, and I threw it on the ground and stamped on it, and then I used it to clean the floor. I was so angry. I don’t know if this is his fault or not, but he died and left us here, and things have been going from bad to worse.”

Indeed, from bad to worse!

In the old days, we used to joke about life in the Soviet Union, with its shortages.  Like this one:

A customer walks into a shop and says, "oh, you don't have any fish".
The shop worker angrily retorts with, "you have come to the wrong shop, comrade.  This is a butcher's shop where we don't have any meat."   And then he adds "the store where they don't have any fish is in the fish shop across the road!"

Those were the days that I was sure we would not return to.  But then, well, there was Hugo Chavez!

Venezuelans have put up with shortages and long lines for years. But as the price of oil, the country’s main export, has plunged, the situation has grown so dire that the government has sent troops to patrol huge lines snaking for blocks. Some states have barred people from waiting outside stores overnight, and government officials are posted near entrances, ready to arrest shoppers who cheat the rationing system.

Lines and crowds like in this photograph:

What a tragedy!

Chavez died and made sure that his chosen successor would further screw things up for the people:

President Nicolas Maduro stuck to the party line, blaming oil's ruinous price plunge on the global capitalism "of the north.""The capitalism of the world of the north is trying to destroy OPEC, to control sources of energy, to destroy the just prices that we need and have been assimilated by the entire world," said Maduro. 

As in the old Soviet Union, Chavez and Maduro have no understanding of price.  All they know is the empty flame-throwing rhetoric attacking "capitalism," whatever that means to whoever listens to them!

Venezuela has the world’s largest estimated petroleum reserves, and when oil prices were high, oil exports made up more than 95 percent of its hard currency income. Mr. Chávez used the oil riches to fund social spending, like increased pensions and subsidized grocery stores. Now that income has been slashed.
“If things are so bad now, I really cannot imagine how they will be in February or March” when some of the lowest oil prices “materialize in terms of cash flow,” said Francisco J. Monaldi, a professor of energy policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Mr. Maduro spent 14 straight days in January traveling the globe in an effort to court investment and persuade other oil-producing nations to cut production and push the price back up.
“We have serious economic difficulties regarding the country’s revenue,” Mr. Maduro said to the legislature during his annual address, which had to be pushed back because of the trip. “But God will always be with us. God will provide. And we will get, and we have gotten, the resources to maintain the country’s rhythm.”

Aha, so there lies the difference between the Soviets and the Chavistas: at least the Soviets didn't believe that god will provide and rescue them from their terrible sins!  

Two boys who wanted to pose for me during that trip in 1988

"College for all" confirms an old truth: there is no free lunch!

The old Soviet Union operated outside of the idea of supply and demand; instead of the marketplace deciding the appropriate levels of supply, bureaucrats and the party apparatchik decided on the quantity, whether it was about tractors or bread.  Such matters are impossible for even the most intelligent human to divine, and it is no surprise that there were long lines for practically everything, prompting various jokes like this one:

After a long wait in the queue, it is now Ivan's turn at the window to buy the television set that he was set on.
"There is a waiting list" he was told.  "Come back in three months."
Ivan is unhappy.  "Three months?" he asks
Then, slowly gathering himself, Ivan says,  "so, can I make an appointment?"
"Of course, comrade" the woman at the window replies with sarcasm in her tone.. "How about exactly three months from now?"
Ivan nods. He asks "morning or afternoon?"
"Afternoon. Why do you need to know?"
"The plumber is coming in the morning." 

Ah, it was fun in graduate school to talk and read about the USSR.  It is a good thing I did because I can relate them all even to contemporary life, here in the US!

Here in Oregon, our elected officials have divined that forty percent of the adults should have four-year college degrees; another forty percent should have two-year college degrees; and the rest will be high school graduates.

Now, why 40-40-20?  Why not 35-35-30?  Or 30-60-10?  Aha, you are beginning to see the craziness!

When we--as the government--decide as that we ought to have a certain number of college graduates, then we are also compelled to follow-up on that by allocating public resources.  Higher education is merely one of the line items in the government's budget.  A forty percent versus thirty percent requires many more millions of dollars, which have to be re-allocated from some other line item.  After all, the  constitution requires us to balance the budget.

Thus far, the drive towards producing college graduates has been accompanied by diminishing allocations from the state, which have then triggered dramatic increases in tuition and fees that students have to pay out of their pockets. Well, most do not have deep pockets, which is why we have an alarming trend of ever increasing student debt, even before they graduate.

Against, such a background of scarce tax dollars, pushing for a 40-40-20 means the budget numbers will not add up.  One option might be to weaken the degree requirements and somehow graduate more students faster and more efficiently.  After all, how hard can it be to transform a university into some kind of a Fordist conveyor belt system, right?

In case you, the enlightened reader, think that I am exaggerating, rest assured that public universities have been asked to develop a degree called the "Applied Baccalaureate" that will provide an easier path for a four-year degree compared to the existing BA and BS.  I shall avoid this "inside baseball" discussion.

But, of course, even the AB won't be enough to help us reach that 40-40-20 goal.  Finances are tight.  Therefore, it is no surprise that the system is now engaged in discussions.  But, as in the case of those old Soviet apparatchik, these meetings are held in secret:

Oregon’s top higher education officials are engaged in a hypothetical analysis of financial pressures that the state’s public universities, including the University of Oregon, face over the next few years.
But they want to keep the projections secret.

Ah, yes, revealing them might harm the country's national security and al-Qaeda might infiltrate the college campuses and make biological weapons that will then be used against the American people.  Surely it is such worries triggering the secrecy, right?

On a war that didn't happen, and a war that did, in 1962

October 1962 might remind at least a few Americans of the Cuban missile crisis, which, during the Cold War, pushed the world that much closer to a nuclear armageddon that was, thankfully, averted. At the same time, on the other side of the planet, while nuclear bombs were not involved, two other heavyweights—India and China—did go to war over a number of difficult and unresolved geopolitical issues, which continue to dog them even today.

The short war in 1962, which was disastrous for India, did not resolve these border disputes.  Both India and China continue to claim the northern Himalayan territory of Aksai Chin as theirs, though it is completely under China’s rule now. All the way across, India’s northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh is claimed by China as South Tibet. In addition, the Dalai Lama’s government in exile in India is a reminder of the complications over Tibet.

There is an important reason why these two countries have not waged any more wars in order to plant their respective flags on the other’s lands—they are busy with economic growth and development. Since the late 1970s, China has been on an accelerated path of economic growth, and India has been trying to catch up with its own liberalized policies a decade after China’s reforms began. The two countries are perhaps examples of how much the war chants decrease in volume when there is a healthy and growing trade in goods and services.

The background noise over the unresolved border issues, how much ever it might be muted now, mean that the economic and diplomatic relations between India and China will be of importance not only to the more than two billion people there but to the entire world. The slow thawing of relations between India and Pakistan, which have been characterized by a belligerent sibling rivalry ever since their independence from Britain in 1947, will further enhance the importance of that part of the world.

The United States appears to be recognizing these developments and, in the language of policymakers, is pivoting towards Asia, and China in particular. This is a contrast to the practice during the bad old days of the Cold War, when the focus was on Western Europe, and how to make strategic friendships with the satellite countries. Thus, the non‐aligned India and the communist China were viewed with suspicion then. After the fall of the Soviet Union, which ended the Cold War, it was perhaps only natural that the United States pivoted towards Asia.

I am worried, however, that we are increasingly focused on China for all the wrong reasons. We seem to be interested in the happenings there not because we want to be where the party is going on, but more because we want to make sure that we can quickly checkmate China, which has unresolved territorial disputes with many countries from Russia and Japan in the north down to the Philippines and Vietnam. These geopolitical issues are not anything new, but are carryovers from centuries of China’s dominance when it was an empire and a superpower.

Both the presidential candidates appear to be intent on escalating tensions. Their rhetoric makes it clear that neither one wants to come across as being wimpier than the other when it comes to dealing with China. Further, China seems to be a convenient scapegoat on which the candidates prefer to pin the blame for our economic stagnation, conveniently forgetting to acknowledge how much our own disastrous policies—like the loosened regulations that encouraged bankers to take wild risks—contributed to the Great Recession. If China had a minimal role in causing the Great Recession, one would think that China is not the reason why we continue to be in a funk either, and yet we beat up on our important trading partner more than even going after the rogue bankers!

Political theorists often point out that governments distract their peoples by pointing at enemies, mostly imaginary, on the other side of the border. I hope this is not what our pivot to Asia implies. As India and China have demonstrated to the rest of the world over the fifty years since their only war, disputes might linger, yes, but we can learn to live together.

How are college campuses like the USSR?

No, it is not any cheap shot at faculty who walk around calling each other "comrade." 
(Wait a sec, that was a cheap shot, right?  But, it is true--they proudly and loudly use the words "comrade" and "solidarity" ...)

Tim Groseclose, a political economist at UCLA, writes in the context of the faculty there rejecting a general education requirement:

While few people will say it, nearly everyone on college campuses understands that the “studies” classes are not very rigorous; nor do they have high intellectual standards.
If, however, you say something like that on a university campus, within seconds you’ll usually hear a reply such as, “No, no academic discipline is any more rigorous than any other.  It’s just that different disciplines require different talents.”
Notwithstanding how often you hear such statements, no one in the history of mankind has ever said, “Darn, I made a D in Chicano studies.  I guess now I’ll have to major in chemistry.”  In contrast, lots of people have said the opposite.  Academic conservatives—even those who are leftwing politically—understand that fact.
My liberal friend made another claim:  The same academic conservatives, although they do not think very highly of the “studies” departments, do not want to admit that fact publicly.  They understand the mob-like responses they will have to face, including being called a racist, if they do that.  ...
Thus, the current situation on college campuses is similar to the last several years of the Soviet Union.  Nearly everyone can see that the system is faulty.  But no one will dare to say that publicly.

Groseclose brings up a number of issues that those outside the academic walls, and many even inside, do not understand.  The first is that left-of-center faculty (which, by and large, includes me too, which is all the more why the "comrades" get pissed off at me, I think) can also be academic conservatives.  Conservatives in the sense of holding on to ideas and ideals that have are often considered old-fashioned anymore: such as, we are about education and knowledge and not about credentialing or inflating grades; we expect students to be self-driven and engaged; faculty will have the highest sense of integrity and will welcome differing opinions; .... you see what I mean?

The various "studies" are often--not always--much lighter intellectual endeavors.  While they are always presented as serious activities, in practice, many of the "studies" are what most students would recognize as easy A.  Further, they tend to be ideological in nature.

One disagreement with Groseclose: he writes that no one will dare to say publicly how faulty the system is.  Ahem, not me; I have been saying and writing about this for years!  Which is also why the "comrades" excommunicated me :)

Why is Michele Bachmann a Communist? A Stalinist? Here is why

Some among the OWS group are the latest in a long line of commentators who point out that socialism is more consistent, than inconsistent, with biblical teaching. 

A note at the Economist shows how much an idea that Michele Bachmann cherishes was an integral part of, gasp, Joseph Stalin's Soviet constitution!

BIBLICAL aphorisms are famous for meaning different things to different people. The one I'm most fond of these days for being cited with extremely different valences by people of differing ideologies is one that I first encountered without knowing it was a biblical aphorism. Apparently Michelle Bachmann referenced it the other day in a speech to the Family Research Council, in which she criticised government social assistance: "Self reliance means, if anyone will not work, neither should he eat." The citation is from 2 Thessalonians 3:10, "If any would not work, neither should he eat." (H/t Dave Noon, who notes that it was cited by Captain John Smith, the leader of Jamestown colony, in 1609 to justify banishing lazy or unskilled colonists across the river to starve.)
Not having grown up as a Christian, I encountered this aphorism first while studying Russian history, as a Communist slogan embraced by Vladimir Lenin in his 1917 work "The State and Revolution": "Кто не работает, тот не ест." Mrs Bachmann might correctly note that this is one Christian precept that actually is explicitly incorporated into the constitution—but it's the wrong constitution: it figures in Article 12 of the 1936 Soviet constitution adopted by Josef Stalin. My impression that the saying's main contemporary fame comes from its centrality to the Soviet project seems to be shared by Wikipedia, which provides the Lenin citation:

The socialist principle, "He who does not work shall not eat", is already realized; the other socialist principle, "An equal amount of products for an equal amount of labor", is also already realized. But this is not yet communism, and it does not yet abolish "bourgeois law", which gives unequal individuals, in return for unequal (really unequal) amounts of labor, equal amounts of products.
This is a “defect”, says Marx, but it is unavoidable in the first phase of communism; for if we are not to indulge in utopianism, we must not think that having overthrown capitalism people will at once learn to work for society without any rules of law.

I love how Lenin tosses in that little injunction not to "indulge in utopianism" here. In every society, the most ludicrous and ruinous projects are constantly being justified as hard-headed, practical realism by the very serious people who run them. Anyway, as late as 1962 the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party published a pamphlet entitled "The struggle of the Communist Party to implement the principle 'He who does not work, does not eat'". Here's the slogan figuring as the centrepiece of a beautifully designed constructivist-era poster from the 1920s that I had sitting around on my hard drive:

I wonder if Bachmann and her people read the Economist and the blogs there; I am guessing not because, after all, all the wisdom one wants has already been recorded in the bible, right?  Including "if anyone will not work, neither should he eat."

Quote of the day: TSA and Stalin

Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s notorious secret police chief, once said, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” The T.S.A. seems to operate on the basis of an adapted maxim: “Show me the security check and I’ll find you the excuse.”

That was Roger Cohen in his NY Times column (ht).

I can't understand how such a madness called the TSA can continue despite all the protests.  I suppose if the ACLU can't stop the madness, then ... hey, join the ACLU

This just gets better, er, worse:

There are now about 400 full-body scanners, set to grow to 1,000 next year. One of the people pushing them most energetically is Michael Chertoff, the former Secretary of Homeland Security.

Oh crap!
Why stop at the airports?  We can start installing them in malls, government buildings, and in the classrooms too!

And, of course, the dark irony here that the company behind these TSA porn scanners is Rapiscan!
Cohen writes:

Rapiscan: Say the name slowly. It conjures up a sinister science fiction. When a government has a right to invade the bodies of its citizens, security has trumped freedom.

Universities have people with clear minds and open to listening? Yeah, right!

 I am looking for that place where "there are people with clear mind to talk and open mind to listen" ... Certainly not my experience here, where I have been explicitly told to shut up.

अप्रियस्यापि पथ्यस्य परिणामः सुखावहः ।
वक्ता श्रोता च यत्रास्ति रमन्ते तत्र संपदः ॥

- हितोपदेश, सुहृद्भेद

A matured (well thought out) speech will bring out good results even when it is harsh (or unpleasant). Any place where there are people with clear mind to talk and open mind to listen will always prosper.

- Hitopadesha, Suhrudbheda

Source

Ah, academe, with its pretense of pursuit of truth, but the reality of allowing only one kind of sanctioned truth!  Like the old Soviet statement that anything not forbidden is banned :)

China's Charter 08, and the Nobel Peace Prize

Liu Xiaobo was one of the first to sign on to a document, Charter 08, the contents of which will/should astonish every American because we have, and take for granted, the basic rights and treatment that this document seeks for every Chinese.

The NY Review of Books presents the entire Charter, and the notes before and after are wonderfully explanatory both about the Charter itself, and about the people involved.

The planning and drafting of Charter 08 began in the late spring of 2008, but Chinese authorities were apparently unaware of it or unconcerned by it until several days before it was announced on December 10.

Soon, the authorities knocked on several doors, including that of the Nobel Peace Prize recipient:

It was also late on December 8 that another of the charter’s signers, the literary critic and prominent dissident Liu Xiaobo, was taken away by police.

I just can't see how the Chinese system can continue with its authoritarian structures forever.  I wonder what the endgame will be.  After all, how many experts--inside and outside--predicted the quick and sudden collapse of the Soviet Union?  And along with that, a redrawing of the political maps of Europe?  Most were caught flat-footed, including the CIA and even Condi Rice!

Here is to hoping for a quick and peaceful collapse of the Chinese Communism.

From the Eisenhower Highway--in Afghanistan, that is!

True to the adage that we learn something new everyday, now I know that there is an Eisenhower Highway in Afghanistan. 

Here in the US, we are all too familiar with how Eisenhower participated in the army’s exercise to study the logistical issues in moving military vehicles and equipment from coast to coast, which was a huge factor in President Eisenhower leading the charge on building the interstate highway system that we now take for granted. 

But, I certainly had no idea that there was an Eisenhower Highway all the way in another part of the world!

The road, known as Highway One, runs in a massive arc from the capital Kabul in the eastern part of the country southwest to Kandahar, Afghanistan's second major city, and then northwest to Herat, an economic center near Afghanistan's borders with Turkmenistan and Iran.
By a strange coincidence President Dwight Eisenhower, who is remembered as the father of the U.S. interstate highway system, has a similar legacy among Afghans: The Kabul-Kandahar-Herat road has been known locally as the Eisenhower Highway because it was built with U.S. assistance in the 1950s and 60s.

Jonathan Steele's description of it is sadly poetic:

Built in the 1950s, when the United States and the Soviet Union competed peacefully for Afghan friendship, this US-funded 300-mile ribbon of tarmac was plied for two decades by lorries and garishly painted buses with no concern for security. Among the passengers were half-stoned Western hippies on the overland trail through Asia. Then came civil war and in 1979 the Soviet invasion.

As one can imagine, this highway is in a state of disrepair after years of war.

More than a quarter of the 745-mile highway is dirt and gravel. Depending on weather conditions and the mood of local bandits, the trip from one end to the other can take from 28 hours to a week.

In other words, yet another evidence that the Afghanistan of today is in a worse shape than the country that it was forty years ago. Perhaps we have invented the time machine after all--bomb a country enough, and time reverses!

When the Chinese state collapses

So far at least, Deng Xiaoping's approach to open up the economy without political liberalization seems to be working, and much better (?) than Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost.

The latter quickly triggered the demise not only of the feared USSR but the entire Eastern European Communist bloc.

China, meanwhile, is going strong, and a pretty good economic speed.

Like many, I thought that the protest movements in 1989 would fundamentally restructure China's internal political arrangement.  But, Deng and Li simply wiped out the protesters. 

There is still a part in me that hopes that the Communist government would collapse. Soon.  But, there are no signs of such an apocalypse.

At least, that is what I thought until I read this blog post over at the New York Review of Books.  Pretty darn exciting:

On July 21 in Beijing, four days before WikiLeaks published its documents, Chinese President Hu Jintao convened a high-level meeting to discuss ways to prevent leaks from the archives of the Communist Party of China. 

How fantastic it would be if slowly various secrets begin to leak out ... It has the potential for not only the downfall of the Communist government, but even for a completely new global order.

So, what are the kind of secrets that we might want to know about first?  Apparently there is a list of seven party secrets that have a priority over others:

1. The famine during the Great Leap Forward in 1959-62. Somewhere between 20 and 50 million people died because of bad policy, not “bad weather.” What exactly happened? What policies caused the famine and what policies suppressed information on it? How much grain was in state granaries while people starved? Is it true that Mao sold grain to the Soviet Union during those years in order to buy nuclear weapons?
2. The death of Mao’s military commander General Lin Biao in 1971. The official version of events, which to this day exists only in bare outline, strains credulity: Mao’s “closet comrade in arms” suddenly plotted a coup, failed in it, tried to flee to the Soviet Union, and was shot down in his plane. What really happened? Why? Why shouldn’t we know more?
3. Mao’s will and personal lockbox. Mao’s wife Jiang Qing said at her trial (as part of the “Gang of Four”) that Mao had a written will that mentioned her. Did he? What did it say? Mao also apparently kept his own lockbox of “most core secrets” that, in his later years, not even Jiang Qing could see. Mao’s mistress Zhang Yufeng kept the key until September 21, 1976, twelve days after Mao’s death, when Hua Guofeng, Mao’s anointed successor, is said to have taken it from her. What’s in the box?
4. The Beijing Massacre of 1989. The basic story is fairly well known from The Tiananmen Papers, Zhao Ziyang’s memoirs, and Li Peng’s diary. But the records of some key meetings still are classified, and responsibility for the massacre remains an extremely sensitive question in Chinese politics.
5. The brutal suppression of the Falun Gong after 1999. Falun Gong claims there are concentration camps for their members and that internal organs of executed believers are surgically removed and sold. True? Untrue? What do the records say?
6. Beijing’s huge but secret “stability maintenance” budget. The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences reports that Chinese government spending on domestic “stability maintenance”—the monitoring, intimidation, roughing-up, and illegal detention of petitioners, aggrieved workers, religious believers, professors, bloggers, twitterers, and other sources of “trouble”—now exceeds what the government spends in any category except the military. What are the details of this budget?
7. Bank accounts of Communist Party officials. Corruption and graft are widely viewed to be problems at every level of Chinese government, but exactly how much money have officials squirreled away? How much have they sent abroad?

 I can't wait ... here is to wishing that it will happen soon. Real soon.

Cartoon of the day: Afghanistan, again

But, wait, from the Chinese press, of all places?  Hmmm... let us see this cartoonist draw something critiquing an important geopolitical agenda of the Chinese government!

Am reminded of an old Cold War-era joke.
A Moscow resident, Vlad, is on a peace-exchange trip to the US, and his American host, Jim, takes him to the White House.
While standing outside the gates, the American says he will demonstrate the beauty of America's freedom.  Jim then yells "the American president is a moron who needs to be thrown in jail."  The visiting Soviet, Vlad, is impressed.
A year later, this same American is visiting the USSR, and Vlad is his host who takes him to the Kremlin.  Vlad swears that he too has the kind of freedom of expression that Jim has in the US, which Jim finds it hard to believe and asks Vlad to prove it.
So, Vlad takes out his megaphone right there at the Kremlin and yells:
"the American president is a moron who needs to be thrown in jail."

Afghanistan: US beat USSR, and now China beat US?

In the current news culture where events from a month ago are equivalent to something from the Stone Age, it is easy to forget, for instance, the Google controversy in China.  Could the assertiveness of the Chinese government be because it senses the beginning of the end of the unique economic relationship it has/had with the US (the economic version of the mutually assured destruction)?  That the economic quagmire in which the US is trapped for various reasons is the equivalent to the the USSR's final days in Afghanistan, which was only months before the entire system collapsed?  While predicting is difficult, as Yogi Berra remarked, particularly when it comes to the future, I have no doubts that the Chinese economy is at a significant place.  As Ian Bremmer notes:

China’s leaders no longer believe that American power is indispensable for their country’s prosperity—or their own long-term political survival. The financial crisis has underlined the risk that China has accepted in relying on exports to developed states for economic growth. This has increased the urgency with which the leadership works to build domestic demand for Chinese products. Chinese officials have made news in recent months with the occasional call for the establishment of a new reserve currency to replace the dollar. That cannot happen overnight, but as China reduces its dependence on market conditions in the West, the need to purchase dollars will gradually ease, and much of the reserves will flow toward the purchase of commodities. This is a long-term project and one that will have to be undertaken carefully to ensure that the creative destruction that accompanies this transition does not force so many people out of work at one time that widespread social unrest reaches critical mass. 

It might be even harder to remember then, or even imagine, that before 9/11, China was the greatest threat to the US--not from an economic perspective, but in terms of military and national security.  These tensions came head-to-head, or plane-to-plane, only five months before 9/11 over Hainan Island:

While gathering intelligence off the coast of China, a U.S. Navy EP-3 electronic spy plane, piloted by Lt. Shane Osborn, collides in mid-air with a Chinese F-8 and is forced to make an emergency landing at Hainan Island. The Chinese pilot, Wang Wei, is killed in the incident. China charges that the U.S. plane illegally entered Chinese airspace, and detains the 24 U.S. crew members for 11 days. It demands that the U.S. take full responsibility for the incident and issue a full apology. In the end, the United States offers a letter in which it says it is "very sorry" for the loss of the Chinese pilot and "very sorry" that the aircraft landed in China without permission. The damaged U.S. airplane is not returned for three months.

Another interesting, and profound, coincidence?  A week after 9/11, China's membership in the World Trade Organization was green-lighted.  The economic, political, and military worlds have never been the same since the transformational September 2001.

A Tale of Two Gulfs

Taking off on the classic Charles Dickens work, A Tale of Two Cities, perhaps the economic, environmental, and geopolitical aspects of petroleum can be woven together as A Tale of Two Gulfs.

Growing up in India, I, like many others, was familiar with “the Gulf” to which hundreds of thousands of Indians headed every year.  The geographic area referred to was the Persian Gulf, which had gained prominence thanks to the phenomenal growth in employment in the oil-rich Gulf countries—specifically, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait. 

Here in the US, in the current contexts, “the Gulf” now refers to the Gulf of Mexico, where oil has been gushing out from a mile under the sea for two months now.  The live video feed from the site continues to mesmerize not only us here in America, but in the rest of the world as well.

But, more than thirty years ago, it was that other Gulf, and the oil there, that monopolized the attention of Americans.  In 1979, the Iranian revolution ousted the Shah, and installed a theocratic regime, and the geopolitical instability that resulted triggered a massive increase in the global price for oil.  The high oil prices that were recorded then went unmatched until very recently, immediately before the Great Recession. 

As the planet watched the unfolding events in Iran, and struggled to cope with the high price of oil, President Jimmy Carter addressed the country—and the world—in the “Crisis of Confidence” speech.  Carter noted early on in that speech on July 15, 1979, “I began to ask myself the same question that I now know has been troubling many of you. Why have we not been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problem?”

Thirty-one years have gone by since Carter’s frustration that we have not been able to figure a way out of the energy problem.  Six months later, after losing the election in November, Carter stated in his State of the Union address that the official position of the United States was that “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

Since then, we have been quite fixated on the Persian Gulf, with mostly disastrous economic and human costs.  While Carter couched this doctrine in the context of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the altered landscape since the fall of the Communist bloc has apparently not dented our perspectives on the Persian Gulf and petroleum. 

Even more, despite the political fixation, I suppose most Americans are unfamiliar with the geography and geopolitics.  Every once in a while I quiz students on the Persian Gulf and Middle Eastern countries, and rare is a student who correctly identifies at least a half of them.   

As problems began in the “other” Gulf—the Gulf of Mexico—I asked students in my introductory class to quiz at least six on campus about the catastrophe.  One of the questions was to list all the states in the union that border the Gulf of Mexico.  The results of this exercise, also, were far from encouraging. 

Our collective apathy about the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Mexico, and the valued resource that is in common—petroleum—is depressing.  Particularly when we project it against the background of Carter’s speech from 1979, in which he observed that “the energy crisis is real. It is worldwide. It is a clear and present danger to our nation. These are facts and we simply must face them.”

We threw out any sense of urgency once the Persian Gulf crisis eased.  The Gulf of Mexico gusher, which ought to have been avoided in the first place, will be capped, hopefully sooner than later.  But, even after the images of oil-stained pelicans disappear from the daily news, I hope we will stay focused enough to write the rest of A Tale of Two Gulfs, and get to my favorite phrase: The End!

Rewriting history, in a capitalist manner :)

The Soviets airbrushing photos, or Winston Smith in 1984 being one of the employees to constantly re-write history are, well, old ...
Here is a new twist to how to rewrite the past:
A few days ago, Roy Halladay of the Florida Marlins pitched a perfect game.  Suppose you want to claim that you were there at the ballpark, and you witnessed that rare event ... but you weren't actually there.  Yet, you want a piece of real evidence that you can use ... hurry up; don't let that opportunity slip past :)

Here's a chance to buy tickets to a guaranteed perfect game -- the one Roy Halladay already threw.
The Florida Marlins will begin selling on Tuesday unused tickets to the game in which the Philadelphia Phillies ace pitched the 20th perfect game in major league history, a 1-0 victory over the Marlins on Saturday.
All tickets will be regularly priced at "face value" and on sale both online and through the Marlins' box office.

ht

The other 9/11s

In talking about the latest wave of globalization, Thomas Friedman has often remarked that 9/11 was an important date, and this was before the events of 2001.
It was on September 11, 1989 that Hungary opened its border to the free world, and created a channel that eventually brought down the USSR itself.
And then, in even more coincidence, on November 9th, written as 9/11 in most of the rest of the world, the Berlin Wall fell.

This opinion piece in the LA Times tells the story, and it is worth reading in full:

[In Hungary] a new generation of reform-minded communists had taken charge. Almost overnight, they wrote a U.S.-style constitution and began speaking openly of a free press, free markets and free elections. Emboldened, a small group of local Sopron activists decided to celebrate the new spirit. Their modest aim: put up some tents, hire a brass band and let the beer and good vibes flow. One of the organizers came up with an especially inspired idea -- to briefly open a gate through the barbed-wire frontier to Austria, allowing people to casually stroll back and forth across the border for the first time in four decades. They called it the Pan-European Picnic.

Because anything involving the border was a matter of extreme sensitivity, their request for a permit came to the attention of Hungary's young prime minister, Miklos Nemeth, the man behind so many of the Gorbachev-like changes taking place. Immediately, a light bulb went off in his head.

Every summer, tourists from East Germany descended on Hungary, where "goulash economics," mixing Marxist industrial planning with a measure of free enterprise, provided things unavailable elsewhere in the grit-gray Soviet sphere: nice restaurants, ample food, good wine. But this year would be different. This year, Nemeth decided to use Hungary's visitors as pawns in a great geopolitical chess game.

Since 1988, Hungarian citizens had been allowed to travel relatively freely. But East Germans were still not allowed by their government to cross into Western Europe. Although they could vacation in Hungary, there was a mutual treaty in force obliging the Hungarians to ensure that East Germans did not escape to the West.

Earlier in 1989, before the seasonal onslaught of East German tourists, Nemeth had very publicly ordered the electricity in the barbed-wire border with the West turned off. Border guards began ceremoniously cutting down large swathes of the barrier -- filmed by Western TV crews summoned for the occasion. Nemeth intended this as a clear message to Hungary's East German guests. Look folks, he declared in effect, a hole in the Iron Curtain. There's nothing to prevent you from "escaping" through it to freedom.

Nemeth hoped to unleash a flood. He believed that a mass escape of East Germans from Hungary would pose an existential threat to the regime of Erich Honecker, the dictatorial boss of the German Democratic Republic. He also believed that if Honecker fell, it would bring down the Berlin Wall -- and with it the entire communist bloc. Amid the chaos, he could realize his true goal. Hungary too would gain its freedom.

The rest, as they say, is history.

1979: start of a new era

Way back on January 31, 2008, the Register Guard published my op-ed--titled "1979 was the start of a new era", where I pointed out that pretty much everything that we are dealing with today as major global issues can be traced back to one single year: 1979.

Fast forward 18 months. One of the essays in the latest issue of Foreign Policy--a leading policy publication--is "1979: The Great Backlash"

Am excited that I was way ahead--by a year and a half, which seems more than a lifetime in this contemporary world :-)

Afghanistan: War escalation to win hearts and minds!

Professor Paul Robinson compares the Soviet experience in Afghanistan with the current US and NATO practices, and finds that we are repeating the Soviet mistakes in a worse way:

[The] barriers to development lie not in a lack of aid but in poor human capital and weak social and political institutions. Although Western economists came rather later to this conclusion than the Soviets, most now accept it. Practice, though, continues to lag theory. Too often, those tasked with development still view it—as the Soviets initially did—as an engineering problem, a matter of building roads, factories, and schools.

The 2009 U.S. inspector general’s audit report cites the renovation of a power station in Khost. After installing three new generators, the Americans handed the plant over to the Afghans, only to find that within a few months two of the three no longer worked. Similarly, the British have invested millions of dollars into digging hundreds of wells in southern Afghanistan in an attempt to “win the hearts and minds” of villagers. The new wells bypass existing institutions for the stewardship of water resources while not putting anything in their place. Afghans, not used to having unrestricted access to so much water, have responded by pumping with abandon. As a result, the water table has dropped, increasing the danger of drought. Meanwhile, according to Nipa Banerjee, nearly half of the schools in Kandahar province sit empty because there are no teachers to staff them. Yet the Canadian government is pressing ahead with plans to build even more schools. Such failures are entirely typical and predictable. They reveal how “hearts and minds” operations, undertaken to support the short-term goals of counterinsurgency, can have damaging effects on long-term development.

In some respects, Soviet advisers, despite their failings, were somewhat better than ours. Ivanov, for instance, studied Dari at the School of Oriental Languages. As he and his wife recounted over a bowl of homemade borscht, rather than living in a fortified compound, he had an apartment in the Soviet-built Mikrorayon district of Kabul with his family (unthinkable for a contemporary adviser) and drove himself without escort to work every day (at least as unfathomable).

The flow of Western advisers is driven by supply rather than demand. The Afghans get what we send them, not what they ask for. Few high-ranking civil servants are willing to go to Afghanistan. As a result, the West sends young and inexperienced personnel to “mentor” much older Afghan colleagues. Few have any knowledge of Afghan languages. Valerii Ivanov told me that his Afghan contacts say that they laugh when these zealous Westerners tell them how to manage their affairs. Now President Obama is promising to send hundreds more. We can hardly imagine that, if he can actually find that many—and so far he appears to be having trouble—such a large number will really consist of highly experienced, properly qualified personnel with appropriate cultural understanding. More will not mean better.

Worse, in our efforts to fight the Taliban, we are providing Afghanistan with a massive army, a huge police force, and vast numbers of schools, hospitals, roads, and so on. All of this has to be paid for. The Afghan state cannot do so, nor will it ever be able to. When the Soviets left, Najibullah’s regime survived only as long as Moscow paid the bills. The same will be true for Karzai and his successors.

The election in Afghanistan is round the corner. Any odd development there, along with chaos in its neighboring countries--Iran and Pakistan--can make 2009 one milestone year in global history. Here is to hoping for an uneventful remainder of 2009.

The Chinese are coming, The Chinese are coming

Unless you are totally into movies, it is most likely that you haven't heard of a movie called 'The Russians are coming, The Russians are coming'. It came at the heights (depths?) of the Cold War--in 1966. A great comedy, and a great picture at the same time--not merely a slapstick one.


According to this LA Times story, it is literal--the Chinese are coming. And apparently they are coming to buy homes, because prices have dropped so much. It is almost like somebody went to China and advertised a huge clearance sale in California and elsewhere :-)

An excerpt from the Times piece:

The Chinese do have a lot of cash to spend. The central government holds the biggest stockpile of foreign reserves in the world, nearly $2 trillion, most of it in dollars. And the Boston Consulting Group estimates that there were more than 391,000 millionaire households in mainland China last year, up from 310,000 reported the previous year.
....
[Home] prices in the U.S. have fallen more sharply than in China, and many Chinese consider the American market highly alluring as a place to invest and live because of the United States' developed economy.

The purchasing tours in the U.S. grew out of similar trips by well-heeled Chinese back home.

Investors from Wenzhou and other entrepreneurial hot spots were known for chartering buses to visit such cities as Shanghai to shop for apartments. Now some of them are signing up with outfits like Soufun.com, the real estate website that is sponsoring the home-buying trip next month from Beijing to California and Nevada."