Issue LIV: When the Arab Spring plays Cricket

A civilian ambassador to the United States is recalled home after asking the American military to help prevent a military coup in his home country.  The president denies asking America for help.  The military denies it runs things or wants to run things.   The ex-ambassador remains in house arrest while the president (alternatively known as corrupt, depressed, schizophrenic, and a numbskull) flees to Dubai for medical treatment.

As the rotting edifice of Pakistani politics sinks further in disrepute and shame, it begs the question, “Is there any chance it will get any better?”  If the Pakistani military were as good defending the nation as playing politics, perhaps Pakistan would still have Bangladesh, taken Kashmir, and wouldn’t be dealing with so much terrorism in their own backyard.  If President Zardari, a man so grotesquely out of touch with his people that he visited his French chateau during the worst floods in Pakistan’s history, was as good at governing as he was at stealing, perhaps he would not have to worry about being overthrown every other week.  And if the opposition was not so full of incompetent crooks, perhaps they would actually win an election.

But that brings us to perhaps the only rays of light in Pakistani politics, the perhaps last two honest men in a world of sleaze, nepotism, and murder.  One is Chief Justice Iftikar Chaudhry, a man who lost his job because he said General Musharraf could not be president and general at the same time.  His firing led to a political revolt that led to the overthrow of Musharraf and the return of “democracy” to Pakistan.  Unfortunately, this led to the return of Asif Ali Zardari who managed to use his wife’s death and her famous last name to win Parliament and then the presidency.  He reluctantly let Judge Chaudhry back into office after protests only to see him sue Zardari for corruption.  The Supreme Court could dismiss his government at any time.

The only other honest man is perhaps Imran Khan, the Pakistan cricket captain who won the 1992 World Cup.  An Oxford-educated ex-playboy, his political party has only won one seat in 15 years….. his own.  But in an era where Pakistanis are tired of the rigged two party system (three if you count the military), he has drawn hundreds of thousands to his political rallies.  In the era of  worldwide revolution, why him and why now?

Imran Khan built an honest charitable cancer hospital named after his mother from money he won from the World Cup.  75% of patients are treated with support from the 25% that are private patients.  In a nation where wealth is inherited or embezzled, his money comes sport not stealing.  Building a support base from a middle class that has not participated in politics on a grand scale, Imran Khan hopes to win the next election with the support of young people tired of politicians living in palatial wealth while giving nothing to regular people.  He also pushes for an end to the war in Afghanistan and for drone attacks that have killed hundreds of innocent  people.  Khan frightens Washington.  India, on the other hand, would likely be delighted if he does as he says and uses cricket and common sense to build bridges between the two nations.

But Imran Khan has had some blind spots in the past.  He supported Musharraf’s coup against Nawaz Sharif and is allegedly supported by the Pakistani military.  As a Johnny-come-lately to Islam after years of women and womanizing, feminists fear that he would fail to repeal medieval Islamic rape laws to show how Muslim he is.

One thing is clear though.  If there is one man to watch in South Asian politics in the next year, keep your eyes on this former cricket captain.  After 15 years in the political wilderness, now is his time.

 

India Today - ”Want a new beginning with India“

Issue LIII – Dispatch from Austin: Pass the Biscuits, Perry

While the world waits with baited breath whether ex-Democrat Rick Perry decides to throw his cowboy hat into the ring for president, those familiar with his Aggie antics roll their eyes.  Much ink will be spilled over his “record” as a career politician.  Starting out as a conservative Democrat representing West Texas in the 1980s in the state legislature, Rick Perry switched parties in 1989 to run against the populist Jim Hightower for agriculture commissioner.  In a dirty campaign advised by Karl Rove, Perry narrowly defeated this hero of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party by focusing on agriculture issues like, you know, Hightower’s endorsement of Jesse Jackson and stance against a flag burning constitutional amendment.

In 1998, Perry narrowly won a race to be the first Republican Lieutenant Governor of Texas of the 20th century.  In this position (widely believed to the be most powerful job in Texas), Rick Perry’s oh-so-lucky timing got him into the governor’s mansion when then-Governor George W. Bush resigned to become President.  Slick Rick’s never looked back since and has defeated every opponent to his governorship since.  Rick Perry is now the longest serving governor in Texas history having been in office since 2000.  He won’t leave until at leastJanuary 2015.

Counter-narrative to the “Texas Economy”
Rick Perry’s claim to fame is that the Texas economy has low taxes and little regulation of business.  Being so business-friendly has made it successful his boosters claim.  This is not really a new development though.  The business lobby has always controlled Austin and focused on making it “bidness” friendly.  Our poor rankings in health, environment, and education honestly pre-date Perry (or even Bush) so it is not fair to blame those problems on Rick Perry.  The fact that he has never tried to fix Texas’s widespread poverty and lack of social services is his fault.

But honestly, Texas is (or was) booming relative to the rest of the nation.  Can Perry’s blathering about a “Texas Century” or the Economist’s praise of us being the “New California” have any merit?  There is something to see, but perhaps not for the reasons conservatives like to think.  Honestly, a lot of it had to do with the 1980s, industrial policy, high taxes, regulation, and good luck.

Let’s start with the housing crisis.  Anyone who was around in the 1980s remembers that Texas in the 1980s was in a depression.  Oil prices plummeted when the Middle East began exporting oil back to the United States.  High gas prices had led investors to splurge in real estate and oil speculation.  Many of those companies (like Bush’s oil company) drilled dry wells and/or busted when cheaper, foreign oil started flowing in.  Of course, the banks that loaned money to these real estate and oil companies all went bust.  As a consequence, every local bank in Texas went bust or had to be bailed out by the FDIC except for Frost Bank.  With Texan James Baker running the White House in the Reagan/Bush administration, he covered up the huge disaster that was the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s (which was worst in Texas).  Many people (professional or otherwise) lost their shirts.

How does that relate to today?  So many bankers lost out on the 1980s and early 1990s that they didn’t make as many stupid loans as bankers in other states.  Also Texas’s farmer-written constitution forbids many types of loans and has lots of regulations on home loans that other states don’t have.  Texas also has very high property taxes relative to the value of the property because it has no income tax.  Texas property taxes are three times that of California’s.  You are less likely to speculate on property when you have to pay thousands of dollars a year in property tax.

Let’s not forget oil prices were doing well and compared to the rest of the nation Texas maintained an industrial base.  Texas exports more than any other state in the nation by far.  It also benefits from high tech sectors in Dallas and Austin, and a large military presence throughout the state.  Houston also has another federal government spending projected called NASA.

So what made the Texas economy do so well recently?  Dumb shit luck and cheap houses is probably the best guess anyone can make.  Again, Rick Perry was at the right place at the right time.  But he did nothing to continue that success by focusing on, say, education.  Which brings us to his most glaring failure.

War on Higher Education

     People have been saying for years that Texas needs to focus on improving education, increasing its Tier 1 colleges, and increasing the number of minorities going to college.  And actually, surprisingly, Texas public schools were improving steadily over the last twenty years.  The key failure of the school system is actually the very high poverty rate of children in Texas.

Perhaps that can be excused, but more fascinating is Rick Perry’s “war on higher education.”  Perry graduated from Texas A&M and is the first Aggie governor of Texas.  Ordinarily you would think the second most important university in the state would be happy with that fact, but Aggieland is not pleased at all with their first governor.

Rick Perry wants to destroy tenure at Texas universities using the different board of regents for each system.  He wants them to operate like businesses and evaluate each professor by how much “productivity” they have.  Through his control of the A&M board of regents, he is pushing through a loopy evaluation system created by a for-profit college owner, Jeff Sandefer.  He focuses on “seven breakthrough solutions” to improve higher education by de-emphasizing research and increasing the number of large classes.  Although he has never been on the board of regents of any university, Sandefer is the most important man in higher education because Perry listens to him, and Perry controls the regents.  It also helps he has donated $300,000 to Perry as well.  Defense of the autonomy of higher education and research are coming from the UT System’s Bill Powers and Francisco Cigarroa, and an alliance of Aggies and Longhorns has been struck to fight Perry’s attacks on research.

But the politicization of the boards of regents and higher education has a long pedigree in this state.   The University of Texas at Austin has always been a very political campus.  For a decade, LBJ buddy and regent Frank Erwin dominated the campus and hired and fired deans on a whim.  He sacked every single university president in the system except for Truman Blocker at UT Medical Branch.  He separated the college of arts and sciences into the College of Liberal Arts and College of Natural Sciences over the objections of the faculty and Dean Silber.  He fired Silber who moved on to become president of Boston University.

 

       Rick Perry also fires anyone who disagrees with him.  In 2009, he fired several university regents who were supporting Kay Bailey Hutchison over himself in the Republican primary.  The boards need a cleaning out for sure, but he only cleans them out when they turn against them.

Honestly, Rick Perry’s attacks on academic freedom are reminiscent of the first student protest that ever occurred in Austin.  In the 1930s, a cartoonish conservative radio talk show host named W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel got elected governor with his radio and country-western band.  Ol’ Pappy “pass the biscuits” O’Daniel stacked the Board of Regents with right-wing no-nothing hacks.  These hacks were upset about all the “liberal” and “atheist” professors running around the University of Texas.  They particularly did not like that  who were upset that the state university had pro-New Deal economics professors.

The Board handed then-President Homer Rainey a notice that he needed to fire these professors.  President Rainey declined to and told the faculty that he was being pushed to fire tenured professors illegally.  They supported Rainey, and then the board fired Rainey and fired the New Deal economics professors too.  This lead to UT being reprimanded by most academic accreditation boards and the American Association of University Professors for almost a decade.  This will probably happen again if the current path is not altered.

Can a state that only has two public Tier 1 universities really afford to have them kicked out of the American Association of Universities?  Should the state really try to kill research at a university system that invented cardiac stents?  What is the long term purpose of this “reform” of education that Perry promotes?  Rick Perry doesn’t understand that slogans against “lazy professors” won’t fix the fact that he deregulated college tuition and underfunded K-12 and colleges.  In a state that has succeeded by stealing other states’ brainpower, he does not recognize that a new, high-tech economy comes from more Tier 1 colleges not less.  He succeeds by making us dumber.

Of course, we don’t have to make that mistake when he decides to run for president.  Spread the word about Perry’s attacks on universities.

 

Links
Washington Post – Rick Perry wages an assault on university establishment
Texas Coalition for Excellence in Higher Education – A group to defend UT and A&M’s research

What you should read

These are some of the latest and greatest articles that I have meant to send to you.

• Mother Jones ran a fantastic article a few months ago explaining how the American oligarchy has succeeded in its war against the middle class.  Key to their strategy was the the destruction unions in the United States through Ronald Reagan’s  attack on the working class.  These fascinating charts show how the bottom 80% of Americans have had a net loss of income over the last thirty years that has been transferred to the top 10%.  Most of that went to the top 1%.  That means that every year $743 billion is lost from 80% of Americans and $673 billion of it goes to the top 1%.  Inequality has also slowed economic growth as money circulates through fewer and fewer hands.  A must read.
• TIME ran an interesting article on a number of myths about the recession and the “recovery.”  They end concluding that the solution for America’s jobs crisis is German style industrial policy.  Not everyone should go to college, and it is important for the economy to produce middle and lower tier jobs that rely on skilled labor developed through technical or community colleges.  That also relies on re-emphasizing industry over services, something the United States has refused to do.  Besides Obama’s bailout of the automobile companies, he has made no significant efforts to support heavy industry in the United States.
• Is India developing into an oligarchy? – Raghuram Rajan warns that India’s development is very unequal and could potentially turn into oligarchic capitalism like Russia or many Latin American countries.  Economic development would proceed up to a point and then fall into a middle income trap whereby any further development of the country would depend on breaking the power of large, powerful, and well-connected industrial families.  India is not there yet, but if the connections between businessmen and politicians grow even more then the country will come to resemble Mexico and not South Korea.  Given that Rajan  warned that financial deregulation was making the world economy more unstable long before the financial crisis, he is worth listening to.
• Are vaccines a CIA plot?  – a common complaint heard in the Muslim world is that vaccine drives are really a conspiracy against poor people by the United States.  Polio drives in India fail often in Muslim neighborhoods where this belief is common.  Unfortunately, The Guardian, reveals that the CIA really did run a fake vaccine drive in Pakistan to “find” Osama bin Laden.  Naturally, Doctors without Borders is not amused.  This can undermine public health everywhere!

Issue LII: Dispatch from Canada – Conservative Nation?

Last week, a page in the House of Commons lost her job for holding a sign during the Canadian equivalent of a State of the Union address.  Bridgette DePape’s red sign simply said, “Stop Harper.”

Harper being Stephen Harper, the recently re-elected Conservative Prime Minister of Canada.  Last month, the Conservative Party won a crushing victory in the federal election against the Liberal Party, the socialist New Democratic Party, and the separatist Bloc Quebecois.  After years of a minority government in which no party had a majority in the House of Commons, Stephen Harper finally achieved his dream of a full Conservative majority in Parliament.  Unbridled from having to please three parties to the left of the Conservatives to win votes, he is free to achieve all he wants.

But what does the Conservative Party want?  The present-day Conservative Party formed out a merger of two right of center parties in 2003: the Progressive Conservative Party and the western Canadian Alliance.  This “unite the Right” movement decreased vote splitting among conservative voters.  Previously the Conservatives played the Washington Generals to the Liberal Party’s Harlem Globetrotters.  For pretty much the entire 20th century, the Liberal Party ruled Canada with only a few accidental Progressive Conservative victories.  In the 1993 election, for example, the Progressive Conservative majority lost all of its seats but two.

Stephen Harper represents Calgary, Alberta and originally came from the Canadian Alliance.  Alberta can be roughly compared to Texas: large, conservative, cowboy, and full of oil.  By elevating an Albertan to the highest office in the land, Canadians have brought some Texas-style politics to Ottawa.  The agenda is disturbingly Republican.

Increased military spending, more prisons, longer prison sentences for nonviolent drug crimes, further developing the tar sands of Alberta (possibly the world’s dirtiest form of oil), cuts to health and social spending, tax cuts for corporations, ending public financing of elections, and relaxing gun control laws are all part of the government’s program.  Military spending for jets has been criticized as being too costly with deliberate lowballing of costs to Parliament.  My friend here also complained that Statistics Canada would get a budget cut and they would throw out the long-form census and replace with a short one with minimal information about demography.  American conservatives floated such an idea in the United States, but not even Bush would go through with such a plan.

At the Copenhagen climate conference in 2010, climate change campaigners complained that Canada and not the United States fought the hardest against a climate change treaty.  Alberta’s pursuit of tar sands fossil fuel means that Canada will produce high levels of green house gases.  Harper won’t let his home province kill its golden goose.

Michael Ignatieff, the latest of many hapless Liberal leaders, got slammed by Harper’s American-style attack ads.  The academic, who spent much of his life in England and Massachusetts, got nailed as an out of touch intellectual professor “just visiting” Canada for his political career.  This Swift Boating of a John Kerry-like figure not only lost the Liberal Party the election, but Ignatieff failed to even win his seat in Parliament.  Dirty games in and outside of Parliament suggest an Americanization of Canadian politics.

But is the death of Liberal Canada overdone?  Anyone who looks at the numbers will tell you that the Conservative Party won less than 40% of all votes but got 54% of seats in Parliament.  First past the post electoral systems do not work well when you have multiple parties like Canada does now.  The combined vote of the New Democrats and Liberals came to 49.5% but only 44% of seats.  Many suggest a left of center merger between the Liberals and the New Democrats like the Conservatives did in 2003.  With a more effective opposition leader in New Democrat Jack Layton, Stephen Harper may get a tougher rival than with Michael Ignatieff.

Absolute power leads to overreach then failure.  Liberal Canada’s best hopes depend on Stephen Harper mistaking Canada for America.

Links

Toronto Star – Letter from the page who got fired

Issue XLIXc : Other Peoples’ Thinking

Jorge Luis Borges once wrote about Averroes or Abul Walid Mahommed Ibn Achmed, a Moorish philosopher in 12th century Spain.  This Andalusian Muslim polymath wrote about medicine, Islam, Islamic law, psychology, music and more.  This outrageously smart man once wrote commentaries in Arabic about Aristotle but (according to Borges) struggled over the two words comedy and tragedy.

Averroes could not translate these words.  He could not explain them.  And he could not fathom what these two words meant in the context of his Muslim culture.  The Moors told stories.  They did not have theaters, and they did not have plays.  The Islamic storytelling culture centered around a single speaker telling a story (involving as many characters as needed) without a need for fake swords, fake deaths, and imagined actors.  As a man unable to step out of his cultural context, he failed at his task of commenting on Aristotle’s opinions on theater.

Are we similarly unable to step out of our cultural contexts when thinking about other societies?  How can we avoid being like Averroes?  What are some different ways of thinking?  Let’s contrast the logic of different people.

Backwards Bolivians
The indigenous of South America are now more influential at any point since the fall of the Incans.  However the logic of indigenous peoples have quite different concepts of the world, society, and less of a concept of the individual.  Mother Earth is the goddess Pachamama (often conflated with the Virgin Mary) and use of coca leaves is sacred among the Quechua and the Aymara people.  The indigenous respect the wisdom of tribal elders and emphasize community unity (not an uncommon trait in African tribes).

Aymarans have a particularly unique view of time.  To the Aymara, the past is in front of them and the future is behind them.  Coming from a culture where respecting elders and the past is paramount, this makes sense.  Aymara emphasize what has been seen, either by themselves, their elders, or their elders’ elders.  Thus the past is something that has been seen, and everyone knows something you see is in front of you.  As we all know, the future is a mystery and we cannot see it.  Thus the future is behind the Aymara, not in front.  American or European concepts of “progress” might be difficult to explain to these Bolivian highlanders.

Bolivian social movements have another “backwards” approach to leadership and government compared to Americans.  Americans elect leaders and put them on a God-like pedestal.  They then complain to them and about them when they do not fix our problems.  Bolivian indigenous do things the opposite way.

Their concept is to “lead by obeying.”  This means that leaders do not just boss and manage the people around. Instead leaders must obey the wills of the people.  The people and social movements are the real leaders, not politicians.  A collective of the people will make a decision (say, nationalize the natural gas) through consensus and seeking out everyone’s opinion (not just those who show up to the meeting).  The “official leaders” (i.e. politicians) don’t lead by pushing their own way around, they must obey the collective decision of the people.  Leaders lead by obeying the people.  If the leader does not obey, they must be held to account by a tribal or collective council and explain their actions.  If they continue to disrespect the will of the people, they can be recalled immediately.  This makes the concept of constitutional “four year terms” irrelevant to the indigenous.  If some leader is not obeying the people, his/her term ends the minute the people decide it is.

Bolivian President Evo Morales came from these social movements, leading the coca leaf growers union.  His current unpopularity comes from his disconnecting himself from the social movement and being inaccessible to the people, refusing to consult with the social movements, and following conventional “bossy” ways of political and economic leadership.  His pursuit of great macroeconomic figures and “growth” to impress foreigners is irrelevant to them.  The people come first, not statistics.  A recent letter from the movements to Evo Morales from the grassroots leaders pointed out that being indigenous is about the mind not the skin:

We would like to finish by saying something that an Aymara elder said: The indigenous are not defined by physical traits, nor language, nor last name, nor culture. The indigenous come from an attitude of generosity, of respect, of reciprocity, transparency, of listening to others.

Perhaps we can learn from these forms of leadership and governance too.

Understanding Indians
Two decades ago, A.K. Ramunajan wrote an influential essay called “Is there an Indian way of Thinking?”  This enlightening article explains succinctly the differences between Western and Indian Hindu thought.
Logic and morality, Ramunajan argued, depends on context in India (“context-sensitive”).  Logic and rules and morality are universal in the West and are “context-free.”  It goes back to the ancient texts of both civilizations.  The Torah has the Ten Commandments which categorically forbids worshiping graven images or killing (no exceptions!).  Hinduism’s many texts have no such blanket statements.  “Can I kill my family,” asked Arjuna to Krishna in the Mahabharata.  Krishna said he could because his cause was just and his duty (dharma) was to fight as a soldier.  Different castes have different ethics and orientations; Brahmins are to be wise and scholarly while the Kshatriyas like Arjuna are to be brave.  Our answer, it seems, tends to be “it depends.”

Different punishments applied to different people in India.  The Laws of Manu had no Golden Rule.  The same crime received different punishments depending on the criminal’s caste.  Your morality, ethics and compassion extended not to everyone in your area but to your particular community and friends.  Only with the coming of British rule and the beginning of a British-educated elite (Nehru, Gandhi, the Congress Party) did ideas of universal law and freedom take hold.  But even then it never took hold over the minds of the masses.

This leads to interesting situations for outsiders.  A true Indian (say on a train or movie theater) will be superficially rude and crude to strangers.  He’ll jump the queue, push you around, hassle the employees and never hold the door open for you.  A Westernized one would do none of these things.  However, should you make the true Indian’s acquaintance (and you enter his sphere of community and friends) it will be he who treats you best when you visit his home.  He will feed you, take you places, and pull strings for you.  Which matters more?  The superficially small gestures or the real acts of kindness when help is needed?

To make it even more confusing, Indians may compartmentalize their multiple ways of thinking.  This makes Indians look inconsistent or hypocritical, but it might be something a bit more subtle.  Hinduism survived for thousands of years by adopting other religions’ gods and practices, always absorbing yet another way of thinking without throwing out the old one.  Ramunajan’s own father taught astronomy and mathematics while still entertaining pandits and astrologers.  How could an astronomer give horoscopes to people on the side?  This inconsistency puzzled him until he realized he applied a different mentality to each field.  A scientific mind for science and a religious mind for religion.  Or perhaps he would say what my grandfather’s classmate once told me , “Sometimes it is important not to be too scientific.”

This may explain Indians lack of rule-following yet tolerance for the ways of others (“that’s just what ____ people do!”).  We accept the tendencies of others as long as we don’t have to follow it.  Perhaps it’s not the worst way to deal with others.

Issue L: Wisconsin and La Follette’s Shadow

William Greider once wrote that the animating impulse behind the Republican Party in the George W. Bush era was to roll back the twentieth century’s progress on the environment, worker’s rights, civil rights, and the New Deal.  Perhaps no place better represents this fight to undo progress than the state of Wisconsin.

The Badger State looms large in the history of the American Progressive Movement.  Wisconsin’s most important governor, Robert M. La Follette, was a fiery populist who fought for the working man and against corporate power.  His followers nicknamed him “Fighting Bob” for his struggles against a bipartisan political system corrupted by railroad money.  He started out as an unremarkable politician in the late 1800s, serving as a Republican in Congress.  After he lost the 1890 election, the establishment offered this former farmer a bribe to fix a court case.  La Follette refused and began a 10 year people’s campaign against the political system, railroads, and the lumber companies that controlled the state.  Once elected governor in 1900, La Follette began a system of reforms copied across America.

His accomplishments included the invention of primaries for party nominations.  La Follette’s idea intended to break the control of party bosses.  In education, he invented the “Wisconsin Idea,” a highly influential idea in the history of American higher education.  The idea brought the University of Wisconsin into close contact with the real world: government professors advised city planners, agriculture professors taught farmers, and engineering departments improved manufacturing.  This public service function of higher education is uniquely an American idea.  Governor La Follette also broke up the monopolies in the state, made corporations pay their fair share in taxes, and protected the forests and small farmers.  He also strongly supported women’s suffrage and opposed the Ku Klux Klan.  Many of the ideas came from German immigrants who brought the ideas of worker’s compensation and disability insurance from Otto von Bismark’s social welfare system.  Wisconsin started the nation’s first worker’s compensation system.

When the people of Wisconsin sent him to Washington as a senator in 1906, they intended for him to become the ambassador of Wisconsin reform ideas to the rest of America.  A fiery orator, he opposed the corporate takeover of Washington.  He derided Theodore Roosevelt as too weak on the Progressive cause and ran against him in the 1912 Republican primary as the stronger champion of reform.  Senator La Follette was the original antiwar and anti-imperialist politician, opposing the United States entry into World War I.   The senator argued strenuously against this war of imperialism on behalf of big business and the corporate oligarchy in a filibuster.  In fact, the Senate had to invent the cloture rule to end his filibuster.  A man of extremely strong principle, he defended the rights of Socialists being imprisoned for their beliefs like Eugene Debs and criticized Congress’s refusal to seat Socialist congressmen.

After such brave and unpopular stands, you would think the old man would retire.  He instead ran for re-election to take on the war profiteering companies that benefited from World War I; he won by the largest landslide in Wiconsin history.  After two party hacks were nominated by the Republicans and Democrats for president, La Follette ran as a third party candidate in 1924 for president.  Senator La Follette called for the abolition of child labor, defense of freedom of speech, nationalization of the railroads, municipal ownership of power companies, and a national referendum before the nation went to war.  Exhortations to vote for the “lesser of two evils” prevailed, and the Republican corporate hack Calvin Coolidge won the election in a landslide.  The election had the lowest turnout in American history which suggests that millions of people were discouraged from voting for the man they believed in.  La Follette died the following year; before he died he warned America that the unjust Treaty of Versailles would cause another world war and that rising bank and farm failures in the 1920s would lead to a financial crisis.

La Follette stood for everything great and good in America.  Everything cowardly scoundrels like Glenn Beck denigrate on a nightly basis in the comfort of their New York studios.  Progressives like La Follette stood for America when America wouldn’t stand for itself in its darkest days of pro-war hysteria.

Wisconsin politicians since then love to pay tribute to the great man.  The recently defeated Senator Russ Feingold admired La Follette and followed his principles when in office, voting against the Iraq War and the Patriot Act.  But these days, gee, they just don’t make them like they used to.

Governor Scott Walker represents the antithesis of everything Robert La Follette ever stood for.  He hates the unions and the working class.  He cut taxes for big corporations and planned to sell off the public power plants in no bid contracts.  Walker has cut into  environmental regulation while serving as the errand boy for Koch Industries and their pro-pollution far-right agenda against the people.  The Koch brothers, the top Tea Party financiers in America, make billions off of American taxpayers by mining on public lands and eating up biofuel subsidies.  They are the type of monopolists La Follette and the Progressive Party were born to fight.

In fact, unlike past governors, he refused to be sworn in near the bust of Robert La Follette in the state capitol.  Governor Walker likes his unpopular stand in this collective bargaining battle, but he is not standing up on deep principle or on on behalf of the little people who have no voice.  He’s too busy fighting to end kindergarten for four year olds.

In short, Scott Walker wants a Wisconsin without Robert La Follette.  The people of Wisconsin have decided they want a Wisconsin without Scott Walker.

Links

Wisconsin Historical Society – “Career of Robert La Follette“

Fighting Bob – “About Robert La Follette“

Issue XLIXb: Diversity is in the mind, not in the skin

In order to help us remake our mental map of the world, we need to understand different ways of thinking and of seeing the world, with different geographies and realities.  True diversity is in the mind, not in the skin.  But before we can reconceptualize East and West, we need recognize who the pretenders are.

What it does not look like

Jorge Luis Borges famously questioned literary nationalism in his speech “The Argentine Writer and Tradition.”  Argentinean writers were fascinated with uncovering the true, indigenous tradition of Argentina by relying on the local gaucho (cowboy) oral tradition.  They would write stories in what they thought was the strongest rural gaucho dialect possible.  Whoever used the most country (i.e. hick) language was the best storyteller and the most “Argentinean.”

Borges did not criticize relying on the local gaucho tradition.  He may even prefer it to the unreasonable love of literature from their former colonizer, Spain.  But does fetishization of the local idiosyncrasies really make one Argentinean?  Is piling on local flavor really making you a local?  Or does it make you a tourist?

Borges pointed out that in the Koran there is no mention of camels.

“I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work.  It was by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, and no reason to know that camels were especially Arabian; for him they were a part of reality, he had no reason to emphasize them; on the other hand, the first thing a falsifier, a tourist, an Arab nationalist would do is to have a surfeit of camels, caravans of camels, on every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab was unconcerned: he knew he could be an Arab without camels.  I think we Argentines can emulate Mohammed, can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local color.”

Similarly, the Buenos Aires intelligentsia misrepresented the gaucho tradition by overemphasizing differences and overdoing their manners of speech.  They were caricaturing and fetishizing the gaucho like a foreigner would.  A real gaucho would not talk like that, and a real Argentine would not get away with such a parody of their tradition.

Is this some old, irrelevant speech from a country most of us have ever visited?  Not really.  Think about other situations.  Do hip hop artists overemphasize the violence of the ghetto, the hardness of their life, the desperation of the ’hood, and the ghetto-ness of their slang?  Would someone from the inner city really talk like that or are these artists outsiders (or selling to outsiders)?  Who is more authentic?  The people really in the ’hood just live the life, not rap about it.

The same can apply to Indian writing in English.  Do Indian writers always emphasize mangos and spicy chutney in their stories? Is the pushiness and coziness of family life being told or implicitly accepted?  Are these Anglicized urban Indians selling to outsiders or are they telling it like it is to those who instinctually live it without question?  In the real India, rural India, the stories are always known in advance but are told over and over again with different spins or emphases.

George W. Bush was born in Connecticut and after a few years in Midland public schools went to boarding school in Massachusetts and then to Yale and Harvard.  When he ran for Congress in the 1970s, he lost to a good ol’ boy from Texas Tech who emphasized Bush’s blue blood Yankee roots.  A distant relative of the Queen of England does not poll too well in West Texas.  After Bush’s loss, he decided to never be out-Texaned by anyone again.  He emphasized his (slight) Midland roots, and he even bought a ranch with no cattle the year before he decided to run for president.  Bush’s walking and talking parody of Texas was marketing for the non-Texans while he did what he could for the New England country club class he was born to serve.

How do you know when something is real then?  There are many George W. Bush’s playing on their movie set ranches, pretending to be something they are not to outsiders and gullible locals.

The truly authentic will exude their diversity in how they act and think.  You don’t see Obama sporting beach clothing and talking about how much he likes to surf.  He exudes the Hawaiian cool attitude and relaxed nature in his every move.

But what are diverse ways of thinking?  The next report will discuss some different ways of thinking in the world.

Issue XLIXa: Reconceptualizing East and West [a series]

When Sultan Mehmet captured Constantinople and ended a Western empire that lasted 1,123 years and 18 days, he walked into the desolate palace and found ruins.  The Byzantine Empire outlasted the Roman Empire for centuries, and it had now met its end by the Turkish Muslim king who began the Ottoman Empire.

As the sultan stepped into the Palace of the Emperors, he whispered these immortal lines in Persian:

The spider weaves the curtains in the palace of the Caesars; the owl calls the watches in the towers of Afrasiab.

Given the recent events in the Middle East, perhaps the West should feel as irrelevant and defeated as the old Byzantines.  History’s movers and shakers now populate the East and not the West.  For the first time in maybe centuries, events and ideas in the East inspire history in the West.

Madison, Wisconsin is a strange place to imagine would be where the globalization of ideas began to reverse its direction.  Cairo’s protests inspired massive resistance in Wisconsin.  Al Jazeera (which spread the seeds of revolution) received surprising praise for its substantial and serious news coverage (especially compared to American news) from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  The export of ideas and ideologies (or at least the credit for them) has flowed from West to East for decades if not centuries.  The current of ideas, backed up like the Aswan Dam, just burst through from East to West and (like the Nile) from the global South to North.  The West is stuck and in decline.  If it is to remain relevant, it needs to copy the best of the other side’s ideas.

The old ways of teaching history and conceiving of the world do not give us the appropriate language to speak intelligently about this new world.  Mehmet even changed the name of Constantinople to Istanbul so we may need a new map to this world as in his world.

How can we find this language?  Where do we begin?  How do we re-conceptualize East and West?  The following Bhatany Report series will seek to answer these questions and re-orient our Eurocentric understanding of the world.  First, we will challenge certain orthodoxies on the origins of ideas.  Then we will challenge the idea that increasing diversity in employment, politics, and power will increase a diversity of the mind.  And finally the Bhatany Report will explain how and why we can fix our own mental maps.

Dispatch from London: The Middle East’s Laundromat

This morning’s edition of the Guardian fronted the news that the head of the London School of Economics and Political Science had resigned last night over donations from Libya.  Colonel Qadaffi’s son received a Ph.D. from the institution that may be fraudlent.  Lord Megnhnad Desai (an economics professor) supervised the dissertation that a quick Google search revealed to be ripped off of the IMF’s website.

Is it really that unusual?  London is the Middle East’s favorite spending place.  An Egyptian owned Harrod’s and sold it to the Qatari royal family.  A few steps north of Oxford Street finds offices of all the Middle East airlines.  U.A.E. money paid for the Sheik Zayad Theatre in the LSE’s New Academic Building.  Hijabs and rather stylish burkas parade down Regent Street shops.

It’s in a central time zone (not too far from the Continent, Africa, the Middle East, Russia, Asia, or the Eastern U.S.A.).  The tax laws are favorable to foreigners in a wayAmerica’s are not.  Financial regulation like Sarbanes-Oxley did not apply here; a little known fact about the AIG implosion is that it began at their division in London.

Is there a better way for this city to exist and prosper?

Deconstructing the Economist

The Economist may rank among the world’s most prestigious publications, but it is easily among the most dishonest and deceptive newspapers in the English language.  A classically liberal rag from the 1800s, it would more easily be classified as “libertarian” in American political terms.  I know a good many of you admire this British magazine, so I will deconstruct a recent editorial (“leader”) on rising inequality in the world.  They basically shrug the problem off and say it is perfectly natural and part of globalization and development.  Their counterexamples also include many countries and leaders they have opposed editorially in the past.  Let’s begin.  First read the editorial “Inequality: The rich and the rest.”  Below I will demonstrate their FOX News-for-the-global-elite-biases.