Recently disposed Malagasy president Marc Ravalomanana addressed the leaders of the other 14 countries that make up SADC today in Swaziland. He is soliciting their support in officially launching his bid to take back power from Mayor/DJ Andry Rajeolina. There are no reports yet whether or not he cried while giving the speech:
...Majesty; Excellencies, I never resigned. I was forced to hand power over, at gun point, on March the 17th. My family and I, were surrounded by soldiers threatening our lives. My son and his wife were forced to hide in the forest. The only escape for us was out of the country. Andry Rajoelina, the former Mayor of the Capital, Antananarivo, seized power through terrorism.
As soon as he took power, Rajoelina dissolved Parliament and the Cabinet. He has also modified the Constitution, by changing the structure of the High Constitutional Court. As a result, 10 out of the 11 members are appointed by him and his government.... Your Majesty, Your Excellencies, the only solution to this crisis is to return the democratically elected Government back to power. This is what the people of Madagascar are calling for... I ask for your help to save Madagascar from chaos and anarchy. I need your assistance to go back to my country. The situation prevailing in Madagascar is unacceptable. The rule of law and democracy must be restored. Once back in power I will undertake the following:-....
In response, SADC dismembered Madagascar from its ranks and issued a 24 point communique.
I doubt all these African heads of States and prime ministers at today's Extraordinary Summit give a flying divot about what happens to Ravalomanana. But help him they must, otherwise they all risk what happened to him laying down the precedent for what could happen to all of them.
By way of illustration, one could say Ravalomanana has contacted a unique strain of small pox. All the other heads of States see why it is in their own personal best interests to stop it from spreading.
Law prof and blogger extraordinaire Ann Althouse marries a frequent commenter on her blog. In the clip above, Ann talks to Robin Wright about finding compatibility in the age of blogs, emails and commentary. As usual, Ann's dead pan utter frankness in discussing how her virtual romance went down makes this one of the funniest blogging heads sessions ever.
From what Althouse says, it appears she seeks to establish emotional connections through her writing and that may explain why she's susceptible to its reciprocity. Althouse and her commenter also reminds me of one of father's favorite stories, which comes from Max Lucado's book, "And The Angels Were Silent."
Go back a few years, substitute a blog for the margins of a book and hand written letters for emails and the story below, with a Hollywood climax to boot, shows how in spite of technological shifts and limitations, the human need to connect, like the need of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park to breed, will always find a way through:
John Blanchard stood up from the bench, straightened his Army uniform, and studied the crowd of people making their way through Grand Central Station. He looked for the girl whose heart he knew, but whose face he didn't, the girl with the rose. His interest in her had begun thirteen months before in a Florida library. Taking a book off the shelf he found himself intrigued, not with the words of the book, but with the notes penciled in the margin. The soft handwriting reflected a thoughtful soul and insightful mind. In the front of the book, he discovered the previous owner's name, Miss Hollis Maynell. With time and effort he located her address. She lived in New York City . He wrote her a letter introducing himself and inviting her to correspond.
The next day he was shipped overseas for service in World War II. During the next year and one month the two grew to know each other through the mail. Each letter was a seed falling on a fertile heart. A romance was budding. Blanchard requested a photograph, but she refused. She felt that if he really cared, it wouldn't matter what she looked like.
When the day finally came for him to return from Europe, they scheduled their first meeting - 7:00 PM at the Grand Central Station in New York . 'You'll recognize me,' she wrote, 'by the red rose I'll be wearing on my lapel.' So at 7:00 he was in the station looking for a girl whose heart he loved, but whose face he'd never seen.
I'll let Mr. Blanchard tell you what happened: "A young woman was coming toward me, her figure long and slim. Her blonde hair lay back in curls from her delicate ears; her eyes were blue as flowers. Her lips and chin had a gentle firmness, and in her pale green suit she was like springtime come alive. I started toward her, entirely forgetting to notice that she was not wearing a rose. As I moved, a small, provocative smile curved her lips. 'Going my way, sailor?' she murmured."
"Almost uncontrollably I made one step closer to her, and then I saw Hollis Maynell. She was standing almost directly behind the girl."
"A woman well past 40, she had graying hair tucked under a worn hat... She was more than plump, her thick-ankled feet thrust into low-heeled shoes."
"The girl in the green suit was walking quickly away. I felt as though I was split in two, so keen was my desire to follow her, and yet so deep was my longing for the woman whose spirit had truly companioned me and upheld my own. And there she stood. Her pale, plump face was gentle and sensible, her gray eyes had a warm and kindly twinkle. I did not hesitate. My fingers gripped the small worn blue leather copy of the book that was to identify me to her."
"This would not be love, but it would be something precious, something perhaps even better than love, a friendship for which I had been and must ever be grateful. I squared my shoulders and saluted and held out the book to the woman, even though while I spoke I felt choked by the bitterness of my disappointment. 'I'm Lieutenant John Blanchard, and you must be Miss Maynell. I am so glad you could meet me; may I take you to dinner?'"
"The woman's face broadened into a tolerant smile. 'I don't know what this is about, son,' she answered, 'but the young lady in the green suit who just went by, she begged me to wear this rose on my coat. And she said if you were to ask me out to dinner, I should tell you that she is waiting for you in the big restaurant across the street. She said it was some kind of test!'"
"It's not difficult to understand and admire Miss Maynell's wisdom. The true nature of a heart is seen in its response to the unattractive. 'Tell me whom you love,' Houssaye wrote, 'And I will tell you who you are.'"
She Loves Everybody by Chester French. Album: She Loves Everybody. Interscope Records, Nov 2008.
My flatmate recently turned me on to these dudes and they immediately struck me as a brand spilling with ideas, the least of which is the obvious rip of their name. So you call yourself Chester French and you do not only take satyagraha to a whole new level in your first video but, also, your first CD is literally a condom wrapper. Whoever you are, you are definitely worth getting to know.
In 2007, photographer Paolo Woods accompanied the journalist Sergei Michel through the forests of the DRC, along the railroads of Angola and to karaoke bars in Nigeria to document the adventures and enterprise of the Chinese who came to Africa to make their fortune and who have "invested their lives and their money in a continent that the West has long considered fit only for hand outs."
Mr. Wood was born in Shanghai in 1948 has an industrial empire that includes today about 15 factories with more then 1600 workers, construction companies, hotels and restaurants in Nigeria. Photo: Paolo Woods.
The first ever post on this blog was about the "Chinese Invasion," referencing Dayo Olopade's article for Root.com in which she explains how the Chinese do it:
Most of the world wants to know how China does it, says David Shinn, the former U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia and Burkina Faso, who is writing a book on Sino-African relations. The formula, he says, is simple: "One, they take greater business risk, and two, they don't attach the political conditions that the West tends to impose." Indeed, China's remarkable control of its private sector is a clear advantage when it comes to partnerships with less economically sophisticated nations. Eight hundred Chinese companies have set up shop in Africa, and some giants, like Sinopec and Chongqing Telecom in addition to Huawei, have at times operated at a short-term loss (underwritten, naturally, by the Chinese government).
But in making a point about how China is still a fierce competitor even for the low-tier, "sweat shop" jobs that should be going to African workers in these new Chinese-African industries mushrooming all over Africa, New York Times reporter Lydia Polgreen in this podcast discussion with editor Greg Winter makes an interesting point about China being a country that can claim concurrent memberships in the G8 as well as the Third World without bating an eye:
China is so big and it's simultaneously at so many levels of development that it can at the same time be one of the world's biggest, hi-tech economies and still be the world's sweat shop.
In terms of development and underdevelopment, China has what one could call a Du Boisian "double consciousness." Many Chinese are not that far removed, in China, from the very conditions they find in Africa and they, unlike Americans, come from a system of government that is anything but democratic. The Chinese can make the Third World work for them, because China still bears many traits of the Third World even as it cements its place in the First. That also means it possesses a class of small business people, seeking better profit margins and new economies of scale -- a fierce prospector class.
The reverse is, however, not the same. Back in February, Evan Osnos writes in the New Yorker about Guangzhou’s Canaan market on China's southern coast, where merchants from Mali, Ghana, and mostly Nigerians have been arriving and settling down in large numbers. Taxi-drivers call the neighborhood Chocolate City.
Photograph: David Hogsholt/Reportage by Getty Images
African immigrants to China are not a prospector class. Rather, they are a mercantile class, caught in the margins of diminishing returns, hoping, as Osnos' essay suggests, to slice off a buck here or there.
Update: And yesterday, we saw the pull China now has in Africa when it was reported that the South African government denied entry to the Dalai Lama. The South Africans know who butters their bread.
I was telling someone the other day that I've had trouble wrapping my head around how those CDSs (Credit Default Swaps) work. Like everyone else, all I know is that these gunk like financial/insurance instruments AIG was supposedly neck deep in equates to minting money out of thin air -- "why I couldn't wrap my head around it," my colleague at work said," was because, like thin air, there was nothing really there to wrap my head around." He is half right.
"Basically what your derivative guys at AIG kept doing," one of the congress men pointed out at the hearing a few days ago, "was they were packaging smoke," so AIG could make money off the premiums on collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and all the while taking up your commissions and bonuses and living without a backend or an escape hatch of your own.
No wonder easy credit just wouldn't stop flowing and the housing market bubble just couldn't stop growing, because on the back end, the banks and hedge funds that bought up all the asset backed securities or CDOs these housing loans were turned into could further reduce their exposure by buying CDSs from AIG-FP.
Because these CDSs go by AIG's credit rating, the transaction doesn't require the seller of protection to have the money to cover the debt being insured like you would have with other traditional insurance instruments. So, in effect, what these CDS instruments was allowing AIG-FP to do, in their own heads at least, is sell "insurance" to all these firms who are creating these CDOs out of the thin air of stupid debts like the sale of a mortgage on a million dollar mansion to a graduate student with no money down for the first 2 years or so. Securitize or pool together into a CDO a lot of stupid mortgages like that and you manufacture new credit flow by dumping the liability of the CDO through a CDS, which, for a premium, AIG or a Lehman Brothers will pay you, if it defaults, the face value of original debt owed.
In other words, they insure your back end, allowing banks to turn these stupid credit card loans and crazy mortgages and recklessly generated debts into credit flows and get them off their balance sheets, at least on paper. So when someone says, "one incentive for banks to create securitized assets is to remove risky assets from their balance sheet" what they are actually saying is the reverse: banks have been given the incentive to create risky assets which they will now turn into securitized assets by having another institution assume the credit risk so that they (the banks) receive cash in return, which allows them to invest more of their capital in new loans [legit ones? riskier ones? or whatever] or other assets and possibly have a lower capital requirement.
If AIG was required to have the cash to back all the back ends of these banks or hedge funds they were insuring then it would have been plain to even a child that AIG was playing God and trying to insure the impossible -- by underwriting the unbackable back ends of these recklessly generated debts given to people that had no means to pay them back, what AIG was in fact saying to itself, writes Saporito for Time, was that it could actually insure systemic risk:
In its CDS contracts, though, AIG wrote multiple insurance policies covering the same underlying package of increasingly toxic assets. In essence, it was underwriting systemic risk. This is the opposite of what insurance companies are supposed to do: diversify risk across the universe of policyholders. "One thing about the insurance model: it relies on diversification as its means to exist," says a top exec at an AIG competitor. "If an insurance company plays in a field where they underwrite systemic risk, that's a totally different experience." Is it ever. Insurance companies can handle catastrophic risk but not systemic risk. That's why you can buy hurricane insurance from private companies but not terrorism insurance. Only a government can take on that risk. At its most basic, AIG took on colossal risks that it could not afford.
Now, you could ask where were all the credit raters when all the was happening? Well... Standard and Poors, Moody's and others put their top-grade stamp on these flimsy securities created out of reckless debts because it seems there is a "glaring conflict of interest": these outfits are paid for their ratings by the bond issuer. As one S&P analyst wrote in an email, "[A bond] could be structured by cows and we would rate it."
The Ponzi nature of this whole house of financial cards is, perhaps, how Berni Madoff justified what he was doing with the monies given to him to invest. I mean the sustainability of the whole credit to debt to create system is, in essence, predicated on growing it, growing it, growing it, growing it and growing it ad infinitum.
Okay, lets break it down from the top. To create more money from what can be declared on paper as fixed income asset backed securities and for other varying purposes ranging from speculation to arbitrage and so on, banks, hedge funds, Fannie Maes, investors, China, and other sources are ready to buy up all the CDOs that came their way. This creates incentive pressure for those who run the special purpose entities (SPEs) created to structure these CDOs because the more they come up with these so called pools of fixed assets the more million dollar commissions they take home. This creates even more incentive pressure on the bottom tier banks to make out even more reckless loans, mortgages, and for American consumers to keep buying houses they can't afford, artificially fueling the housing market demand and construction bubble, hoping to sell those houses later, pay off their reckless loans and, possibly, even make a tidy profit from a nothing down situation.
As far as I can tell, the philosopher's stone in the middle of all this that allows the transmutation of debt to credit is that erroneous equation of the ability of people to pay up their mortgages and loans--especially in a labor market where wages are pretty much fixed for 80% of the population--to fixed income assets banks can put on their books once they've transferred the liability of those debts to someone else. Actually the word "fixed" works both ways because, for the banks, those loans are fixed income and highly profitable, considering many of us are paying minimums or have our mortagages so spread out through re-financing that we are paying 4 times what the house is really worth. But, again, what is also fixed for the middle class is income and thus the incentive to assume lots of debt and it is on this intrinsic need and ability that these financial instruments prey.
So at the end of the day, when the question is asked: how did we get here? What no one mentions as the root of the problem is that for years the most lucrative business in America, because of the sheer size of its middle class, has been the business of getting them into debt, keeping them in debt, and making them life long monthly interest payers. Frank Sobotka, in season 2 of the HBO cultural dissertation, The Wire, had the best description of the present state of American enterprise. Using what he had, the Baltimore ports, to make money (illegally) so he could keep local politicians' pockets greased in order for the state to vote to build a new grand pier that would keep the docks going and keep not only he and three generations of dock workers working but also a culture and the neighborhoods they grew up in from going extinct. When the walls finally came crumbling down on him, Sobotka aptly summarized the American problem at the end of the clip (5.19) below:
You know what the trouble is Brucie? We used to make shit in this country, build shit.
Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket.
Like David Simon warned of the coming apocalypse with The Wire, David Harvey has been warning anyone who would care to listen of the power of financial institutions or neoliberalism run amuck. He restates his long held argument in a recent article in Red Pepper:
My interpretation [of neoliberalism] is that it’s a class project, now masked by a lot of rhetoric about individual freedom, liberty, personal responsibility, privatisation and the free market. That rhetoric was a means towards the restoration and consolidation of class power, and that neoliberal project has been fairly successful. One of its basic principles that was set up in the 1970s was that state power should protect financial institutions at all costs. This is the principle that was worked out in the New York City crisis in the mid-1970s, and was first defined internationally when Mexico threatened to go bankrupt in 1982. That would have destroyed the New York investment banks, so the US Treasury and the IMF combined to bail Mexico out. But in so doing they mandated austerity for the Mexican population. In other words, they protected the banks and destroyed the people – and this has been the standard practice in the IMF ever since. The current bailout is the same old story, one more time, except bigger.
Below he and Alexander Cockburn discuss the current crisis on Laura Flanders' Grit TV:
In relation to all of the above, they tell us in a nut shell how we all got here:
Cockburn: Usually in a major, major crisis what you do is eradicate debt. You just hyper-inflate the debt away... They [Treasury] are not talking about doing that. They are giving the banks the ability to extend credit. They are wiping out the bank debt by paying for it. But there are other areas there where you are stuck with AIG, which is part of this vast re-insurance paper which is issuing this endlessly complicated mutations of money. One of the reasons it happened is because profit.. they had to try to slice up profit in more and more elaborate ways to make a buck. That's why you had the selling of debt and the multiplication of debt and the multiplication and the multiplication to a level where, literally, when the house of cards goes down you don't know what the debt is. So the balloon went to wide in an effort to keep the whole show on the road and of course people made berserk sums of money...
Harvey: In the 1970s you started attacking the living standards of working people and real wages have not risen around the world very much since the 1970s and if real wages are not rising then you've got a problem in" who do you sell your product to? So real wages didn't rise so you had to go to the credit card and debt and so you increase household debt not only in this country but anywhere around the world where you could do it. The result of that was you had a debt fueled economy; household debt has tripled over the last 20 years. If household debt is doing that (going up) and household income is doing that (stagnant) the gap becomes bigger and bigger till it gets to a point where you can't possibly pay back...
So, in retrospect its safe to say credit cards and the WallMartification of America--i.e. all the outsourcing that kept goods cheap-- had kept the American middle class on a bubble even as it was been destroyed by all these financial instruments for so long. But that is no long case, the chickens have so, so, so come home to freakin' roost.
This story is old and the picture is from 2006. It shows Ntsiki Biyela at the Stellekaya wine cellar in Stellenbosch, South Africa -- she is the country's first fully-fledged black female winemaker and the first to single-handedly take charge of a cellar. She is small part of a growing crop of black women to qualify as winemakers in a wine industry that remains 99% white-owned.
The unspoken attitude among many winemakers -- and drinkers -- is that black people cannot make decent wine because it is not part of their cultural tradition. In villages such as her hometown, Kwavuthela, people drink homemade beer. In black townships, people visit shebeens (taverns) drinking mainly beer and hard liquor. At the Jo'burg Wine Show in Johannesburg in June, there were few nonwhite faces among the tasters and drinkers, let alone behind the stalls. "I was not particularly looking for a black winemaker. I was looking for someone who was capable," said winemaker David Lello, the owner of Stellakaya winery."I think there are prejudices all over. Number one, she's a woman. Number two, she's black," he said of Biyela. "I definitely think there are barriers, but we are not scared of those barriers. Not her, not I." Biyela admitting being scared when Lello told her she would be the sole winemaker at Stellakaya, not someone's deputy. "He just believed in me," she said. Although Stellakaya is small, producing 87,000 bottles a year, its wines are distributed in California and parts of Europe.
In this www.sagoodnews article, Anzill Adams, head of Louisvale Wines and South Africa's wine industry's first nonwhite CEO, says, "Probably 95% of the skills base is white in this industry, and probably 95% of the unskilled labor is black." Based on Adams' numbers, Biyela's story, I think, is an intercultural process worthy of study because it shows the journey from unskilled to skilled is, to wit, a blend of wines that consists of equal amounts of hard work:
While at university of Stellenbosch, she often struggled with the curriculum as it was taught in Afrikaans, a language she barely spoke. She succeeded regardless, using notes taken in English by a student who had already done the course and by investing lots of extra time.
Equal amounts of mentor ship:
Biyela is the protégé of Jabulani Ntshangase, a black South African who developed his love of wine while living in exile in the United States during apartheid. After Biyela graduated in 2003 she had little success in applying for jobs, and it was Ntshangase who advised her to apply for a job at Stellekaya.
Equal amounts of time to grow:
But she worked hard to educate her palate. She prowled the shelves of supermarkets in search of unfamiliar smells, sniffing different fruits and spices she hadn't tasted. "When I got into a shop I would see something I'd heard of and just smell it and smell it," she said. "I would smell any fruit that I would see." Biyela found that her palate grew exponentially when, while still a student, she worked in the acclaimed Delheim winery, renowned for its flagship Grand Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon. She no longer had to pretend to like what she was helping to make. "When I was working at Delheim, I started drinking wine and enjoying it," she said, adding that winemaker Philip Costandius spent hours explaining the qualities of his wines to students. "He really did inspire me. When we finished at the end of the day, you could take an open bottle. "When I was working, [the passion] just grew in me"
And equal amount of opportunity:
After finishing High School in Ulundi, her first intention was to study chemical engineering. However, she didn’t have any funding to study and South African Airways awarded her a bursary. “They paid for my tuition fees, my books, everything"
At the end of day, Biyela's journey and the blend of wines that helped her along is proof that the transition of a delicate skill like wine making is really a delicate process of cultural appreciation, transition and intercultural communication.
But some may ask why it is important for the the delicate, Euro-centric culture of winemaking be passed on to the Biyelas and Ntshangases of the world.
Okay, what the questioners are actually saying in-between the lines is that empowerment of black people, with its good intentions and all, is not a good enough reason for asking/legislating that the wine making industry be more inclusive. Though the protection of racial privilege has played a major role in why South Africa's wine industry is 98% White, but that's not the only reason things are the way they are. The questioners will point to this lack diversity as a product of the fact that the art of wine making, itself, is a culture, and to learn a culture is akin to learning a language. Therefore you can also excuse the fact that wine making in South Africa is a 98% white monoculture because the easiest way to learn its language is to be born into a family of those who already speak the language -- "duh."
So a legit argument can be made that the winemaking culture is the way it is because, like most cultures, it is a self perpetuating monocultural process amongst whites rather than an intercultural process of communication between white and black, which it has never needed to be until now.
But, again, why do white monocultures like wine making need to assume intercultural communication processes to bring about diversity and inclusion? To reach out to a new generation of wine drinkers? To tap into new markets? Tokenism? Possibly, all of the above. But I think a better argument can be made for diversity in relation to a delicate process of intercultural communication that enables the transmission of delicate skill sets.
Through a communication theory lens, there are 2 ways to look at this.
Because our perception, understanding, and interpretation of reality is always perspectival, a person's location--i.e., standpoint--within any social hierarchy affects what he or she sees. Hence in 2009 the U.S. government's bailout package can be one man's bonus and, yet, the source of another person's seething rage. According to Sandra Harding and Julia Wood who have distilled these precepts into a communication theory called "standpoint theory," they go on to make the case that the standpoints of marginalized people provide less false views of the world than do the privileged perspectives of the powerful. Harding came up with the term "strong objectivity," in opposition to mere objectivity or non bias. Strong objectivity, according to standpoint theorists, requires that scientific research start from the lives of women, the poor, gays and lesbians, and racial minorities.
If nothing else, standpoint theory makes the point that Biyela's view of the reality that is wine and wine making is going to be different from the privileged view her white bosses have of the same reality, and if that is so, it then begs the question: is there any import or significance to this difference she brings?
Personally, I think the difference can be better explained phenomenologically, and that this difference is significant because it matters to the evolution of the knowledge of making wines -- all the way down to its epistemological roots. Another way to phrase it is to say though the content of making wines, which has been passed to Biyela and other Africans, remains relatively the same in terms of its content, the way by which they, as people "Other" to the originating culture, uniquely come to know what they need to know is however very different, and it is upon the utility of that difference that I would base an argument for diversity.
I think what I am trying to understand here is, for the lack of a better term, the phenomenology of diversity and what I am arguing for is its connection to the epistemological expansion of the foundations of any kind of knowledge.
A person's "coming to the knowledge of something," Hursserl stated, is not derivative of some consciousness that is "in" the person's mind but rather has more to do with the person's consciousness of something --i.e. as in consciousness directed at something--and that consciousness is constituted not so much by what that consciousness is directed at but rather by the intentional structure of consciousness itself, which is unique for every one. Why?
Because everyone's consciousness, and this why difference is significant, depends on the enabling conditions--or conditions of the possibility--that gives each person's consciousness its structure, and these enabling conditions cover everything from bodily skills to cultural context to language to social practices to social background even to the context of the situation in which consiousness is being directed at something.
I love the phenomenological term "enabling conditions" because it helps us understand that each person's cultural background is an enabling condition that determines his or her structures of consciousness and, like a caste, it is bound to give a unique mold to the reality being observed or to the knowledge being acquired.
It is the ability of our consciousness to derive unique molds of reality/knowledge and the possibility of more unique combinations and permutations of "ways through which we come to know," that underscores the real significance of difference and diversity to the epistemological foundations of any kind of knowledge, especially that on which a monculture is based on. Thus, to keep the understanding of, for example, a culture like wine making viable and evolving, a phenomenology of diversity will insist that said culture must open up to other cultures and perspectives that will bring with them those "enabling conditions" that have shaped, uniquely, castes of consciousness that will now bring to a set of skills or the general knowledge about something new unique molds of comprehending it.
Unique molds of comprehension are necessary if the knowledge of something like, say, wine making is going to evolve in a rapidly changing world. Hence, as the culture bearers continue to discover that they have to open up and transmit their skill sets to those who are not necessarily like them, I see a growing need for us to foster the kind of delicate intercultural communication and processes that produced the likes Ntsiki Biyela.
By the way, to get a hint of the unique mold someone like Biyela brings to comprehending the very unfamiliar skill set, knowledge and reality of wine making, get a load of her own unique wine-speak from the LA Times article:
This is my favorite," the 29-year-old enthused, popping the cork from a bottle of blended Sangiovese, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon, pouring it into a glass and holding it under her nose, with a small frown of intense concentration. "It's this earthiness, walking out into the forest after rain," she said. "That's what I am getting. I used to go and fetch firewood from the forest, and sometimes it's like it's been raining on a sunny day and you get this overwhelming earthiness coming out.
I bet no white South African farmer has ever heard wine described in such terms before.
Over in Liberia, photographer Glenda Gordon is working with UNICEF on "I Have Something to Tell You," a documentary by Loch Philips about the challenges faced by young Liberian women who strive against unimaginable odds to be educated, independent and for the right to pursue their dreams.
At her blog Glenda is telling the story of 10 girls: Janice, Ruth, Joseta, Keturah, Yah, Jewri, Victoria, Elizabeth, Garnice and Betty.
Ruth Dureng, for example, wants to become both a reverend and a doctor. In the caption to the picture below, Glenda wrote that "those pink stuffed animals, blond baby dolls and silk flowers seem almost out of place in Ruth’s new bedroom when she slips on heels and a head scarf, and walks out of the house like a force of nature."
From my experience, dreams force you to surround yourself with the artifacts of all you anticipate, and if you are dreaming in Africa, then it won't be long till you collect those artifacts into enough bricks to build a wall between you and a reality that has zero opportunities for you, especially if you belong to hordes of the unconnected. For Ruth:
A dual career may seem challenging to some, but Ruth has overcome far greater challenges before. She was abused and forced out of her house when she refused to become the second wife of her aunt’s husband... In a culture where women are shamed for saying ‘no’, or shunned when they are the victims of sexual violence, Ruth had the strength to speak out. “Your ‘no’ can save and protect the generation that is not yet born,” she says. “I stood up to protect my pride, and you can do the same, no matter what the case is. Stand up. Life is better if you live it positively.” Ruth wants to achieve many things, but she knows she will need help. “I am convinced that I cannot achieve these dreams alone,” she says. “I need education and help to foster my dreams into reality. more
Like other places in the world, Africa is not immune from culture's intrinsic aversion to difference and to young women who bring such "difference" into the world. In his book, La Chinafrique, an exploration of China's expanding investment and presence in Africa, photographer Paolo Woods includes a picture of little Jonathan Kalunga -- half Zambian, half Chinese.
He caused the dismay of his mother and of the rest of the family because he is half Chinese. Vivien, the mother, had worked for some months in a Chinese restaurant in Kitwe, the main city of Zambia’s Copperbelt, where the Chinese have massively invested in the copper mines. The father, known as Cheng You, disappeared without leaving an address. Five years later Jonathan is still rejected by his family and lives with his grandparents in a far away and marshy village where he has contracted malaria.
African cultures frown hardest on girls and women.
In times of war patriarchal cultures also underlie the use of sex to torture, to dominate, to reward rebels, to service the myths that raping young girls give men invincibility or the cure to HIV-AIDs. Culture and war is always a potent mix, but for women and girls it's lethal. An exhibition of Jonathan Torgovnik's pictures of Rwandan Children Born of Rape will be on display at the Aperture Foundation from Friday, February 20–Thursday, May 7, 2009. Backstory:
Valentine and her daughters, Amelie and Inez.
During the 1994 genocide, hundreds of thousands of Rwandan women were subjected to massive sexual violence by members of the infamous Hutu militia groups, known as the Interhamwe. Among the most isolated survivors are women who have borne children as a result of those rapes. Due to the stigma of rape and “having a child of the militia,” the women’s communities and few surviving relatives have largely shunned them. Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape brings together Jonathan Torgovnik’s remarkable portraits of these women and children, and their harrowing first-hand testimonies.
But it's not all bad news. For every 100 or so women who get the brains of their dreams blown out by horny rebels, early marriages, and a lack of educational opportunities, there is always a June Arunga.
June Arunga was born in Kenya in 1981. She has a law degree from the University of Buckingham and is now in the film industry as founder and president of Open Quest Media LLC. and she speaks regularly on globalization and development issues.
But even though she has managed to scale education, economic, religious, and cultural hurdles, she finds the huddle of Western attitudes towards Africa even more difficult to scale as she explains below at the NYU Development Research Institute conference "What Would the Poor Say: Debates in Aid Evaluation," in New York City on February 6, 2009:
Then you have the foundation girls. Below is model and founder of the Georges Malaika Foundation, Noella Coursaris Musunka, who was born in the DRC to a Congolese mother and Cypriot father. Her foundation, like CAMFED or Angelique Kidjo's Batonga Foundation, is based on the developmental premise that providing education to young girls realigns relationship between the family and the woman, who is the axis of the home; as a result, you create a multiplier effect and solve a lot of unique African problems simply by educating young girls:
And finally, to make your heart play empathy's violins, CAMFED called on who other than Morgan Freeman to narrate the following short doc. In terms of advocacy for the education of girls in Africa, Freeman's voice and a lot of African kids mugging the camera does melt:
How Come by Youssou N'dour (Senegal), featuring Wyclef Jean and Canibus. Album: Joko. Label: Sbme, May 9, 2000.
Desert Rose by Sting, featuring Raï singer Cheb Mami (Algeria). Album: Brand New Day, September 28, 1999. Label: A&M Records.
Someone once said the problem with the world is this: let's say the world consists of yellow, red, black, white, and purple men. And let's say we looked up at sun, wanted to know what it was, and we asked each of these men what's the deal, of course, each of them will give us a different answer.
If you are under the assumption that truth is fixed, intrinsic to things and situation, and that the truth about things neither evolve nor change, then truth for you will have more to do with an explanation of the sun that comes with the ring of utility; meaning, you are going to value as truth an explanation for the sun that fits well--i.e., usefully--with the body of knowledge you have already ascertained about the world. Hence, whoever renders the explanation for the sun that provides you with the most utility, gets the honor of haven told the truth about the sun.
However, what proves useful in the long run is neither static nor fixed, but contextual, hence, truth changes as the questioner's needs change; truth, in other words, evolves and none of the men--yellow, red, white, black, purple-- therefore has the complete answer to what the deal is with the sun.
The most useful answer is never the whole truth, and taking the most useful answer as the most truthful answer only allows us to marginalize 3 other answers and 3 men for the tidiness of picking one man and the effectiveness of having one answer.
But what if because we understand truth as something that evolves and thereby we take all 4 different answers and combine them to come up with a way to grasp a more complete picture of the sun, one that contains all the possible and emergent paths our knowledge of the sun could take as it evolves in relation to what the sun is and what it means to us?
In other words, if the goal is not selection and marginalization but rather proliferation, collaboration, combination, then the whole point is that we will find that truth never comes in one piece but, rather, in many pieces which have to be gathered and assembled. Truth does not belong to one person or to one approach or to one methodology; truth is multivalent and always shared out among many, and if the truth is always shared then its multi-aspects need to be combined as could have been done with Mr. Purple, Mr. White, Mr. Yellow, Mr. Black and Mr. Red and their explanations for the sun, thus bringing new meaning to and reverence for the term "difference."
Thus the idea of diversity and quest for difference shouldn't be that of a legislated tokenism. Rather, we pursue diversity and embrace the inclusion of very different things because in their combination lies the key to an evolving truth, an emergent world, its fuller picture and its myriad of possibilities.
Just when you, the blogosphere and James Poiniewozik conclude the writers of 30 Rock phoned in episode 12 (season 3), in comes Ron Weiner, who wrote episode 13, to make you all eat your posts -- along with your choice of side. In terms of structure, jokes, plot device, I place 13 up there with season 2's Greenzo episode.
From Frank, who wants to live up to his Italian family name which, in English, means "well poisoner," to Liz reprimanding Tim and her line about disposable cameras at the wedding, episode 13 makes all these lines and jokes functional to a structure and plot device and eventually all three beautifully collide like crash test dummies each driving a Honda chassis at 130 miles per hr.
But what really stood out in episode 13 was the insight into what this generation is willing to settle for when it comes to communicating in the digital age.
We are taken back to the season's overarching adoption theme as Liz cozes up to the pregnant youngster, Becca, who works in the dough nut shop, has a baby for her baby's father, and who, to Liz's delight, is reading adoption literature. Liz, desperately seeking spawn, listens to her potential surrogate carry on about her boy friend:
Becca: And when I told Tim I was pregnant he just freaked out and didn't call me for a week. Then he texted me... oh I love you ...oh i'm mad at you ...you did this on purpose, as if. Meanwhile, his my Face page still says status: horny. And I'm like, if you care about me at all at least have the decency to skype me face-to-face.
Liz: Man, there just so many different devices for guys to not call you on now. When I was your age, you be like, oh, he probably tried to call me but my line was busy, then watch falcon crest and cry yourself to sleep.
So in a digital world it seems each medium (i-pods, cell phones, blogs, twitter, social network sites...) we adopt has to create in cyberspace our virtual equivalents: an email address, usernames, 1st, 2nd, 3rd person role playing, avatars, and so on); in other words, the medium, as far as the digital realm is concerned, ends up re-making us in its image, and the rules of the image in which we are re-made and virtually rendered, in turn, imposes on us new boundaries, parameters and even ethics.
Those absurd gaps which open up when the new rules of our images trump older social rules and norms (i.e., the different uses of one's facebook status) is a tell tale sign that the medium now defines the terms of our relations and mediations.
When "skyping" becomes the new equivalent for confrontation, the medium, indeed, is now the break up.
The academic job market sucks so hard that even people with PhDs aren't immune and those with PhDs in the humanities, Patricia Cohen reports, are certainly the most vulnerable as public universities stash hiring plans into freezers, bracing themselves for massive cuts in their state funding.
The situation is no better at the private universities, who are also drastically cutting back on spending as they try to right themselves from the shock their endowments took on the stock market.
In Cohen's article, Catherine Stimpson, the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University, gives, perhaps, the most vivid illustration of the prevailing academic job market:
This is a year of no jobs, Ph.D.s are stacked up... like planes hovering over La Guardia.
With PhDs circling over the academia-La Guardia, soon they are all going to start running low on fuel, especially those who finished dissertations in 2007/08 and have been circling out there the longest.
The only difference though is, unlike a real La Guardia, universities' control towers are under no obligations to bring in all these PhDs who are looking for a place to land.
They are all living out the plot of Die Hard 2 and no one in academia is required to play the role of Trudeau--the airport chief played by former senator Fred Thompson (Republican-Tennessee)--who has no landing systems to bring in the planes circling over his airport -- oh the irony. Hence, no one at control tower academia is going:
...We've just brought ourselves maybe 2 hours. After that those [PhDs] low on fuel aren't going to be circling. They are going to be dropping on the White House lawn.
Lille by Lisa Hannigan. Album: Sea Saw. Label: Arto Records/ RED, 2009.
Okay, I'm still taking in Lisa Hannigan's first solo album and I'm trying my best to get used to hearing her voice alone and no longer as the haunting backdrop to Damian Rice's folksy anguish.
More like a living arrangement than an actual partnership, Hannigan and Rice's musical union always felt like a cocktail, 2 parts Bohemian, one part Bonnie and Clyde. It's hard to think of the 2 of them parting ways, but alas, without compromise, all good relationships and living arrangements must come to an end. Below she sings "Some Surprise" with Gary Lightbody from the "Cake Sale" album:
Susan Tsvangirai, wife of Zimbabwe's opposition leader and prime minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, died today from severe injuries sustained in a car accident. Tsvangirai , who was also in the car, is said to be okay. They've been married for 31 years and have 6 children.
Okay, there are conflicting reports here. The BBC says the driver of the haulage truck that ran into the 4x4 the prime minister and his wife were in was asleep at the wheel. SW Radio says the driver of the truck swerved into the prime minister's vehicle.
If you buy the BBC version, then this is a "life sucks then you die" kind of thing. Go with SW Radio's take and you can conjure up the image of Mugabe at the wheel of that haulage truck.
The Times introduces three separate lists of the best-selling graphic books in the country: hardcover, softcover, and manga. We’ll update those lists weekly in this space, and offer a few observations along the way.
And with those two sentences a little bit of history was made today. For the first time ever, graphic novels-- as in longer comic book works or collections--now have their own New York Times bestseller lists.
The irony isn't lost though. Forever comic book creators thought the only way comics would gain respectability and mainstream clothes was for them to stop drawing superheroes altogether. Comics, in a bid for respectability and the license to tackle more difficult subject matter, wanted so much to move on to a more literary fare, hence Will Eisner's invention of the term the "graphic novel" as part ambition, part marketing ploy. But who knew all we needed was a savier and more technologically "endowed" Hollywood and its respectful treatment and realization of those same superheroes. Thus, through an onslaught of superhero movies, comic books or graphic novels--i.e., medium as well as content--have been forklifted out of their Werthamed cultural backwaters and into the coverted American mainstream.
A precursor to the New York times graphic novel bestseller list was Andrew Arnold's graphic novel best list/review, "Time Comix," which appeared online in Time magazine from 2000 to 2007.
In a column on the 25 year anniversary of the graphic novel as a medium and literary form, his thoughts, especially with balloons afloat and the words "New York Times bestseller Lists" emblazoned on the party banner in the background, now feel like champagne flowing and glasses clinking in a toast to the journey made so far. In 2003 he wrote:
...Will Eisner's "A Contract with God," published in 1978, gets the credit for being the first graphic novel, though it was not actually the first long-form graphic story nor the first use of the phrase. It was, however, the first marriage of the term, which appeared on the cover, and the intent of "serious" comix in book form. "It was intended as a departure from the standard, what we call 'comic book format,'" Will Eisner recently told TIME.comix. "I sat down and tried to do a book that would physically look like a 'legitimate' book and at the same time write about a subject matter that would never have been addressed in comic form, which is man's relationship with God." Though the concept of a "graphic novel" had been brought up among comix fans during the 1960s, Eisner claims to have to come up with it independently, as a form of spontaneous sleight-of-hand marketing. "[The phrase] 'graphic novel' was kind of accidental," Eisner said. While pitching the book to an important trade-book editor in New York, says Eisner, "a little voice inside me said, 'Hey stupid, don't tell him it's a comic or he'll hang up on you.' So I said, 'It's a graphic novel.'" Though that particular editor wasn't swayed by the semantics, dismissing the book as "comics," a small publisher eventually took the project and put the phrase "A Graphic Novel" on the cover, thereby permanently cementing the term into the lexicon.
The future of the graphic novel seems both sunny and dim. As a term for a kind of book, "graphic novel" has become increasingly dissatisfying. "Maybe for a short window it was enough to say 'graphic novel' but soon it won't be," says Art Spiegelman, "because if you talk about [Chris Ware's] 'Jimmy Corrigan' as a graphic novel you'll have to explain that it's not manga or Marvel. Then you are left saying, 'well it's got a seriousness of purpose' that the phrase 'graphic novel' alone won't offer." On the positive side, the public awareness of these books has vastly increased, creating a kind of renaissance era of intense creativity and quality. Says Spiegelman, "Ultimately the future of the graphic novel is dependent on how much great work gets produced against all odds. I'm much more optimistic than I was that there's room for something and I know that right now there's more genuinely interesting comic art than there's been for decades and decades."
In the past graphic novels like Art Speigelman's Maus and Neil Gaiman's Sandman: Endless Nights have managed to sneak into the New York Times Bestseller lists for books. Now that graphic novels and mangas have their own bestseller lists, some may argue that the gesture represents a new kind of marginalization that will keep people from recognizing well written graphic novels as just what they are -- books.
They might argue that separate bestseller lists legitimates a new era of literary segregation just as the graphic novel was at the cusp of breaking into the mainstream and, like the novel, become so accepted that it simply exists in our mass consciousness as an invisible default.
Each of the ongoing trials of an African "warlord" for crimes against humanity summarized below is unprecedented in some way, shape or form. That said, what has been especially unprecedented is the rate at which these trials are going, and the pattern at which arrests are being made and warrants issued for some of the permanent board members of Africa's rebel rogues gallery.
The way all these trials have cummulated, one would think that the legal crows at the Hague all got together in a room and came up with a new year's resolution to wage war against impunity in 2009. But with the prevailing economic crisis and credit crunch and thenews that funding is drying up for these hybrid international courts and with critical reports like this one, my cynical guess is the lawyers, judges, and prosecutors are thinking that if they don't show the world some results ASAP they might be going the way of Lehman Brothers.
Let's start with the May 24, 2008 arrest of Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo, president and Commander in Chief of the Mouvement de libération du Congo (MLC), in Brussells.
There are reasonable grounds to believe that in the context of a protracted armed conflict in the Central African Republic from about 25 October 2002 to 15 March 2003, MLC forces led by Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo carried out a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population during which rape, torture, outrages upon personal dignity and pillaging were committed in, but not limited to, the localities of PK 12, Bossongoa and Mongoumba. Pre-Trial Chamber III also found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo, as President and Commander in Chief of the MLC, was vested with de facto and de jure authority by the members of the MLC to take all political and military decisions.
Word on the street is that Bemba's arrest scared the living daylights out of Laurent Nkunda's general, Bosco Ntaganda, and he soon gave up his boss after he cut a deal with the Congolese government who promised to try to protect from being sent to The Hague.
The lateset warlord in the sights of the Hague is, of course, Omar al-Bashir. A warrant was issued yesterday (Wednesday) by the ICC for the arrest of the Sudanese president on charges of crimes against humanity taking place in Dafur. Precedence? Well, he is the first sitting head of state the court has ordered arrested. But that's a topic for another post.
Back on the 20th of June 2006, former Liberian President Charles Taylor (below) arrived at Rotterdam Airport to face trial at the Special Court of Sierra Leone, which is being held at The Hague in the Netherlands for security reasons.
To try Charles Taylor for the war crimes he committed during Liberia's civil war (1999 - 2003) will be opening a serious can of boa constrictor sized worms, but as fate would have it the egomaniac left his dirty finger prints all over the crime scene that is the RUF's diamond trade, hacking of limbs and decade long war (1991 - 2002) that saw over 200, 000 Sierra Leoneans dead.
Taylor can now be charged on the basis of his alleged role as a major backer of the Sierra Leone rebel group the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), his links with senior leaders in the RUF and a second warring faction, the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council, and responsibility for Liberian forces fighting in support of the Sierra Leonean rebels. The specific counts against Taylor are:
• Five counts of war crimes: terrorizing civilians, murder, outrages on personal dignity, cruel treatment, and looting; • Five counts of crimes against humanity: murder, rape, sexual slavery, mutilating and beating, and enslavement; and • One count of other serious violations of international humanitarian law: recruiting and using child soldiers.
Precedence? Taylor will be the first president of an African state to be indicted on serious crimes under international law by an internationalized criminal court -- hear that Bashir? In the meantime, Taylor's trial took a break and was to recommence on February 19th.
Thomas Lubanga Dyilo (below) was arrested in 2006 and has been held at The Hague since, awaiting trial.
Lubanga is the first in a long line of these idiots to be brought up on charges of conscripting and using child soldiers to fight in his militia during 2002 and 2003 fracas in the troubled Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Due to the uncharted territory this trial opens, one can't fault the prosecutors for stumbling out of the gate as they cut a legal path through the dense, tangled African political bush in an effort to make their case.
The prosecutors have, however, based their entire case on the testimony of the child soldiers Lubanga allegedly enlisted in his militia, and, of course, when some of the children start rescinding or fudging their stories out of fear or so as not to implicate themselves, the crap straight hits the legal fan. Jumping on the credibility gaps, this is what Lubanga's lawyer, Jean-Marie Biju-Duva, is basing his defense on:
Thomas Lubanga is [being] charged in the place of those who should have been prosecuted... Specifically, that included the former chief-of-staff of Lubanga’s militia, Floribert Kisembo, who currently is an officer in the Congolese army, Biju-Duval said. Government leaders in Rwanda and Uganda, who provided weapons and support to various militia groups in the DRC, were also culpable... The ICC cannot prosecute all suspects, but should resist the temptation to convict Lubanga as a proxy for those who are absent.
Hopefully, the way things went with the trial of the RUF leaders (below) in Sierra Leone should give Lubanga's trial and the young witnesses some new "balls" to bring this trial home.
On February, 25, the surviving leaders of RUF (Revolutionary United Front) Issa Sesay, 38, and Morris Kallon, 45, were convicted of 16 of the 18 charges, while Augustine Gbao, 60, was found guilty on 14 of the counts. The Freetown trial of the RUF rebel leaders, related to Sierra Leone's 10-year civil war, began in mid-2004.
RUF epitomizes that war is not only politics by other means, but more to the point, it is business by other means.
RUF started with the goal to overthrow the corrupt government of Sierra Leone, but as soon as they got control of the diamond mines, the revolution turned into a war to control the diamond trade. All the hacked off limbs we see was to stop Sierra Leoneans from mining or voting for the government or, according to this report, it was also "RUF’s response to Sierra Leone president Ahmad Tejan Kabbah’s 1996 plea for citizens to 'join hands for peace'." Huh, so RUF had a sick sense a humor. Who knew?
Stephen Rapp, the court's chief prosecutor, talks hereabout the all the legal precedents these trial laid down. Everything from the issue of forced marriages, the use of child soldiers, sexual slavery to attack on peace keepers were addressed and defined as crimes under international law. Like with SEC regulations and the Wall Street, international law has also been lagging behind 21st century Third World war criminals and the innovations they've made in waging unending conflict and business.
And of course there's been talk about hauling Laurent Nkunda's ass to the Hague and someone said a few weeks ago that LRA's Joseph Kony is cornered in a swamp somewhere in the Congo. A pundit once said, the wheels of international courts turn slowly but surely. So far, 2009 is proving this pundit wise.
Time magazine photographer Peter DiCampo treks past Timbuktu to attendthis year'sFestival au Desert (Jan 8 - 10), an annual gathering of African musicians set in the dunes of the Sahara.
Here is another cool photo essay from South African Mail & Guardian photographer Lisa Skinner and journalist Lloyd Gedye.
A link to the Guardian's music journalist Rosie Swash's short doc of the 2008 festival and below is another short doc, Desert Blues, about the 2008 fest, this time from Al Jazeera:
It is nothing but sheer coincidence that President Obama uses his speech to a joint session of congress on Tuesday night to bring to the nation's consciousness the plight of a young girl from Dillon, South Carolina, and then on Thursday in releasing his budget for 2010 he fires the first shot, like South Carolina did in 1861, to begin the civil war that will take this country in totally new direction.
For those who weren't sure what they heard on Thursday was gun fire, the president, using his most pugilistic rhetoric yet, confirmed it was gun fire in his weekly "fireside chat" on Friday when he says:
Because it represents real and dramatic change, it also represents a threat to the status quo in Washington. I know that the insurance industry won’t like the idea that they’ll have to bid competitively to continue offering Medicare coverage, but that’s how we’ll help preserve and protect Medicare and lower health care costs for American families. I know that banks and big student lenders won’t like the idea that we’re ending their huge taxpayer subsidies, but that’s how we’ll save taxpayers nearly $50 billion and make college more affordable. I know that oil and gas companies won’t like us ending nearly $30 billion in tax breaks, but that’s how we’ll help fund a renewable energy economy that will create new jobs and new industries. In other words, I know these steps won’t sit well with the special interests and lobbyists who are invested in the old way of doing business, and I know they’re gearing up for a fight as we speak. My message to them is this: So am I.
The battle ahead in getting his $3.5 trillion budget passed is going to be against Republicans and Democrats . If money is to be equated to power--which often is--then the hard Washington truth is the house and senate appropriation committees wield the only power that matters -- the control of the Federal government's purse strings. Federal spending is allegedly in the interest of the American people, but the interest of the American people is often derailed by what we have come to infer as the "special interests" of groups, whose sole agenda is to advocate/lobby their own side of an argument in order to gain or preserve certain benefits or privileges integral to whoever they are or whatever it is they do.
So how is Obama going to fight the Frankenstein-Goliath sustained by the electricity generated when the interests of lobbists and legislators entwine and collude in a place called Washington, DC? No problem. He will call on his own Philistine giant -- the American people. In the same weekly address, he stops just short of sounding the clarion call to arms:
The system we have now might work for the powerful and well-connected interests that have run Washington for far too long, but I don’t. I work for the American people. I didn’t come here to do the same thing we’ve been doing or to take small steps forward, I came to provide the sweeping change that this country demanded when it went to the polls in November. That is the change this budget starts to make, and that is the change I’ll be fighting for in the weeks ahead – change that will grow our economy, expand our middle-class, and keep the American Dream alive for all those men and women who have believed in this journey from the day it began.
Obama's leverage against the legislature--i.e., Washington, DC-- is that he has 10 million email addresses, a grass roots movement, and the rhetorical power to plead his cause directly to the American people. The Washington Post agrees:
Just as John F. Kennedy mastered television as a medium for taking his message to the public, Obama is poised to transform the art of political communication once again, said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist who first helped integrate the Internet into campaigning four years ago. "He's going to be the first president to be connected in this way, directly, with millions of Americans," Trippi said. The nucleus of that effort is an e-mail database of more than 10 million supporters. The list is considered so valuable that the Obama camp briefly offered it as collateral during a cash-flow crunch late in the campaign, though it wound up never needing the loan, senior aides said. At least 3.1 million people on the list donated money to Obama.
... signaling the kinds of direct and instantaneous interaction that the Obama administration will encourage, perhaps with an eye toward turning its following into the biggest special-interest group in Washington. Once Obama is sworn in, those backers may be summoned to push reluctant members of Congress to support legislation, to offer feedback on initiatives and to enlist in administration-supported causes in local communities. Obama would also be positioned to ask his supporters to back his favored candidates with fundraising and turnout support in the 2010 midterm elections.
However, if at the end the stimulus fails and all this borrowed trillions of dollars come to naught, America, explains Colbert, has nothing to worry about because she can simply refuse NOT to pay back any of it to China and others lenders:
"Yes, all our cash maybe gone but there is one thing America will always have plenty of -- guns. We have the biggest, baddest fighting force in the world. I will love to see someone try to collect our debts. Whose gonna do it? The United Arab Emirates?"
In other words, before giving someone a loan, apart from he or her ability to repay the loan, another thing you should consider is if your borrower has more glocks and techs than you. At the end of the day, that consideration might be the only one that matters.
