The way Egyptian officials honor Al Jazeera: Raid their offices

Al Jazeera has become one of the most valuable sources of information on what's going on in the Middle East. One wonders if the "Arab Spring" could have taken place without the involvement of the media to broadcast what was going on. Al Jazeera was crucial. But publishing what was happening in the Arab world -- what was really happening -- made Al Jazeera unpopular.

That the Egyptian government has had no use for Al Jazeera is no surprise. New York Times describes Al Jazeera as "known for attentive coverage of street protests" and "known for its attentive, if not sensational, coverage of street protests, including the Israeli Embassy attack on Friday." And for reporting on the attack on the Israeli embassy the other day they were raided by "officials" {not thugs?}. Here is what The Times has to say about this affair:

"The raid also came after a warning last week by Egypt’s minister of media, Osama Heikal, that the government would take legal action against stations that “endanger the stability and security” of the nation, and some analysts said they feared the raid could signal a broader effort to curtail the new freedoms of expression experienced since the uprising that ousted former President Hosni Mubarak this year.

"The network, Al Jazeera Live Egypt, was founded in the aftermath of the uprising and has become known for its attentive, if not sensational, coverage of street protests, including the Israeli Embassy attack on Friday. The raid forced the network to halt its programming for a period before it resumed broadcasting from Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar.

"Officials of the Interior Ministry said they had raided the network because it lacked a license, and that neighbors had complained about noise. ... But Islam Lotfy, a lawyer for the channel, said the channel had applied for a license in March without a response."

The raid took form as "officers in plain clothes" entering "without showing a warrant or identifying themselves." They "confiscated equipment and arrested an engineer operating it."

But the response of manager of the television channel had an eminently quotable response to all this: “If broadcasting the truth is considered endangering stability,” he said, “then it is an honor for any media outlet to be endangering stability.”

What's being drowned out of the news: Flooding in Pakistan again

It’s surprising what doesn’t get reported in the news. The case at this moment that strikes me is the flooding in Pakistan. Again the people of Pakistan have to bear flooding -- on top of the suicide bombing, the corruption, the indifference of their own government to their needs, the failure of the education system, etc. etc. The Pakistani folks deserve better leadership. The comparison with what's happening in India displays in stark economic numbers how much Pakistan has suffered because of the narrow-focused military leadership that has controlled politics in the country. In so many ways, Pakistan illustrates how important good leadership matters.

But today's news is what may be called a natural disaster because of the flooding, but as others have pointed out "natural disasters" are actually rarely "natural": Much has to do with the human preparedness for events like this. For this is a repeat of the flooding last year, when the government failed to provide much help to those most affected. Now the numbers are growing.

Here are some details from today’s article in Al Jazeera [“Anger grows over Pakistan flood relief: Rescue efforts after heavy flooding in Sindh province still hampered by bad weather, as 132 deaths reported.” Al Jazeera 10 Sep 2011 06:59].

• A least five million people in Sindh and Baluchisntan provinces have been affected by the monsoon rains.
• About 900 villages have been submerged and about 100,000 homes have been completely destroyed.
• About 200,000 people have turned to relief camps.
• The worst-hit districts are in Sindh and Baluchistan.
• Residents in the area were in desperate need of assistance, asking for food, drinking water and shelter. "We have lost our homes, our belongings, and our lifestock. No one is here to help us, the government is not worried about us," said one person.
• It’s still raining in Sindh. According to one official, "most people have been rescued. There are a few, unfortunately, who want to stay on their own lands. But we are trying to bring rescue to their doorsteps…”
• The flooding has also caused tremendous damage to Pakistani crops during the harvesting. ... up to 13 per cent of the country's estimated crop may have been lost.
• In the "most fertile part of the province [Sindh]” … more than 80 per cent of the cotton crop has been destroyed.
• "60,000 cattle have gone, drowned and dead.” [In Sindh]
• Last year, about 20 million people were directly affected by the worst floods in the country's history. About 2,000 people were killed in the disaster. Now we have another year of it.
• One year after the floods, more than 800,000 families remained without permanent shelter and more than a million people remained in need of food assistance.

Link to the original article here:
Anger grows over Pakistan flood relief - Central & South Asia - Al Jazeera English

Surprising civility among the victors in Libya

The situation in Libya seems to be taking on qualities most of us didn’t expect. I have supposed that the opposition that came together to fight Ghaddafi’s loyalist forces was a rag-tag collection of volunteers whose only commonality was a hatred of the Colonel. That they, or at least a number of them, had a fair sense of what they wanted the next society to look like was beyond our expectations. We didn’t expect that the opposition fighters would have much of a sense of what to do next – that is, how to establish and observe an organized social order. To the contrary, Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed today [NYTimes 9/8/11] suggests that at least some of the fighters have a reasonable sense of how a society should be operating in the absence of hostilities. He indicates that the people he encountered were already acting as if they were part of an ordered society. No looting – well, limited looting. That’s a surprise. Reasonable treatment of civilians connected with the losing side – this also is surprising. Compared to the way folks behaved in Iraq after Saddam was deposed these Libyan rebels have displayed exemplary courtesy to the losers in this war. Note especially the following statements:

• What’s particularly impressive is the paucity of revenge killings and looting in Tripoli, the capital. There have been a few incidents in which rebel soldiers apparently executed prisoners, and black Africans have been treated abysmally (they are accused of being mercenaries for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi). But the Libyans who served in that hated regime mostly have not been molested.

• I saw many Libyans fleeing for Tunisia, and, presumably, many of them were Qaddafi loyalists. But rebels did not hinder them at checkpoints or pilfer their belongings. And, as far as I could tell, the homes and luxury vehicles the loyalists left behind have been mostly untouched by neighbors and rebels alike.

• I went through dozens of armed rebel checkpoints and was never once asked for a “baksheesh,” meaning bribe or gift.

• Very few of the rebel leaders have been associated with Islamic fundamentalism. One exception is Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a military commander in Tripoli, who says he was tortured by the C.I.A. in 2004. Yet he told my Times colleague Rod Nordland that all is forgiven and that he appreciates the American role in the Libyan revolution.

• The mood in Tripoli seems largely tolerant and forgiving, and exuberant about the prospect of democracy. “We are free now,” an engineer named Belgassim Ali told me. “Make a newspaper to support Qaddafi; I don’t mind. But no dictatorship!”

• The rebels have coordinated disparate fighting units and have tried to arrange the surrender of holdout towns like Surt, Colonel Qaddafi’s hometown, rather than just marching in with guns blazing.

Of course the observations of one person are insufficient to draw generalizations from, but Kristof’s report suggests that these “rebels” are much more prepared to put together a working society than most of us had imagined.

South China Sea as the emerging center of gravity?

In a recent article in Foreign Policy Magazine (Sept/Oct, 2011) Robert D. Kaplan has argued that the Western Pacific is becoming the world’s new center of naval activity, specifically the South China Sea. Here are some of the assertions in the article:
• East Asia is the center of global manufacturing.
• More than half the world’s merchant fleet tonnage passes through the choke points leading westward from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean
• A third of all maritime traffic passes through these choke points.
• Oil from the Indian Ocean passes through the strait of Malacca is more than six times the amount passing through Suez and seventeen times that through Panama Canal.
• About two thirds of Koreas energy supplies pass through the South China Sea; and 60% of Japans; 60% of Taiwan’s; 80% of China’s crude oil imports come through that choke point.
• South China Sea has 7 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and an estimated 900 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
• All the nine states that touch the South China Sea are necessarily arrayed against China and therefore inclined to US.
• Energy consumption in Asia will double by 2030.
• South China Sea has become an “armed camp”: China has claimed 12 geographic features; Taiwan one; Vitname 25; Philippines 8; Malaysia 5.
• Defense budgets of Southeast Asian states have increased over the last decade while they have declined in the west: Since 2000 Indonesia has increased 84%, Singapore up 146%; Malaysia up 722%.
• Vietnam has spent 2 billion on Russian submarines and 1 Billion on jet planes.
• Military power has shifted from Europe to Asia “quietly”.
All this makes us wonder: How perceptive are we of the changes taking place in our time? It’s not easy to track shifts in power relationships, taking “power” here to mean military power, and even possibly industrial power. I don’t know Kaplan is right but I do take note of the some of the specific details he musters to develop his point: Shifts in leverage and military capability matter – especially in the long run.

Friedman said it plainly: Why our budget is in the red

Tom Friedman's op-ed piece today [New York Times "The Whole Truth and Nothing But"] says a number of things that need to be said even though in fact they are obvious. The politicians seem unable to say the obvious, the truth. But what I liked was the following succinct formulation of the problem.

Why has this been a lost decade? An answer can be found in one simple comparison: How Dwight Eisenhower and his successors used the cold war and how George W. Bush used 9/11. America had to face down the Russians in the cold war. America had to respond to 9/11 and the threat of Al Qaeda. But the critical difference between the two was this: Beginning with Eisenhower and continuing to some degree with every cold war president, we used the cold war and the Russian threat as a reason and motivator to do big, hard things together at home — to do nation-building in America. We used it to build the interstate highway system, put a man on the moon, push out the boundaries of science, teach new languages, maintain fiscal discipline and, when needed, raise taxes. We won the cold war with collective action.
George W. Bush did the opposite. He used 9/11 as an excuse to lower taxes, to start two wars that — for the first time in our history — were not paid for by tax increases, and to create a costly new entitlement in Medicare prescription drugs.

The reason politicians can get away with such much verbiage and so little information is that the public member is so short. There is no longer any mention that Bill Clinton left office with a budget surplus. The claim that both parties have contributed to the debt problem we have now is obvious but it conceals a critical reality: The administration of George W. Bush effective wiped out all surplus and -- according to a source quoted elsewhere on this page -- borrowed more money than all the presidents before him combined. {I have not checked this out; there should be a way to do it and I will try to get it done.]

Anyway, it's a reality that needs to be faced if wise decisions are now made in choosing the next body of leaders to take us out of this mess.

Field of Hope - where rape is a daily way of life

Rape in Congo takes place in unbelievable numbers every day. It is hard to internalize what is going on. According to one source, a film on Congo rape, some fighters in the Congo believe they cannot succeed in a battle if they have not just raped a woman successfully. The world they and their women live in is terrifying, violent, cruel. So consider the courage and dedication of a woman that would undertake to help these women recover. Thanks to Al Jazeera for making this available to us.

Field of Hope - Witness - Al Jazeera English

Syria's sign language: Imprinted on the hands of cartoonist Ali Ferzat

Only human beings kill and maim each other over scratches on a page. Most people in the west think it is bizarre that some radical Muslims want to kill anyone who has tried to draw Muhammad in a cartoon. Now we hear that the Syrian government has maimed a man who has lately been publishing his cartoons on his own website. Such is the terror of a government over images. The incident reveals how powerful and how dependent we are on the imagination. It takes imagination to "read" into scratches on the page a conception of something abstract, especially to see in the drawings of Ali Ferzat images of the Syrian dictatorship. He has drawn a picture of President Assad of Syria trying to hitch a ride with Muammar Ghaddafi as he frantically flees his own rebellious citizens; and of Assad offering tea to a man who is meanwhile being beaten in his feet. It take imagination to grasp the irony of these images but once we know the context we all get it immediately. This is how human society is enabled, through representations -- images, sounds in speech, gestures -- to which we impute connection with things of another order. I know of a situation in which a simple note on a door led to a fist fight between famous scholars.

All this seems perhaps unduly academic. However it works, this is the stuff of the human imagination. And how it works in the intersubjective world of human interaction is one of the most interesting and challenging intellectual pursuits. Unfortunately, contrary to what some people suppose, it leads us to inquire into the conflicts that so broadly characterize the human condition. It leads us to take note of how materially and painfully real are the wounds of Ali Ferzat even if they are powerfully symbolic. Those broken hands "say" to the rest of the people of Syria "Don't mess with this government", "Don't represent this government as disingenuous," "Don't suggest that this government is repressive" [even if everyone in the country knows otherwise]. What must be fully understood -- that this is a repressive regime -- must not be expressed in word or image. Ferzat had his canvas; the government has another: the bodies of citizens. And both tell a story.

The power of the moral imagination.

[Here is a link to the original article in Al Jazeera on Ferzat, with a video]

US condemns Syria political cartoonist attack - Middle East - Al Jazeera English

Portrait of a hedonist; the fruit of Ghaddafi's profligacy

Nick Meo’s portrait of Mutassim Gaddafi [in today's Telegraph], the son of the dictator in Libya, is sobering. Here is a personality whose life of privilege has deprived him of the ability to appreciate the how much he has enjoyed all his life, to the point where he has scarce respect for the humanity around him, especially for those who serve him. The sense of a person who lives in a bubble of privilege pervades this whole article. As he entertained his guest he displayed a pathetic ignorance of what was actually happening in the world barely outside his door, a popular movement of rebels who hated him and his father and were bent on overwhelming the regime. The article for some of us is a revelation: Could this be the way the upper 1% is able to live these days?: glamorous guests, dinner parties with eminent social figures (Princesses), annual excursions to the Caribbean via a private Boeing jet, hundreds of guests completely provided for in the most expensive hotels, the finest Italian hairdressers flown in for an affair, etc. And in order to remove him, to bring him into the real world, to experience what life is like for the people whom he seems to despise, how many will have to die?

Mutassim Gaddafi's girlfriend tells of the final days of Libyan regime: Mutassim Gaddafi's former girlfriend, Dutch glamour model Talitha van Zon, talks to Nick Meo about the dying days of the Gaddafi regime.

By Nick Meo, Tripoli6:00AM BST 28 Aug 2011
Filipino servants wearing spotless white jackets mixed his favourite Jack Daniels whisky and coke, and then Mutassim Gaddafi raised his glass and toasted the victory that he was sure was close.
Relaxing in one of his Tripoli homes just over a week ago, during a break from commanding at the front, the fifth son of Libya's ruler was in a defiant mood. Soon, he boasted to the blonde foreigner sitting with him, he would lead his father's regime to a victory over the "rats".
The woman at his side was Mutassim's ex-girlfriend Talitha van Zon, a Dutch glamour model who still regularly visited him in the Libyan capital.
Her most recent trip, however, proved to be a far cry from the luxury break she was used to - as the Libyan regime crumbled last week and her male companion took flight, she endured several days of utter terror as battles raged around her five star hotel.
On Wednesday, The Sunday Telegraph found her alone and frightened in a Tripoli hospital ward, where she was being treated for injuries after leaping from a hotel balcony - apparently fearful that a group of rebels were about to burn her alive.

Before she was evacuated from the city by a humanitarian ship to Malta on Friday, though, she gave an extraordinary account of the final days of the Gaddafi regime - an insight into a family who will fight to the death and destroy their country before they give up power.

"I was shocked when I met Mutassim. He had changed," said Miss van Zon. "It was the first time I had seen him since just before the February uprising. He had a beard, he was sitting on a couch strewn with automatic weapons, and he was guarded by unsmiling 16-year-old boys with sub-machine guns." On the wall behind was a huge portrait of his father, Muammar Gaddafi.

... A former Playboy centrefold, Miss van Zon met Mutassim in an Italian nightclub in 2004, kindling a three-month relationship that ended when she learned that she "was not the only woman in his life". ... she was drawn into a fabulous private world of luxury, showered with gifts and invited to some of the world's most exclusive destinations. In Monaco she was taken to the Grand Prix and a dinner party attended by Princess Caroline. At Christmas, there was Mutassim's annual excursion to the Caribbean island of Saint Barts, with his entourage flown there in his private Boeing. When Mutassim was in Paris or London he would book several floors of the most expensive hotels, filling them with his friends, and the finest Italian hairdressers would be flown in from Italy, at a cost of 5,000 euros per time. "I asked him once how much he spent, and he took a minute to add it up in his head," Miss van Zon recalled. "He said 'about $2 million'. I said 'you mean a year?' He said 'no – a month'."

... "Of course I knew that it was not right to spend so much money like that," she said. "I asked him many times about the welfare of the Libyan people, and he said the schools and hospitals were free, that rice and flour were cheap. It was hard for me to judge life in Libya for ordinary people – I was always staying in a gilded cage when I visited. They looked happy enough."

She did, though, see occasional flashes of temper, in particular on one occasion where a servant had brought in a meal that was cold.

"He shouted at the guy and threw plates on the floor. He put that guy like a dog in a corner and then he demanded that he eat the whole lot, there in front of us. It was humiliating. I never saw the servant again, and I don't know what happened to him.
...

The hedonist son also had ambitions for power, inspired by his father's example. "He worshipped his father," Miss Van Zon said. "He talked a lot about Hitler, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez. He liked leaders who had a lot of power. He always said 'I want to do better than my father'."

[Click on the title above for a link to the original article.]

A prognosis for the future, from Australia

Greg Sheridan has an interesting, though risky article, in The Australian [August 20, 2011] --risky because he presumes to predict the future, which of course is why the effort is interesting. He opens with the maxim "You rarely go wrong predicting trouble ahead (and if you do, few remember it anyway)". And indeed he sees things going wrong in the future -- that much is easy. You want to look at the whole thing [click on the title for a direct link to the original], but you should note some of his guesses:

> 2012 will be a particularly dangerous and conflict-prone year [because of] the forthcoming US presidential election, because the US budget is broke and because US leadership looks weak and "uncertain." The problem with the US budget, he says, is not foreign commitments but "the massive bailouts it undertook in response to the global financial crisis; the huge stimulus spending it has undertaken since; the prolonged slowdown in economic growth; and the inexorable rise of social entitlements spending." [Does anyone else think it is strange that he omits the unnecessary Iraq war and the huge giveaway to the super-rich in what Bush W called a "tax break for the middle class"?]

> The US will be unwilling to spend substantial amounts of money on any new commitments. And there will be a move to bring troops home [again, no surprise].

> North Korea will be a major pain because they will test another nuclear weapon in 2012. "The North Koreans want to be a fully capable nuclear weapons state, a status they will never give up once they acquire it. But they still think they might do a profitable deal with the Americans. This would involve the US paying the North Koreans not to export nuclear technology. They are likely to make some kind of deal but as before break it.

> Iran is trying to project its interests in the maelstrom in the Arab Middle East. Iran will not want the Americans to have an elegant or successful departure from Iraq and will work to ensure that either the US leaves Iraq in ignominy or stays in agony. This means increased attacks on Americans in Iraq, many sponsored by Iran.

> Afghanistan is supposed to be vacated by the US by 2014, but there is no chance of the US-led coalition force achieving its intended goals of establishing democracy there, or the rule of law "broadly secular". He asks whether the US will continue to pay for the Afghan army and whether it will keep 10,000 or so troops, perhaps special forces, in Afghanistan to ensure the survival of the government in Kabul and undertake some specific missions. [I'm not sure why he asks; there is no doubt the US will stay in many unspecified ways, including those he mentions.]

> He is correct that the Pushtuns of FATA will continue to resist the American presence in their area.

> In Afghanistan / Pakistan he predicts increased Taliban attacks; increased challenges to the Pakistan state by Pakistani radicals; and a continued effort by Pakistan to keep the pot simmering in order to keep the flow of US aid.

> China is the other factor. Sheridan specifically mentions the Chinese navy which is involved in "a continual series of maritime provocations in the South China Sea and the waters to its north." Strangely, he makes no mention of China's rising presence in the Indian Ocean. IN any case he expects a serious incident at sea.

> And of course there will be an election in 2012 -- that will produce enough fire and brimstone to keep the year interesting.

NB: The trends in Pakistan: population, resources, and public opinion

I have just finished reading Bruce Riedel's Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of Global Jihad [D.C.: Brookings] and as usual the more detail I get on Pakistan the more I wonder about the future for that country. I keep hoping for signs that the plethora of dilemmas there are being resolved before they spin completely out of control. But I find it hard not to despair the more I think I know about it.

Here are some statistics that Riedel provides on the country. Consider the trends these numbers represent: are they not reason for alarm? [from Riedel 2011: 120+]

On population
> 53.8% of Pakistanis are under the age of 19.
> 37.7 % of Pakistanis are between the ages of 20 and 39
> At the current rate of fertility in Pakistan the population will reach 460 million by 2025.
> By 2050 Pakistan will be more populous than Indonesia.

On resources
> Probably for reasons of the population growth, per capita water availability between 1951 and 2007 declined from 5,000 to 1100; by 2025 the number will drop to 700.
> This decline could become worse if the warming of the earth cuts the amount of flow from the Himalaya glaciers. I am told that the decline is already measurable.

So, some problems:

What are the prospects for employment of this young population in Pakistan these days? Or in the next ten years? [So far, one of the main paying jobs for young men is jihad.]

And, if the current situation remains so conflicted, what are the prospects for resolving them when the population has doubled? Or tripled?

And then there are the conditions of popular opinion, which has been profoundly influenced by the Pakistani military.

> More than two-thirds of Pakistanis have a negative view of the United States.
> 90% of Pakistanis believe the U. S. wants to weaken the world-wide Muslim community.
> Half of the Pakistanis believe the US is Pakistan’s greatest danger [greater than India].
> Only 11% regard the Taliban and Al Qaeda as its greatest danger.
> 79% of Pakistanis have a favorable view of China.

Note the reaction to the Kerry-Lugar legislation of 2009 that tripled aid to Pakistan: “Pakistanis almost universally denounced it.” [p123] Most of the editorials were against it -- and most of them “were orchestrated by [Gen] Kayani, Chief of the army, and the ISI… " Such are America's colleagues in the attempt to stabilize Afghanistan and crush Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

So it is crucial that our leadership take further steps to reach the Pakistanis people and help them work through the substantial challenges that lay ahead.

Gangs fighting in Karachi over drugs and patronage?

Bombs going off in Kabul today, and in Khybar agency. And signs of a major turf war in Pakistan. There are many law-abiding people in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but it is hard to envision the many internal issues getting resolved very soon. Below are some excepts from today's Al Jazeera on the fighting in Karachi. Note that drugs are involved and political patronage. Does this imply that the drug industry in Pakistan and the political patronage system are connected?

Maybe we should be surprised, but we are not. Most of us cannot remember that there was a similar article last Aug 2, in which there was the statement:

> Over the years, criminal gangs have been used by political parties in a city-wide war for influence in Karachi, which contributes about two-third of Pakistan's tax revenue.

Below are selected statements from the article in Al Jazeera. [click on the title for a link to the source article.] RLC

Karachi violence claims more lives: Escalating gang violence in Pakistani port city claims lives of at least 37 people in past 24 hours.

At least 37 people have been killed in Karachi in the past 24 hours in another outbreak of gang-related violence that has claimed hundreds of lives in Pakistan's commercial capital and main port city.

… spats between rival gangs have intensified in recent weeks.

… a senior leader of Pakistan's ruling Pakistan People's Party (PPP), was among those killed on Wednesday, ….

...The attacks happened as Karachi's main party, the MQM, said it was rejoining the national PPP-led coalition government.

"Most of the killings have resulted from clashes between criminal gangs …,".
"It's not the kind of fighting that we saw last month; this is more of a gang war."
But police said turf wars between gangs dealing in drugs and extortion rackets were by no means a new development in Lyari.

"These gangs regularly clash and kill members and supporters of rival groups," ….
…. the killings were directly related to gang warfare conducted with the patronage of the country's political elite. ...

Security officials say this is because the killers are being protected by senior politicians.

They say the violence is being used to stoke recently ignited ethnic passions both for political gains and as a means by criminal gangs to fight turf wars behind the facade of political activism.
"Everything boils down to politics," said Hyder.

A city of more than 18 million, Karachi has a long history of violence, and ethnic, religious and sectarian disputes and political rows can often explode into battles engulfing entire neighbourhoods.
….

About 300 people were killed in July, making it one of the most deadliest months in almost two decades. Human rights groups say 800 have been killed since the start of the year.

A tribute to Ehsan Yarshater

A great tribute to Ehsan Yarshater has appeared in the New York Times today. It is refreshing to see that a popular news source would celebrate the life-absorbing project of a serious and dedicated scholar. Patricia Cohen, the author, has recognized not only the significance of Yarshater’s project – to produce a comprehensive Encyclopedia of Iran – but also the example that he provides of what a life of scholarly commitment consists of. I have never met Yarshater but I have been aware of his work, and have already been mining the Encyclopedia for nuggets available nowhere else. It is worth remembering that for Yarshater “Iran” can include a wide swath of territory, depending on the time, as Persians have had an influence on affairs in virtually all the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Ganges and from the Aral Sea to the Indian Ocean. This is truly a grand project.
In some university settings professors are obliged to think primarily about getting published early and often in order to gain tenure, a practice that tends to force the grand projects into a distant future. Yarshater has demonstrated that a major enterprise like his, spanning many years, can bring forth a distinctive scholarly resource that will be appreciated for decades. Thanks to the work of Ms. Cohen we are reminded that a few great visionaries in the scholarly world still exist. RLC

New York Times August 12, 2011
A Lifetime Quest to Finish a Monumental Encyclopedia of Iran
By PATRICIA COHEN
Ralph Ellison wrote for 40 years without finishing his novel “Juneteenth.” Antoni Gaudí labored 43 years on the Sagrada Família basilica in Barcelona, but construction continues today. And in the annals of grand quixotica, Ehsan Yarshater also deserves a prominent chapter.
At 53, he embarked on his magnum opus, a definitive encyclopedia of Iranian history and culture. At 75, he started looking for a successor. He didn’t find one so he kept going himself. Now he’s 91. He’s up to “K.”
“My mission is to finish the encyclopedia,” he said recently from his office at Columbia University’s Center for Iranian Studies. He knows he won’t be able to do it personally, especially since the task keeps expanding as progress is made. There are topics to be added and entries to be updated. So Mr. Yarshater has tried to make sure the work will continue by establishing a private foundation with a $12 million endowment and finally choosing three scholars to replace him as general editor.
The sheer ambition of Mr. Yarshater’s vision is daunting. With money from the National Endowment for the Humanities, he has worked to create the most comprehensive account of several millenniums of Iranian history, language and culture in the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and Central Asia.
“There is nothing like it” in scope or quality, said Ali Banuazizi, a professor at Boston College and a former president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America.
Unlike a conventional encyclopedia, which briefly summarizes existing knowledge, Mr. Yarshater’s work, Encyclopedia Iranica, is producing original scholarship. “Most of the articles require research,” said Mr. Banuazizi, because they are topics no one has studied in much depth.
Mr. Yarshater has raised the bar further. “Our aim is that for each subject,” he said, “we should find the best person in the entire world.” With that in mind, he has been searching two and a half years for an expert to write about Sirjan and Rafsanjan, townships in the south of Iran.
Mr. Yarshater has not been back to Iran in 32 years, ever since the Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah of Iran and established an Islamic republic in 1979. “The encyclopedia’s impartiality does not please the current Persian government,” Mr. Yarshater said in a low, breathy voice. A troublesome tremor that started in his hand several years ago has moved to his knees and vocal cords, slowing him down and compelling him to use an assistant. But otherwise he feels healthy. “My immune system is excellent,” he boasted.
For years Mr. Yarshater’s routine was to work late into the night, coming home only when his wife walked down the hallway from their apartment to the Iranian center to fetch him. “I don’t know many wives who would tolerate that,” he said appreciatively. (She died in 1999; the couple had no children.)
“I’ve seen him work 12 hours without a break,” said Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak,director of the Center for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland, who has known Mr. Yarshater for more than 40 years. He remembers a visit when Mr. Yarshater stayed up until 3 a.m. editing. Three hours later, he was in the shower, getting ready to return to work.
Mr. Yarshater expects others to have equal enthusiasm for the task. It took him 17 years to choose his replacements, rejecting one potential successor when he concluded that the man was “too concerned about the number of holidays he could take and the number of hours he would work.”
Now Mr. Yarshater works only until 9 p.m., staying long after his colleagues have turned off their lights. When he returns home, he indulges in his latest hobby: learning Russian.
The 1,480 contributors from around the world who, so far, have composed 6,500 entries are familiar with Mr. Yarshater’s relentlessness. “By hook or by crook, he gets you to do what he wants you to do,” Mr. Karimi-Hakkak said. (Eight hundred entries out of alphabetical order are posted in an online version.)
. . .
[For a link to the source article click on the title above.]

The moral imagination on display in riots and demonstrations: from London to Daraa

One of the qualities that makes human behavior so complex, so difficult to analyze, is the richness of meanings embedded in it. The riots in London are a good example. Ysmine Ryan has written an article comparing the many nuances in the intentions of the Britain rioters with those of the rioters and demonstrators in Tunisia and Egypt.

Fredrik Barth [in book carefully snubbed by southeast Asiaianists, Balinese Worlds] has pointed out that folks act with intentions that are informed by their own fund of cultural resources whereas the observers of their behavior must “read” their intentions on the basis of their own cultural resources, which means that the possibilities for misreading of each other can be large, and especially so when the actor’s intentions are nuanced with deeply felt personal sentiments. Actors in fact can seek to convey a whole range of meanings in what they do – rage, fear, frustration, a desire for attention, despair, revenge, greed. Sometimes folks do what they do because to them it feels like the most effective way to express their complex feelings – feelings too complex and deeply felt for words. We’ve all been there: In times of exhaustion and frustration we have all been tempted to lash out.

But from the vantage-point of the observer unpacking the meanings embedded in the behavior of others turns out to be a huge challenge. Critical for the observer is the need to appreciate the meanings embedded in the context. The attempt to understand social explosions like those in London or Tunis or Cairo or Yemen or Daraa demands care and empathy – for all the actors on all sides – if one is ever to appreciate what animates the behavior of collectivities in such social movements. We must be ready to appreciate the contradictory and even self-destructive intentions – some of them base, some of them noble -- that animate the behavior of folks in times of stress. If ever there was a complex object of study it is the human imagination.

This article [from Al Jazeera] is rich with the complexities of meaning that inform human behavior. Note, for instance, the statue erected to commemorate one thing, destroyed to commemorate something quite different, and then used by a contemporary artist to convey yet another message, which was, again, destroyed, apparently for reasons considered significant to the state. Meanings upon meanings upon meanings -- an illustration of the the multiple and confused meanings that must be read empatheticly if they are to be understood. Anthropology seeks empathy even when we cannot agree.

From the Arab Spring to Liverpool? : The UK riots have unique roots, but British youths' alienation is similar to the disenfranchisement behind Arab revolts.
Yasmine Ryan: 11 Aug 2011 14:47

In the heart of Toxteth, Liverpool, a mysterious statue appeared in the early hours of July 30.

It was a monument to Mohamed Bouazizi, the young Tunisian man who, after being humiliated by police, had set himself alight in an act of protest that was to inflame the simmering rage of hundreds of thousands of people.

Last Thursday, in the London borough of Tottenham, the British police shot and killed a 29-year-old black man named Mark Duggan. The following day, the monument in Toxteth - a district that had been the site of racially-fuelled social unrest in the 1980s - disappeared, the monument's artist told Al Jazeera.

The Liverpool city council was unable to comment on whether it was responsible for having the monument removed, as they were swamped trying to deal with the riots, which spread to Liverpool over the weekend.

Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation, and the uprising that followed, happened in a very different context to the British riots.

When Tunisia's peaceful protesters in the underprivileged centre of the country were slain by the police's use of lethal force, the country’s middle class poured into the streets to show their outrage, and solidarity.

In Britain, by contrast, people across socio-economic groups are calling on the police to protect them from the seemingly uncontrollable mobs of youths, who, according to the dominate media narrative, seem intent on wreaking havoc for the simple reason that they can.

Yet the artist who created the monument to the young Tunisian street vendor, who wishes to remain anonymous in the commodity-free spirit of his work, told Al Jazeera that his work celebrated universal aspirations of emancipation and social justice.

His unsanctioned "people's monument" referenced other recent uprisings in the Arab world, including Egypt and Libya.

Commonalities with Arab Spring?

Closer to home, it also referred to the Toxteth riots of 1981. The statue was mounted on a plinth where a statue of William Huskisson had stood until it was mistaken for a tribute to a slave-trader and torn down in the protests against racism and police brutality of 1981 (the unfortunate Huskisson had, in fact, been the world’s first railway victim in 1830).

The myth that has arisen around Bouazizi is relevant to the UK, the artist explained, where the conservative government's cutbacks have taken their toll on people's daily life.

"[Bouazizi] represented everyday struggle, his gesture was not politically motivated but about the right to exist, to provide for one's family," he said. "I like that fruit and vegetables were the cornerstone of the revolution – not political ideology or other beliefs."

In any event, such overt political messages or symbols have been largely absent during the riots in the UK, which have been left many commentators stunned by the apparent lack of any political agenda.

Will Davies, a spokesperson for Avaaz, an international organisation that works for social justice and has rallied in support of the Arab Spring, told Al Jazeera that those rioting in the UK were, in stark contrast, not politically minded and were causing "anarchy for anarchy's sake".

"Juxtapose that with the situation in Syria, where they've finally got the courage to stand up to a brutal regime and they've done that entirely peacefully."

"They should take a long hard look at what is going on in places like Yemen and Syria," Davies said, noting the state violence and forced disappearances endured by protesters elsewhere in the world simply for exercising the right to peaceful protest or for speaking to the media.

There have, nonetheless, been some attempts to link the UK riots with the string of uprisings in North Africa and Middle East.

For some, emphasising such a link is a way of eliminating any need to discuss the local and national roots to the violence.

The neighbourhood of Toxteth in Liverpool saw some of worst riots over police brutality in 1980s [REUTERS]
Stuart Bell, a British Labour Party MP, told Europe 1, a television station, that "these riots have nothing to do with unemployment, or with government cutbacks. It has its origins in Tunisia".

Others, meanwhile, have taken a more nuanced approached.

Expressing his frustration with the way the media were covering the unrest, Darcus Howe, a 68-year-old West Indian writer, broadcaster and resident of South London, told the BBC that turmoil was very much a consequence of the British police's shooting of Mark Duggan, and of routine police bullying.

Parallel to this very local root cause, the writer argued that the social dissent should also be viewed as part of a global movement.

"I don't call it rioting - I call it an insurrection of the masses of the people. It is happening in Syria, it is happening in Clapham, it's happening in Liverpool, it's happening in Port-au-Spain, Trinidad, and that is the nature of the historical moment," he told the BBC host.

'Only then do the media listen to you'

While most other commentators agree it would be a stretch to argue that the Arab Spring in helped to ferment social unrest in the UK, North African activists who had participated in protests against their own governments told Al Jazeera that they felt solidarity with the British youths who have taken to the streets.

. . . [much is excised here]

[For more, click on the title above for a link to the source]
. . .

As a consequence of issues highlighted by those riots, there was social change which benefited the Liverpool community as a whole, he said.

"The dynamic of this riot is very difficult. This riot is not being led by black people, it is being led by youth," he said. "There's no colour bar, no gender bar."

While the rioters have no clear agenda and their behaviour should not be excused, the poet said, the existence of so many restless young people was directly linked to David Cameron’s conservative government cutbacks to community and social services.

"It should be said that the last civil unrest we've had in this country was under [former prime minister] Margaret Thatcher, during a similar time of austerity," he said.

There had been "disproportionate investment" in the upper and middle classes, notably in the war effort in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the bank bailouts, while millions of children have received little from their government.

"These are children who now appear to have no purpose. Society does not seem to see them as a significant enough group to invest in."

The story of Bouazizi captured so much attention because of the sheer desperation embodied by the act of self-immolation. Britain’s youth may be speaking a different language and their violence turned outwards, rather than inwards, but they have no less legitimacy than their counterparts in the Arab world.

Follow Yasmine Ryan on twitter: @YasmineRyan

Source: Al Jazeera

Peck's comparative insights on why economic depressions become so severe

Don Peck’s new book, Pinched, How the Great Recession Has Narrowed Our Futures and What We Can Do About It makes several sobering points about how public sentiment during an economic downturn can make a bad situation worse. Several assertions of that book are worth giving serious thought to.

> Severe recessions often turn out to be more severe and longer-lasting than is expected.

> In periods of economic stress, governments tend to retreat, reducing their commitments, and thus make the economic downturn worse. This seems to be a pattern in other societies than our own.

> Governments commonly underestimate the true cost of economic retreat and conservative spending. At the same time they overestimate the risks of taking aggressive steps to resolve an economic crisis. This has taken place over and over again in American history. Administrations commonly have done too little whereas more expansive commitments actually have helped the economy recover more quickly.

> True recovery requires adjusting to the wider patterns of change in the world at large.

> The primary agenda should be to help the middle class recover.

> A economic depression worsens class distinctions, so that the interests and perspectives of socioeconomic classes become all the more distinct. He refers to it as a “cultural separation” that tends to sort the populations into winners and losers. As a result, the ways of life of the nonprofessional middle class become more like those of the poor while the well-to-do develop ways of life that are quite different financially and emotionally.

If Peck is right, then our country is on track to follow the pattern, which means we are in for a long difficult decline in our economy. What prospect is there that this country will recover?

Attacks against the Shia in Pakistan: From The Friday Times

The following is an article from The Friday Times [Lahore, Pakistan] that reveals some of the ugly features of Pakistan's internal politics. This source used to be only available for a small fee but it is now free. Take advantage of it.
Consider what it means to live as a minority person in a place like this. But also consider what is entailed in being a journalist in this place. It takes courage to put your name on an article that calls a spade a spade in a place where there is little assurance that a journalist will be protected. Altogether 39 Pakistani journalists have been killed since the 1990s, the most recent being Salim Shahzad, who reported on the hypocrisy of the Pakistani government. RLC

Balochistan crisis: Sectarian groups continue to target the Persian-speaking Shia community, which is not sure if the state wants to protect it
By Zia Ur Rehman

Lashkar-e-Jhangvi behind Hazara killings in Quetta


Eleven people, including a woman, were killed on July 30 when gunmen opened fire on a passenger vehicle near Pishin bus stop in Quetta. All the victims were Hazaras. The incident sparked violent protests and Quetta was completely shut down on July 31.

Over 200 Shia Hazaras have been killed in Balochistan in the last three years; they include businessmen, political leaders, government employees, clerics, police cadets, vegetable vendors, and daily-wage workers.

This is not the first such attack on members of the Shia Persian-speaking Hazara community. On July 10, two Hazara policemen were shot and killed on Qambrani Road. On June 22, two people were killed and 11 others injured in Hazar Ganji area when armed men ambushed a bus carrying pilgrims to Iran.

Syed Abrar Hussain Shah, a former Olympian, deputy director of Pakistan Sports Board, and recipient of the prestigious presidential Pride of Performance and Sitara-e-Imtiaz medals, was gunned down on June 16 near Nawab Nauroz Khan Stadium in Quetta. Shah, who belonged to the Hazara community, has represented Pakistan in the Olympics thrice and won a gold medal at the 1990 Asian Games in Beijing.

In another sectarian attack near Mirgahi Khan Chowk on May 18, unidentified men shot dead seven members of the Hazara community, including a baby, and injured five others. Most of the killed were vegetable vendors.

Seven Hazara men were killed and several injured in a rocket and gun attack in Hazara Town on May 6. There were Frontier Constabulary and Police checkposts nearby, but the attackers fled.

Over 200 Shia Hazaras have been killed in Balochistan in the last three years, according to elders of Hazara tribe and media sources. They include businessmen, political leaders, government employees, clerics, police cadets, vegetable vendors, and daily-wage workers. Hazaras are identifiable because of their Mongoloid features.

A large number of Hazaras have also been killed in attacks on religious processions. Last year, over 80 Shias, most of them Hazaras, were killed in a bombing on a Shia procession on September 3.

"Members of our community have been targeted persistently for the last 10 years by sectarian outfits, especially the banned militant organisations Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) and Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP)," said Abdul Khaliq, chairman of Hazara Democratic Party.

LeJ has accepted responsibility of most of these attacks. A spokesman for the LeJ in Balochistan, who ironically identifies himself as Ali Sher Haidri, said his group would avenge the killing of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden by targeting not only government officials and security forces, but also Hazara Shias.

Handbills distributed in Quetta recently have warned the Hazaras of a "jihad" similar to the one carried out against the Hazaras of Afghanistan by the Taliban.

Handbills distributed in Quetta recently have warned the Hazaras of a "jihad" similar to the one carried out against the Hazaras of Afghanistan by the Taliban; the Taliban regime had killed 12,000 Hazaras in central Afghanistan.

The 3.5 million Hazaras in Balochistan are said to have migrated to Quetta from Afghanistan a century ago. In the 1990s, the Taliban massacred the community - the third largest in the country - killing thousands in Bamyan, Ghazni and parts of Uruzgan that later became the Daykundi province. They had accused the Hazaras of collaborating with the Afghan Northern Alliance (ANA) fighting the Taliban regime in Kabul. According to an Amnesty International report, about 12,000 Hazaras were killed in central Afghanistan by the Taliban.

"Hundreds of Pakistani young men from militant organisations including the SSP, Jaish-e-Muhammad, Jundullah and Harkatul Mujahideen fought with the Taliban against the ANA," said an expert on militancy who teaches at Balochistan University. "The same men are now killing the Hazaras in Balochistan." He said the Al Qaeda and Taliban-linked groups accuse the community of colluding with the Americans and causing the downfall of the Taliban. Quetta is reportedly the new hub of the defeated Taliban factions, and has become a major site of expression of the hatred
towards the Hazaras.

The LeJ network in Quetta is being run by Usman Saifullah Kurd, Dawood Badini and Shafiqur Rind, a senior police official said. Kurd, who heads the LeJ in Balochistan, has trained a new group of killers who are carrying out attacks on the Hazaras, he said. Rind was arrested in 2003 from Mastung area of Balochistan while Kurd was arrested by the Criminal Investigation Unit in Karachi on June 22, 2006. Both fled from the Anti-Terrorist Force jail in Quetta on January 18, 2008. Rind was rearrested, but Kurd is still at large.

A source in the SSP said Kurd had recently met Malik Ishaq, a founding member of the LeJ, in Rahim Yar Khan and invited him to visit Quetta to address the banned SSP's public meetings.

Ishaq, accused of having masterminded the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in 2009 from behind the bars, was recently released by the Supreme Court after 14 years in prison.

The Hazara community had expressed concerns over his release. "The courts are releasing top leaders of banned organisations, and that shows these groups are getting stronger once again," said a Hazara religious scholar.

According to the Hazara Democratic Party chairman, Kurd's escape from jail was proof that these groups have inside support. He said the government claims to have arrested the attackers in all the cases, but they are never brought before the court or the public.

"The government has failed to tackle sectarian violence and protect the Hazara community," Khailq said, whose predecessor Hussain Ali Yousafi was also killed for being a Hazara in 2009.

Hazara elders believe intelligence agencies know about the activities of banned outfits and the whereabouts of their leaders, who simply operate under new names. They believe the state is either indifferent or supporting them.

The writer is a journalist and a researcher who works on militancy and human rights.
He can be contacted at zia_red@hotmail.com

When China wises up, what then?

The issues of our time are becoming more acute. Of course we watch with alarm the affairs in Libya, Syria, and now Britain. But also, over the long term there is the changing attitude of the Chinese toward the United States, whose wealth, along with that of the Japanese, has been holding up the profligacy of the Americans. An article on this by Stephen S. Roach puts it together for us. Below are some quotes from his article. [Click on the title for a link to the whole article.] RLC


Read China's lips: China may soon be fed up with US fiscal intransigence and show it by halting the purchase of the dollar.
Stephen S Roach: 07 Aug 2011 07:53

The Chinese have long admired the economic dynamism of the US. But they have lost confidence in America's government and its dysfunctional economic stewardship.

… ….Senior Chinese officials are appalled at how the United States allows politics to trump financial stability. One high-ranking policymaker noted in mid-July: "This is truly shocking … we understand politics, but your government's continued recklessness is astonishing."

….China recognises that it no longer makes sense to stay with its current growth strategy - one that relies heavily on a combination of exports and a massive buffer of dollar-denominated foreign-exchange reserves. Three key developments led the Chinese leadership to this conclusion:

First, the crisis and Great Recession of 2008-2009 were a wake-up call. ….Second, the costs of the insurance premium - the outsize, largely dollar-denominated reservoir of China's foreign-exchange reserves - have been magnified by political risk. …. Finally, China's leadership is mindful of the risks implied by its own macroeconomic imbalances - and of the role that its export-led growth and dollar-based foreign-exchange accumulation plays in perpetuating those imbalances. Moreover, the Chinese understand the political pressure that a growth-starved developed world is putting on its tight management of the renminbi's exchange rate relative to the dollar - pressure that is strikingly reminiscent of a similar campaign directed at Japan in the mid-1980s.

…With these considerations in mind, China has adopted a very transparent response. Its new, 12th, Five-Year Plan says it all - a pro-consumption shift in China's economic structure that addresses head-on China's unsustainable imbalances. By focusing on job creation in services, massive urbanisation, and the broadening of its social safety net, there will be a large boost to labour income and consumer purchasing power.

…. It moves economic growth away from a dangerous over reliance on external demand, while shifting support to untapped internal demand. In addition, it takes the heat off an undervalued currency as a prop to export growth, giving China considerable leeway to step up the pace of currency reforms.

But, by raising the consumption share of its GDP, China will also absorb much of its surplus saving.

… So China, the largest foreign buyer of US government paper, will soon say, "enough". Yet another vacuous budget deal, in conjunction with weaker-than-expected growth for the US economy for years to come, spells a protracted period of outsize government deficits. That raises the biggest question of all: lacking in Chinese demand for Treasuries, how will a savings-strapped US economy fund itself without suffering a sharp decline in the dollar and/or a major increase in real long-term interest rates?

The cavalier response heard from Washington insiders is that the Chinese wouldn't dare spark such an endgame. After all, where else would they place their asset bets? Why would they risk losses in their massive portfolio of dollar-based assets?

China's answers to those questions are clear: it is no longer willing to risk financial and economic stability on the basis of Washington's hollow promises and tarnished economic stewardship. The Chinese are finally saying no. Read their lips.

Stephen S. Roach, a member of the faculty at Yale University, is Non-Executive Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and the author of The Next Asia.

A version of this article first appeared on Project Syndicate.

Sobering news from Pakistan. A low-grade war in Karachi – or in all of Pakistan?

The news from Pakistan is worrisome. We have already noted how badly things have been moving there for many years, with signs of the price the Pakistan people are paying for a double-minded administration. The latest evidence is the fighting in Karachi. Here are some quotes from the Al Jazeera article [8/2/11].

Karachi violence leaves 34 dead in single day: Interior minister vows to restore peace after at least 34 people are killed and 90 vehicles burnt over 24-hour period.
02 Aug 2011 16:14

Dozens of people were killed and scores of vehicles burned in Karachi in the latest violence on Tuesday [EPA]

> 34 people have been killed in the past 24 hours.

> at least 18 of the killings targeted political activists,

. . .

> The latest round of violence has been attributed to a fight for political influence in the city between Karachi's main parties, Tyab said.

> police say about 200 people were killed in last month alone,

> Local media put the toll even higher, with the Dawn newspaper reporting that 318 people were killed during the month.

> in Orangi, Karachi's largest and one of its poorest slums... More than 100 people were killed during three days of violence in the slum [recently].

> violence has since spread to other parts of the city of more than 18 million.

> On Monday, at least 90 vehicles were set ablaze in different parts of the city.

> In one incident, at least 80 motorcycles were burnt when dozens of people stormed a textile factory late on Monday and set fire to the vehicles parked outside the industrial unit.

> Over the years, criminal gangs have been used by political parties in a city-wide war for influence in Karachi, which contributes about two-third of Pakistan's tax revenue.

> criminal elements were "exploit[ing] the breakdown of law and order".

> "While gangs of land-grabbers and mafias have tried to exploit the breakdown of law and order, they do not appear to be the main directors of the horrible game of death and destruction; that distinction belongs to more powerful political groups and it is they who hold the key to peace".

> the political parties in Pakistan have been exploiting the divisions that exist in this city ... and often they will turn to the underworld, the criminals, to carry out their dirty work," he said.

> The HRCP had previously said that 1,138 people were killed in Karachi in the first six months of 2011, of whom 490 were victims of political, ethnic and sectarian violence.

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

Why worry about Al Qaeda when Congress is controlled by saboteurs?

Joseph McCarthy had this country in terror in the 1950s claiming that a Soviet funded fifth column had infiltrated the highest levels of government. Little did he know. Now our country is under the control of ideologues whose first commitment is to an ideal with no concern for what it will do to the people they are responsible for. Have they no conscience about what they have already been doing to their own people? And they are confidently ready to do even more, with virtually no cost to themselves.

The Republicans formerly signed off on the profligate spending of the GW Bush administration, coupled with the liberal handout to all the rich in the “Bush Tax Cuts”, (remember the surplus that Bush inherited from Clinton?), but now have returned the old Republican religion of fiscal restraint. They are now in the process of disemboweling our government. The Democrats, who were pussy cats during the Bush administration are now pussy cats under Obama.

The result is a government committed to wrecking the whole fabric of our economy in one fell swoop. No one knows what the implications will be of what they are doing, but what seems clear is that Congress has virtually no interest is dealing with the most urgent and fundamental issue this moment: A depressed economy that is likely to languish for years on end. It seems certain that one way or another this Congress will abandon the poor and vulnerable to their own devices at a time when there are no other sources of help than the government.

I can’t find words for my own feelings about this government. We are all despairing of where this country is going. Aren't these leaders vulnerable to the criticism of the greatest social critic of all time?
“You load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.”

Reflections on a note in Science about a Central Asian astronomer

The American Association for the Advancement of Science is the most prestigious scholarly organization in this country. But the June 17 issue of the society’s journal Science has a brief note [p 1365] that veils a useful distinction that to some of us is important.

The note is about the esteemed Central Asian astronomer Ulugh Beg. The note refers to a tribute made to Ulugh Beg by the Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius in 1687. Hevelius asked for help in finding Beg’s map of the heavens and asked for it to be translated from the Persian.

The resultant map produced by Hevelius is being displayed in a show called Arabick Roots in London. The article refers to the “flow of knowledge from the Arab world to Europe in the 17th century.”
Technically the statement is OK but it masks a certain historical reality. That is, Ulugh Beg was not Arab; he was Turko-Persian, the grandson of Tamer lane, and the son of the famed ruler of Herat Shah Rukh who sponsored an elaborate Turko-Persian culture. Ulugh Beg wrote in Persian even though he may have known Arabic as well as Persian and Turkish. So the “Arabic world” in Ulugh Beg’s time was very Persian as well as Arabic. Much of the scholarly knowledge that came to Europe from the “Arab world” was very Persian as well as Arabic. In fact, some of the most scientific gains in those centuries were made by Central Asians – that is, Turko-Persians. So the flow of knowledge to Europe came from the Turko-Persian societies in Central Asia.

The ugly side of power in the capitalistic world

I can’t remember a time when the ways capital exerts its influence on social affairs has been so evident in the news.

We are in fact seeing the ugly side of power being displayed in lots of places these days. Usually power masks its ugly side. Syria, for example. Syria has been a stable country for many years, so that a careless observer traveling through would easily suppose that the people are content and all is well. What one only occasionally could see was how the regime in power – composed of a relatively small cadre of relatives and co-sectarians – could remain in control. We are seeing that mechanism of control now: their army has been shooting unarmed demonstrators on the streets. The number of dead is now more than 1400 (not 14,000 as NYTimes says in 7/20/11 issue). All of them were peaceful demonstrators, as far as we know – Of course what we know is limited to what the regime wants us to know. They are trying to control all the news coming out of the country -- fortunately unsuccessfully.

But in the capitalistic world power works differently. The mechanisms of influence exerted by large capitalistic interests are more subtle, usually. But they seem blatant these days, and evident in so many contexts, and many of them seem to be in the foreground of the news lately. Here are some articles that provide examples.

> ProPublica reports on how the donors to the campaign of Louisiana’s President of St Bernard Parish benefitted from the BP oil spill cleanup. “Spillionaires Revisited: Gov’t Official’s Associates Got Big Contracts After the BP Oil Spill.”

> The no-holds-barred way Rupert Murdock’s newspaper did its business is now coming out in the open. There are many good articles but one that summarizes all that is known can be found at the Telegraph web site:
Phone hacking: timeline of the scandal
It’s worth noting that Fox news and the Wall Street Journal, both owned by Murdock have made very little of it. The difference between what his papers have to say about it and what other papers have to say illustrates how much it matters that news ownership be as dispersed as possible.

> Paul Krugman and Robin Wells describe how the same sets of investment/ banking companies keep on bilking the system by over-reaching and then demanding bailouts: “The Busts Keep Getting Bigger: Why?” It's about economic downturns.

> Representative Fred Upton (R-MI) is now for incandescent light bulbs whereas he used to be against them. Try to guess why. Have a look at what drives this bizarre political boondoggle.

> Capital works on the side of contraband behavior also, of course, manifest in the brutality of the Mexican drug war: Here is the Los Angeles Times’ summary of what has been going on.

Sober reflections on the contraries that led to Bastille Day

[slightly revised 7/15/11 @3:11}
Sometimes a situation becomes so complicated, disputes become so irresolvable, and adversaries so irreconcilable, that a great deal comes to bear on what happens in a single moment. The outcome of a high-stakes situation can be revolutionary change, when the system in place gets upended. I keep hoping that the disputes in our Congress have not reached such a state. But as today is Bastille Day it might be worth noting some circumstances that led up to the French Revolution, in case you notice parallels.

The whole story is too complicated to try to tell here, but I quote William Sewell, Jr’s summary of the issues that set the clash of interests in motion, to create a huge societal convolution in France. I quote from Chapter 8 of his book “The Logics Of History”. I arrange his statement in stages, in order to emphasize how as the situation developed the problems became all the more dire and irresolvable so that the underlying premises that held the French Crown in power were being undermined before it was completely overturned.

> “In 1786 the comptroller general informed the king that the state was nearly bankrupt.

> By the summer of 1789, the crisis of the state’s funding had become a crisis of the system of social stratification (because fiscal reform would mean stripping the clergy and nobility of one of their major privileges, their immunity from taxation);

> it had become a crisis of the privileged corporate institutions that were the integument of the social order of old regime France (because their privileges were linked to particular fiscal arrangements);

> it had become a deep constitutional crisis (because it was unclear which governmental body had the authority to change the system of taxation)

> and it had also become a crisis of the very principles of the social and political order (because proponents of natural rights, national sovereignty, and civic equality had managed to dominate political discourse and gain a sizeable foothold among the deputies to the Estates General.)"

That is to say, the fundamental assumptions that held the King in place were now crumbling at just the time when a contrary and irreconcilable concept of authority was being widely discussed, namely, that sovereignty should belong to the nation and the populace should have a voice in determinations of how (and possibly by whom) they should be governed. The events that took place in a cascade of miscommunications and conflicting agendas as the problems became more acute could never have been predicted, but in retrospect it is possible to notice that the ambiguities and contraraties of the situation were destabilizing the system in place, that is, the monarchy. Nothing required that the events that took place should take place that way, but much in the way of a collapse was potential in the situation. And as events took place a series of errors of understanding and communication added to the possibilities that the old order might be swept away. A spark was all that was needed.

It’s hard to think about the irreconcilable contraries in France in late eighteenth century without wondering if our own country, and perhaps even the capitalistic world as we know it, might be careering toward a point when powerful contrary interests could become, as in the French Revolution, an uncontrollable societal convolution.

The Insurance Institution of Last Resort

The insurance protection of last resort

Societies hold together by more or less agreeing on a common myth. By myth I mean broad formulations of common interest and of how the world works, what the future looks like. They are broad and general formulations too abstract to be proven by empirical evidence. Rather, they are useful conventions of public discourse that enable people to make plans together and come to an understanding of how they share common interests. I say “more or less” because some people believe these myths while others are willing to work with them even if they aren’t sure about them, and maybe others work with them simply to get along because in fact they don’t really believe them; to disagree openly creates too much trouble. That’s how societies work, how collectivities of self-interested, self-oriented human beings work together.

The common myth of the Republican Party for some time has been that business – private industry – is more efficient than government. Bureaucracy costs too much, they suppose. Whatever has to be done can be done better, more efficiently, and cheaper than government. So they promote the idea that whenever possible government should be replaced by private industry. This is a proposition too abstract to prove even though a few scholars claim to have gotten results that make this view plausible.

So many people believe it. I even remember hearing Mark Shields on the News Hour a couple of years ago say that the Republican Party doesn’t believe in government. He has never hinted such an accusation since that I know of; I suspect he got some flack for saying it. But even if it is unfairly broad, the charge may be almost true for the most extreme elements on the Far-Far Right.

I don’t know for sure but I believe there were similar opinions among the Wall Street and Banking barons in the 1920s. What seems to have been true, in any case, was the belief that the market could solve most of the problems of the world. In any case, it was flourishing.

The prosperity of the 1920s however masked another rarely stated myth that lies behind most publics in the modern age: When things go wrong people demand that the government do something. When the market crashed and the banks failed the American people demanded that the government do something. And in fact Hoover’s administration started programs for the public that did help, but they came too slowly and too late. FDR became President by running against Hoover for the next four terms. He claimed to be representing the common man and boasted that the fat cats hated him. That was because whatever the myth was in the 1920s, in the 1930s the American people demanded that something be done. By the government.

The government is the insurance institution of last resort.

I fear the Republicans have forgotten that. If things turn bad they may have to pay for it as the Republicans did in the 1930s.

Ahmed Wali Karzai is dead

Reports of the assassination of Ahmed Wali Karzai, younger brother of Hamed Karzai, President of Afghanistan, indicate that he was shot several times by a former bodyguard of their older brother Qayyoum. Stratfor says this is a serious blow to the President. This is what they say:
“His death comes as a major blow to President Karzai who depended on Ahmed Wali for creating a social support base for the president in Kandahar province, the homeland of the Taliban. Ahmed Wali’s official position was head of the legislative council in Kandahar, but he wielded a disproportionate amount of influence in the province and the country at large, claiming close relations with a wide array of players including the CIA, local Taliban elements and even drug lords. Despite his close dealings with U.S. intelligence, American officials openly criticized Ahmed Wali in 2009, accusing him of corruption and being involved in the drug trade.”

Joseph Stiglitz on how severe the economic crisis is

The Nobel Prize Winner in Economics Joseph Stiglitz has explained in much more elegant terms than I could express in an earlier statement how dire the situation is for our country. Dire doubly: Dire because of the urgency that wise decisions be made soon and dire because the leadership of Congress continue to demonstrate an inability to get beyond their respective ideologies. RLC

From Project Syndicate 2011-07-06
Joseph Stiglitz: The Ideological Crisis of Western Capitalism

NEW YORK – Just a few years ago, a powerful ideology – the belief in free and unfettered markets – brought the world to the brink of ruin. Even in its hey-day, from the early 1980’s until 2007, American-style deregulated capitalism brought greater material well-being only to the very richest in the richest country of the world. Indeed, over the course of this ideology’s 30-year ascendance, most Americans saw their incomes decline or stagnate year after year.

Moreover, output growth in the United States was not economically sustainable. With so much of US national income going to so few, growth could continue only through consumption financed by a mounting pile of debt.

I was among those who hoped that, somehow, the financial crisis would teach Americans (and others) a lesson about the need for greater equality, stronger regulation, and a better balance between the market and government. Alas, that has not been the case. On the contrary, a resurgence of right-wing economics, driven, as always, by ideology and special interests, once again threatens the global economy – or at least the economies of Europe and America, where these ideas continue to flourish.

In the US, this right-wing resurgence, whose adherents evidently seek to repeal the basic laws of math and economics, is threatening to force a default on the national debt. If Congress mandates expenditures that exceed revenues, there will be a deficit, and that deficit has to be financed. Rather than carefully balancing the benefits of each government expenditure program with the costs of raising taxes to finance those benefits, the right seeks to use a sledgehammer – not allowing the national debt to increase forces expenditures to be limited to taxes.
. . . [Some of this is deleted. For a link to the full text of the article click on the title above]
. . .
Regrettably, the financial markets and right-wing economists have gotten the problem exactly backwards: they believe that austerity produces confidence, and that confidence will produce growth. But austerity undermines growth, worsening the government’s fiscal position, or at least yielding less improvement than austerity’s advocates promise. On both counts, confidence is undermined, and a downward spiral is set in motion.

Do we really need another costly experiment with ideas that have failed repeatedly? We shouldn’t, but increasingly it appears that we will have to endure another one nonetheless. A failure of either Europe or the US to return to robust growth would be bad for the global economy. A failure in both would be disastrous – even if the major emerging-market countries have attained self-sustaining growth. Unfortunately, unless wiser heads prevail, that is the way the world is heading.

Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University, a Nobel laureate in economics, and the author of Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011.
www.project-syndicate.org
For a podcast of this commentary in English, please use this link:
http://media.blubrry.com/ps/media.libsyn.com/media/ps/stiglitz140.mp3

The strange economics of American politics; and a layman’s history of the Great Depression

I’m having trouble figuring out how the current plans for recovery are supposed to work. I’m not an economist but it seems to me that the plans in some general way should add up, and so far I can’t figure it out.

What I hear from both parties is that the real issue is “Jobs, jobs, jobs”. We all expect we will be hearing about that in the forthcoming election. Also, we are told that for this reason the government must reduce spending. The deficit ceiling plans are not settled but we are getting a sense of some of the way they plan to work it out, and what appears to be happening is that both parties are going to agree to cutting back government spending. Maybe they will ask the super-rich to pay a few more taxes but as we all know the Republicans have been fighting that prospect tooth and nail; they don't even bother to conceal whose side they are on. For me, a non-economist on the sidelines, it’s hard to make sense of all this.

Here is the plan, as I understand it.
• The government will cut back: that is, it will reduce the number of government employees and also reduce the number of contracts with private industry.
• The government will cut back on Medicare and Medicaid, thus reducing the safety net for the most financially vulnerable sector of the economy.
• Also, the plan is to bring our troops home; the sooner the better. So, our troops will be brought back to join the labor force.

Now, lets add this up: fewer government jobs, less money to employ the lower income segment of our society, more unemployed veterans: That means, voila!, More Jobs! If there is a logic here I don't get it. How do we add layoffs, starving the poor, bringing in more unemployed from the military and get a bump in the economy?

These policies sound much like the policies that got this country into trouble during the Great Depression – that’s the way I remember it (but remember I’m not an economist). At a time when the stock market tanked and the banks failed the government cut back on expenditures. And as the world economy collapsed other countries did the same. To me that sounds like what has been going on in our time: Britain has cut back, the US is cutting back, the EU is struggling to right itself owing to the debt in several countries.

So how do we know we are not on the verge of another Great Depression? That is a terrifying prospect.

To emphasize the point, I will rehearse what the Depression meant for my family. My father grew up in a wealthy Oklahoma family. Six sons. All went to college in the 1920s. But my grandfather lost everything in 1930. Everything; he was a pauper for the rest of his life. My father and mother had married just before the collapse, and although a graduate in Chemical Engineering he could not find work, although my mother got some income by teaching music in a small town. During the day my father carried ice for an ice factory (few people had refrigerators then) and at night he worked on a correspondence course in accounting. When he finally qualified as an accountant he looked for jobs keeping books for small companies. All of the companies were struggling to survive, and a couple times, when he finally got a company's books in order, he found out it was broke; there was no money even for him to be paid. He moved from job to job. We moved from town to town. When he got a job in Wichita he was able to take in one of our cousins, a teenager whose parents had no money. But that job disappeared and we had to live with a distant relative on an oil reservation, a man who was a gruffy old geezer who didn’t like kids (like me).

It was the war that brought the country out of depression. Roosevelt had started a number of national work projects in order to put people to work – Work Projects Administration, the CCC (I don’t remember what that stood for, but they built many of the facilities in national parks that are still in use). The government didn’t have much income so FDR had to borrow by issuing government bonds – all the while wondering whether it was a good idea to borrow from ourselves. Anyway, his administration started many of the safety-net programs like Social Security that the Republicans, who hated them then, are now trying to dismantle. And when war started in Europe Roosevelt borrowed more so that our country could support the Allies in Europe. When we entered the war the American government went into full press mode, mostly with borrowed money. And when the war was over the US Congress invented an amazing new idea – can anyone imagine a congress that would do this now?: they would pay the veterans to go to college. The GI Bill was opposed by the major universities of America. They thought it would bring the ordinary riff-raff into our institutions of higher learning, which saw them selves as serving the upper class (which of course no one wanted to admit existed in this country). It didn’t take even those universities long to discover there was money in this program for them so they finally went along with it -- and discovered that the veterans were better students than the usual college students.

All this took place because the government borrowed money. The more they spent on national projects the stronger the middle class got and were able to pay the taxes that kept the country going.

So much for what a non-economist remembers about how the world works. That’s why I at least can’t figure out how the plans being talked about in Congress today could add up to anything but disaster.

Another formulation of the issues in Central Asia

I'm glad to see any signs of interest in the growing investment of the Chinese in Central Asia, as is indicated in this opinion piece by Pepe Escobar, even if it seems a bit jargonistic ("Great Game", "pipelinestan", angel of history). In geopolitical terms we can speculate whether the war in Afghanistan-Pakistan is mere the current expression of what augurs to be a century-long power struggle over access and control over the mineral resources of Inner Asia. On that issue China is winning, as Escobar suggests. From Al Jazeera. RLC

Opinion
High stakes in Eurasia's 'New Great Game'
China and Russia will benefit from US mistakes in Afghanistan, and the operation in Libya, gaining influence and energy.

Pepe Escobar Last Modified: 04 Jul 2011 14:39

China is investing on a land-based Central Asian energy strategy - a pipeline-driven New Silk Road from the Caspian Sea to China's Far West in Xinjiang [GALLO/GETTY]
Antonio Gramsci once mused that the old order has died but the new one has not yet been born.

While Washington's geopolitical/energy focus was on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Iran, and to a lesser extent on Central Asia, international politics was already in transition from a unipolar world towards a new, polycentric system.

And then the 2011 Arab Revolt irrupted all across the MENA (Middle East-Northern Africa) chessboard, turning all calculations upside down and reconfiguring the relationship between the US, the main Eurasian nations, and Northern Africa.

Time to recall an ultimate Cold Warrior, Dr Zbigniew Brzezinski, who in 1997, in the article "A Geostrategy for Eurasia", published by Foreign Affairs, conceptualised that: "Eurasia is the world's axial supercontinent. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world's three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa. With Eurasia now serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard, it no longer suffices to fashion one policy for Europe and another for Asia. What happens with the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America's global primacy and historical legacy."

US power waning

Fast forward to the first decade of the 2000s. The George W Bush administration devised a strategy for a Great Central Asia according to which the US would roll back Russia's traditional and China's growing influence.

Washington would have New Delhi as the partner of choice in Afghanistan and Central Asia - laying the foundations of a new Silk Road.

And Washington would establish itself not far from Xinjiang, in Western China, and close to Russia's underbelly. Essentially, that's how the US would win the New Great Game in Eurasia.

This strategy was inbuilt in the Pentagon's Long War - codename for the Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine - and its far more important, if half-hidden, twin: the global energy war.

In my 2007 book Globalistan, I branded this process as Liquid War; here we would find "liquidity" not only in terms of fast-flowing capital and information shaping liquid modernity (a hat tip to Zygmunt Bauman), but also as in oil/gas pipelines crisscrossing an enormous battlefield, what I have called Pipelineistan.

The problems with the Bush administration strategy may have already started way back in 2003, when Turkey - the bridge par excellence between Central Asia and the Mediterranean - decided not to support the war in Iraq.

Since then, Turkey has gotten closer to Russia and, following Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's concept, in fact all its neighbors, especially Iran - performing what could be called an "escape from the US" - and thus denting its role as a NATO base for penetration into Eurasia.

It's in this context that an Ankara-Tehran-Damascus alliance was solidified (and, incidentally, may now be unraveling). Meanwhile Eurasia as a whole changed at breakneck speed.

Russia was "back" on a continental and also global scale; China and India emerged geo-economically; the US got bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq. Soon the US was not the "indispensable nation" anymore.

China and Russia

Very few former Soviet states were annexed to the US sphere of influence - as it was expected after 9/11. Moreover, Washington's dream of a line of control stretching from the Mediterranean all the way towards Central Asia, aimed at cutting in two the Eurasian landmass, did not happen.

China and Russia developed a joint Eurasia policy - organised, among other channels, by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the Eurasian Economic Community and now increased military cooperation.

In Pipelineistan terms, China didn't have to send a single soldier (to Iraq) or get bogged down in an infinite quagmire (in Afghanistan); instead it will get plenty of oil from Iraq and much of the natural gas it needs from Turkmenistan.

China is massively investing in a land-based Central Asian energy strategy - a pipeline-driven New Silk Road from the Caspian Sea to China's Far West in Xinjiang.

The US's geopolitical perspective is characteristic of a sea power - framing its relationship with other nations from the position of an "island"; the Mediterranean basin and Central Asia are viewed as placed in a so-called "arc of instability", as defined by Dr Brzezinski.

Over these past few years, in a constantly evolving context, much more than Great Central Asia, what became paramount for Washington was the geopolitical concept of a Great Middle East - expanding on Brzezinski's "arc of instability" and running from the Maghreb all the way to Central Asia.

So as much as Brzezinski conceptualised Central Asia as a volatile and unpredictable "Eurasian Balkans", we had the Bush administration forcefully dreaming of the "birth pangs" of the Great Middle East. The aim was unmistakable; to cause a lot of trouble to the increasing geopolitical union between China and Russia.

Botched operations

In these past few years, up to the - largely botched - Africom/NATO operation in Libya, the US strategy has been aimed at the militarisation of the entire arc between the Mediterranean and Central Asia.

Africom, the US Africa command implemented in 2008 with a headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, has now engaged in its first African war, in Libya. Africom aims at rapid intervention all across Africa but also has its sights on the "New" Middle East and Central Asia.

So now the US strategy can finally be examined in detail as a militarisation of the Mediterranean-Central Asian arch.

That would assure the US a wedge between Southern Europe and Northern Africa; assure military control over Northern Africa and Southwest Asia, with particular emphasis on Turkey, Syria and Iran; and "cut" Eurasia in two. In sum: divide and rule.

So this geopolitical road map was bound from the start to target Syria (already happening); Iran (a perpetual neo-con dream); and even Erdogan's Turkey - all useful for a US advance in Eurasia.

Meanwhile Eurasian powers Russia, China and India - all BRICS member countries - not to mention Iran and Turkey themselves, are slowly calibrating their response.

In the midst of this ever-shifting accommodation of tectonic plates, Afghanistan assumes an even more crucial role. It could - and should - recover its status of crossroads/hub bringing Central Asia and South Asia together. Yet that may ultimately happen not under American sponsorship - but under Chinese and Russian partnership.

The Moscow/Beijing counterpunch is to organise the SCO as a rival to NATO in terms of providing security for Central Asia - and for Afghanistan. Wily Hamid Karzai has seen which way the wind is blowing - and he's all for it.

Moscow and Beijing have decided to enter into "tight cooperation" (their terminology) not only in Central Asia but in the Middle East and North Africa as well; Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao admitted as much in a recent op-ed piece for the Financial Times newspaper.

The wake-up call was the Western intervention in Libya. The Chinese economic/political/diplomatic push will be organised under the aegis of the BRICS group of emerging powers (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa).

The complex hidden agendas at play in Syria; the unraveling of the Ankara-Tehran-Damascus alliance; the West's double standards over Bahrain; Washington's determination to overstay its military presence in Iraq -these developments are all seen by Moscow and Beijing as part of a strategy to perpetuate Western dominance in the Middle East.

So expect even more feverish moves by the angel of history. Eurasian actors Turkey, Iran, Russia and China will be ever more active in the Mediterranean and Central Asia - the key geostrategic battleground in a 21st century New Great Game that might even be pitting Washington against Eurasia itself.

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for the Asia Times. His latest book is Obama Does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Source: Al Jazeera

Immigrant Young Maids of America, Watch Out!

This is addressed to immigrant women generally but in fact Rita and I know a number of them, and their stories are so similar to that of the Guinean maid who is about to lose her case against former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn that it occurs to me to address a note to them generally.

What I know about you is that you left your home country out of desperation. You had good reasons to flee, but they were too complicated to make sense to Americans who have scarcely any sense of what it’s like out there, and certainly your problems were far different from anything the American legal system would recognize. So you had to lie. And you had to get help fabricating a story that would make sense to the American legal system. Once you figured out what might work you memorized it.

The truth was otherwise, of course; the reality was far too bizarre from the American point of view that even your friends in American now cannot understand it. In fact, many of the judges that have to decide on your story, whether to allow you to immigrate, have becomes so jaded, so frustrated by the ways they have been deceived that they can be scornful of anything you tell them. So you have to make your story really good.

But anyway the story you invented got you here. And then once on the ground, you discovered how hard life is here, especially for someone who comes with essentially no skills. And of course you had no money. And no language. Whatever English you thought you knew was little help. Everyone talked so fast and used so many colloquial idioms that you were overwhelmed from the beginning.

So you were lost and helpless, with hardly a friend, and virtually no one with means to help. Desperate, you had to do whatever to survive. You had children, and you needed to escape from the dive the immigration authorities put you in when you arrived. So what you were reduced to, you will never want to admit.

Thank God, somehow you survived. You lived through those horrible days, and now you are at least more or less ensconced in this country. Eventually you came to know – it’s among the various schemes that get passed around among the immigrant populations of this country -- that if you claimed to have more children than you actually had your taxes would be lower and maybe you could even get more financial aid from the government. So you claimed your neighbor’s children on your taxes as well as your own.

All of this seems to have paid off. You at least have been able to survive. At least you are holding on. What you have not realized is that the lies are now your history, and they have left you vulnerable. With this kind of history you have little chance of making any claim in a dispute over any issue without your history being brought up against you in court. So without knowing it you have placed yourself in a far more vulnerable position than you know. Besides being limited in your English and your skills and still desperately poor you are un-savvy, and in this country that can be a tragic weakness. You are exceedingly vulnerable, and more so if you are young and pretty.

We all know the platitudes: In the end it doesn’t pay to lie. But the consequences in this country can be devastating if you have to make a case in court. If by some miracle you should inherit a billion dollars, there is maybe a chance for you. At least we surmise so from what we read in the newspapers.