Avuncular American

The Media Week That Was - Bread & Circuses

In the Sixties, when I was a kid, I developed an early sense of the absurd thanks, in part, to the short-lived TV news satire “That Was The Week That Was,” or, as the original BBC series was dubbed, “TW3.”  These were the days before Saturday Night Live (I could never stay up that late anyway), or today’s Daily Show and Colbert Report.  But viewers of these programs are among those best equipped to deal with the media news worldwide this week.  It was a doozie.  Consider the following:

•    In the US, legendary network news of record, CBS, explores outsourcing newsgathering to CNN.  This is the broadcast equivalent of The New York Times subcontracting its Op-Ed page to the Fifth Grade debate team in Mrs. Gilbert’s English class.  Edward R. Murrow’s ghost is aghast.
•    In France, the midday half hour France Inter radio news devoted 29.99 minutes to breathless coverage of the Olympic Torch being assaulted by Tibetan and human rights protesters in the street of Paris.  It was a team effort to broadcast this political theatre, but the laurels went to a sports announcer dragooned for this “news” event, and his segment of the coverage sounded more like the narration of a photo-finish horse race than a news report.
•    In the US, two live TV days were devoted to coverage of the testimony of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, testifying that the US was (a) staying the course; (b) returning on success; (c) accomplishing its mission; or (d) none/all of the above.  Their non-news was pre-empted two days later by President Bush announcing that his successor would have to deal with the entire Iraq mess.
•    Meanwhile, in France, with everyone properly transfixed by the Olympic torch, Parliament debated the deployment of an additional contingent of French troops to Afghanistan.  In any case, the debate was just for form; President Sarkozy was sending the troops, no matter what.
•    Also in France, there was a mini-scandal over what a junior minister said about her boss the minister, accusing the Minister of Environment of “cowardice” for his handling of a bill dealing with GMO crops.  For days, it was nearly impossible for the normally sentient French citizen to find out exactly what was in the bill; what appeared to be important was the controversy, not the underlying facts.

It’s dog-bites-man banal to state that the media often has its priorities totally cockeyed.  Well of course.  The Mainstream Media is often accused in the alternative blogosphere of toeing the Bush Administration (or Sarkozy government, or whoever) line.  That may be true in many instances.  Bread, circuses, and Olympic torches have been around for a few millennia, and the public’s ability to be distracted by moving images and bright colors, as opposed to dull text and important facts, has only increased with time.

Meanwhile, speaking of bread, you can’t have been awake without having heard that several countries, including Egypt, Haiti, and Senegal, have had riots over the skyrocketing price of basic foodstuffs.  By “basic,” I’m talking bread.  Wheat flour.  Rice.  Corn.  Corn – you mean that great “green” raw material for “bio”-ethanol?  Even the American head of the World Bank, former Bush Administration official Robert Zoellick (photo, courtesy World Bank), said this week that government subsidies to “burn” food crops for fuel are a recipe for disaster.  The one “silver lining” story out of this was outlined on French TV and radio by French Ambassador to Senegal Jean-Christophe Rufin (like his boss the Foreign Minister, a doctor, and formerly of Action Against Hunger, an NGO).  Rufin said that subsidized exports from the US and Europe had displaced locally grown crops in many developing countries, but that the current inflation in world food prices will encourage importing countries to again grow their own crops.  The problem is that this will take years.

I have a suggestion for the financial luminaries meeting in Washington this weekend.  End, immediately, subsidies for crops used in ethanol.  Overnight – well, quickly anyway – the corn and other grains destined for distillation into fuel for Humvees could be added to the declining world food reserves.  Ethanol prices might go up and the fuel become scarcer, but which is more important: rioting throughout the world and the specter of starvation, or feeding the West’s (read American) appetite for consience-cleansing “green” fuel?

It was a hell of a week for the news.  But you might have been mesmerized by a little flame...

Contacts With the Opposition II: Ireland, Good Friday, and Terror

Today is the tenth anniversary of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which has allowed Northern Ireland to regain a measure of peaceful coexistence, as well as a considerable economic rebirth.  On a visit to Belfast circa 1999, the change in atmosphere was already apparent; Belfast bloomed with construction sites, “boutique” hotels were catering to business travelers if not tourists, and I recall that Belfast had something like the UK’s highest concentration of Mercedes and BMWs.

But as the BBC’s Panorama program showed this week, all is not love and roses between the communities; some 47 “peace walls” separate the Protestant and Catholic communities in several Ulster cities.  Though former sworn enemies Martin McGuinness of the Sinn Fein Catholic nationalists and Ian Paisley of the Protestant unionists now cavort laughingly together at the Stormont regional assembly, so much so that they’ve been dubbed “The Chuckle Brothers,” things are not so cozy on the street, where sectarianism is very much alive and well.

Yesterday’s Terrorist Is Today’s Statesman

So though the Northern Irish peace is not perfect, it is unquestionably better than the alternative.  The same might be said of Bosnia in the years after the Dayton Agreement, though the country is still divided into ethnic enclaves.  People can at least go shopping in Sarajevo without being picked off by snipers.  And Kosovo, Europe’s newest state(let), which may need an international umbilical cord for the foreseeable future, has settled into a sort of modus vivendi among its warring factions.

If Martin McGuinness – former IRA commander and convicted under terrorism charges – can now share parliamentary power with his former enemy, what does that tell us about the nature of politics?  Examples of former “terrorists” graduating to statesman status abound: Israel’s Menachim Begin of Irgun/Stern Gang infamy, becoming a peace partner with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat; Nelson Mandela, though probably the world’s most respected former leader, was originally imprisoned as the leader of the “terrorist” ANC, and still has to be "waivered" into the United States for his link with anti-apartheid terrorism; and if the French Revolution hadn’t yet “invented” the term terrorism in the late 18th century, the colonial British had similar terms a few years earlier for their American Revolutionaries, whose guerrilla operations (the “Swamp Fox”) and privateering went beyond the bounds of conventional military etiquette.

Back to the Good Friday anniversary and Tony Blair’s Finest Hour.  Today’s BBC World Service radio program “Analysis” is an excellent 9 minute evocation of the true political courage and vision that was behind the British-Irish-American (former senator George Mitchell was a key intermediary during the talks) initiative that resulted in the Good Friday Agreement of April 10, 1998.  “Analysis” notes that Blair rightly judged that the men-with-guns had to be included in the process, which tended to sideline or at least diminish the role of moderate parties like the SDLP, the largely Catholic Social Democratic and Labour Party.

But Blair’s approach – if the men-with-guns are talking, they might be distracted from shooting – is singular in its audacity.  Governments, whether it is Bush’s with-us-or-against-us “hunt ‘em down in their caves” approach to Islamist extremism or Algeria’s “eradicateurs” set on destruction of the Islamist opposition, whether terrorists or simply activists or even elected officials, tend to paint a simplistic picture of radical opposition, often with predictably disastrous results.  Blair, at least in his Northern Ireland peacemaker role, took a chance and it has paid off over the last decade.

Overseas Americans Look At US Economy

If this post seems Spartan, shorn of all my usual links, quotes, indents – all those little touches that make for fun blogging – it’s because I am afraid that all that effort will be for naught, given my recent “Beta test group” problems.  So I’ll keep this short and sweet.

True to their serious wonk natures, members of Brussels’ Democrats Abroad gathered last night, in the presence of reps from economic policy think tanks, to discuss the “dismal science” as it pertains to their home country.

The discussion was lively, though the subject is indeed dismal: one think tanker read off a series of indicators (jobs created, poverty thresholds cleared, budget surpluses, etc.), which set off in very sharp contrast the Clinton ‘90s from the Bush ‘00s.  On all the indices, it’s clear that the Bush years have been a disaster in terms of economic stewardship.

Several overseas Dems, suffering from the de facto devaluation of the US dollar, looked for some ray of hope from the experts.  Others, who had just received their “Economic Stimulus Payment Notices” from the IRS, felt that this squandering of happy money (ludicrous when translated into Euros) could have been targeted to provide some measure of relief for the millions of Americans losing their homes.

The experts had little succor to offer in return, and marveled at the willingness of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to take over the helm of state, given the holes below the waterline.  With record budget and trade deficits, astronomic national debt, and a hemorrhaging housing market, the resources to solve crucial needs in health care, critical infrastructure, and energy diversification will be in short supply.

And John McCain, whose interest in economics mirrors his knowledge of Sunni and Shia Islam, seems to have a one note song to all questions of national security: “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb-Iran...”  No sense that indebtedness to China and the Gulf nations, credit card funding of endless war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and dependence on foreign oil (and consequent enriching of foreign oil producers) – might too be matters of national (in)security.

So last night was a choir preaching to itself, convinced that – for reasons of economic self-interest, along with the broader goals of starting to bring back America’s reputation in the world – Election 2008 must be one of a sweeping Democratic victory.

Oh yes, and a question that us dollar-dummies should have asked last night: how many Wall Street mega-bonuses were awarded on selling the dollar short?  Surely the Gordon Gekko’s of 2008 know that when the Bush Administration repeats that it wants a “strong dollar” – but then does precisely nothing to strengthen it, and everything (chronic deficit spending, record-breaking national debt, a string of Federal Reserve interest rate cuts) to further its decline – surely the Wall Street whizzes know that it’s time to play in the Forex fields.  No wonder someone last night used “dollar” and “peso” interchangeably.

Outsourcing Border Controls: American Passports

Before my blog service started to go haywire, I had drafted a post to draw readers' attention to what I think is a very important article by fellow ex-Foreign Service blogger Pat Kushlis in "Whirled View."  Writing last Friday in "Losing 'the keys to the kingdom'," Pat drew my attention to what has to be one of the worst ideas yet in the realm of "outsourcing" and "privatizing" functions that used to be national and governmental.  Passports.  American passports.  Made in... Thailand.

This is the second time in two weeks that American passports, the keys to the kingdom, have been compromised. Bill Gertz of the Washington Times, of all newspapers, broke both stories. These are two separate instances of gross mismanagement and perhaps even malfeasance. Both relate to the outsourcing epidemic for which our current administration is famous.  Not only did the GPO – the federal government’s printing press – grossly overcharge the State Department for the production of passports when GPO is supposed to undertake the work at cost, but it also outsourced the work to Smartrac, a European company with production facilities in Thailand. “Smartrac,” according to Gertz, “divulged in an October 2007 court filing in The Hague that China had stolen its patented technology for e-passport chips, raising additional questions about the security of America's e-passports.” (emphasis added)

When you put the words "US high-tech e-passport chips," "technology stolen by China," and "production facilities in Thailand," in the same sentence, someone's common sense alarm should have been ringing loudly.  And all this, for a RFID technology that has itself been shown as vulnerable to hacking.

But rest assured, the GPO tells us, according to The Federal Times:

The government had no choice but to outsource a key security feature of the new electronic passports to a foreign corporation, the Government Printing Office said in response to a series of critical news reports by The Washington Times last week.  GPO is contracting with a Dutch company, which does part of its work in Thailand, to produce and implant a data chip in the back cover of each new passport. The company, Smartrac Technology Ltd., was the only company in the world that produced a chip to store passport information that met the State Department’s standards.  Smartrac warns that because Thailand is politically unstable, production could be halted, according to news reports.

I sent "Losing the keys to the kingdom" to a longtime expat in Thailand with extensive experience throughout Asia.  After first thinking that it was an April Fool's gag, this is what he had to say:

Very unwise to not have total control over the production of passports. There have been several arrests of Pakistani forgers over the years, producing every kind of valuable document from student IDs to national passports. Imagine if they got just a few blanks. Also, China fields many workers in high-tech factories in the USA, where secrets are obtained and transferred to the motherland.  With the virtual takeover of Thailand by Chinese business people, and Thailand's proclivity to corruption and making a quick buck, the idea of making passports outside the USA should not be even considered.

Well yes, but then GPO honcho Robert C. Tapella is a believer in the power of private enterprise in public ventures, and a practicioner of the revolving door; here he is in an interview with a printing industry journal after his appointment by President Bush:

I was involved in the Bush campaign, and when President Bush was elected in 2000, I was asked whether I wanted to continue to work in the government and what type of assignment I would like. The only thing I was interested in was the GPO. In my roles with Congress, I had been a customer of the GPO.

My guess is that someone is on a fast track to some lucrative future business with Smartrac or some other outsourcers, and who cares if the next administration has to clean up the mess?  And this cavalier approach to sensitive documents (remember, with a stolen valid American passport, a potential infiltrator has a much easier time of slipping into the US) is from the same team which uses the highest of hi-tech to spy on Americans in order to "protect" its citizens.  Let's just hope that Smartrac opens their planned factory in the US before some resourceful Thai or Chinese entrepreneur gets his hands on "the keys to the kingdom."