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When a Good Thing Goes Bad: The J-1 Visa

By Patricia L. Sharpe

For years and years, in America, chocolate meant Hershey. Today, evidently, Hershey means sweets kept affordable by exploiting U.S. J-1 visa laws.  Who knew that Hershey kisses come to us wrapped in sweat and tears? 

But now we do.  Some of Hershey’s overworked and underpaid workers have turned out to be eager young foreign students fed unsuspectingly into the American underworld of semi-enslaved, sub-contracted workers who keep the cost of living for cheapskate Americans unrealistically low.  Unlike the tens of thousands of workers who find themselves trapped in an all too common bait and switch situation, however, these students weren’t afraid to go public. They got in touch with unions and non-profits.  They took to the streets in protest.  And their families back home, not abject have-nots, but people with accomplishments and aspirations in countries where America wants to look good,  joined the protest. 

The All-American Summer Job

What an embarrassment!  The students were supposed to experience the joys of American culture and perfect their English  while they, like so many young Americans, held a summer job that would help defray their college expenses.  How American can you get?   So they’d been issued a variant of the classic  J-1 educational visa. 

In fact,  working a speed-up job on the night shift for peanuts (not even the joys of almonds) they did experience American culture, but not the kind that features summer music festivals and tete-â-tetes at Starbucks.  And they reacted in a way that drew on (once) standard operational procedure among mistreated American workers.  They rose up.  They protested.  And they did find some admirable segments of American society ready to show them how the system could work for them.  So call it a mini American Spring.  What a pity if overworked, underpaid native-born American workers don’t follow the visitors’ self-respecting example and demand a government that represents Main Street, not Wall Street.

The Hershey story is fascinating and instructive for three reasons.  It reveals, once again, how  the J-1 visa, for all its idealistic origins and fine accomplishments, has always been susceptible to manipulation.  It also shows how the U.S. government’s ever-multiplying levels and varieties of sub-contracting have made supervision so difficult that mission goals often become distorted and financial malfeasance becomes commonplace.  Finally, the Hershey debacle is just one more chapter in the exploitation of labor that has blighted American history from day one and, now, under global cost pressures, seems to be providing material for a new ignoble chapter.    

The Happy Student Story

So what’s a J-1 visa anyway?  To keep it simple, let’s say it’s the visa foreigners must seek if they want to study in the U.S.  With the right papers from the accepting university, college or other bona fide educational institution and strong evidence of plans to return home after the graduation ceremonies are over, the visa is granted expeditiously.

What’s the point of making it (relatively) easy for these students to enter the U.S?  It’s good for America if people wish to study here. U.S. universities and colleges can use the tuition money, especially to support programs in the science and math departments spurned by too many Americans.  Better yet, historically, some of the top foreign students have remained (legally) in the U.S. and thank goodness for that.  Since so few native-born Americans wish to study math, engineering or the sciences, these  J-1 alumni immigrants have been disproportionately responsible for the American lead in computer and computer-based technology, to name just one area of excellence which helped to prolong the American century.

As for those foreign students who chose, degrees-in-hand, to return home, that was good for the U.S., too.  Having been in contact with the best of America and often being grateful for a first rate education, the returnees became de facto American ambassadors in their own country.  They have been knowledgeable.  They have been sympathetic.  Soft power at its best. A terrific return on America’s  investment in the bureaucratic capacity to issue visas to those properly qualified to receive them.

The Perversions

Well, that’s how the J-1 visa is process is supposed to work.  Mostly it does, but it’s never been easy to separate the honest students from the opportunists, some heart-wrenchingly in need of a path—any path—to a better future. So, on any one day, American visa officers have to deal with sad cases who plead for exceptions as well as shady operators who play games with the truth and submit documents of dubious validity.  As for those documents, fraudulent or not, they bring further complexities.  Some of the more naive candidates may not know that their admission papers come from notorious—or newly established—diploma mills, which serve two ignoble purposes.  They allow American fraudsters to collect tuition money from clueless foreigners who will end up with worthless educational credentials.  They also allow knowing foreigners to masquerade as students in order to evade America’s otherwise forbiddingly strict immigration laws. 

In February I wrote about the diplomatic fallout from a raid on a relatively unknown diploma mill in California.  At the time, it was not known if all or indeed any of the students who were uncivilly apprehended and clamped into ankle bracelets had been aware of the true caliber of the “university” they planned to attend when they applied for admission, but all of them were treated like criminals by U.S. immigration authorities.  The reaction in India was shock and anger, and the clumsy handling of the incident by a public affairs officer at an American consulate in India added fuel to the fire.  The State Department’s immediate response to the Hershey affair was equally clumsy.

The Monstruous Pyramid of Contractors

Unfortunately, any attempt to understand and assign responsibility for the perversion of the J-1 visa process at the Hershey packing plant has been complicated by the multi-leveled sub-contracting network that blights too many U.S. government operations today. “Among the four companies with a role in the huge plant where the foreign students were employed, each one pointed to another as being the primary manager in charge of monitoring the students’ work....The Hershey Company said it had contracted day-to-day operations at the packing plant to Exel, a logistics company. Exel contracted with a local labor supplier, SHS Staffing Solutions, to provide temporary workers, including the J-1 students, for the summer months when work is at a peak....” 

The chocolate-maker, worried about its image, came up with a boilerplate PR response.  “The Hershey Company expects all its vendors, including Exel, to treat employees fairly and equitably,” said Kirk Saville, a spokesman, when the J-1 story broke.  And the State Department, no doubt, could express equally sanguine expectations re the performance of its J-1 contractors and sub-contractors. But, as a certain president is supposed to have said, trust isn’t enough.  You have to verify. When you give money away, you must ensure that the contractor has used the funding according to contract—and, my goodness, effectively. That means hiring auditors, lots of auditors, auditors with guts and no complicating connections.  It ain’t cheap.

All in all, when oversight and goodly profit margins are built in, not all that much is saved by contracting out—especially when a more or less normal amount of corruption is added in—and a predictably  minimal commitment to the mission itself is allowed for.  Let’s put the commitment part this way.  A State Department employee’s mission is to produce a good policy result for the U.S.  He or she gains no institutional reward  by doing a shoddy job.  However, since a contractor’s mission is only to make a profit, the quality of the job isn’t as important as his bottom line.

Cynical?  No, realistic.  Again and again in recent years we’ve witnessed the tragicomedy of foreign policy—developmental, diplomatic, military—contracted out.  The reports from U.S. missions in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq show how billions of U.S. dollars have been funneled through private sector organizations to very poor effect.  Sometimes, it seems, sub-contractors have found it profitable to funnel U.S. dollars to Taliban agents!  And so on.  The Hershey debacle is the tiniest peephole into this vast scandal made possibly by the ideological romance with privatization. Needless to say the ideologues in Washington do not want a proper auditing of this waste of tax payer dollars.

Cheap Labor Redux

Unfortunately, the Hershey incident also reminds us of the ruthless exploitation that has been a constant of American economic history.  The norm was established early on, with black slave labor and indentured white labor. By the nineteenth century the cheap labor that was needed had other origins: the Chinese who built our continent-spanning railroads; the Eastern and Southern Europeans who did the grunt work in factories and mines that made for the industrial revolution.  Toward the end of the twentieth century the people who were worked as hard as possible for as little as possible tended increasingly to be Latinos.  In America, anyone will do, so long as the price is right. 

And so, in the Hershey case, the J-1 visa process was co-opted for private profit, but the State Department was largely oblivious. Or was it?  I don’t know.  I only know that the Hershey situation, once it developed, was managed badly.  Surely, it could have been handled managed more adroitly—but only if there had been the kind of oversight that would have provided the data to respond convincingly.  In that case, State could have cited the huge numbers of happy participants involved in this wonderful program, then told a few well-chosen emotionally-satisfying success stories and finally promised, with convincing earnestness, to get to the bottom of this truly unfortunate aberration. The press reaction, I promise you, would have been far less scornful.   

 

The Unsettling Case of Sergei Magnitsky, Hermitage Capital and the Russian Mafia

By Patricia H. Kushlis

The last time I visited Moscow was three years after the Soviet Union collapsed.  It was an unsettling experience and one reason why I have yet to return.

Crime was rampant and one of our exchange professors – a young Russian speaking teacher – had just been assaulted on the Stari Arbat, one of Moscow’s most prestigious central shopping streets, by men in Russian army uniforms.  She had been physically attacked, robbed and her teeth smashed.  This had happened one early Friday evening in October during the height of an after work shopping excursion. 

This young woman and her friend and colleague - another American teacher who also spoke fluent Russian – blended in with the crowd in appearance and language.  Other Russians were horrified at what had happened and tried to help her. An Embassy officer and I interviewed her in her dormitory soon after.  The physical violence was painfully obvious.

A culture of seemingly senseless crime

This was not the first time I had experienced similar senseless street crime in that city.  When I was exchanges officer at the US Embassy nearly a decade earlier, three foreign women – two American exchangees and a Finnish nanny - had been physically accosted at different times and places during my two year tenure there by drunken Russians and a male student had reported seeing fresh blood smeared on the walls of his apartment building’s stairwell one weekend. 

Since the Soviets then tried to shield foreigners from the effects of the country’s rampant criminality and physical violence (bad press for a society that claimed to be the crimeless Communist Nirvana), I still wonder what occurred in less well guarded buildings – away from the possibility of prying foreign eyes.

In 1978, the caviar-packed-in-tuna-fish-cans-for-export scam broke.  This almost laughable crime against state property involved the highest levels of the Soviet government.  Essentially, profits from the sales of the expensive contents of the cans made their way into secret foreign bank accounts of high level Soviet officials.

That was then, this is now

Has anything changed subsequently since the Communist regime collapsed?

Certainly. Both for good and for bad.

Many more Russians are allowed to own private property.  Moscow is jammed with cars. Russians travel and live abroad.  They work for private companies formed after 1991.  They dress well and fashionably. And, more importantly they write about events such as the Magnitsky affair in print and post them on the Internet even though the country's major mass media messenger - television is thoroughly controlled by the Putin regime.

Beneath the surface, however, corruption and the violence that accompanies it thrive big time. Perhaps even bigger time than when the stakes were far smaller.  Now not just state property is the object of personal avarice – individual and corporate holdings have become subject to the dictum that operated during the Soviet Union - “what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine too – that is if I can get my hands on it – never mind how.”

The Law of the Jungle Still Applies

That’s what seems to have happened in terms of Sergei Magnitsky and the head of Tax Office Number 28, a woman named Olga Stepanova.  This former mid-level tax official who now works as an adviser to the head of Russia's new and powerful arms procurement agency clearly did not operate alone.  Investigative reporters have shown that she and her accomplices stole at least half a billion dollars, including or perhaps, in addition to, private property owned by individuals acquired by Stepanova by forging and issuing fraudulent deeds. 

Candidates for an Underground Railroad: Afghan Women

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Little by little U.S. policy makers are beginning to realize that a war with the Taliban can’t be won.  Why not?  Because it’s almost impossible to extricate or isolate “the Taliban” from the rest of Afghan society. 

Here, for instance, is a less than exhaustive list of how and why Afghan menfolk get involved with the Taliban:  Theology.  Ethnic loyalty.  Yearning for justice and order.  Traditional mores.  Excitement and adventure.  Disgust with corruption in Kabul.  Money. Self-protection.  Anti-American, anti-foreigner sentiments.  Fear, threats or duress. 

Unfortunately for American (or NATO) aspirations, no one incentive can counter or neutralize  each and all of these motivations.  As far as theology is concerned, there is a civil war going on within Sunni Islam.  Since this is not our battle, we can’t win it.  What's more, our influence is negligible—or worse: by confronting the Taliban, we create sympathy for beleaguered fellow Muslims even among those who actually loathe the Taliban.  The U.S. has also been unable to mitigate corruption within a central government functioning under a Constitution imposed by foreigners, whose fingerprints taint it beyond redemption, corrupt incumbents or not.  Traditional Afghans ask:  wouldn’t Sharia or simple Paktunwali be preferable?  Fear is more elemental.  Fear goes away when the Americans patrol, though relief is usually tinged with the shame of depending on non-Afghans for security. When the Americans move on to the next village, district or province, however, the guys with the guns are Taliban again.  Time to grow the beard back.

So it’s not surprising that a new Washington consensus is emerging: bring the Taliban in from the cold.  Get them to buy into the system.  More wishful thinking! If the Taliban leadership (or even lower level types) were sincerely amenable to joining in a government according to the present rules, why have they been fighting all these years?  Who honestly believes the Taliban, even in partial power, will respect women’s rights (defined according to Western standards) even if they promise to do so? Isn’t this the likely scenario: they’ll persuade their non-Taliban male colleagues to limit women’s opportunities, little by little, until it’s back into the box, ladies. 

The Taliban may take a while to regain the unchallenged upper hand in much of Afghanistan, and that’s the bright side for American forces.  With a little luck, the Yanks will be gone, the war lords will regroup and the re-Talibanization can be blamed on U.S.-favored Afghans who refused to use a proven model effectively. Whew!

The Airport Scene - Time to Change Those American Welcome Mats

In Tyler Brûlé’s September 18, 2010 Financial Times column entitled “Let’s play ‘Guess where I am?” the columnist wrote: “I’ve just come off an airliner (after an eight hour, 45 minute flight from Frankfurt) and it’s absolute pandemonium. There are gate agents screaming for transfer passengers, there are sniffer dogs, there are loads of immigration officers and there’s a general sense of disorganization.” His experience descended quickly downhill from there.

The answer to his “guess where I am” question - which he reveals later in his column - is Washington, DC’s Dulles Airport on a Sunday afternoon.

Akin to a “dumpy” airport in a “shambolic banana republic” or “police state”

Brûlé’s description of the immigration hall at Dulles was that of a “corral for citizens of the country” he’d “just arrived in and a much larger maze for everyone else.” “The citizen’s line (had) about 200 people waiting to be processed, while the other pen (had) more than 1,000 passengers waiting to be interrogated. . . He said that he studied “the scene . . .and reckoned” that he “was in for an hour’s wait. When passengers from a Jeddah flight” were “ushered to the front of the line,” he quickly revised his “timetable to 90 minutes.”

As he finally approached the inspector’s booth, a bevy of immigration officers closed up shop and waddled off duty in response to an all-points bulletin announced over the public address system that advised all officials who had not signed up for overtime to “leave their post.”

Dallas-Ft. Worth: Immigration the Weak Link

My experience at the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport on a Wednesday afternoon coming from an equally long, or longer flight that originated in London was nowhere as horrific as Brûlé’s. I didn’t have to deal with antiquated airline-to-terminal shuttles that were state of the art decades ago but have long past their prime; the American Airlines flight I was on landed on time and the airline’s baggage transfer system functioned far better than a near Brûlé-type disaster I remember in Denver four years ago when the pandemonium there – at every step of the way from airline ground crew incompetence to long backlog at immigration - resulted in my missing my, albeit short, connecting flight to Albuquerque.

Nevertheless, the immigration hall at Dallas-Ft Worth was the weak link in the chain on September 8. The line was far longer for non-Americans – at least double. Even those of us with the appropriate passports had to wait in a queue for twenty or more minutes before approaching the official’s booth although handicapped were exempted and wheeled to the front of the line. An INS employee was assigned to direct the able-bodied to booths to keep us, I guess, from rushing the special booth reserved for airline crew, diplomats and APEC where, guess what, no one was waiting.

America’s Anchor Babies: Can You Say ‘Bundles of Joy’?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

The rabid Right went into a tizzy over a report released a couple of weeks ago by the Pew Hispanic Center.  The anti-immigration claque went so far as to reinvigorate a movement to amend the Constitution.  They want to eliminate the “birthright citizenship” clause that resides, not by amendment, but in the very body of the U.S. Constitution.  As things now stand, and always have stood, in these United States, anyone born on U.S. territory is automatically an American citizen, even if the proud parents are visa-less. 

It seems that Conservatives, usually so eager promote “original intent” as the only allowable approach to interpreting the Constitution, respect the words of the nation’s founders only when their own prejudices are thereby unhindered.  Oh, but the founders never envisioned a porous border with Mexico, they say.  Indeed!  Should we laugh or cry at the inconsistency?

Still, there’s no doubt that some women who are pregnant, or planning to become pregnant, time their entry into the U.S., legally or illegally, to ensure that their children will be birthright Americans.  The understandable hope of such parents is that these offspring, aka anchor babies,  will ease their own naturalization process.  Sometimes it works.  Sometimes it doesn’t.  It never would, the alarmists promise, if the Constitution were amended.

From one absolutely incontrovertible point of view, the law’s the law.  No one has the right to break it.  So illegals are illegal.  Another point of view suggests leniency.  American immigration law is an unworkable crazy quilt that in no way covers the U.S. need for labor.  The flow of illegal workers results as much from incessant U.S. demand as from largely Latino opportunism, an inevitable consequence of well known economic laws.  Finally, there are those who insist that, the law being what it is, people caught up in the deportation process should be treated with compassion, respect and due process.

Let’s leave this debate for a moment, and look at the aspects of the Pew report that terrify the conservatives who fear some fatal dilution of American culture, whatever precisely that is.    Here are some excerpts:        

Unauthorized immigrants comprise slightly more than 4% of the adult population of the U.S., but because they are relatively young and have high birthrates, their children make up a much larger share of both the newborn population (8%) and the child population (7% of those younger than age 18) in this country....

The new Pew Hispanic analysis finds that nearly four-in-five (79%) of the 5.1 million children (younger than age 18) of unauthorized immigrants were born in this country and therefore are U.S. citizens....
   
 The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1868, grants an automatic right to citizenship to anyone born in the U.S....

In 2009, immigrants—be they legal or unauthorized—comprised 12.8% of the total population of the United States and 15.7% of the total adult population. However, because of their youthful age structure and higher fertility rates, immigrant adults are more likely than native-born adults to be parents of children younger than 18. As a result, they are the parents of 23% of all children in this country ages 17 and younger....

In addition, immigrant adults tend to have higher rates of fertility than do native-born adults. As of 2008, the total fertility rate among females ages 15 to 44 was 2.0 for the native born and 2.7 for immigrants. 

 Please notice that last sentence.  A fertility rate of 2.0 is bare replacement, which means the U.S. is teetering dangerously on the edge of population decline without those immigrant births.  Perhaps baby bonuses would help.  Perhaps universal day care for working mothers would help.  Perhaps subsidizing the cost of a college education would help.  Ironically, all such interventions would require government action.  How amusing it would be should Conservatives suddenly espouse them to protect the nation from Hispanic babies.

Meanwhile, Russia is shrinking.  Europe is shrinking.  Japan is shrinking.  When the population replacement rate goes into negative numbers, the prognosis for a country’s future is grim: not enough maturing workers to sustain the economy or support a population skewing toward elders.  In short, things go out of whack.  Too few babies results in too few adults to support and care for a disproportionate number of seniors.  When the life cycle contract becomes disfunctional, the results aren’t just financial.  The social fabric is torn.  Things get ugly domestically.

And, of course, national power declines, which, you’d think, would give the Conservatives pause re this issue.  A puny population can’t support a huge military establishment, to say nothing of the R & D required to maintain the budget-breaking, cutting edge equipment a modern army fights with.

Because of the dismal phenomenon known as the Great Recession, the U.S. birth rate has declined these last couple of years, even among Hispanics, according to demographers.  Two years don’t make a trend. It’s still possible to say that the U.S., so far, has escaped the worst of the  population shrinkage that afflicts most industrialized countries.

But—remember this!—we've escaped only because we have so many young immigrants presenting us with their beautiful babies.  So down your tequila, munch your tacos, spoon up your chili and celebrate.  These anchor babies that terrify American nativists are really bundles of joy for America.  We need them, every one of them. 

The 2007 Passport Fiasco, Maura Harty and State’s 2009 Presidential Rank Awards

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Updated September 25, 2010

What does it take to qualify for a Presidential Rank Award? Serve in a war zone perhaps, or, maybe, preside over the worst US passport issuance debacle in recent history?

The State Department announced its prestigious Foreign Service 2009 Presidential Rank Award winners in the July/August 2010 State Magazine. Four of the Foreign Service recipients had previously held top positions in either Iraq or Afghanistan and one has just returned to Iraq as Ambassador. Given the tenor and tone of US foreign policy since 9/11 these awards make sense.

Other winners, however, include Nancy Powell, State’s own Director General of the Foreign Service; Philippe Lussier, head of the Office of Resource Management; and Foreign Service Institute Director Ruth Whiteside – in essence members of State’s own management team also rewarding, ahem, who else? Themselves?

The strange case of Maura Harty

Even more strangely, however, one of the other Presidential Rank Award winners had retired – or perhaps been retired kicking and screaming – from the Foreign Service on February 29, 2008 nearly two years before the most recent period covered by the award. Her last overseas assignment which had ended in 1999 was as Ambassador to Paraguay – neither an onerous war zone nor hazardous duty at the time.

Presidential Rank Awards are “for exceptional service over an extended period.” The recipients are “nominated by their agency heads, evaluated by citizen panels and designated by the President” according to the write-up in State Magazine. So it’s difficult to understand how Maura Harty, the recipient in question, could have possibly qualified for an award that was supposed to cover more than a year when she was no longer employed by the US government. Not only had she already left the Department well before years before but her final assignment as Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs (2002-8) had been fraught with scandal.

(Update) As it turns out, the March 2010 State Department Report on Integrity and Fairness in the Foreign Service stated that "Initial recommendations for presidential awards (based on the candidate's performance over the previous 3 year period) are made by the senior promotion boards." (see page 14 of the report)  So how could Ms. Harty have even been eligible for the award when she left the service in early 2008?   

Tariq Ramadan: Where’s the Beef? Here’s my Beef

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

 I have beheld the Beast-that-had-to-be-barred-from-the-U.S. I am still alive.  In fact, having submitted myself to Tariq Ramadan as the featured speaker at lunch during last week’s all-day conference under the auspices of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, my primary reaction was this:  I bin had!   This famed (or notorious) Muslim theologian who has for so long been denied a U.S. visa, this professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford, this supposedly great thinker, insulted an eagerly attentive audience with disorganized repetitive remarks that boiled down to this: “Muslims of America, use your citizenship rights to pursue your interests and values vis-à-vis domestic and international issues. Be involved.  Be serious.  Stress schooling and education.  Teach ordinary Americans about Islam.” 

 Well, gee!  That’s what all Americans are expected to do.  In fact, that’s precisely what I told my friends at the Saudi-funded World Muslim Congress in Karachi some years ago.  America’s Muslim citizens enjoy the same rights and opportunities for participation in American politics as anyone else; to have an impact they need to exercise those rights effectively.  Etc.  None of the highly educated Muslims in the banquet room at the CSID luncheon needed Tariq Ramadan to travel thousands of miles and brave the U.S. immigration authorities to tell them this. And not all of us, by far, were Muslims.  We were being ignored altogether.

And so, as I listened to Ramadan, I oscillated among three reactions to his apparently simplistic remarks.  His presentation was (1) contemptuously dismissive of the audience, (2) super-cautiously innocuous to avoid offending immigration authorities or (3) duplicitously disingenuous and thus in need of some careful code word  interpretation.

The first was entirely possible.  There was a certain sneering superiority and hauteur to his manner.  It was hard not to conclude that this was a man with little interest in making friends. 

The second was also all too sadly plausible.  We all know that the U.S. has got culpably timid about free speech, and Tariq Ramadan is not the only intellectual who has been denied a visa in recent years.  Why upset the censors the minute you arrive, especially if you have some serious work to do?  Ramadan’s snarky comments about this state of affairs were right on.

The third hypothesis offered itself only as the boredom and dissatisfaction settled in.  Why is he bothering with such apparently banal stuff?  What’s he really saying?  So hey!  I’m not so dumb.  How about this: use the American system to undermine the American system.  This isn’t so hard, actually.  The U.S. doesn’t always live up to its ideals.

Thus, in speaking of values that must be reinforced, Ramadan touched on some soft issues that all Americans need to pay some attention to, especially in these days of Tea Party nativism.  Racism persists in America.  So does a pernicious class system.  These barriers to equality in the U.S. vitiate our own democratic values and they are also contrary to the bedrock values of Islam, which stresses the equality of all believers.  Yet, even as we criticize the U.S., we also need to be aware that Muslim majority countries seldom perfectly exemplify the core values of Islam.  Take a look at the social and economic system in Pakistan, for example.

The tenacious issue of Israel and Palestine came up briefly during the painfully truncated question period.  Ramadan’s response is worth paying attention to.  He suggested that the fruitless efforts of the U.S. might be superceded by another country’s mediation.  In short, China might play a role. What interests me here isn’t the non-existent immediate potential for a Chinese intervention, but the very idea of it.  The world is changing.

A few parting words: many Americans of good will have been eager to learn from Traiq Ramadan’s reputed profundity vis-à-vis Islam.  They clamored for the issuance of his visa.  How odd that he seems disinclined to participate whole-heartedly in the educational project he urged so exhaustively on fellow Muslims last week.

    

Back to the Future -Revisiting the US, Russian dialog

By Patricia H. Kushlis

I spent Wednesday afternoon at the Wilson Center at “Dialogue, Defense and Media Messaging: US-Russian Citizen Diplomacy Past and Present,“ a Kennan Institute program devoted to US-Russian relations from the standpoint of the people, the media, the desire to avoid nuclear holocaust and the signing of the New START. A substantial portion of the two and one-half hour event consisted of retelling and revisiting the past, a past that is, that began in 1985 with an all but forgotten “Citizen’s Summit” called a “Spacebridge.

This electronic bridge linked, by satellite, audiences in Seattle and what was then Leningrad and consisted of two separate Q and A sessions jointly moderated by larger than life American journalist and former NBC television host Phil Donahue and Soviet counterpart Vladimir Pozner.

Donahue was at the Wilson Center event on Wednesday and in excellent form. Pozner was supposed to have been there too – but the Icelandic volcanic eruption not the long disappeared Iron Curtain– kept him home in Moscow. To compensate, he participated live on camera – in a kind of contemporary give and take version of the Spacebridge.

Much as it would have been nice to have seen him there in the flesh, the Skype-kind of dialogue did work – and especially so for a back-to-the-future event rife with historical comparison, archival clips and an exploration of its meaning in context of the times. The event itself was conceived of by Ellen Messinger, producer of Global Pulse at Link TV in San Francisco. The timing could not have been better.

The almost forgotten Spacebridge

To tell the truth, I had almost forgotten about the Spacebridge – an early form of US-Soviet citizen-to-citizen diplomacy brought about through the very latest technology then available. It signaled the beginning of the Gorbachev era policy of glasnost (transparency) in Soviet politics and occurred before another kind of person-to-person bridge - the Reagan-Gorbachev Summit in Reykjavik in September 1986. In fact, according to Pozner, had Gorbachev not personally sanctioned the Spacebridge, it would not have happened and certainly would never have aired on Soviet national television as it did.

The Spacebridge - although dropped by NBC because it did not command the Neilsen ratings needed to keep it on the air (Donahue wryly characterized American interest in their Soviet counterparts as tepid) - nevertheless performed a useful function in breaking down national stereotypes, misperceptions and lowering heated Cold War era barriers between the two countries and peoples.