WhirledView

Too Many Old People?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Once upon a time ever-increasing longevity was the mark of a successful advanced industrial society.  Now, according to the latest manifestation of conventional wisdom, it’s the bane.  Countries are aging—and not gracefully, it’s said. You can have too much of a good thing, including old people, it seems.

Mass (Media) Hysteria

There's been a blizzard of demographic scare-mongering: I can’t call it mass hysteria, exactly, because it occurs in elite publications, too.  Alarmist copy cat articles are popping up everywhere. Here are some which have appeared in the last few weeks:

“The Old World,” in the  New York Times Magazine for October 17, 2010
“The Graying of the Planet” in Foreign Policy for November 2010.
“The Demographic Future” in Foreign Affairs for November-December 2010..

And the pictures!  Especially the one that's becomethe heart-tugging  cliché: a row of very old people hunched on a bench, apparently staring at nothing.  I look at the pictures and muse, “Why aren’t they doing something?  If they can walk to the park, surely they can be usefully engaged.  They can absorb themselves in something interesting.”   

They could, probably, unless they’ve been convinced of their uselessness.  According to current conventional wisdom, people over 65 are hopeless deadwood.  They're become human shells with nothing but dying on the agenda, and people, whether ghetto kids or octogenarians, tend to perform to expectations, high or low.

Branding the Old

Actually, huge numbers of officially old and very old people are performing useful tasks, well paid, ill paid and unpaid.   With a little encouragement, others could join them.  More about that later.  Let’s stray first into the matter of “branding” old age. Let’s see how images have evolved

A long time ago age was synonymous with wisdom.  Who but the elders had enough memory and experience to guide the tribe?  Then the alphabet arrived.  And writing.  And books.  Today the human memory itself is pretty much passé.  We have enormous libraries.  We have giga-plus bytes of computer memory.  We also have the youth culture and the senior moment, which stereotypes the not-so-young brain as an unreliable filing and retrieval system.   Misplace the car keys?  Stumble over a name?  Time to hand over the power, the status, the salary to impatient and ambitious younger folk.  Time to enter the allegedly golden years of leisure, which is to say, to be warehoused first in segregated retirement communities and ultimately to be stuffed into poorly-staffed old age homes.  Either way: out of sight, out of mind. 

Remember when women were “put on a pedestal” to keep them from noticing their actual second-class citizenship?  The equivalent  for the elderly was the invention of "senior citizen" status for those granted the privilege of enjoying some well-earned "golden" years of palm-shaded golf and responsibility free grand parenthood.  The image was enticing, alluring, hard to resist: smiling white-haired couples (love is eternal) framed by an attractive background.  The image was soothing to the displaced and soothing to the displacers, although it was really only a glitzier version of the marooned-on-a-bench life.

Tossing Mama from the Train

Unfortunately, the house by the golf course isn’t looking so possible anymore. The days of the defined pension are just about over, increasingly replaced by defined contributions and unpredictable payback. To translate: you give; we get, take our cut and promise nothing in the way of returns or protection of capital.  What a scam!  The financial "advisor" is protected from market risk, but the retiree isn't. 

Thanksgiving 2010: Farm in Foreclosure

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

 

 

A Whistle Blown at State, Finally

 By Patricia H. Kushlis

The November 18, 2010 Government Executive carried a story by Robert Brodsky entitled “Watchdog calls for removal of State Department’s interim IG.” The report is based on a call by POGO (Project on Government Oversight), a well respected government oversight group, for Harry Geisel, the State Department’s Interim Inspector General to resign and for the Department to appoint a truly independent IG – vetted by the White House and Congress - to take his place. This is no small stuff. Moreover, State is now the single agency in the Executive branch with neither an independent IG nor someone waiting confirmation on the Hill.

With the Republicans soon to be the majority party in the House of Representatives, Hillary and the rest of the State Department will need to take seriously charges leveled by organizations like POGO and deal with those problems preferably before, what seems likely, the inevitable grillings begin on the Hill.

POGO is accusing Geisel - with internal e-mail evidence to back up its charges - of lacking impartiality in IG investigations - precisely the position an IG, or his or her office, should not be in and a major reason why career Foreign Service Officers, retired or otherwise, are prohibited from occupying the position of permanent IG. The relationship is all too cozy and vulnerable to undue insider influence.

POGO's letter to President Obama

Here’s what Danielle Brian, POGO’s Executive Director wrote in a letter to President Obama that was also distributed, not just to the State Department where it would all too likely be buried or conveniently lost, but to selected members of the Senate and House as well as the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan:

“This e-mail is profoundly troubling because Geisel appears to be informing management that he is on their side and that his office needs to conduct just enough oversight to placate Congress and prevent a legitimately aggressive and independent IG from taking his place.”

Just to make sure POGO’s report got read, the organization also sent it to Government Executive.com whose reporter then wrote the story - complete with links to relevant documents – and published it on the Internet.

For FYs 2001 through 2006, State’s budgets increased from $13.7 billion to about $24 billion, an increase of almost 75 percent (55 percent in constant dollars adjusted for inflation) to manage its expanding role in the “global war on terror.” State’s budget and personnel requests have substantially risen in the four years since then as its tasks and responsibilities have continued to increase.

Yet, according to the GAO in its October 31, 2007 report, the budget for the OIG only rose from $29 to $31 million (adjusted for inflation a decrease of 6%) In 2006, OIG staff of the 318 authorized only 182 actual or about 57% of the authorized level and about 20% less than in 2001.

WhirledView Long Been Questioning the OIG’s Impartiality - Diplopundit

Diplopundit is right when he stated that I have long been blogging about Human Resources issues at State and questioned the impartiality of the OIG well before the POGO report became public. Ironically, I had just updated my October post on that very topic when the Geisel story broke in Government Executive. Diplopundit is also correct when he links the two.

Professor P. Lal: He da Man

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

        That is Fullness
               This is Fullness
                      From Fullness comes Fullness
                             Take Fullness from Fullness
                                    What remains is Fullness
                                           Om  Shantih  Shantih  Shantih
                                                        The Paramahamsa Upanisad

This has been hard to write, not only because I am sad, but because sloppy thinking and writing won’t do for  P. Lal.

I planned to visit him, in Kolkata, this coming January or February.  For months I’ve been looking forward to another session of wide-ranging, exhilarating conversation, some heavy literary and philosophical stuff, perhaps, but also the elation of minds meeting in surprising ways, all to be heightened (I hoped) by cups of Darjeeling  and squares of cloud-light shondesh from the kitchen of Shyamasree, his wife, whose family had been intimately connected with the Shanti Niketan of  Rabindranath Tagore. 

That wordfest won’t happen now.  P. Lal died on November 3, 2010.

Purushottama Lal (aka Profsky) was, oddly enough, the only mentor this American writer ever had.  He hounded me relentlessly until I let him publish my first collection of poetry.  The Deadmen and Other Poems appeared in 2002 with the Writers Workshop imprint, gold-embossed, handloom-bound, in a rainbow of colors.  Three books have followed that one.  Would any of my poetry gone public without P. Lal’s hectoring?  I don’t know.  But this is the way publishing began for me, and I am grateful.

We met face to face, a qualification whose importance will emerge shortly, while I was Branch Public Affairs Officer at the American Consulate in Calcutta/Kolkata in 1998.  He had committed himself to translating (or transcreating, as he immodestly put it) the Mahabharata of Vyasa and, tranche by tranche, he was reading his beautifully—indeed lovingly Englished lines to a small collection of enthusiasts who gathered at 11:00 am on Sunday mornings. Having taken a graduate course in Sanskrit literature at the University of Chicago, I’d nibbled at some tone-deaf Victorian and 20th century translations, so I was eager to know if a readable version might finally be in the works.  Off I went, one Sunday, and established myself, as discreetly as I could for the only non-Indian in the room, as far toward the rear as empty seats permitted.

Thus I found a refuge from the pain that went along with the State Department’s gleeful absorption of the U.S. Information Agency.  U.S.I.A.’s Indian employees were being squeezed mercilessly. Collegial operations were being replaced by rigid hierarchies.  Rapid response was giving way to bureaucratic sclerosis.  My efforts to influence the process were fruitless.  But Profsky knew nothing of this.  I left it all behind on Sunday mornings. 

We Love You, Barry, But---: Understanding Indonesia-Speak

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Somewhere recently I read an piece by a U.S.-based analyst that I can’t, however ingeniously I go googling, find now.  It said something condescending like this:  with the U.S. and China competing for influence in Indonesia, Indonesian leaders are going to have to pick up some extraordinary diplomatic skills in order to play the one off against the other successfully.

That Indonesia will have to string its Chinese and American suitors along in coming years I don’t doubt.  But, having been fluent in Indonesian and having  worked for three years in Jakarta and Medan, pursuing what is now called public diplomacy, I really did have to laugh at the suggestion that Indonesians need instruction in the subtleties of diplomatic interaction.   Clearly the (happily unnamed) writer knows little of what you will (I hope) pardon me for referring to as the “Indonesian mind” in any of its many ethnic variants. 

As an immediate corrective to his (it was a he) misperception, I would suggest a visit to a museum with a collection of daggers from the archipelago.  A kris can be an artwork of sublime beauty.  Its ways of killing have also been highly developed. Just a glance at those exquisite wavy or serrated blades, which may or may not have been anointed with poison,  sends shivers down my spine.   Sitting in on conversations between Indonesians, I often felt I was in the presence of some very sophisticated verbal kris-work.

Coincidentally, shortly after encountering the above cited bit of pseudo-analysis, I stumbled upon a lovely demonstration of Indonesia’s undoubted ability to understand and cope with the world as it is.  The quote comes from a Jakarta Post column by veteran lawyer/politician/educator  Jusuf Wanandi.  He's musing over Beijing’s  inept handing of economic issues sure to be discussed at the upcoming G20 meeting. 

The Chinese might have a point to resist US pressures, such as to revaluate the yuan to reduce imbalances. They could do it with finesse and nuance.
   
This is at least expected from a big power that is self-confident and knows what it wants. One can always cooperate to find solutions, especially if one is in a better and more powerful position.
   
In the end, while China has elevated its stature globally, it is still limited in the economic realm. I assume Deng Xiaoping’s advice from some decades ago is still valid: Don’t have hubris, don’t be over-confident —  and play your strengths with care.

  
Similar commentary on the Obama visit exemplifies the sort of editorial writing that also flourished in the Suharto era when I was reading newspapers in Indonesian as well as English.   The style is still in style, it seems.  To see what I mean,  I recommend reading from start to finish a "welcome Barry" editorial.  While appearing to be  gratified by Obama’s bahasa-studded flattery (Obama also laid it on too icky thick in India, with Hindi, to my mind), the Post gets in some very heavy criticism, alternating ever so delicately between the pros and sorta cons, making points but refraining from anything so crude as a death blow. 

When I was working in Indonesia, often preparing media reaction cables (no email then), I came to enjoy this style that frustrated many of my colleagues.  "Indonesian journalists should learn to get to the point," they complained.  To that there were three responses.  For one thing, it was dangerous to be too overt when it came to criticizing the Suharto regime.  Writing nakedly, you could end up dead; sinuous indirection would allow you to speak your mind and survive.  Equally important, was the matter of language itself.  Bahasa Indonesia has two passive voices and only one active voice. Finally, there’s etiquette.  Even among the supposedly unrefined Bataks of North Sumatra, you couldn't just blurt things out.  So Indonesian editorializing wasn’t bad writing.  It’s just wasn’t American writing.  And it still isn’t.

That being the case, let me translate the Post’s conveniently Englished, Obama-centered editorials and columns into Americanese.  This is what I get:

1.  It was deeply insulting for Obama to cancel his previous visits.  We Indonesians haven’t quite forgiven him, but we did appreciate his all-out homecoming performance this time.  A caution, however.  If he’s serious about how important we are to the U.S. (we’ve heard this before), he won’t cancel the trip he’s promised for next year.  Still, maximal expectations have to be tempered by realism (another under-appreciated Indonesian trait).  As Abdillah Toha put it in another Post column, “Despite many problems that point to the declining power of the US, America is still a superpower to be reckoned with.  Thus America is more important to Indonesia than vice versa.”

2.  America and Indonesia do indeed share certain constitutionally-enshrined political values (unity in diversity, religious tolerance, etc.), which should make it relatively easy to cooperate, and we  love it when you Americans mention this.  However, this apparent affinity can degenerate into words, words, words.

3.  Yes, we Indonesians are pretty tolerant, but most of us are Muslims, and we think the U..S. condones intolerable behavior by Israel.  To make this brotherhood business work, we need to see  serious changes in America’s policy in the Middle East   Israeli settlements need to be stopped.  Israel’s disproportionate response to Palestinian provocation is also unacceptable. We didn’t hear anything encouraging during Obama’s visit.

4.  Nevertheless,  since we Indonesians are indeed realistic and pragmatic and because China is getting too damned peremptory,  Indonesia is willing to cut the U.S. a little slack. 

As Wanandi put it: “For Indonesia, a US presence in East Asia is important so Indonesia has the option to implementing [sic] a free and independent foreign policy.  It is also important for other small and middle-sized countries to pursue their national interests in East Asia.”

Jakarta Post items worth reading:   

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2010/11/11/editorial-until-next-year-barry.html

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2010/11/09/obama-between-hope-and-reality.html

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2010/11/11/obama-leaves-ri-people-breathe-sigh-relief.htm

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2010/11/09/%E2%80%98barry%E2%80%99-return-home.html

For less on style and more on policy check this out:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/LK16Ae01.html

Where Cold War Remnants Live On: the New, Old Russia

By Patricia H. Kushlis

“Whatever organization we try to create, it always ends up looking like the Communist Party.” Viktor Chernomyrdin, (April 9, 1938-November 3, 2010).

You’d think that the detritus from the Cold War would have long been relegated to the pages of John Le Carré spy novels and Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Series. Yet a dysfunctional Russia that had once been the head and heart of the Soviet Union still seems to struggle on and not just between the pages of those and other popular thrillers.

The revelations in the Moscow newspaper Kommersant about the Russian spy chief who defected to the US last June just before the round-up of ten of his sleeper agents who had been hibernating - for the most part - on leafy-green streets in American suburbia indicates otherwise. Why Russian intelligence chose to leak this embarrassing story through its own print media last week is a question in search of an answer.

What were the Russian leakers' motives? And why now?

Was the goal to embarrass President Medvedev when he met President Obama at the G-20 in Seoul in light of the upcoming Russian Presidential elections? I doubt it, but this was suggested as one or several possible motives in an article in the November 12 Financial Times.

Was it to warn Colonel Shcherbakov, the defector, and perhaps as significantly other members of the Russian Federation’s spy apparatus of the deadly consequences that could await them if they turned coat and then fled into the enemy’s arms despite the ending of the Cold War nearly twenty years ago? How many other Russian intelligence officers have children in the West who, unlike ex-spy Anna Chapman, apparently prefer it to Moscow? Or were the threats printed in Kommersant against Shcherbakov's life by his former employer hyperbole?

Obama’s Asia Visit: The Yogi and the Dragon

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Isn’t it interesting?  While President Obama was in India, the C-word was hardly ever mentioned. C for China.  Sometimes important matters are broached by indirection.

American media ridiculed India for the messy run up to the Commonwealth games, which turned out to be just fine.  Yet, although the grand finale was everything Bollywood fans could have hoped for and the Indians won scads of glittery medals, the U.S. press neglected to headline either.  Such justice would have complicated the Indian image as incompetent  foil to China’s much-lauded staging of the Beijing olympics.  But! But! But! Wasn’t there something roboticly authoritarian about the Beijing operation? 

Like North Korea, that other supreme organizer of colorful mass spectacles, China struts arrogantly on the international stage, and the deal for getting filthy rich in China is: work like a dog and be quiet as a mouse.  In myth the dragon jealously guards his horde of gold.  The bigger the pile, the fiercer his fiery breath.   Under an almost slavish admiration for China’s economic growth spurt, the U.S. is fearful.  China is getting too big, too rich, too ambitious, too demanding.  (Hubris anyone?)

Unsurprisingly, therefore, as political analysts considered President Obama’s visit to India  en route to the G20 meeting in Seoul, they focused on the dramatic increase in Washington’s military cooperation with Delhi in recent years. With China on a South China Sea rock-collecting jag and also constructing a system of deep water ports in Burma/Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, an India-strangling noose widely known as “the ring of pearls,” the U.S. has rekindled its long-lagging enthusiasm for A.S.E.A.N.  Obama would like  India to become a strong A.S.E.A.N. collaborator, thus creating a ring of resistance to China’s hegemonic aspirations, which also extend to territories along the northern border with India.  The dragon has halitosis and a very long, well-armored tail, but the U.S. wants unimpeded access to Asian waters. 

India has another jealous and bellicose neighbor, whose reaction to Obama’s visit next door was bound to be mixed at best.  Pakistan (long a close ally of China) has already protested  Obama’s pledge, during his  Lok Sabha remarks in Delhi, to make the case for India as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. No doubt Pakistan is also unhappy about the agreement to sell ten C-17 cargo planes to India (thereby, says the election-bashed Obama administration, creating some 22,000 American jobs), to say nothing of Obama’s praise for the “major development assistance from India has improved the lives of the Afghan people.”  Pakistan would prefer to have Obama’s backing in cleansing Afghanistan of the Indian consulates that have sprouted up over the past few years, although non-Talib Afghans welcome a countervailing presence in what Pakistan considers to be its purely private sphere of influence.  As regards terrorism, Obama also spoke boldly in ways that couldn’t please Islamabad, asserting that the U.S. will “continue to insist to Pakistan’s leaders that terrorist safe havens within their borders are unacceptable, and that terrorists behind the Mumbai attacks must be brought to justice.”  Finally, far from excoriating India for its stance as a non-signatory to the existing non-proliferation treaty, Obama plans to build on his predecessor’s initiatives in the civilian nuclear arena:

As a result of this visit, we are already beginning to implement our civil nuclear  agreement.... We’re expanding our efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation.  In keeping with its commitment at our Nuclear Security Summit, India will build a new center of excellence for nuclear energy and security to help reach our goal of securing vulnerable nuclear materials in four years.

Personally, I’d like a little more detail re the nuclear business, but even this hint should be enough to set Pakistan’s teeth on edge.  Any American cooperation with India is viewed as betrayal in Islamabad.

Whatever the details, it’s not surprising that national security concerns (plus G20-related trade and investment issues) should play a major or even a primary role in discussions between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.  Also extremely (and perhaps more) interesting is the starring role played by promoting and applying knowledge in their joint vision of the evolving U.S.-Indian relationship. On the applied side there are pledges to institutionalize mutuality in agriculture, medicine, nuclear security, clean energy and ultra high tech applications for economic growth and security. 

Also in the works: more educational cooperation, including the Singh-Obama 21st Century Knowledge Initiative and a summit to forge new collaborations in higher education, all this at a time when the Republicans, including the American Enterprise Institute, clamor to eliminate educational and other international exchanges from the American diplomatic quiver. To help balance the budget, the Republicans say.  As if exchanges cost more than a drop in the fiscal bucket.  As if American higher education and imported Indian brains hadn’t powered much of America’s success in the past few decades. As if, without a strong educational foundation, including knowledge and experience of the world beyond the American heartland, military and economic ambitions can fare well.  

This is where the yogi comes in.

Imagine the dragon as Winston Churchill, at the height of British colonial power, puffing on his cigar. Suddenly he had to deal with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi aka the Mahatma, who strolled into a meeting in London, not in bowler and well-blacked lace-up shoes, with umbrella, but dhoti-clad,  barefoot, bareheaded and practically naked: the yogi representing the soul and/or people power of India.  What a hoot!  Churchill despised him.  He couldn’t believe that this quirky little guy in a diaper was a brilliant strategist, an impishly clever tactician and a leader who could inspire urban sophisticates as well as villagers among his countrymen.

But Gandhi won. The English colonial period in India was over.


 



 

Hello Vietnam – When Trade and Security Trump Ideology

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Why did the US fight the Vietnam War?

According to Jon Boudreau in a report in The San Jose Mercury News on October 29, Intel has just inaugurated its largest semiconductor manufacturing plant in an outlying District of Ho Chi Minh City. This huge $5 billion plant - when fully operational - will double the company’s worldwide testing and assembly capacities. It will immediately begin to produce microchips for mobile devices and laptops. Down the road, Intel’s Ho Chi Minh City plant will also be able to produce microprocessors.

Vietnam’s downside? educational infrastructure and corruption

Lack of top quality educational institutions and a trained workforce vie with the draw of cheap labor and a Communist government that seeks foreign investment – but apparently preferably not from its neighbor to the north.

Vietnam is poor. Its per capita income is $2,900 – about half of China’s – so wages are lower but its population is also known to be smart, young, hard working and surprisingly pro-American.

The country is also among the most corrupt in the world. It ranks 120 out of 180 countries on the 2010 Transparency International corruption index – a slight improvement over 2009. It is also controlled by the Communist Party – a stodgy authoritarian organization (helps explain the corruption ranking) but also one that has finally embraced the post- Mao Chinese Communist Party’s economic model. This model is best described in Deng Xiaoping’s words as he rescued China from Mao Zedong’s disastrous economic, social and cultural experiments and launched China on the economic modernization path it continues today: “It does not matter,” said Deng then, if a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.”