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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.   

 

Moscow Not Tripoli: A Remembrance of Things Past not Present

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Twenty years ago this past week, the 70 year old Communist rule over the once mighty Russian Empire ended.  A small group of apparachiki-cum-coup-leaders were turned out by Russians in Moscow and Leningrad taking to the streets and squares in response to a failing coup.  

The dissolution of that enormous empire had been in the works for months, or more accurately, years.  It didn’t happen overnight and it didn’t happen in response to a foreign invasion or a Soviet military loss – although the drain of the decade old war in Afghanistan and a militarized economy were contributing factors.

The regime’s collapse happened internally in response to a failed system imposed from the top on an empire of restless and resentful minorities some of whom had seen far better days before their forcible incorporation into a sprawling empire that stretched across Asia from Europe to America and the Artic to the Black Sea. 

The dissolution was messy - seemingly chaotic and unpredictable. 

It occurred in overlapping maze-like stages - not neat quantifiable steps.   And it didn’t happen with help or even official US and other governments’ encouragement despite Ronald Reagan’s seemingly meaningless 1982 proclamation of Baltic Freedom Day nearly a decade earlier.

On August 1, 1991 less than three weeks before the end, President George H.W. Bush had delivered his infamous “Chicken Kiev” speech extolling Ukrainians to stay with the Union. High level US administration officials were still so wedded to support for then President Mikhail Gorbachev, the first Soviet leader they could actually talk with in years – if ever, that they continuously cautioned Baltic independence leaders against rocking the then leaky boat adrift on turbulent seas. 

Unfortunately, most twentieth anniversary commemorations of the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union disappeared from American view before they had hardly begun. 

They were overtaken by the rebirth of the Arab spring with the Libyan rebel forces entering Tripoli after weeks of seeming stalemate in the desert, the made for television gun battles with Gaddafi loyalists, and the disappearance of the country’s former colorful leader and his less colorful sons who, at this writing, are apparently holed up somewhere and last heard from in a futile Gaddafi radio broadcast calling on his loyalists to fight to the finish.

Back to Moscow

Nevertheless, as Fred Weir wrote in the Christian Science Monitor on August 22, 2011 “Why Half the Russians Regret the August 1991 Coup,” its aftermath was far from unanimously acclaimed.  Yes, the Yeltsin government made mistakes – including one colossal one which Weir only partially explains.  Yeltsin kept the 1978 Russian Republic Constitution in place.  This meant that he and his administration faced old Communists and their allies who still controlled the Russian parliament until – that is - Yeltsin used the military to remove them.  Had a new Constitution been written and implemented at the outset of the Russian Federation, the 1993 shoot-out at the Russian White House might never have occurred.  But then, isn't hindsight always better than foresight?

Food shortages, high prices for basic commodities, fire sales of Soviet assets, traumatic loss of empire and equally important, the unraveling of an economic and social platform or social contract that underpinned a low, but seemingly secure, cradle-to-grave standard of living for all were part and parcel that fueled popular disenchantment with what followed the August coup and remains today.   Several of these complaints - especially the food problem and the fraying of the social services support network - were already evident when I visited Leningrad (not yet St. Petersburg) in 1990.

It's not all bad:  A mixed result

But what people forget is that the Russian Federation is, in fact, far different from the Soviet Union just a quarter century ago.  As Weir also points out, quoting Alexei Makarkin, deputy director of the Center for Political Technologies: “it may sounds banal, but people today can travel freely abroad, read whatever they want, listen to the music they like, and enjoy a lot of things that would have been banned in the USSR. People today just don’t understand it all might have been otherwise.”   

This, I might add, includes private property ownership as well as the mushrooming of schools and universities unheard of before 1991 despite the all too rampant corruption and dubious scams that emerged like mushrooms after a rain once the Soviet edifice was no longer and that still plague Russia.

There were other major changes as well:  some good; others bad.

Shedding many disgruntled minority nationalities was, in my view, among the most positive - for both Russians and the minorities.  In fact, one has to wonder why other ethnically geographically compact minorities weren’t also allowed – if not encouraged - to leave – especially those in regions with external borders – old or new.       

The European Soviet Republics – including Russia - had paid a high economic price so the Soviet government could maintain its Central Asian empire.  Wealth from Russia and the Baltics, for example, was routinely transferred to Central Asia to support the regime there.  If I remember correctly, only the Central Asians were not clamoring at the gates upon the Union’s dissolution.  No wonder why. 

But what did Russia get from them in return?

These Republics did not exactly contain beach front property or Silicon Valley intellectual capital.  True, Kazakhstan was and is oil rich but then Russia itself does not lack for petroleum reserves.   And the Russian Empire’s version of Manifest Destiny was not destroyed – this enormous country still stretches from the Baltic to the Pacific across 9 time zones and 1/8th of the earth’s inhabited territory.  It maintains a nuclear arsenal second only to the US - far more than either will ever need - as well as the Soviet seat on the UN Security Council and in other international organizations.  

Meanwhile, Russia’s problems in the Caucasus continue to fester.  The worst: Moscow’s Chechen headache will not end until and unless this north Caucasus region is let go and also economically stabilized.  It could have happened constitutionally and with Russian help – but instead, the Russian Federation waged war against the Chechens – first under Yeltsin then under Putin – playing off intra-Chechen rivalries in the ages old game of divide and rule.   Yet, the anti-Russian Chechen insurgency is not likely to evaporate in thin air.  The roots are just too old and deep.

Sometimes true federation or even confederation – which is what the Gorbachev Constitution that set off the 1991 coup was all about - can make a difference – but Putin’s centralization of power in Moscow and his tough line against the Chechens – is likely just a band aid that buys time- not a permanent solution.

Meanwhile today’s Tripoli saga continues to dominate the airwaves here – that is, on the channels that actually carry international news.      

August 27, 2011 addendum:  See Ambassador James Collins' excellent first person account Fall of the Soviet Union: the Inside Story from the vantage point of the US Embassy in Moscow where he was then in charge.

 

Tables Turned: Elephants and People

By Patricia L. Sharpe

People in the know whom I met this month found no fault with the article that appeared in Vanity Fair shortly before I left for Tanzania.  Now that the Chinese, who built massive showpieces during the Cold War, are once again engaging with Africa, elephant poaching has increased exponentially, it says and they say.  This time around, the technology of ivory snatching is more impressive than ever.  Can you say helicopter? 

DNA tests on intercepted shipments of smuggled ivory suggest that most of the contraband is coming from the Selous Game Preserve, which straddles the Rufiji River in Southern Tanzania.  Hunting is not permitted in the northern portion where my grandson and I just spent four days (in addition to the time we enjoyed in other game-viewing areas).  It is allowed in the Southern portion, in which I frequently camped with friends (yes—they killed game, for the pot, under license), when I worked in Dar-es-Salaam in the ‘80s. 

Tanzania’s current hunting regulations are stringent and bring in scads of money for the Tanzanian treasury.  All in all, it comes to some $250,000 to mount an elephant hunting expedition, I'm told. That provides for one elephant to be bagged in two weeks or less.  Although the likelihood of bringing down a male elephant beyond breeding age with two perfect tusks on foot with approved weapons in that period of time is pretty low, local experts say that Russian oligarchs and Texans don’t seem to mind. Legal elephant hunting in Tanzania really is sport.

Somerset Trip Day 3: Bristol, The Metropolis

By John C. Dyer, UK correspondent

Over a million and a half people call greater Bristol home.  First chartered in 1155 AD, its busy port sent explorers and migrants all over the globe. 34 cities across the globe bear its name.  (Photos left and right by JC Dyer, summer 2011)

Bristol is the seat of one of the UK’s major universities, the University of Bristol, (Photos right Bristol Student Union and Bristol U Art Department by John C Dyer, summer 2011) a rival to its esteemed colleagues, Oxford and Cambridge.

Bristol is a survivor, reborn as a modern city from the rubble of the Battle of Britain.  After over 850 years rich in history, Bristol remains vital. It is figured to be among the five cities in the UK best positioned to re-emerge strong and vibrant from the current recession. 

Yet an ancient spirit still weaves through its hilly streets. (Photo left: "An Old Spirit" by JC Dyer, summer 2011)

Bristol’s special meaning

Bristol has meaning for both my partner and I.  For her, it was her first professional and family home, the birthplace of her daughter. For me, it is the scene of Dyer dramas both ancient and modern.  Victoria guided me among her favourite haunts.

Queen Victoria still presides over Bristol Cathedral (Photo right by JC Dyer summer 2011).   The Cathedral exterior is young relative to Wells, Exeter and Salisbury (Photo left by JC Dyer, summer 2011), but its Chapter House (meeting room) is Norman. (Photos left by JC Dyer summer 2011) .  

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Cathedral’s windows and interior are new, the originals casualties of the Blitz, but detailed in the magnificent old tradition. (Photos left and above by JC Dyer, summer 2011)

Its cloisters have an ancient feel. (Photo left by JC Dyer, summer 2011)

The dark stone Cathedral shelters a unique garden graveyard (Photo center left by JC Dyer, summer 2011), which like many English graveyards is oddly inviting.  So inviting, in fact, a picnic area nestles among the graves (Photo far right by JC Dyer, summer 2011). 

We were hungry, so we gave the area a once over.  But we soon left. Victoria knew the man buried most immediately next to the picnic grounds. We hiked up a hill to the Cafe Rouge. Victoria knew a cafe not far from the Cathedral which she prefered to show me. (Photo left by JC Dyer, summer 2011). 

Lunch was lovely.

Tummies satisfied, it was on to the Bristol City Museum.  A WWI vintage airplane dominates the entrance (Photos right by JC Dyer, summer 2011). 

The museum holds a vast array of treasures, sculptures  (Photos left by JC Dyer, summer 2011) and mummy cases among my favourites.  Even more favourite than my usual beloved Impressionists and dinosaur bones.

After over an hour of wandering the Museum, it was time for afternoon tea.  We beat it to one of those many side streets that so feature in a British town, the ones that make a village out of a city.   My partner knew of a little cafe with excellent tea and cakes, the Primrose Cafe (Photo left above by John C Dyer, summer 2011).  We enjoyed a pot of tea each, cake, and the intriguing surroundings (Photo right above by John C Dyer, summer 2011). 

Why the Congress Over-reacted to Anna’s Hunger Strike

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

It’s hilarious.  A Prime Minister from the Indian National Congress, which led the movement for Indian independence, thinks to silence a picture perfect Mahatma Gandhi impersonator, his weapon a hunger strike, by throwing him in jail.

“It’s blackmail,” the PM sputters.  “You can’t use this cheap trick of fasting to put pressure on the government.” 

So—does the police action work?  Not in India. The upstart’s appeal is enormously enhanced.  More people take to the streets in support of their anti-corruption champion.

Why the appeal?  History.  Plus a fine union of style and substance, all magnified by the modern media. 

Aside from the fact that maintaining its hold on India was getting prohibitively expensive, the British colonial regime found it hard to cope with an opponent who wanted to fight with  moral force rather than violence.  That was Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Mahatma, who perfected the tactic of non-violent resistance, which included some cliff-hanging hunger striking by the Mahatma himself.

The issue today isn’t independence.  It’s corruption and whether the government is willing to deal with it, not cosmetically, but effectively.  Graft, bribery, palm-greasing—this is the daily reality in India at all levels. India is 87th on the corruption perception index, in the middle essentially, but that’s not good enough for Indians.  The all pervading stench (and financial drain) of systemic corruption doesn’t make them happy.  Nor are they deceived by bureaucratic responses to demands for reform.

So Anna Hazare, a retired military man cum social worker from Maharashtra, decided to reincarnate himself as a modern day Gandhi.  Note the white cap and the home spun khadi cloth his clothes are made of.  Shades of Jawaharlal Nehru and the other freedom fighters. Note the tactic of the hunger strike, by which one puts one’s own life on the line.  As a septuagenarian with caved-in cheeks Hazare even looks like the aging Gandhi.

So the issue is of urgent universal appeal and the tactics build on the most vital symbols of modern Indian history—and Indians were responding fervently. Surely the government should have been more cautious in its approach.  Surely Prime Minister Man Mohansingh might have guessed that arrest would have been counter-productive.  Why has the Congress-led government been so clumsy?

I have a hunch. The Congress Party is, to a certain extent, a family affair, and there is an heir apparent: the great grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, the grandson of Indira Gandhi, the son of Sonia Gandhi, current leader of the Congress Party and widow of Rajiv Gandhi, who was the third in his line to be prime minister when he was assassinated.  Because Rahul Gandhi needed seasoning and a little time to demonstrate charisma, character and competence, Man Mohansingh, the eminently respectable and highly respected economist, has been filling in as PM.  

Rahul Gandhi, a young man of privilege and position if there ever was one in modern India, set out to position himself as a man of the people, a noble but unrealistic aspiration.  Although he’s never been exposed as a rank hypocrite and he’s managed to get himself elected to Parliament where he’s an entirely competent Member, but he hasn’t exactly caught the imagination of the Indian people as a whole.

And then, out of the blue, comes this nobody who has the pulse of the people. How galling!


 

Who’s Responsible for Feeding Africans?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

When I left the U.S. for some elephant and lion watching in Tanzania with my grandson—that was the last week in July—the top news story on BBC and PBS was the drought in East Africa.  These channels and others had turned themselves into ardent fund raisers for public and private charities seeking to alleviate the suffering and limit the deaths due to nature’s indifference to human welfare.  The tactic: trying to shame non-African individuals and governments into giving much much more.

At the time, I found myself thinking that for every five minutes devoted to scenes of suffering five minutes, equally emotional, should have been devoted to exposing and re-exposing the human agents of human misery.  Such thoughts were only partly prompted by Al Shebab’s callous refusal to allow aid workers access to starving refugees and others in territories under their control. 

Three weeks later, it seems, these supposedly pious militants still prefer controlling lives  to saving lives.  But things aren’t much better in Mogadishu, apparently, where profiteers are selling sacks of grain intended for free distribution to the hungry and destitute. This blatant misappropriation could happen only with the collusion of at least  some figures in the UN-backed Somali government, such as it is.  Hardly the best way to keep the global charity pipeline flowing generously.

We have long known that the infamous Bengal famine during World War II didn’t have to happen.  Winston Churchill, no lover of the “jewel in the crown,” refused to release the food stocks that would have saved millions of Indian lives.  Studies of previous famines in East Africa and elsewhere have also shown that surplus food is usually available, somewhere, for a price. The real problem is that the poor are poor.  Amartya Sen, the Indian economist, won a Nobel Prize for his studies of these dynamics.

Meanwhile, since today’s hungry do lack the money that’s needed to buy life-sustaining food, they starve to death.  This is where global charities come in.  Better yet, this is what good governments are prepared to deal with, especially in areas where drought occurs more or less frequently.  Unfortunately good governance has been in fairly short supply in Africa.

Talking Turkey by Turkey to Syria

By Patricia H. Kushlis

I’ve thought for some time that if there is to be effective international pressure on the Assad government in Syria to get it to stop its Alawite storm troopers from continuing to murder the country’s unarmed, mostly Sunni, citizens it would need to come from Ankara. 

Since April when the demonstrations began, both the Turks and the Saudis have been patient – likely too patient with this out of control government. 

The Saudis, of course, have fewer quivers in their arsenal than the Turks.  First, Saudi Arabia is no paragon of virtue itself – after all “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”  Second, the Saudis are known for paying off friends and enemies alike – and if they’ve been paying off Assad, it obviously hasn’t changed his behavior.

And third, just plain geography.

Look at the map: Turkey neighbors Syria on the north and the Turkish government could, and likely pretty easily, send in the troops to stop the mayhem in Syria’s north if it so decided.  It could also mount a sea offensive to protect Syrian cities along the coast. 

After all, Syria was an Ottoman province for centuries before the Empire’s demise after World War I.  Do Assad and his security forces really want to take on the Turkish army too if it were to come to that?  I don’t think so.      

Assad:  Listen Up

Here’s what Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu reportedly said at a news conference after six hours of apparently fruitless talks last week in Damascus:

“This is our final word to the Syrian authorities:  our first expectation is that these operations stop immediately and unconditionally.  If the operations do not end, there would be nothing more to discuss about steps that would be taken.”

Now, regardless of the apparent open-ended ambiguity – or veiled threat – of Davutoglu’s public statement, if I were an advisor to Assad, the first thing I would remind him of is Cyprus July 20, 1974.

The good news was that the much hated Greek military junta collapsed almost immediately as a result of the junta’s provoked Turkish invasion of the island, democracy and Karamanlis returned to Greece and the junta members themselves spent the rest of their lives in jail.

The bad news was that lots of Greek Cypriots lost property, some lost lives, some are still missing, the US was blamed by Greeks for the Turkish military invasion of the northern part of the island and UN troops still patrol the “Green Line.”

Read the Turkish coffee grounds: Enough means enough

The second thing I would warn Assad is that Turks may well be slow to boil – but when they’ve had enough, enough means enough.  There is, after all, only a land border between the two countries and I very much doubt Syrian forces could withstand the Turkish military for very long if Erdogan orders the troops to cross it.  After all, Turkey now has to deal with more and more Syrian refugees who have fled the country in recent months to escape the Assad pogroms so the Turks have more to cope with than simply a heinous neighboring regime.  

Tweaking, therefore, the Turkish elephant’s tail is never a good idea and despite Iran’s quiet military support for Assad and his wayward Shiite sect, Iran has enough problems at home to think five times before going further.  And as for China and Russia  – these regime supporters on the sly – are simply too far away to make a real difference and, after all, whatever happens in Damascus just isn’t that important in their over all scheme of things.              

 

Parliament on the August 2011 Riots: The Right Answers to the Wrong Questions

By John Dyer, UK correspondent

Parliament sat in extraordinary session 11 August 2011, debating the causes and handling of the riots of the previous week, the most severe in a generation.   The Prime Minister knew the cause. The cause was gangland culture and not tough enough law and order.   Certainly not his austerity programme.   No need for a Commission to suss it all out, as some from Labour asked.

Labour’s  front bench had it figured too.  Disaffected youths, gangland culture, compounded by the Coalition’s cuts to the police.  The Green Party’s one representative suggested social inequality.   The Liberal Democrats were noticeably muted, with Business Secretary Vince Cable not in evidence despite the report on the economy and any need for a Plan B, scheduled to immediately follow the Prime Minister’s lead off presentation on the violence.  It seems everyone had it figured out.

1500 Arrests thus far under frenzied media scrutiny

But there are problems with the instant assessments that so neatly fit everyone’s pre riot points of view. For starters, 1500 hundred arrests have been made thus far.  A number of these have been charged.  Under the intense scrutiny of a frenzied media, the gangland youths often turned out not to be youths, from social housing, or members of a gang.  Among the arrestees were young professionals and middle aged white men, single moms, employed, at least one preteen and the daughter of a multimillionaire.  

This did not stop Sky News, which has - since the Murdoch hearings and shuttering of The News of the World - increasingly come to resemble Fox in its reporting, sourcing, and colour commentary.  A Sky News on line article began with the bold headline, Exclusive Interview Teen Gang Reveals Looting Spree.   Read a couple three paragraphs and you learn the interviewees were four young friends who claimed they had no relation to a gang.  But today they exemplify “gangland culture.”  

Bring in the tough cops.  Which is what the government is reportedly doing.  Because the government already knows what’s to blame- gangland culture and lack of tough enough policing.

Labour seemed to agree. The problem was the government’s cuts to policing. But ooops, they haven’t happened yet.  No matter. They are going to happen. That is enough to link the two issues.  The cops themselves are quick to do so. The day after the debate, Labour is calling for dialogue, but the basic view remains the same.

But there are problems with the analysis.

Thus far, the gang members have not been prominent among the arrestees, have they. Maybe they will emerge later.  There are a lot of arrestees yet to process.  Even assuming all the rest turn out to be gang members, there is one little problem with the analysis. Gangs and gangland culture have been on the scene for years without riots.  So why did they choose the second week in August, 2011?  Why now?

There are other problems.  While the government and Labour characterize this sorry affair as looting not rioting to make a political statement, much of the damage thus far attributed to the riots has been from vandalism and arson, not theft. There is no question there was theft, but thus far most of the theft offenses charged have been anything but grand scale.  Maybe the grand scale details will emerge later?  Let’s keep an open mind.

Strategy, organization and coordination

The riots were organized, directed at authority and prosperity. Videos have caught images of men with blackberries and phones coordinating and directing the rioters. The tactics used included setting fires away from the looting for the believed purpose of distracting and thinning police lines.  This is strategy, organization, coordination and thus far strategy, organization, and coordination more clearly aimed at property damage than property theft. To be clear, I am not saying that many of the participating rioters were not looters, but the coordination, strategy and tactics thus far evidences an intention to cause chaos and damage rather than to make a killing on loot. 

The tactics bear an uncanny resemblance to those used by Anarchists during the peaceful demonstrations concerning Tuition fees and later pension reform.  In both of these latter cases Anarchists hijacked the headlines with wanton destruction.  

Finally, shouldn’t we return to that basic question, why now?

Whatever degree of organization, by whom organized, the fact remains all these factors failed to ignite a riot before now. While we cannot excuse their violence, shouldn’t we take seriously what the rioters say about events?   Lots of would be causes out there, but all of them have existed for some time. Something triggered them now.

But Parliament is not asking why now, who coordinated, or how come the early arrestees are so different in profile from gangland youths from social housing.  With the possible exceptions of BBC and the Guardian, everyone already "knows" The answer. No need for a Commission. No need to reexamine austerity cuts to social programmes or the flatlined economy.

For the Prime Minister it is, Bring in Rambo.