Desicritics Author: spincycle

'Wax'ing Poetic

spincycle — Sat, 26 May 2007 00:22:36 EDT

Emily Wax in her Washington Post article writes (without corroboration), "India has a growing middle class estimated at 300 million people."

300 million is an astounding figure and just a shade below the US population. If indeed India has a "growing" middle class that is 300 million strong, then US and the rest of the world better take notice. There is just a small problem. Middle class is a phenomenally slippery concept.

The term was initially used to refer to the urban bourgeoisie. In its modern avatar, it was meant to refer to people who could afford, say, certain amenities. As amenities have become the norm in the West, calls have been made to redefine the term again. The term itself though has a lot of emotional cache and almost 90% of the people in US, according to a survey in 1992, thought themselves to be middle class.

Statistically, we can define "middle class" as the class of income earners that is within one Standard Deviation of the mean. But for a country like India where the mean wage is less than $2/day, the statistical definition as above would be thoroughly bankrupt.

Main Course: Pass me the knife, please

Let's briefly analyze Wax's claim about the numbers in Indian middle class. According to World Bank, India's GDP was $796 billion in 2006. Assuming that all economic activity was produced by the 300 million and the gains spread equally among them, Gross Income Per Person would be $796,000/300 = $2600/year or $7/day. All hail this "middle class". Even this figure is a vast exaggeration given India has more than a billion people.

It is fashionable to use terms like "middle class" and then attach numbers like 300 million but both the term and the number are grossly inaccurate.

Newspaper Gestalt

Over the years, stories on economic miracle in China and India have become de rigeur in newspapers. The stories are uniformly bankrupt for they fail to get even the basic figures right and put things in proper perspective.

A new foreign correspondent to India, like Wax, is expected to file in his/her share of these formulaic stories along with the expected special report on the heartrending poverty in rural China and India.

There is little hope that we will ever have better coverage or even that different topics will be covered, except the occasional Shilpa Shetty-Gere kiss induced frenzy, given that most foreign press reporters go to other countries with doltish prior hypotheses, look for confirmation, confirm them, and sigh with relief and move on to their next story. The whole problem is exacerbated by the fact that the tour of duties for journalists have shrunk.

On Wax

Emily Wax is a much feted reporter due to her coverage on Darfur. While I have never read her stuff from Darfur, it is unlikely that it will be any better than the shoddy reporting from India. Before her ridiculous article on the current state of Indian economy, she wrote an article on the Shetty-Gere scandal framing the story as a 'Lexus and the Olive Tree' kind of fight. Not once did she draw the reader's attention to the frayed judicial system, or the poorly educated justices, or archaic laws. The omission was astounding.

Book Review: City of Sin and Splendour - Writing on Lahore by Bapsi Sidhwa

spincycle — Tue, 22 May 2007 00:23:38 EDT

A city hasn't been showered with such love since Dalrymple wrote about Delhi. Bapsi Sidhwa's edited volume on Lahore in fact far exceeds it. After all, Dalrymple was nothing but a foreigner who had only spent a few years in Delhi when he wrote the book, while Sidhwa in her endeavor is accompanied by a range of distinguished authors and intellects, only tied together in their love for Lahore.

The love for the city, its landmarks, its famed cuisine, its gourmets, its brutal summers, its people, its stories, and its relationships shines through on every page.

Every great city deserves an admirer and chronicler of the caliber of Bapsi Sidhwa - someone who will perspicaciously and assiduously collect stories that celebrate her beauty and look unflinchingly, yet lovingly, at her bruised soul and her warts.

The Book

The book strikes an immediate rapport that is akin to being invited to an intimate familial Punjabi gathering. I felt alternately like a kid sitting on the lap of my maternal uncle being told stories about the city, a young adult guiltily listening to the adult conversation about the brutal tales about city's history, and an objective adult reflecting on history, and politics.

There is a warm intimacy that suffuses each of the stories in City of Sin and Splendor. The additional element of emotional immediacy comes from stories that talk about things we South Asians have grown up with. All of it is made available 'naturalistically' by the craft of authors who rarely go beyond what is known. It is an important talent. For authors are always tempted by superfluous cleverness.

It is the Jane Austen method of writing in some ways - writing honestly, perspicaciously, and often with great wit about what is known without flirting with the unnecessary or the arcane. It is grounded writing. The authors use words that are well worn and apt and not ones with peripatetic grandiloquent pretensions. The resulting atmosphere in the book is not stifling because of the self restraint, but educated and homely.

I have never been to Lahore. Yet the city stands alive in front of me. Though I don't eat meat, I savored the morning Nihari with Irfan sahib. I shared in the pain of partition with Ved Mehta and Sadat sahib. I stopped to celebrate the indomitable spirit of Ismat Chugtai. I stood ring side as Bina Shah described the long standing tussle between Karachi and Lahore.

And I wore my heart on the sleeve when I read Ranamama by Urvashi Butalia. Butalia's phrase, "cracked pistachio green walls" will always stay with me for it describes pitch perfectly the color of walls on some subcontinent homes. I also admired the honest revolutionary spirit of Habib Jalib's Dastoor. How did he know the story of Pakistan before it was ever written?

Third World

We are third world denizens. Our cities have always seemed shabby and poor and slung in deep unending mediocrity. The heat has always been brutal, and atmosphere dusty and arid. We have always struggled to grow trees and grass in face of hot summers, scarce resources, and petty corruption.

Culture has melted into a thick gooey nothingness pressed on all sides from globalization, self-serving politicians, and poverty. Immigration and sprawl have killed the remnants of other things. Our chowks are nothing but traffic choked dusty islands.

Yet we have formed familial bonds and come to be part of our cities. We have found times and places to share. We visit each other's houses and exchange stories. People come over when we are in need. We listen to the stories of our doodhwallahs (milk men), and our kaam waalis (maids) and though we love to cavil about them, there is an unsaid human connection.

Perhaps that is a bit too sunny an assessment. But indulge me for a little. All of it is held together by the incessant chatter. Conversation is the glue that keeps us together. We haven't yet made conversation into a stylized art of identity negotiation. It is these relations, these conversations, the unsaid courtesies, and the people that Sidhwa celebrates in her book.

Colonial Rule

The British Raj left its mark on Lahore. Kim's Gun haunts the hollow haunches of the emaciated old city. The gardens and separate civil line quarters for the English Sahibs have entrenched themselves in to the modern hierarchy of the city. More importantly, the Raj has scarred us psychologically.

We have never grown to be proud of our heritage and culture. Forever chastened by the West that raced ahead, we have never sat down and taken notice of our heritage. We do pay a lot of lip service to the heritage but seldom do we believe in it.

Delhi and Lahore

I am from Delhi, which in many respects can be seen as Lahore's twin. The cities share similar climates, somewhat similar Punjabi dominated cultures, similar histories, similar old-new city Raj-inspired distinctions, and similar heartaches of partition.

I could find flavors of Delhi in the book - the 'gates' of the old city, the civil lines area, the colonial bungalows, the partition stories, and the oncoming McDonald's culture. In getting to know Lahore, I felt that I got to know my city better.

Contemporary Conditions and History

He whose light shines only in palaces
Who seeks only to please the few
Who moves in the shadow of compromise
Such a debased tradition, such a dark dawn
I do not know, I will not own

--Dastoor, Hajib Jalib

Lahore has suffered from the vicissitudes of the people in Islamabad and Washington. The malaise in its contemporary politics, the perversion to its culture from the Islamists and the secularists, both equally delusional and equally adamant, is quickly reducing this great city.

The single most important fact is that the world is wrecked by a thousand mutinies everyday. With globalization and technological onslaught, the mutinies have multiplied. All unleashed, without prior thought. We try to craft our lives around one while we are led by our noses to the next. It is unsettling to stop and take stock of the grievous loss that we will continue to take on our world.

The elite Lahore

The remembrances of a city and the love of a city only come naturally to those with time for leisure. To that extent this book is about the padshahs of Lahore. The book is an ode of the ruling class to itself, to its culture, and to its land marks. Yet, often times the book is much more than that.

The everyday street is never far in this book. The everyday street may not have the kaamwali (maid) in it, but it does have the patang baaz's, the halwais, the rickshaw wallahs, and more. It is that everyday street that I carry in my heart.

Pakistan's Civil Crisis - Chaudhry, Musharraf, and Karachi

spincycle — Sun, 20 May 2007 00:11:51 EDT

Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry was born in 1948 in Quetta, Balochistan. Chaudhry went on to work for more than a decade in varying capacities in Balochistan. So it is surprising that the firing of this Baloch has prompted little or no response in Balochistan. The fact isn't surprising if you look a little closer. Mr. Chaudhry, now feted as a humanitarian crusader, never once raised his voice when the general sahib ordered a full-fledged military assault on Balochistan. The reason why I mentioned this anecdote is because it serves as a useful example for how much arm in glove was Mr. Chaudhry with the general before the glove was discarded and picked up by the opposition parties.

There is one more twist to the tale – ethnicity. Chaudhry sahib is not an ethnic Baloch but a Punjabi abdagar, whom Balochis despise. We will come back to the ethnic angle later for no analysis of Pakistani politics is complete without analyzing the cross-cutting ethnic cleavages.

The Upright Justice

As Chief Justice, Chaudhry's reputation rests on two cases – the now famous Steel Mill Case in which he ruled against selling of Pakistan Steel Mills to a group led by a friend of Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz (whose own position is in doubt due to the fact that he holds dual citizenship). Just as a footnote – the sale, which was overturned by Chaudhry, was authorized by a Cabinet Committee on Privatization led by Shaukat Aziz.

The second case that made his reputation was his decision to declare the Hasba bill, the NWFP Islamist bill, unconstitutional. Chaudhry was also vocal recently decrying Pakistani government's complicity with US intelligence agencies and demanding the government provide information about the 'missing people'.

The Corrupt Justice

Chaudhry was elevated to the position of Chief Justice by Musharraf in 2005. Since then Chaudhry sahib has played the role of an administration sock puppet admirably except, of course, in the cases mentioned above. There is little doubt that the humble justice's wealth has grown with his position.

Most of the charges filed against the ex-CJP seem like the de-rigueur perks that a government bureaucrat in a reasonable position considers his right in South Asia – use of multiple cars, requiring "senior officials to receive him at airports", "using helicopters and planes to go to private functions", and forcing officials to help his son get admission in medical colleges and then getting him appointed as a "Grade 18 Police Officer".

Somewhere among the litany of abuses is also this startling fact that Chaudhry wrote decisions on cases worth 55 million PKR. But the scale of corruption allegations can hardly be called dire - certainly not by South Asia's lax standards. Critics point out more serious charges like property fraud and financial embezzlement dog other justices including two members of the Supreme Judicial Council which will hear the chief justice's case. (BBC The critics further allege that "the chief justice was singled out because of his past performance, they say, which created misgivings in official circles about his likely role in the coming legal battles ahead of national elections, due later this year."

Timeline– Chaudhry Dismissal to Karachi Clashes

Significant political events don't automatically happen. A political scandal much like an unheeded boil festers and then bursts in violence. A timeline can give vital clues as to the kind of infection, who joined in and when, and what spurred the final orgy of violence. So here is a timeline to give a sense of the ebb and flow of this scandal.

March 9 – Justice suspended. More than the fact that he was suspended, it was the manner in which he was suspended that caught the attention. He was called up to General's Rawalpindi residence, and held incommunicado for what people allege up to two days. The horror.

March 12 – Lawyers Begin boycott.

March 19 – Seven of the country's judges resign including top judge of Punjab. Newspapers publish the picture of Chaudhry being shoved into a car.

March 28 – Chaudhry gives a speech arguing for independent judiciary

April 3 – Lawyers are still on strike. The SJC adjourns the hearings.

May 6 – Chaudhry gives speech in Lahore

May 13 – CJP Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, came to address the city bar association on the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Pakistani Supreme Court. Except it was not. It was a choreographed political move targeted to gain momentum against Musharraf. Except the move stalled and unraveled in its own strange way. Chaudhry never left the Karachi airport as PPP and MQM factions waged pitched battles in the streets killing nearly 40 and injuring 150 people.

Detailed Timeline at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/south_asia/6649463.stm

Karachi, MQM, Jamat-e-Islami, and PPP

There are multiple centrifugal forces that make Karachi politics so volatile - the Mujahir-Sindhi-Pathan divide, the enormous class divide, the interaction between those two divides (ethno-class angle), and the divide created by self serving politics.

The political fortunes keep shifting depending on who is in power in Islamabad and the wishes of the American puppeteers. This current phase of violence saw the lines being redrawn across the MQM –PPP axis but with one key variation – MQM and PML-Q (Musharraf's party) are now aligned. There is a reason for the realignment – MQM is the only viable political force against Jamaat-e-Islami Islamic fundamentalists that the US government so abhors. There is little doubt in my mind that this is a temporary alliance for Muhajirs have never had strong allies. It is likely that this current episode will eventually end with PPP and Musharraf coming to some kind of deal to thwart both MQM and JI.

Class and conflict

One look at the people going to welcome Chaudhry is enough to tell that they were these super well groomed rich elites. PPP has today become a party with significant traction amongst the landowning elite. In Karachi, it is represented and funded by the industrialists and the business owners.

Media and conflict

There was of course bias in the way media – and here I mean Western media for that is what I had access to – covered this event - it was the story of how a hero for political freedom and his supporters were thwarted by the autocratic government backed militia. The truth on the street obviously was a bit different.

Analysis

The most worrisome aspect of the violence was the collusion between the police and government. The 13,000 strong paramilitary that was deployed to control violence stood casually by as both the MQM and PPP backed militia sparred with each other. What brought home the complicity of the police for me was this classic video clip of a person held by the police on the street still being beaten by, who I am sure, were Musharraf supporters. Some have alleged that the indifference of the paramilitary forces was because they are Punjabi dominated.

The strangest thing in the whole Chaudhry scandal is not the Karachi violence but the alacrity with which lawyers banded together to protest the firing of the Chief Justice. Mobilization of lawyers seems like a handiwork of the PPP. It is unclear to me as to why would the lawyers protest – they didn’t protest when Mushy was made president. Why are they suddenly so worried about political freedom? It seems to be an exercise in political opportunism.

Lastly we must focus our attention on Chaudhry. He is neither a crusader for freedom nor a deeply corrupt judge. Chaudhry is somebody who dallied with anti-government stance, found himself in the deep-end, got scared, found the rope thrown by the opposition parties and hung himself with it. Now Karachi hangs in balance with him.

Further Reading:

Dawn: Back to the future? By Zaffar Abbas

BBC: Q&A: Pakistan's judicial crisis

BBC: Blood and batons spur Pakistan row

Interview: Bill Thompson - Part I

spincycle — Fri, 9 Mar 2007 01:09:52 EST

While technology has become an important part of our social, economic and political life, most analysis about technology remains woefully inadequate, limited to singing paeans about Apple and Google, and occasional rote articles about security and privacy issues. It is to this news market full of haberdasher opining that Mr. Bill Thompson brings his considerable intellect and analytical skills every week for his column on technology for the BBC.

To those unfamiliar with his articles, Mr. Bill Thompson is a respected technology guru and a distinguished commentator on technology and copyright issues for the BBC. Mr. Thompson's calm moderated erudition of technology comes from his extensive experience in the IT industry at varying capacities and a childhood that he spent without computers.

"I was born in 1960 so I grew up before there were computers around. Indeed, I never touched one at school." It was not until his third year at Cambridge University, while he was running experiments in Psychology, that he first touched a computer. He says that in many ways his first experiences with the computer formed his mindset about computers, something that has stayed with him for over 25 years that computers are there to perform a useful function.

Mr. Thompson went on to get a Master's level diploma in Computer Science from Cambridge University in 1983. After graduating from Cambridge, he joined a small computer firm and then quit it to join Acorn Computers Limited, creators of the successful BBC Micro., as a database consultant. He left the enterprise because "they wanted to promote me" and joined as a courseware developer with Instruction Set.

After a stint with PIPEX, he found himself running Guardian's New Media division a decade or so ago when the Internet was still in its infancy. After working for a few years managing Guardian's online site, Mr. Thompson left to pursue writing and commentating full time. It is there in the field writing and providing astute analysis on technology related issues that Mr. Thompson finds himself today.

I interviewed Mr. Thompson via Skype about a month ago. Here's an edited (both style and content) transcript of the interview.

The technology opinion market place seems to be split between technology evangelists and Luddites. Your writing, on the other hand, manifests a broad range of experience; it reflects moderated enthusiasm about what computers can do. I find it an astute and yet optimistic account.

I am fundamentally optimistic about the possibilities of this technology that we have invented to both make the world a better place and to help us recover from some of the mistakes of the past and make better decisions as a species, not just as a society, in the future. It informs my writing. It informs as well the things that I am interested in, and the areas that I want to explore.

Our relationship with machines was once fraught with incomprehension and fear. Machines epitomized the large mechanized state and its dominance over the natural world. There was a spate of movies somewhere in the 70s when refrigerators and microwaves 'rose up' to attack us. Over the past decade or so, our relationship has transformed to such a degree that we not only rely on fairly sophisticated machines to do our daily chores, we look at machines as a way to achieve utopian ideals. Dr. Fred Turner, professor of Communication at Stanford, in From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, traces this rise of digital utopianism to American counterculture. How do you think the relationship evolved?

The way you phrase the question leads me to think that perhaps it was the exaggerated claims of the Artificial Intelligence community that led people to worry that computers would reach the point at which they would take over. And the complete failure of AI to deliver on any its promises has led us to a more phlegmatic and accepting attitude, which is that these are just machines - we don't know how to make them clever enough to threaten us and therefore we can just get on with using them.

The fact is you know that Skynet is not going to launch nuclear weapons at us in a Terminator world and so we can then focus on the fact that the essential humanity of the Terminator itself, certainly in the second and third movies, is a source of redemption. We can actually feel positive about the machines instead of negative about them.

When you have a computer that is around, that crashes constantly, that is infected by viruses and malware, that doesn't do what is supposed to do and stuff like that, you are not afraid of it - you are irritated by it and you treat it as you would a recalcitrant child that you might love and care for and that has some value but is certainly not something that is going to threaten you. And then we can use the machines. That then actually allows us to focus on what you call the Utopian or altruistic aspects. It allows us to focus on machines in a much broader context, which is recognize that human agency is behind it.

The dystopian stories rely on machines getting out of control but in fact we live in a world in which the machines are being used negatively by people, by governments, by corporations, and by individuals. The failure to have AI allows us to accept that - to reject the systems they have built without rejecting the machines themselves.

And for those who actually believe that information and communication technologies are quite positive - (it allows us) to focus on what could be done for good instead of just dismissing all of the technology as being bad. It allows us to take a much more complex and nuanced point of view.

When I look at Internet there is this wonderful sense of volunteerism. It is incredible to see the kind of things that have come out of recent technology like the open source movement, and Wikipedia. There is palpable sense of volunteerism that pervades the medium. Even Internet companies seem to have, regardless of what they actually do, adopted sort of socially nurturing missions. How did these norms of volunteerism get created? Has technology created or merely enabled these norms, as in made it easier for people to volunteer or are we witnessing something entirely new here?

If you look at common space peer production, as Yochai Benkler calls it, what motivates people - that is exactly the same question as what motivates altruism. It sits on it perfectly. Because what we have with contributions to open source projects like Linux or positive contributions to Wikipedia is what would seem to be on surface just pure altruistic behavior. So we can ask the same questions - what do people get in return? And do they have to get something in return?

Pekka Himanen in the Hacker Ethic, I think, nailed what people get in return - the social value you get from that, the sense of self-worth, the rewards that you are looking for - all of that makes perfect sense to me. I don't think we need to ask any more questions about that. You get stuff back from contributing to the Linux kernel or putting something up on SourceForge. The stuff you get back is the same sort of stuff you get back from being a good active citizen. It is the same stuff as you get back from say recycling your trash.

The question as to whether something new is emerging, whether what's happening online, because it allows for distributed participation - because the product of the online activity is say, certainly in the case of open source, a tool which can then itself be used elsewhere, or in the case of Wikipedia, a new approach to collating knowledge. Whether something completely new or radical is coming out of there still remains to be seen.

I am quite skeptical about that. I am quite skeptical of brand new emergent properties of network behavior because we remain still the same physical and psychological human beings. I am not one of those people who believes that singularity is coming, that they are about to transcend the limitations of the corporeal body and that some magical breakthrough in humanity is going to happen thanks to the Internet and new biomedical procedures. I don't think we are on the verge of that change.

I think that Internet as a collaborative environment might emphasize what it is to work together and change what it means to be a good citizen but it doesn't fundamentally alter the debate.

But the kind of interactions that we are seeing today wouldn't have happened if it were not for the Internet. For example, the fact that I am talking to you today is, I believe, sufficiently radical.

But has it changed anything fundamentally? Ok, it has allowed us to find each other but there was in the 13th century medieval Europe a very rich and complicated network of traveling scholars, who would travel from university or monastery to share each others ideas, they would exchange text. It was at a smaller scale, it was much slower, and it was at a lower level but was it fundamentally different to what we are doing in the blogosphere or with communications like this? Just because there is more of it doesn't mean it is automatically different.

Let me move on here to a related but different topic. I imagine that the techniques which have been developed around this distributed model be applied to a variety of different places. For example, lessons from open source movement can be applied to how we do research. Can lessons of the Internet be applied elsewhere? Certainly alternative forms of decision making are emerging within companies. Is Internet creating entirely new decision models and economies?

That's quite a big question. There's a sort of boring answer to it which is just that more and more organizations and more and more areas of human activity are reaching that third stage in their adoption of information and communication technologies.

First stage is where you just computerize your existing practices and the second stage is where you tinker with things and perhaps redefine certain structures but the third stage is where you think, ok these technologies are here so lets design our organizational processes, structures and functions around the affordances of the technology, which is a very hard thing to do but something which more and more places are doing.

So just as in the 1830s and 1840s, organizations built themselves around the capabilities of steam systems and technologies and in the 1920s they built themselves around the new availability of the telephone, so now, in the West certainly, it is reasonable to assume that the network is there, and the things it makes possible it will continue to make possible. So you start to build structures, workflow and practices, businesses and indeed whole sectors of the economy around what the net does.

In that sense it is changing lots of things. As I said, I think that's a boring insight. That's what happens! We develop new technologies and we come to rely on them. It's happened for the past five thousand years. So while it may be a new one but it's the same pattern. Joseph Schumpeter got it right in the 1930s talking about waves of 'Creative Destruction' and everybody is now talking about that in the media but fundamentally there is nothing different going on there.

There is a more interesting aspect of that which is, are some of the outputs of the more technological areas - the open source movement and things like that -creating wholly new possibilities for human creative and economic expression? And, they might be. I don't think we know yet. I think it's too early to tell.

We have seen the basis of the Western economy and hence of the global economy move online (become digital) over the past twenty years. As Marx would put it the economic base has shifted. We are seeing the superstructures move now to reflect that. The idea of economic determinism is not right at every point in history but certainly the world we live in now is a post-capitalist world.

We still use the word Capitalism to describe it but in fact the economy works in slightly different way and we are going to need a new word for it. In that world - we have a new economic base - we will find new ways of being. And we will start to see impact in art and culture, in forms of religious expression. You know we haven't yet seen a technologically based region and it is about time we saw something emerge where the core presets rely on the technology.

------

Watch out for the second part of the interview with Bill Thompson. The second part will focus on issues like political economy of the Internet and Copyright Law.

Interview With Dr. Victor Stenger, Author of God: The Failed Hypothesis

spincycle — Tue, 6 Mar 2007 00:45:51 EST

Dr. Victor Stenger is professor emeritus of physics and astronomy with University of Hawaii and adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. He is the author of God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist, which debuted on the New York Times Bestseller List last week.

Q. When did you first realize that you were an atheist? Was it a sort of a Eureka moment or a gradual realization?

In high school I started reading a lot of popular science, especially astronomy, nuclear physics, and evolution. I began to see Catholicism as irrational but I did not become an atheist immediately. When I was a graduate student at UCLA I attended a Methodist church and sang in the choir. When I lived in Hawaii, my wife and I sent our kids to church-related schools, although we did not go to church. Finally, in the 1980s I began to get involved with the skeptical movement and learned about Humanism. The more I gained from experience, the more I read, the more I realized that the God concept had no merit.

Q. Church attendance and belief in God have remained relatively steady in the U.S., while there has been a precipitous decline in Western Europe. What do you think is behind this?

Big money is given by extremely conservative, wealthy sources in the U.S. to churches and other organizations such as so-called think tanks to brainwash Americans. Europe is less vulnerable to what Chris Hedges, in his best-seller, called "American Fascists". Incidentally, he is not an atheist.

Q. On occasion when I chance upon religious programming on TV – it seems half gimmicky and half psychological therapy. In fact, mass religions from fairly early on took on the job of providing 'guidance' to people. What do you make of this sort of role of religion?

While it is mostly good-intentioned, much in the religious right — the American
Fascist movement — is motivated by the desire for political power and the helping people aspect is a phony con game that is part of the scheme.

Q. This question is somewhat related to the previous one. Say if we were to find out that belief in God is psychologically helpful, can we argue for an evolutionary reason behind existence of religion? This question was famously asked by Time in its article – "The God Gene – does our DNA compel us to seek a higher power?" What do you make of these kinds of assertions?

I don't think it's in the genes. I think religion evolved in cultures, ironically, by
Darwinian means. Religion has always be the method used by those in power to keep the masses in line. For example, I was recently in India. There the vast majority of people live in misery and squalor. But they don't complain, they don't revolt against the rich, because the Hindu religion tells them it is their dharma - their fate. In the West, the divine right of kings justified their dominance. Today George Bush tells us that he is doing God's work.

Q. People have often times argued that religion is needed to uphold moral values. Psychology literature points to that people are more liable to take advice from institutions or people they trust. Is there a case to be made for religion to be there as a service that disseminates morality?

This is the prime example of how religious brainwashing works. People are told that morals come from God. But the facts say otherwise. Moral concepts such as the Golden Rule were around centuries before Jesus. They are the collective principles of humanity. Studies show that atheists are at least as moral as theists, and certainly there is a connection between fundamentalism, in Islam and Christianity, and antisocial behavior. I prefer to call myself a humanist rather than an atheist because Humanism is the source of our morality and provides a positive outlook on life.

Q. Religion in everyday life is understood as something uncontestable while scientific theories are considered debatable. How can we provide a more open attitude towards investigating religion?

Religion makes testable claims so these can be treated the same as any scientific claim. I document these in detail in the book, but let me give you one example. Most believers do a lot of praying and think it has a positive effect. These effects should be observable. Controlled experiments have been done and have found no effects. It could have turned out otherwise, in which case I would have to admit that science had found God.

Q. It is a well known fact that very few people actually ever read the religious texts and it is likely that very few of those who read them understand them. So there is chasm between the way a religion is lived and the way it was fundamentally conceived and hence the numerous 'fundamentalist' movements. The argument that I am making is that 'faith' that is driving most religious people is of a vague though absolute kind. Debunking the extraordinary stories of the books, and even providing convincing arguments against God is unlikely to change the views of the majority of religious people.

Probably. But there are still a lot of people I think I can reach with rational arguments: agnostics; believers who are not too sure; young people, especially college students who are learning to think critically and have not yet formed their views. Also I provide ammunition for those who think like I do to use in their arguments with believers.

Q. Science thrives on the parsimonious model. One shouldn't create something if it isn't needed to explain the phenomenon at hand. Hence if all 'natural' phenomena can be conceivably explained by variables at hand then why devise new ones. This, I believe, is one of the chief arguments that you try to make about absence of God. Can you expand a little more on this?

In an earlier book, Has Science Found God? I refute the claims that there is scientific evidence for God. In this book I go much further than just the absence of evidence argument that you reiterate in your question. I claim there is positive scientific evidence against the existence of the God most people worship, as in the absence of support for the efficacy of prayer that I mentioned earlier.

Q. It is a well-known scientific corollary that absence of proof is not proof of absence. The kinds of models that you describe in your book are really a probabilistic debunking that derive their strengths from 95% confidence intervals and unlikelihood of the hypothesis but not proof that it doesn't exist. Can you shed a bit more light on this?

The word "proof" has at least two different meanings. In logic and mathematics, a proof or disproof is with certainty given the starting assumptions. In science and law, proof means beyond a reasonable doubt. The latter allows one to conclude that God can be "proved" not to exist if the data show this beyond a reasonable doubt. Note I use "show" rather than "prove" in the subtitle to avoid that confusion.

Q. One of the arguments that is made by people who believe in God is that there must a reason to our existence. This is sort of an existentialist argument that says that we must have a cause behind our lives and only human lives, I may add. What do you think of this?

That is simply a pious hope. There is no basis, and I would add, no evidence, for this. In fact, the universe looks just as it should be expected to look if there is no special role or purpose for humanity. However, it is important for me to add that this does not mean that we cannot find purpose in our own lives in family, work, art, music, doing good deeds, and so on. In fact, releasing the bonds of religion gives us more freedom to explore all that life has to offer.

Q. Tell us a little more about the kind of problems you see if we allow religious superstition to dictate policy and even science.

As documented in several other books, the religion-based decision making of the
Republicans and Bush administration does more harm than good, threatens the health and well being of all of us, and increases the amount of unnecessary human suffering in the world. For example, most of the federal money spent on AIDS, in Africa and America, goes to advocating abstinence and none to condoms. Scientific studies showing that abstinence does not work are deleted from government reports.

Q. Any final words to the believers and the non-believers?

If scientific evidence were ever found for God or some other form of the supernatural, then scientists like myself would become believers. I give hypothetical examples of observations that would convince me that God exists. I ask all believers and nonbelievers to look at the data and argue about it rationally, without polemics or ad hominems. I try to do this in my book.

Book Review: The Acid Alkaline Balance Diet: An Innovative Program for Ridding Your Body of Acidic Wastes by Felicia Drury Kliment

spincycle — Thu, 1 Feb 2007 00:05:35 EST

There has been a glut of diet books in recent years that have tried to tap into the robust US market for weight loss and increasingly, healthy eating. Between the 190,000 books that come up when I search for the word 'diet' on Amazon to the 164 million hits that come up on Google for the search of the same word, both the business and the need for diet information seem virtually inexhaustible. Into this cluttered market comes Felicia Drury Kliment's Acid Alkaline Balance Diet: An Innovative Program for Ridding Your Body of Acidic Wastes.

The premise of this book is that a good balance between acidic and alkaline substances is crucial to avoiding a variety of chronic problems. And if acidic wastes, primarily stemming from food processing, are allowed to accumulate in the body over time, they will lead to a spate of problems. Kliment argues that while the body has evolved to handle naturally occurring toxic by-products of foods--such as the acids produced from the digestion of grains, the body is not capable of efficiently clearing artificial chemicals such as flavor enhancers, chemical preservatives, and pesticides.

The diet plan this book recommends is that people go back to consuming the 'ancestral diet'. Kliment strongly recommends that people eat natural, preferably organic, unprocessed food. This book takes to task the companies that market processed, phyto-chemicals and fiber lacking, calorie and sodium rich food sprinkled with a variety of vitamins as 'healthy' food. Kliment persuasively argues that not only are these 'healthy foods' unhealthy, but they can have an adverse impact on your waist.

Kliment believes that enzymes are important for disease prevention and encourages people to eat raw foods with each meal that contain their own enzymes. Except, Vivian Crisman, a nutritionist at Stanford University, argues that body has all the enzymes it needs to digest food and that enzymes eaten by people will most likely be neutralized by stomach acid. Crisman further adds that cooking a food can sometimes increase the bioavailability of certain vitamins, for example tomatoes are much better cooked than raw for cooking increases the presence of lycopene and anti-oxidants.

Often times it seems that Kliment treats anecdotal evidence as indisputable facts. Kliment argues that her diet can help combat obesity, digestive ailments, hypothyroidism, cardiovascular disease, and even alcoholism, and 'female reproductive disorders'. It seems unlikely that these miraculous effects exist. One may argue that she relies on anecdotal evidence because insufficient clinical studies have been carried out with these treatments in mind but then again why not wait to corroborate the claims before writing.

There is very little doubt in my mind that eating predominantly plant based, organic, unprocessed food would alleviate a lot of problems that afflict Americans today. And, while consistent overstatement of claims undermines the overall message of the book, I still believe that this book would prove to be useful to people struggling to find a simple, effective diet plan.

Monika Kowalczykowski contributed reporting to this review.

Editor's Note: spincycle's interview with Felicia Kliment is also available on Desicritics.

Book Review: The World is Flat? - A Critical Analysis of Thomas L. Friedman's New York Times Bestseller by Ronald Aronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo

spincycle — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 01:05:02 EST

I started off writing for Blogcritics.org with my own critical analysis of Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat - A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. It has been over a year and a half since I wrote that review and during that interim period, Friedman's book has managed to be on the New York Times Bestseller List for most of the time, and more spectacularly, has managed to sell about 2 million copies.

Those figures don't take away from the fact that Friedman's book is deeply flawed, and riven with factual and argumentative inaccuracies.

Ronald Aronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo have tried to set the record straight with their blistering critique of Thomas Friedman in their new book, The World is Flat? - A Critical Analysis of Thomas L. Friedman's New York Times Bestseller. While Aronica and Ramdoo's book is not full of Friedman-esque anecdotes, or anointed by a catchy title like the ones Mr. Friedman is so adept at coming up with, just to take the two examples, The Lexus and the Olive Tree to The World Is Flat, what this new book does offer is a deeply satisfying, encyclopedic, richly supported, step by step dismantling of each of Friedman's arguments.

The vision of the globalized world that Friedman offers in his book is a rose-tinted, cheery, bullish version, one that has little to do with reality, according to the authors. Friedman's 'golf course account' of globalization revels in accounts of successful businesses and people. Friedman proffers a vision of a globalized world that has an essentially 'flat' meritocratic global playing field, and provides limitless opportunities for profit for people who are intelligent or who choose to invest in schooling. He seasons his 'analysis' with accounts of his unmitigated fascination with gadgetry, and unbridled confidence in technology. Friedman's conjuring of this globalized world is in fact so utopic that even the familiar hindersome 'olive tree' is missing - only rearing up its head in the Middle East to let you in on the fact that its only the backward culture that's holding the Arab civilization back from the wonderful riches of the flat world. There are no losers in Friedman's flat world - only people for whom it may take a little longer to get their piece of the pie, for example the Chinese sweatshop worker who saves up to educate his kids who then go on to get better jobs and better pay. Of course, Friedman is wrong.

What Aronica and Ramdoo do in their slim book is make sure that you how utterly wrong Friedman is.

Aronica and Ramdoo spend time talking about a variety of substantive problems that afflict the current global economic regime including how the massive account deficits of US that underpin the global economic system, and how the middle class is increasingly losing out. They argue that Friedman's book is a testament to how you can be a peripatetic and still be basically a resort town to resort town peripatetic who never really visits the vast global ghetto made of upwards of 3 billion people with limited access to potable water and surviving on $2/day. Ramdoo and Aronica spend time explaining to the readers the vast underclass that dots the globalized world. The simple fact is that the world is not flat because it is patently laughable to compare the opportunities of the millions born into starvation and penury with children from the first or third world elites who get to buy $100 sneakers (made of course by the starving children).

The authors argue that globalization is indeed much more complex than what Friedman posited. As Aronica says, "Globalization is a highly complex interaction of forces. Not only does it exhibit integration, it also exhibits disintegration. It is rooted in cooperation--and it is rooted in violence. For some, it represents the triumph of free-market capitalism over communism, ushering in democracy, world peace and universal prosperity; for others, it represents conflict, unbridled greed, deregulated corporate power, and an utter disregard for humanity."

Throughout the book, Ramdoo and Aronica are concerned about the shrinking white collar jobs, the vanishing health and retirement benefits, and the simultaneous mass exploitation of the poor in the global third world. This attrition, this slide to the bottom, on both sides of the globe, argue the authors, is due to one single mechanism - the transnational corporations whose gargantuan profits have been fuelled by leeching the job security from the white collar workers in the west and extorting labor and resources from the unprivileged.

The message that I could distill from this book is that this kind of rampant predatory capitalism is not sustainable. The global economic regime is trying to cut off its nose to spite its face or in other words, corporations are willing to sacrifice the middle class to temporarily this short term hunt for profit. Profit is not the global good but often times pursuit of it is left unmonitored based on the argument that it somehow is.

There is a popular saying that a capitalist will even sell you the rope that you need to hang him with and that seems to be becoming increasingly true. We must disassociate global good from corporate profit and argue and work stridently towards a sustainable future before it is too late.

Aronica and Ramdoo's sobering account is an important addition to the literature of globalization and a necessary therapy for all those whose minds have been stunted by Friedman's glib book.

Interview: Ronald Aronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo: Authors, The World is Flat? - A Critical Analysis of Thomas L. Friedman's New York Times Bestseller (Part 2)

spincycle — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 01:06:30 EST

This is the second and concluding part of the interview with Ronald Aronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo, authors of The World is Flat? - A Critical Analysis of Thomas L. Friedman's New York Times Bestseller. Part 1 also appears on Desicritics.

Q) Thomas Friedman in his book, "The World is Flat: A brief history of the 21st Century" quotes Bill Gates, "Thirty years ago, if you had a choice between being born a genius on the outskirts of Bombay or Shanghai or being born an average person in Poughkeepsie, you would take Poughkeepsie, because your chances of thriving and living a decent life there, even with average talent, were much greater. But as the world has gone flat, and so many people can plug and play from anywhere, natural talent has started to trump geography." It seems to me Bill Gates is comparing a child born to fairly rich educated parents near Bombay or Shanghai given only a tiny fraction (about 1% in India) of people in India and China have access to "plug and play", something which you point out in your book. Even if we agree with Mr. Gates, we still miss the close to 95% of population with its share of geniuses that don't live close to Mumbai and Shanghai. Can you shed some light on their chances for "success" or integration in the global economy?

MR: What Gates and Friedman are discussing are the opportunities for the elite. Friedman writes, "I cannot tell any other society or culture what to say to its own children, but I can tell you what I say to my own: The world is being flattened. I didn't start it and you can't stop it, except at a great cost to human development and your own future. But we can manage it, for better or for worse. You can flourish in this flat world, but it does take the right imagination and the right motivation. While your lives have been powerfully shaped by 9/11, the world needs you to be forever the generation of 11/9 [the fall of the Berlin wall]--the generation of strategic optimists, the generation with more dreams than memories, the generation that wakes up each morning and not only imagines that things can be better but also acts on that imagination every day."

While these lessons display concern for his children, he leaves it up to their imagination as to the way forward. Friedman's daughter attends Yale, and there he sees the "precisely the sort of young person we want the America education system to keep churning out." People getting degrees in biomedical engineering while having medical doctors and science professors for fathers.

If only every kid in America had these advantages and could graduate from Yale, all would be well in the Kingdom of Flat. All they need is a wealthy daddy, a degree from U.S.-President-producing Yale, and we are off to the races. But for those of us whose children do not breathe such rarefied air, Freidman tells them to use their imagination.

Ditto for our children that don't breathe such rarefied air Chindia (China and India). The haves and have-nots are growing further apart in both rich countries and poor. But there is hope in programs such as microbanking. Bangladeshi Grameen Bank and its founder Muhammad Yunus received the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to create economic and social development from below. Indeed, there is a fortune at the bottom of the pyramid, but few multinationals seem to notice. While most IT activity is focused on urban centers such as Bangalore, India's Netcore is producing the $100 PC for the next billion. So, the big hope for addressing poverty isn't about the "zippies" in Bangalore that Friedman writes about, it's about the bottom of the pyramid. And when innovations happen there, entrepreneurs in Chindia will take them global at Chindia prices. Change is being driven by the bottom of the pyramid and not in the chrome and rosewood boardrooms and halls of the WTO or the World Bank or Wall Street.

Q) Friedman has all sorts of suggestions for parents living in suburbs like Poughkeepsie. What would you like to say to the parents of young kids across America - Is it to vote to change the economic and social policy of the government?

MR: Americans are just beginning to think about what can happen as early as 2010. Some forecasts show that, with an average growth rate of 8-10%, China's GDP will, by 2010, have surpassed Japan's, by 2030, China will have the world's largest economy, and, by 2050, it could be double that of the U.S.

Meanwhile, Washington leaves industrial policy up to the "free market"--or, as we write in our book, Washington has no industrial policy, which is perhaps the real issue--America does not have a national industrial policy that identifies and strengthens the industries in which it wants to be the master in the twenty-first century. America's economic policies are, by and large, set by transnational corporations who wield excessive power in Washington. Their interests are not in America, but are in their stockholders. As more than one CEO has said, their interests may indeed lie outside of the United Sates. So, keeping this in mind, Friedman's thesis could translate into "Go East, young man. Get your engineering degree, and move to Bangalore, because that's where your job is going."

For starters, I'd tell parents to read Sen. Byron Dorgan's book, Take this Job and Ship It: How Corporate Greed and Brain-Dead Politics Are Selling Out America. It's a real eye opener. Then visit his Web site, http://dorgan.senate.gov, to see the kind of legislation that is needed to put America's industrial policy back on track. He calls for: (1) antisweatshop legislation that bar imports produced under internationally defined "sweatshop" conditions and hold companies accountable for using forced labor or denying basic human rights to workers, including the right to organize; (2) repealing tax incentives for American companies that enjoy all the benefits of being "American"--government services and subsidies, and U.S. Military protection--while discarding reciprocal obligations to the country--jobs, economic investment, and paying a fair share of the tax burden; And (3) capping trade deficits and stopping the $800-billion-a-year trade deficit hemorrhaging. These recommendations do not deal with every disorder caused by globalization, but they could jump-start a debate that Congress has long avoided. And they are not about "protectionism." Instead they are about America formulating an industrial trade policy, because as, as former Reagan commerce advisor Clyde Prestowitz said, , "China and India have very clear national industrial policies. America does not."

Q) You bring out a variety of points that dismantle nearly all of arguments that Friedman makes in the book. What, according to you, did Friedman get right in his book? What does he get about global economic regime?

RA: The main thing Friedman got right was that there is a need for a book on globalization that can reach the general population. Unfortunately, his book misinforms the public. We could not find a single falsehood in Friedman's book. What he wrote, he mostly got right. But it's what he didn't write--it's what he left out--that makes the book so problematic. There's little more in his book beyond being a cheerleader for unfettered corporate globalization. And its important to recognize that, in some sense, this globalization stuff he writes about really does seem to work; if you consider that if four average blue-collar Americans join Friedman at a bar, the five of them, on average, would be a group of millionaires. As some of our politicians like to remind us, America is the economic envy of the world, and similar statistics to the bar scenario prove them right. That's right, eh?

Q) Thomas Friedman started of as a successful Middle-East pundit, something for which he has actually received training. It is at best a strange transition from being a Middle-East pundit to being an "expert" on globalization. Do Friedman's flaws in his economic analysis, as pointed out by you and numerous other scholars, emanate primarily from his lack of intellectual training in economics or his lack of intellectual honesty or is it something else entirely?

MR: It seems Friedman is an opportunist. Remember, he started on his globalization quest when he was on assignment for the Discovery Channel doing "The Other Side of Outsourcing." It seems to have occurred to him during that assignment, "Aha. A book!" You'll see that he based many of the stories in his book on the Discovery documentary. Being a well-placed smart person, Friedman did what any capitalist would do, he used his celebrity assets to make money. And to him, we say kudos. Stiglitz, Bagwhati, Roach, Leamer and other well-respected, fully-qualified economists and business analysts can write their hearts out, but who will read them? Celebrity has its privileges.

What's unnerving is not Friedman, but the overwhelming traction of his book. This is best explained by Professor Roberto Gonzalez, "Ultimately, Friedman's work is little more than advertising. The goal is not to sell the high-tech gadgetry described in page after page of the book, but to sell a way of life--a world view glorifying corporate capitalism and mass consumption as the only paths to progress. It is a view intolerant of lives lived outside the global marketplace. It betrays [unconsciously reveals] a disregard for democracy and a profound lack of imagination. This book's lighthearted style might be amusing were it not for the fact that his subject--the global economy--is a matter of life and death for millions. Friedman's words and opinions, ill informed as they are, shape the policies of leaders around the world. Many consider him to be a sophisticated thinker and analyst--not a propagandist. It is a sobering reminder of the intellectual paralysis gripping our society today." Today we don't play sports; we sit on the couch and play our sports vicariously through celebrity sports stars. Today, we don't have much time to think; we let our celebrity pundits do that for us.

Q) You heavily rely on paraphrasing and quotations from others authors to put forth your case. Was that a conscious decision or was it strictly a result of time pressures?

RA: We'll give you yet another quote to tell why! Here is Bill Moyers at the 2007 National Conference on Media Reform, "The degree to which this [free trade] has become a purely ideological debate, devoid of any factual basis that people can weigh the gains and losses is reflected in Thomas Friedman's astonishing claim, stated not long ago in a television interview, that he endorsed the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) without even reading it. That is simply because it stood for 'free trade.'

We have reached the stage when the Poo-bahs of punditry have only to declare that 'the world is flat,' for everyone to agree it is, without going to the edge and looking over themselves. It's called reporting."

And that's exactly what we want to accomplish with our book, going to the edge and doing some "reporting" on what those qualified to analyze and report on 21st century globalization has to say.

We have 46 footnote references on our sources of information. Friedman has zero. We don't make stuff up and tell stories about friends and elite CEOs. And we explore nine critical issues Friedman ignores or glosses over, along with an enumeration of 22 action items. Our book would be hundreds more pages if we expounded on each of these strategies and their rationales. We meant only to set the record straight on what Friedman is saying by providing the views of the experts, and then to provide the reader with a roadmap for exploring this vital subject further, for globalization affects all our lives and will be of even greater significance to our children and grandchildren. Simply stated, we all must learn about globalization and our available choices as we define our place in a global economy.

We hope our analysis of Friedman's book provides readers who were awed by his 600 pages of bafflegab with a second take on the monumental subject of globalization.
To help our readers to develop their understanding of the issues, we have a shortlist of suggested readings and a comprehensive and growing resource list at www.mkpress.com/flat. Our message is "Wake up!" it's past time to come to grips with the greatest reorganization of the world since the Industrial Revolution.

Q) Friedman is often accused of writing newspaper plain speak, speaking in clichés and in analogies but avoiding facts and avoiding substance to story telling. The idea is, according to Friedman, to be a translator of the economic jargon and make it accessible to the public. Is there any merit in this idea? Are economic facts about the current global regime so complex?

RA: A translator of economic jargon would be great. We open our book saying that the person on the street, especially in America, has little clue what globalization is all about. But few have any doubt that change is placing the world under great stress, that it is being "turned upside down." And the person on the street may suspect that it has to do with the word, which increasingly appears in the press and other media: globalization. But what does it really mean? It would be great if a popularizer, a famous personality or pundit, would explain the many complicated political, economic and social issues connected to the phenomenon of globalization. Walter Cronkite or Bill Moyers could probably do that.

Desperate for such information, millions of people, including leaders in business, government and education, have turned to Friedman's mass market book to gain an understanding of globalization. Unfortunately, they are served up stories from friends, CEOs and other personal contacts of the author. These stories are not harmless, for they become solemn writ for lawmakers and opinion mongers.

It's not so complex to explain that multinational corporations, are by their very nature, aimed at maximizing shareholder value. To achieve this corporate goal, multinational corporations are literally going to the ends of the earth in search of dirt-cheap labor for both manufacturing and high-end knowledge-based workers. IBM recently laid off 15,000 employees in America, while hiring 45,000 in India. There is nothing complex about that idea.

But shipping jobs overseas and hollowing out America's middle class is only part of the picture. America is exporting its pollution by relocating manufacturing facilities to countries where environment laws are lax or non-existent. Let's not forget about the human abuses lurking behind famous brand names and companies. Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee cites Wal-Mart among others as repeat offenders. Friedman has nothing but awe for Wal-Mart's supply chaining, failing all mention of Wal-Mart's darker side cited by Kernaghan. Like other US retailers, Wal-Mart claims to be enforcing decent labor conditions, but investigators find otherwise. Kernaghan points out that the same companies have won enforceable rules in trade agreements to protect their trademarks, labels and copyrights, yet regard protections for workers as "an impediment to free trade." "Under this distorted sense of values," says Kernaghan, "the label is protected but not the human being, the worker who makes the product."

What's so hard for the laymen to understand about that? Plain newspaper speak is great if it conveys substance. Friedman is especially destructive when he opines on public matters outside his supposed expertise. His thinking seems to be anchored by Ayn Rand's social philosophy: Let the strong prevail, let the weak pay for their weakness. There is no doubt that many of those who read Friedman are now convinced the world is flat (perhaps they also believe the moon is made of green cheese). But newspaper plain talk doesn't make it so. Having paid the price of wading through Friedman's almost 600 pages of grandiloquent prose and bafflegab, there are those who want to protect that investment by clinging to the idea that they have gained a full understanding of globalization. Albert Einstein once wrote, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." Friedman's simplistic treatise on globalization fails that test.

While Friedman's personal anecdotes fascinate many readers and make for good tales at cocktail parties, it's what's left out of story after story after story that makes the book such a flawed distillation of globalization. Thus, it is what's ignored on the many issues that Friedman touches upon that makes the book dangerous, for it gives average readers a false sense that they are gaining a true understanding of this broad and complex subject, globalization.

Interview: Ronald Aronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo: Authors, The World is Flat? - A Critical Analysis of Thomas L. Friedman's New York Times Bestseller (Part 1)

spincycle — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 00:55:22 EST

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, the runaway bestseller by New York Times columnist Friedman has now been on the New York Times Bestseller list for over 85 weeks and has sold over 2 million copies in hardcover alone. Ronald Aronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo, authors of The World is Flat? - A Critical Analysis of Thomas L. Friedman's New York Times Bestseller, point out that Friedman's book is also full of factual and argumentative inaccuracies, some deliberate and some as a result of living in the CEO bubble. In their book, Ramdoo and Aronica conduct a step by step demolition of nearly all the points that Mr. Friedman makes in his book.

The interview has been split in two parts due to the length. Here's part one of the interview.

Q) What prompted you to write this book? Were you primarily motivated by wanting to straighten the record? Can you also talk a little more about your background and how this book came about?

RA: With a 30-year career at the intersection of business and technology under my belt, I coauthored a book in 2001, The Death of "E" and the Birth of the Real New Economy. In that book, we described how the technology-enabled globalization of white-collar work would be the new frontier in the world economy. The book is about business transformation as a result of the world being wired and the capability that the Internet provides to interconnect business processes around the globe. It was time to prepare for a whole new way of operating a business. In 2006, I picked up a copy of Friedman's book and was floored by its superficiality. But what was more shocking to me was the fact that millions of copies had been sold and its influence on leaders in business and government. Indeed, I wanted to set the record straight, for Globalization is the greatest reorganization of the world since the Industrial Revolution, and the stories Friedman spun are but a small piece of the overall tapestry of this monumental transformation.

Globalization is a highly complex interaction of forces. Not only does it exhibit integration, it also exhibits disintegration. It is rooted in cooperation--and it is rooted in violence. For some, it represents the triumph of free-market capitalism over communism, ushering in democracy, world peace and universal prosperity; for others, it represents conflict, unbridled greed, deregulated corporate power, and an utter disregard for humanity.

Yet, the person on the street, especially in America, has little clue what globalization is all about. Few have any doubt that change is placing the world under great stress--that it is being turned upside down. And they may suspect that it has to do with the word, globalization, which increasingly appears in the press and other media. But what does it really mean? It would be great if a popularizer, a famous personality or pundit, would explain the many political, economic and social issues connected to the phenomenon of globalization. Desperate for such information, millions of people, including leaders in government and education, have turned to Friedman's mass market book to gain an understanding of globalization. Unfortunately, they are served up stories about Friedman's friends, elite CEOs and other personal contacts.

The notion of globalization has been around for centuries, and has taken many forms: political, economic, cultural, and technological, to name a few. But the twenty-first century-style globalization that Friedman writes about is unique. It has a name: "corporate" globalization.

What we want our book to do is to go beyond Friedman's superficial treatment of globalization and encourage readers who were awed by his book to "think again."

The aim of our short monograph is to provide a counterbalance to Friedman's cheerleading for corporate globalization. To help readers get a fuller understanding of the issues, we provide suggested readings at the end of our book and at our Web site. Globalization is so important to all of us that we need become more fully informed, not misinformed by story after story based on personal anecdotes, and stories spun from meeting Friedman's daughter's friend's boyfriend at Yale, or playing golf with rich and famous corporate executives. While readers might be unable to find a single falsehood in Friedman's book, neither can they find the whole truth, nor most of the critically important facets needed for a full picture of globalization.

Q) The current way of globalization, according to you, seems like a race to the bottom. It seems like a system largely driven by large corporations and their obsession with lowering the cost of production. Let me juxtapose this thought with something which is oft mentioned - that success of US from the 1950s onwards was largely buttressed by robust middle class with decent disposable incomes. My question to you is that is there a chance that the vanishing middle class will translate into a vanishing consumer, and what will that mean for the whole enterprise?

MR: That's a very good question, for it touches on some of the more profound aspects of twenty-first-century style globalization. We have a whole section in our book, "America's Former Middle Class" that talks about the plight of the American middle class. Three pillars: land (material resources); labor; and capital form the foundation of industrial economies. In the early years of the Industrial Revolution, Dickensonian industrialists kept labor down when it came to any stake in wealth.

Then, in 1901, Republican Teddy Roosevelt became President. He distrusted wealthy businessmen and, as a Trust Buster, dissolved 40 monopolistic corporations. His Square Deal promised a fair shake for the average citizen, including regulation of railroad rates, and pure foods and drugs. As an outdoorsman, he promoted the conservation movement, emphasizing efficient use of natural resources. After 1906, he attacked big business and suggested that the courts were biased against labor unions. In short, you might say Roosevelt gave birth today's American middle class. Recognizing the capitalists' excesses during the Industrial Revolution, leaders, such as Roosevelt, reigned in raw capitalism and created a "mixed economy," not the pure laissez-faire form of capitalism advocated by the Dickensonians.

Fast forwarding to today, free-market Friedman seems to assert that now, with his utopian, digitally connected flat world, even the nation-state could wane as flat-world capitalists create, in the words of Marx and Engels, "a world after its own image."

Henry Ford was a pioneer of "welfare capitalism" designed to improve the lot of his workers and especially to reduce the heavy turnover that had many departments hiring 300 men a year to fill 100 slots. Efficiency meant hiring and keeping the best workers. In January 1914, Ford announced his five-dollar a day program. The revolutionary program called for a reduction in length of the workday from 9 to 8 hours, a 5-day work week, and a raise in minimum daily pay from $2.34 to $5 for qualifying workers.

Wall Street criticized Ford for starting the 40-hour work week and the minimum wage, but he showed that by paying his people more, Ford workers would be able to afford the cars they were producing--which would be good for the economy. Ford labeled the increased compensation profit-sharing rather than wages.

With today's corporate globalization, we are seeing a return to Dickensonian capitalism on a grand scale. Not only do we need a strong American middle class, we need a strong global middle class, not a global 3rd world that is seeing America heading toward 3rd world status. We need a new Teddy Roosevelt and thinking capitalists in the likes of upstart Henry Ford if the world is to avoid Wall Street's rule and its preeminent goal of only increasing shareholder value.

Q) You raise multiple points in your book illustrating ways in which the world is not particularly "flat". If I read you right, you are not against "flat world" but a Friedman conception of a neo-liberal "flat world" that exists today. Tell us a little more about your thoughts the current "flat" world and the kind of "flat" world that you would like to see. In other words, how does the current global economic regime look like and what would you like to see changed?

RA: Neo-liberals believe that free markets, free trade, and the free flow of capital are the most efficient ways to produce the greatest social, political, and economic good. They argue for reduced taxation, reduced regulation, and minimal government involvement in the economy. They include privatizing health and retirement benefits, dismantling of trade unions, and generally opening our economy to foreign competition. Detractors see neo-liberalism as a power grab by economic elites and as a race to the bottom for everyone else.

The current economic regime unleashes neoliberalism. Agriculture, indigenous peoples' resources, water, genes, medicines--increasingly, they are all being privatized and placed in the hands of transnational corporations. The field of economics has always addressed both private and public goods. But today's neoliberal philosophy views all goods as private goods--perhaps even our laws are becoming private goods.

Corporations no longer influence our laws--now, they write them! Multinationals, working behind closed doors are writing the world's economic agreements unfettered by any one nation's interests and unaccountable to individual nations' citizens. For example, the WTO, which emerged from GATT, which covered international trade and tariffs, is an organization that protects multinationals. And Chapter 11 of the supposed free-trade agreement of NAFTA, establishes a new system of private arbitration for foreign investors to bring injury claims against governments.

The operative principle is that foreign capital investing in Canada, Mexico or the United States may demand compensation if the profit-making potential of their ventures are injured by government decisions. This gives foreign-based companies more rights than have domestic businesses operating in their home country. Global corporations are free to litigate on their own without having to ask national governments to act on their behalf in global forums. The national identity of multinationals will become less and less relevant, since they have status to challenge governments. NAFTA creates, as Lydia Lazar, a Chicago attorney, puts it, "an open class of legal equals." She adds that "NAFTA is really an end run around the Constitution."

What we'd like to see changed is the form of governance needed for global trade. Current forums and trade agreements (WTO, World Bank, IMF, NAFTA, CAFTA) have stripped many nation-states--hence, their people--of their former roles governing trade. Not doing this, indeed, could lead to the scenarios described in Harvard's David Korten's book, When Corporations Rule the World.

Because globalization is the greatest reorganization of the world since the Industrial Revolution, there's no pat checklist to instantly change policy and strategy. We're talking about a multi-year struggle for individuals, companies and nations to adjust and readjust. Although we do not in any way provide cookie cutter solutions in our book, we enumerate many of the issues that must be addressed.

Here are some examples: 1. Reform of the dependence on Treasury securities, which funds U. S. over-consumption with borrowed dollars from China, Japan and other export driven nations. 2. Reform the IMF, World Bank, and WTO to make their decision-making more transparent. 3. Provide education subsidies, not farm subsidies in the U.S. and Europe 4. Establish worldwide regulation that would restrict continuing damage to the environment and maintain biodiversity. 5. Have government once again govern corporations versus the reverse as it is today (e.g. put trade policy back into Congress, not in trade agreements written behind closed doors). 6. Establish a U.S. Federal Competitiveness cabinet position. 7. Break the bribery cycle between poor countries' governments and international companies. 8. Establish tripolar trading blocs, not American unipolar hegemony (e.g. establish true economic unions, not asymmetric trade agreements). 9. Separate public goods (the commons) from private goods. 10. Foster. increased savings (e.g., with automatic 401K plans). 11. Develop energy policies and strategies that will break our dependency on oil (e.g. rethink and reorganize America's sprawling suburbs (exurbs)). 13. Globalize health care, e.g., allow people to spend Medicare dollars overseas (Mexico would boom, solving much of the illegal immigration problem in the U.S.). We are well overdue for a wakeup call to address these and other issues. And an open debate could just lead to peoples' active engagement in creating a just, sustainable, economic world.

Q) You spend a fair amount of time on describing the underbelly of the beast - the 998 million Indians with no access to Internet, the farmers coming suicide there, or the laid off workers in Detroit. The global middle class and under class are suffering. But certainly the number of Chinese below poverty line has taken a dramatic nose dive in the past two decades. It also seems clear to me that the 9% growth rates in India are benefiting some poor. Certainly the story of globalization is not all doom and gloom. Tell us about the cross cutting forces at work in globalization today.

MR: Today, leading economists, both advocates and critics of globalization, agree that international trade has improved the lives of many across the world, bringing technology and knowledge to virtually every corner of the globe, and has raised many above the tyranny of backward and often repressive cultures. No doubt volumes could be filled with success stories of international trade. It's "corporate globalization" that's at issue in the 21st century. Neoliberal free-trade proponents too often frame the issues in a polarizing way: "free-trade" versus "protectionism," "good" versus "bad." "Your are either for us, or against us," they might say. "Free-trade reduces poverty, protectionism creates poverty." Of course, this is bullshit. Globalization is not a bipolar issue, while the case can be made that "corporate globalization" is.

Defining poverty is key to any discussion of the so-called poverty lines. Is economic globalization the only form of globalization? Should some goods be off limits to corporate globalization and, if so, which ones? To answer these questions, we've included a large section in the book devoted to the concept of the Privatization of the Commons. We quote Indian ecologist Dr.Vandana Shiva, "People do not die for lack of incomes. They die for lack of access to resources. Here too Jeffrey Sacks (The End of Poverty) is wrong when he says, 'In a world of plenty, 1 billion people are so poor, their lives are in danger.' The indigenous people in the Amazon, the mountain communities in the Himalaya, peasants whose land has not been appropriated and whose water and biodiversity has not been destroyed by debt-creating industrial agriculture are ecologically rich, even though they do not earn a dollar a day. On the other hand, even at five dollars a day, people are poor if they have to buy their basic needs at high prices. Indian peasants who have been made poor and pushed into debt over the past decade to create markets for costly seeds and agrochemicals through economic globalization are ending their lives in thousands."

After China announced plans to adopt a new law that seeks to crack down on sweatshops and protect workers' rights by giving labor unions real power for the first time since it introduced market forces in the 1980s, guess who started lobbying the Chinese politicians? As David Baboza reported in the New York Times, "The move, which underscores the government's growing concern about the widening income gap and threats of social unrest, is setting off a battle with American corporations that have lobbied against it by hinting that they may build fewer factories here. The workers' advocates say that the proposed labor rules--and more important, enforcement powers--are long overdue, and they accuse the American businesses of favoring a system that has led to widespread labor abuse." "You have big corporations opposing basically modest reforms," said Tim Costello, an official of the Global Labor Strategies and a longtime labor union advocate. "This flies in the face of the idea that globalization and corporations will raise standards around the world."

What's currently going on is called "corporate globalization," where powerful transnational corporations, backed by supposed "free trade" treaties penned by corporate lobbyists in Washington, go to the ends of the earth to exploit slave-like labor. No one of us wants continuing poverty in China, India, or elsewhere. But is making $2.00 a day (the oft quoted dollar amount to be "out of poverty") the goal, the only goal?

Out of Poverty?

Life in rural communities in China, India and elsewhere is tough. Are we to displace a non-money economy with formerly self-sufficient peoples moving to the mega cities to live in slums? In the recent PBS documentary, "China From the Inside," rural people dislocated due to the damming of rivers were given new high density housing. But as one of them exclaimed, we have no jobs and cannot raise our food anymore. Relocation from dam areas, like the Three Gorges, is causing huge social upheaval (75,000 riots in China in 2005).Thousands of families are divided throughout China as parents spend most of the year in large cities making a living, while their children remain in rural villages with grandma tending to all the chores and to the fields. In other cases, women are left in the villages to raise children while husbands go off alone to the cities to work. Expectant mothers still abort female fetuses or abandon newborn girls because of the long-held view that women are not as valuable to the culture as men. China is the only nation in the world where the suicide rate for women is higher than that for men. Of course, relocated peasants cannot afford the shoe strings on the brand-named shoes they manufacture in sweatshops. But then, again, they do get to see their children 4 days out of the year! So yes, they are "out of poverty" according to the $2.00 a day rule, but at what cost? Is there hope for a Global Middle Class? Why, when the Chinese Communist Party's latest five-year plan called for increased focus on unions, did multinationals threaten to relocate jobs to Viet Nam or other dirt-cheap-labor countries?

China is run by the Communist Party, which bases its legitimacy on delivering both stability and the conditions for prosperity. But stability is under threat as the economic boom strands millions at the margins. Meanwhile, rampant corruption is sapping people's trust in the Party. Officials are seen, increasingly, not as public servants but as profiteers. Is China Corporate Globalization's 21st century poster child where the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer in social as well as monetary terms? We don't have the answers in our book, but we identify the essential questions, such as, Is earning $2.00 a day the end of poverty? You'll see little discussion of these matters in Friedman's book.

Interview: Felicia Drury Kliment, Author of Acid Alkaline Balance Diet: An Innovative Program for Ridding Your Body of Acidic Wastes

spincycle — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 16:39:47 EST

The interview with Felicia Drury Kliment, author of Acid Alkaline Balance Diet: An Innovative Program for Ridding Your Body of Acidic Wastes, was conducted via email over the past week.

Q) Let me begin by asking you a little more about yourself- Where did you grow up, in particular, what kind of food you generally ate while growing up?

A) I grew up in the late forties and fifties in Youngstown, Ohio, population 100,000. The food additive industry was still in its infancy then, so food was relatively free of pesticides. At the time a well balanced meal which included the three food types--carbohydrates, fat, and protein--was the by-word to good health. A typical dinner was made up of meat, potatoes, vegetables and salad, while a typical breakfast consisted of eggs, bacon, and toast for breakfast.

One of the highlights of my youth was the food we got fresh from a farm or grown in our backyard. Although Youngstown was then referred to as a steel town, we -my mother, father, and brother--lived in a suburb only minutes away by car from many small farms In the summer my mother and I would drive to the Fite farm to buy corn on the cob. When we arrived, Ms. Fite would go out to the cornfields and pick corn especially for us. I also remember our 'milkman,' delivering milk in glass bottles. The top third of the bottle was pure cream because milk was not homogenized in those times. What also stands out in my memory are the beefsteak tomatoes my mother raised in the backyard. She fertilized them with her 'handmade' fertilizer--a compost heap of leaves and other debris.

Q) Tell us a little more about your professional background. What led you into your current profession and your interest in the Acid Alkaline Diet?

A) You might say that it started when I was 10 years old. I had terrible headaches from the strong glasses I wore, so I started eating raw carrots all day long. In three months my eyesight was normalized and I threw my glasses away! My interest in the healing power of foods then went into hibernation--until I was in my early thirties when I picked out a book in the library at random, unintentionally re-awakening my interest in alternative medicine and diet. The book was about how vitamin E could heal eye disease. I was hooked! I began researching the subject of alternative health and writing articles in professional journals and popular magazines. Years later I began teaching at City College in New York.

What triggered my book writing and health consulting was an ailment I had developed, acid reflux. My knowledge of chemistry had made me aware that the body consists most basically of acid and alkaline particles. Their balance is vital not only to good health but to survival itself. Acid reflux increases the levels of acid in the body, thereby disrupting the acid-alkaline pH of the blood. I set about working out a diet that would heal acid reflux and other degenerative disease, thereby restoring the normal ratio of the acid alkaline ph balances in the body. Then I wrote a book about it, the Acid Alkaline Balance Diet.

Q) Can you talk a little more about the history of acid alkaline diet? Who first came to the conclusion that it is the acid-alkaline imbalances that lead to certain diseases? How has the field grown since?.

A) Concern with acid alkaline imbalance stretches way back to the late nineteenth century. However, the idea that acid waste can disrupt the acid-alkaline pH balances in the body has evolved fairly recently, in the last 25 years or so. German and Japanese scientists came to the conclusion that the acid wastes from metabolic (organ) function was the cause of pH imbalances. I have taken the problem a step further by pin pointing the wrong diet as the principal culprit in the production of acid waste in the body.

Food that the individual can't break down in the digestive tract turns into acid waste, which is highly toxic. The blood stream carries it to all parts of the body and wherever acid waste settles, it inflames organ tissue. This is how degenerative diseases get started.

Q) A simple search on Google for "healthy diet plans" reveals that diet plans these days are inextricably linked to weight loss. In particular, the diet options seem particularistic and generally tailored towards "fixing" the weight problem. Please tell us about you thoughts on this issue?

A) That's the problem with most diet plans. They're standardized--one size fits all--as if every person has the same physiology as everyone else! Furthermore, most diet plans aim directly at losing weight, rather than doing so indirectly--by eating foods that enhance health. The primary aim of my book is to help the reader find foods that they can digest easily rather than merely the foods that take off weight. Because foods that aren't digested properly ultimately put on weight. When your digestive system works well, you automatically lose weight because there is no leftover acid waste-- some of which the body converts into fatty acid which puts on pounds..

Q) There is a proliferation of healthy diet plans and ideas including the macrobiotic diet and what not. Tell us about the specific problems with other kinds of "healthy" dieting options that fail to address the acid-alkaline balance?

A) What very few diet plans don't address is the differences in individual digestive metabolism. I advocate eating according to your metabolic needs. When you do this you are not only eating foods that your digestive system can break down, but you're also supplying your body with the nutrients you are short in, while eating less of those nutrients that you have in excess. When you approach dieting in this way, you automatically normalize you acid-alkaline pH balances.

Q) Can you walk us through the biology behind the acid-alkaline diet? How important is the acid-alkaline balance as compared to say other health eating virtues including low fat or including Omega3 etc. and healthy lifestyle virtues like exercising regularly. Am I amiss in asking you to compare and contrast when the real answer is syncretism of these options?

A) No you're not. First, a low fat diet is unhealthy because scientists long ago showed that for normal body function, 25% of your diet should consist of fats and oils. All health issues, including obesity can be resolved if you eat according to your metabolic type. There are three types of metabolisms: the grain eater, the meat eater, and the omnivore (meat and grain) eater. The niacin test in my book enables you to discover which metabolic type you are. Your type of metabolism determines what food you should eat.

For example, the meat eater does well on lots of meat, butter, root vegetables, etc., This leads in to your question about omega 3 oils. Everyone needs some omega 3, but the grain eater can digest greater quantities of it than the meat eater because the grain eater can eats lots of fish the primary source of omega 3 oil. By eating the foods for which your digestive system was designed, you will maintain the proper acid-alkaline ph balances in the blood and other bodily fluids.

To answer the third part of your question. Certainly exercise is important, but the problem is that the press, fueled by the medical profession, implies that exercise is the most important factor in good health. A healthy diet comes first. Another problem that should be addressed is electro-magnetic pollution, particularly from cell phones and computers. There are chips which are very effective in neutralizing this pollution.

Q) The book lays a lot of blame on the current dietary acid-alkaline imbalances to modern agricultural and food processing methods including food coloration, hormones, insecticides, preservatives etc. Tell us a little more about this. Pleases give us an example of a specific chemical and how it affects us, if so is possible.

A) There is so much pollution in everything that we are exposed to that it's hard to know where to start. Obviously organic foods should be eaten when ever possible. While not totally free of pesticides, they have far lower levels than agribusiness produce and are free of antibiotics, and additives including food coloring. I'll mention one additive that is particularly harmful to health, and that is the growth hormone in milk. Studies show that it causes a spurt in growth which makes those who grow above a certain level 2 to 3 times more likely to get pancreatic and colon cancer.

Q) You advise people to eat raw foods including organic eggs. If I am not wrong, there is a chance that some harmful bacteria and fungi can be ingested as a result of eating raw organic eggs.

A) You do read a lot about the danger of eating raw eggs, but the facts don't support the claim. The American Egg Board reports that research studies conducted by food scientists have found that the average consumer might encounter a salmonella-infected egg once in eighty-four years! Because organic eggs weren't used in the studies, the chance of eating a salmonella-infected egg if the egg is organic would be even more remote.

Q) Should we take your book as a whole hearted approval of eating organic foods?

A) I certainly would encourage buying organic, but for anyone who is tight financially it isn't necessary to buy all organic produce. If possible, don't buy fruits and vegetables found to be higher in pesticide residues such as peaches, apples, sweet bell peppers, strawberries, imported grapes, spinach, lettuce, carrots, and potatoes. On the other hand, if you're short on cash you can buy broccoli, bananas, pineapple, mangoes, frozen sweet peas, frozen corn asparagus, avocados, and onions since they are low in pesticides.

Q) Lastly, what would be your diet advice for average Americans that cannot avoid eating out?

A) For such people who for one reason or another cannot avoid eating out most of the time, I would suggest that they buy a juicer and make at least one glass of juice daily, preferably in the morning. Use organic vegetables such as carrots, beets, celery, lettuce, zucchinis, and a little parsley. I would also recommend taking supplements that are derived from food complexes. Standard Process is one such brand and probably the best. (I've been through their factory and seen their cultivated fields and the animals they raise, which are the raw materials for their supplements.)