THE CBO REPORT: THE TIMES BLOWS IT; THE POST DOESN'T

I never took economics, but even I know there are 2 basics to most markets, including the labor market: supply and demand.

I was, for a few years, quite active in AFTRA, the broadcasters’ union, serving on the NY Local Board, and as official shop steward or unofficial “point man” on labor issues at 2 radio stations and one TV news operations.  This gave me a fine appreciation of how that worked in labor negotiations:  the people who supplied the labor might push up the price of a job, but those who chose to demand controlled how many jobs were available.

Someone please tell the NY Times.

“Health Care Law Projected to Cut the Labor Force”

That’s how the Times headlined its online report on a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) assessment of the effects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA a.k.a. “Obamacare”) on the American workforce.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/05/us/politics/budget-office-revises-estimates-of-health-care-enrollment.html?hp

And here’s how the Times’ Annie Lowrey and Jonathan Weisman led their story. “Congressional Budget Office analysis released Tuesday predicted that the Affordable Care Act would shrink the work force by the equivalent of more than two million full-time positions and recharged the political debate over the health care law, providing Republican opponents fresh lines of attack and putting Democrats on the defensive.”

Although he nowhere mentioned the Times in his Fact Checker column, the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler and his editors did feature this headline and lead:

“No, CBO did not say Obamacare will kill 2 million jobs

“First, this is not about jobs. It’s about workers — and the choices they make.” 

Kessler then explains, -- Times editors and staff take note – how ACA affects the workforce.  “The health insurance subsidies in the law,” he says, are “a substantial benefit that decreases as people earn more money, so at a certain point, a person has to choose between earning more money or continuing to get the maximum help with health insurance payments.”

 In other words, closer to my workforce experience, Obamacare frees (admittedly at the public expense) some people to ask the one labor question whose answer they control: “Is this job worth it?”

 Even if, in the CBO’s analysis, 2.3 million people over the next 10 years say, “Hell, No!” this does not mean they will not be replaced.

 Even if some employers will reduce their full-time workforce to duck contributing to their employees’ health insurance, this does not mean their hours will not be re-claimed by someone else.

All that comes from the demand side of the ledger.  The employer will hire as many workers as he needs, and smart employers will deploy them in the most efficient manner (even if that means fewer, but full-time workers rather than the greatest use of cheaper part-timers.)

Or, as WaPo’s Kessler points out, the CBO, -- his words --, “virtually screams,” its not-hard-to-understand analysis.  “The estimated reduction stems almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply, rather than from a net drop in businesses’ demand for labor, so it will [produce neither] an increase in unemployment or underemployment.

Rather than detail for you the Times’ mentally and politically unbalanced story, take a look for yourself at the Gray Lady’s triangulation: (1) the Republicans say this and this and this (2) which we admit doesn’t really square with the facts, but (3) what the Democrats give us is drivel.

Fair enough, but how does that correct the complete misconception of the CBO report with which the Times leads and frames the story?

I would quibble with one assumption Kessler makes:  “All things being equal, in a normally functioning economy, the total demand for jobs would equal 95 percent of the supply of jobs. So … over time, the nation does end up with a slightly smaller economy.”

Sounds like a mathematical certainty; except that it does not describe the real world (any more than the allegedly shrinking official unemployment rate describes the real world of job seekers’ opportunities).  Kessler assumes that the folks who “opt out” disappear, at least in terms of their net contribution to the economy.  But some of these people will continue to work, some of these will work “off-the-books” or in what we call “the black economy.”  A few will create new enterprises which in turn produce more jobs and more returns to both the official and unofficial economies.  It is possible the shifts in the workforce attendant upon ACA's subsidies will actually benefit the economy, not shrink it.

In free market terms, the folks whose main motivation at work was to protect their health benefits should be replaced by workers with more productive motivations.  One would bet (heavily) we are talking mostly about the replacement of older workers by younger, perhaps more vigorous, perhaps more flexible, perhaps more adaptable to the ever-changing needs of the employer.  Hang me for a geezer-traitor.

If the economy is to work, we should think not in terms of two workers for the price of 1.5, but 3 times the productive output from the cost of 2.5 new workers.

In any case, here’s one final lesson for the Times from the great Fact Checker of the Post: “If someone says they decided to leave their job for personal reasons, most people would not say they ‘lost’ their jobs. They simply decided not to work.”

 

SAYING NO TO OPPRESSION: CHILE 1988; UKRAINE 2014

I recently took one of those rare “trips back in time,” when I saw the award-winning docudrama No, Chilean director Pablo Larrain’s look at the 1988 plebiscite which dealt the death blow to General Augusto Pinochet’s 15 year dictatorship.  Mexican actor Gael García Bernal plays a young Ad Man who helps create the TV campaign that led Chileans to an overwhelming No vote against the dictatorship.  His ad agency boss runs the Yes TV campaign.

I was there, in Chile, between broadcast jobs, on the State Department’s dime, conferring with the country’s media elite about the future of television, pushing the idea that the coming age of satellite-driven communication was going to make everyplace equidistant from the global center stage, and make Chile’s “end of the road” self-concept an anachronism. 

Some Chileans thought that was an interesting, if radically counter-cultural idea, but most of them were rightfully preoccupied by something else: the role television was then playing in the upcoming national vote on the political future of Chile.

It was quite eerie to see on the movie screen in Albuquerque the very spots and programs I’d seen in Santiago, in production, or as they ran on Chilean TV, to see my best Chilean friend of the visit, Patricio Banados back in the No anchor chair.

It was a fine madness, bred no doubt by a serene confidence in his own re-election, which led Pinochet to approve a perfectly fair plebiscite.  It was also plu-perfectly Chilean.  Part of the horror of America’s Henry Kissinger-led intervention in support of Pinochet’s 1973 coup was that it wrecked the most civil, democratic society south of the United States.  

Thus, in 1988, after 15 years of state violence and deadly “disappearances,” a Chilean plebiscite still had to be real and fair and open.  Even a dictator’s credibility and honor depended upon fidelity to democracy.

In TV terms, this meant that the ground rules of the plebiscite required that the 2 sides on the ballot – Yes, Pinochet rules for another 8 years; No, he doesn’t, and has to leave at the end of his term – share a half-hour of prime time, seen on every TV channel in the country, to make their cases directly to the voting public.  The order of the nightly 15 minute packages alternated, day by day.

The Yes packages argued that 15 years of economic progress (and there had indeed been some under the Dictator) equaled happiness.  The argument was made with a lot of intentionally old-fashioned images of national pride and productivity and a lot of haranguing by “important people,” including most often, Pinochet himself.  This stale concoction was hard to watch, except when the General was on screen, usually in an ornate military uniform, speaking in a voice sounded almost exactly like a chicken.  Then, even to Chileans, it was chillingly hilarious. 

The No packages were a mix of jaunty young people singing and dancing in praise of freedom, gentle reminders of a more civil time from the comfortable, confidence-building anchorman Banados, who was famous in Chile for having been disappeared from the TV screen by Pinochet, and a few moments of brilliant political video.

One of these showed a notorious newsreel of a policeman beating an unresisting demonstrator, labeling both men as “good Chileans,” and insisting that both could, as that American icon of unnecessary violence and conflict Rodney King said, “get along.”

To a foreign media observer, there was no question which was the more effective campaign, but, as I wrote in the NY Times at the time, pre-election polls had the result “too close to call.”

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/04/opinion/chile-waits-in-silence-for-a-verdict.html

Clearly a lot of people who didn’t feel safe telling some pollster they were against the government, did feel safe when casting their ballots.  The final score was 56% to 44% for the No.  Not even close.

At the climax of the film, after the National TV Channel’s announcement that the No had won a clear majority, there is a moment of terror at the No headquarters when there is a report that General Pinochet has summoned the heads of the security services to the Presidency.  Everyone there knows someone for whom a crackdown could mean prison or death.

People hold their breaths, until a follow up makes it clear, there will be no second strike against democracy: the Chiefs of Staff will have none of that.  They’ve told Pinochet he will have to recognize the vote and move away from power.

For many of the folks I had met in Chile on that trip, and an earlier one for The Committee to Protect Journalists to protest to Pinochet’s Justice and Defense Ministers the dictatorship’s use of military courts to suppress newspeople, that moment of personal pleasure was followed by a surge of national pride.  This is Chile, they congratulated themselves, here we prefer civility and democracy.

Which brings me (hold tight, this is something of a 180) to today and Ukraine.

One of the first scenes in the movie No, shows an early planning session of the No media team.  There are many points of view, many ideas that someone on the team thinks are essential to the campaign against Pinochet, freedom of speech, the right to organize, the crimes of military, the collaboration of the Church, (you should pardon me) blah blah blah (or as the fabulous Banados titled his first book Bla ble bli blo blu).

“No!” says the Garcia Bernal character, there is only one essential idea: gaining enough votes to win the plebiscite. 

And so it was: people voted for freedom, civility, kindness, and comfort and against oppression, violence, cruelty and discomfort.  The No won big.

Unlike Chile, whose perception that it was the last place anyone could or would go had bred not just insularity but a national identity, Ukraine is riven by an ongoing history of division and conflict, that is not just conceptual but geographic.  South and East Ukraine has a longer and closer (if not much happier) history with Russia, the Russian language, the Russian Orthodox Church, and more recently Sovietized industry and collective agriculture.  In the north and west of the country, the same cultural-historic lines lead more to Poland, Austria and Hungary; the Ukrainian language; the Ukrainian Catholic Church, and less mass-oriented economic and political institutions.

Those fractures are real and deep and active and were highlighted at the beginning of the current crisis when President Viktor Yanukovych withdrew from a promised entente with the European Union in favor of closer collaboration with Vladimir Putin’s plan for a renewed Russian empire.  “We want our Europe,” those first protestors seemed to shout, even as they looked nervously over their shoulders to the not-necessarily-on-board East.

But recent polls suggest that those reasons for division may be receding in the face of awidely-shared national disgust with Yanukovych, his government, his predecessors, and their co-dependents, co-defendants, the powerful apparatchiks and oligarchs.

As I was told again and again during my one reporting visit to Kiev and its rural surroundings in 2008, “They’re all assholes, thieves, thugs.”

It must be said, the historical record supports this harsh judgment.  Here’s hoping it sustains to a successful conclusion today’s ongoing “popular uprising.”

After all, Ukraine already had its “Orange Revolution,” 10 years ago, in which today’s Russian-leaning President Yanukovych was booted out, after a clumsily cooked election and replaced by the European-leaning Viktor Yushchenko.  Yuschenko, who doctors believe was not-quite-fatally poisoned by his opponents, was less Soviet than his predecessors, but not more effective.  Worse, he left office with wealth and real estate that could not have been purchased from his official earnings. His replacement, also regarded as pro-EU, Yulia Tymoshenko has been imprisoned by Yanukovych’s people, who charge her with making billions in corrupt dealings in natural gas with Vladimir Putin.  The judicial process in the Tymoshenko case has been widely judged to be deficient, but not absent of apparently damning evidence that she was a grafter.   

The guy before them, President Leonid Kuchma lost his hold on his notorious kleptocracy when audiotaped evidence tied him to the murder of Georgiy Gongadze, the popular and respected investigative reporter who had made Kuchma’s crimes notorious.  President Kuchma’s greatest accomplishment was creating a national consensus that he had to go.

Polls in the past week or 2, taken in all regions of Ukraine, suggest another consensus is building: they all have to go.

A moment of great opportunity is at hand. 

If that 99 to 1 consensus can be kept together, if the un-powerful 99% can put those traditional disagreements, even temporarily aside, national unity to start over, with a new constitution, new leaders, and very new adherence to democracy and of rule of law, might be a real possibility, and Ukraine might be saved.

You can read that possibility, ironically enough, in the hostile analyses of mostly-Russian “experts” quoted in the Christian Science Monitor, and echoed in the Washington Post, which propose – in headline form in the Monitor, less brashly in the Post – an alleged threat of civil war. 

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2014/0129/Amid-civil-war-talk-Kremlin-keeps-wary-eye-on-Ukraine-video

“Amid ‘civil war’ talk, Kremlin keeps wary eye on Ukraine,” is what sits atop Fred Weir’s report in the CSM, which cites 3 Moscow sources.  Alexei Vlasov, director of the Center for the Study of the Post-Soviet Space at Moscow State University says, "The most dangerous variant for Russia is the threat of destabilization in Ukraine. If the situation goes out of control there, it could lead to civil war." Meanwhile, Alexander Konovalov, president of the independent Institute of Strategic Assessments in Moscow projects an even greater threat: "The idea that people can take to the streets and force changes in government and policy orientation is something Putin worries about all the time,” he says. “Though the Ukrainian example is not spreading in Russia at the moment, that doesn't mean it won't have any effect."

These fellows sound like the advisors who told Pinochet he should reject the No vote and “:save Chile from chaos.” 

They are referenced and reified by Max Fisher, the WaPo foreign policy blogger: “There is chatter among analysts,” he writes, “ in Moscow as well as Washington, that if Yanukovych panics and calls in the military to disperse protesters it could lead to a civil war.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/01/30/9-questions-about-ukraine-you-were-too-embarrassed-to-ask/

Would civil war in Ukraine (with or without some implicit threat it could ignite rebellion in Russia, too) provoke intervention by Putin?  “No way,” says the man himself.  “Not yet,” murmur his local analysts.

“Russia has no intention of ever intervening,” Putin declared at a Russia-EU summit in Brussels. Then he accused European leaders of butting in themselves. “I can imagine how our European partners would react if at the height of the crisis in Greece or Cyprus, say, our foreign minister turned up at one of the anti-European Union meetings there and began making appeals to the crowd."

The reference, Weir writes, is clearly “a dig at EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and other EU officials who have addressed protesters on Kiev's Independence Square, or Maidan, over the past two months.”

Weir quotes “Sergei Strokan, foreign affairs columnist with the pro-business Moscow daily Kommersant: ‘Putin seems to have come to the conclusion that Ukraine is like a volcano that will erupt from time to time. It's a natural disaster and you just have to get used to it. That's why he comes off looking far more pragmatic, even phlegmatic, than he did [in 2004].’”

So, is this war talk to sell papers, or paper the way to Russian intervention?

I don’t think it matters because I don’t think civil war is coming to Ukraine. 

This is not a country or a culture in love with violence.  It is the government’s resort to force and to repressive legislation that has discredited the Yanukovych regime with this growing majority of Ukrainian citizens.  And by the way, the use of violence attributed to the opposition produces only popular denunciation and disconnection.  The provocateurs are widely suspected of acting for the government, or of being useless nutballs.  Ukraine today, like Chile 25 years ago, has a civil opposition.

In Ukraine, there is a near monopoly on violence that resides in the state and its institutions.  There is no popular army to oppose them, and no popular wish to translate the political battle into literal bloodshed.  Ukrainians will neither support nor sustain terrorism, even to oust their political oppressors and economic exploiters.

Furthermore, as there was in Chile, there is a strong suspicion inside Ukraine’s security services and on its streets, that the state’s violence monopoly cannot successfully be used, because significant numbers of troops and cops would side with the people against their bosses, the generals and politicians.

Putin’s so-called calm in the face of the Kiev uprising may actually be his Obama moment, in which realizes that in Ukraine, as for Obama in Syria, he has no good option.  Russian interference would only trigger Ukrainian resistance and raise the possibility of truly dangerous instability and chaos.

Hence, today’s standoff continues in Kiev’s Independence Square and in provincial offices around the country.  Hence, the possibility exists that tomorrow could bring real political change to Ukraine. As a media guy said to me about Chile, “It could all happen, if we can just get enough people to say No.”

Certainly from what we see reported from Ukraine, no one there is saying anything better.

 

INVITING IRAN TO PISS ON OUR TENT

Here is one of the cruelest facts of life:  You only get to make peace with your enemies.

Here’s another:  Peace means an end to organized violence.  You do not have peace while the perpetrators of organized violence are not restrained (see Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Mali etc etc etc).

This, in a nutshell, is what is wrong with America’s insistence on excluding Iran for the negotiations to bring peace to Syria ongoing in Montreux.

As Ian Black reported in The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/21/us-russian-co-operation-key-hope-progess-syria-peace-talks

“The Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, stated on his website his belief that the talks have little hope of success. ‘Because of the lack of influential players in the meeting, I doubt about the Geneva II meeting's success in fighting against terrorism ... and its ability to resolve the Syria crisis,’ Rouhani said. ‘The Geneva II meeting has already failed.’” 

So long as Iran continues to supply fighters (some Iranians, but many more Hizbullah warriors from Lebanon) in support of Syria’s criminal President Bashar al-Assad, there will not be peace.  Excluding the Iranians from the peace talks does guarantee their failure, since it all but takes away any reason for Teheran to restrain either Assad or Hizbullah.

America offers 2 quasi-rationales for the exclusion: (1) the Iranians have not committed in advance to the goal of the conference, the transitioning out of power of President al-Assad and his government, and (2) the presence of the Iranians would trigger a boycott by our favorite rebel group, the Syrian National Coalition (SNC).

Both points have their flaws: (1)  the Iranian position is more or less the same as the Russian position, but the Russians have not been booted from the talks, rather their participation is considered one of the keys to any potential success; and, (2) the SNC by itself can contribute to peace, but cannot come close to assuring it, as it remains out-gunned and out-organized by the rest of the rebel movement, the radical Islamist forces, many allied to Al Qaeda, who have rejected the talks from the moment they were proposed.     

Negotiations only succeed when all the controlling stakeholders can derive some benefit from them.  Excluding a necessary stakeholder to keep a less crucial one on board makes no sense.  Our rebels need and benefit from peace too much to pull out, no matter what they threaten.

So, who are the stakeholders here?  (1) The wretched Syrian government and its 1%ers, the Assad family and its closest associates; (2)  The Syrian rebel forces; (3) The Syrian people, most of them bullied by, but not loyal to any of the contending forces; (4) Assad’s regional supporters, almost all of them Shi’ites, of whom Iran and Hizbullah are the most important; (5) Assad’s regional opponents, almost all of them Sunnis, of whom Saudi Arabia and Qatar are the biggest funders of the rebels; (6) global kibitzers like Russia, the United States and its allies in Western Europe.

What benefits might convince each of the stakeholders to make and sustain peace? 

(1) For Assad and the other beasts of his herd the prime benefit of agreeing to peace and giving up power would be that they will not only be allowed to live, they might be guaranteed immunity from prosecution, judgment, incarceration and loss of all their worldly goods. As if this opportunity were not enough in itself, the Washington Post editorial board says it might seem more valuable were it more aggressively threatened by the Obama White House.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/on-syria-obama-administration-is-leading-to-failure/2014/01/22/90b040b2-8390-11e3-9dd4-e7278db80d86_story.html?tid=up_next

More on this exercise in facile fatuity later.

(2)  The benefits for the anti-Assad forces are both obvious and, alas, fatally incomplete.  “Peace” declared in Switzerland will not become peace in Syria until the SNC’s fellow rebels, their Islamist rivals in rebellion, are subdued, and, as events in Iraq next door daily illustrate, subduing the jihadis will be hard to do.  But like including the Iranians, subduing the Islamists is not a choice, but a necessity to peace.

(3)  Making “peace” pay real-life dividends for the Syrian people will demand not just freeing them from Assad’s homegrown tyranny and the equally overbearing, mostly foreign, Fundamentalist threat, but freeing themselves from their ruinous addiction to sectarian conflict.  Syria’s majority Sunnis must convince their opponents in the Alawite, Shi’ite, Christian and Maronite communities that they are willing to live civilly, even harmoniously, alongside them, that bygones from this brutal war will indeed be bygones.  In many ways this is a more complex, maybe even more difficult task than defeating the Islamists.  But again, necessary.

(4)  The promise of a Levant ruled by law, and based on inter-communal co-operation would relieve Assad’s allies, Iran and Hizbullah of a conflict that has grown ruinous in blood and treasure.  It also might lead to a future in which both the Iranian government and Hizbullah’s leadership could use their strengths of political and social organization to grant their peoples infinitely better lives, safe from foreign threats or local violence. 

(5)  Peace in Syria would not guarantee, but would certainly make more possible, both a wider peace and even a stable region.  The blessings of peace in Syria would be constantly communicated to the peoples of the rest of the Arabic-speaking world by vigorous and competitive news media, hopefully growing a regional constituency for rule of law and civility.  The chief bankrollers of the Syrian rebellion, Saudi Arabia and especially Qatar are much happier being merchandising states than militarizing states, and a Mideast without war plays directly to their strengths and interests.  The removal of the semi-Shi’ite Alawites from power in Syria, the retreat of Hizbullah back to Lebanon (and even better, back to more civil, less brutal political competition within Lebanon), and the predictable advantages of Sunni majority power in Syria would more than offset having to play live-and-let-live with the Shi’ite triumphalists in Nouri al-Maliki’s government in Baghdad. Selling out their temporary allies-in-regime change, buying them off, or helping kill them, would not, I’m betting, be a big problem for either the Saudis or the Qataris.

(6)  The reduction in bloodshed, and progress towards stability would be the biggest payoffs from peace for almost everyone, from the Syrian people who would no longer be dodging daily bombs and bullets, to the regional rulers in Riyadh and Doha, and the global powers in Moscow and Washington who could go back to making money and self-congratulatory pronouncements.  Another important benefit, for Putin, Obama, Hollande, Cameron and the royal, military or democratic leaders of the Islamic world from  ending the conflict in Syria would be the opportunity to join forces in eliminating the irreconcilable guerillas.  No one in any of these governments and almost no one in their countries would mourn their demise.  

(7)  What benefits could convince Al Qaeda and its allies to call off their war and seek the true triumph of jihad, personal religious purity and discipline?  Probably, there are none, which is why they rejected the peace talks and why they must be defeated. 

But, let’s be honest here.  Worthy as these goals may be, they simply cannot be realized without Iran’s assent.  One monkey, the old saying goes, can stop the show, and in the Mideast, Teheran is the headquarters of one hellacious combination of peace-stoppers.

The opportunity to improve their chances to be accepted into the community of peace-makers, and allowed to prove through actions that they are a nation worthy of respect and equal economic and political treatment has proved quite alluring to Iran in the context of its nuclear ambitions.  If Teheran can be convinced that similar benefits would accrue to them and their people, and their allies from Beirut to Bahrain, Iran might rehabilitate itself to everyone’s profit.

The diplomatic negotiation which may well have put Iran on a path to nuclear restraint was called Geneva I.  The people who have put together, and then tossed Iran out of, this week’s conference in Montreux call it Geneva II, for the same reason the folks who play football in New Jersey’s Meadowlands call themselves the New York Giants and Jets: marketing.

But as the humorist Finley Peter Dunne wrote, “Politics ain’t beanbag;” and peace-making ain’t football.  Branding the conference in the name of the city where a watch-makers convention (really!) displaced the diplomats to the smaller town an hour’s drive away won’t accomplish anything.  Real give and take, even with our enemies, is the only way to make peace a best-selling product.

Oh, yes, -- I mentioned the WaPo editorialists and their suggestion that Barack Obama can force humanitarian concessions (even the Posties don’t think he can force real peace) “by presenting Mr. Assad with the choice of accepting them or enduring U.S. airstrikes.”

As if bluffing a guy into giving up just one of his still supreme arsenal of weapons means you can bluff him out of power itself.  This is just self-inflating, self-deluding crap. 

For the editorialists who, I’m sure, would also recommend that Obama back up his bluff, if it were called, I have my favorite 3-word question, the one policy-makers and conference table commanders never seem to ask themselves, “And then what?”

Lob a few bombs, kill off a bunch of bad guys, and then…??  Wasn’t that Don Rumsfeld’s prescription for Iraq?  Not even the Post’s own eternal optimists would buy that sack of ignorant shit a second time.  Or would they?

Better to try to find a deal that meets almost everyone’s need to think it got them something good.

 

JOURNALISM AND INFORMATION IN CHINA AND UKRAINE

The news about the news in China is anything but good.  I first learned about it close to 2 weeks ago, when my China mentor, and the former Assistant Dean of the Journalism School at Shantou University where I taught the fall semester in 2008, sent the following news clip, a story by Teddy Ng in the authoritative Hong Kong-based newspaper, the South China Morning Post (SCMP)

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1385380/propaganda-officials-head-top-tier-chinese-journalism-schools

“The Communist Party's propaganda authority is planning to tighten its control over major journalism schools across the country and increase Marxist education at the universities,” Ng reported.

“Three people familiar with the plan said senior local propaganda officials would become heads or high-level officials of journalism programs at 10 top-tier universities, in an attempt to ensure their teaching is in line with authorities' directives.”

Leaders of the Chinese Communist Party have hardly hidden their plan, which is to spread soon from 10 elite J-schools to all places where Journalism is taught in China.

The story had actually been reported by Japan’s Kyodo News Agency almost a week earlier.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/kyodo-news-international/131222/china-tighten-control-universities-journalism-schools

Kyodo’s story cited a party source on what triggered the J-School takeover.  “President Xi Jinping senses a crisis ‘at universities and in the mass media where reformists (who support such values as democracy) have the most influence.’”

Several reports agree that officials from the party's Central Propaganda Department will, in Kyodo’s words, “take over the top posts of their journalism schools, and also beef up the media's role in serving as the ‘throat and tongue’ of the Communist Party.”

Herford, whose long career in journalism education was preceded by a distinguished record as a senior producer and bureau chief at CBS News, was properly horrified.

“I feel for our former students and those who might have been our future students,” Peter emailed.  “This latest step cements changes that have been creeping forward. They include the seven "no’s", a list of basics that are no longer to be taught in Chinese universities. These include Human Rights concepts and many of the foundations of literature and history (expunging foreign and particularly Western influences).”

According to SCPM’s Ng, the creeps have been advancing since 2001, when party hard-liners took control of journalism education at Shanghai’s Fudan University.one of the top schools in the country.  Back then, Ng reported, “Jiefang Daily quoted then Shanghai deputy party secretary Gong Xueping as saying the arrangement would ensure local propaganda authorities utilized their strength in leading and organizing the mass media.”

And sure enough, today, Ng said, “The current head of the university's journalism program is Song Chao , who is a deputy propaganda director for Shanghai.”

But today, a dozen years after the CCP put its foot down at Fudan, the party propagandists’ plan for control is widely predicted to be ineffective.

Ng quoted Li Datong, a former editor with China Youth Daily: "’The journalists will memorise some lines of Marxist thought but in the end they won't care too much about it,’"    

5 days later, Ng wrote that the CCP crackdown would extend beyond Journalism, to everything taught at China’s universities, and to what the Chinese people will see on their major broadcast networks “specific programmes for spreading socialist ideologies, as well as more public service advertisements.”

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1389382/communist-party-orders-core-socialist-values-curriculum

But will President Xi’s dictates make a difference? Ng cited another skeptic, Zhang Ming, a political science professor at Renmin University, another top university in Beijing, "’The question remains whether the public will buy it. It is impossible to carve them into the brain’."

Xi’s problem is simple: the world of information is complex, even in China, where the government and Party are just 2 of thousands of would-be sculptors, carving away at the public brain.  Cracking down on J-Schools or all schools, lobotomizing the content of mass media, is a sad old story, and a lot of the sadness and frustration is inside the government/party power structure, which still feels besieged. 

Still, like Peter, and some other former visiting teachers at Shantou, I was pretty disheartened by the news.  Until I saw the following response my wife Amy got from a Chinese friend who is both a professional translator, and a volunteer in a 20-year campaign to give all Chinese access to the significant ideas current in the world, by publishing translations on the internet.

He wrote:  The crackdown is “routine, rather than news.”  CCP policing of the media, “particularly in terms of politic issues,” he wrote, has turned “most Chinese journalists into mere zombie followers who retweet everything the Party says.

 

“Luckily,” he added, “we are not living in North Korea. The best thing that ever happened is the internet. I don't have a TV and I subscribe to no newspaper. I look out to the world through my optic fiber, in which way I can get information from both sides and make my own judgment.”

 

Which was, he said, “I am sure the CCP, no matter how hard they try to tighten their grip on journalism, has weaker influence today on intellectuals and the economically advanced areas in this country.  For journalists, it is just one more test to pass, for which they have already been inoculated during their school days.”

 

Which reminded me of my own wonderful experience at Shantou, and left me convinced he’s got it right. Even 5 years ago, the Journalism school, like every school at the University, had a Party Secretary, who was largely unseen and unheard, but could pop out at any moment with some annoying judgment or admonition.  I was warned (and had already assumed) every class had an assigned Party snitch.

 

Kyodo reported, as early as last May, “university officials in Beijing and Shanghai were saying that Chinese authorities had banned the discussion in university classes of seven subjects (Peter Herford’s “7 No’s.”)  including "freedom of the press," "citizen rights," "universal values" implying respect for human rights and democracy, and "historical mistakes of the Communist Party."

In 2008, there was no such explicit ban, and I regularly discussed journalism’s role in society using all those forbidden concepts, except the last one, on which my students had nothing to learn from me: they were already experts.  Clearly, someone ratted me out to the Dean, who counseled me to “stop talking about China and human rights, and just teach them what you know about journalism.”

I kept to my prior teaching plan, and never heard another word.

Here are 2 things my students taught me (here I paraphrase and combine sources): 

(1) “Journalism in China is a regulated profession.  To work, you must be a member of the Party and go regularly to meetings on party policy and propaganda.  This is true for us as students and will be true for us as journalists for as long as we work.”

“How do you deal with that?” I asked several students.  Their answers made for Lesson  (2)  “It’s all bullshit and everyone knows it.  You join the Party.  You go to meetings.  You nod your head, and go home or back to the office.  Then you do your best to give people real information and hope you don’t piss anybody off too much.  The whole thing is a pain, and it hurts us and the country, but you’d be surprised how much gets through.”

I was surprised at the results of a game my students and I played every week.  I would name a story that had appeared on a portion of the internet which I could see because I was a visiting professor, but which never appeared on a server they could use, and ask them to have read it by my next class.  Every time, every student passed the test.  For them, as for hundreds of millions of Chinese netizens every day, the news does get through.

Which brings me to another country where the government is trying desperately to control information and citizens alike: Ukraine.

Over the past year, the Soviet-style governance of President Viktor Yanukovych has asserted increasing direct and indirect control over the nation’s news media, and, recently, has stepped up thuggish violence against opposition reporters and demonstrators.  But all this wave of authoritarianism has produced is a backlash of  popular commitment to opposition, and widespread use of new and old communication networks.  Yanukovych, like President Xi in China, is not just failing to cut the flow of ideas, he is failing to suppress the demand for reform.

In Kyiv, the worse the government behaves, the more people know about it.  It has now been documented; the government’s own violence produces bigger crowds of demonstrators and more definitive demands for reform.  

A recent blog post in the Washington Post by Oxford University political scientist Olga Onuch passed along the results from ongoing polling of demonstrators in Kyiv.  They  suggest that a lot of journalists and activists have been mis-describing what’s going on there. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/01/02/social-networks-and-social-media-in-ukrainian-euromaidan-protests-2/

For one thing, Onuch reported, more than 1200 interviews show, the protests are not a youth movement.  “While many reports have championed Ukrainian students and youths for being the predominant actors in the protests, the majority of the respondents (69 percent) are in fact older than 30. The average age of the Ukrainian protester in Kyiv is closer to 36, with approximately 24 percent of participants older than 55.”

What the crowds are is diverse: students, academics, workers, and retired people; Orthodox and Catholic believers and atheists.  One characteristic of the people on the streets of the Ukraine capitol that should be shockingly bad news for the government is how many of those polled are newly declared dissidents.

Onuch reported, “A surprising 38 percent of current protesters did not participate in previous protests, and 37 percent did not participate in the “Orange Revolution” [of 2004.] 

“This is, of course, not to say that students, youths and activists are not a significant group,” Onuch reported, “but they do not represent the majority of participants.”

The diverse protesters against the government have, Onuch’s poll revealed, definably diverse goals.

“The students and youth under 30 use more media savvy language of ‘EU accession,’ ‘global human rights’ and employ abstract concepts such as ‘freedom.’

But, Onuch wrote, “The 30 to 45 year-old protesters focus more on practical matters like ‘economic security,’ ‘better opportunities for their children,’  and their desire to live in a ‘normal, European democracy.’  They insist that their presence lets the regime known the ‘voters are here.’

“The protesters over 55 explain that they ‘have lived through many injustices’ and that because they are ‘retired, [they] can protest in the place of the young, who have to work and raise families.’ Thus, they see themselves as guardians of the protests, when others cannot be there.”

And while social media are important, informing people about the time and place of manifestations and framing issues, they are just part of a diverse set of communications inputs Ukrainians draw on, inputs that, as in China, are moving more and more from the policed official media to the internet. 

Asked how they follow the protest campaign, 48% of those polled said they watched on broadcast TV; but, already 41% said they have shifted their allegiance and now watched internet news channels instead.

Internet influence could be seen in the way personal contacts outweighed media contacts, including social media. Almost everyone told the pollsters they got political information from their friends, most of it from computers, tablets and mobile phones: 46% by text messages, 30% via email, versus 23% by telephone.  Asked if they responded to protest invitations posted on social media, 10.4% said yes, they had responded to an invitation on Facebook, 14% from Russian competitor VKontakte.

It is in a form of “elite communication,” that Onuch said the polls showed important influence from the social networks. “Our analysis of demands (as reflected in slogans and signage), is still very preliminary, [but] it does seem to follow certain patterns of words mentioned on Twitter, Facebook, chain e-mails and internet news sites. We have noticed a pattern whereby a sign or slogan first goes viral on Facebook, and then seems to show up more often in protester signs. While making any serious conclusions from this method is complicated, first impressions point to an “Internet-to-the-streets” directionality of claims and framing of demands.”

In China, this pattern has long been observed, although the word patterns are closer to coding than sloganeering.  Although mass media coverage of the Arab Spring was long-delayed and closely-crimped in China, it soon acquired an internet code name, “Jasmine,” which soon became a banished word from the Chinese internet.  Banished, but not forgotten.

As the world changes, communication, social and journalistic, changes with it.  Usually, it is the repressive government that can’t keep up.

Will that mean political change?  The attitude I get from people in China is typically patient and confident.  Just as most your people assume it is inevitable that the 21^st Century will be China’s (just as the 20^th was America’s), they also assume, slowly, the unstoppable spread of popular knowledge about the ideas and options available outside China will force the government in Beijing to serious reform.

Right now, most of the global evidence suggests, the coalescence of public recognition of the realities of the world into greater public participation in political and economic power is a long way off.

Great troughs of information, most of it introduced to the region by Al Jazeera (Arabic), and the implicit imperative for viewers to sort it out for themselves, are what set off the Arab Spring.  Today, a few short years later, “people power” in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria is being crushed, the old-fashioned way, under the boot heels of unpopular state force (except in Libya, where the state, as well as the people, are prey to the new-fashioned pandemonium of well-armed, poorly-disciplined independent militias.)

Long-term, I’m betting on information and the innumerable ways people devise to obtain it

The master-pessimist Herman Melville unforgettably wrote: “What like a bullet can undeceive?”

To which I reply, “What like a tyrant can unleash communication?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WHAT HAPPENS IN AFGHANISTAN, STAYS IN AFGHANISTAN.

They say there’s no going back in time, but for tens of thousands of Afghans, it is as the blues singer says, “Thems that’s sayin’, sure ain’t  thems that has.” 

Afghanistan’s grip on the 21^st century, always weak and partial, seems to be slipping, threatening a return to its recent, but pre-modern past.

For someone who spent a few weeks teaching young video journalists in Afghanistan, this is a very painful reflection, occasioned by the Washington Post’s account of a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of the future of that country.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/afghanistan-gains-will-be-lost-quickly-after-drawdown-us-intelligence-estimate-warns/2013/12/28/ac609f90-6f32-11e3-aecc-85cb037b7236_story.html?hpid=z1

“A new American intelligence assessment on the Afghan war,” the Post’s front-page story begins, “predicts that the gains the United States and its allies have made during the past three years are likely to have been significantly eroded by 2017, even if Washington leaves behind a few thousand troops and continues bankrolling the impoverished nation, according to officials familiar with the report.

“[The NIE,]” the Post continues, “predicts that the Taliban and other power brokers will become increasingly influential as the United States winds down its longest war in history.”

To this, may we all add, “DUH!” 

What is accomplished by force can only be sustained by force, until all opposing forces have been rejected, disarmed and disabled, and a credible local government is in place.

After 12 years, and more than 2300 Americans killed and more than 19,000 wounded (according to icasualties), and roughly $680 Billion spent (says the Center for Defense Information), The US effort has failed at both tasks, -- creating a government that is close to credible or competent, or disarming or disabling it’s life-threatening enemies (and not just the Taliban; all over Afghanistan, much local turf is ruled by local warlords, militias or religious factions). 

Hence, a sharp reduction, or complete withdrawal of American forces in Afghanistan will result in a sharp reduction, if not eradication of American influence in Kabul.  No kidding?  As it did in Iraq?  And Vietnam?

Is it us?  Or is it the world?  More on this later.

Let’s first return to the more immediate question, the future of Afghanistan, a.k.a. after American and other foreign forces leave. Will it irrevocably plunge my Third Millennium former students back into First Millennium feudalism, tribalism, fundamentalism, and violence?  Is the best they can hope for that a few Afghan cities like Kabul or Herat might become relative safe havens of urbanity and opportunity, surrounded and besieged by various rural-based absolutisms.

The Post reports that the NIE says even that hope may be too optimistic.  “The central government in Kabul is all but certain to become increasingly irrelevant as it loses ‘purchase’ over parts of the country,” is the estimate.

The report also predicts “that Afghanistan would likely descend into chaos quickly if Washington and Kabul don’t sign a security pact that would keep an international military contingent there beyond 2014. ’The situation would deteriorate very rapidly,’ said one U.S. official familiar with the report.

Whether achieving an agreement, and keeping forces here for 3 or 10 or a 100 years would, in the analysts’ opinion, do anything more than delay the inevitable, either the NIE or the Post has left unmentioned.

But as to the imminence of “chaos, “the Post reports, “That conclusion is widely shared among U.S. officials working on Afghanistan, said the official.”

But in Washington, it would seem, the Post found a different perspective, or at the least, it found 3 home front dissenters.

“One American official” told the Post, “there are too many uncertainties to make an educated prediction.”  The big variable to this observer, “next year’s presidential election.”

The other push-back against the NIE comes from “a senior administration official [who] said that the intelligence community has long underestimated Afghanistan’s security forces.”

And this person predicted to the Post, White House pushback against the NIE assessment will be decisive. “’An assessment that says things are going to be gloomy no matter what you do, that you’re just delaying the inevitable, that’s just a view,’ said the official. ‘I would not think it would be the determining view.’”

Then there was the “e-mailed statement” from a presumably second “senior administration official saying intelligence assessments are ‘only one tool in our policy analysis toolbox… as we look at the consequential decisions ahead of us, including making a decision on whether to leave troops in Afghanistan after the end of 2014.’”

According to the first “senior official,” “’the intelligence community has long underestimated Afghanistan’s security forces.’”

Actually, the “gloomy” and “grim” assessments of the Afghan armed forces made in NIEs in 2008 and 2010 seemed pretty much borne out by the metrics of desertion, training performance, and battlefield outcomes

But in December 2013, this senior official told the Post, “’the development of a credible and increasingly proficient Afghan army and [has] made it unlikely that al-Qaeda could reestablish a foothold in the country.’”

This, the senior government defender attributes to President Obama’s decision to “surge” 30,000 American troops into Afghanistan in 2009.  Whatever critics, including many of the military participants themselves, may think, the White House insists, the American fighters have not fought, slogged, frozen or died in vain, because al-Qaeda has lost its foothold in Afghanistan.

If Al Qaeda were still (or was ever) primarily an organization, this assertion might hold some water.  But Al Qaeda has long since devolved into an idea, a shared, diversified mission to expel “Western,” modern, secular influences from Muslim lands and to bring the world of Islam under total Wahhabi control.  This idea remains as alive and well in Afghanistan as the Taliban and other jihadis who adhere to it.

The Obama Administration’s “decimation” of the Al Qaeda group’s leadership hasn’t slowed the spread of the Al Qaeda mission to Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Kenya,  Nigeria and Mali.  As for Afghanistan, there are real questions to be raised about whether 12 years of American and international military intervention has produced real, lasting change.  The NIE suggests that most of rural Afghanistan will be, as it long has been: a patchwork of feudal zones, controlled by local warlords, tribal elders or religious zealots like the Taliban.  Even the cities, Kabul, Mazar-I-Sharif, Herat, Kandahar, whatever their shared interests might be, are as separate in culture and mentality as they are geographically.

But after 12 years of funding and frustration, fighting and dying in Afghanistan, almost all of it borne by people who live far from Washington, one sees few significant changes in the mindset of America’s rulers or its journalists. 

For one thing, we still think it’s all about us.

For the Post that means, receiving the NIE leak, detailing it, and soliciting comment from within the Beltway, and then without any reference to what is happening in Afghanistan, turning to the important hometown question of who benefits, politically, from the leak. “The latest intelligence assessment, some U.S. officials noted, has provided those inclined to abandon Afghanistan with strong fodder.”

Actually, it provides “strong fodder “to those who advised against going to war in Afghanistan and those who opposed the “surge” of 2009.  Especially, since this time, as opposed to when NIEs were issued in 2008 and 2010, the Post says, “Gen. Joseph F. Dunford, the commander of international troops in Afghanistan, chose not to submit a rebuttal.” 

But lest defeatism dislodge “pragmatism,” the article gives the last word to Stephen Biddle, whom the Post calls, “a defense policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations,” forgetting, I guess, that he has been a constant counselor in devising the disasters of Afghanistan’s last dozen years.  “He predicts a stalemate for years to come,” the Post concludes, “‘Whether it’s a worse or better stalemate depends on the rate at which Congress defunds the war,’ he said.”

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who got and kept his job largely because of American support, says what determines worse or better is the rate of death and destruction in his country, and he says that making things better depends on reducing the numbers, activities and autonomy of American forces.  

Not everyone in Afghanistan agrees, and that very issue is likely to be very important in the 2014 elections for Karzai’s Presidential successor. 

But there are other, perhaps even more important questions about Afghanistan which involve, not Americans, but Afghans. They relate to the 2 goals of the whole intervention, governance and security.

In re governance: these questions about the 2014 elections.  (1) Who will be the candidates? (2) Will any of them represent a national constituency, or will each be beholden to particular local, tribal, or religious interests? (3) If it’s to be the latter, how will coalitions be formed to achieve a national plurality and central government? (4) Will the election be clean and credible, or just another instance of political theft? And (5) will the winner rule in the national interest, or just to enrich his particular constituents, his backers, his family or himself?

And for the purported hallmark of American achievement in Afghanistan, the security forces, the military and the police? (1) Will either group fight, and how well? (2) For what principles or values? (3) For whom, the nation, the leaders, some smaller center of power? (4) Against whom, all comers?

These are really hard questions, but they define the Afghan reality and its future, and not just political gamesmanship thousands of miles away.  But these are the questions that matter.

Where were they in the Post’s report?  AWOL.

No wonder the US has such an interventionist losing streak.  We remain steadfast in our ignorance about our ignorance; we retain our Rumsfeldian determination to deny or ignore what we don’t like about what we ought to know.

Before we “surge” somewhere else, here a few small lessons we might want to learn.

Force sometimes works, but always breeds resentment, especially when it is visiting force used against “homies.”  Thus, a visitor’s use of force should be minimized.

Reliance on local sources to identify enemies sometimes works, but always risks confounding the visitor’s enemies with their sources’ enemies.  On the other hand, the visitors’ enemies, and local bystanders, can always identify them, both for blaming and for targeting.

The only way in which visitors win is by weakening their local enemies so definitively that their creation of a “better” home team can survive.  The quicker and more completely the home team government can take over, the better.

It is always just a matter of time until the visitors return home. Everybody there knows this, and knows the capabilities of the “insurgents” to re-insurge, and shapes his or her loyalties accordingly.

Everyone here and there knows that time in Afghanistan is coming; sooner, or Steven Biddle would say, “better,” later. Then we’ll know the truth. 

Did American intervention produce both a credible, sustainable governing structure, and a population ready to embrace it?  Or have we, once again, spent blood and treasure trying to impose old-fashioned short-term domination on a world where new-fashioned weaponry and communications make that an impossible long-term ambition?