From The Long Now Foundation, a conversation with archaeologist Sander van der Leeuw on the dangers of constant innovation. “Every innovation creates a cascade of new challenges,” he says, which shifts a society’s focus to short-term thinking. He warns China is currently “addicted to innovation,” but praises the bustling nation for its focus on long-term thinking.
Are we the first civilization to try and innovate our way out of climate change? How have past societies engineered sustainable solutions to a shifting world?
Sander van der Leeuw, Director of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University and External Faculty Member of the Santa Fe Institute, has spent his career studying these questions. During his seminar, van der Leeuw explores this research into the past, as well as its application to our current global predicament. – Long Now Foundation
Sander van der Leeuw is an archaeologist and historian by training. After teaching appointments at Leyden, Amsterdam, Cambridge (UK) and Paris he presently holds the Chair of Anthropology at Arizona State University in the USA. He is an External Faculty Member of the Santa Fe Institute, a Correspondent of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Member of the Institut Universitaire de France.
Stewart Brand is a co-founder and managing director of Global Business Network, founded and runs the GBN Book Club, and is the president of The Long Now Foundation.
One of the political events anticipated in 2010 is the elections promised by Myanmar’s military government. The polls scheduled to take place later this year would be the first since 1990.
But while the military rulers say people will be allowed to have their say, many remain sceptical that the polls will pave the way to democracy and change.
Kansas State Senator Laura Kelly has bowed out of the race in the Kansas Second Congressional District, a seat that is now held by GOP Congresswoman Lynn Jenkins. The Second Congressional District in Kansas covers most of eastern Kansas, except for the core of the Kansas City Metro Area. The district includes the state capital in Topeka and Manhattan, the home of Kansas State University. Rep. Jenkins is serving her first term in Congress.
State Sen. Laura Kelly (D) just announced her withdrawal from the race to face Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R-Kan.). She becomes the fifth formidable recruit to bow out in recent weeks.
“I have been forced to make a decision between honoring the pledge I made to the people in my Senate district and my firm conviction that the people of the 2nd congressional district deserve a truly independent voice in Congress,” Kelly said in a statement.
“This has been a very hard decision, but it is the right one.”
Kelly joins several recent dropouts, including businessman Jack McDonald, a well-funded challenger to Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) who announced last week that he wouldn’t run. The others are Ohio state Rep. Todd Book, who was running against Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio); former Tennessee Commerce and Insurance Commissioner Paula Flowers, who was running for Rep. Zach Wamp’s (R-Tenn.) seat; and Solana Beach City Councilman Dave Roberts, who was running against Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Calif.).
Seemingly, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, the DCCC chair, has his work cut out for him.
Garrick Utley and Rana Foroohar discuss the salient developments of 2009. These are best characterized by the rise of rest. China, India and Brazil flexed muscles and continued on the path towards challenging the United States regionally if not globally.
Yesterday, a suicide bombing at a US base in Afghanistan killed eight Americans, seven of whom were CIA employees. Today, a spokesperson for the Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, saying a Taliban bomber wearing an Afghan military uniform blew himself up.
The deaths of seven Central Intelligence Agency operatives at a remote base in the mountains of Afghanistan are a pointed example of the civilian spy agency’s transformation in recent years into a paramilitary organization at the vanguard of America’s far-flung wars.
The C.I.A. operatives stationed at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost Province, where Wednesday’s suicide bombing occurred, were responsible for collecting information about militant networks in Afghanistan and Pakistan and plotting missions to kill the networks’ top leaders. In recent months, American officials said, C.I.A. officers at the base had begun an aggressive campaign against a radical group run by Sirajuddin Haqqani, which has claimed responsibility for the deaths of dozens of American troops.
Even as the C.I.A. expands its role in Afghanistan, it is also playing a greater role in quasi-military operations elsewhere, using drone aircraft to launch a steady barrage of missile strikes in Pakistan and sending more operatives to Yemen to assist local officials in their attempts to roll back Al Qaeda’s momentum in that country.
Over the past year, the C.I.A. has built up an archipelago of firebases in southern and eastern Afghanistan, moving agency operatives out of the embassy in Kabul and closer to their targets.
But the push to the front lines carries great risk.
In 1983 in Beirut, it took a car bomb loaded with 2,000 pounds of explosives to kill eight C.I.A. officers stationed at the heavily fortified American Embassy in the city. In Khost on Wednesday, all it took was one man bent on martyrdom to slip into a remote base and inflict a similar toll on the spy agency’s relatively small work force.
Among those killed, officials said, was the chief of the Khost base, who was a mother of three and a veteran of the agency’s clandestine branch. Besides the seven C.I.A. operatives who died, the blast also wounded six agency employees, according to a C.I.A. statement.
Current and former intelligence officials said Thursday that early evidence indicated that the bomber, in Afghan military fatigues, might have been taken onto the base as a possible informant and might not have been subjected to rigorous screening. But details about the episode remained murky, and a NATO official said the bomber had managed to elude security and reach an area near the base’s gym.
C.I.A. personnel regularly take foreign agents onto the base before sending them on intelligence collection missions in eastern Afghanistan and across the border into Pakistan, said one Pentagon consultant who works closely with the C.I.A. in Afghanistan.
In a 1955 essay entitled The Role of Government in Education, Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning economist and a leading member of the neoliberal Mount Pelerin Society, argued that universal vouchers for elementary and secondary schools would usher in an age of educational innovation and experimentation, not only widening the range of options for students and parents but increasing all sorts of positive outcomes. Thankfully this idea hasn’t been widely adopted though it is being tested in Florida with less than stellar results so far. In his essay, Friedman also touched on the role of government in higher education arguing that government should play no role in subsiding education but rather a free market should govern the sector. He envisioned human capital contracts – an “equity-like” financial instruments – which individuals would use to finance their own higher education. In his conclusion, he wrote that:
The result of these measures would be a sizable reduction in the direct activities of government, yet a great widening in the educational opportunities open to our children. They would bring a healthy increase in the variety of educational institutions available and in competition among them. Private initiative and enterprise would quicken the pace of progress in this area as it has in so many others. Government would serve its proper function of improving the operation of the invisible hand without substituting the dead hand of bureaucracy.
Whereas Milton Friedman’s vision for elementary and secondary education has been mercifully been kept at bay, his free market ideas have come to increasingly define higher education in the United States as the GOP successfully cut federal subsidies to education and as state governments also curtailed their sponsorship of public and land grant colleges. For example, since 1986 the purchasing power of the federal Pell Grant program, the nation’s largest need-based financial aid program for college students, has decreased by 57 percent. Since 1980, federal financial aid has been transformed-with little explicit policy debate-from a system characterized mainly by need-based grants to one dominated by loans. In 1981, loans accounted for 45 percent and grants for 52 percent of federal student financial aid. In 2000, loans represented 58 percent of federal student financial aid, and grants represented 41 percent. The results have been an unmitigated disaster for the American middle class.
Since the early 1980’s, the cost of an education at American universities has been rising steadily, at two to three times the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Since 1980, through 2005, after adjusting for inflation, the average cost of tuition plus room and board at a four year public university has increased by over 120 percent. For the private 4-year institutions, tuition prices have increased by over 140 percent. The College Board reports that private college tuition rose most sharply in the early and mid 1980’s, while public tuition increased the most in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. If a gallon of milk in 1980 had sustained this level of increase, it would now run just over $15.00; if a gallon of gas in 1980 had sustained this level of increase, it would now run over $9.50. While the cost of a college education has more than doubled, median income in the United States has risen by 18 percent.
Most American families have lost ground in college affordability. Over the last two decades, the cost of attending two- and four-year public and private colleges (including tuition and other education-related expenses) has grown more rapidly than inflation, and faster than family income as well. As a result, the share of family income that is needed to pay for tuition and other college expenses has increased.
The principal driver of the increased cost of attending college is higher tuition, and only the wealthiest families have seen their incomes keep pace with increases in tuition. The lowest-income families have lost the most ground, and this is a major factor in their lower rates of college attendance. For example, for the lowest-income families in 1980, tuition at public two-year colleges represented 6% of their family income. For the lowest-income families in 2000, tuition at these colleges represented 12% of their income. Likewise, tuition at public four-year colleges and universities represented 13% of income for the lowest-income families in 1980. In 2000, tuition at these colleges and universities equaled 25% of their income.
Today the Washington Post has a story on the impact of all this. I can normally write with an academic detachment on free market disasters but on the subject of education, how does one one quantify the damage inflicted? Milton Friedman wasn’t just wrong; he was spectacularly wrong and thanks to his nefarious and frankly crackpot ideas millions are paying the price with dreams deferred and freedoms curtailed.
The implications are actually severe. Because the costs of attending college have risen so fast, students are choosing majors and careers that are remunerative since they are coming out with higher debt loads. So whereas Milton Friedman predicted this flourishing of ideas with positive benefits for society, in fact the very opposite has occurred. English accounted for almost 8 percent of degrees in 1971, but had sunk to 4 percent by 2002; history had 5 percent back then but now gets 2 percent. The number of degrees in foreign languages and literatures has been cut in half, from 2.4 percent to 1.2 percent. Meanwhile, business degrees accounted for 13.6 percent of the nation’s bachelor’s degrees in 1971, by 2002 they accounted for almost a quarter of all degrees. The outcome has been anything but positive.
Northwestern University’s Medill News Service in partnership with the Tribune Newspapers Washington Bureau and the Center for Responsive Politics have released their analysis of the revolving door in the healthcare debate. OpenSecrets’ Revolving Door database tracks anyone whose résumé includes positions of influence in both the private and public sectors and tracks the shuffle of individuals who were former federal employees and then take jobs as lobbyists, corporate consultants and legislative strategists as well as hired guns who then return to work in government helping to craft legislation.
The fact is that a stint on Capitol Hill as a legislative aide often leads to a more lucrative perch in the land of tasseled loafers known as K Street. For example, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer has 14 of his former employees now working for the US Chamber of Commerce, Pharmaceutical Research and the National Association of Manufacturers, and Verizon while Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has 13 former staffers who now lobby for clients including the US Chamber of Commerce and Pharmaceutical Research. In the healthcare debate, at least 14 former aides to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and at least 13 former aides to Montana Democratic Senator Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee served as registered lobbyists lobbying their former bosses and their colleagues.
At least 166 former aides from the nine congressional leadership offices and five committees involved in shaping health overhaul legislation — along with at least 13 former lawmakers — registered to represent at least 338 health care clients since the beginning of last year, according to the analysis.
Their health care clients spent $635 million on lobbying over the past two years, the study shows.
The total of insider lobbyists jumps to 278 when non-health-care firms that reported lobbying on health issues are added in, the analysis found.
Part of the lobbying pressure on current members of Congress and staffers comes from the powerful lure of post-congressional job possibilities.
“There’s always a worry they may be thinking about their future employment opportunities when dealing with these issues, particularly with health care, because the stakes are so high and the breadth of the issues — pharmacies, hospitals, doctors,” said Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz.
Lobbyists’ earnings can dwarf congressional salaries, which currently top out at $174,000 annually for lawmakers and $156,000 for aides, though committee staff members can earn slightly more.
In the health care showdown, insider lobbying influence has magnified the clout of corporate interests and helped steer the debate away from a public insurance option, despite many polls indicating majority support from Americans, according to Rutgers University political scientist Ross Baker.
“It imposes a kind of conservative bias on the discussion,” said Baker, himself a former Senate staffer.
Breaking it down by Senate or House Committee, the numbers are eye-opening. Forty-five former staffers of the members of the Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) are now lobbying. Their clients include the Chamber of Commerce, Exxon Mobil, AARP, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers, General Electric, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Verizon, AT&T, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. Thirty-six current lobbyists are veterans of the Senate Finance Committee. They now represent the Chamber of Commerce, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturesrs, General Electric, and Blue Cross/Blue Shield.
Over in the House of Representatives, the House Energy and Commerce Committee has 45 former staffers now working as lobbyists, the Ways and Means Committee 23, and House Education and Labor trails with just 18.
A noted scion of Rhode Island politics, Lincoln Chafee is set to announce a run for the Governorship in the Ocean State. The former United States Senator who defected from the GOP after his failed 2006 reelection bid that ended in a loss to Sheldon Whitehouse and who endorsed Barack Obama during the primaries now hopes to become Rhode Island’s first governor without a major-party backing in more than 150 years. The last minor party candidate to win a state wide election in the Ocean State was Byron Diman in 1846 of the Law and Order Party, a short-lived party that developed in response to the famed Dorr Rebellion of 1841-42.
There’s little doubt that Chafee is still bitter after surviving a bitter primary against conservative Cranston Mayor Steve Laffey in 2006 and less than sanguine about the GOP’s electoral chances in New England. In early December after Rory Smith, the state’s only Republican candidate for governor, dropped out, Chafee confided to the Providence Journal that “the big base of the party here in Rhode Island said good riddance to Chafee.”
“Now they live with the results,” added Chafee referring to the GOP’s difficulty attracting and keeping candidates. Chafee went on to say that “the Moderate Party was formed in response to the ineffectiveness of the Republican Party. Certainly the wolves are at the door. They drove me out of the party.”
The state GOP, Chafee said, is suffering from the “dark cloud” of the national party’s agenda.
“The agenda that the national party is bent on pursuing, frankly, for me, is an erratic agenda,” he continued. “We saw the fiscal irresponsibility of the Bush years, unprecedented spending. And then their agenda on the environment — that doesn’t sell well here in Rhode Island. Using social issues to divide the people — gay marriage and abortion — at a time when people just want to get to work.”
The outlook for the state and national party has never been this low, Chafee said.
“The years after Watergate, those were tough years. I think this is bleaker than ever.”
The last governor in Rhode Island who wasn’t either a Democrat or a Republican was William Hoppin, a Whig who served from 1854 to 1857. The current incumbent, Republican Donald Carcieri, is term-limited and can’t run again next year.
According to the World Health Organization, the H1N1 virus has peaked in much of the northern hemisphere, with substantial declines in the U.S. and Canada. While the disease is still active in the U.S., increases are occurring in central and eastern Europe, and in parts of west, central and south Asia.
The Chilean presidential campaign is in full gear pitting the conservative Sebastián Piñera who polled 44.05 percent of the vote in the first round against Eduardo Frei, a Christian Democrat that forms part of the governing left of center La Concertación por la Democracia alliance, who polled just 29.6 percent in the first round given a split in the alliance that saw a Socialist candidate, Marco Enríquez Ominami, take 20.13 percent. Jorge Arrate, the candidate of the Chilean Communist Party (PCC), trailed with 6.21 percent.
Frei, a former President and the son of a President, now has the task re-uniting his electoral coalition that is composed of his economically left but socially conservative Christian Democratic party (DC), the Socialist party (PS), the Partido Radical Social Demócrata (PRSD) and the Partido por la Democracia (PPD). Frei is clearly trying wrap himself up as the historic heir to the center-left alliance that has governed Chile since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship in 1990.
This first ad is entitled Vamos a Vivir Mejor or “We Are Going to Live Better.” In the ad, the four presidents – Patricio Aylwin (1990-1994), Eduardo Frei (1994-2000), Ricardo Lagos (2000-2005) and Michelle Bachelet (2005-2010) that have ruled Chile appear together to reinforce that message of continuity. The ad runs as “We are going to keep on growing, we are going to live better, we know that we stick together we are going to live better, today I reflect on everything that we have built as of now, it has been during these years that I learned that I could advance, and looking back we remember the path we have traveled, today I will again follow my heart.”
This second ad, what spurred me to write this post, is simply remarkable. I had to do a double take and ask myself this is Chile we are talking about? Chile is a modern country and was just earlier this month invited to become the 31st member of the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development, a grouping of the world’s most industrially advanced countries. Chile thus becomes the first member from South America and the second from Latin America (México is the other). But Chile has long been a rather socially conservative country even by South American standards. Issues like divorce (only legalized in 2004), abortion and sexual orientation have long been taboo. Santiago is a very pleasant city but a vibrant nightlife akin to other large cities in South America it does not boast. So this ad is from the Frei campaign is surprising and a measure of perhaps that change is indeed coming to once sleepy Chile. It needs no translation really.
Again the ad features the Frei campaign motto as in the above ad Vamos a vivir mejor, “we are going to live better.” After the kiss by the lesbian couple, the line is simply “we all deserve the same rights.”
But nothing could prepare me for this next ad, a web only spot. The ad is from the Sebastián Piñera campaign, the billionaire conservative who is making his second consecutive attempt to win the presidency and the former head of the right wing Renovación Nacional party. The spot is entitled La Voz de los sin Voz, or the “voice of the voiceless.” The ad runs five minutes but at the 40 second mark Piñera who speaks in the ad is shown next to a gay couple holding hands saying “today people accepts us, now we need the country to respect us.” Piñera is pledging to support civil unions for same-sex couples and to allow gay Chileans to serve in the military. But I will also note that Rolando Jiménez of the Movimiento de Liberación Homosexual (Movilh), or the Homosexual Liberation Movement, while applauding the inclusion of gay men in the Piñera campaign also found that Piñera has yet to articulate a specific plan on how he will structure gay civil unions. If you read Spanish, here is more background.
Piñera’s campaign slogan is Bienvenido el cambio, or “welcome change.”
Both campaigns are also making use of social media using Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to get their message out.