Two Nobelists Offer Views of Human-Driven Global Warming

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Given the flurry of attention this week around what two batches of scientists of various stripes think of evidence that humans are exerting a growing and disruptive influence on climate, it’s worth checking in with two Nobel laureates who’ve long been focused on the atmosphere and climate.

As I’ve written before, whatever your view of the science and policy choices related to global warming, you can probably find a Nobelist with matching views. But Mario Molina and Burton Richter deserve a prominent place at this table given their sustained attention to relevant issues.

Mario MolinaMario Molina, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, uses this image representing a partially completed jigsaw puzzle to convey the state of understanding of human-driven climate change. CLICK TO ENLARGE

While participating in a November conference connected with the International Year of Chemistry, I spent time talking with Molina of the University of California, San Diego, a 1995 laureate in chemistry for his work (with others) on the atmospheric impact of ozone-destroying refrigerants and related chemicals. In a talk at the event, he conveyed his view of the incomplete, but compelling, picture of greenhouse-driven climate change with this photo illustration (right).

I’ve posted a lot on contrasting climate manifestos published in the past week by The Wall Street Journal, but it’s worth adding the perspective of Richter, a physics Nobelist who’s been deeply focused on humanity’s energy challenge, including the climate impact of greenhouse gases. As I’ve noted before, he’s the author of “Beyond Smoke and Mirrors,” a cogent road map for facing the daunting long-term challenge of cutting emissions of greenhouse gases even as humanity’s growth spurt crests in the next few decades.

Here’s a note Richter sent in reaction to the initial 16-author op-ed article in the Journal, which challenged the need for prompt action to stem emissions:

The letter of the 16 scientists (physicists, I am sorry to say) published in the Wall Street Journal on 1/27/2012 says that more and more scientists doubt the dangers of global warming. That may be true of those who have not really looked at the issue, but it is certainly untrue of those that have.

There are two legitimate questions to ask about global warming. First, is the temperature going up? Second, if it is changing, what is causing it? The letter first casts doubt on the temperature rise, and then goes on to say even if it is rising, it is probably natural and has little to do with greenhouse gas emissions. I suppose it is nice to try to have two strings for your bow.

On the first question, the average temperature of our planet has, in fits and starts, been going up for more than 100 years. The average temperature each year fluctuates by a considerable amount and to see an effect one has to average over some period of time just as the technical analysts of the stock market look at the moving average over some number of day to discern trends.

Some of the authors of the letter know this; some do not. That the temperature has not gone up for a few years is irrelevant. To those who are interested in the most recent analysis, I point them to the work of Dr Richard Muller and his group at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Muller was a climate skeptic and pulled together a group of scientists and mathematicians and reanalyzed all the data. He did an outstanding job and gets the same answer as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The letter quotes one of its authors, Nobel Laureate Ivar Giaever, damning the American Physical Society’s statement that the evidence for warming is incontrovertible.

Armed with my own Nobel Medal, I say if you can read a graph, the evidence is indeed incontrovertible because the temperature has gone up. The Physical Society is right, he is wrong, and I can’t understand why he complains about the temperature rise issue when there is more to discuss on the second question; who is the villain?

We have seen in the past a temperature change of about the same amount as the current one and it was a cooling. The Little Ice Age that began in the 14^th century reduced the temperature of at least the northern hemisphere by about one degree centigrade in a couple of hundred years, and CO-2 emissions had nothing to do with it. The authors should be asking why today we are fairly sure the enemy is us.

In science we try analyze effects to discern their cause. When effects showed Newton was wrong on some things, Einstein put forward relativity which left Newton alone in his domain of validity and showed how new things happened when one left that domain. That is also the story of climate change.

In the 1950s we learned that CO-2 was going up faster than assumed previously. In the 1970s the World Meteorological Organization and the International Council for Science put together a group to try to understand what might happen if trends continued. The UN took it over in 1988 and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change was born. Its first report in 1990 said the temperature was going up and not enough was known to say if it was nature or us doing the driving. In its 1995 report humans were said to be contributing. In the 2001 report it said human activity was the likely cause. In the 2007 report it said it was very likely that humans were the drivers. The next report is due out in 2013.

As to the Little Ice Age, its origins were a mystery until very recently. New research ties it to a series of violent volcanic eruptions that threw material into the sky leading to a cooling. We will need more work to make sure this is true, but this is how science works; analyze effects to discern their causes and incorporate what you learn into a larger understanding.

The science is still evolving and new effects are being recognized and included. It may be that some of them will lower the predicted greenhouse driven rise while some will increase it. Meanwhile there are many things we can do that have multiple benefits. Going to 54 miles per gallon as the E.P.A. and the car companies agree can be done lowers our oil imports and reduces greenhouse gases. Switching from coal to gas to generate electricity eliminates a major harmful set of pollutants and improves health as well as reducing emissions. Improved efficiency can lower energy use in buildings, saving money and reducing emissions. It makes sense to do things that have economic benefits as well as potential climate benefits.

There is one place where the writers and I do agree. There are lots of uncertainties in the climate analysis and more investment in reducing those uncertainties is certainly warranted. Maybe we can at least get that done no matter who wins the next election.

Incidentally, The Physical Society has started a Topical Group on the Physics of Climate. The authors can join in the discussion without resigning from the society, and perhaps learn a few things. Of course, polemical letters are more fun.

NYT

Don Cornelius

Do-It-Yourself Deportation

By ANTONIO ALARCÓN

From the time I was just a baby in Mexico, I lived with my grandparents while my parents traveled to other Mexican states to find work. I was 6 in 2000 when they left for the United States. And it took five years before they had steady jobs and were able to send for me. We’ve been together in this country ever since, working to build a life. Now I am 17 and a senior in high school in New York City. But my parents have left again, this time to return to Mexico.

Last week, when asked in a debate what America should do about the 11 million undocumented immigrants living here, Mitt Romney said he favored “self-deportation.” He presented the strategy as a kinder alternative to just arresting people. Instead, he said, immigrants will “decide they can do better by going home because they can’t find work here.”

But really this goes along with a larger movement in states like Arizona and Alabama to pass very tough laws against immigrants in an attempt to make their lives so unbearable that they have no choice but to leave. People have called for denying work, education and even medical treatment to immigrants without documentation; many immigrants have grown afraid of even going to the store or to church.

The United States is supposed to be a great country that welcomes all kinds of people. Does Mr. Romney really think that this should be America’s solution for immigration reform?

You could say that my parents have self-deported, and that it was partly a result of their working conditions. It’s not that they couldn’t find work, but that they couldn’t find decent work. My dad collected scrap metal from all over the city, gathering copper and steel from construction sites, garbage dumps and old houses. He earned $90 a day, but there was only enough work for him to do it once or twice a week. My mom worked at a laundromat six days a week, from 6 a.m. until 6 p.m., for $70 a day.

But the main reason they had to leave was personal. I have a brother, 16, a year younger than me, still living in Mexico. He was too little to cross the border with me when I came to the United States, and as the government has cracked down on immigration in the years since, the crossing has become more expensive and much more dangerous. And there was no hope of his getting a green card, as none of us have one either. So he stayed with my grandparents, but last year my grandmother died and two weeks ago my grandfather also died. My parents were confronted with a dilemma: Leave one child alone in New York City, or leave the other alone in Mexico. They decided they had to go back to Mexico.

Now once again I am missing my parents. I know it was very difficult for them to leave me here, worrying about how I will survive because I’m studying instead of earning money working. I’m living with my uncles, but it is hard for my mother to know that I’m coming home to a table with no dinner on it, where there had been dinner before. And it’s hard for me not having my parents to talk to, not being able to ask for advice that as a teenager you need. Now that they are in Mexico, I wonder who will be at my graduation, my volleyball games or my birthday? With whom will I share my joy or my sad moments?

I know a girl named Guadalupe, whose parents have also decided to return to Mexico, because they can’t find work here and rent in New York City is very expensive. She is very smart and wants to be the first in her family to attend college, and she wants to study psychology. But even though she has lived here for years and finished high school with a 90 percent average, she, like me, does not have immigration papers, and so does not qualify for financial aid and can’t get a scholarship.

People like Guadalupe and me are staying in this country because we have faith that America will live up to its promise as a fair and just country. We hope that there will be comprehensive immigration reform, with a path to citizenship for people who have spent years living and working here. When reform happens, our families may be able to come back, and if not, at least we will be able to visit them without the risk of never being able to return to our lives here. We hope that the Dream Act — which would let undocumented immigrants who came here as children go to college and become citizens and which has stalled in Congress — will pass so that we can get an education and show that even though we are immigrants we can succeed in this country.

If, instead, the political climate gets more and more anti-immigrant, eventually some immigrants will give up hope for America and return to their home countries, like my parents did. But I don’t think this is something that our presidential candidates should encourage or be proud of.

Immigrants have made this country great. We are not looking for a free ride, but instead we are willing to work as hard as we can to show that we deserve to be here and to be treated like first-class citizens. Deportation, and “self-deportation,” will result only in dividing families and driving them into the shadows. In America, teenagers shouldn’t have to go through what I’m going through.

Antonio Alarcón is a high school student and a member of Make the Road New York, an immigrant advocacy group. This essay was translated by Natalia Aristizabal-Betancur from the Spanish.

NYT

Do-It-Yourself Deportation - NYTimes.com

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Europe freeze kills 89, fears rise over Russian gas : Scientific American

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Drought and Cold Snap Cause Food Crisis in Northern Mexico - NYTimes.com

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The Shining in depth analysis

The Bookstore’s Last Stand

William J. Lynch Jr., chief executive of Barnes & Noble, with a wall full of e-readers at its site in Silicon Valley, where 300 employees are building the company's digital side.

By JULIE BOSMAN

IN March 2009, an eternity ago in Silicon Valley, a small team of engineers here was in a big hurry to rethink the future of books. Not the paper-and-ink books that have been around since the days of Gutenberg, the ones that the doomsayers proclaim — with glee or dread — will go the way of vinyl records.

No, the engineers were instead fixated on the forces that are upending the way books are published, sold, bought and read: e-books and e-readers. Working in secret, behind an unmarked door in a former bread bakery, they rushed to build a device that might capture the imagination of readers and maybe even save the book industry.

They had six months to do it.

Running this sprint was, of all companies, Barnes & Noble, the giant that helped put so many independent booksellers out of business and that now finds itself locked in the fight of its life. What its engineers dreamed up was the Nook, a relative e-reader latecomer that has nonetheless become the great e-hope of Barnes & Noble and, in fact, of many in the book business.

Several iterations later, the Nook and, by extension, Barnes & Noble, at times seem the only things standing between traditional book publishers and oblivion.

Inside the great publishing houses — grand names like Macmillan, Penguin and Random House — there is a sense of unease about the long-term fate of Barnes & Noble, the last major bookstore chain standing. First, the megastores squeezed out the small players. (Think of Tom Hanks’s Fox & Sons Books to Meg Ryan’s Shop Around the Corner in the 1998 comedy, “You’ve Got Mail”.) Then the chains themselves were gobbled up or driven under, as consumers turned to the Web. B. Dalton Bookseller and Crown Books are long gone. Borders collapsed last year.

No one expects Barnes & Noble to disappear overnight. The worry is that it might slowly wither as more readers embrace e-books. What if all those store shelves vanished, and Barnes & Noble became little more than a cafe and a digital connection point? Such fears came to the fore in early January, when the company projected that it would lose even more money this year than Wall Street had expected. Its share price promptly tumbled 17 percent that day.

Lurking behind all of this is Amazon.com, the dominant force in books online and the company that sets teeth on edge in publishing. From their perches in Midtown Manhattan, many publishing executives, editors and publicists view Amazon as the enemy — an adversary that, if unchecked, could threaten their industry and their livelihoods.

Like many struggling businesses, book publishers are cutting costs and trimming work forces. Yes, electronic books are booming, sometimes profitably, but not many publishers want e-books to dominate print books. Amazon’s chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, wants to cut out the middleman — that is, traditional publishers — by publishing e-books directly.

Which is why Barnes & Noble, once viewed as the brutal capitalist of the book trade, now seems so crucial to that industry’s future. Sure, you can buy bestsellers at Walmart and potboilers at the supermarket. But in many locales, Barnes & Noble is the only retailer offering a wide selection of books. If something were to happen to Barnes & Noble, if it were merely to scale back its ambitions, Amazon could become even more powerful and — well, the very thought makes publishers queasy.

“It would be like ‘The Road,’ ” one publishing executive in New York said, half-jokingly, referring to the Cormac McCarthy novel. “The post-apocalyptic world of publishing, with publishers pushing shopping carts down Broadway.”

Shouldering the responsibilities of Barnes & Noble is one thing. Holding the fate of American book publishing in your hands is quite another. But William J. Lynch Jr., the C.E.O. of the company, says he is up for the battle. With all of three years of experience in bookselling, Mr. Lynch must pull off a balancing act that would be tricky even in good times. He must carve out a digital future for Barnes & Noble without forsaking its hard-copy past, all while his company’s profit and share price are under pressure, his customers are fleeing to the Web and Amazon is circling.

It might come as a surprise, but Mr. Lynch says Barnes & Noble is, in fact, a technology company. Never mind that it has 703 bookstores and operates in all 50 states. To the delight of publishers, he has pushed hard into e-books and, with the help of the well-reviewed Nook, even grabbed a lot of market share from Amazon. But he is playing David to Mr. Bezos’s Goliath. Barnes & Noble’s stock closed on Friday at $11.95, putting the value of the company at $719 million. Amazon’s shares closed at $195.37, valuing Mr. Bezos’s company at $88 billion.

“We could sit here and bang our head against the wall and get sick about it like we do every week,” Mr. Lynch, 41, said of his company’s stock price. But he contends that pushing into e-books with the Nook is the right way, and perhaps the only way, forward.

“Had we not launched devices and spent the money we invested in the Nook, investors and analysts would have said, ‘Barnes & Noble is crazy, and they’re going to go away,’ ” Mr. Lynch said.

BEFORE Mr. Lynch joined Barnes & Noble in 2009, he had never sold a book in his life. (The last book he read — on the Nook, he said last week — was “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold,” by John le Carré.) Mr. Lynch came to the job from IAC/InterActiveCorp, where he worked for HSN.com, the online outlet of the Home Shopping Network, and Gifts.com.

And yet, in three years, he has won a remarkable number of fans in the upper echelons of the book world. Most publishers in New York can’t say enough good things about him: smart, creative, tech-savvy — the list goes on. It helps that he has forged the friendliest relations between publishers and Barnes & Noble in recent memory. They are, after all, in this together.

Mr. Lynch grew up in Dallas and still speaks with a hint of Texas twang. But he has the foot-tapping intensity of a tech type running on four Mountain Dews. It seems fitting, then, that he usually works out of an office in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, where Barnes & Noble’s Web and digital operations are based, rather than at the company’s stately headquarters on Fifth Avenue, not far away. When he talks, you get the sense that he could be selling just about anything. As it happens, he is selling books.

Mr. Lynch says Barnes & Noble stores will endure. The idea that devices like the Nook, Kindle and Apple iPad will make bookstores obsolete is nonsense, he says.

“Our stores are not going anywhere,” he said in an interview this month in his office. He pointed to a surprisingly robust holiday season. In the nine weeks leading up to Christmas, sales were up 4 percent from the previous year. Titles for children and young adults are doing well, partly a result of the popularity of fiction with paranormal or dystopian themes, like “The Hunger Games.” And in the second half of 2011, Barnes & Noble picked up a big chunk of business from its vanquished rival, Borders.

Yet no sooner had the holidays passed than Barnes & Noble came out with some downbeat news for the year ahead. On Jan. 5, it projected it would lose as much as $1.40 a share in fiscal 2012. On top of that, Mr. Lynch said shareholders seemed to be underestimating the Nook’s potential so much that perhaps the company would be better off if it just spun off its digital business. Wall Street howled, and Barnes & Noble’s stock still hasn’t fully recovered. A bit of good news for the company is that, thanks to the Nook, it’s been grabbing e-book business from Amazon. Mr. Lynch said Barnes & Noble now held about 27 percent of the market, a number that publishers confirm gleefully. Amazon has at least 60 percent.

Responding to questions about the battle over e-books, Amazon issued a statement on Friday pointing to its own recent growth. In the nine-week holiday period ended Dec. 31, it said, “Kindle unit sales, including both the Kindle Fire and e-reader devices, increased 177 percent over the same period last year.”

Granted, Mr. Lynch inherited a company at a pivotal moment in its long, winding history. Barnes & Noble dates back to 1873, when Charles Barnes went into the used-book business in Wheaton, Ill. His company later moved to New York, bought an interest in an established textbook wholesaler, Noble & Noble, and opened a large bookshop on Fifth Avenue.

So it went until an enterprising young bookseller, Leonard Riggio, came along. After gaining a foothold in college bookstores, he bought that Barnes & Noble bookshop in 1971. Before long, he was offering deep discounts — and expanding wildly across the nation.

Early in his tenure, Mr. Lynch pressed Mr. Riggio’s brother, Stephen, his predecessor as C.E.O., to explain the business he’d gotten himself into.

“I had this ‘La Femme Nikita’ immersion with him,” Mr. Lynch recalled. “We went to lunch and I just told him, ‘Tell me everything you know about the book business.’ ”

But at that time, Amazon had already made the first successful move in e-readers: the first-generation Kindle hit the market in November 2007. Mr. Lynch had arrived in the C-suite, but was perilously late to the party.

ON Homer Avenue in downtown Palo Alto is a tiny, two-story building that once housed the maker of Palo Alto Bread. It was here, in March 2009, that Barnes & Noble brought a few new hires to create the Nook. Outsiders weren’t quite sure what the company was up to. The landlord figured that Mr. Lynch wanted to open a store.

What began as an almost quixotic effort to catch up with the Amazon Kindle has now grown into a 300-person operation in the heart of Silicon Valley. Mr. Lynch has hired engineers, software developers and designers, who are today spread among five low-slung buildings.

In one room, a virtual wallpaper of Nook color devices hangs in rows neat as a checkerboard. A common area holds a foosball table and a cooler of VitaminWater. Some of the walls are made of silver-colored mesh. Some of the cubicles are lime green.

But there are also reminders of the old Barnes & Noble. Over here is a basket of actual books, including “Travels With Charley” and “The Little Prince.” Over there on a wall are enormous vintage covers of books like “Of Mice and Men” and “The Great Gatsby.”

It was Nick Carraway who told Jay Gatsby, “You can’t repeat the past.” That warning seems to hang over these offices. A sign above one group of engineers says: “We are changing the future of bookselling.”

For all the bells and whistles and high-minded talk, Barnes & Noble doesn’t exactly have the cool factor (or money) of, say, a Google or a Facebook.

Ravi Gopalakrishnan, the first engineer whom Mr. Lynch hired and now the chief technology officer for digital products, said his techie friends were incredulous when he joined Barnes & Noble.

“They were all wondering what I was up to,” Mr. Gopalakrishnan, 46, said. “I’m a technology guy — why I was working for a retail company? They thought I was nuts. There were a lot of e-mails that said, ‘Barnes & Noble?!’ ”

Bill Saperstein, a mild-mannered surfer and a veteran of Apple, said he was persuaded to leave retirement to join Barnes & Noble as vice president for digital products hardware engineering.

“We don’t see a lot of the stock and the free sushi bar and everything else that you find at Google, but there’s a lot of responsibility,” said Mr. Saperstein, 62, who spent seven years working for Steve Jobs. “It was stuff that I strongly believed in, which was reading.”

Barnes & Noble is trying to strike at Amazon with another device. At its labs in Silicon Valley last week, engineers were putting final touches on their fifth e-reading device, a product that executives said would be released sometime this spring. (A Barnes & Noble spokeswoman declined to elaborate.)

Back in New York, Mr. Lynch has been working to revamp the look of Barnes & Noble stores. Last year, the company expanded sections for toys and games and added shiny new display space for its Nook devices. In another sign of the digital revolution, Mr. Lynch expects to eliminate the dedicated sections for music and DVD’s within two years — while still selling some of them elsewhere in the stores. He also plans to experiment with slightly smaller stores. And, before long, executives will take the Nook overseas — a big switch, given that Barnes & Noble has focused almost exclusively on the American market for decades. The first stop is expected to be Waterstones bookstores in Britain.

All of this would be a tall order for any C.E.O., and some analysts wonder if Mr. Lynch has bitten off more than he can chew. Then again, given this industry’s pace of change, Barnes & Noble may have to adapt to new realities, or die trying.

“I think they realize they can’t continue at the rate they’re going,” said Jack W. Perry, a publishing consultant. “They need more money to invest, to slug it out.”

THESE are trying times for almost everyone in the book business. Since 2002, the United States has lost roughly 500 independent bookstores — nearly one out of five. About 650 bookstores vanished when Borders went out of business last year.

No wonder that some New York publishers have gone so far as to sketch out what the industry might look like without Barnes & Noble. It’s not a happy thought for them: Certainly, there would be fewer places to sell books. Independents account for less than 10 percent of business, and Target, Walmart and the like carry far smaller selections than traditional bookstores.

Without Barnes & Noble, the publishers’ marketing proposition crumbles. The idea that publishers can spot, mold and publicize new talent, then get someone to buy books at prices that actually makes economic sense, suddenly seems a reach. Marketing books via Twitter, and relying on reviews, advertising and perhaps an appearance on the “Today” show doesn’t sound like a winning plan.

What publishers count on from bookstores is the browsing effect. Surveys indicate that only a third of the people who step into a bookstore and walk out with a book actually arrived with the specific desire to buy one.

“That display space they have in the store is really one of the most valuable places that exists in this country for communicating to the consumer that a book is a big deal,” said Madeline McIntosh, president of sales, operations and digital for Random House.

What’s more, sales of older books — the so-called backlist, which has traditionally accounted for anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of the average big publisher’s sales — would suffer terribly.

“For all publishers, it’s really important that brick-and-mortar retailers survive,” said David Shanks, the chief executive of the Penguin Group USA. “Not only are they key to keeping our physical book business thriving, there is also the carry-on effect of the display of a book that contributes to selling e-books and audio books. The more visibility a book has, the more inclined a reader is to make a purchase.”

Carolyn Reidy, president and chief executive of Simon & Schuster, says the biggest challenge is to give people a reason to step into Barnes & Noble stores in the first place. “They have figured out how to use the store to sell e-books," she said of the company. "Now, hopefully, we can figure out how to make that go full circle and see how the e-books can sell the print books.”

Mr. Bezos, for one, isn’t waiting. Amazon has set the book industry on edge by starting a publishing unit that has snagged authors like Timothy Ferriss and James Franco. And, each day, the stock market provides a sobering reminder that Mr. Bezos, not Mr. Lynch, has the deeper pockets.

While publishers’ fates are closely tied to Barnes & Noble, said John Sargent, the C.E.O. of Macmillan, it’s not all about them.

“Anybody who is an author, a publisher, or makes their living from distributing intellectual property in book form is badly hurt,” he said, “if Barnes & Noble does not prosper.”

NYT

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Just Don’t Call Her Che

By WILLIAM MOSS WILSON

LATE last month the British newspaper The Guardian asked readers to vote for its person of the year. The candidates included household names like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Egyptian techno-revolutionary Wael Ghonim and the Burmese pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. All placed far behind a striking, nose-ringed student from Chile named Camila Vallejo.

Though far from a familiar face in the United States, the 23-year-old Ms. Vallejo has gained rock-star status among the global activist class. Since June she has led regular street marches of up to 200,000 people through Santiago’s broad avenues — the largest demonstrations since the waning days of the Pinochet regime in the late 1980s. Under her leadership, the mobilization, known as the Chilean Winter, has gained nationwide support; one of its slogans, “We are the 90 percent,” referred to its approval rating in late September.

Ms. Vallejo’s charismatic leadership has led commentators to make the obligatory comparisons to other Latin American leftist icons like Subcomandante Marcos and Che Guevara. Yet “Commander Camila,” as her followers call her, has become a personality in her own regard. She skewers senators in prime-time TV debates and stays on message with daytime talk-show hosts hungry for lurid details about her personal life, while her eloquence gives her a preternatural ability to connect with an audience far beyond her left-wing base.

In perhaps the most poignant set piece in the year of the protester, Ms. Vallejo addressed a dense ring of photographers and reporters in August while kneeling within a peace sign made of spent tear-gas shells, where she calmly mused about how many educational improvements could have been bought with the $100,000 worth of munitions at her feet.

Ms. Vallejo, like many of her fellow student leaders, is an avowed communist. But while she has publicly commended other regional leftists like Presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia and Rafael Correa of Ecuador, she and her generation have little in common with the older left of Fidel Castro or Hugo Chávez. They are less ideological purists than change-seeking pragmatists, even if that means working within the existing political order.

Still, there’s no question that the movement is upending Chilean society. True, it is centered on a policy question, namely reforming an educational system that disproportionally favors the children of wealthy families. But the earth-shaking Paris protests in 1968 also began with calls for university reform — before spiraling into street battles between radicalized students and truncheon-wielding gendarmes, opposing symbols in the culture war between old and new France.

The same process is under way in Chile. As the protests increasingly devolve into rock and tear-gas exchanges between students and the police, it’s becoming clear that more than education policy is at stake: a nonviolent social revolution in which disaffected, politically savvy youth are trying to overthrow the mores of an older generation, one they feel is still tainted by the legacy of Pinochet. It is not just about policy reform, but also about changing the underlying timbers of Chilean society.

It’s no surprise that the movement should be led by someone as charismatic as Ms. Vallejo. Paris 1968 had its celebrity protesters, handsome faces that brought hundreds of thousands into the streets, photogenic young men like Jacques Sauvageot and Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Chile has Ms. Vallejo.

Chile is perhaps Latin America’s greatest success story. After decades of authoritarian rule, it has spent the last 20 years building a thriving economy with a renewed democratic culture and a booming, educated middle class. But it is also confronting a dangerous imbalance: While the liberalization of higher education has led to improvements in access, tuition has consistently outpaced inflation and now represents 40 percent of the average household’s income.

At the same time, protesters say that wealthy students from private and expensive, co-pay charter schools have unfair access to elite universities, while the rest struggle to meet entrance standards at under-financed public institutions.

Criticism of the university system has been growing for years, but it was only in April that, energized by protests against a dam in Patagonia, students finally took to the streets. The protests grew over the winter; by the first press conference held by the national confederation of student unions, known as the Confech, Ms. Vallejo had emerged as its leader.

Echoing 1960s street activism, the Chilean Winter dabbled in the absurd, but with a high-tech, social-media twist. Thousands gathered in front of the presidential palace in June dressed as zombies, then broke into a choreographed dance to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” In July, students again gathered in front of the palace for a huge “kiss-in.”

Though the ideas came, said Giorgio Jackson, former student president of Chile’s Catholic University, from “everywhere, absolutely every local space,” the movement’s success hinged on the leadership’s ability to channel such creativity while maintaining a unified front to government and the media. The organization used a Web site to gather ideas and disseminate content for placards and posters. And it has used Ms. Vallejo’s 300,000-plus Twitter followers to quickly initiate huge “cacerolazos,” a form of dictatorship-era protest where people walk the streets banging on pots and pans.

While they vow to continue until all their lofty demands are met, the students have already scored some political victories. The government’s proposed 2012 budget has a $350 million increase for higher education, with promises to finance scholarships for qualifying students from families up to the 60th percentile in household income. Meanwhile, the year began with the naming of Chile’s third education minister in six months.

It was only a matter of time, perhaps, before the movement’s focus on education began to broaden. As more support for the movement came from outside the universities, its interests changed accordingly. “This year we have already started talking about political reforms and tax reforms, and we think the students and youth in general play an important role in profound reforms in the country,” said Noam Titelman, the new student president at Catholic University.

Tax reform is, not coincidentally, now at the top of the government’s agenda. And rightly so: though it has the largest economy in Latin America, Chile is the 13th most unequal country in the world.

“Something very powerful that has come out of the heart of this movement is that people are really questioning the economic policies of the country,” Ms. Vallejo said. “People are not tolerating the way a small number of economic groups benefit from the system. Having a market economy is really different from having a market society. What we are asking for, via education reform, is that the state take on a different role.”

The movement has also begun to spread regionally. Ms. Vallejo lent her star power to Brazilian student protests in August, while in November students demonstrated in France, Germany and several other countries in support of Confech’s Latin American March for Education.

“The student movement here is permanently connected to other student movements, principally in Latin America, but also in the world,” Ms. Vallejo said. “We believe this reveals something fundamental: that there is a global demand for the recovery and defense of the right to education.”

But the students clearly have a lot to learn about real-world politics. Ms. Vallejo and other student leaders spent weeks lobbying in Parliament, only to be left out of the final budget negotiations.

Frustration with Ms. Vallejo’s strategy propelled a rival leftist, Gabriel Boric, to challenge her in the latest round of student-government elections. On Dec. 7, national TV news crews lingered past 5 a.m. outside the University of Chile to cover a stunning defeat for the world’s most famous student leader.

Yet even in her early-morning concession speech, Ms. Vallejo claimed victory, recognizing that the movement was greater than any one figure. Indeed, her rise has barely broken stride. She just left for a speaking tour in Europe, while her first book, a collection of her speeches and essays from the last year, is rising through the best-seller ranks. And she is being heavily courted by the Communist Party to run at the top of its list for the Chilean Congress in the 2013 elections.

For all its recent stumbles, the movement’s prospects of getting a woman under 26 elected to Congress would help fulfill one of its underlying aims, to kindle young people’s interest in traditional politics. This may be Ms. Vallejo’s greatest contribution: to restore faith in a discredited system by showing a new generation that politics can be responsive to the people’s demands.

William Moss Wilson is a freelance journalist based in Chile.

NYT

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George Soros on the Coming U.S. Class War

You know George Soros. He’s the investor’s investor—the man who still holds the record for making more money in a single day’s trading than anyone. He pocketed $1 billion betting against the British pound on “Black Wednesday” in 1992, when sterling lost 20 percent of its value in less than 24 hours and crashed out of the European exchange-rate mechanism. No wonder Brits call him, with a mix of awe and annoyance, “the man who broke the Bank of England.”

Soros doesn’t make small bets on anything. Beyond the markets, he has plowed billions of dollars of his own money into promoting political freedom in Eastern Europe and other causes. He bet against the Bush White House, becoming a hate magnet for the right that persists to this day. So, as Soros and the world’s movers once again converge on Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum this week, what is one of the world’s highest-stakes economic gamblers betting on now?

He’s not. For the first time in his 60-year career, Soros, now 81, admits he is not sure what to do. “It’s very hard to know how you can be right, given the damage that was done during the boom years,” Soros says. He won’t discuss his portfolio, lest anyone think he’s talking things down to make a buck. But people who know him well say he advocates making long-term stock picks with solid companies, avoiding gold—“the ultimate bubble”—and, mainly, holding cash.

He’s not even doing the one thing that you would expect from a man who knows a crippled currency when he sees one: shorting the euro, and perhaps even the U.S. dollar, to hell. Quite the reverse. He backs the beleaguered euro, publicly urging European leaders to do whatever it takes to ensure its survival. “The euro must survive because the alternative—a breakup—would cause a meltdown that Europe, the world, can’t afford.” He has bought about $2 billion in European bonds, mainly Italian, from MF Global Holdings Ltd., the securities firm run by former Goldman Sachs head Jon Corzine that filed for bankruptcy protection last October.

Has the great short seller gone soft? Well, yes. Sitting in his 33rd-floor corner office high above Seventh Avenue in New York, preparing for his trip to Davos, he is more concerned with surviving than staying rich. “At times like these, survival is the most important thing,” he says, peering through his owlish glasses and brushing wisps of gray hair off his forehead. He doesn’t just mean it’s time to protect your assets. He means it’s time to stave off disaster. As he sees it, the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of “evil.” Europe is confronting a descent into chaos and conflict. In America he predicts riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties. The global economic system could even collapse altogether.

George Soros. , Photograph by Jake Chessum for Newsweek

“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,” Soros tells Newsweek. “We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”

Soros’s warning is based as much on his own extraordinary personal history as on his gut instinct for market booms and busts. “I did survive a personally much more threatening situation, so it is emotional, as well as rational,” he acknowledges. Soros was just 13 when Nazi soldiers invaded and occupied his native Hungary in March 1944. In only eight weeks, almost half a million Hungarian Jews were deported, many to Auschwitz. He saw bodies of Jews, and the Christians who helped them, swinging from lampposts, their skulls crushed. He survived, thanks to his father, Tivadar, who managed to secure false identities for his family. Later, he watched as Russian forces ousted the Nazis and a new totalitarian ideology, communism, replaced fascism. As life got tougher during the postwar Soviet occupation, Soros managed to emigrate, first to London, then to New York.

Soros draws on his past to argue that the global economic crisis is as significant, and unpredictable, as the end of communism. “The collapse of the Soviet system was a pretty extraordinary event, and we are currently experiencing something similar in the developed world, without fully realizing what’s happening.” To Soros, the spectacular debunking of the credo of efficient markets—the notion that markets are rational and can regulate themselves to avert disaster—“is comparable to the collapse of Marxism as a political system. The prevailing interpretation has turned out to be very misleading. It assumes perfect knowledge, which is very far removed from reality. We need to move from the Age of Reason to the Age of Fallibility in order to have a proper understanding of the problems.”

Understanding, he says, is key. “Unrestrained competition can drive people into actions that they would otherwise regret. The tragedy of our current situation is the unintended consequence of imperfect understanding. A lot of the evil in the world is actually not intentional. A lot of people in the financial system did a lot of damage without intending to.” Still, Soros believes the West is struggling to cope with the consequences of evil in the financial world just as former Eastern bloc countries struggled with it politically. Is he really saying that the financial whizzes behind our economic meltdown were not just wrong, but evil? “That’s correct.” Take that, Lloyd Blankfein, the Goldman Sachs boss who told The Sunday Times of London at the height of the financial crisis that bankers “do God’s work.”

To many, the idea of Soros lecturing the world on “evil” is, well, rich. Here, after all, is an investor who proved—and profited hugely from—the now much-derided notion that the market, or in his case a single investor, is more powerful than sovereign governments. He broke the Bank of England, destroyed the Conservative Party’s reputation for economic competence, and reduced the value of the pound in British consumers’ pockets by one fifth in a single day. Soros the currency speculator has been condemned as “unnecessary, unproductive, immoral.” Mahathir Mohamad, former prime minister of Malaysia, once called him “criminal” and “a moron.”

In the U.S., where the right still has not forgiven him for agitating against President George W. Bush and the “war on terror” after 9/11, which he described as “pernicious,” his prediction of riots on the streets—“it’s already started,” he says—will likely spark fresh criticism that Soros is a “far-left, radical bomb thrower,” as Bill O’Reilly once put it. Critics already allege he is stoking the fires by funding the Occupy movement through Adbusters, the Canadian provocateurs who sparked the movement. Not so, says Soros.

Soros’s fragrant personal life will also prompt many to pooh-pooh his moralizing. Last year, Adriana Ferreyr, his 28-year-old companion for many years, sued him in New York Supreme Court in Manhattan, alleging he reneged on two separate promises to buy her an apartment, causing her extreme emotional distress. Ferreyr, a former soap-opera star in Brazil, said Soros had given the apartment he had promised her to another girlfriend. She also claimed he assaulted her. Soros has dismissed Ferreyr’s claims as “frivolous and entirely without merit” and “riddled with false charges and obviously an attempt to extract money.”

Despite his baggage, the man who now views himself as a statesman-philanthropist is undeterred. Having profited from unregulated markets, he now wants to deliver us from them. Take Europe. He’s now convinced that “if you have a disorderly collapse of the euro, you have the danger of a revival of the political conflicts that have torn Europe apart over the centuries—an extreme form of nationalism, which manifests itself in xenophobia, the exclusion of foreigners and ethnic groups. In Hitler’s time, that was focused on the Jews. Today, you have that with the Gypsies, the Roma, which is a small minority, and also, of course, Muslim immigrants.”

It is “now more likely than not” that Greece will formally default in 2012, Soros will tell leaders in Davos this week. He will castigate European leaders who seem to know only how to “do enough to calm the situation, not to solve the problem.” If Germany’s Angela Merkel or France’s Nicolas Sarkozy nurses any lingering hopes of finding their salvation outside the continent, they are mistaken. “I took a recent trip to China, and China won’t come to Europe’s rescue,” Soros says. Despite all its woes, he nevertheless thinks the euro will—just barely—survive.

While Soros, whose new book, Financial Turmoil in Europe and the United States, will be published in early February, is currently focused on Europe, he’s quick to claim that economic and social divisions in the U.S. will deepen, too. He sympathizes with the Occupy movement, which articulates a widespread disillusionment with capitalism that he shares. People “have reason to be frustrated and angry” at the cost of rescuing the banking system, a cost largely borne by taxpayers rather than shareholders or bondholders.

Occupy Wall Street “is an inchoate, leaderless manifestation of protest,” but it will grow. It has “put on the agenda issues that the institutional left has failed to put on the agenda for a quarter of a century.” He reaches for analysis, produced by the political blog ThinkProgress.org, that shows how the Occupy movement has pushed issues of unemployment up the agenda of major news organizations, including MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News. It reveals that in one week in July of last year the word “debt” was mentioned more than 7,000 times on major U.S. TV news networks. By October, mentions of the word “debt” had dropped to 398 over the course of a week, while “occupy” was mentioned 1,278 times, “Wall Street” 2,378 times, and “jobs” 2,738 times. You can’t keep a financier away from his metrics.

As anger rises, riots on the streets of American cities are inevitable. “Yes, yes, yes,” he says, almost gleefully. The response to the unrest could be more damaging than the violence itself. “It will be an excuse for cracking down and using strong-arm tactics to maintain law and order, which, carried to an extreme, could bring about a repressive political system, a society where individual liberty is much more constrained, which would be a break with the tradition of the United States.”

In spite of his warnings of political turmoil in the U.S., he has no plans to engage in politics directly. “I would prefer not to be involved in party politics. It’s only because I felt that the Bush administration was misleading the country that I became involved. I was very hopeful of a new beginning with Obama, and I’ve been somewhat disappointed. I remain a supporter of the Democratic Party, but I’m fully aware of their shortcomings.” Soros believes Obama still has a chance of winning this year’s election. “Obama might surprise the public. The main issue facing the electorate is whether the rich should be taxed more. It shouldn’t be a difficult argument for Obama to make.”

If there is a glimmer of hope for the world in 2012, Soros believes it lies in emerging markets. The democratic-reform movement that has spread across the Middle East, the rise of democracy and economic growth in Africa, even reform in Russia may yet drag the world out of the mire. “While the developed world is in a deep crisis, the future for the developing world is very positive. The aspiration of people for an open society is very inspiring. You have people in Africa lining up for many hours when they are given an opportunity to vote. Dictators have been overthrown. It is very encouraging for freedom and growth.”

Soros insists the key to avoiding cataclysm in 2012 is not to let the crises of 2011 go to waste. “In the crisis period, the impossible becomes possible. The European Union could regain its luster. I’m hopeful that the United States, as a political entity, will pass a very severe test and actually strengthen the institution.” Nor has he quite given up hope that the central bankers and prime ministers gathering in Davos this week have got what it takes to rally round and prove him wrong. This time, being wrong would make him happy indeed.

Newsweek

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We are in a crisis of the total system which must be faced: Bartlett Diaz

2012-01-26 04:00:00

Manuel Bartlett Diaz in a lengthy interview 
that made ​​executives and reporters of this 
publishing house

Manuel Bartlett Diaz (MBD) has returned to the state that ruled for nearly 20 years. It does so as a candidate to the Senate, but not the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)-the political institution in which he fought all his life, but championed by the Workers' Party (PT) and supporting the cause Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador leads.

Former federal interior minister paid a visit to the premises of La Jornada de Oriente (JO). In an extensive interview with executives and reporters made ​​this publishing house, Bartlett talked about how he was always on the wing of the tricolor claimed social justice and revolutionary nationalism, of their struggle, since it occupied the Palace of Covián against the technocracy and how the PRI and the country eventually turn to the right when Carlos Salinas de Gortari won the presidency of the Republic.

He referred to the fruits that has given the marriage between the PRI and the National Action Party (PAN) with retrograde laws-some even sneak a fascist, that individual rights, the organization and repress social protest and have widened to levels never before seen the gap between rich and poor.

That brace of a PRI "derechizado" with National Action, he added, has had its replica in Puebla, where the PRI behave submissively, as comparsa Governor Rafael Moreno Valle Rosas, appearing as a "confused opposition."

In contrast, the former governor of Puebla, who already held a seat for two terms of six years, praised the National Regeneration Movement (Morena), which he defines as "a genuine social force, strong and surprising." Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador says he is "the only truly popular leader in the country and the only real change is."

Bartlett finishes warning that, as a champion of the left, its mission is "to give a cleaned Puebla" and particularly "shake the PRI."

The talk is initiated by Bartlett Diaz with a diagnosis of the country, talking about a deep crisis that is not limited to economics, but has transferred to politics, social life, institutions and even moral. In sum, says, afflicts the country a "total crisis" and must confront.

"I think this election is crucial, I've never seen the country so badly as now. We have had financial crises, but this is a total crisis, a crisis of governance, is a crisis of state, a comprehensive crisis beyond an economic crisis. It is a moral crisis so. It has been decomposing in the management of the State, public affairs, corruption is widespread. I'm not trying to justify to anyone, it is generally awful, terrible, a country with a moral decline in the public sector in the governorate. Is an economic crisis, employment, social crisis is acute, not circumstantial, is not like the other crises we have had, because here you lost control, there was a financial imbalance, "he says.

He adds, "we see growing poverty, wealth and have more concentrated than we could have. What has led to this situation? ... No, not this crisis has brought us the current U.S. and Europe, which recently broke out, ours is much older than that, is more acute as presents additional challenges that Europe has no economic activity not buy, sell and America is the same, but the problem is that we have no domestic market, rather than an exporting country are an importing country, then it is dramatic because it assumes that globalization leads countries to market integration, but we are an importing country, we are exporting many things, but these exports, if we begin to analyze, they are much of multinationals that sell cars to the U.S.. Then it is a total system crisis. "

Bartlett Diaz then refers to the problem of violence and militarization of the country:

"The safety issue we generated several problems, we generated the militarization of the country. This country was not militarized, we assumed an army barracks, doing civil work, participating in civil defense programs, according to farmers (users) out there with Operation Condor, but was in the barracks, did not see the Army in the streets. "

To give an example of what is happening with the militia, Bartlett Diaz recalls the episode in which Gen. Alfonso Duarte complained in September last year, with Baja California Gov. Jose Guadalupe Osuna Millan, the behavior of Secretary of Government, Cuauhtemoc Cardona.

"Today the army is everywhere, has taken control of the police do not know if remember a scene that was terrible in Baja California after the report of the governor to enter the room, heard a scream and go into the general area, the governor, prying cameras are working, then yells General (Cardona) 'Come here you, you're a Bum!' and puts it in front of the governor. It is a scene, well, that placing military to civilian authority despised, is berating the authorities, that is very serious, that brings us another side to the disproportionate military spending since we do banana republic, as he spent all those South American resources on armies and weapons and had no schools, this is happening, it goes there. "

Then refers to the intrigue of Felipe Calderon Hinojosa by given contracts on natural resources like oil and mining.

Then goes on to talk about Enrique Peña Nieto, who says that "your party is Televisa." He criticizes the PRI presidential candidate statements about repealing the law that prevents the media propaganda space-charge during campaigns.

"Linking the PRI candidate pointer ferocious and insatiable these interests and bring others besides, it is certainly a danger, to use Spanish well, a danger to this country. Then the candidate pointer with all the strength back is the continuity of what is happening, is the Mexican drama.

JO - Is that why you agreed to join the left?

MBD-What we need is a change, calls for urgent change. There is a relationship years ago matches motivated by many years in government, in the Senate, marched up together! ...

JO-Con Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano ...

MBD-Yes, Cuauhtémoc, but I talked a lot with Senator (Alberto) Anaya (national leader of the Labour Party) and the invitation extended to me is to go to the Senate because they need people to give battle, like the one the Senate gave above (the force), six years ago.

JO - Why Left today is defined, or does it always been a leftist?

MBD-is ​​the position I have ever had. Formally he was in a left-wing party when it was. The PRI gives rise to the left ...

JO-A few ...

MBD-An important part is of PRI, there is such as Cuauhtémoc (Cardenas) in Salinas, is the power of Lopez Obrador, is the Communist Party and those things are also important at the time. I hear many say "I am left," and what is that?, I answer what Bobbio says: "Left is a movement that stands for equality ', ie has a policy, strategy, an act of equality in society, that says Bobbio.

JO - That is the definition that pleases you?

MBD-Yes, there are leftist Trotskyites, Marxists, Maoists, finally, there were all these ranges, but with a common thread. The old PRI or former PRI had to democracy and social justice principles. The Constitution was ahead of social guarantees, so you could have qualified as a leftist party, which then has an open shift to the right.

JO - So you stayed in the same place, which were moved others?

MBD-so it proved.

JO - Holds his early 20 years ago?

MBD-Essentially I think so. Here I have things I have written, I have had positions, do not think that has changed radically, nor have I been invited to transform.

La Jornada de Oriente