Below you can read a note by the NYT on the hunger strikes going on in Israel. Even 3,200 prisoners can eventually join the struggle. The battle is simple: State your objective, and refuse to eat. If 3,200 people die, the authority will have to explain why so many lives are not enough to change the stated policy.
From what I know, the issue here is that after World World II, some Jewish people left Europe, and Europeans exiled ( this is rhetorical, they were not exiled there, read the comments) them to the Promised Land of Palestine. They changed the name of the land to Israel, and claimed that their religious texts clearly indicated that what was then Palestine, was really, their land, and should be called Israel. If some Jewish people lived in Arab lands (read comments below) before, maybe they can do it again in modern times. I hope so.
Confusing?
Is that a justification to let 3,200 people starve to death?
I do not know the answer to that question, and I am not in a position to let this prisoners go or stay. What I do in this note is state something I just learned.
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson just published a book: Why Nations Fail.
The authors do not identify themselves as Neo-Marxist, but I explain here why I do.
Karl Marx in the Eighteenth Century wrote, that one needs to understand economics to understand, not only Why Nations Fail, but many other important social and historical questions. We only know the facts, but we need to know why they happened instead of something else.
Two crucial concepts are invented by these two scholars. Inclusive and Extractive.
Inclusive and Extractive Institutions could be political or economical, the first type includes most of the population, the second set of Institutions or rules, states that a person can appropriate the products of the work of others. This work can be extracted from other people, in the same way that the owner of a goat is allowed to get the goat's milk for his own benefit, without regard of the kid goats.
I call this Neo-Marxism.
The rulers of Israel put some of the Palestinians previously living in the land then called Palestine, and now called Israel, in the Gaza Strip, as if they were goats.
The goats now, rather die, than live under Israeli rules.
You can read Monsieur Seguin's Last Kid Goat, by Alphonse Daudet, in his book "Letters from my Windmill".
Thursday, May 03, 2012
Palestinian Resistance Shifts to Hunger Strikes - NYTimes.com
Palestinian Resistance Shifts to Hunger Strikes - NYTimes.com:
"KHARAS, West Bank — The newest heroes of the Palestinian cause are not burly young men hurling stones or wielding automatic weapons. They are gaunt adults, wrists in chains, starving themselves inside Israeli prisons."
'via Blog this'
"KHARAS, West Bank — The newest heroes of the Palestinian cause are not burly young men hurling stones or wielding automatic weapons. They are gaunt adults, wrists in chains, starving themselves inside Israeli prisons."
'via Blog this'
Debate on Presidential Debate Riles Mexico
By JOSÉ DE CÓRDOBA
MEXICO CITY—Some of Mexico's presidential candidates cried foul on Wednesday after the country's second-largest broadcaster said it would air a soccer game instead of the first presidential debate on Sunday.
The decision this week by broadcaster TV Azteca SAB has sparked a brawl involving the candidates, the country's political parties and electoral authority, pundits, its soccer league and sports fans.
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The move led to accusations that TV Azteca, and its billionaire owner Ricardo Salinas Pliego, is protecting front-runner Enrique Peña Nieto, the candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, Mexico's former ruling party.
Mr. Peña Nieto enjoys a 20-point lead in most polls over his nearest rival, and has by far the most to lose by a bad debate performance. With the election only two months away, his rivals hope a debate stumble could slow his momentum.
"If the debate is not broadcast on open television, it's going to be obvious that the networks want to impose the next president of Mexico," said Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the candidate of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, whom polls put in third place.
Mr. López Obrador, who narrowly lost the 2006 election, called on Mexico's election agency to force broadcasters to carry the debate. The agency said it was considering such a move.
The debate over the debate underlines the continuing influence that the country's television duopoly, made up of TV Azteca and No. 1 broadcaster Grupo Televisa SAB, exerts on its politics. TV Azteca, controlled by Mr. Salinas, has about 30% of Mexico's open television market, while rival Televisa controls the rest.
The two broadcasters have long been among the country's most important power brokers, trading access to the airwaves in exchange for protecting their business interests.
Some analysts say that both Azteca and Televisa want to help elect Mr. Peña Nieto in exchange for protecting their duopoly by ensuring that no other firm can build a viable third or fourth broadcaster. In the past, both companies have acted to block new entrants, according to rival media companies and analysts.
Azteca had no immediate comment on Wednesday, but in the past it has rejected any accusations it has tried to cut deals to protect its business interests. Mr. Peña Nieto's campaign has also rejected any such quid pro quo.
For its part, Televisa is broadcasting the debate, but not on its flagship channel, where it is airing a popular variety show. It has aired past presidential debates on its secondary channels. A Televisa official said on Wednesday the company covered all presidential candidates fairly, and said there was no evidence to "sustain the hypothesis" that it favored Mr. Peña Nieto.
The ties between the TV firms and the PRI run deep. Televisa's late founder, Emilio Azcarraga Milmo, famously called himself a "soldier of the PRI." The telegenic Mr. Peña Nieto is married to a former top Televisa soap-opera star. And both companies have had top executives serve as PRI senators or deputies.
Jorge Chabat, a political analyst at the CIDE, a Mexican graduate school, said the broadcasters appeared to have a political motive. "I fear…there is a clear intention to protect Peña Nieto," he wrote in Animal Politico, a Mexican political website.
TV Azteca says it can choose what to air. "If you want a debate, see it on Televisa, if not, see the soccer on Azteca. I'll send you the ratings the day after," Mr. Salinas wrote on his Twitter account Monday, setting off the controversy.
In the U.S., networks are expected to air presidential debates. In 2000, NBC and Fox networks were criticized by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission for failing to air the first of two presidential debates. Both networks have since aired all of the debates.
"This is a mockery of Mexico's fragile democracy and an arrogant message to the people of 'give them bread and circuses,'" wrote Enrique Krause, a leading Mexican intellectual and historian.
Josefina Vázquez Mota, the candidate for the conservative ruling National Action Party, implored fans to watch the debate. "What's in play is very important," she said in an interview.
Mr. Peña Nieto said he was ready to debate but said it was up to the election agency to make sure it was widely broadcast. A PRI party official said it would be undemocratic to force broadcasters to carry the debate.
The Anonymous group of computer hackers said it disabled various websites belonging to Mr. Salinas' business empire in response to the decision to air the soccer game.
Mr. Salinas, widely considered to be the brash bad boy of Mexico's billionaires for his many run-ins with the country's regulatory authorities, has had a running battle with the Federal Elections Institute, or IFE, as Mexico's electoral authority is known, since 2007. That year reforms decreed that broadcasters could not charge for televised ads by candidates, increased the number of free spots, and fixed the times that they had to run, including prime time.
Since then, TV Azteca has been fined millions of dollars by the IFE. A TV Azteca spokesman declined to comment.
The day and time of the presidential debate, one of just two such debates scheduled before the July election, was set nine days ago. The timing of the broadcast of the game was set on Monday after discussions between soccer officials and TV Azteca, which owns the Monarcas, one of the two teams which are facing off Sunday at the time of the debate.
Analysts and rival parties to the PRI say the timing of the game and its broadcast was aimed at sabotaging the debate's ratings. For starters, the vast majority of Mexican soccer league games are scheduled in the afternoon on Sundays. Officials from the PAN said the late start of the game, 8 p.m., has taken place fewer than 15 times since 1996.
Monarcas team officials say that no other slot was open, given the intense heat of Morelia, Michoacan, where the match will be played.
"We are talking about a democracy," said a Monarcas official, who asked not to be named. "Let each person decide whether they want to see the debate or the soccer game."
Mexico's soccer federation didn't respond to emails and telephone calls requesting comment.
Mr. Salinas' message instantly attracted a multitude of negative reactions on social networks, making him a trending topic, and generating a storm of editorial cartoons and columns.
Undeterred, Mr. Salinas answered critics with another Twitter message on Tuesday. "This is a real debate! Between a group of authoritarian twitterers and citizens free to vote for what they want to see."
A spokesman for TV Azteca said that aside from Mr. Salinas' tweets, the broadcaster had no comment.
Taken From WSJDebate on Presidential Debate Riles Mexico - WSJ.com
Debate on Presidential Debate Riles Mexico - WSJ.com:
"MEXICO CITY—Some of Mexico's presidential candidates cried foul on Wednesday after the country's second-largest broadcaster said it would air a soccer game instead of the first presidential debate on Sunday."
'via Blog this'
"MEXICO CITY—Some of Mexico's presidential candidates cried foul on Wednesday after the country's second-largest broadcaster said it would air a soccer game instead of the first presidential debate on Sunday."
'via Blog this'
Televisa Billionaire's Real Life Telenovela Saga - Forbes
Televisa Billionaire's Real Life Telenovela Saga - Forbes:
"In a story line that might have been pulled from a popular Mexican soap opera, the widow of the late Mexican billionaire Emilio Azcarraga Milmo, former chairman of broadcaster Grupo Televisa, was arrested and put in jail last week in the midst of a trial in which she claimed that she had been denied an inheritance of hundreds of millions of dollars in Grupo Televisa (TV) stock. After three days in jail, she dropped the suit seeking her inheritance. The Wall Street Journal’s Jose de Cordoba did a nice job chronicling the play by play in a pair of articles here and here last week."
'via Blog this'
"In a story line that might have been pulled from a popular Mexican soap opera, the widow of the late Mexican billionaire Emilio Azcarraga Milmo, former chairman of broadcaster Grupo Televisa, was arrested and put in jail last week in the midst of a trial in which she claimed that she had been denied an inheritance of hundreds of millions of dollars in Grupo Televisa (TV) stock. After three days in jail, she dropped the suit seeking her inheritance. The Wall Street Journal’s Jose de Cordoba did a nice job chronicling the play by play in a pair of articles here and here last week."
'via Blog this'
2 journalist killed in east Mexican state less than a week after reporter found slain - The Washington Post
2 journalist killed in east Mexican state less than a week after reporter found slain - The Washington Post: "MEXICO CITY — Officials say at least two news photographers have been found slain in the eastern Mexican state of Veracruz, less than a week after the killing of a reporter in the state for an investigative newsmagazine."
'via Blog this'
'via Blog this'
Paul Krugman on How to Fix the Economy - and Why It's Easier Than You Think
By JULIAN BROOKES
Four years after the start of the Great Recession, nobody would mistake U.S. economy for a thrumming engine of growth, prosperity, and human flourishing. Sure, we're officially out of "recession." But the recovery is painfully slow and uneven, and 24 million Americans are still unemployed or underemployed. There's a lot of pain out there, and a lot of potential going to waste.
The worst part? It doesn't have to be this way. Or so says Paul Krugman. In a new book, End This Depression Now!, the Nobel-winning economist and New York Times columnist makes an urgent, even passionate case that our economic problems are, at root, fairly simple, and we have the knowledge and the tools to solve them. We've been here before, Krugman argues, during the Great Depression, and the actions that got us out of that crisis will get us out of this one, too.
The basic issue, says Krugman, is a lack of demand. American consumers and businesses, aren't spending enough, and efforts to get them to open their wallets have gone nowhere. Krugman's solution: The federal government needs to step in and spend. A lot. On debt relief for struggling homeowners; on infrastructure projects; on aid to states and localities; on safety-net programs. Call it "stimulus" if you like. Call it Keynesian economics, after the great economic thinker (and Krugman idol) John Maynard Keynes, who first championed the idea that government has an essential role in saving the free market from its own excesses. Whatever you call it, it worked in the late nineteen-thirties and forties, when the U.S. government started shelling out on the military in the build-up to World War II, bringing an abrupt end to years of economic misery and laying the foundation for decades of prosperity. Krugman is not calling for an increase in military spending, much less a global war! But the WWII example shows that large-scale government spending can kick-start the economy. It worked then, he says, and it will work now.
Krugman's diagnosis and prescriptions cut sharply against the conventional wisdom in Washington, according to which "austerity," – throttle back on government spending, tackle the budget deficit now – is the way to get the economy back on track. Not only is this wrong, he argues, it's making a bad situation even worse. He writes: "Now is the time for the government to spend more, not less, until the private sector is ready to carry the economy forward again." On the positive side, people are starting to look at the train wreck that is Europe, where austerity has failed – and how – to produce growth, and at our own protracted slump, and concluding that people like Krugman – who, truth be told, has been right about a lot in recent years – might be onto something. "All indications are that the economy will remain weak for a very long time unless our policy makers change course," he writes in his introduction. "And my aim here is to bring pressure, by means of an informed public, to get that course change and bring an end to this depression."
Krugman, who dedicates his book to "the unemployed, who deserve better," spoke to RollingStone.com by phone the other day from his home in Princeton, New Jersey.
Passion isn't something we expect from economists, but this strikes me as a passionate book.
It's easy to become deadened to this depression. But I think it's really important to step back and think and realize that, hey, this is an ongoing terrible thing that does not have to be happening. Everyone, unless they're completely secluded, knows somebody who's suffering terribly. The passion is not always there for me because, like everybody else, I get used to days and weeks going by when nothing much changes. But I need to keep hold of it and I tried to tap into it for this book.
You say we’re in a "depression," but isn’t the economy improving?
A depression is being down for an extended period, even if there are ups and downs along the way. What we call the Great Depression actually contained two recessions and two recoveries. We're technically not in a recession anymore, but things are deeply depressed, and the economy is operating well below its productive capacity.
And the basic problem is a lack of overall demand?
The economy is suffering because there isn't enough spending. Not because there aren't enough resources out there. Not because of hard choices we're refusing to make. But because there isn't enough spending. It's really that simple.
Really?
A lot of people find emotionally unacceptable the idea that economic suffering on this scale could have a relatively trivial cause. But this has happened again and again through history. And it could be fixed fairly easily, by having government step in and spend.
Something else a lot of people find emotionally unacceptable is increased government spending! And anyway, didn't Obama already try to juice the economy with the "stimulus" and come up short?
Well, the Obama administration’s stimulus didn't work as well as many people had hoped – but it didn't work any worse than other people, myself included, predicted. When the stimulus was being promoted and discussed, I was very publicly tearing my hair out, saying this is way inadequate. And sure enough, it was.
Even so, this is tough sell politically.
It is. But you have to keep on hammering on the right argument, even if it appears that it's a political nonstarter right now. Things change. If you give up on making the point that's right, you have no hope at all. Also, I think we're approaching a watershed here – there's been a palpable change in the last seven or eight months in the discussion of deficits and austerity.
Because of what's happening in Europe?
Yes. In Europe, the failure of austerity, which has been obvious for some time, has suddenly reached the threshold where everybody's saying it. Two years ago, it was, "Slash now, or you'll turn into Greece." Now people are saying, "If you do austerity at a moment like this, you'll turn into Europe." So the background noise has changed.
Even so, Republicans will need to get on board, and they've shown an amazing ability to brush off evidence that calls free-market dogma into question. Not even the apocalyptic financial crisis has shaken their certainty. How do you make sense of that?
Part of it is that if you've been brought up to believe that capitalism is wonderful and perfect then the notion that it could use some help every now and then becomes alien to you, and there are a lot of people who are so deep into that mindset that it's very hard for them to get out. And then, a lot of conventional wisdom is shaped; it doesn't just come from nowhere. It comes from the long-term operation of a lavishly funded propaganda operation. When you've had 40 years of [right-wing mega-donor Richard Mellon] Scaife and the Koch brothers and the Heritage Foundation and so on pushing a line about the perfection of markets and the evil of doing anything that encroaches upon the unfettered right of billionaires to do what they like, that is coloring the way people think about economics, even people who've never heard anything directly from any of these think tanks.
Given that, what are the chances the congressional GOP will come around to your way of thinking?
I don't think John Boehner is going to announce next week that Republicans were wrong and we need more government spending, but I do think that some time next year we might be able to have a discussion that turns around at least some of the mistakes that were made in the past few years.
OK, so where would you start?
You could get a lot of stimulus, about $300 billion, just by providing aid to states and localities so they can reverse their budget cuts. That would create a million jobs, including those 300,000 schoolteachers that were laid off.
Don’t you worry about the impact on the deficit?
The deficit is way overstated as an immediate action-forcing issue. It's something to worry about over the next decade, but not something that should be dictating your policies right now. And the fact of the matter is that austerity, when you're in depression economics, doesn't even work from a fiscal point of view. Slash government spending and the economy contracts and it cuts into the economy's long-run prospects.
You’ve criticized Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke for not doing enough to right the economy. He's lowered interest rates to the basement. What more can he do?
It’s true that the interest rates the Fed controls directly are as low as they can go. But Bernanke could change expectations about the Fed's future behavior and convince people it will hold off on raising rates. If somebody's thinking about borrowing for a project or a business is deciding whether to sit on cash or invest it, it makes a big difference whether you think that money you borrow now will be paid in dollars that have less purchasing power than they have now. If you can convince people they can borrow at 2 percent interest right now and the rate will stay at 2 for 10 years, and inflation will be 4 percent, then borrowing becomes a much more attractive proposition than borrowing at 1 percent with 2 percent inflation. It's just textbook economics applied to a very nonstandard situation, which just happens to be world we live in. The depressing thing is that the Fed has basically said: We wash our hands of this.
You say in the book that higher inflation would be a good thing. That’s not something you hear very often.
There’s nothing in the Fed's charter that says inflation has to be at 2 percent. Back when Ronald Reagan was president they used to consider 4 percent perfectly OK.
You’ve called Obama out on his too-timid approach to the economy. How hopeful are you that he’ll get religion on this?
You never know, but my sense from talking to people in the administration and watching their behavior is that they and he have had something of a defining moment. At some point, they finally appreciated that the people they were negotiating with were not negotiating in good faith. They're looking at the news coming in from Europe and understand that we've had a rather drastic demonstration of the wrongheadedness of the policy approach that's been dominating our discussion. I think the chances that they'll do the right thing are reasonably good.
And the chances they'll play hardball?
Also pretty good. It's going to be rough. We have to expect more scorched-earth politics until something changes about the nature of the modern Republican Party, but I think the notion that a second Obama term would be just like the disappointments of the first is probably wrong.
Wednesday, May 02, 2012
Romney’s Former Bain Partner Makes a Case for Inequality
Illustrations by Mat Maitland. Photographs from Getty Images.
By ADAM DAVIDSON
Ever since the financial crisis started, we’ve heard plenty from the 1 percent. We’ve heard them giving defensive testimony in Congressional hearings or issuing anodyne statements flanked by lawyers and image consultants. They typically repeat platitudes about investment, risk-taking and job creation with the veiled contempt that the nation doesn’t understand their contribution. You get the sense that they’re afraid to say what they really believe. What do the superrich say when the cameras aren’t there?
With that in mind, I recently met Edward Conard on 57th Street and Madison Avenue, just outside his office at Bain Capital, the private-equity firm he helped build into a multibillion-dollar business by buying, fixing up and selling off companies at a profit. Conard, who retired a few years ago at 51, is not merely a member of the 1 percent. He’s a member of the 0.1 percent. His wealth is most likely in the hundreds of millions; he lives in an Upper East Side town house just off Fifth Avenue; and he is one of the largest donors to his old boss and friend, Mitt Romney.
Unlike his former colleagues, Conard wants to have an open conversation about wealth. He has spent the last four years writing a book that he hopes will forever change the way we view the superrich’s role in our society. “Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong,” to be published in hardcover next month by Portfolio, aggressively argues that the enormous and growing income inequality in the United States is not a sign that the system is rigged. On the contrary, Conard writes, it is a sign that our economy is working. And if we had a little more of it, then everyone, particularly the 99 percent, would be better off. This could be the most hated book of the year.
Conard understands that many believe that the U.S. economy currently serves the rich at the expense of everyone else. He contends that this is largely because most Americans don’t know how the economy really works — that the superrich spend only a small portion of their wealth on personal comforts; most of their money is invested in productive businesses that make life better for everyone. “Most citizens are consumers, not investors,” he told me during one of our long, occasionally contentious conversations. “They don’t recognize the benefits to consumers that come from investment.”
This is the usual defense of the 1 percent. Conard, however, has laid out a tightly argued case for just how much consumers actually benefit from the wealthy. Take computers, for example. A small number of innovators and investors may have earned disproportionate billions as the I.T. industry grew, but they got that money by competing to constantly improve their products and simultaneously lower prices. Their work has helped everyone get a lot more value. Cheap, improved computing helps us do our jobs more effectively and, often, earn more money. Countless other industries (travel, telecom, entertainment) use that computing power to lower their prices and enhance their products. This generally makes life more efficient and helps the economy grow.
The idea that society benefits when investors compete successfully is pretty widely accepted. Dean Baker, a prominent progressive economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, says that most economists believe society often benefits from investments by the wealthy. Baker estimates the ratio is 5 to 1, meaning that for every dollar an investor earns, the public receives the equivalent of $5 of value. The Google founder Sergey Brin might be very rich, but the world is far richer than he is because of Google. Conard said Baker was undercounting the social benefits of investment. He looks, in particular, at agriculture, where, since the 1940s, the cost of food has steadily fallen because of a constant stream of innovations. While the businesses that profit from that innovation — like seed companies and fast-food restaurants — have made their owners rich, the average U.S. consumer has benefited far more. Conard concludes that for every dollar an investor gets, the public reaps up to $20 in value. This is crucial to his argument: he thinks it proves that we should all appreciate the vast wealth of others more, because we’re benefiting, proportionally, from it.
Google’s contribution is obvious. What about investment banks, with their complicated financial derivatives and overleveraged balance sheets? Conard argues that they make the economy more efficient, too. The financial crisis, he writes, was not the result of corrupt bankers selling dodgy financial products. It was a simple, old-fashioned run on the banks, whom, he says, were just doing their job. There are a huge number of people in our economy who want ready access to their savings — pension-fund managers, insurance companies and you and me with our bank accounts. And because economic growth comes from long-term investments in things like housing, factories and research, the central role of banks, Conard says, is to turn the short-term assets of nervous savers into risky long-term loans that help the economy grow.
Every once in a while, this system breaks down. For one reason or another, the savers panic and demand all their money back. This causes a massive problem because the money isn’t sitting at the bank; it’s out in the world in the form of long-term loans. “A lot of people don’t realize that what happened in 2008 was nearly identical to what happened in 1929,” he says. “Depositors ran to the bank to withdraw their money only to discover, like the citizens of Bedford Falls” — referring to the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” — “that there was no money in the vault. All that money had been lent.”
In 2008 it was large pension funds, insurance companies and other huge institutional investors that withdrew in panic. Conard argues in retrospect that it was these withdrawals that led to the crisis — not, as so many others have argued, an orgy of irresponsible lending. He points to the fact that, according to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, banks lost $320 billion through mortgage-backed securities, but withdrawals disproportionately amounted to five times that. This stance, which largely absolves the banks, is not shared by many analysts. Regardless, Conard told me: “The banks did what we wanted them to do. They put short-term money back into the economy. What they didn’t expect is that depositors would withdraw their money, because they hadn’t withdrawn their money en masse since 1929.”
Conard concedes that the banks made some mistakes, but the important thing now, he says, is to provide them even stronger government support. He advocates creating a new government program that guarantees to bail out the banks if they ever face another run. As for exotic derivatives, Conard doesn’t see a problem. He argues that collateralized-debt obligations, credit-default swaps, mortgage-backed securities and other (now deemed toxic) financial products were fundamentally sound. They were new tools that served a market need for the world’s most sophisticated investors, who bought them in droves. And they didn’t cause the panic anyway, he says; the withdrawals did.
Even though these big conclusions are at odds with most other accounts, several economists said that they see Conard’s description of the crisis as more than just an apologia for the banking class (though it certainly is that, too). Andrei Shleifer, an influential Harvard economist, told me that he thought Conard was “genuinely fantastic on finance.”
“Unintended Consequences” only mentions Romney by name once (and in the acknowledgments, at that), but Conard hopes that the arguments detailed in his book will help readers understand why it’s so crucial that his former boss — who believes the government should help the investor class — win this November. As I read “Unintended Consequences,” though, I wondered if the book would have the opposite effect. Even staunch Republicans and many members of the Tea Party might bristle at a worldview that celebrates the coastal elite and says many talented people in the middle class aren’t pulling their weight. Was Conard saddling his old boss with another example of how out of touch those with car elevators and multiple Cadillacs can be? In this time of overheated arguments between opponents who rarely listen to one another, here was a rare member of the 1 percent openly trying to make his case. How convincing is it?
Conard and I eventually sat down at a cafe off Madison. His book is filled with a lot of abstraction, so I asked him to show me how his ideas play out in the real world.
Conard picked up a soda can and pointed to the way the can’s side bent inward at the top. “I worked with the company that makes the machine that tapers that can,” he told me. That little taper allows manufacturers to make the same size can with a tiny bit less aluminum. “It saves a fraction of a penny on every can,” he said. “There are a lot of soda cans in the world. That means the economy can produce more cans with the same amount of resources. It makes every American who buys a soda can a little bit richer because their paycheck buys more.”
It might be hard to get excited about milligrams of aluminum, but Conard says that we live longer, healthier and richer lives because of countless microimprovements like that one. The people looking for them, Conard likes to point out, are not only computer programmers, engineers and scientists. They are also wealthy investors like him, who are willing to risk their own money to finance improvements that may or may not work. There is a huge mechanism constantly trying to seek out and support these new ideas — entrepreneurs, multinationals and, crucially for Conard, investment firms and hedge funds and everyone down to individual bond traders. As Conard told me, one of the crucial lessons he learned at Bain is that it makes no sense to look for easy solutions. In a competitive market, all that’s left are the truly hard puzzles. And they require extraordinary resources. While we often hear about the greatest successes — penicillin, the iPhone — we rarely hear about the countless failures and the people and companies who financed them.
A central problem with the U.S. economy, he told me, is finding a way to get more people to look for solutions despite these terrible odds of success. Conard’s solution is simple. Society benefits if the successful risk takers get a lot of money. For proof, he looks to the market. At a nearby table we saw three young people with plaid shirts and floppy hair. For all we know, they may have been plotting the next generation’s Twitter, but Conard felt sure they were merely lounging on the sidelines. “What are they doing, sitting here, having a coffee at 2:30?” he asked. “I’m sure those guys are college-educated.” Conard, who occasionally flashed a mean streak during our talks, started calling the group “art-history majors,” his derisive term for pretty much anyone who was lucky enough to be born with the talent and opportunity to join the risk-taking, innovation-hunting mechanism but who chose instead a less competitive life. In Conard’s mind, this includes, surprisingly, people like lawyers, who opt for stable professions that don’t maximize their wealth-creating potential. He said the only way to persuade these “art-history majors” to join the fiercely competitive economic mechanism is to tempt them with extraordinary payoffs.
“It’s not like the current payoff is motivating everybody to take risks,” he said. “We need twice as many people. When I look around, I see a world of unrealized opportunities for improvements, an abundance of talented people able to take the risks necessary to make improvements but a shortage of people and investors willing to take those risks. That doesn’t indicate to me that risk takers, as a whole, are overpaid. Quite the opposite.” The wealth concentrated at the top should be twice as large, he said. That way, the art-history majors would feel compelled to try to join them.
I first met Conard last fall, around the same period in which I was spending a lot of time in Zuccotti Park, interviewing anti-Wall Street protesters who argued that people like him were destroying our democracy. Most Wall Street leaders ignored the Occupy movement or evaded it, and I was sure Conard would be among the most silent. He had recently been stung by a 1 percent scandal of his own: setting up a company whose sole purpose was to donate $1 million to a political-action committee that supported Romney. He was being cast as the embodiment of the secretive and growing influence that the hyperrich have in our political system. If anybody was going to be shy with a reporter, I figured, it was him.
Over lunch with editors from The Times Magazine, Conard proved the exact opposite. He looks like a benign middle-aged guy until he starts making an argument. At which point, Conard stares into your eyes and talks with intense force, punctuated by the occasional profanity, in full paragraphs. He delighted in arguing over corporate-bond rates and Chinese central-bank policy, among other arcane minutiae. It also became clear that he had exhaustively thought through the role of the superrich in our economy, and he wasn’t afraid to share those opinions.
Conard’s life serves as the perfect model for his economic philosophy. Born in 1956, he grew up in a middle-class suburb of Detroit, the son of a kindergarten teacher and a Ford engineer. His childhood ambition was to be able to afford his own house in a Detroit suburb, but, he likes to say, he took a series of risks (like forgoing the more secure path of law school) that eventually led him to Harvard Business School. When Conard graduated, in 1982, he entered the burgeoning field of management consulting. He joined the prestigious Boston-based firm Bain & Company, which nine years earlier was founded with a radically different approach from the more traditional New York-based consulting firms. Those firms positioned themselves as grand thinkers, far above the fray of daily business struggles. Bain’s approach was to join its clients in the trenches, providing analysis and working with senior management to beat the competition.
In 1990, Conard decided to pursue even greater wealth by quitting Bain to become a manager at the investment bank Wasserstein Perella, in New York. He disliked the job, though, and when his old colleague Mitt Romney took him to lunch in 1992, Conard offered his services to Bain Capital, a division that Romney helped start in order to acquire companies with the goal of improving them itself. When Romney said he couldn’t afford to match his Wall Street pay, Conard offered to work for less until Romney decided he had added enough value to deserve a bonus and stock options. His first year did not go terribly well, though Conard eventually identified an ideal takeover target, a company that made pharmaceutical-test instruments. Bain paid less than a half billion for the company. Its value has since risen to more than $7 billion. In 2000, he became the head of the New York office.
Which leads us to what Conard said was his next big risk — leaving the business world to make his case for a new, decidedly pro-investor way to think about the economy. He seems genuinely certain that his arguments in “Unintended Consequences” will persuade a fair number of economists, politicians and thought leaders. I suggested during many of our conversations that being a public intellectual might be tricky when you freely say the sorts of things that Conard often does. During one conversation, he expressed anger over the praise that Warren Buffett has received for pledging billions of his fortune to charity. It was no sacrifice, Conard argued; Buffett still has plenty left over to lead his normal quality of life. By taking billions out of productive investment, he was depriving the middle class of the potential of its 20-to-1 benefits. If anyone was sacrificing, it was those people. “Quit taking a victory lap,” he said, referring to Buffett. “That money was for the middle class.”
There’s also the fact that Conard applies a relentless, mathematical logic to nearly everything, even finding a good spouse. He advocates, in utter seriousness, using demographic data to calculate the number of potential mates in your geographic area. Then, he says, you should set aside a bit of time for “calibration” — dating as many people as you can so that you have a sense of what the marriage marketplace is like. Then you enter the selection phase, this time with the goal of picking a permanent mate. The first woman you date who is a better match than the best woman you met during the calibration phase is, therefore, the person you should marry. By statistical probability, she is as good a match as you’re going to get. (Conard used this system himself.)
This constant calculation — even of the incalculable — can be both fascinating and absurd. The world Conard describes too often feels grim and soulless, one in which art and romance and the nonremunerative satisfactions of a simpler life are invisible. And that, I realized, really is Conard’s world. “God didn’t create the universe so that talented people would be happy,” he said. “It’s not beautiful. It’s hard work. It’s responsibility and deadlines, working till 11 o’clock at night when you want to watch your baby and be with your wife. It’s not serenity and beauty.”
Central to this investor’s work ethic is another pillar of his worldview. Unlike Romney, Conard rejects the notion that America has “some monopoly on hard work or entrepreneurship.” “I think it’s simple economics,” he said. “If the payoff for risk-taking is better, people will take more risks.” Conard sees the success of the U.S. economy as, in part, the result of a series of historic accidents. Most recently, the coincidence of Roe v. Wade and the late 1970s economic malaise allowed Ronald Reagan to unify social conservatives and free-market advocates and set the country on a pro-investment path for decades. Europeans, he says, made all the wrong decisions. Concern about promoting equality and protecting favored industries have led to onerous work rules, higher taxes and all sorts of social programs that keep them poorer than Americans.
Now we’re at a particularly crucial moment, he writes. Technology and global competition have made it more important than ever that the United States remain the world’s most productive, risk-taking, success-rewarding society. Obama, Conard says, is “going to dampen the incentives.” Even worse, Conard says, “he’s slowing the accumulation of equity” by fighting income inequality. Only with a pro-investment president, he says, can the American economy reach its full potential.
At its core, Conard’s book addresses what is perhaps the most important question in economics, the one Adam Smith set out to answer in “The Wealth of Nations”: Why do some countries grow so rich and others stay poor? Where you come down on the answer has as much to do with your politics as your economic worldview (two things that can often be the same). Glenn Hubbard, a prominent economist and one of Romney’s chief economic advisers, takes his ideas seriously. “He doesn’t have the blinders of a model-based view of the world, which is an advantage and a disadvantage,” Hubbard told me. Others, like the progressive economist Dean Baker, were less kind. “I can’t say there was much I found compelling,” he told me. The celebrated New York University economist Nouriel Roubini went out of his way to say that he had “great intellectual respect for his sharp mind,” even if he didn’t agree on numerous points, especially the benefits of inequality.
Nearly every economist I spoke with said that Conard has too much faith in the market’s ability to reward only those who create real value. Conard, for instance, insists that even the dodgiest financial products must have been beneficial or else nobody would have bought them in the first place. If a Wall Street trader or a corporate chief executive is filthy rich, Conard says that the merciless process of economic selection has assured that they have somehow benefited society. Even pro-market Romney supporters take issue with this. “Ed ought to be more concerned about crony capitalism,” Hubbard told me.
“Unintended Consequences” ignores some of the most important economic work of the past few decades, about how power and politics influence economic growth. In technical language, this field is the study of “rent seeking,” in which people or companies get rich because of their power, not because of their ideas. This is one of the few fields in economics in which left and right share many influences and ideas — namely that wealthy individuals and corporations are able to influence politicians and regulators to make seemingly insignificant changes to regulations that benefit themselves. In other words, to rig the game. One classic example is banking. Banks have enormous resources to constantly put explicit or subtle pressure on lawmakers and regulators so that regulation can eventually serve their interests.
Conard’s version of the financial crisis ignores much reporting and analysis — including work I’ve done with NPR’s “Planet Money” team — that shows that some of the nation’s largest banks actively manipulated customers and regulators and, sometimes, their own stockholders to profit from dangerous risk. And for many economists, rising inequality can create exactly the wrong outcomes for society over all. Rather than simply serving as an invitation for everybody to engage in potentially beneficial risk-taking, inequality can allow those with wealth to crush new ideas.
I kept raising these questions with Conard, but he repeatedly waved them off. “I don’t want to talk about rent-seeking,” he told me. “When you go off to a third-world country, there’s a dictator who says, ‘I’m giving the telephone franchise to my brother-in-law.’ It’s pretty hard to do that here.” I countered that many economists see rent-seeking in the United States as a much more subtle but still destructive process. If some rich people are able to get and stay rich by messing around with the rules, then those art-history majors will feel as if they have no chance to break into a well-connected, well-protected elite.
Perhaps concentrated wealth will inspire a nation of innovative problem-solvers. But if the view of many economists is right — that it sometimes discourages innovation — then we should worry. While Conard offers deep and well-argued analyses on almost every issue, on this one he resorted to anecdotes and gut feelings. During his work at Bain, he said, he saw that successful companies had to battle against one another. Nobody was just given a free ride because of their power. “Was a person, like me, excluded from opportunity?” he asked rhetorically. “If so, I wasn’t aware!”
I suggested that both could be true. The rich could earn a great deal of wealth through their own hard work, skill and luck. They could also use their subsequent influence to make themselves even richer. One of the great political and economic challenges of our time is figuring out the balance between wealth that benefits society and wealth that distorts. Of course we want to encourage people to take risks and find areas of productive innovation. It’s just not in the interest of the United States to allow wealth to skew the political process so that good new ideas are barred.
Are Conard’s views the uncensored, impolitic version of the man he hopes will be president? The Romney campaign said they wouldn’t comment in any way on “Unintended Consequences,” and Conard wouldn’t share with me anything about his private conversations with his old friend. Glenn Hubbard said only that at a broad level, Romney and Conard share “beliefs about innovation and growth and responsible risk-taking.”
Conard and Romney certainly share views on numerous policy matters. Like many Republicans, they promote lower taxes and less regulation for those who achieve financial success. Romney has also said that rising inequality is not a problem and that the attention paid to the issue is “about envy. I think it’s about class warfare.” The differences between these two men are also striking. Romney’s economic platform and his record as the governor of Massachusetts suggest that he is more of a centrist than Conard. Romney wants to eliminate capital-gains taxes for people earning less than $200,000 a year but keep them in place for the 1 percent, which Conard says is a good start but doesn’t go far enough.
The biggest difference is that Romney is running for president and needs more people to like him. Conard doesn’t have to worry about that. “People get very angry before they change their mind,” he said. “Economics is counterintuitive. It just is.” I told him that surely is true, but his ideas are counterintuitive even to people well versed in economics. After we spoke for one of the last times, he sent me an e-mail summing up his argument: At base, having a small elite with vast wealth is good for the poor and middle class. “From my perspective,” he wrote, “it’s not a close call.”
Harvard and M.I.T. Team Up to Offer Free Online Courses - NYTimes.com
Harvard and M.I.T. Team Up to Offer Free Online Courses - NYTimes.com:
"In what is shaping up as an academic Battle of the Titans — one that offers vast new learning opportunities for students around the world — Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday announced a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, to offer free online courses from both universities."
'via Blog this'
"In what is shaping up as an academic Battle of the Titans — one that offers vast new learning opportunities for students around the world — Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday announced a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, to offer free online courses from both universities."
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Time to go on Top
Fermilab was the site where the Top quark was produced for the first time by humans in 1994.
Now that president Obama announced that by 2014 there won't be any war in Afghanistan, maybe is time to reverse wrong headed decisions like this. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=neutrino-experiment-proton-decay-budget-ax
Hey people wake up, the US is Number One.
Do not let China or Europe be the first to discover proton decay.
We can do this.
Now that president Obama announced that by 2014 there won't be any war in Afghanistan, maybe is time to reverse wrong headed decisions like this. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=neutrino-experiment-proton-decay-budget-ax
Hey people wake up, the US is Number One.
Do not let China or Europe be the first to discover proton decay.
We can do this.
Tuesday, May 01, 2012
Tomás Borge Martínez, Sandinista Rebel, Dies at 81
By ELISABETH MALKIN
Tomás Borge Martínez, the last surviving founder of the Sandinista rebel group that toppled Nicaragua’s dictatorship in 1979 and a former feared interior minister in the revolutionary government, died on Monday in Managua. He was 81.
His death was announced by Rosario Murillo, the wife of President Daniel Ortega. Mr. Borge was being treated for pneumonia at a military hospital in Managua when he died, she said.
The government declared three days of national mourning, and on Tuesday his body lay in state in the National Palace.
Mr. Borge was one of the student radicals who formed the Sandinista National Liberation Front in 1961 with the ambition of overthrowing the American-backed dictatorship of the Somoza family. The students, admirers of the Cuban Revolution, chose the name in tribute to Augusto César Sandino, the nationalist guerrilla leader who fought American Marines in the 1920s and 1930s. Mr. Borge had received training in Cuba.
He was jailed twice by the government, first in 1956 after the assassination of President Anastasio Somoza García, and then in 1977. He was freed in 1978 after a Sandinista raid took the entire Nicaraguan Congress hostage in the National Palace and won the release of 50 Sandinista prisoners, a half-million dollars and the publication of Sandinista communiqués in the newspapers.
Mr. Borge’s first wife was killed by the Somoza government’s National Guard just a few months before the government’s collapse in 1979.
Afterward, he became the interior minister and built up a feared power base. He was in change of the state security, the police and intelligence apparatus, the prison system, the fire department, the press censorship office and the nationwide network of Sandinista Defense Committees.
He also controlled elite Interior Ministry troops and was in charge of dealing with restive Miskito Indians on Nicaragua’s remote Atlantic Coast. Indian groups, appealing to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, have accused him and other Sandinista leaders of ordering the killings of Miskito Indian rebels during the 1980s.
Mr. Borge, the oldest and most hard-line of the nine Sandinista comandantes who ran Nicaragua in the 1980s, was complex and often contradictory. A profile of him in The New York Times in 1985 said that his official biography listed the Bible as his favorite book. His collection of crucifixes filled an entire room. Yet “Mr. Borge deports priests whenever he deems it necessary,” the article said.
Still, he considered himself to be the “Sentinel of the People’s Happiness,” according to the slogan he had painted on the Interior Ministry. Once a week, and with feudal authority, he received ordinary citizens to hear their complaints, which he then dealt with through peremptory phone calls to other government ministries.
“Grandiose and unpredictable, he could be tough with one hand and extremely generous with the other,” the Nicaraguan writer Gioconda Belli, a Sandinista who later broke with the movement, told The Associated Press. “After 1990, I have the sense he gave up his revolutionary illusions. He ended up a tragic-comic figure.”
Many considered Mr. Borge to be a direct rival to Mr. Ortega among the Sandinista leadership. But he was outmaneuvered by Mr. Ortega, who came to dominate the party that was returned to power in 2007 and that he still leads today.
Mr. Borge was tarnished by allegations that he, like other Sandinistas, had helped himself to confiscated riches just before the Sandinistas were ousted in the 1990 elections.
But he remained loyal to the party, serving in Congress and proudly showing visitors a photo album with pictures of him posing with Communist leaders, including Fidel Castro and Kim Il-sung of North Korea. At his death he was ambassador to Peru.
He published several books, including a 1989 memoir, “The Patient Impatience.”
Mr. Borge, who was born into a poor family in Matagalpa on Aug. 13, 1930, is survived by his second wife, the Peruvian singer and actress Marcela Pérez Silva, with whom he had three children. He had three other children, according to Nicaraguan media reports, including a son he adopted after the boy’s father, a guerrilla fighter, was killed.
NYTThe Pirate Party Logs a New Politics - NYTimes.com
The Pirate Party Logs a New Politics - NYTimes.com:
"THE sudden roar erupting from the Jägerklause bar in east Berlin’s bohemian Friedrichshain district late on a recent Sunday sounded like the usual soccer-match pandemonium. But the crowd inside, with their jeans and sneakers and easygoing looks, didn’t seem like typical soccer fanatics."
'via Blog this'
"THE sudden roar erupting from the Jägerklause bar in east Berlin’s bohemian Friedrichshain district late on a recent Sunday sounded like the usual soccer-match pandemonium. But the crowd inside, with their jeans and sneakers and easygoing looks, didn’t seem like typical soccer fanatics."
'via Blog this'
President Obama Visits Kabul to Sign Partnership with Afghanistan - NYTimes.com
President Obama Visits Kabul to Sign Partnership with Afghanistan - NYTimes.com:
'via Blog this'
"“My fellow Americans,” he said, speaking against a backdrop of armored military vehicles and an American flag, “we’ve traveled through more than a decade under the dark cloud of war. Yet here, in the pre-dawn darkness of Afghanistan, we can see the light of new day on the horizon.”"
'via Blog this'
"“My fellow Americans,” he said, speaking against a backdrop of armored military vehicles and an American flag, “we’ve traveled through more than a decade under the dark cloud of war. Yet here, in the pre-dawn darkness of Afghanistan, we can see the light of new day on the horizon.”"
The Mexicans Are Coming!
Now that Afghans are not the enemy , we need another enemy. What about: THE MEXICANS,
I just read the NYT , these guys are dangerous. Have you heard of Montezuma's Revenge?
Bring some toilet paper.
If you want a guide book to help you through the invasion, buy Taco USA.
Today a few of these Mexicans, marched all through the States for their May Day Strike, and nobody noticed.
I guess this enemy is better than Al Qaeda.
On the other hand, if you are afraid of Speedy Gonzales, you have it coming.
I just read the NYT , these guys are dangerous. Have you heard of Montezuma's Revenge?
Bring some toilet paper.
If you want a guide book to help you through the invasion, buy Taco USA.
Today a few of these Mexicans, marched all through the States for their May Day Strike, and nobody noticed.
I guess this enemy is better than Al Qaeda.
On the other hand, if you are afraid of Speedy Gonzales, you have it coming.
North of the Border, It’s Everyone’s Mexican Food
To the left of Gustavo Arellano is the hamburger stand that Glen Bell, the founder of Taco Bell, once ran
By JULIA MOSKIN
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif.
ADMIT it, tortilla-chip fans: you are curious about Taco Bell Doritos Locos tacos, introduced in March. These salt bombs take the usual fast-food taco filling and stuff them inside a giant orange-dusted nacho-cheese chip. They have been so successful that the company has just introduced a Cool Ranch flavor.
But to truly grasp the significance of these creations, the taco must be eaten in the company of Gustavo Arellano, a journalist and Orange County, Calif., native who is perhaps the greatest (and only) living scholar of Mexican-American fast food. And preferably, you will eat it here, in the birthplace of American fast food, while he explains to you precisely how the Frito, America’s first corn chip, was copied from the Mexican tostado, then evolved into the Dorito and eventually the Tostito.
He has just published “Taco USA,” an absorbing account of how a few foods (salsa, tacos, chili, tequila) from the complicated and enormous cuisine of Mexico managed to slip into the mainstream of American taste.
“It’s not exactly a feel-good story, except maybe for the shareholders of Frito-Lay,” he said, gesturing out to the empty storefronts and cash-only gas stations that line the streets.
San Bernardino, an hour east of Los Angeles, is the fertile crescent for American fast food, but its west side has clearly seen better days. In 1940, the first McDonald’s drive-up hamburger stand opened a few blocks from this Taco Bell; throughout the ’40s and ’50s, entrepreneurs came through town to check out the McDonald brothers’ revolutionary technology hacks — like single-serving ketchup dispensers, burger-size spatulas and disposable milkshake cups. (In 1954, Ray Kroc, a salesman of milkshake mixing machines, came through town and was so impressed that he bought in, started his own franchise, and later bought the brothers out.)
The evolution of Mexican food in the United States is the current obsession of Mr. Arellano, the editor of The OC Weekly, a lively journal where he has also been the food critic for the last 10 years. He has spent much of that time exploring precisely how Mexican food became so popular and profitable in this country — where, until very recently, most things Mexican were generally both unpopular and unprofitable.
For the purposes of Mr. Arellano’s tale, the story of the fast-food taco begins here, on the corner of North Sixth and Mount Vernon Streets, where Route 66 used to run through town.
Mitla Cafe, a modest restaurant serving typical Mexican-American food, has been on this corner since 1937 and is still owned by the descendants of its founders, Vicente and Lucia Montaño. It’s the oldest Mexican restaurant in the Inland Empire, the vast tract of sage and scrub east of Los Angeles, now covered with housing developments and strip malls, and home to millions of Mexican-Americans. (San Bernardino County’s population is almost 50 percent Hispanic, according to 2010 Census figures.)
Mitla is not a destination for huitlacoche, epazote or a rigorously authentic mole negra. It is old-school Cal-Mex, with burgers and grilled cheese on the menu. Plenty of patrons eat fries with their enchiladas; Pepsi products, not aguas frescas, fill the drinks cooler. But Mitla does serve a signature Mexican-American dish: tacos dorados con carne molida, “golden” tortillas fried to order and folded around a spicy compressed wedge of ground beef, blanketed with iceberg lettuce, chopped tomatoes and shredded Cheddar. (The hard-shell taco is not unknown in Mexico, but it is usually deep-fried with the stuffing already sealed inside it. These proto-tacos can still be found at Cielito Lindo on Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles, where the recipe hasn’t changed since 1934.)
At Mitla, the tortilla is hot and crisp, the meat is beefy and satisfying, but other than that, this specialty — which has been on the menu as long as any of the Montaños can remember — very closely resembles the taco served to more than 36 million customers every week at 5,600 Taco Bell locations in the United States.
Coincidence? Mr. Arellano thinks not.
In 1950, one Glen Bell, an entrepreneur possessed by envy of the McDonald brothers’ success, opened a burger stand across the street from Mitla. (The building is still there; today, it’s a taco stand.) According to Mr. Arellano’s research, Mr. Bell ate often at Mitla and watched long lines form at its walk-up window; later, having persuaded the Montaños to show him how the tacos were made, he experimented after hours with a tool that would streamline the process of frying the tortillas.
He started serving his own tacos in 1951 (this according to Mr. Bell’s 1999 biography “Taco Titan,” which Mr. Arellano has practically memorized), and the business went through several name changes (Taco Tia, El Taco) before starting as Taco Bell in 1962. Now, at Mitla, the lines are gone; only the brown vinyl booths and the lunch regulars remain; while on the Taco Bell Web site, Mr. Bell is cited as the creator of the “fast food crunchy taco.” The Montaño family members are philosophical about this outcome, but Mr. Arellano isn’t.
“There’s a lot of anger about appropriations from Mexico, but in my opinion it’s not enough,” he said.
The book tells many similar tales of white Americans (gabachos, he said, is the term Mexican-Americans use; gringo is now used only by gabachos) who have managed to capitalize on Mexican food, going back to the 19th century, when entrepreneurs in Texas raced to produce the first canned chili con carne. There is Duane Roberts, the son of a California butcher, who engineered the first frozen burrito; Henry Steinbarth, a German-American butcher, who first brought packaged chorizo to the national market; and George N. Ashley, who managed (briefly) to produce canned corn tortillas that seem to have been eaten mainly as a last resort by expatriate Southwesterners.
“It tasted pretty much like you would imagine a tortilla in a can would taste,” said Tony Ortega, the editor of The Village Voice, who grew up in Los Angeles and recalls making enchiladas with canned tortillas, refried beans and salsa in a Columbia dorm in 1982. “There wasn’t even a Taco Bell in New York City back then, and I was desperate.”
There are a few happy endings for Mexican cooks in “Taco USA”: one is Mariano Martinez, the Dallas restaurant owner who invented the frozen-margarita machine. His original contraption, adapted from a used soft-serve ice cream machine, is now among the holdings of the Smithsonian Museum of American History. Without it, Mr. Arellano said, the mass success of restaurant chains like Chipotle, Chili’s, and El Torito would never have been possible. (Margaritas are often the most profitable menu item in Mexican restaurants; the food is expected to be inexpensive.)
Mr. Arellano is far from a Mexican-food purist. (“You would have to go back to before the Spanish conquest: no carnitas, no cheese, no beef, no thank you.”) Some of his favorite Mexican-American foods are the Sonora dogs found in Arizona, bacon-wrapped hot dogs stuffed into soft bolillo rolls with salsa, pinto beans and mustard; the breakfast burritos stuffed with Tater Tots served at a chain called Taco John’s that he tried in Brookings, S.D.; and the Mexican hamburger at Chubby’s in Denver, a hamburger patty pressed into a burrito with beans and crisp pork rinds, then drowned with green chile sauce, which he anoints the single greatest Mexican dish in the United States. That burger/burrito hybrid is, he said, “the dish that best personifies the Mexican-American experience, a monument to mestizaje.”
But he is wary of the many non-Mexicans who have anointed themselves as ambassadors for Mexican food in the United States, from Bertha Haffner-Ginger (who taught cooking classes at The Los Angeles Times in the early 20th century and wrote an influential and confusing cookbook called “California Mexican-Spanish Cook Book”) to more modern arbiters of taste like the British expatriate Diana Kennedy and the Chicago chef Rick Bayless.
For Mr. Arellano, non-Mexicans who glorify “authentic” Mexican cuisine, even with respectful intent, are engaging in a kind of xenophobia. “It’s a different way of keeping Mexican food separate, out of the American mainstream,” said Mr. Arellano, who calls Mexican-food purists “Baylessistas.” (Mr. Bayless declined to be interviewed for this article.)
Mr. Arellano, 33, has lived in Orange County his whole life, remaining inside what he calls the “Mexican bubble” through high school, eating mainly fast food and his mother’s cooking. His parents were born in Zacatecas, in the mountainous center of Mexico, where potatoes, beans, beef and cheese are plentiful; chiles rellenos, stuffed with aged cheese nicknamed queso de pata (foot cheese) are a family favorite.
“I never had Thai food or Korean food until I was 21,” he said, pointing out that while Orange County is huge, densely populated and home to many immigrant communities, people tend to remain separate for the first few generations. In towns like Irvine and Newport Beach, Orange County also has a high concentration of wealthy whites; over all, there is plenty of opportunity for culture clash in the region. In 2004, perpetually amazed by local ignorance about Mexican culture and history, he invited reader submissions to a provocative and now widely syndicated column, “¡Ask a Mexican!”
As “The Mexican,” a fat sombrero-wearing caricature with a gold tooth, the angular and bespectacled Mr. Arellano answers readers’ deepest questions about Mexico — questions that are sometimes sincere but frequently racy, racist or both. (Some of the more tame examples: “Why do Mexicans like Chinese food so much?” “Is it true that Mitt Romney is part Mexican? “What is the deal with Cinco de Mayo?” )
For the record: it’s tasty and familiar; Mitt Romney’s father, George, was born in Mexico, where many American Mormons moved after the church banned polygamy in 1890; Cinco de Mayo is the anniversary of the 1862 Battle of Puebla, when Mexican forces held off French invaders. It is celebrated there, but traditionally not in the rest of Mexico. And certainly not with frozen margaritas.
The big question of what constitutes Mexican-American food has never been more interesting. In Orange County these days, he said, young Chicanos (whom he defines as Mexican-Americans who speak English as a primary language) are crushing on teriyaki rice bowls, an inflammatory Japanese-Hawaiian-Cal-Mex mashup of short-grain rice, teriyaki meat, scallions and Tapatío hot sauce. It’s a quick, cheap lunch, with a side of horchata, the cooling, sweet Mexican drink that is like rice pudding in liquid form.
The Korean taco, stuffed with bulgogi and kimchi and popularized around Los Angeles by chef Roy Choi — who also grew up in Orange County — has become a hipster street-food standard; last week, the T.G.I. Friday chain started serving a version. Alex Stupak, a classically trained pastry chef, has turned his hand to making fresh corn tortillas and filling them with Wagyu beef steak tartare in the East Village.
Can Chinese-American carnitas bao and Swiss enchiladas be far behind? (That last one exists already; enchiladas suizas, named for the blanket of béchamel that covers them in the oven.)
“Here’s what I know,” Mr. Arellano said. “If it’s in a tortilla, it’s Mexican food. If it’s made by a Mexican, it’s Mexican food.”
A version of this article appeared in print on May 2, 2012, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: How the Taco Gained in Translation.
NYTBolivia Seizes Local Assets of Spanish Utility - NYTimes.com
Bolivia Seizes Local Assets of Spanish Utility - NYTimes.com:
"The turmoil in Latin America comes at a particularly difficult time for Spanish companies, which have grown increasingly reliant on earnings from the region to offset falling revenue in their home country, where unemployment has climbed to 24.4 percent."
'via Blog this'
"The turmoil in Latin America comes at a particularly difficult time for Spanish companies, which have grown increasingly reliant on earnings from the region to offset falling revenue in their home country, where unemployment has climbed to 24.4 percent."
'via Blog this'
British Panel Finds Murdoch Unfit to Lead Media Empire
By ALAN COWELL and JOHN F. BURNS
LONDON — In a startlingly damning report after months of investigation into the hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers, a parliamentary panel here concluded on Tuesday that he was “not a fit person” to run a huge international company, amplifying a public outcry against him, but threatening further bruising divisions within the political establishment.
The conclusion about the world’s most influential media tycoon went much further in lambasting Mr. Murdoch than had been expected from Parliament’s select committee on culture, media and sport, which has conducted several inquiries into press standards in recent years, the most recent starting last July as the hacking scandal burrowed ever deeper into Britain’s public life.
But the impact of the report by the all-party committee was blunted by divisions within the panel itself. Presaging further disarray within Britain’s strained coalition government, the committee said it had split, 6 to 4, on party lines, with the dominant Conservatives opposing the censure of Mr. Murdoch while the Liberal Democrats, the junior partner in Prime Minister David Cameron’s government, joined the Labor opposition in supporting it.
“On the basis of the facts and evidence before the committee,” the report said in one passage, “we conclude that, if at all relevant times Rupert Murdoch did not take steps to become fully informed about phone hacking, he turned a blind eye and exhibited willful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications.”
“This culture, we consider, permeated from the top throughout the organization and speaks volumes about the lack of effective corporate governance at News Corporation and News International,” its British newspaper subsidiary.
“We conclude, therefore, that Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company,” the report said.
In a statement from its New York headquarters, News Corporation said it was “carefully reviewing the select committee’s report and will respond shortly.” It also said the company “fully acknowledges significant wrongdoing at News of the World” — the now-shuttered Sunday tabloid at the heart of the scandal — “and apologizes to everyone whose privacy was invaded.”
Louise Mensch, a Conservative member of the panel, said the division had come about because of “the line in the middle of the report that said that Mr. Rupert Murdoch was not a fit person to run an international company.”
“We all thought that was wildly outside the scope of a select committee” and “was an improper attempt to influence” Ofcom, the British media regulator, which is already investigating whether News Corporation is “fit and proper” to hold a broadcast license.
Another dissenting conservative, Philip Davies, told reporters: “To me, very clearly, Rupert Murdoch is a fit and proper person to run a major company,” arguing that Mr. Murdoch had spent decades building the world’s most powerful and successful media company, employing tens of thousands of people.
News Corporation owns 39.1 percent of BSkyB. A $12 billion bid to acquire full ownership collapsed last year after the hacking controversy unfolded. In addition to its stake in BSkyB, News Corporation’s newspapers in Britain account for between 30 and 40 percent of the country’s newspaper readership, giving Mr. Murdoch and his editors enormous political influence, especially at elections.
In a statement after the report was published, Ofcom said it had a legal duty “to be satisfied that any person holding a broadcasting license is, and remains, fit and proper to do so. Ofcom is continuing to assess the evidence — including the new and emerging evidence — that may assist it in discharging these duties.”
In its report, the committee did not use the full term “fit and proper” in its condemnation of Mr. Murdoch, a distinction that John Whittingdale, the Conservative who was the committee’s nonvoting chairman, told the BBC was significant, though he did not say why.
Labor members of the committee, and the party’s parliamentary leaders, said they would press for the regulator to find against the Murdochs on the “fit and proper standard,” a move that media analysts have said could imperil News Corporation’s existing 39.1 holding in BSkyB.
The parliamentary panel’s report on Tuesday said that, by ignoring “evidence of widespread wrongdoing,” News Corporation and its British newspaper subsidiary News International exhibited “willful blindness, for which the companies’ directors — including Rupert Murdoch and James Murdoch — should ultimately be prepared to take responsibility.”
While the full consequences of the panel’s findings were not immediately clear, the panel raised the possibility that three senior former managers at News International, Colin Myler, Tom Crone and Les Hinton, could be cited for contempt of Parliament for misleading the panel in their testimony.
“I refute these accusations utterly,” Mr. Hinton said in a statement reported by The Wall Street Journal, where Mr. Hinton resigned as publisher last year. “I have always been truthful in my dealings with the committee and its findings are unfounded, unfair and erroneous.” Mr. Hinton said he planned to write to the committee’s leader “to object formally.”
Mr. Crone did not respond to messages seeking comment.
News International had long maintained that hacking had been the work of what was termed a single “rogue reporter” — an argument that the panel found on Tuesday to be “simply astonishing.”
Indeed, the report said, throughout the scandal, the instinct at News International had been to “cover up rather than seek out wrongdoing and discipline the perpetrators.”
The 121-page report also singled out Mr. Murdoch’s son James Murdoch, who until recently was head of the family’s media interests in Britain, for failing to act much earlier. “Had James Murdoch been more attentive to the correspondence that he received at the time, he could have taken action on phone hacking in 2008, and this committee could have been told the truth” during an earlier inquiry in 2009, the report said.
It also said News Corporation had tried to blame lower-ranking executives while “striving to protect more senior figures, most notably James Murdoch.”
“Even if there was a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ culture at News International, the whole affair demonstrates huge failings of corporate governance at the company and its parent, News Corporation,” the report said.
The scandal exploded last year after disclosures that, as long ago as 2002, the mobile phone of an abducted and subsequently murdered teenager, Milly Dowler, had been hacked after she disappeared but before her body was found.
The committee’s findings appeared certain to set off a new storm in Parliament, with the Labor opposition signaling that it intended to press for a vote finding Mr. Hinton, Mr. Myler and Mr. Crone guilt of contempt of Parliament, a rarely used sanction in modern times that Labor supporters said would do serious damage to the men’s reputations and professional careers. The report on Tuesday came less than a week after both Rupert Murdoch, 81, and James Murdoch, 39, testified before a separate judicial inquiry into the affair. They insisted, as they have done throughout the scandal, that they had no direct initial knowledge of the extent of the hacking.
Rupert Murdoch accused top managers of The News of the World Sunday tabloid of staging a cover-up of the practice.
His son said last week that, when he took over News International in late 2007 — months after a News of the World reporter and a private investigator were jailed for hacking into the voice mail of members of the royal family — he believed that the affair had been settled.
But that version has been challenged by Mr. Myler, a former editor of The News of the World, and Mr. Crone, the newspaper’s former legal manger — the executives accused by Rupert Murdoch of a cover-up. The men have testified that they told James Murdoch in June 2008 of the extent of the hacking, but Mr. Murdoch has said he did not learn of the extent of the practice until last year.
On Tuesday, Mr. Myler, who is now the editor of the New York Daily News, said he stood by his testimony. “I have always sought to be accurate and consistent in what I have said to the committee,” he said in a statement.
In a measure of the damage to his interests since the scandal broke, Rupert Murdoch closed the 168-year-old News of the World and the family withdrew a bid to assume full control of BSkyB. For his part, James Murdoch has severed many business ties with Britain, although he remains on BSkyB’s board.
The ramifications have continued to spread.
Apart from the separate parliamentary and judicial inquiries, British police have started three separate investigations into phone hacking, e-mail hacking and bribery of police officers. More than 40 people have been arrested and questioned — though not charged — including senior editors and executives at News International. They include Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of News International, and Andy Coulson, a former editor who left the company to become Prime Minister David Cameron’s media adviser — a job he has now quit.
The chairman of the parliamentary committee, Mr. Whittingdale, said on Tuesday that the panel had been careful not to publicize conclusions that might prejudice criminal proceedings against any of those involved.
The committee criticized Scotland Yard and the Crown Prosecution Service as failing to take action soon enough. As the political fallout from the scandal widens, it also has threatened Jeremy Hunt, Mr. Cameron’s culture minister, who was in charge of overseeing the BSkyB bid. As culture minister, Mr. Hunt had the power to waive regulatory scrutiny that could have doomed the takeover.
Mr. Hunt’s aide, Adam Smith, resigned last week after e-mails presented at the separate judicial inquiry depicted a cozy relationship between the minister’s office and the Murdoch family. The Labor opposition has called for Mr. Hunt’s resignation, accusing him of protecting the prime minister’s own ties to the Murdoch empire.
What if Azcarraga Were Treated Like Berlusconi and Murdoch?
Today in the NYT you can read that Murdoch was declared unfit to run a huge media conglomerate in Britain. A few months ago Berlusconi lost his powerful position in the Italian elite. Now we have the Mexican equivalent Emilio Azcarraga Jean, interfering with democracy there. Since his PRI candidate is so weak, he decided to run a soccer game exactly at the same time when a political debate was scheduled days in advance.
Get Televisa out of Mexican Politics!
Get Televisa out of Mexican Politics!
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