A Different White Elephant a Generation Later?

Years ago a senior politician in Singapore known as LKY went on television to talk about how quickly things can change for a nation as its fortune declines. As example, he cited the case of Britain. Specifically, he noted (I assumed it must have intrigued him) that in a generation or so, the British had turned from the gentlemen he knew when he studied in England to the brutes he see in soccer hooliganism nowadays.

LKY was only partly correct. But whole people could not have changed so quickly, hor? It was not that the British had 'ceased to be gentlemen'. The more probable explanation is that during LKY's 'good old days' in England the not so gentlemanly types were not in London but elsewhere 'serving their queen and country'. Now that there is no more 'empire where the sun doesn't set' left to settle their brutes, they had settled on their own soccer stadiums. Just read the below report.

Now you see if LKY's white elephant is really so different over the course of one generation...


Natasha Walter
Saturday July 5, 2003
The Guardian

Our boys, their rapists? We need a public inquiry

In Kenya, the British army stands accused of systematic abuses

Imagine that half a dozen German women had just claimed they had been gang-raped by British soldiers who were stationed in their country on exercise. Imagine that even when the women had reported the rapes the soldiers had been allowed to fly home and the incident was never investigated. Imagine that a few months later another such incident took place. If such accusations were being made against British soldiers by European women, and if the women's stories were backed up by hospital and police records and compelling testimony from the traumatised young women, then the media would have gone into a frenzy - demanding to know how British soldiers could go on the rampage, and why officers were covering up for them.

Far from just a few cases, we are currently seeing hundreds of women coming forward to claim that they have been raped by British soldiers. Six hundred and fifty women who say that they were raped over the past 30 years - the most recent incident took place last year - have just been granted legal aid to bring a case for compensation against the British army. But these women aren't from Europe; they come from pastoralist communities in the highlands of Kenya. For the past 50 years their land has been used by thousands of British soldiers who go out to Africa for a few weeks or months at a time to practise desert and mountain warfare.

The mere fact that they are in Africa seems to have ensured that these women's claims have sparked little fury in comparison to what would have occurred if the same had happened on any other continent. A racist view that black women do not have the same rights or the same sensibilities as other women still seems to influence us in Britain, far more than we like to admit. But it shouldn't need to be stated that the trauma these women have suffered goes just as deep as it would with any other women in any other part of the world. I went out to Kenya when the first women began
to put their claims to a British solicitor, and although I spoke only to a small number of them, I will never forget their tales of emotional and physical pain.

If we do allow ourselves to take these allegations seriously, then they must change the way we look at the British army. When I first reported on the women's claims for this newspaper back in March, the armed forces were just going into action in Iraq. From that moment on, we have faced a barrage of exhortation from politicians and the media to get behind our boys. In contrast to the troops of other countries, we are told, British soldiers are always disciplined, and always respectful towards local people. We have been shown charming pictures of British soldiers giving sweets to children and putting themselves at risk by going around without their helmets. Their bravery, we are told, is matched only by their gentlemanly behaviour.

Are we allowing this spurt of patriotism to blind us to the gravity of the accusations coming out of Kenya? Their nature and number suggest that rapes were not simply being committed by a few soldiers going on a brutal spree for a few days.

More than half of the alleged attacks were gang rapes, and many of them were carried out in a systematic manner by groups of soldiers hunting down women at watering holes or in pasture grounds. I spoke to one woman who said that she was caught up in an attack in which at least 12 soldiers raped six women. One woman told me of another incident in which two soldiers raped her in turn, while another soldier looked on silently, holding the others' guns.

If these rapes did go on for so long and in such numbers, then the whole scandal could not have continued without officers deliberately turning a blind eye. Documentary evidence of reports made to army officers in Kenya is now coming to light, including letters written by local chiefs and local government officers that are dated as far back as 1977.

I have spoken to Masai chiefs who attended a meeting with senior army officers in 1983 at which the rapes were discussed and the officers promised to take steps to prevent them; I have also spoken to a Kenyan man who remembered reporting a rape as recently as 1998 to a major at a British army camp. No action, however, was ever taken to investigate or discipline any soldiers.

The suggestion that a culture of impunity reached throughout the army from the bottom to the very top can be put into the wider context of the history of the British army in Kenya. Only now is the real story being told of the atrocities carried out by the British against fighters for Kenyan independence in the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s.

Although full investigations have, up to now, been thwarted by Kenyan and British authorities, veterans of that struggle are now preparing to launch their own action for compensation against the British government. Their allegations against British authorities include tales of starvation, beatings, forced labour, torture, and also claims by Kikuyu women that they were systematically raped by British soldiers as punishment for their people's involvement in the independence uprising.

The legacy of this brutal colonialism clearly infects the behaviour of the British army in Kenya to this day. If you are simply incredulous at the very idea that the British soldiers could still get away with raping Kenyan women without immediate disciplinary action being taken, you might want to consider other aspects of the way the army behaved while on exercise in these areas. Although the area that I visited is actually owned by the Masai people, the British army never paid them directly (money went instead to the Kenyan government) for the privilege of taking over part of their precious grazing land every year, but they would treat the land as if it were their own. Sometimes they would divert the water supply from local settlements for the army camps, so that Kenyan children went thirsty while British soldiers drank freely.

And then there is the fact that for decades these soldiers left their unexploded ordnance on grazing grounds so that ordinary people, including children, could stumble on them and be maimed and even killed. A £4.5m compensation settlement was winkled out of the Ministry of Defence only last year for those people who were injured or bereaved in such incidents, when at last our government realised that it could not get away with allowing black children to be blown up by its bombs in peacetime.

Amnesty International has now called for an independent inquiry to be held into these hundreds of allegations of rape. Indeed, although the Ministry of Defence has recently sent a few members of the Royal Military Police to start an investigation, a more public and more accountable inquiry is essential. The scale and gravity of these alleged crimes suggest that this goes way beyond the wild behaviour of a few soldiers. As one of the Kenyan women I met said to me of the men who raped her: "They have brought shame on all the British people."

Quiz: What does the African saying "The Hour of the Idiots" Mean?

Specially for those with eyesight & other problems that are still trying to figure out their white elephant.

WASHINGTON (AFP) Firms doing US government-funded business in Iraq and Afghanistan donated more to President George W. Bush's 2000 election campaign than they gave any other politician in the past 12 years, said a new study.

Researchers at Washington-based watchdog group the Center for Public Integrity said US contractors with multibillion-dollar contracts to rebuild the war-torn countries also enjoyed influential military and political connections.

The report did not accuse the firms or US agencies of corruption. It detailed more than 500,000 dollars in donations to Bush's 2000 campaign coffer from 70-plus US firms and individual contractors now active in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The same donors have garnered up to eight billion dollars in reconstruction business, the report said.

Many deals were not put out to tender as contract-issuing agencies -- chiefly, the Pentagon, State Department and US Agency for International Development -- said needs were too urgent to allow for time-consuming competitive bids, the report said.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the agency had yet to review the report in detail but rejected key findings and the implication of impropriety.

"People in senior positions have no influence over the decision (to award a contract). The decisions are made by career procurement officials," Boucher told reporters.

"There's a separation, a wall, between them and political-level questions when they're doing the contracts, and the contracts are evaluated for technical merit as well as for the lowest cost."

Contrary to the report, key Iraq contracts were open to competitive bidding, he added.

For example, 10 firms were invited to compete for a contract ultimately awarded to California-based construction giant Bechtel Group Inc. after it and six others vied for the deal, Boucher said.

The contract to restore Iraqi utilities, telecommunications and transport infrastructure, schools and hospitals was valued at just over one billion dollars.

According to the Center report, Bechtel and other contract recipients have been well-connected.

"Nearly every one of the 10 largest contracts awarded for Iraq and Afghanistan went to companies employing former high-ranking government officials or individuals with close ties to those agencies or Congress," the study said.

"Dozens of lower-profile, but well-connected, companies shared in the reconstruction bounty," it added.

Halliburton Co. -- the oil services titan once headed by now Vice President Richard Cheney -- scooped up the biggest contract: 2.3 billion dollars for its Kellogg, Brown and Root unit to support the US military and rebuild Iraq's oil infrastructure, the report said.

Halliburton chairman Dave Lesar, responding on Wednesday to lawmakers' allegations the company was overcharging for gasoline imported into Iraq, said criticism of its work there was "less about Halliburton and more about external political issues."

The company won the Iraq contract on the strength of a long track record, not its political connections, he added.

Bechtel chief executive Riley Bechtel serves on the President's Export Council, which advises Bush on trade issues, the report said. George Schultz, who served as Secretary of State under then president Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, sits on the company's board of directors.

Like Halliburton, Bechtel said its connections had nothing to do with winning contracts.

"We do engage in the political process, as do most companies in the United States," the company said on its Web site.

"We have legitimate policy interests and positions on matters before Congress, and we express them in many ways, including support for elected officials who support those positions."

"We do not expect or receive political favors or government contracts as a result of those contributions," it added.

Masters of Economy of Scale or Big Time Blood Suckers?

Pls read this article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3220619.stm

Those that believe that big MNCs really add value to the world through economy of scale, can try explaining how they think they can charge 80+ times the price for AIDS drugs compared to that charged by this Indian company runned by a Muslim? And they call him a 'pushy drug dealer'!

Or is this just a first world way of screwing all others (even when they are down)?

And you know why a big time capitalist rep like Clinton has to 'broker a deal' for this pushy drug dealer? Compassion for the sick, greed management for the MNCs, or just free market at work? Or you have a better explanation?

Dedicated to those that try to make a difference like the Muslim man in this article.

p.s. some folks told me that the reason why they follow a certain book is that those who do so 'turn out to be good' and others that do not do so 'failed to see the light'. I assume that meant other books are not as good - if not why say that one special, hor?

So I try a simple logic: there are 1.5 billion Muslims - out, another 2.5 billion Buddhist/Hindus - out. OK, hurray! GOOD enough. At least 4 billion 'did not turn out to be good' or 'cannot see the light' ones. Now you see how the remaining minority should all feel damn special? By just counting the bulk of the world out?

If you are a Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu, we can always start another different line of thought for the same end.

If all these fellas disagree on their own special logic, we can always sort it out by reducing the number of the others, hor? In the end we shall all end up better off.

OK, I was only joking. Everything I said above is hog wash. Of course. Unless, you are one of Bush's general, or JI's chief honcho. All 'em good people.


Three years ago Yusuf K Hamied, head of Indian drugs company Cipla, stunned a European Commission medical meeting in Brussels by offering to sell anti-Aids drugs at a fraction of the going rate.

He announced that he could sell a three-drug anti-retroviral combination for around $800 per patient per year. Big brand-name pharmaceutical companies were then selling their Aids drugs at $12,000 per patient per year. The following year, in 2001, Dr Hamied declared he was ready to sell the drugs even more cheaply - at about $300 per patient per year.

Last week, Dr Hamied won a major victory when former US president Bill Clinton brokered a deal whereby four companies making cheap, generic Aids drugs could begin supplying to millions of people in developing countries.

One of them is Cipla, India's third largest drug company. It is now offering to sell a three-drug anti-Aids cocktail for $140 per patient per year "subject to some conditions".

'Generic drugs are now respectable'
The generic drug company, set up by Dr Hamied's father in Bombay (Mumbai) in 1935, makes some 800 drugs - 20 of them anti-Aids ones - and exports to around 140 countries. It is legal in India to copy a drug designed abroad and sell it in the market - as long as the company can prove that it used a different manufacturing process. Dr Hamied says the Clinton Foundation's endeavour has given a greatly-needed shot in the arm to generic drugs. "Generic drug companies, especially from India, have now got respectability, quality and trust," he told BBC News Online from Frankfurt where was attending a pharmaceutical fair. "Multinationals have been running us down for years. Now there's international recognition of our quality and service."

Last year Cipla won the approval of the World Health Organisation (WHO) to market the Aids drugs whenever local governments allow their sale.

`Pushy drug dealer'
The Cambridge-educated Dr Hamied, 67, has been described as a "pushy drug dealer" and a "generic drugs maverick". He feels that his three-year battle for cheaper Aids drugs for poorer nations has had a multiplier effect.

"The fact that the MNCs have reduced prices [of their Aids drugs] from $12,000 to three to four times the present prices of generic companies proves that their conscience has been pricked," says Dr Hamied. "Remember, most of the Aids drugs were not originally invented by these companies - they are mostly in-license products."

But offering to supply cheap Aids drugs is only half the battle. Mr Clinton hopes that up to two million people will have received the cut-price drugs by 2008. But Dr Hamied says governments around the world need to take major initiatives to fund the purchase of cheaper drugs. "It just does not start and finish with the supply of drugs. There's medicare and continuing tests that cost money," he said.

Free offerings
"Supplying cheap drugs in isolation will not solve the problem." He singled out the governments of Brazil and Uganda as being pro-active in controlling the spread of the disease in their countries.

Cipla has registered its anti-Aids drugs in 65 countries, and is already supplying to 59 of them. The company already supplies one drug - to stop mother-to-child transmission - free of charge. Cipla has also offered free technology to make anti-Aids drugs "to state-owned companies in all Third World countries", says Dr Hamied. But he is not very happy with the way the Indian Government has moved to tackle Aids. India has an estimated four million cases of HIV.

Dr Hamied wants lower duties on imported raw materials for the drugs, government distribution and slashing of local taxes to make the drugs still cheaper. "We need more action than words in India today," said Dr Hamied.

Do You Really Want to Know?

Attached link is for those interested in the really big things that are happening around us. Analysis from all round the world by some top experts.

Perhaps we will better appreciate JFK's saying "Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not."

Er, actually JFK left out one part: "Many people don't see things or see things as they are not and say why not say why not and not why."

http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/crisis/index.htm#deficit

View of Another Blind Man

If this man's writings (below is just a sample) don't make sense to you, it is more likely you are blinder than him. You know how I can tell?

In memory of Edward Said.

Rgds
CCK

Imperial Arrogance and the Vile Stereotyping of Arabs
By EDWARD SAID

The great modern empires have never been held together only by military power. Britain ruled the vast territories of India with only a few thousand colonial officers and a few more thousand troops, many of them Indian. France did the same in North Africa and Indochina, the Dutch in Indonesia, the Portuguese and Belgians in Africa. The key element was imperial perspective, that way of looking at a distant foreign reality by subordinating it in one's gaze, constructing its history from one's own point of view, seeing its people as subjects whose fate can be decided by what distant administrators think is best for them. From such willful perspectives ideas develop, including the theory that imperialism is a benign and necessary thing.

For a while this worked, as many local leaders believed--mistakenly--that cooperating with the imperial authority was the only way. But because the dialectic between the imperial perspective and the local one is adversarial and impermanent, at some point the conflict between ruler and ruled becomes uncontainable and breaks out into colonial war, as happened in Algeria and India. We are still a long way from that moment in American rule over the Arab and Muslim world because, over the last century, pacification through unpopular local rulers has so far worked.

At least since World War II, American strategic interests in the Middle East have been, first, to ensure supplies of oil and, second, to guarantee at enormous cost the strength and domination of Israel over its neighbors.

Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and
liberate. These ideas are by no means shared by the people who inhabit that empire, but that hasn't prevented the U.S. propaganda and policy apparatus from imposing its imperial perspective on Americans, whose sources of information about Arabs and Islam are woefully inadequate.

Several generations of Americans have come to see the Arab world mainly as a dangerous place, where terrorism and religious fanaticism are spawned and where a gratuitous anti-Americanism is inculcated in the young by evil clerics who are anti-democratic and virulently anti-Semitic.

In the U.S., "Arabists" are under attack. Simply to speak Arabic or to have some sympathetic acquaintance with the vast Arab cultural tradition has been made to seem a threat to Israel. The media runs the vilest racist stereotypes about Arabs--see, for example, a piece by Cynthia Ozick in the Wall Street Journal in which she speaks of Palestinians as having "reared children unlike any other children, removed from ordinary norms and behaviors" and of Palestinian culture as "the life force traduced, cultism raised to a sinister spiritualism."

Americans are sufficiently blind that when a Middle Eastern leader emerges whom our leaders like--the shah of Iran or Anwar Sadat--it is assumed that he is a visionary who does things our way not because he understands the game of imperial power (which is to survive by humoring the regnant authority) but because he is moved by principles that we share.

Almost a quarter of a century after his assassination, Sadat is a forgotten and unpopular man in his own country because most Egyptians regard him as having served the U.S. first, not Egypt. The same is true of the shah in Iran. That Sadat and the shah were followed in power by rulers who are less palatable to the U.S. indicates not that Arabs are fanatics, but that the distortions of imperialism produce further distortions, inducing extreme forms of resistance and political self-assertion.

The Palestinians are considered to have reformed themselves by allowing Mahmoud Abbas, rather than the terrible Yasser Arafat, to be their leader. But "reform" is a matter of imperial interpretation. Israel and the U.S. regard Arafat as an obstacle to the settlement they wish to impose on the Palestinians, a settlement that would obliterate Palestinian demands and allow Israel to claim, falsely, that it has atoned for its "original sin."

Never mind that Arafat--whom I have criticized for years in the Arabic and Western media--is still universally regarded as the legitimate Palestinian leader. He was legally elected and has a level of popular support that no other Palestinian approaches, least of all Abbas, a bureaucrat and longtime Arafat subordinate. And never mind that there is now a coherent Palestinian opposition, the Independent National Initiative; it gets no attention because the U.S. and the Israeli establishment wish for a compliant interlocutor who is in no position to make trouble. As to whether the Abbas arrangement can work, that is put off to another day. This is shortsightedness indeed--the blind arrogance of the imperial gaze. The same pattern is repeated in the official U.S. view of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the other Arab states.

Underlying this perspective is a long-standing view--the Orientalist view--that denies Arabs their right to national self-determination because they are considered incapable of logic, unable to tell the truth and fundamentally murderous.

Since Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, there has been an uninterrupted imperial presence based on these premises throughout the Arab world, producing untold misery--and some benefits, it is true. But so accustomed have Americans become to their own ignorance and the blandishments of U.S. advisors like Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, who have directed their venom against the Arabs in every possible way, that we somehow think that what we do is correct because "that's the way the Arabs are." That this happens also to be an Israeli dogma shared uncritically by the neo-conservatives who are at the heart of the Bush administration simply adds fuel to the fire.

We are in for many more years of turmoil and misery in the Middle East, where one of the main problems is, to put it as plainly as possible, U.S. power. What the U.S. refuses to see clearly it can hardly hope to remedy.

Did you know? And a Little Mind Game

Did you know that Coalition Provisional Authority chief Paul Bremer (the American assigned by Bush to 'rule free Iraq') had approved laws that allow 100 per cent foreign ownership of all Iraqi state assets apart from natural resources?

Do you know what that means? If your answer to any of above is no, do you know why that's the case?

Do you know what Joseph Stiglitz says about that? Who is he? Mr Stiglitz was former economic adviser to Bill Clinton, World Bank chief economist, and Nobel prize winner for economics. Enough credentials?

Find out what people like him has to say and you will discover a whole new world out there. To help you convince yourself, here's a little mind exercise for all:

Remember the story of the elephant and the 5 blind men? Let's extend that story a bit and wonder what will happen if those 5 fellas were lazy fellas and have no sense of curiosity and lack the ability to analyse data from multiple sources. What a field day we will then have hah?

You laughing by now? Ok let's have some more fun.

Let's further assume that these fellas are cocksure that their views of an elephant is correct, and start telling themselves that what the others were telling them are pure hogwash (some call it conspiracy theories but there are other terms u can get off a cheap dictionary). What do you think will then happen?

OK, you are not likely to be laughing by now but let's try to look ahead a bit shall we?

Let's then assume that these 5 fellas have children of their own (assumed to be also blind for our mental exercise & hey it's not too unrealistic, u never heard of genetics?) and they believe only in home education (hey, papa & mama knows best what), what then happens?

Well, don't ask me what I think. How do you know I am not like one of those fellas in our little exercise?

But I can tell you this: I am cocksure I am not God-like.

Always Yesterday

I noticed that Li Ling has a very good memory and can remember many things that had happened. Many times she would talk about something that I would have forgotten had she not brought it up. When I could not remember something she would say “you remember? Yesterday we did such and such a thing?”

For her the past is always ‘yesterday’. I’m still trying to teach her other words like “last week” or “the last time”.

Moo Kim Seng & Others

Mom called last night to say that he died yesterday. He must be ninety or so. He was already a retiree when I stayed with them when I was 6 or 7. When mom visited them sometime back he looked alright despite having gone through some surgery. In addition, his wife “Jit Jeh’ is also having difficulty walking and is now chair bound. When I visited him the last Chinese new year, I remembered his daughter, sis Choo, saying that he loved to eat biscuits. Thought of buying him some in the next visit but never had the chance.

When I was in primary 1, the Moos invited me to stay with them during the long school holidays. Moo Kim Seng would bring me along with him to the nearby Ampang lake to fish – that’s where I learnt fishing. And when they needed to buy something from the nearby shops, they will send me to do it but with the instruction to buy myself some titbits with the spare change.

Also, Cousin Yin’s husband died in Taiping recently of cancer. He was in KL for operation to remove the cancer but the doctors did not proceed as they found that the whole body was already ‘infected’. So they just ‘sewed’ him backup and he died soon after. He was bald headed since many years ago and weared a wig in public. I wonder if that was related to the cancer that eventually took his life – may be his diet had something to do with both?

Yin Zhang’s mom is in KL to have her cataract removed.

Citizenship in New Superpower

By the act of reading the article at the below link, you shall forthwith be a citizen of the Second Superpower on Earth. May whatever, whatever you like, bless you.

http://cyber.law.harvard.epeopledu//jmoore/secondsuperpower.html

This service is provided free of charge. For those who believe that only money determines what is valuable or useful, consider this: you got your brain for free.

Er, may be that is not a very good example.... OK, Einstein's brain was free! So was Gandhi's and Mother Teresa's...

I know, George Bush got his for free too but he never quite bought the idea. In fact, he sold it for some cheap money and have to resort to asking for his god'sblessings daily to make up for the resultant shortfall. You think the Supergiver will buy it? And for free?


The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head

James F. Moore
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
jmoore@cyber.law.harvard.edu
Monday, March 31, 2003
Available as PDF
Jim Moore's Weblog

As the United States government becomes more belligerent in using its power in the world, many people are longing for a “second superpower” that can keep the US in check. Indeed, many people desire a superpower that speaks for the interests of planetary society, for long-term well-being, and that encourages broad participation in the democratic process. Where can the world find such a second superpower? No nation or group of nations seems able to play this role, although the European Union sometimes seeks to, working in concert with a variety of institutions in the field of international law, including the United Nations. But even the common might of the European nations is barely a match for the current power of the United States.

There is an emerging second superpower, but it is not a nation. Instead, it is a new form of international player, constituted by the “will of the people” in a global social movement. The beautiful but deeply agitated face of this second superpower is the worldwide peace campaign, but the body of the movement is made up of millions of people concerned with a broad agenda that includes social development, environmentalism, health, and human rights. This movement has a surprisingly agile and muscular body of citizen activists who identify their interests with world society as a whole—and who recognize that at a fundamental level we are all one. These are people who are attempting to take into account the needs and dreams of all 6.3 billion people in the world—and not just the members of one or another nation. Consider the members of Amnesty International who write letters on behalf of prisoners of conscience, and the millions of Americans who are participating in email actions against the war in Iraq. Or the physicians who contribute their time to Doctors Without Borders/ Medecins Sans Frontieres.

While some of the leaders have become highly visible, what is perhaps most interesting about this global movement is that it is not really directed by visible leaders, but, as we will see, by the collective, emergent action of its millions of participants. Surveys suggest that at least 30 million people in the United States identify themselves this way—approximately 10% of the US population. The percentage in Europe is undoubtedly higher. The global membership in Asia, South America, Africa and India, while much lower in percentage of the total population, is growing quickly with the spread of the Internet. What makes these numbers important is the new cyberspace-enabled interconnection among the members. This body has a beautiful mind. Web connections enable a kind of near-instantaneous, mass improvisation of activist initiatives. For example, the political activist group Moveon.org, which specializes in rapid response campaigns, has an email list of more than two million members. During the 2002 elections, Moveon.org raised more than $700,000 in a few days for a candidate’s campaign for the US senate. It has raised thousands of dollars for media ads for peace—and it is now amassing a worldwide network of media activists dedicated to keeping the mass media honest by identifying bias and confronting local broadcasters.

New forms of communication and commentary are being invented continuously. Slashdot and other news sites present high quality peer-reviewed commentary by involving large numbers of members of the web community in recommending and rating items. Text messaging on mobile phones, or texting, is now the medium of choice for communicating with thousands of demonstrators simultaneously during mass protests. Instant messaging turns out to be one of the most popular methods for staying connected in the developing world, because it requires only a bit of bandwidth, and provides an intimate sense of connection across time and space. The current enthusiasm for blogging is changing the way that people relate to publication, as it allows realtime dialogue about world events as bloggers log in daily to share their insights. Meta-blogging sites crawl across thousands of blogs, identifying popular links, noting emergent topics, and providing an instantaneous summary of the global consciousness of the second superpower.

The Internet and other interactive media continue to penetrate more and more deeply all world society, and provide a means for instantaneous personal dialogue and communication across the globe. The collective power of texting, blogging, instant messaging, and email across millions of actors cannot be overestimated. Like a mind constituted of millions of inter-networked neurons, the social movement is capable of astonishingly rapid and sometimes subtle community consciousness and action.


Thus the new superpower demonstrates a new form of “emergent democracy” that differs from the participative democracy of the US government. Where political participation in the United States is exercised mainly through rare exercises of voting, participation in the second superpower movement occurs continuously through participation in a variety of web-enabled initiatives. And where deliberation in the first superpower is done primarily by a few elected or appointed officials, deliberation in the second superpower is done by each individual—making sense of events, communicating with others, and deciding whether and how to join in community actions. Finally, where participation in democracy in the first superpower feels remote to most citizens, the emergent democracy of the second superpower is alive with touching and being touched by each other, as the community works to create wisdom and to take action.

How does the second superpower take action? Not from the top, but from the bottom. That is, it is the strength of the US government that it can centrally collect taxes, and then spend, for example, $1.2 billion on 1,200 cruise missiles in the first day of the war against Iraq. By contrast, it is the strength of the second superpower that it could mobilize hundreds of small groups of activists to shut down city centers across the United States on that same first day of the war. And that millions of citizens worldwide would take to their streets to rally. The symbol of the first superpower is the eagle—an awesome predator that rules from the skies, preying on mice and small animals. Perhaps the best symbol for the second superpower would be a community of ants. Ants rule from below. And while I may be awed seeing eagles in flight, when ants invade my kitchen they command my attention.

In the same sense as the ants, the continual distributed action of the members of the second superpower can, I believe, be expected to eventually prevail. Distributed mass behavior, expressed in rallying, in voting, in picketing, in exposing corruption, and in purchases from particular companies, all have a profound effect on the nature of future society. More effect, I would argue, than the devastating but unsustainable effect of bombs and other forms of coercion.

Deliberation in the first superpower is relatively formal—dictated by the US constitution and by years of legislation, adjudicating, and precedent. The realpolitik of decision making in the first superpower—as opposed to what is taught in civics class—centers around lobbying and campaign contributions by moneyed special interests—big oil, the military-industrial complex, big agriculture, and big drugs—to mention only a few. In many cases, what are acted upon are issues for which some group is willing to spend lavishly. By contrast, it is difficult in the US government system to champion policy goals that have broad, long-term value for many citizens, such as environment, poverty reduction and third world development, women’s rights, human rights, health care for all. By contrast, these are precisely the issues to which the second superpower tends to address its attention.

Deliberation in the second superpower is evolving rapidly in both cultural and technological terms. It is difficult to know its present state, and impossible to see its future. But one can say certain things. It is stunning how quickly the community can act—especially when compared to government systems. The Internet, in combination with traditional press and television and radio media, creates a kind of “media space” of global dialogue. Ideas arise in the global media space. Some of them catch hold and are disseminated widely. Their dissemination, like the beat of dance music spreading across a sea of dancers, becomes a pattern across the community. Some members of the community study these patterns, and write about some of them. This has the effect of both amplifying the patterns and facilitating community reflection on the topics highlighted. A new form of deliberation happens. A variety of what we might call “action agents” sits figuratively astride the community, with mechanisms designed to turn a given social movement into specific kinds of action in the world. For example, fundraisers send out mass appeals, with direct mail or the Internet, and if they are tapping into a live issue, they can raise money very quickly. This money in turn can be used to support activities consistent with an emerging mission.

The process is not without its flaws and weaknesses. For example, the central role of the mass media—with its alleged biases and distortions—is a real issue. Much news of the war comes to members of the second superpower from CNN, Fox, and the New York Times, despite the availability of alternative sources. The study of the nature and limits of this big mind is just beginning, and we don’t know its strengths and weaknesses as well as we do those of more traditional democracy. Perhaps governance is the wrong way to frame this study. Rather, what we are embarked on is a kind of experimental neurology, as our communication tools continue to evolve and to rewire the processes by which the community does its shared thinking and feeling. One of the more interesting questions posed to political scientists studying the second superpower is to what extent the community’s long-term orientation and freedom from special interests is reinforced by the peer-to-peer nature of web-centered ways of communicating—and whether these tendencies can be intentionally fostered through the design of the technology.

Which brings us to the most important point: the vital role of the individual. The shared, collective mind of the second superpower is made up of many individual human minds—your mind and my mind—together we create the movement. In traditional democracy our minds don’t matter much—what matters are the minds of those with power of position, and the minds of those that staff and lobby them. In the emergent democracy of the second superpower, each of our minds matters a lot. For example, any one of us can launch an idea. Any one of us can write a blog, send out an email, create a list. Not every idea will take hold in the big mind of the second superpower—but the one that eventually catches fire is started by an individual. And in the peer-oriented world of the second superpower, many more of us have the opportunity to craft submissions, and take a shot.

The contrast goes deeper. In traditional democracy, sense-making moves from top to bottom. “The President must know more than he is saying” goes the thinking of a loyal but passive member of the first superpower. But this form of democracy was established in the 18th century, when education and information were both scarce resources. Now, in more and more of the world, people are well educated and informed. As such, they prefer to make up their own minds. Top-down sense-making is out of touch with modern people.

The second superpower, emerging in the 21st century, depends upon educated informed members. In the community of the second superpower each of us is responsible for our own sense-making. We seek as much data—raw facts, direct experience—as we can, and then we make up our own minds. Even the current fascination with “reality television” speaks to this desire: we prefer to watch our fellows, and decide ourselves “what’s the story” rather than watching actors and actresses play out a story written by someone else. The same, increasingly, is true of the political stage—hence the attractiveness of participation in the second superpower to individuals.

Now the response of many readers will be that this is a wishful fantasy. What, you say, is the demonstrated success of this second superpower? After all, George Bush was almost single-handedly able to make war on Iraq, and the global protest movement was in the end only able to slow him down. Where was the second superpower?

The answer is that the second superpower is not currently able to match the first. On the other hand, the situation may be more promising than we realize. Most important is that the establishment of international institutions and international rule of law has created a venue in which the second superpower can join with sympathetic nations to successfully confront the United States. Consider the international effort to ban landmines. Landmines are cheap, deadly, and often used against agrarian groups because they make working the fields lethal, and sew quite literally the seeds of starvation. In the 1990s a coalition of NGOs coordinated by Jody Williams, Bobby Muller and others managed to put this issue at the top of the international agenda, and promote the establishment of the treaty banning their use. For this, the groups involved were awarded the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize. While the United States has so far refused to sign the treaty, it has been highly isolated on the issue and there is still hope that some future congress and president will do so.

At the Kyoto meetings on global climate change, a group of NGOs coordinated by Nancy Keat of the World Resources Institute joined with developing nations to block the interests of the United States and its ally, big oil. The only way for the United States to avoid being checkmated was to leave the game entirely. In the World Trade Organization, the second superpower famously shut down the Seattle meeting in 1999, and later helped to force a special “development round” focused on the needs of poor countries. That round is currently underway—and while the United States and others are seeking to subvert the second superpower agenda, the best they have achieved to date is stalemate.

And finally, while George Bush was indeed able to go to war with Iraq, the only way he could do so was to ignore international law and split with the United Nations. Had he stayed within the system of international institutions, his aims likely would have been frustrated. The French and the Germans who led the attempt to stop him could not, I believe, have done what they did without the strength of public opinion prodding them—the second superpower in action.

Now we all know that the Bush administration has decided to undermine, in many cases, the system of international law. Some argue that by pulling out, the administration has fatally damaged the international system, and ushered in a new era where the United States determines the rules—hub and spoke style—through bilateral deals with other nations. The result, some will say, is that the second superpower no longer has a venue in which to meet the first effectively. In my view this is an overly pessimistic assessment—albeit one that members of the second superpower need to take seriously and strive to render false by our success in supporting international institutions.

International law and institutions are not going away. Too many parties want and need them. First, individuals around the world are becoming more globally aware, and more interested in international institutions. Global media, travel, and immigration all contribute to citizens being aware of the benefits of consistent approaches to everything from passport control to human rights. It is striking, for example, that up until the final days before the war, a majority of the US population wanted the president to deal with Iraq in concert with the United Nations. Second, business organizations want global rule of law. Global trade is now central to a vast majority of businesses and almost all nations—and such trade requires rules administered by multilateral bodies. Third, most nations want a global legal system. In particular, European nations, wary of war, outclassed in one-on-one power confrontations with the United States, have become strongly committed to a post-national world. They are pouring collective national resources of enormous magnitude into continuously strengthening the international system.

The key problem facing international institutions is that they have few ways to enforce their will on a recalcitrant US government. And this is where the second superpower is a part of the solution. Enforcement has many dimensions. When the United States opts to avoid or undermine international institutions, the second superpower can harass and embarrass it with demonstrations and public education campaigns. The second superpower can put pressure on politicians around the world to stiffen their resolve to confront the US government in any ways possible. And the second superpower can also target US politicians and work to remove at the polls those who support the administration’s undercutting of international law.

Longer term, we must press for a direct voice for the second superpower in international institutions, so that we are not always forced to work through nations. This means, as a practical matter, a voice for citizens, and for NGOs and “civil society” organizations. For example, the Access Initiative of the World Resources Institute is working to give citizens’ groups the ability to influence environmental decisions made by international organizations such as the World Bank. The Digital Opportunity Task Force of the G8 group of nations included a formal role for civil society organizations, as does the United Nations Information and Communications Technology Task Force.

Overall, what can be said for the prospects of the second superpower? With its mind enhanced by Internet connective tissue, and international law as a venue to work with others for progressive action, the second superpower is starting to demonstrate its potential. But there is much to do. How do we assure that it continues to gain in strength? And at least as important, how do we continue to develop the mind of the second superpower, so that it maximizes wisdom and goodwill? The future, as they say, is in our hands. We need to join together to help the second superpower, itself, grow stronger.

First, we need to become conscious of the “mental processes” in which we are involved as members of the second superpower, and explore how to make our individual sense-making and collective action more and more effective. This of course means challenging and improving the mass media, and supporting more interactive and less biased alternatives. But more ambitiously, we will need to develop a kind of meta-discipline, an organizational psychology of our community, to explore the nature of our web-enabled, person-centered, global governance and communication processes, and continue to improve them.

Second, and ironically, the future of the second superpower depends to a great extent on social freedoms in part determined by the first superpower. It is the traditional freedoms—freedom of the press, of assembly, of speech—that have enabled the second superpower to take root and grow. Indeed, the Internet itself was constructed by the US government, and the government could theoretically still step in to restrict its freedoms. So we need to pay close attention to freedom in society, and especially to freedom of the Internet. There are many moves afoot to censor the web, to close down access, and to restrict privacy and free assembly in cyberspace. While we generally associate web censorship with countries like China or Saudi Arabia, tighter control of the web is also being explored in the United States and Europe. The officials of the first superpower are promoting these ideas in the name of preventing terrorism, but they also prevent the open peer-to-peer communication that is at the heart of the second superpower. We need to insist on an open web, an open cyberspace, around the globe, because that is the essential medium in which the second superpower lives.

Third, we must carefully consider how best to support international institutions, so that they collectively form a setting in which our power can be exercised. Perhaps too often we attack institutions like the World Bank that might, under the right conditions, actually become partners with us in dealing with the first superpower. International institutions must become deeply more transparent, accessible to the public, and less amenable to special interests, while remaining strong enough to provide a secure context in which our views can be expressed.

And finally, we must work on ourselves and our community. We will dialogue with our neighbors, knowing that the collective wisdom of the second superpower is grounded in the individual wisdom within each of us. We must remind ourselves that daily we make personal choices about the world we create for ourselves and our descendants. We do not have to create a world where differences are resolved by war. It is not our destiny to live in a world of destruction, tedium, and tragedy. We will create a world of peace.