Scenes: Upon the Demise of Kim Jong-Il 12/29/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Defense, Global, Politics.Tags: Global Security, Kim Jong-Il, North Korea, Politics, The Atlantic
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North Koreans have shown extraordinary displays of grief in the days since the death of their leader Kim Jong Il on December 17th. Today marked the start of a two-day funeral ceremony, as thousands of North Koreans lined the snowy streets of Pyongyang to witness the procession of vehicles as it made its way to Kumsusan Memorial Palace. Official North Korean news sources have been declaring Kim Jong Un the “great successor,” but questions about the transition and future governance of the volatile, secretive state continue to make foreign governments wary. South Korean intelligence recently indicated that North Korea has tightened security in cities, put troops on alert and won loyalty pledges from top generals after Kim’s death as it consolidates power behind the anointed heir. Collected here are images — most of them official North Korean releases — of the public mourning in North Korea.
Photo Credit: The Atlantic
THE SUDDEN PASSING OF KIM JONG-IL from a heart attack, removed a longstanding figure from the balance of power in the Pacific; kept it all the same in another, while completely flipping a valued (relative) predictability on its ear, in yet another. While American forces, the State Department and Western intelligence services all suddenly lost the figure that they’ve painstakingly focused so much time and effort on, collecting information looking to understand a hidden, cloistered nation, but were still mostly in the dark about, a face who stared at American military power across from the Demilitarized Zone’s 38th Paralell for five decades, from a land frozen in time (and atmospherics); they now gain his heir, along with a North Korea now worse off than years’ prior and greater uncertainty.
The historic factors of this change are significant, as Kim Jong-Il’s successor and youngest son, Kim Jong-un, becomes the country’s next leader with far less grooming than his father had, and in a world less stable than the one Kim Jong-Il took the nation’s yoke in; way back when the dangers of the world were just comprised mainly of the influence of superpowers. But it is also historic within the context of potential stability: In this crisis for North Korea, there is the slight chance of an opportunity for the West and North Korea to find an alternate path than the one that has been established, even if it is but a small one.
The young Jong-un, a man in his late 20s, inherits this seat of power in one of the very last (ostensibly) communist countries on the planet, and which is suffering from crippling economic stagnation. And perhaps this will practically necessitate an opening of what is known as “The Hermit Kingdom.” (North Koreans are already practicing micro forms of capitalism, following the failure of the Soviet Union in the 1990s leading to starvation, as consequence to the elimination of subsidies for the nation.) How and if Jong-un can navigate out of that economic and diplomatic trench created by years of enmity, or if he even has the inkling to, is another question all together, though. He will undoubtably have an old-guard couturier of handlers that he would have to sway his way.
The situation Jong-un assumes leadership of isn’t easy, either. In the last couple of years, North Korea has been stricken by famine as a result of flooding in the country soaking its grain crops, and this has killed many North Koreans; a morose flashback to the North Korea of Kim Il-Sung and the 1990′s when torrential rains flooded the area and killed millions of people. It has been precarious in North Korea ever since that time, and Jong-un may be well-served by looking to engage the world, even though China already provides a great deal of help. And he, like many others of visibly anti-Western figures, is evidently somewhat open to the West, in the form of America’s soft-power, our culture, much like his father, who reportedly kept a collection of N.B.A. basketball tapes. Jong-un, supposedly, also has an interest in the N.B.A., and particularly Michael Jordan. He was also educated in Switzerland.
Pictures from North Korea and any general, confirmable knowledge about it is somewhat difficult to come by due to its strict rules concerning foreign press. However, the state media broadcast of Kim Jong-Il’s funeral were readily available for all the world, as were photographs of the multitude of saddened North Koreans. The Atlantic‘s In Focus provided some of the best of the lot, covering its circumference with the help of Reuters.
View The Atlantic‘s In Foucs blog’s “North Korea Mourns Kim Jong Il” [Here]
The ‘Paradox of Autocracy’ and the Young 12/16/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Global, Politics.Tags: Bloomberg Business Week, Politics, The Great Recession, Youth Unemployment
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Photo Credit: Coverjunkie
IN the midst of the many uprisings of 2011 — from the Arab Spring to the week of the London Riots; the latter leaving those with left-leaning analytical orientations, stretching from Marxists’ conflict perspectives to neo-Marxists and the sociological thought that flows from them, argue were class-rage expressions of our day — several major news magazine titles hit the newsstands displaying covers discussing the world’s disgruntled, unemployed youth, who played the central figure in those disruptions.
During the Arab Spring protests and just months before the London riots, Bloomberg Business Week published “The Kids Are Not Alright” cover in which the lot of the young across the globe was given exegesis in their feature piece,”The Youth Unemployment Bomb.” And it’s no state secret that the future of the youth across the globe, especially in the undemocratic nations, is in jeopardy now; what with dwindled prospects for a good life, employment and the like, and the consequences it may wrought for the future of several nations. In ”The Youth Unemployment Bomb,” Peter Coy analyzes world youth unemployment and its influence upon the unrest seen throughout the globe.
The contentiousness of this current generation has been spurred by a broken promise: the idea that they would work hard to get educated and develop employable skills, and in kind they would be afforded passage through the gates of adulthood and experience lives of substantial contribution to the society. However, when that traditional promissory note has been turned on its ear — as a result of a global recession, poor governance, [and in the Democratic West], lack of market oversights, stagnated and narrowed economies with rigged markets and real wage diminishment over the past three decades — great disruptions occur. This longstanding issue finally reared its head this past year, and it has long been a concern in countries like Libya and Egypt for sometime. (It has also been a recent issue in much of Europe, Japan and the United States, to a degree. Though these nations are far less hampered, because of democracy’s ability to accommodate such expressions of grievance and produce change over time.)
I once linked to a 2008 New York Times’ report from well before the Arab spring – Memo from Cairo: “In the Shadow of a Long Past, Patiently Awaiting the Future” — that made mention of Egypt’s young population’s growing disaffection with the state of the economy and the anxiety it was creating internally for the government. It was but a small element in a story about how the nation was oddly, heavily reliant on tourism, as the pyramids crumbled and tourists’ interest in them waned, and how Mubarak was losing support due to years of a paralyzed economy affecting many of Egypt’s educated young.
By 2011, Mubarak’s contracting support morphed into a tidal wave of young who wanted to take the leader and his phalanx to the scrap heap. What Mubarak was ultimately experiencing in 2011 is known as “the paradox of autocracy,” * a sociological phenomena identified by a University of California at San Diego professor, which explains much of the plight of this educated youth and the challenges governments in Arab Spring states face. It’s also a phenomena that was mentioned in “The Kids Are Not Alright”:
For decades, Mubarak coped with Egypt’s youth unemployment problem by expanding college enrollments. That strategy couldn’t last forever. This past March, scholars Ragui Assaad and Samantha Constant of the Middle East Youth Initiative, a venture of Brookings Institution and the Dubai School of Government, put it bluntly: “In Egypt, educated young people who spend years searching for formal employment, mostly in the public sector, are now forgoing this prospect as the supply of government jobs dries up. Formal private sector employment—quite limited in the first place—is not growing fast enough. … Hence, young people are left with either precarious informal wage employment or expected to simply create a job for themselves in Egypt’s vast informal economy.”
Mubarak gave no sign of knowing how explosive the situation was, but his ministers did state repeatedly that Egypt needed rapid growth to soak up new job-seekers. The country started getting some things right in 2004, when Mubarak appointed a business-minded government under Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif. The nation lowered corporate taxes and import tariffs, privatized telecom, and expanded exports. The economy grew 7 percent annually from 2006 through 2008, dipped below 5 percent in 2009, and was on track for over 5 percent growth this past year, according to the International Monetary Fund.
That was good and bad. While growth is essential for easing social tensions in the long term, it can exacerbate them in the short term in a country such as Egypt. That’s because, former Finance Minister Youssef Boutros-Ghali told BusinessWeek several years ago, the first fruits of growth go to those who are already wealthy.
* The lack of democracy in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East—Israel being the exception—makes matters worse. Goldstone, of George Mason, says Mubarak is running afoul of the “paradox of autocracy,” a phrase coined by the late University of California at San Diego sociologist Timothy L. McDaniel. “Any authoritarian ruler who wants to modernize his country has to educate the workforce,” Goldstone says. “But when you educate the workforce you also create people who are not so willing to follow authority. Thus you create this threat of rebellion and disorder.” Democracies are “much better at managing large numbers of highly educated people,” Goldstone notes. Spain’s youth unemployment is even higher than Egypt’s, but young Spaniards aren’t trying to overthrow the government.
Even so, rich democracies ignore youth unemployment at their peril. In the 34 industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, at least 16.7 million young people are not employed, in school, or in training, and about 10 million of those aren’t even looking, the OECD said in December 2010. In the most-developed nations, the job market has split between high-paying jobs that many workers aren’t qualified for and low-paying jobs that they can’t live on, says Harry J. Holzer, a public policy professor at Georgetown University and co-author of a new book, Where Are All the Good Jobs Going? Many of the jobs that once paid good wages to high school graduates have been automated or outsourced.
Read “The Youth Unemployment Bomb” at Bloomberg Business Week [Here]
The War in Africa 12/07/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Defense, Global, Journalism.Tags: Africa, Foreign Policy, Global Security, Special Operations
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Photo Credit: Army Times
STARTING with The Nation‘s, Jeremy Scahill, reporting of secret bases used for the War on Terror (I forget that this is now an anachronism, and the conflict is now known as “The Overseas Counterinsurgency Operation“), in Somalia, the new-ish reports of a drone program in the region and President Obama’s recent move to send 1oo special operations soldiers to act as advisers; it is clear that there is a move afoot to focus American efforts on the continent. This, accompanied by the newly established Africa Command (AFRICOM), to oversee counter-terrorism operations in the region, makes this only more obvious. The motivation behind this is partly the rise of al-Shabaab (“Movement of Striving Youth”), an African al-Qaeda affiliate working primarily out of controlled areas in Somalia. (And years of perhaps inchoate policy in regards to terror threats on the continent, however there are some who ask whether the cells in Africa present a clear threat to America.)
When it has come to intelligence, there has simply been a vacuum on the African continent, both those of the technical and human variety. The war in Africa, itself, beyond the War on Terror produces a new reality with regards to the overall global counter-terror effort, as we ramp down in Afghanistan and Iraq and ramp-up elsewhere in what seems like the equivalent of proxy wars, like those of the Cold War, only this time focused on counter-terror. Recently, the Army Times conducted a six-month long, six-part special investigation on the matter in a series called “Secret War in Africa” which began with “The Secret War: Africa Ops May Just Be Starting.”
In “The Secret War: Africa Ops May Just Be Starting” the Army Times tells of a pivotal mission of divergent details and accounts — in the sense of what’s true depends on just who you ask — where two human intelligence (HUMINT) soldiers were taken hostage as either covert operators or as non-covert military personnel, in what may have been a clandestine operation in the Ogaden of Ethipoia. It was the first major incident, that indicated something had changed with our approach.
The two men were on the ground as part of Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa’s intelligence directorate, and were granted permission to go “beyond the wire” to handle, presumably, intel-collection duties. But just how they did that may have been part of the problem, as they reportedly developed a cover story which had them working for the Red Cross and which created a much larger issue when they were eventually approached by Ethiopian troops, and their weapons were found. The two soldiers were detained by the Ethiopian forces who presumed the soldiers to be hostile, particularly after their cover story of working for the Red Cross was upturned by their concealed pistols.
Depending on the conflicting account you choose to believe, the men were held anywhere from 48 hours, according to Major General (Maj. Gen.) Timothy Ghromley the head of Central Command during that time; or about 10 days, according to a senior intelligence officer. The account by Maj. Gen. Ghromley had the men under his charge acting in rogue. According to him, they were not to be operating in a covert manner:
‘They’re completely overt,’ he said. ‘They’re supposed to identify themselves as U.S. service members.’
The account by the intelligence official implies something a bit different, calling it a “clandestine operation.” The men were not in their uniforms, but according to the senior official; if they were detained they’d be able to declare their status as American soldiers, so that in the official’s words, “somebody could get them the hell out of there.” It eventually took the ambassador to Ethiopia, the State Department, and Central Command commander, (now-retired) Admiral William Fallon, to free them. The incident led to African intelligence operations in the specific area to become public and compromised. Everything from notepads, military-related items and papers, was scooped up by the Ethiopian government, according to the State Department. An intelligence official quoted in the Army Times article stated:
‘It was like amateur hour, this team that got rolled up,’ the intelligence official said. ‘There was information that they had that they should not have been carrying … It gave away techniques and procedures that we couldn’t afford to do, because we knew at that time that al-Qaida was building up its capability in Somalia and that was why we were trying damn hard to get into Somalia with really sensitive collection.’
The event which transpired between March 2007 and March 2008, depending on who one talks to (again), may have set the operations back in the horn of Africa for years. That is until now. A quick timeline of events show an escalation between the summer of 2009 to roughly the present:
• On Sept. 14, 2009, a U.S. special operations helicopter raid killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a senior al-Qaida in East Africa figure.
• On April 19, 2011, the U.S. captured Somali national and al-Shabaab member Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, 25, as he crossed the Gulf of Aden on a ship to Yemen from Somalia. The U.S. held Warsame, who allegedly has links to Yemen’s al-Qaida branch, for two months on a Navy ship before flying him to the U.S.
• On June 7, TFG [Transitional Federal Government] forces killed Harun Fazul, the most-wanted al-Qaida figure in East Africa, when he mistook their roadblock in Mogadishu for an al-Shabaab position.
• On June 23, U.S. drones struck al-Shabaab targets near Kismayo.
• On July 6, there were reports of airstrikes in Lower Juba, the southernmost region of Somalia, according to the website SomaliaReport.com.
• In early August, under increasing military pressure from the TFG [Transitional Federal Government] forces backed up by 9,000 African Union peacekeepers from Uganda and Burundi, al-Shabaab announced its withdrawal from Mogadishu.
• On Sept. 15, there were more airstrikes on an al-Shabaab training camp in Taabta in Lower Juba, according to SomaliaReport.com.
• On Sept. 21, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. is building a “ring of secret drone bases” including facilities in Ethiopia, the Seychelles and “the Arabian Peninsula.”
• On Sept. 23, airstrikes hit al-Shabaab’s main camp at the Kismayo airport.
• On Oct. 4, an al-Shabaab truck bomb killed an estimated 65 people in Mogadishu.
Read “The Secret War in Africa” series at the Military Times [Here]
Zoo Kid / King Krule, “Out Getting Ribs” 11/26/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Art, Indie Culture, Media, Rock, Youth Culture.Tags: Indie Rock, Zoo Kid
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ZOO KID’S enigmatic presence on the music scene as a teen underground sensation hasn’t truly been explored as far as I can tell. He’s just not quite big enough, maybe? There is not even a Wikipedia page for journalists to scan (though after his recent name change to “King Krule,” there was an addition ), in order to get a sketch of the young man who is being besieged with music snob laudations, and is just the age of your average high school sophomore or maybe he’s the age of a junior now? Regardless, he has already released wonderful industry-noticing work that is some new take on Billy Brag (he sounds a little bit like a somewhat drawled-out, booming garage crooner version of the legend), but sometimes armed with synths and dipped in lo-fi ephemera; when most of us were skipping out of lecture to shoplift and blow smoke rings.
And Archy Marshall, [Zoo Kid's real name], is apparently as in touch with the visual arts as he is the sonic one. His ode-in-the-form-of-borrowed-title, of street art culture progenitor and underground icon Jean-Michael Basquiat’s “Out Getting Ribs,” makes it appear so, at least, with Marshall leaving the rougher edges of his track exposed as either a premeditated design or a hat-tip to signal his lo-fi literati cohort. (Though, it is choice both ways; either to leave the song rough and unfinished or to polish it beyond the point of any natural beauty, like some ironically unappealing, over-manicured, modern, unthreatening, mass-appeal and plastic Hollywood model.)
The roughly four minute single released in November of last year on House Anxiety shares its name with a Basquiat pencil sketch (above), maybe as a statement of the gritty nature of Basquiat’s work in general and a larger statement on Zoo Kid’s raw, unvarnished feelings. Or it could just be the byproduct of a kid who — despite the sometimes deceiving artistic signature of lo-fi artists — really is working out of his room with Fruity Loops (FL Studio), a Mac and a Casio keyboard; the ultimate music nerd, just randomly assigning names to his gush of prodigious intellectual products; this one just being one of an unwieldy corpus.
What I know is he wails a mean and skilled, intimate confession over jagged electric guitar melodies in “Out Getting Ribs,” and he does it appropriately in your face, at times: His is the voice of an angry, sensitive boy who’s been rebuffed. The song and delivery challenges the earlier Beta Male feel of similar 2000′s singer-songwriters like Ben Gibbard of The Postal Service and Death Cab for Cutie, The Shins and fellow Brit, Badly Drawn Boy. (And somewhat newer, Bon Iver.) Unlike them, though, Zoo Kid is truly of this new, young lo-fi sweep in the culture, and what makes him so intriguing on this track is the fierceness of it, this is truly how boys feel when things go asunder.
And further unlike those far older men in Zoo Kid’s relative genre, there’s something more urban going on inside with him, hailing from southeast London. (He seems a bit more vulnerable, but still not completely castrated, ala a Drake.) And his look is another thing altogether, it seems part working-class Manchester in the 1980s and part anti-racist, early skinhead dub music fans, melded with some indie hip-hop aesthetics and prep school oddball to boot. He intermingles street culture with a traditionally alien music form, when he uses the term “boo” for his lady. It’s a brilliantly odd new thing that I relate to far more than those acts before him; of the college rock stations and lumberjack sartorial leanings.
‘Freakonomics’ on Cheating Enviornments 11/17/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Editorial, Film, Global, Media, The Great Recession.Tags: Books, Cheating, Economics, Freakonomics, Japan, Sumo Wrestling
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Photo Credit: Dr. Lakra
THE 2005 BOOK FREAKONOMICS was a resounding hit. The authors, Steven Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, and Stephen J. Dubner, a New York Times’ journalist, looked to explain the world through economics and the lens of the transactions that govern daily lives. The project eventually spawned a film (and blog) in 2010, where various directors were enlisted to explore sections of the original book. In one of the more salient moments of the film, the section entitled “Pure Corruption,” written by Peter Bull and directed by Alex Gibney of Taxi to the Darkside, the authors relay a case study concerning how the perception of “purity” in environments, such as those in Japan and its cultural mores, facilitates the cloaking of cheating.
A philosophical cornerstone of Japanese society is the ideal of honor, promoted by the nation’s dominant religion, Shinto. This permeates any discussion of corruption in Japan: from individuals’ motivations to how it becomes systemic. But Shinto’s principle of honor has helped the country consistently rate among the lowest across nations in measures of corruption. [Japan scored an "8" this year according to Transparency International's 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index on a scale of ten, with "10" meaning "very clean" and "0" meaning "very corrupt."] So while Japanese society is not considered corrupt, there are, nonetheless, warrens which exploit that reality; specifically those elements walled-off from everyday society, say like those activities of the yakuza.
In Japan, Sumo is sacrosanct. This is partly based on the facade of its entwine with Shinto, as even referees are presented as Shinto priests, but also it is the effect of its time-honored legacy and weave into the nation’s culture. Sumo’s rituals date back thousands of years, which further helps in representing the ideal of Sumo’s honorability in the society. All of this provides it with an air of infallibility, an environment where Sumo’s propriety is seen as beyond suspicion. The belief is that it shows no taints and therefore has no impurities.
Yet there is a great incentive to cheat because of the money, the high-stakes gambling surrounding the game and the reputation conferred to its wrestlers at the highest levels. The Japanese public learned this in 1996 when two whistle-blowers, one of whom was a former stable master — stables are Sumo’s training communities, where young wrestlers begin their rise through the ranks and live together under austere (and many times physically abusive) conditions — who penned a tell-all book that included names, allegations of match-throwing, and which was re-printed in a series by the Shukan Post, exposed the dark-side of Sumo. Professional Sumo’s governing body, the Japanese Sumo Association, responded to the allegations by claiming that the tell-all and its corresponding Shukan Post series were outright fabrications, and it roundly dismissed the printed accusations as the words of a vengeful man seeking publicity and compensation.
In response, the whistle-blowers decided to hold a press-conference. However, two weeks before that press-conference, both men mysteriously died on the same day, in the same hospital, from the same unidentified respiratory problem. Despite these extraordinarily odd circumstances surrounding the men and their demise, the culture of honor and its appearance of pervasiveness in Japanese life, led to an absence of inquiry by either of the deceased’s families or the media. Everyone from the families to the nation’s press, simply accepted the police’s line on the matter, who said: “It’s a very good hospital, and there were no grounds for suspicion.”
But when another young, in-training “rikshi” — directly translated to “strong man,” but means wrestler — passed in what was initially explained as an accident, but whose body displayed visible signs of assault and mutilation; suspicions were again aroused throughout the country concerning the propriety of Sumo. It was found, only after an autopsy requested by the wrestler’s father, that the young man was beaten by baseball bats and burned with cigarettes by fellow rikshi, whom he had trained with. The wrestlers were ordered by their stable master to punish him for attempting to run away. The incident sent a shock-wave which rippled through Japanese society, and the way in which murders were being investigated by the nation’s law enforcement, came to the fore as a national issue and an example of an overly-imbalanced separation between Japan’s dueling concepts of “tatamae,” meaning the perceived truth or appearance of propriety, and the “honnae,” or the hidden truth. It is a Shinto philosophy that looks to sometimes explain moral dysfunctions.
This separation between the two versions of truth was so wide that it led Tokyo police investigator, Hiromasa Saikawa, to publicly question the procedures involved in conducting murder investigations, in the wake of the wrestler’s death; particularly in a country where law enforcement regularly boasts an arrest rate greater than 96 percent. According to Saikawa, in Japan when there is a suspicion of murder, the police look to identify a killer, much like any country with an honest law and order system. But unlike in other nations, it is only if authorities can identify a suspect, do cops initiate a murder case. If there is no identifiable suspect, then a case can potentially be closed and ruled as an “abandoned body.” This obviously manipulates Japan’s crime statistics in such a manner, that it can’t ever accurately be known what the nation’s true murder rate is, or the police’s ability to solve such crimes. Hiromasa Saikawa officially resigned the Tokyo police force in protest of this investigative procedure.
This kind of numbers rigging which governs Japan’s police work is an important microcosm as it is a cultural red-flag that ties to Sumo, beyond those mysterious deaths that surround the sport. As in Sumo, as long as law enforcement kept its appearances and produced great numbers, then there was no need to question their propriety, regardless of schemes, because the “tatamae” — in this case, the widely-held perception of cops’ honorable intent to solve crimes – was met. But the data in Sumo, much like that of Japan’s murder arrest figures, tells a story about (another kind of) numbers scheming: A systemic preponderance of corruption known as “yaocho,” meaning match-fixing; which was long suspected, but still seen as unlikely by many.
To Japan’s outsiders Sumo is a sport and an important pastime, but to its wrestlers it is a lifestyle and cherished community. Wrestlers live in a closed society, which they were raised in since they began training as youngsters. This fact, along with the sport being treated as above suspicion, only motivates cheating given Sumo’s system, which operates on a hierarchy of ranks and money distributed to all its wrestlers, at every level; with every match promising a certain amount as one travels up this hierarchy, known as the “pyramid.” The best parts of life as a wrestler, like anywhere else, accumulate at the top, and for only wrestlers with the best records. However, there is but a minimum threshold where this “good life” is bestowed, and so individuals’ records matter, only to a certain point; in the sense that a better life is dispensed upon one’s performance, determined by meeting that threshold.
In professional Sumo tournaments wrestlers wrestle one match per day for 15 days, with the eighth win of a wrestler being critical in the schedule, because it produces a winning record (say of 8-7), and allows him to advance and move up in rank. Otherwise, a wrestler could drop from the sekitori class, the highest division of Sumo, that is made up of the juryo and makuuci divisions, and where the most prestige and privileges in Sumo lie. The difference in half a rank in professional matches can be as much as (the equivalent of) $5,000 USD a month. As wrestlers attempt to rise through the stable system from the “jonokuchi,” the lowest rung, to the “makuuchi,” the sport’s highest individual realm; wrestlers inevitably become friends and begin to understand that a blind-spot in the organizational architecture, is that the ranking system affords a better life for some, at no cost to others, at certain points. Since it is a system based on honor and trust; that all wrestlers will put up an honest fight.
This produces collusion that allows for many wrestlers to essentially win outside of the game, by being rewarded the fruits of victory liberally, with the assistance of their sympathizing buddies, who they’ve fostered relationships with since they were in the stables. The authors found that at the threshold between the seventh and eighth wins, when a rikshi is entering his final fifteenth do-or-die match between him and an opponent who has already gained the all-important eighth win, the wrestler who needs the eighth win, won an astounding 75 percent of the time; an incredibly odd deviation from the normal odds of it occurring.
It turns out that when two wrestlers meet and one has already secured his place within the pyramid, it is a common practice that he will usually help the other wrestler who needs the win more, and he will literally take “the fall,” hoping at some point the favor will be paid forward. But when those two wrestlers happen to meet again, the wrestler with the better record, originally, going into that deciding fifteenth match, wins a resounding amount of time according to the same data. It’s a built in incentive, and is the result of the tight-knit bonds of the wrestlers’ smaller society, and the presumption of purity in Sumo. Moreover, it keeps earnings high for everyone and fosters Sumo, as this money trickles down the pyramid.
What the authors conclude from looking at the case study of “pure environments,” is that presumptions of honorable intent can produce systemic fraud, as in the case of the most recent American financial mess: The presumption of free-markets and good, honorable stewards such as Alan Greenspan or to a lesser degree, financial agents like Bernie Madoff; men who held pristine reputations in the finance world, led to the wide moral failure in the system to go unnoticed. The presumption of honest and fair-play throughout finance created by supposed oversight boards and transparency regulations and trumpeted by the examples of those men, averted attention and reserved our suspicions for far too long.
Basically 11/15/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Editorial.Tags: Identity Politics, Politics
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Photo Credit: Only the Young Die Young
Police: ‘Keeping the Peace’ Through Military Ways? 11/07/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Defense, Journalism, Law and Order, Policy.Tags: Militarization, Police, The Atlantic
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Photo Credit: National City Police Department
To assist them in deploying this new weaponry, police departments have also sought and received extensive military training and tactical instruction. Originally, only the largest of America’s big-city police departments maintained S.W.A.T. teams, and they were called upon only when no other peaceful option was available and a truly military-level response was necessary. Today, virtually every police department in the nation has one or more S.W.A.T. teams, the members of whom are often trained by and with United States special operations commandos. Furthermore, with the safety of their officers in mind, these departments now habitually deploy their S.W.A.T. teams for minor operations such as serving warrants. In short, “special” has quietly become “routine.”
ANYONE who has watched any National Geographic Television or Discovery Channel all-access program following law enforcement, or have witnessed them in action, or unfortunately have dealt with them first hand, will have noticed something: There is increasingly little difference between cops and the appearance of our modern infantrymen, deployed in war-zones.
The trend towards beefing up our police, military-style, started with Special Weapons and Tactics (S.W.A.T.) teams and high-priority, specialized gang units in big metropolitan areas, and was probably given momentum by watershed events like the violent and televised North Hollywood shootout in 1997; between bank robbers in full body armor, toting fully-automatic rifles, and woefully under-armed Los Angeles Police Department officers, that seemed to bring about imagery from the film Heat.
But it is mostly the great effect of 9/11 and the constant specter of myriad forms of terrorism that could potentially require military-type firepower, lurking just around the corner, that is mostly responsible for this new approach. Nationally, law enforcement had been reminded time and again, that in many ways they were not as well-equipped as they should be, to meet the challenges of modern-day policing. (And because Americans love their guns, it has increasingly fostered an arms race between cops and criminals, who can purchase an easily-converted-to-automatic AK-47 or an AR-15 at a gun show, and with some savvy and evil enterprise, load it with explosive rounds or those meant to pierce through body armor.)
As any global security analyst will tell you, law enforcement was and is considered one of the first lines of defense against terrorism. That is until the days after 9/11, when George W. Bush declared a “War on Terror” and the focus shifted towards our military. Under the old paradigm, the basic nuts and bolts of thwarting terror was laid at the police’s doorstep: doing good detective work, showing a presence, working with the community to be vigilant, and so on. But our dramatic intelligence failure on 9/11 and the two successive wars to address Islamist terror — if one counts Iraq as having this justification — and the creation of several agencies under the new Department of Homeland Security, all have conferred this fight largely to the domain of the United States military and the national-security-industrial-complex.
This, in turn, has changed the posture of America’s law enforcement. The police, now feeling even more under-prepared to handle all of its duties along with the addition and prioritization of the staving of potential terror plots, began to invest in military-style weapons, adopt its tactics, consult with the military’s special operations units for training (as though they are some opposing guerrilla force to a dictator in a banana republic), and now work to absorb the military mindset. In The Atlantic‘s “How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police,” Arhtur Rizer, a former officer and the article’s author, explains that the justification behind this “weapon inflation” is primarily safety.
What was once considered tactics or weaponry only to be used in special circumstances, say like a S.W.A.T. team or the application of once-limited, but now readily available, assault rifles, are being regularly employed in the more routine parts of policing. But as pointed to in “How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police,” there are some legitimate civil liberty concerns because of this, as a recent mishap in a botched raid involving an innocent ex-Marine named, José Guerena, who served two tours in Iraq implies:
Within moments, and without Guerena firing a shot–or even switching his rifle off of “safety”–he lay dying, his body riddled with 60 bullets. A subsequent investigation revealed that the initial shot that prompted the S.W.A.T. team barrage came from a S.W.A.T. team gun, not Guerena’s. Guerena, reports later revealed, had no criminal record, and no narcotics were found at his home.
Sadly, the Guerenas are not alone; in recent years we have witnessed a proliferation in incidents of excessive, military-style force by police S.W.A.T. teams, which often make national headlines due to their sheer brutality. Why has it become routine for police departments to deploy black-garbed, body-armored S.W.A.T. teams for routine domestic police work? The answer to this question requires a closer examination of post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy and the War on Terror.
The chief concern in regards to this escalation of firepower and this new mentality among the police is that the organizational culture in the military and its operational philosophy of: identifying if someone is a threat and neutralizing them, and if so, do it with limited civilian casualties; is unlike that of the police, whose role is to “keep the peace,” uphold the law and the rights’ of citizens, even those it suspects. If the police changes its posture from “keeping the peace” and treats everyone as criminals, the way the military treats everyone as a potential combatant, it creates more situations such as that of José Guerena, where excessive and lethal force is sometimes just the cost of doing business, and where suspects no longer have the rights that they are supposed to, as the officers become judge, jury and executioner.
When law enforcement begins to adopt the soldiers’ mentality, it tends to forget its original goals of maintaining a good solid relationship with its public, while upholding the laws when they are broken, along with the most important rights of the individual. This is not to understate the difficulty of their jobs or minimize their optimal chances for safety by not having them bring as many resources to bear as possible, as Arhtur Rizer put it:
The point here is not to suggest that police officers in the field should not take advantage of every tactic or piece of equipment that makes them safer as they carry out their often challenging and strenuous duties. Nor do I mean to suggest that a police officer, once trained in military tactics, will now seek to kill civilians. It is far too easy for Monday-morning quarterbacks to unfairly second-guess the way police officers perform their jobs while they are out on the streets waging what must, at times, feel like a war.
Notwithstanding this concern, however, Americans should remain mindful bringing military-style training to domestic law enforcement has real consequences. When police officers are dressed like soldiers, armed like soldiers, and trained like soldiers, it’s not surprising that they are beginning to act like soldiers. And remember: a soldier’s main objective is to kill the enemy.
Read “How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police” at The Atlantic [Here]
A Telling Answer on Inequality 10/21/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Economics, Journalism, Policy, Politics.Tags: Inequality, Politics, Scientific American
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Photo Credit: We Are the 99 Percent
AS THE OCCUPY WALL STREET movement gains steam and 68 percent of millionaires, according to The Wall Street Journal, now say that they actually support more taxes on their earnings, a recent article in Scientific American implies a retreat on the idea of increasing taxes on the nation’s top earners, in a key sector. While a vast majority of the one percent — despite our currently personally beneficial tax situation — feels that a country in need should have those most able of it to pitch-in just a bit more, there has been a surprising attitudinal adjustment with working-class Americans.
In the article “The Last Place Paradox,” Scientific American reporters Ilyana Kuziemko and Michael I. Norton, Ivy League business school professors who co-authored a paper of the same title, found that among the nation’s blue collar, support for income redistribution (taxes) fell, marking this odd shift of millionaires, generally, approving to be taxed, while potential beneficiaries of such taxes believing it is unfair to tax them. Between 2008 and 2010 — the most recent years of data available — support for such measures actually “plummeted.”
My first inclination was to presume that the drop was due to the demagoguery of President Obama as a “socialist re-distributor” by his opponents on the right, but that presumption does not square with who is primarily in fundamental opposition to the government addressing large-scale income inequality; our have-nots in this winner take all system.
While the working-class is a demographic that is known to vote against its general interests, and those actions are thought to be an expression of their aspiration – for example, voting for policies that favor the wealthy, because they innately believe that they will be the wealthy someday, or their kids will be — it turns out that their motivations in regards to flagging support for re-distribution efforts, is actually motivated by a fear of being met at the same economic rung, or lapped, by those below them.
Our recent research suggests that, far from being surprised that many working-class individuals would oppose redistribution, we might actually expect their opposition to rise during times of turmoil – despite the fact that redistribution appears to be in their economic interest. Our work suggests that people exhibit a fundamental loathing for being near or in last place – what we call “last place aversion.” This fear can lead people near the bottom of the income distribution to oppose redistribution because it might allow people at the very bottom to catch up with them or even leapfrog past them.
How does last-place aversion play out with regard to redistribution? In our surveys, we asked Americans whether they supported an increase to the minimum wage, currently $7.25 per hour. Those making $7.25 or below were very likely to support the increase – after all, they would be immediate beneficiaries. In addition, people making substantially more than $7.25 were also fairly positive towards the increase. Which group was the most opposed? Those making just above the minimum wage, between $7.26 and $8.25. We might expect people who make just below and just above $7.25 to have similar lifestyles and policy attitudes – but in this case, while those making below $7.25 would benefit if the minimum wage were raised to, say, $8.25, those making just above $7.25 would run the risk of falling into a tie for last place.
The writers replicated this finding in lab tests where an artificial income distribution was created and subjects are shown their position within it, and where each rank is separated by just $1.00 USD. The subjects were then given $2.00 USD to either give to those below them in the distribution or above them, meaning giving to those below them would make those recipients jump past them in position, relative to the scale. While most gave the money to those below them, regardless of those recipients jumping their position, those in the penultimate (or second-to-last) and would thus become the lowest in the income distribution, were the least likely of all to give to those below them.
While these finding are not necessarily indicative of how things actually work in America, because of a number of factors, but primarily that it’s not always certain that everyone knows their position on the economic scale, as seems to be the case, since most Americans consistently identify themselves as “middle class,” it is an important finding that provides some very strong explanations as to why the G.O.P. is undeniably successful in attracting blue-collar workers, beyond just their economic aspirations to be wealthy. And beyond that, as said by the writers, this experiment and its finding portends a key effective strategy on the part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, because instead of dividing the income distribution among several strata, which would then produce potential supporters of the cause competing against each other, it focuses on one large group versus another, smaller group. As the writers said:
Framing the issue this way focuses the attention of people at the bottom of the distribution on those at the top – rather than on each other – and implicitly suggests that anyone not in the top 1 percent (“them”) is one of “us.” While it is too soon to tell if OWS has staying power, their rhetoric has the potential to reframe the discussion on redistribution and inequality.
Read “The Last Place Paradox” at Scientific American [Here]
The Fight Over Chavez 10/08/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Politics, Street Brands.Tags: Chavez Ravine, Fresh Jive, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Dodgers, Politics
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Photo Credit: FreshJive
WHILE LOS ANGELES’S sports fans are anxious over the still unresolved and perpetually ongoing saga of the Frank McCourt divorce and its potential to reap utterly negative consequences upon the franchise, possibly leaving it to Major League Baseball to step in — or owner Frank McCourt having to split the Dodgers in half with his wife — and now with an absolutely deplorable and savage beating of a Giants’ fan, Bryan Stow, leaving him in a coma at the beginning of this baseball season; some in the city are pointing fingers and becoming very critical of just how the Dodgers are being managed off the field of play. It is mostly the uncertainty surrounding the team now and the lack of security in the venerable stadium in recent years, along with “the element” McCourt supposedly attracted through his economical marketing promotions, often involving the sales of beer, and which is presumed to be a culprit in the Stow attack, that the Dodgers franchise now find themselves in a bad way with a segment of its faithful public.
But the McCourt case and even the Stow beating, are a mere pebble compared to the boulder of a problem that the building of now-timeworn and iconic Dodger Stadium was, in order to get the Dodgers here; an event which exposed the racial cleavages between whites and Latinos in the city, in the 1950s, just years after the Zoot Suit Riots. (One can argue that the recent ramping up of security by Dodgers’ management and the Los Angeles Police Department, and their perceived racial profiling of Latino Dodger fans, in particular — one of the team’s courted and stalwart patronages — in response to the most recent controversy, has also shown this, in the aftermath of the Stow incident.)
Prior to Chavez Ravine housing Dodger Stadium, the area was home to a community of mostly Mexican-Americans spread among a conglomeration of three smaller towns by the names of Bishop, La Loma and Palo Verde. The 175 acre tract of land was originally inhabited by 3,800 residents and named after Julian Chavez, the original landowner, and early Los Angeles councilman in the 1800s. Once a parcel tended to by the state government, over time, Chavez Ravine became a neglected area where its inhabitants relied heavily upon each other, and where they created a communal garden, began to hold social functions and essentially produced a de facto ghetto or ethnic enclave, depending on how one wants to parse it. But more importantly, it became a tightly-bound, respectable community. However, as many of these stories go concerning resource-neglected and predominantly minority communities, Chavez’s perception to those on the outside in surrounding Los Angeles, found it to be a less-than desirable blight. This began a move to look to re-develop the swath with 10,000 new units furnished by the 1949 Federal Housing Act.
Through several political machinations to clear the land by a group of local business elite known as Citizens Against Sociable Housing (C.A.S.H.) — that acronym is some kind of irony! — and a grand deceit on part of the local government who promised Chavez’s residents first crack at the new homes being built and also largely recanted a promise of compensations to those who were dislocated; the Ravine became a ward to the city at a bargain-basement price of $1.25 million (a 75 percent discount), but only under the federal government’s required auspice of using it for a “public purpose.” This “public purpose” condition was the byproduct of negotiations by mayor, Norris Poulson, a man essentially elected through the works of C.A.S.H., and who ran on an anti-housing development platform for Chavez Ravine.
The individuals who made up C.A.S.H. had plans for the Ravine all along and to “cake-up,” as we say now, but several failed attempts by the city to do anything with the space made it a nuisance to some in the local government, and a portion of the original homes were cleared to be used for firefighter training, while others were just stripped and sold piece meal at auction. At that point, still unable to find that federally mandated public purpose for the area, Chavez Ravine could have just been handed back to its original community, who were now seen as squatters; to do with it what they once did, and which would meet the federal requirements for its selling. That didn’t happen.
But that was just the beginning, because Brooklyn Dodger owner and legend Walter O’Malley wanted to move West and showed interest in the spot, or at least used it as bargaining chip to have Brooklyn help him build the new stadium he was looking for. And so began a battle with a series of dramatic turns that speaks to the powerful and their flagrant moral abuses of power to make money, with little regard for people, and which is outlined at luminary Los Angeles street wear company’s, FreshJive‘s, blog. Here is an excerpt:
Playing off the needs of both coasts, O’Malley spent much of 1957 considering the idea of staying on the east coast or heading west. Facing mounting pressure from city businesses and politicians to bring the Dodgers to Los Angeles, Mayor Paulson gathered city officials together to begin planning a way to bring the Dodgers to L.A. Considering the legal and financial solutions of the move, Mayor Paulson found that his biggest obstacle lay in the rhetoric of the legalities, as the construction of a stadium did not serve as an “appropriate public purpose” to the citizens of Los Angeles.
After rejecting O’Malley’s proposition to build a new stadium in New York, the Dodger’s owner’s attention turned to Los Angeles. Receiving approval from the National Baseball League to pursue a move to the west coast, Walter O’Malley was given until September 30th, 1957 to make his decision. Amongst mounting pressure from the Los Angeles Times urging city officials to bring baseball to Los Angeles at any cost, The Los Angeles City Council sat down to propose a deal to attract the Dodgers. Crafting what would later be considered a “sweetheart deal” with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the city of Los Angeles offered to trade 300 acres of the Chavez Ravine land, while taking on over $4 million towards the construction and grading of the ravine. In return the Dodgers would trade the 9-acre Wrigley Field property owned by O’Malley, while paying $350,000 in annual property tax. Additionally, the deal called for the Dodgers to maintain a 40-acre public park for 20 years that would become the property of the Dodgers after the duration was over: the small stipulation regarding the 40-acre park serving as a sly political maneuver aimed to make the deal appear as though the agreement served an “appropriate public purpose.”
Needing a two-thirds vote to confirm the deal by midnight of September 30th, a 14 member city council met to decide the fate of Chavez Ravine. Debating throughout the day and into the night, a deal had not been confirmed as the council grew closer to midnight. Eager to conclude the dispute and bring the Dodgers to Los Angeles, Mayor Paulson lied in front of press and media, telegramming the National Baseball League that the council had reached an agreement when in fact they hadn’t. The lie spurred an unexpected series of events. Although facing immense backlash from city council, the National Baseball League extended their deadline two more weeks, allowing O’Malley more time to declare his decision. Taking another week to reach a verdict, the Los Angeles City Council voted in favor of the Chavez Ravine deal in a ten to four vote, officially allowing for the move of the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles.
Read more of “For the Love of Baseball: The Battle for Chavez Ravine” [Here]
Kingston Scary 09/28/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Art, Global, Global Street Culture, Journalism.Tags: Art, Boogie, Jamaica, Photography
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Oh, the Kingston gangsters use masks like that to scare victims before shooting them.
- Boogie
A PHOTOGRAPHIC SERIES by the acclaimed street scene, gang and war photographer known as “Boogie”; a born and bred Serbian who got his start documenting the ravages of the conflict in Yugoslavia and who emigrated to New York in 1998, only to become an art world darling, made the Internet rounds after he had posted the images on his personal blog, and then the art magazine Juxtapoz.
The destination for this particular photo excursion was the gritty streets of Kingston, Jamaica, a place where Boogie had previously produced a great series of photographs. It is also a place that has stood out in an underground music scene and culture often dominated by its influences, think Jamaican patois in rap, ganja culture and Rastafai culture, dancehall, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Bob Marley, Ziggy Marley and now Damian Marley.
It’s also a city known for a mixture of sexy flair and disturbing violence, and which has been thus tapped to provide the background scenery in some hip-hop videos. What is little known about the city and country, however, other than what is portrayed by the culture at large and the nation’s tourism board, is not really heartening, though its revenues were up last year, surprisingly, in the midst of a global recession. According to the C.I.A. World Fact book on Jamaica:
Tourism revenues account for roughly 10% of GDP, and both arrivals and revenues grew in 2010, up 4% and 6% respectively. The Economic growth faces many challenges: high crime and corruption, large-scale unemployment and underemployment, and a debt-to-GDP ratio of more than 120%. Jamaica’s onerous public debt burden – the fourth highest in the world on a per capita basis – is the result of government bailouts to ailing sectors of the economy, most notably to the financial sector in the mid-to-late 1990s.
Boogie’s pictures tell the story even better. Now, obviously, one could find people to stage pictures and make them look reflective of a time and place much more raw than is actually the case, but that has not been Boogie’s modus operandi. Nope, these are what they are, the pictures which tell a story about Kingston, Jamaica rarely told. Boogie is able to capture the fallow of the area, the way its poverty and resulting crime economy seems to burst out of every seam of the life there. It’s as real as photography outside of war, natural disaster and famine gets, when looking at the eyes of his trusting subjects who as he put it in a Vice Magazine interview:
Yeah, man. The police in Kingston are very brutal. If they catch you with a gun they’ll most likely just kill you on the spot without making an arrest. So, the fact that these guys let me shoot them with their guns meant big respect.
View Boogie’s Kingston, Jamaica experience at Juxtapoz [Here]
Read an interview with Boogie at Vice Magazine [Here]
