People :
Author : Carne Ross
Text :
[1] “The Flash Crash: Autopsy,” Economist, Oct. 7, 2010.
[2] Alex Evans of Chatham House originated this term.
[3] “Food and Water Driving 21st-Century African Land Grab,” Observer, Mar. 7, 2010.
[4] “Immeasurable loss,” Economist, Nov. 12, 2008.
[5] As reported in Financial Times, Nov. 9, 2010.
[6] State Department Assistant Secretary for Human Rights Mike Posner, reported in “Clinton Defends Human Rights Approach,” New York Times, Dec. 14, 2009.
[7] Colum Lynch, “U.N. Takes Stock of Its Diminished Influence,” Sept. 13, 2010, turtlebay.foreignpolicy.com.
[8] Parag Khanna, “Future Shock: Welcome to the New Middle Ages,” Financial Times, Dec. 29, 2010.
[9] Timothy Garton Ash, “Timothy Garton Ash in Davos: Illiberal Capitalism and New World Disorder,” posted to his listserve, Jan. 28, 2011.
[10] “Climate Change Diplomacy: Back from the Brink,” Economist, Dec. 16, 2010.
[11] “As Jobs Fade Away,” Economist, May 6, 2010.
[12] Bob Diamond, the chief executive of Barclays Bank, said, “There was a period of remorse and apology; that period needs to be over.” His expected bonus that year was over £3 million.
[13] Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
[14] “China to Alter Taxes in Attempt to Cut Wealth Gap,” Financial Times, Apr. 20, 2011.
[15] “India’s Boom Fails to Feed the Hungry,” Financial Times, Dec. 23, 2010.
[16] Economist, May 6, 2010.
[17] AFP, “Al-Qaeda Vows to Continue Parcel Bomb Attacks,” Nov. 20, 2010.
[18] C. J. Chivers, The Gun (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).
[19] Small Arms Survey (Geneva: Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, 2009).
[20] Steve Graham, “From Helmand to Merseyside: Unmanned Drones and the Militarization of UK Policing,” Open Democracy, Sept. 27, 2010; www.opendemocracy.net.
[21] Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, “Monitoring America” and “Top Secret America,” Washington Post, Dec. 20, 2010; projects.washingtonpost.com.
[22] Mark Easton, “Life in UK ‘Has Become Lonelier,’” BBC website, news.bbc.co.uk; see Mark Easton’s blog.
[23] John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (New York: Norton, 2008).
[24] “Iraq Warns of More Suicide Missions,” BBC website, Mar. 29, 2003.
[25] Dexter Filkins, The Forever War (New York: Vintage Books, 2008).
[26] BBC website, Apr. 5, 2003; news.bbc.co.uk.
[27] See, for example, Robert Pape, “Suicide Terrorism and Democracy,” Cato Institute, Policy Analysis No. 582, Nov. 1, 2006, and other such arguments by Pape.
[28] See, for instance, Assaf Moghadam, “Motives for Martyrdom: Al Qaida, Salafi Jihad, and the Spread of Suicide Attacks,” International Security 33:3, 2009.
[29] The PKK in Turkey fights for a Kurdish homeland.
[30] Max Hastings, Retribution: The Battle for Japan 1944–45 (New York: Vintage, 2009).
[31] See “Setback for U.S. Mortgage Sector,” Financial Times, April 30, 2010, quoting a study of the same date by the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
[32] “A Framework for Pro-environmental Behaviors,” Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs DEFRA), 2008; www.defra.gov.uk.
[33] Kees Keizer, Siegwart Lindenberg and Linda Steg, “The Spreading of Disorder,” Science Express, Nov. 20, 2008.
[34] Brooks Barnes, “Claudette Colvin: From Footnote to Fame in Civil Rights History,” New York Times, Nov. 26, 2009.
[35] David J. Garrow, quoted in Barnes, “Claudette Colvin: From Footnote to Fame in Civil Rights History.”
[36] The picture can be found online at www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/08/28/us/politics/20080828_OBAMA_PANO.html?scp=2&sq=obama%20denver%20speech&st=cse.
[37] OpenSecrets.org.
[38] Morning Edition, NPR, Feb. 9, 2009.
[39] Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).
[40] Horst Schlämmer, a mock politician played by a well-known German comedian.
[41] “Before Election, Not a Voter Was Stirring,” New York Times, Aug. 20, 2009.
[42] OpenSecrets.org.
[43] “The Road to Riches Is Called K Street,” Washington Post, June 22, 2005.
[44] “How BP Drafted Brussels’ Climate Legislation,” www.Spinwatch.org, Dec. 15, 2010.
[45] This trend is well documented in many democratic systems. See, for instance, Peter Mair and Ingried van Biezen, “Party Membership in Twenty European Democracies: 1980–2000,” Party Politics, Jan. 2001; Robert Putnam, Democracies in Flux: The Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); and most recently, Paul Whiteley, “Is the Party Over? The Decline of Party Activism and Membership across the Democratic World,” paper presented at University of Manchester conference, April 2009.
[46] The source is worldpublicopinion.org, whose survey “World Public Opinion on Democracy,” a twenty-country global public opinion poll on democracy and governance, found that in every nation polled, publics support the principles of democracy. At the same time, in nearly every nation, majorities are dissatisfied with how responsive their government is to the will of the people. For a more detailed analysis, see: www.worldpublicopinion.org=
[47] “Cuomo Accepts Millions from the Interests He Assails,” New York Times, June 23, 2010.
[48] Senator Fritz Hollings, interviewed on PBS NewsHour. [NEED DATE; NOT FOUND (about K Street/lobbyists]
[49] Center for Responsive Politics.
[50] See Nina Bernstein, “City of Immigrants Fills Jail Cells with Its Own,” New York Times, Dec. 27, 2008.
[51] BBC News. [NEED DATE?]
[52] One of the clients of The Gabriel Company, headed by Edward Gabriel, former U.S. Ambassador to Morocco is, of course, Morocco (U.S. Department of Justice, Foreign Agents Registration Act [FARA] listings).
[53] “American Lobbyists Work for Ivorian Leader,” New York Times, Dec. 23, 2010.
[54] “U.S. Approved Trade with Blacklisted Nations,” New York Times, Dec. 23, 2010.
[55] “While Warning about Fat, U.S. Pushes Cheese Sales,” New York Times, Nov. 6, 2010.
[56] Private Eye, Mar. 18, 2011.
[57] “Some Philanthropists Are No Longer Content to Work Quietly,” New York Times, Nov. 7, 2008.
[58] Urban Institute, National Center for Charitable Statistics.
[59] Grant Jordan and William Maloney, “The Rise of Protest Business in Britain,” in J. W. van Deth, ed., Private Groups and Public Life (New York: Routledge, 1997).
[60] “At National Review, a Threat to Its Reputation for Erudition,” New York Times, Nov. 17, 2008.
[61] “The Daily Me,” New York Times, Mar. 19, 2009.
[62] “The Big Sort,” Economist, June 19, 2008 .
[63] I was the strategy coordinator at the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) from 2003 to 2004.
[64] Human Rights Watch, www.hrw.org.
[65] Fareed Zakaria, “What America Has Lost: It’s Clear We Overreacted to 9/11,” Newsweek, Sept. 4, 2010.
[66] Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disasster (New York,: Viking, 2009).
[67] Letter from Professor Robert H. Wade Financial Times, Jan. 4, 2010.
[68] “From Behind Bars, Madoff Spins His Story,” Financial Times, Apr. 8, 2011.
[69] SEC, Office of Inspector-General Report, case number OIG-509; www.sec.gov.
[70] See, for instance, “Report Details How Madoff’s Web Ensnared S.E.C.,” New York Times, Sept. 3, 2009.
[71] “Chief Regulator Resigns after Strong Criticism,” Financial Times, May 28, 2010.
[72] online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/MarkopolosTestimony20090203.pdf.
[73] Joe Nocera, “Madoff Had Accomplices: His Victims,” New York Times, Mar. 13, 2009.
[74] The full name of the bill is the “Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009.”
[75] “Wall Street to Sidestep Volcker Rule,” Financial Times, Nov. 10, 2010.
[76] Letter from Professor Anat Admati of Stanford University and nineteen others, “Healthy Banking System Is the Goal, Not Profitable Banks,” Financial Times, Nov. 9, 2010.
[77] Clive Crook, “We Have Failed to Muffle the Banks,” Financial Times, Sept. 12, 2010.
[78] “Dimon Warns of Bank ‘Nail in Coffin,’” Financial Times, March 30, 2011.
[79] “The Bipartisanship Racket,” New York Times, Dec. 19, 2010.
[80] See Gary Wolf, “Why Craig’s List Is Such a Mess,” Wired, Aug. 24, 2009.
[81] Mark Pesce at the Personal Democracy Forum, New York City, 2008.
[82] The Business and Human Rights Council is one example.
[83] www.sourcemap.org.
[84] “From Behind Bars, Madoff Spins His Story,” Financial Times, Apr. 8, 2011.
[85] That NGO is International Crisis Group, whose local researcher, Ardian Arifaj, contributed to the preparation of this section; see the full Crisis Group report on the 2004 violence at their website, www.crisisgroup.org.
[86] Eight Serbs and eleven Albanians were killed in the violence; International Crisis Group.
[87] Kosovo became a state on Feb. 17, 2008. Independent Diplomat has advised various of Kosovo’s governments and the multiparty negotiating team in this process.
[88] Anthony Beevor, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006).
[89] www.notonourwatchproject.org.
[90] Edmund Sanders, “Is the Darfur Bloodshed Genocide? Opinions Differ,” Los Angeles Times, May 4, 2009.
[91] Rob Crilly has made this accusation in his book Saving Darfur, Everyone’s Favorite African War (London: Reportage Press, 2010); see also: news.bbc.co.uk.
[92] The laughably named lordsoftheblog.net.
[93] “Chinese Communist Party Opens Online Forum,” Financial Times, Sept. 14, 2010, including quotation from Russell Leigh Moses, a Beijing-based political analyst.
[94] “Athens on the Net,” New York Times, Sept. 13, 2009.
[95] www.seeclickfix.com.
[96] BBC News website. [ provide URL, date?]
[97] Alan Boswell, “Sudan’s Government Crushed Protests by Embracing Internet,” McClatchy Newspapers, Apr. 7, 2011.
[98] “China’s Censors Tackle and Trip over the Internet,” New York Times, Apr. 7, 2010.
[99] At the Personal Democracy Forum, New York City, June 2010.
[100] Jeffrey Rosen, “Google’s Gatekeepers,” New York Times, Nov. 30, 2008.
[101] “The Daily Me,” New York Times, Mar. 19, 2009.
[102] “U.S. Warns of Terror Groups’ Western Recruits,” Financial Times, Oct. 6, 2010.
[103] See www.americaspeaks.org: “Unified New Orleans Plan”; this site also has many other examples of deliberative democracy in action.
[104] Cass Sunstein, Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Sunstein is now an adviser to the Obama White House.
[105] “How to Get a Better Informed European Public,” Financial Times, June 3, 2009.
[106] A senior Labor government minister, Peter Hain, for instance, chose Homage as “the book that changed my life” in the New Statesman.
[107] George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), p. 104.
[108] Arendt coined the term, in describing Nazi Adolf Eichmann during his trial: “the banality of evil.”
[109] Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993).
[110] Benedict Carey, “Decades Later, Still Asking: Would I Pull That Switch,” New York Times, July 1, 2008.
[111] Dr. Jerry M. Burger, “Replicating Milgram: Would People Still Obey Today?” American Psychologist, Jan. 2009.
[112] Professor Joy Gordon, Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010).
[113] International Maritime Bureau.
[114] See, for instance, Alan Beattie, “Wealthy Countries Fail to Hit Aid Target,” Financial Times, Feb., 16, 2010.
[115] “Millennium Goals” (editorial), Financial Times, Sept. 21, 2010.
[116] Full title De la manière de négocier avec les souverains, de l’utilité des negotiations, du choix des ambassadeurs et des envoyez, et des qualitez necessaries pour réussir dans ces employs.
[117] Unpublished research by Independent Diplomat.
[118] By contrast, an excellent account of the review conference is online: Rebecca Johnson, “NPT: Challenging the Nuclear Powers’ Fiefdom,” June 15, 2010; www.opendemocracy.net.
[119] See Alexander Golts, “An Illusory New START,” Moscow Times, Mar. 30, 2010.
[120] EastWest Institute, “Re-framing Nuclear De-Alert: Decreasing the Operational Readiness of U.S. and Russian Arsenals,” 2009; iis-db.stanford.edu.
[121] Reported in ScienceDaily, Dec. 11, 2006, from the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, where twin papers on this topic by scientists from Rutgers University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the University of California at Los Angeles were announced.
[122] Ayman al-Zawahiri, The Exoneration: A Treatise Exonerating of the Nation of the Pen and the Sword of the Denigrating Charge of Being Irresolute and Weak (2008), referred to in Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, “Al Qaeda’s Nuclear Ambitions,” Foreign Policy Nov. 16, 2010.
[123] See Seymour Hersh, “The Online Threat: Should We Be Worried About Cyber War?” New Yorker, Nov. 1, 2010.
[124] See Niall Ferguson, “Complexity and Collapse: Empires on the Edge of Chaos,” Foreign Affairs, Mar./Apr. 2010.
[125] Professor Page teaches complexity theory at the University of Michigan and presents the invaluable primer on complexity theory, “Understanding Complexity” a DVD-based course from The Teaching Company.
[126] See www.commonsecurityclub.org.
[127] We’ve got time to help: wevegottimetohelp.blogspot.com/.
[128] en.wikipedia.org, citing M. K. Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1928), pp. 109–10
[129] en.wikipedia.org, citing journalist Webb Miller.
[130] Judith Brown, the eminent historian of Gandhi, reaches a more nuanced view of the Salt Satyagraha, and indeed Gandhi’s movement of civil resistance, in her excellent essay “Gandhi and Civil Resistance in India, 1917–47,” in Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash, eds., Civil Resistance and Power Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). The essay is well worth reading for those interested in judgments of the effectiveness of Gandhi’s methods.
[131] Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare (New York: Penguin Books, 1961).
[132] en.wikipedia.org, citing Alain Gresh, “The Dream of Better World Is Back,” Le monde diplomatique, May 8, 2009.
[133] The POLISARIO Front, the political representatives of the Sahrawi people, is a client of Independent Diplomat.
[134] Nelson Santos, East Timor’s permanent representative to the United Nations, in conversation with the author.
[135] “Group of Bed-Stuy Men, We Make Us Better, Escorts Pedestrians in Wake of Robberies,” New York Daily News, Nov. 30, 2010.
[136] Guy Dinmore, “Naples Fights to Reclaim the Mafia Badlands,” Financial Times, Sept. 27, 2010.
[137] Raghuram G. Rajan, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010).
[138] Transcript and recording available at www.johnlewispartnership.co.uk.
[139] “Case Study: How to Cope with a Slump in Demand,” Financial Times, Dec. 23, 2010.
[140] See the review of Kotlikoff’s book: Martin Sandbu, “A Less Wonderful Life for Bankers” Financial Times, Mar. 22, 2010.
[141] See Elinor Ostrom’s excellent “meta-research” article “A Behavioral Approach to the Rational Choice Theory of Collective Action: Presidential Address, American Political Science Association, 1997,” American Political Science Review 92(1): 1–22.
[142] The Heritage Foundation published an interesting but not comprehensive analysis of principles to observe in health care cooperatives: Edmund Haislmaier , Dennis Smith and Nina Owcharenko, “Healthcare Cooperatives, Doing It the Right Way” June 18, 2009, available at www.heritage.org.
[143] ForestEthics.org.
[144] www.cdproject.net.
[145] “Banks Grow Wary of Environmental Risks,” New York Times, Aug. 30, 2010.
[146] See, for instance, the Business and Human Rights Resource Center at www.business-humanrights.org, or www.climatecounts.org.
[147] This is a paraphrasing of what Bernard-Henri Lévy said during a discussion at the New York Public Library on Sept. 16, 2008. It’s possible that I recorded this statement incorrectly, in which case my apologies to the reader and “BHL.”
[148] If in doubt about this question, please consult my testimony to the Butler inquiry in 2004, and to the Chilcot inquiry in 2010, both available at relevant websites, or upon request.
[149] Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty (New York: Random House, 2009).
[150] Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the 21st Century,” 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture, in Scandinavian Political Studies 30:2, 2007.
[151] You will find further discussion of these options on my personal website, www.carneross.com, and in my opinion article “Let’s Boycott, Isolate and Sabotage Gaddafi,” Financial Times, Mar. 10, 2011.
[152] See “Dutch Bankers’ Bonuses Axed by People Power,” Observer, Mar. 27, 2011.
[153] See “Helping Women Fight Back Against Street Harassment, Seconds After It Occurs,” New York Times, Nov. 8, 2010.
[154] See this invaluable article on Stuxnet: Michael Joseph Gross, “A Declaration of Cyber-War,” Vanity Fair, Apr. 2011.
[155] Quotations from Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, are from the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation (New York: Macmillan, 1943).
[156] Gillian Tett, Fool’s Gold: The Inside Story of J. P. Morgan and How Wall St. Greed Corrupted Its Bold Dream and Created a Financial Catastrophe (New York: Free Press, 2009).
[157] “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats, 1921.
[158] A crucial factor behind the crisis wrought by the selling of “credit default options (or swaps)” in the 2008 financial crisis was that these products, initially designed to spread risk, in actual practice obscured it, because purchasers of the CDOs did not properly understand the risk they comprised.
[159] The head of the British armed services, Sir David Richards, told the BBC in November 2010 that Al Qaeda could only be “contained” not defeated, saying that you cannot defeat “an idea.” BBC website, “West Cannot Defeat Al Qaeda, Says U.K. Forces Chief,” Nov. 14, 2010.
[160] The so-called Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
[161] The letter set out the legal justification—self-defense—under Article 51 of the UN Charter for the United Kingdom’s participation in the allied invasion.
[162] As an official working during the first Gulf War with Iraq in 1991, I had as one of my duties to count Saddam’s tanks and soldiers in such a way as to affirm the claim, not strictly true but made by a politician and therefore requiring some kind of validation, that Iraq had “the third largest army in the world.” This claim could only be “proven” if all of the reserve forces of the Iraqi army were included in the count, but were ignored in counting the armies of other competitors for the third place slot (India, the United States, Russia).
[163] In this book, itself influential, Malcolm Gladwell suggests that a few highly connected people influence the choices of everyone else, what he calls the “Law of the Few.” Another book—The Influentials—similarly claims that “one American in 10 tells the other 9 how to vote, where to eat, and what to buy.”
[164] Though there is not the space here to explore this phenomenon fully, this sorting—or to put it more bluntly, segregation—by political views, which also occurs according to income, religion and race, is a characteristic of complex systems. Economist Thomas Schelling won the Nobel prize in economics for explaining how the choice made by a few, say, Democrats, to live in a particular location can, over time, transform or “tip” a hitherto mixed neighborhood into one that is uniformly of one political persuasion. Even if individuals are tolerant at the micro level, over time a neighborhood will become segregated, a phenomenon called “micro level tolerance; macro level segregation.”
[165] The deaths were later found to have been accidental.
[166] The New York Times reported that “Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa., posted a photo on her MySpace page that showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption ‘Drunken Pirate.’ After discovering the page, her supervisor at the high school told her the photo was ‘unprofessional,’ and the dean of Millersville University School of Education, where Snyder was enrolled, said she was promoting drinking in virtual view of her underage students. As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree.” Jeffrey Rosen, “The Web Means the End of Forgetting,” New York Times, July 19, 2010.
[167] An international embargo was in theory supposed to stop arms supplies to both sides, but its enthusiastic enforcement by Britain, France and others had the principal effect of denying arms to the Republicans. Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, meanwhile, breached the embargo to support the Francoists with impunity. A similar situation arose during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s when a UN arms embargo, proposed and enforced by the UK, U.S. and others, failed to diminish the military effectiveness of the genocidal armies of the Bosnian Serbs (mainly because they already enjoyed the considerable military resources of the former Yugoslav army). The UN embargo, however, considerably hindered the defenses of their victims, the Bosnian Muslims and Croats. The effect of that embargo therefore, as with Spain in the 1930s, was to deliver a military advantage to the fascist aggressor. In the 1930s, this was indeed the intent.
[168] In its first ten years of operation, the court has failed to secure any convictions.
[169] In American prisons, the proliferation of smart phones has allowed criminals to continue to organize drug trafficking and gang activity outside even while incarcerated; Facebook, Twitter and e-mail listservees were used to coordinate recent protests across several prisons (New York Times, “Outlawed, Cellphones Are Thriving in Prisons,” Jan. 2, 2011).
[170] The so-called digital divide.
[171] Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, or Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification.
[172] In former colonies that are now members of the British Commonwealth, British representations are not known as embassies but as High Commissions.
[173] As the UK’s Middle East and Iraq “expert” at the UN from 1998 to 2002, I was required to read a thick folder of intelligence every day on Iraq, its WMD and efforts to rearm. There was not a single report suggesting a connection between the Saddam regime and Al Qaeda, nor would such a connection be plausible given the radically different natures of these entities—one secular and Ba’athist, the other fundamentalist and Islamist. The head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (often known as MI6) also confirmed the absence of connection.
[174] These arguments are more fully discussed in my earlier book Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite.
[175] According to economist Raghuram Rajan’s calculations, for every dollar of growth in income between 1976 and 2007, 58 cents went to the top 1 percent of households. The other 99 percent of American families had to scrap over the 42 cents of loose change. The result was a country as unequal as it had been just before the Wall Street crash of 1929—and with much the same results. The Guardian, “What the £35,000 Cocktail Taught Us,” August 3, 2010.
[176] www.thelifeyoucansave.com.
[177] The new sanctions policy altered controls on exports to Iraq so that everything was permitted except goods that appeared on a “control list” of items that might be used for weapons manufacture. Previously, nothing could be exported except goods which were expressly permitted, case-by-case, by the UN sanctions committee (with some exceptions).
[178] I also recommend Mark Kurlansky’s Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Modern Library, 2009).
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