Ron Mwangaguhunga: August 2009 Archives

Giraffe Manor in Kenya is the sort of elegant African hotel where a giraffe just may join you for breakfast. Surrounded by 140 acres of indigenous forest just outside Kenya's capital, the manor also hosts The Giraffe Centre. At the Centre, Kenyan school children can learn about ecology and conservation in a hands-on environment. All procedes go to Kenyan environmental projects.

CNN's "Inside Africa," the best televised half-hour on Africa, ran a story on this resort outside of Nairobi. In it an adorable park ranger quixotically explains why it took a while to get over his irrational fear of giraffes. Also, CNN International producer Jessica Ellis -- an animal lover from the looks of her Flickr photostream -- gets a smooch from the sand papery tongue of the hotel's lovable namesake.

The Obama administration -- mostly because of The Great Recession -- is a profoundly Keynsian one. And, as we have written on this blog, Ayn Rand -- and her disciple, former Fed chief Alan Greenspan -- are on the outs. But what about philosopher Adam Smith? He is getting a re-reading and it is about time. Long considered the avatar of laissez-fair capitalism, the moral underpinnings of his philosophy -- long overlooked -- are gaining attention from high places. In a telling moment on Fareed Zakaria's GPS this week, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, ironically, lectured the CNN host on the works of Adam Smith, saying:

If you are familiar with the classical works of Adam Smith, you know that there are two famous works of his. One is 'The Wealth of Nations.' The other is the book on the morality and ethics. And 'The Wealth of Nations' deals more with the invisible hand, that is, there are the market forces. And the other book deals with social equity and justice. And in the other book he wrote, he stressed the importance of playing the regulatory role of the government to fairly distribute the wealth among the people.

If in a country most of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few, then this country can hardly witness harmony and stability.

"Harmony," granted is an organic part of Chinese thinking (as, say, "liberty" is a part of the American political vernacular). Still, Jiabao has a point despite his own country's profound deficits of freedom (Averted Gaze). This Sunday's New York Times Book Review also revisited Smith, noting, ".. as the historian Emma Rothschild has noted, 'The Wealth of Nations' uses the phrase 'invisible hand' precisely once. In the 1,231-page Bantam edition, it appears on Page 572." Only once! It is interesting that the "invisible hand" has, over the years, become an almost inarguable Archimedian point as to how human beings make economic decisions. Did that "invisible hand" simply vanish the Scottish author's other long-forgotten book, Theory of Moral Sentiments?

[Image: Artsentrepeneurship]

Toure's much buzzed about article for New York magazine's summer issue called the African-American community on Martha's Vineyard -- where the President is presently vacationing -- "self segregating." On NPR's Tell Me More, Jill Nelson, the author of "Finding Martha's Vineyard: African Americans at Home on an Island," refuted that claim, arguing that the cultural critic "did not visit the island" for the piece, and, further, that he was "career building." Martha's Vineyard -- the setting, we cannot fail to note, of 1984's "The Inkwell" -- has strong African-American loyalists. The aforementioned Nelson, a journalist and author, who has been a resident of that swishy island for nearly a half-century writes of the Vineyard:

Yet as much as we are united by class and race, neither is absolute. These obvious identifiers are trumped by the seductions of the physical and psychic separation of Martha's Vineyard from the rest of the world. In the plaza in front of the Oak Bluffs post office are two mailboxes. For years one was labeled 'On Island'; the other, 'America.' The fact that we are on an island, detached from the mainland, isolated con­sciously or not, necessitates a level of mental detachment from many of the demands of the so-called real world. We may come here by choice, but it is also true that we are trapped by geography. On Martha's Vineyard there is no simply getting in your car or on a plane and leaving. Once here, we are all captives, dependent on the ferry schedule, the weather, and the season. It is these factors that define our comings and goings. Voluntarily captive, we are forced to figure out ways to coexist, live and let live, to cre­ate a reasonably civil society that encompasses all who are here.

Other prominent African-American residents include the President's drinking buddy Skip Gates; Spike Lee; arguably America's first African-American President, Bill Clinton; Harvard law professor, Charles Ogletree, and, according to The Telegraph, "Oprah has been seen strolling around town."

[Image: CBSNews]

The release of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds is drawing intense international scrutiny. Compassionate release is normally granted only if a prisoner has less than three months to live. Al-Megrahi, who is dying from advanced prostate cancer, met those standards; but the nature of his crime gives even the most compassionate of observers pause. The 57-year-old Libyan national, convicted and sentenced in 2001, was serving out a 27-year prison term in Scotland for his role in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie. Two hundred seventy people died in that attack, most of them American, many of them college students. Yesterday, Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill announced the Libyan's release from jail so that he could end his life in his home country.

The victims' relatives do not agree with this decision. Susan Cohen of Cape May Court House, N.J. lost her only child, Theodora, who was 20. Cohen, speaking from her home in New Jersey, told the Press Association, "Any letting out of Megrahi would be a disgrace. It makes me sick, and if there is a compassionate release then I think that is vile." President Obama also disagrees, calling the release of the Lockerbie bomber ''a mistake." The Wall Street Journal goes further, calling it "a criminal justice."

Curiously, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger also released a terminally ill convict, who had been in jail since 1983. There is something to be said about the idea that justice is not based merely on vengeance, and that the introduction of a terminal condition into the equation might make it such that continued incarceration is no longer in the interest of justice. Still, al-Megrahi was greeted as a hero as his plane touched down in Libya. The Obama administration is pressing that he be kept under house arrest, probably to stop al-Megrahi from doing any potentially embarrassing interviews.

Is compassionate release just?

[Image: WSJ]

Those raucous town halls -- even in states the President carried -- is indicative of .. something. But what?

It is no secret in American politics that President Obama has a blind side with the bubba vote. For whatever reason -- race, Harvard, personality clash -- Barack Obama is disadvantaged among white working class voters. His cerebral approach is not an organic fit with Bubba. For that reason, and his governmental experience, the President chose Joe Biden, then the least-wealthy man in the United States Senate, as his running mate.

Hillary Clinton's campaign exposed Obama's weakness in places like Appalachia and the rust belt. Her argument at the time was how could then-Senator Obama win in 2008 if he couldn't carry Democrat strongholds suffused with hard working, suds drinking, unionized Americans. Barack Obama never had a problem with minorities or "Starbucks Democrats" -- college students and elites. While some white working class voters -- like those in Pennsylvania -- ultimately saw their economic self-interest and came out for Obama over McCain last November, a vocal percentage have subsequently become teabaggers and town hollerers. If only a civil, well-choreographed beer summit could solve that problem.

Enter: Bill Clinton, formerly the biggest cat in the jungle. The 42nd President's credentials with white working class voters are impeccable. After his triumphant return with Current TV journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling, Bill appears poised for prime time, ready for another difficult assignment. Irrelevance does not suit William Jefferson Clinton, who congenitally cannot, cannot go quietly into the night. So why not make use of him domestically, even as his wife serves at the pleasure of the President on the international stage? Tina Brown recently wrote on TheDailyBeast:

If Obama has lost his customary ability to synthesize, perhaps he should turn for help to that great ol' explainer William Jefferson Clinton. This administration's determination not to make the last Democrat's mistakes on health care has been overlearned by Obama and his advisers. Because the received wisdom about Hillarycare is that it was killed by the unilateral arrogance with which it was handed down to Congress, Obama has gone too far in letting warring committees turn his key campaign promise into roadkill.

Surely it's the former president who got it wrong once who has spent the most time and lost the most sleep thinking over how he would do it again. More important, wouldn't Bubba do a better job than the professorial Obama at sweet-talking, arm wrestling, hugging, and head locking such obstructive Blue Dogs as Arkansas Rep. Mike Ross, who used to run a family drugstore just like the one Bill remembers from his years growing up in Hot Springs? Or North Carolina Rep. Heath Shuler, who's one of that class of moderate Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer promised not to push around too much when Rahm persuaded them to run for a seat in the House? Obama needs to get himself dirty, and be seen to get dirty.

Clearly, Barack Obama will have to make sure he maintains the independent character of his presidency. Lines would have to be drawn as to who is the President and who is in a strictly advisory role. But Clinton's stature as a former president -- and possible future Secretary General of the United Nations -- makes him politically useful to the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Clinton might even go a long way in narrowing the distance between the perception of Obama as overly cerebral and true working class grit. Bill Clinton can be more than just a special envoy to Haiti to this administration. Could he help President Obama connect -- really connect on a visceral level -- with the people of West Virginia, a state he lost in 2008, but who's self-interest on the health care issue is consonant with those of the White House? Why not?

[Image: Cinie]

A recent poll showed that 38 percent of Americans would be willing to do without their iPod if it meant helping the environment. That number, unfortunately, is pretty low considering the stakes. Former Presidential candidate Stephen Colbert publicly sacrificed his old iPod for the endangered Virginia fringed mountain snail (polygyriscus virginianus). Is this just an effort to curry favor with the people of Virginia for 2012 or a truly humanitarian sacrifice?

Billionaire George Soros came up with a novel way to help 850,000 low-income children in New York State receive federal monies that were slipping away as a result of the Great Recession. His $35 million gift to the state of New York will be matched on a 4-to1 basis as a way to leverage federal stimulus money to assist low-income children in the state. Because of the current budget crisis the state would otherwise not have been able to have made the matching funds available. George Soros' philanthropy made the difference; his $35 million is worth $170 million to the state's schoolchildren.

The idea came to Soros as a kind of karmic give back for the help he received to get through his university studies half a century ago. Soros was the recipient of aid when he was a student at the London School of Economics in the early '50s. He worked as a waiter at nights. When his tutor found out, she submitted his name as someone worthy to the Quakers, and he subsequently received a check for 40 pounds. "They just sent me 40 pounds without any strings attached. I thought that was the way to do it, without strings attached," Soros told The New York Times. "And it touched me, I must say; I felt then that this is a very nice way to help people," Soros told NPR. "And so it gives me personal satisfaction to be able to do it on a much larger scale."

[Image: AMEINFO]

Earlier this year, Paper magazine's co-founder Kim Hastreiter attended a White House briefing and symposium on cultural activism. The Obama administration made an outreach to over 60 influential artists and cultural activists left out in the cold during the last eight years. But the speakers -- incoming political deputies with law degrees -- did not particularly impress our favorite gatekeeper as taking artists and the artistic process seriously. Artists, unfortunately, are not thought of as strategic assets in our country's national security portfolio. Artists at the White House are instruments of soft power -- charming cultural diversions, soundtracks and background music to the American Presidency, like those famous Pablo Casals concerts at Camelot. Kim Hastreiter argues, however, that artists are "true-blue American workers who deserve to be treated with the same respect as any other American worker." Further, artists -- by virtue of the fact that their craft is intuitive -- can contribute to the struggle against terrorism. From Papermag:

I kept thinking about how after September 11th, every artist I knew agreed that the horror we had witnessed was actually a major piece of performance art that could not possibly have been conceived by a lawyer or a politician, but more likely by a jihadist with a wild imagination and an artist's mind. Even our government's official "9-11 Commission" summarized the attacks as a failure of imagination, and reportedly included a section on "Institutionalizing Imagination,: which called for making imagination a skill in the service of the nation. What many people also don't realize is that within two weeks of the attacks, the Department of Defense actually brought together a large group of American artists and progressive thinkers (including someone I know) to consult in a series of top-secret meetings, at which they were asked to imagine how this (super-creative) enemy of ours might attack us next.

Following our lunch break, we were asked to gather into small groups and ideate about what we had just heard and how art could integrate with and help promote the Obama agenda. Five of us -- myself, Aaron, Duffy, Anne Pasternak (Creative Time), Jonathan Wells (Flux/RESFEST) and Liz Manne (Work in Progress) -- decided to develop the idea of establishing a Department of Alternative Thinking: a think-tank and brain trust made up of the most creative minds in the country, including artists, inventors and visionaries. The DoAT would formally integrate creative brain consultation (performed gratis as a national service) as a required aspect into every detail of governmental decision-making, whether about arts education, the economy, health care, energy and environmental policy, national security, the country's infrastructure or international policy.

The asymmetrical warfare practiced by terrorists is designed to confound traditional strategic planning. Their approach relies heavily on secrecy, stealth and speed, and the avoidance of direct combat (think: cyberwar). Can the unconventional thought-processes of the creative class anticipate and strategically counter threats from fourth generation tactics? It is certainly worth a try, especially considering that Kim's proposal won't cost the taxpayer. Linear and technology-centric thinking did not anticipate the September 11th attacks. Radical groups and weak state actors, for lack of a better phrase, think different. Perhaps the American government should think closely about utilizing the underused natural resource that is its own creatives.

[Image by Duffy Culligan: Papermag]

CNN's "Inside Africa" -- hands down the best half-hour round up of that continent's news -- this week ran a story on Nelson Mandela using his singular soft power to rally celebrities around a good cause. Alfre Woodard, Alan Rickman, Whoopi Goldberg, Charlize Theron, Hugh Jackman, Matt Damon, Helen Mirren, Don Cheadle and many others lent their voices to his audiobook of African folktales. Proceedes from the project go to Artists for a New South Africa, a nonprofit dedicated to helping children of South Africa orphaned and impacted by AIDS/HIV as well as the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund. Mandela, by the way, celebrated his 90th birthday on July 9.

Check out the website for "Mandela's Favorite Folktales."

Is "The Great Recession" over? Last week the president appeared to be saying that this might be the beginning of the end. The GDP numbers also seem to say as much. Even the dark NYU professor Nouriel "Dr. Doom" Roubini -- who predicted this recession -- and who is usually gloomy when talking about the American economy, seems to see "green chutes." On Fareed Zakaria's GPS panel on the recession, Roubini, billionaire NY Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman and Harvard financial historian Niall Ferguson.