Kardashian Barbie
January 13, 2012
Via TribLive
Putin and the Uses of History
January 13, 2012
AT LAST fall’s Valdai Discussion Club, the annual Moscow session where Russian leaders meet with Western journalists and academics, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin made clear he would issue no apologies for his recent maneuver to reclaim the Russian presidency from his protégé, Dmitri Medvedev, and dominate his country’s politics for perhaps the next dozen years. Responding to one question, he declared, “I do not need to prove anything to anyone.”
Such defiance reflects two central elements of the Putin persona: his firm conviction that his personal destiny is intertwined with that of his country; and his resolve to fashion the Russian destiny through slow, methodical decision making over a long period of time. In past public appearances, Putin has made repeated references to one of his Russian heroes, Pyotr Stolypin, the reformist prime minister under the last czar, Nicholas II, who also favored measured, evolutionary change; and to his American model, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who brushed aside the unwritten two-term presidential limit that had guided all U.S. executive leaders up to his time. At one point at the recent Valdai conference, Putin was asked directly about these references to Stolypin and Roosevelt, both of whom, noted the questioner, “did not survive to see their projects through.”
Putin did not miss a beat. “Well,” he interjected, to a smattering of nervous laughter, “don’t go planning my funeral just yet.” Clearly, he does not conceive of the next phase of Russia’s history moving forward without him.
Putin is back, or almost assuredly will be back, as Russian president in 2012. Notwithstanding all his time as Russian president or as the stealthy power behind the presidency, Putin remains a shadowy and inaccessible figure. This is not by accident, given that he has invested extraordinary efforts into hiding his true identity. There are large discrepancies in his official narrative—not surprising, perhaps, for a former KGB case officer adept at masking his real self as well as, sometimes, his very existence. His KGB role, including his East German service in Dresden, remains a mystery. Little is known even of his activities as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. So little, in fact, that to our knowledge there may be only one published photo of the man from this important period of his official career. This is a striking contrast to his more recent penchant for projecting his political persona widely through photographs.
This vague biography prior to Putin’s August 1996 arrival in Moscow contributed to another aspect of his career—a widespread tendency on the part of others to underestimate him. Seemingly lacking a firm identity or ideology, Putin was seen as a “quiet Chekist” who could easily “disappear in a crowd of two,” as Russia expert Pavel Baev once put it. He seemed to have a knack for getting others to construct their own versions of what they wanted him to be and did not seem overly concerned about the result. When Putin first joined the Russian government, former acquaintances widely dismissed him as a second-rate figure. He was “a mediocrity,” as a senior official from Helsinki put it. He was also called a puppet of the “Yeltsin family” (the entourage around former Russian president Boris Yeltsin), a tool of the security services (siloviki) or simply a “KGB thug” motivated by lust for money.
None of this was accurate. Putin turned out to be much more important—and more complex—than almost anyone perceived a dozen years ago. As president and premier, he is one of the longest serving leaders in postczarist Russian history. As the 2012 Russian presidential election approaches, Putin has put himself forward as a critical protagonist in Russia’s historical narrative. We propose here to offer a portrait of the man from official biographical accounts, his numerous interviews and speeches, our personal interactions with individuals who have known and worked with him, and our participation in the annual Valdai sessions. These offer an image of Putin as a student of Russian history who is moving increasingly into the dangerous territory of writer, manufacturer and manipulator of history.
Indeed, any effort to understand Vladimir Putin must begin with the man of history. For Putin, the interpretation and reinterpretation of history is a crucial matter. History was his favorite subject in school, and he remains an avid reader today. He appreciates the power of “useful history,” the application of history as a policy tool, as a social and political organizing force that can help shape group identities and foster coalitions. At the September 2010 Valdai Club conference, Russian deputy prime minister Igor Shuvalov told the group that Putin and his team “are good students of Russian history. We’ve studied it and learned lessons from it.” In late October 2011, in a Reutersinterview, Putin’s press secretary Dmitri Peskov stressed that “Putin reads all the time, mostly about the history of Russia. He reads memoirs, the memoirs of Russian historical state figures.” For Putin, history is both personal and personalized—focused on individuals and their actions rather than on political, social and economic forces.
During a September 2005 Valdai Club lunch with Putin in the Kremlin, participants noted the prominent placement of busts and pictures of the great czarist-era reformers in his public-private area. In 2008, the Kremlin and the Russian government conducted a national contest in which Russian citizens chose “the most important persons in Russian history.” The contest unfolded according to an elimination-round format in which each round’s highest vote getters would be pitted against one another in subsequent rounds. The top designee turned out to be Alexander Nevsky, thirteenth-century grand prince of Vladimir and one of the most significant early Russian rulers, declared a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church. Number two was Stolypin, who resigned after a series of political setbacks and was subsequently assassinated. As a number of prominent Russian commentators pointed out at the time of the contest, it was fixed. Independent polls showed that few Russians considered these two figures even in the top twenty-five. The regime manufactured their popularity for its own purposes. But it was a hard sell. Stolypin had been denigrated in the Soviet era and depicted as a brutal repressor of the people. Yet Stolypin has since become Putin’s role model of choice, a historical figure who justifies both Putin’s policies as prime minister and his program for the further development of Russia.
Putin, it seems, has embraced Pyotr Stolypin as the model for his current premiership and putative future presidency because Stolypin tried to accomplish the political, economic and social transformation of Russia through nonrevolutionary means. Putin’s favorite quote these days is, “We do not need great upheavals. We need a great Russia,” a paraphrase of Stolypin’s famous rebuke to his fellow Duma deputies in 1907: “You, gentlemen, are in need of great upheavals; we are in need of Great Russia.” At the 2011 Valdai meetings, as in previous sessions, Putin made frequent references to the importance of gradual, evolutionary change.
But there are risks in this effort to manufacture and manipulate history for purposes of the present. History can be stubborn in its details. Stolypin, for example, did not succeed in transforming Russia through steady, well-planned actions after Russia was humiliated in the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War and shaken by revolutionary turmoil. He repeatedly dissolved the Russian parliament after clashing with its more radical members, and Czar Nicholas II famously grew weary of the constitutional monarchy and tentative parliamentary democracy that Stolypin tried to lead. Putin and Stolypin have many more differences than similarities, and it would be rash to suggest that Putin is predestined to share Stolypin’s fate, politically or personally. But in a general sense, Putin does face the same dilemma as Stolypin: before he can shape the future and make it into history as he envisions it, he has to deal with the political exigencies of the present. The past teaches us that the forces and pressures of politics sometimes go their own way despite carefully calibrated efforts to channel them. The disappointing results for Putin’s United Russia party in the recent parliamentary elections are a reminder of that lesson. Putin expected voters to elect a thoroughly supportive parliament for his upcoming presidency. The newly elected Duma will not be as docile as he had planned. The challenge in scripting history is getting the real-world actors to understand and play their parts. Putin knows and plays his role. His people seem less willing to play theirs…
Making It in America Today
January 13, 2012
In the past decade, the flow of goods emerging from U.S. factories has risen by about a third. Factory employment has fallen by roughly the same fraction. The story of Standard Motor Products, a 92-year-old, family-run manufacturer based in Queens, sheds light on both phenomena. It’s a story of hustle, ingenuity, competitive success, and promise for America’s economy. It also illuminates why the jobs crisis will be so difficult to solve.
I FIRST MET MADELYN “Maddie” Parlier in the “clean room” of Standard Motor Products’ fuel-injector assembly line in Greenville, South Carolina. Like everyone else, she was wearing a blue lab coat and a hairnet. She’s so small that she seemed swallowed up by all the protective gear.
Tony Scalzitti, the plant manager, was giving me the grand tour, explaining how bits of metal move through a series of machines to become precision fuel injectors. Maddie, hunched forward and moving quickly from one machine to another, almost bumped into us, then shifted left and darted away. Tony, in passing, said, “She’s new. She’s one of our most promising Level 1s.”
Later, I sat down with Maddie in a quiet factory office where nobody needs to wear protective gear. Without the hairnet and lab coat, she is a pretty, intense woman, 22 years old, with bright blue eyes that seemed to bore into me as she talked, as fast as she could, about her life. She told me how much she likes her job, because she hates to sit still and there’s always something going on in the factory. She enjoys learning, she said, and she’s learned how to run a lot of the different machines. At one point, she looked around the office and said she’d really like to work there one day, helping to design parts rather than stamping them out. She said she’s noticed that robotic arms and other machines seem to keep replacing people on the factory floor, and she’s worried that this could happen to her. She told me she wants to go back to school—as her parents and grandparents keep telling her to do—but she is a single mother, and she can’t leave her two kids alone at night while she takes classes.
I had come to Greenville to better understand what, exactly, is happening to manufacturing in the United States, and what the future holds for people like Maddie—people who still make physical things for a living and, more broadly, people (as many as 40 million adults in the U.S.) who lack higher education, but are striving for a middle-class life. We do still make things here, even though many people don’t believe me when I tell them that. Depending on which stats you believe, the United States is either the No. 1 or No. 2 manufacturer in the world (China may have surpassed us in the past year or two). Whatever the country’s current rank, its manufacturing output continues to grow strongly; in the past decade alone, output from American factories, adjusted for inflation, has risen by a third.
Yet the success of American manufacturers has come at a cost. Factories have replaced millions of workers with machines. Even if you know the rough outline of this story, looking at the Bureau of Labor Statistics data is still shocking. A historical chart of U.S. manufacturing employment shows steady growth from the end of the Depression until the early 1980s, when the number of jobs drops a little. Then things stay largely flat until about 1999. After that, the numbers simply collapse. In the 10 years ending in 2009, factories shed workers so fast that they erased almost all the gains of the previous 70 years; roughly one out of every three manufacturing jobs—about 6 million in total—disappeared. About as many people work in manufacturing now as did at the end of the Depression, even though the American population is more than twice as large today.
I came here to find answers to questions that arise from the data. How, exactly, have some American manufacturers continued to survive, and even thrive, as global competition has intensified? What, if anything, should be done to halt the collapse of manufacturing employment? And what does the disappearance of factory work mean for the rest of us?
Across America, many factory floors look radically different than they did 20 years ago: far fewer people, far more high-tech machines, and entirely different demands on the workers who remain. The still-unfolding story of manufacturing’s transformation is, in many respects, that of our economic age. It’s a story with much good news for the nation as a whole. But it’s also one that is decidedly less inclusive than the story of the 20th century, with a less certain role for people like Maddie Parlier, who struggle or are unlucky early in life.
The Life and Times of Maddie Parlier
The Greenville Standard Motor Products plant sits just off I-85, about 100 miles southwest of Charlotte, North Carolina. It’s a sprawling beige one-story building, surrounded by a huge tended lawn. Nearby are dozens of other similarly boxy factory buildings. Neighbors include a big Michelin tire plant, a nutrition-products factory, and, down the road, BMW’s only car plant on American soil. Greenville is at the center of the 20-year-old manufacturing boom that’s still taking place throughout the “New South.” Nearby, I visited a Japanese-owned fiber-optic-material manufacturer, and a company that makes specialized metal parts for intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Standard makes and distributes replacement auto parts, known in the industry as “aftermarket” parts. Companies like Standard directly compete with Chinese firms for shelf space in auto-parts retail stores. This competition has intensified the pressure on all parts makers—American, Chinese, European. And of course it means that Maddie is, effectively, competing directly with workers in China who are willing to do similar work for much less money.
When Maddie says something important, something she wants you to really hear, she repeats it. She’ll say it one time in a flat, matter-of-fact voice, and then again with a lot of upstate South Carolina twang.
“I’m a redneck,” she’ll say. “I’m a reeeeeedneck.”
“I’m smart,” she told me the first time we met. “There’s no other way to say it. I am smaaaart. I am.”
Maddie flips back and forth between being a stereotypical redneck and being awfully smart. She will say, openly, that she doesn’t know all that much about the world outside of Easley, South Carolina, where she’s spent her whole life. Since her childhood, she’s seen Easley transform from a quiet country town to a busy suburb of Greenville. (It’s now a largely charmless place, thick with chain restaurants and shopping centers.) Maddie was the third child born to her young mother, Heather. Her father left when Maddie was young, never visited again, and died after he drove drunk into a car carrying a family of four, killing all of them as well.
Until her senior year of high school, Maddie seemed to be headed for the American dream—a college degree and a job with a middle-class wage. She got good grades, and never drank or did drugs or hung out with the bad kids. For the most part, she didn’t hang out with anybody outside her family; she went to school, went home, went to church on Sundays. When she was 17, she met a boy who told her she should make friends with other kids at school. He had an easy way with people and he would take Maddie to Applebee’s and cookouts and other places where the cool kids hung out. He taught her how to fit in, and he told her she was pretty…
The Global War Against Baby Girls
January 13, 2012
Over the past three decades the world has come to witness an ominous and entirely new form of gender discrimination: sex-selective feticide, implemented through the practice of surgical abortion with the assistance of information gained through prenatal gender determination technology. All around the world, the victims of this new practice are overwhelmingly female — in fact, almost universally female. The practice has become so ruthlessly routine in many contemporary societies that it has impacted their very population structures, warping the balance between male and female births and consequently skewing the sex ratios for the rising generation toward a biologically unnatural excess of males. This still-growing international predilection for sex-selective abortion is by now evident in the demographic contours of dozens of countries around the globe — and it is sufficiently severe that it has come to alter the overall sex ratio at birth of the entire planet, resulting in millions upon millions of new “missing baby girls” each year. In terms of its sheer toll in human numbers, sex-selective abortion has assumed a scale tantamount to a global war against baby girls.
Initial Signal in China
A regular and quite predictable relationship between total numbers of male and female births is a fixed biological characteristic for human populations, as it is for other species of mammals. The discovery of the consistency, across time and space, of the sex ratio at birth (SRB) for human beings was one of the very earliest findings of the modern discipline of demography. (One of the founders of the field, the German priest and statistician Johann Peter Süssmilch, posited in 1741 that “the Creator’s reasons for ensuring four to five percent more boys than girls are born lie in the fact that it compensates for the higher male losses due to the recklessness of boys, to exhaustion, to dangerous occupations, to war, to seafaring and immigration, thus maintaining the balance between the two sexes so that everyone can find a spouse at the appropriate time for marriage.”)
Medical and demographic research subsequently identified some differences in SRB that correspond with ethnicity, birth order, parental age, urbanization, environmental conditions, and other factors. But such differences were always quite small; until the 1980s, the SRB for large human populations tended to fall within a narrow range, usually around 103 to 106 newborn boys for every 100 newborn girls and typically centering no higher than 105. Until the 1980s, exceptions to this generality were mainly registered in small populations, and attributable to chance.
The modern phenomenon of biologically unnatural increase in the sex ratio at birth was first noticed in the 1980s for China, the world’s most populous country. In 1979, China promulgated its “One Child Policy,” a compulsory and at times coercive population-control program that continues to be enforced to this day (albeit with regional and temporal variations in severity). In 1982, China’s national population census — the first to be conducted in nearly two decades — reported an SRB of 108.5, a striking and disturbing demographic anomaly. Initially, researchers surmised that this abnormal imbalance might be in large part a statistical artifact, under the hypothesis that Chinese parents might be disposed to conceal the birth of a daughter so as to have another chance for a son, given the strict birth quotas so often decreed by the One Child Policy. But successive Chinese population censuses registered ever-higher SRBs. By the 2005 “mini-census” — a survey of 1 percent of the country’s population, conducted between the full censuses — China’s SRB approached 120, and the reported nationwide sex ratio for children under 5 was even higher (see Table 1). Although, as recently noted in a study by Daniel M. Goodkind in the journal Demography, there remain some discrepancies and inconsistencies among data sources (census numbers, vital registration reports, hospital delivery records, school enrollment figures, and so on) concerning China’s SRBs and child sex ratios over the past two decades, there is absolutely no doubt that shockingly distorted sex ratios for newborns and children prevail in China today — and that these gender imbalances have increased dramatically during the decades of the One Child Policy.
Chinese census data outline the basic geo-demography of China’s imbalanced sex ratios at birth. For the country as a whole, SRBs since 1982 have consistently been lowest for China’s cities, and highest for rural areas; in the 2005 mini-census, reported SRBs were roughly 123 for rural areas, 120 for towns, and 115 for cities. But there are major SRB variations within China at the regional level; as of 2005, only three provinces reported essentially “normal” SRBs, while many more reported SRBs of 125 or more, with two provinces reporting levels in excess of 130 (see Figure 1). The geography of China’s gender imbalance is further highlighted by a county-level breakout of sex ratios for young children in the year 2000 (see Figure 2, below). As may be seen, sex ratios are essentially “normal” (105 or lower) in much of Western China and along parts of the country’s northern border — areas where non-Han ethnic minorities predominate — while unnatural gender imbalances characterize virtually the entirety of the Han-majority areas in China’s east and south. There are tremendous variations in the extremity of the condition within this Han expanse: a number of inland and coastal areas stand out as epicenters of the problem, and are marked by concentrations of counties, each encompassing millions or tens of millions of people, wherein child sex ratios of 150 or greater prevail. Demographers Christophe Z. Guilmoto and Sébastien Oliveau describe these radical-imbalance areas as “hot spots” — and since the phenomenon has spread across China’s population over the past three decades, Figure 2 may be regarded as the map of mounting national casualties…
Economic Uptick
January 13, 2012
Via Newsday
Occupy Newt
January 13, 2012
Via Newsday
