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« April 2006 | Main | June 2006 » May 26, 2006Teheran Universities Erupt in Violence overnightMaybe this is where the solution to Iran's nuclear ambitions lie:
Gateway Pundit
Observations of the World from the Heart of Jesusland! May 23, 2006FT - Israel cannot always rely on US helping handI was incensed to see this article appear in the Financial Times commentary page today. I will have to leave it to the likes of Alan Dershowitz and others to fully rebutt Tony Judt's poison pen. I will take just one of his points. He writes: "Israel’s long-cultivated persecution mania no longer elicits sympathy. The country’s national narrative of macho victimhood appears to many now as simply bizarre: a collective cognitive dysfunction. Israel, in the world’s eyes, is a normal state; but one behaving in abnormal ways." Of course, all normal states exist in violent neighbourhoods, are subjected to continuous terrorism, are vastly outnumbered by peoples who seek to annihalate them, are seeking to retreat from territories they occupied in defensive wars for the sake of peace. What planet is Mr. Tony Judt on? Oh, yes. NYU studentland, and New York Times MSM land. But shame, Financial Times, Shame for wanting to join that bunch of kool-aid drinkers.
Psychology of economic progressThe futurist writes about the psychology of economic progress. His last sentence is that, " this is a vast subject, on which more articles will follow" I look forward to reading them. As we evolve into an information economy, where more and more people are occupied in knowledge-based careers, self-actualization will be attainable for millions of people. Through actualization arises the greatest examples of social innovation, entrepreneurship, and charity, and these forces will be the key to creating the wondrous new technologies and robust economic growth that we expect in the 21st century. West bank terrorist stateI never understood why Israel gets to keep some 1.2 million Arabs, while the Gaza strip and the West Bank have to be made Judenrein. While I think that a Jewish person (Israeli or not) would be crazy to want to live in a place that puts them in harms way (e.g. Hebron in the West Bank, or Kfar Darom in Gaza), I fully support their right to choose to. James Woolsey, formerly a Director of the CIA makes the same point:
Today we cannot envision the 250,000 Jewish settlers who live outside Israel's pre-1967 borders being permitted to live at all, much less live free and unmolested, in a West-Bank-Gaza Palestinian state. But some 1.2 million Arabs, almost all Muslim, today live in Israel in peace among some 5 million Jews -- about double the percentage of Jews now in the West Bank as a share of the Muslim population there. Israel's Arab citizens worship freely -- one hears muezzins calling the faithful to prayer as one walks around Tel Aviv. They vote in free elections for their own representatives in a real legislature, the Knesset. They give every evidence that they prefer being Arab Israelis to living in the chaos and uncertainty of a West Bank after Israeli withdrawal. Common Sense on remittancesMy hero, Victor Davis Hanson, complains that remittances to Mexico are a negative. This opinion column debunks that idea rather effectively. WSJ.com - Mexican Working Capital But foreign "remittances," as these expat cash flows are called, are a force for economic and political good. As an economic matter, they flow directly from individuals in the U.S. to private individuals or businesses south of the border. This cuts out the government middleman and provides capital immediately for private investment or consumption. Rumsfeld's rules - Advice on government, business and life.In spite of all the negativity surrounding Donald Rumsfeld, I have tremendous respect for the man. To me, he appears to be someone who is willing to be unpopular if it means doing what he believes to be right. Whenever I hear him speak, my gut reaction is positive. That said, I have not read Cobra II - which I understand is pretty damning. Its on my list. The following is a list of maxims for the business of government and the business of life - written by Rumsfeld. I think that it is a valuable list. Many of these rules, reflections and quotations came from my role as chairman May 18, 2006China's looming talent shortage - the McKinsey QuarterlyChina's economy is growing by leaps and bounds, and its labour market can't keep up.
New research from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) suggests that this outcome is unlikely. (The full report, The Emerging Global Labor Market, is available free of charge online.) The reason: few of China's vast number of university graduates are capable of working successfully in the services export sector, and the fast-growing domestic economy absorbs most of those who could. Indeed, far from presaging a thriving offshore services sector, our research points to a looming shortage of homegrown talent, with serious implications for the multinationals now in China and for the growing number of Chinese companies with global ambitions. If China is to avoid this talent crunch and to sustain its economic ascent, it must produce more graduates fit for employment in world-class companies, whether local or foreign. Raising the graduates' quality will allow the economy to evolve from its present domination by manufacturing and toward a future in which services play the leading role—as they eventually must when any economy develops and matures. The conditions for a flourishing offshore services sector will then surely follow. Link to the article here: Or full text below. Alternatively, you can email me for a very nicely produced PDF version. China's looming talent shortage To make the move from manufacturing to services, China must raise the quality of its university graduates. Diana Farrell and Andrew J. Grant 2005 Number 4
With a huge supply of low-cost workers, mainland China has fast become the world's manufacturing workshop, supplying everything from textiles to toys to computer chips. Given the country's millions of university graduates, is it set to become a giant in offshore IT and business process services as well? New research from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) suggests that this outcome is unlikely. (The full report, The Emerging Global Labor Market, is available free of charge online.) The reason: few of China's vast number of university graduates are capable of working successfully in the services export sector, and the fast-growing domestic economy absorbs most of those who could. Indeed, far from presaging a thriving offshore services sector, our research points to a looming shortage of homegrown talent, with serious implications for the multinationals now in China and for the growing number of Chinese companies with global ambitions. If China is to avoid this talent crunch and to sustain its economic ascent, it must produce more graduates fit for employment in world-class companies, whether local or foreign. Raising the graduates' quality will allow the economy to evolve from its present domination by manufacturing and toward a future in which services play the leading role—as they eventually must when any economy develops and matures. The conditions for a flourishing offshore services sector will then surely follow. China's pool of potential talent is enormous. In 2003 China had roughly 9.6 million young professional graduates with up to seven years' work experience and an additional 97 million people that would qualify for support-staff positions. Despite this apparently vast supply, multinational companies are finding that few graduates have the necessary skills for service occupations. According to interviews with 83 human-resources professionals involved with hiring local graduates in low-wage countries, fewer than 10 percent of Chinese job candidates, on average, would be suitable for work in a foreign company in the nine occupations we studied: engineers, finance workers, accountants, quantitative analysts, generalists, life science researchers, doctors, nurses, and support staff. Consider engineers. China has 1.6 million young ones, more than any other country we examined.1 Indeed, 33 percent of the university students in China study engineering,2 compared with 20 percent in Germany and just 4 percent in India. But the main drawback of Chinese applicants for engineering jobs, our interviewees said, is the educational system's bias toward theory. Compared with engineering graduates in Europe and North America, who work in teams to achieve practical solutions, Chinese students get little practical experience in projects or teamwork. The result of these differences is that China's pool of young engineers considered suitable for work in multinationals is just 160,000—no larger than the United Kingdom's. Hence the paradox of shortages amid plenty. For jobs in the eight other occupations we studied, poor English was the main reason our interviewees gave for rejecting Chinese applicants. Only 3 percent of them can be considered for generalist service positions (those that don't require a degree in any particular subject). Overall communication style and cultural fit are also difficult hurdles. One Chinese HR professional points out, for example, that Chinese software engineers would find it hard to draw up an information flowchart for an international five-star hotel, not because they don't understand flowcharts, but because state-run hotels in China—the only ones they know—are so very different.3 Some people argue that a willingness to work long hours will compensate for any deficiencies in the suitability of China's talent. Although this may hold true to some extent in manufacturing, it is likely to make only a marginal difference in services because of the specific skill deficiencies that come into play. On top of the generally low suitability of Chinese graduates, they are widely dispersed. Well over 1,500 colleges and universities produced the 1.7 million students who graduated in 2003, and likely less than one-third of them had studied in any of the top ten university cities (Exhibit 1). Just one-quarter of all Chinese graduates live in a city or region close to a major international airport—a requirement of most multinationals setting up offshore facilities. Compounding that problem is a lack of mobility: only one-third of all Chinese graduates move to other provinces for work. (By contrast, almost half of all Indian students graduate close to a major international hub, such as Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad, and Mumbai, and most are quite willing to move.) As a result of these two factors, world-class companies that want to hire service labor in China have difficulty reaching as much as half of the total pool of graduates. Finally, companies that wish to set up services offshoring operations in China face more competition for talent than they would in other low-wage locations. In India and the Philippines, for example, the local economy is growing less briskly, and working for a company that provides offshore services is therefore a good option. In China, domestic and multinational companies serving the fast-growing domestic market already provide attractive opportunities for suitable graduates, and there are many more jobs in the manufacturing export sector. As a result, it's wrong to assume, as many companies do, that every suitable young professional in China is available for hire in the services offshoring sector. More crucially, companies that are already in China and serve its fast-growing domestic market will also, our research shows, have difficulty finding enough suitable employees in key service and managerial occupations. The demand for labor from just the large foreign-owned companies and joint ventures that now do business in China highlights the problem.4 From 1998 to 2002, employment in these two categories rose by 12 and 23 percent a year, respectively, to about 2,700,000 workers. Assuming that 30 percent of these workers must have at least a college degree5 and that the labor demands of such companies continue to grow at the same rates, they will have to employ an additional 750,000 graduates from 2003 through 2008. China, we estimate, will produce 1,200,000 graduates suitable for employment in world-class service companies during that period. So large foreign multinationals and joint ventures alone will take up to 60 percent of China's suitable graduates before demand from smaller multinationals or Chinese companies even enters the picture (Exhibit 2). If these numbers suggest fierce competition for China's best graduates, unemployment statistics confirm that impression. In 2003 just 1 percent of the country's university graduates were unemployed—an almost negligible rate. Unemployment among the graduates of China's colleges is a bit higher, at about 6 percent. Effective managers are in short supply as well. We estimate that given the global aspirations of many Chinese companies, over the next 10 to 15 years they will need 75,000 leaders who can work effectively in global environments; today they have only 3,000 to 5,000.6 Management talent generally comes from several sources—offshoring enterprises that train lower-level workers, industries that produce managers with relevant skills, and expatriates who have worked or studied in countries with developed economies. But people from all of these sources are scarce in China. Although multinational companies there do currently train and promote managers from entry-level positions, the process is time consuming and costly. Moreover, with levels of foreign direct investment so high, multinationals often resort to poaching from each other. The problem is all the worse because not many middle managers can be hired from Chinese companies; only people employed by very high-performing ones (such as the consumer electronics company TCL) have the skills and cultural attributes needed to work for the multinationals. A more plentiful source of middle-management talent is the large number of ethnic Chinese who fill management roles for companies in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. These people can be recruited to mainland China but often require "local-plus" packages: wages and benefits above what the locals receive, though less than the full expatriate package. A shortage of world-class university graduates in key occupations such as finance, accounting, engineering, and business represents a major problem for multinationals in China, for Chinese companies, and for the country's policy makers. Companies need these graduates to improve their marketing and product-development efforts, to understand consumer tastes, to develop customer service and after-sales-service operations, and to raise their local financial and accounting standards. In the longer term, China's economy as a whole needs more such graduates if it is to compete in the world beyond the simpler, labor-intensive manufacturing areas in which it is now the global leader. As economies develop, they shift from labor-intensive manufacturing to higher-value areas, notably marketing, product design, and the manufacture of sophisticated intermediate inputs. Northern Italy's textile and apparel industry, for example, has moved most garment production to lower-cost locations, but employment remains stable because companies have put more resources into tasks such as designing clothes and coordinating global production networks. Similarly, in the US automotive industry, imports of finished cars from Mexico increased rapidly after the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect, but at the same time exports of US auto parts to Mexico have quadrupled, allowing much of the more capital-intensive work—and many of the higher-paid jobs—to remain in the United States.7 With an estimated 150 million surplus unskilled rural workers,8 who can be hired mainly by manufacturers, China is decades away from developing a consumer-oriented service economy. But policy makers must make that their ultimate aspiration. No nation will remain the world's low-cost manufacturer forever, and if it were to try to do so, its living standards would stagnate at today's levels—or even decline. Today China's economy is greatly tilted toward manufacturing, and the services sector is notably underdeveloped (Exhibit 3). But in China, as in all economies, services will be the future engine of job growth. According to Alliance Capital Management, the country's manufacturing sector shed 15 million jobs from 1995 to 2002, when large state-owned factories restructured their operations. As manufacturing productivity rises, still more jobs will be lost. Creating the conditions that attract offshore services operations will help China move up the ladder. The country does have some strong advantages in this arena, notably low labor costs, an enormous domestic market, and a relatively high-quality infrastructure. Offshore services activities are often developed from existing operations, so China's services offshoring sector is most likely to arise as an offshoot of the activities of companies that are already there. China is not the only country facing an impending talent shortage. See "Ensuring India's offshoring future." Pharmaceutical and software companies will probably take the lead, for in these industries some multinationals have already set up Chinese R&D operations to customize products for local needs. Several players now use incremental capacity in their Chinese R&D facilities to serve overseas markets too. Pharma companies can also run bigger, and therefore faster, clinical trials in China more cheaply, thereby cutting overall product-development costs as well as approval and release times. In addition, mainland China could emerge as a base for business process offshoring by multinationals that serve Chinese-speaking populations elsewhere—such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan—if the country solves its looming shortage of qualified labor. Raising the quality of China's graduates will be a long-term effort, but even modest improvements would make a huge difference. If the proportion of Chinese engineering graduates who could work at global companies increased to 25 percent (as it is in India), from today's 10 percent, China's pool of qualified young engineers would be among the world's largest by 2008. How can the country raise the quality of its graduates? First, it must change the way it finances its universities. Expenditures for tertiary education are growing quite rapidly—from 2000 to 2002, by more than 50 percent. The number of students increased even more, however, so expenditures per student fell by 5 percent. Funding is also spread unevenly throughout the country: in Beijing average spending per student is more than 30 percent higher than it is in second-place Shanghai and more than twice the level in 25 of the 31 provinces. More money should be focused on raising quality than quantity, and funds for institutions in places other than Beijing and Shanghai should rise dramatically. In addition, China must continue to improve its English-language instruction. Since 2001, the Ministry of Education has required all students to start learning English in third grade. This is a step in the right direction and will pay dividends in the long run, but English classes are still very large, even at universities, because teachers are in short supply.9 Furthermore, conversational skills receive too little attention. To resolve both of these issues, China must train many more English teachers and do more to recruit them from abroad. For the foreseeable future, companies themselves will have to invest more in training and developing the talent they need. When Microsoft, for instance, outsourced part of its Web-based technical support to Shanghai Wicresoft, a 400-employee joint venture with the Shanghai municipal government, it hired ten native US English speakers to teach their Chinese coworkers about US e-mail protocol and writing style. These instructors hold language classes and meet one-on-one with Chinese employees to assess their progress, an effort that raises the joint venture's personnel costs by about 15 percent10 but brings the language skills of Chinese workers up to speed. Other foreign companies are developing management-training courses, sometimes in collaboration with local business schools, to upgrade the skills of existing middle and top managers.11 Companies can also work with policy makers and university leaders to bring curriculums—not only at the top universities but also throughout the university system—more in line with the needs of industry. Software projects are team efforts that require less theoretical knowledge than application skills, which Chinese graduates lack, according to managers at multinational companies. In response, Microsoft has formed partnerships with four universities in China to establish software labs where student interns learn practical software-development skills. Other companies should adopt similar policies. Such public-private education programs make students more suitable for good jobs with world-class companies and ease the transition to middle-management roles later on. Finally, China's policy makers must ensure that its many students who study abroad return home, since a relatively high proportion of them have the skills needed to work for multinationals. In 2003, some 120,000 Chinese students were studying abroad—the highest number of any of the 28 countries whose supply of graduates MGI has investigated. Moreover, half of these Chinese students were living in the United States, the largest overseas market linked to China. India's diaspora, including people who have returned to their homeland, has played an important role in the growth of the Indian IT and business process services sector while helping to alleviate the country's management shortage. China too needs its expats. China faces a looming labor shortage that could stall not only its economic growth but also its migration up the value chain. Reforms in the educational system—including a greater emphasis on practical and language skills—will help the country fill its skilled-labor gap. Diana Farrell is director of the McKinsey Global Institute, and Andrew Grant is a director in McKinsey's Shanghai office. The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of Martha Laboissière, Jaeson Rosenfeld, Sascha Stürze, and Fusayo Umezawa. 1The low-wage countries we studied were Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Vietnam. The mid- to high-wage countries we studied in depth were Canada, Germany, Ireland, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States; Australia and South Korea were studied by way of extrapolation. 2All branches except civil and agricultural engineering. 3Juhi Bhambal, interview with Alan Choi, Korn/Ferry's regional managing director for Greater China, Global Outsourcing, January 11, 2005. 4We considered only companies with more than 1,000 employees. Foreign-owned companies in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan were excluded. 5This estimate is based on MGI's study of the global automotive industry, where 48 percent of all jobs require a college education. Since the estimate includes headquarters functions, we reduced it to 30 percent. 6Andrew Grant and Georges Desvaux, "Narrowing China's corporate-leadership gap," China Daily, May 18, 2005. 7Diana Farrell, Antonio Puron, and Jaana K. Remes, "Beyond cheap labor: Lessons for developing economies," The McKinsey Quarterly, 2005 Number 1, pp. 98–109. 8"Surplus rural laborers hit 150 million," Xinhua News Agency, April 8, 2004. 9Yuan-yuan Huang and Hua-li Xu, "Trends in English language education in China," ESL Magazine, November/December 1999. 10Li Yuan, "Chinese companies vie for a role in US IT outsourcing," Wall Street Journal, April 5, 2005. 11McKinsey will pilot such a program in early 2006.
Searing Inditement of Main Stream MediaGates of Vienna is a great blog. This article lays out at least some of what I've been sensing for a long time. Gates of Vienna: MSM Scrapings vs. Real Reporting Ultimately, the career path at MSM will have to change. Rather than hiring from within, or from journalism schools, the institutions that survive in MSM will hire direct from the blogosphere. The blogosphere will become the main training and recruiting ground for new journalists. May 16, 2006Warren Buffett and the Chicago Graduate School of Business - trip to Omaha May 12th 2006I recently gave a talk at the Chicago Graduate School of Business. One of the students that I met there, James Bray sent me his notes on their trip to Omaha to meet Buffett. His write-up, which is full of gems, is in the extended entry, or you can download the file here:
Notes by James Bray - student at Chicago GSB Dave Sokol was the “warm up act” – answered questions for about 30 minutes, then WB answered questions for around 2 hours. Took us to gorat’s for steak. General Notes: Personal characteristics / General observations My question to Dave Sokol: Answer: WEB has the talent to get to the essence of a business and its people. He knew Walter Scott and had the benefit of observing him over many years. When DS was going to sell Mid-American Energy to WEB he made a flipbook presentation. It was never opened – WB knew the business better than DS did! Said that WB “reads everything” synthesizes data and sees opportunity. After speaking for a few minutes, WB told him “The enemy of your business is inflation.” DS said he knew several utility CEOs who could not have boiled it down so simply. Regulator doesn’t care about utility costs in a non-inflationary environment. My question to WEB: (he didn’t call on me – lots of students had questions. My guess is it might not be perfect, but it’s still better than just giving them 300,000 cash. Still, it’s always good to hear his perspective on governance/incentives. Maybe next time……) Lory and Guy
This is how we used to look before we had kids... May 14, 2006Restaurant in Zurich
I recently purchased a new Leica MP to replace one that was stolen. Even in this digital age with 8 megapixels and what have you, there is no question that analogue Leica's take great photos. The Perfect Mark - a Massachusetts psychotherapist and a Nigerian e-mail scamI don't know how many Nigerian scam emails I have must have received. Who would have thought that anybody actually gets taken in. This article that appeared in the New Yorker provides a fascinating insight into the mind of someone who succumbed. The poor subject of the scam in this case was ultimately (and in my mind rightfully) sentenced to two years in prison for knowingly passing falsified checks. The article provides the best insight that I have seen to date of the mind of someone who succumbs - with plenty of lessons. If something is too good to be true, then it generally is. Link here, or full article below. THE PERFECT MARK Late one afternoon in June, 2001, John W. Worley sat in a burgundy leather desk chair reading his e-mail. He was fifty-seven and burly, with glasses, a fringe of salt-and-pepper hair, and a bushy gray beard. A decorated Vietnam veteran and an ordained minister, he had a busy practice as a Christian psychotherapist, and, with his wife, Barbara, was the caretaker of a mansion on a historic estate in Groton, Massachusetts. He lived in a comfortable three-bedroom suite in the mansion, and saw patients in a ground-floor office with walls adorned with images of Jesus and framed military medals. Barbara had been his high-school sweetheart—he was the president of his class, and she was the homecoming queen—and they had four daughters and seven grandchildren, whose photos surrounded Worley at his desk. Worley scrolled through his in-box and opened an e-mail, addressed to “CEO/Owner.” The writer said that his name was Captain Joshua Mbote, and he offered an awkwardly phrased proposition: “With regards to your trustworthiness and reliability, I decided to seek your assistance in transferring some money out of South Africa into your country, for onward dispatch and investment.” Mbote explained that he had been chief of security for the Congolese President Laurent Kabila, who had secretly sent him to South Africa to buy weapons for a force of élite bodyguards. But Kabila had been assassinated before Mbote could complete the mission. “I quickly decided to stop all negotiations and divert the funds to my personal use, as it was a golden opportunity, and I could not return to my country due to my loyalty to the government of Laurent Kabila,” Mbote wrote. Now Mbote had fifty-five million American dollars, in cash, and he needed a discreet partner with an overseas bank account. That partner, of course, would be richly rewarded. Mbote’s offer had the hallmarks of an advance-fee fraud, a swindle whose victims are asked to provide money, information, or services in exchange for a share of a promised fortune. Countless such e-mails, letters, and faxes are sent every year, with a broad variety of stories about how the money supposedly became available (unclaimed estate, corrupt executive, and dying Samaritan being only a few of the most popular). Worley, who had spent his adult life advocating self-knowledge and introspection, seemed particularly unlikely to be fooled. He had developed a psychological profiling tool designed to reveal a person’s “unique needs, desires and probable behavioral responses.” He promised users of the test, “The individual’s understanding of self will be greatly enhanced, increasing the potential for a fulfilled and balanced life.” And Worley was vigilant against temptation. Two weeks before the e-mail arrived, he had been the keynote speaker at his eldest granddaughter’s graduation from the First Assembly Christian Academy in Worcester, Massachusetts. He cautioned the students about Satan, telling them, “He’s going to be trying to destroy you every inch of the way.” Still, Worley, faced with an e-mail that would, according to federal authorities, eventually lead him to join a gang of Nigerian criminals seeking to defraud U.S. banks, didn’t hesitate. A few minutes after receiving Mbote’s entreaty, he replied, “I can help and I am interested.” His only question was how Mbote had found him, and he seemed satisfied with the explanation: that the South African Department of Home Affairs had supplied his name. When Worley attributed this improbable event to God’s will, Mbote elaborated on the story to say that Worley’s name was one of ten that he had been given, and that it had been pulled from a hat after much prayer by someone named Pastor Mark. (A more likely possibility is that his e-mail address was plucked from an Internet chain letter, which he received and passed on, that promised a cash reward from Microsoft to anyone who forwarded the letter to others.) In e-mails, phone calls, faxes, and letters during the ensuing weeks, Mbote laid out the plan: If Worley would pay up-front costs, such as fees to a storage facility where the cash was being kept, and possibly travel to South Africa to collect the money, he would receive thirty per cent, or more than sixteen million dollars. Worley told Mbote that he lived his life with the “utmost integrity” and didn’t want to jeopardize that. He also said that he couldn’t fund the operation. (Though he would report nearly a hundred and forty thousand dollars in income in 2001, he had declared personal bankruptcy in the early nineties, had relatively little saved for retirement, and wanted to help his grandchildren through college.) No problem, Mbote answered; “investors” would provide up to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for airfare and other expenses needed to move the money to the United States, while Worley would act as middleman and curator of the funds. As promised, in late August, 2001, Worley received a check for forty-seven thousand five hundred dollars, purportedly from one such investor. It was from an account belonging to the Syms Corporation, the discount-clothing chain whose slogan is “An Educated Consumer Is Our Best Customer.” Worley was wary. He called the Fleet Bank in Portland, Maine, where the check had been drawn. The bank told him it was an altered duplicate of a check that Syms had paid to the Maryland office of an international luggage manufacturer. Every swindle is driven by a desire for easy money; it’s the one thing the swindler and the swindled have in common. Advance-fee fraud is an especially durable con. In an early variation, the Spanish Prisoner Letter, which dates to the sixteenth century, scammers wrote to English gentry and pleaded for help in freeing a fictitious wealthy countryman who was imprisoned in Spain. Today, the con usually relies on e-mail and is often called a 419 scheme, after the anti-fraud section of the criminal code in Nigeria, where it flourishes. (Last year, a Nigerian comic released a song that taunted Westerners with the lyrics “I go chop your dollar. I go take your money and disappear. Four-one-nine is just a game. You are the loser and I am the winner.”) The scammers, who often operate in crime rings, are known as “yahoo-yahoo boys,” because they frequently use free Yahoo accounts. Many of them live in a suburb of Lagos called Festac Town. Last year, one scammer in Festac Town told the Associated Press, “Now I have three cars, I have two houses, and I’m not looking for a job anymore.” According to a statement posted on the Internet by the U.S. State Department, 419 schemes began to proliferate in the mid-nineteen-eighties, when a collapse in oil prices caused severe economic upheaval in Nigeria. The population—literate, English-speaking, and living with widespread government corruption—faced poverty and rising unemployment. These conditions created a culture of scammers, some of them violent. Marks are often encouraged to travel to Nigeria or to other countries, where they fall victim to kidnapping, extortion, and, in rare cases, murder. In the nineteen-nineties, at least fifteen foreign businessmen, including one American, were killed after being lured to Nigeria by 419 scammers. Until recently, Nigerian officials tended to blame the marks. “There would be no 419 scam if there are no greedy, credulous and criminally-minded victims ready to reap where they did not sow,” the Nigerian Embassy in Washington said in a 2003 statement. The following year, Nuhu Ribadu, the chairman of Nigeria’s Economic & Financial Crimes Commission, noted that not one scammer was behind bars. Last November, however, Ribadu’s commission convicted two crime bosses who had enticed a Brazilian banker to spend two hundred and forty-two million dollars of his employer’s money on a fictitious airport-development deal. (Prosecutions by U.S. authorities are rare; most victims don’t know the real names of their “partners,” and 419 swindlers are adept at covering their tracks.) Despite Nigeria’s efforts, the schemes have reached “epidemic proportions,” according to a publication by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. The agency received more than fifty-five thousand complaints about them last year, nearly six times as many as in 2001. The increase is due in part to the Internet, which makes it easy for scammers to reach potential marks in wealthier countries. “If we educate the public to the point where nobody falls for it, then they’ll go out of business,” Eric Zahren, a spokesman for the Secret Service, the lead U.S. agency in investigating advance-fee frauds, says. The agency estimates that 419 swindlers gross hundreds of millions of dollars a year, not including losses by victims too embarrassed to complain. In February, the son of a prominent California psychiatrist named Louis A. Gottschalk—he identified what turned out to be early signs of Alzheimer’s in Ronald Reagan after analyzing his speech—filed suit seeking to remove his father from control over a family partnership, claiming that Gottschalk had lost more than a million dollars to Nigerian scammers. Some victims try to pass along their losses. The former Iowa congressman Edward Mezvinsky, who had refashioned himself as an international businessman, was caught up in a 419 scam, and during the nineteen-nineties stole from his law clients, friends, and even his mother-in-law to cover his losses. He is serving more than six years in prison after pleading guilty to thirty-one counts of fraud. Robert B. Reich, the former Labor Secretary, who has studied the psychology of market behavior, says, “American culture is uniquely prone to the ‘too good to miss’ fallacy. ‘Opportunity’ is our favorite word. What may seem reckless and feckless and hapless to people in many parts of the world seems a justifiable risk to Americans.” But appetite for risk is only part of it. A mark must be willing to pursue a fortune of questionable origin. The mind-set was best explained by the linguist David W. Maurer in his classic 1940 book, “The Big Con”: “As the lust for large and easy profits is fanned into a hot flame, the mark puts all his scruples behind him. He closes out his bank account, liquidates his property, borrows from his friends, embezzles from his employer or his clients. In the mad frenzy of cheating someone else, he is unaware of the fact that he is the real victim, carefully selected and fatted for the kill. Thus arises the trite but none the less sage maxim: ‘You can’t cheat an honest man.’ ” Born in the small town of Zanesville, Ohio, Worley joined the Army after high school. He served for a year as a staff sergeant with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam, earning decorations that included a Bronze Star. In 1976, after fifteen years in the military, he was convicted of driving a car for a fellow-serviceman who held up a store; nevertheless, Worley received an honorable discharge and was later pardoned for his role in the robbery. He went to college and divinity school, and got a Ph.D. in psychology through correspondence courses from the Carolina University of Theology, then in Mount Holly, North Carolina. A. Erven Burke, a Baptist pastor who has known Worley for nearly thirty years, has called him a man of “integrity and honesty,” dedicated to helping others. In the early nineteen-nineties, Worley developed a sixty-item questionnaire that he called Worley’s Identity Discovery Profile, or W.I.D.P., which sought to quantify a person’s temperament in three areas: social and vocational, leadership, and relationships. W.I.D.P. assigned labels to each: Introverted Sanguine, Sanguine, Phlegmatic, Melancholy, or Choleric, or a blend, such as Phlegmatic Introverted Sanguine. People whose “living patterns” were primarily focussed on fulfilling a temperament need were labelled Compulsive. Over time, Worley built a successful business selling W.I.D.P. to churches, businesses, schools, individuals, and other counsellors. Worley’s own profile was Melancholy Compulsive in the social-vocational realm, Choleric Compulsive in leadership, and Introverted Sanguine in personal relationships: inward, headstrong, needy. The combination, he said later, made him ripe for scamming. He had abundant time to strategize with Nigerian partners, he tended to ignore warnings, and he yearned for his family’s approval. (Anticipating his fortune, he asked his daughters to list all their debts, which he promised to pay.) But Worley’s egotism also may have made him think he could gain the upper hand. When Mbote asked him to fly to South Africa to collect the money, he agreed—but only if Mbote reimbursed him for lost wages. Worley set the price at thirty-five thousand dollars a week. After the Syms check proved false and Mbote failed to send a replacement, Worley told him that their partnership was over. A few days later, though, he began receiving e-mails from someone claiming to be Mohammed Abacha, the eldest surviving son of Nigeria’s late dictator General Sani Abacha, who reputedly stole billions from the Nigerian treasury. Mohammed Abacha told Worley that Joshua Mbote had been operating surreptitiously on the Abacha family’s behalf, but had bungled so badly that Abacha decided to step forward. He told Worley that the story about buying weapons had been a ruse to protect the Abacha family and their money, which, he said, was actually hidden in Ghana. Soon Worley was put in touch with someone claiming to be the General’s widow, Maryam Abacha. In a torrent of phone calls and e-mails, she appealed to Worley. “I learned you wanted to hear from me,” she wrote. “Here I am. Help me.” In his e-mails, Worley seemed invigorated by this new scenario; he apparently believed that he was on the verge of becoming rich while rescuing a woman in distress. In late November of 2001, Worley spent several thousand dollars on an attorney who specialized in international tax planning. The attorney warned him against the seeming opportunity, as did Barbara Worley. She knew little about her husband’s “project,” as he called it, but she didn’t like it. Barbara lived a life that revolved, as she put it, “around God and family.” In some ways, she still looked to her husband for guidance, as she had when they were in high school; she expressed her opinion, but deferred to his judgment. Worley dismissed these warnings; now that he had committed money to the partnership, he had a vested interest. By the end of 2001, he was telling the Abachas that he had investigated ways to ship the cash secretly and had searched a half-dozen countries for a bank that would accept a huge deposit without alerting authorities. He reassured them that they had chosen the right partner, and begged for patience: “I am a smart man and very cautious and do not want anything to go wrong.” He settled on the Bermuda-based Bank of Butterfield, and in late January, 2002, he told Mrs. Abacha that he had spent forty-three hundred dollars to open an account there. “There will be no trail back to the U.S. and no tax to be paid,” he wrote. Worley’s partners soon persuaded him to wire more than eight thousand dollars to retain a Nigerian lawyer and “to cover the bank fees and late fees” that supposedly were the last barriers to the transfer. But, after more delays and growing doubts, Worley told them that he would not travel abroad—the money, they said, had been moved to Amsterdam—to collect the cash. They couldn’t change his mind, so they tried a different approach. Mrs. Abacha asked him for help in claiming forty-five million dollars that she told him was hidden in an account of the Federal Ministry of Aviation at the Central Bank of Nigeria. It was a textbook 419 tactic. When Worley doubted Mbote, he disappeared; when Worley wouldn’t travel for one treasure, they found another. He sent more money. Under this new plan, Worley allowed his partners to file false documentation claiming that he was a private aviation contractor to whom the Nigerian government owed forty-five million dollars. At the end of February, Worley crossed another line when a patient named Jennifer Morlock came to his home office for a counselling session. She had barely arrived when he told her he was engaged in a business venture with partners in Nigeria. Violating his profession’s code of ethics, he asked to borrow fifteen thousand dollars. Morlock went home, spoke with her husband, and agreed. By noon, Worley was at her door to collect the money. The same day, he went to a nearby liquor store with a Western Union outlet and wired all fifteen thousand dollars to Nigeria. He soon repaid Morlock, with interest, by borrowing on his credit card. Meanwhile, Worley was growing more and more distressed. The number of correspondents was increasing—at one point, he counted nine—and the spelling of their names kept changing. He complained of receiving letters from “Maram Abacha,” “Mariam Abacha,” and “Mrs. Maryam S. Abacha.” “I would think that everyone would know how to spell their own real name,” he wrote testily. “Obviously, someone does not.” When he still seemed no closer to receiving the payment he’d been promised, he made a bid for sympathy, falsely telling his partners that he had been given a diagnosis of cancer. That didn’t work, so he told them that he was abandoning the project: “To date, I have lost nearly fifty thousand dollars chasing a rainbow with a pot of gold at the end of it. I cannot go any further. It will take me two years to recover from this, and I will probably be dead by then.” Mrs. Abacha’s reassurances wrung thirteen thousand dollars more from Worley, but in April, 2002, he swore he was through, writing, “I must stop this financial torment and anguish and pray that God forgives me for my pursuit of money, simply put, greed.” For five months, Worley didn’t correspond with the Nigerians. Then, in September, 2002, a fax arrived from someone calling herself Mercy Nduka, who claimed to be a confidential secretary at the Central Bank of Nigeria. Nduka told Worley that the Aviation Ministry funds were still waiting for him, and that she was secretly working with the Abacha family. She said that they needed five hundred thousand dollars to bribe five Nigerian bank officials who had the power to release the forty-five million; plus, she said, they needed another eighty-five thousand to cover fees. Worley refused to send more money, so Nduka and her boss, Usman Bello, said that they would borrow it from investors. Worley would pass along the investors’ money and then receive the fortune on behalf of the Abachas, with shares going to him, Nduka, and Bello for their services. Soon men who claimed to be investors began calling Worley from New York and Washington, asking him to provide credit references and requesting that he put up collateral for the loans they were considering making to him. He refused to offer collateral, but that was never the point. The investors’ questions and demands made him feel more secure, as though they were truly weighing whether to lend him money. In late November, 2002, Worley received a check for ninety-five thousand dollars, drawn on an account of the Robert Plan Corporation, a Long Island-based insurance company. Without verifying it, as he had done with the Syms check, he deposited it at a branch of Fleet Bank. In fact, the check was fraudulent, but a novice employee at the insurance company approved Fleet’s payment inquiry. When the money appeared in Worley’s account, Nduka told him to wire eighty-five thousand dollars to a bank in Latvia, which he did. He wired another thirty-eight hundred dollars when Bello said that he needed to buy a Rolex watch to bribe a bank official. Although the Robert Plan employee had approved the check and Fleet had paid it, Worley, according to federal law, was responsible for repayment. (If a fraudulent check is passed deliberately, a depositor can face felony charges.) About a month later, the Nigerians sent Worley a check for some four hundred thousand dollars from a Michigan marketing company. This check was real, but it had been stolen and altered to make Worley the payee. When Worley deposited it at a branch of Citizens Bank near his home, it cleared; following Nduka’s instructions, he wired the money to an account in a Swiss bank. In the meantime, the Nigerians had ensnared the wife of a Mississippi car dealer, a woman named Marcia Cartwright. In October, 2002, she had received a 419 e-mail from a man saying he was desperate to get his money out of Nigeria. Two months later, Cartwright received a check made out to her for nearly a hundred and nine thousand dollars, drawn on the account of a Texas advertising firm, and deposited it at the Farmers & Merchants Bank of Booneville, Mississippi. It cleared, and, on orders from Nigeria, she sent Worley a cashier’s check for a hundred and six thousand dollars, keeping the remainder for herself. He deposited the money in his Citizens account on January 15, 2003. The next day, he wired a hundred thousand dollars to the Swiss account. Worley told Nduka and Bello that he was certain they now had more than enough to bribe the bankers and cover other expenses. Nduka, ever polite, said that they were not quite there. She sympathized with his frustration, and Worley promised to be patient. She asked for another six thousand dollars—the balance of Cartwright’s cashier’s check—to bribe the telex operators who would execute the transfer. Worley hesitated, but soon sent that money, too. Finally, Nduka told him what he longed to hear: “All is set for the final release of your fund.” That day, the president of the Farmers & Merchants Bank learned that the check Marcia Cartwright had deposited a month earlier had been returned as fraudulent. Bank officials called federal and state authorities, and Citizens Bank, where Worley had deposited Cartwright’s cashier’s check, was also notified. An investigator for Citizens, a former police lieutenant named Michael Raymond, told Worley what had happened and said that he was investigating potentially fraudulent activity. Worley sent frantic e-mails and made repeated calls to Nigeria, begging for a replacement check. Nduka answered with bad news: Bello had been attacked by robbers and was comatose. But, she wrote, “I have reached an agreement with them for your fund to be released as planned on Friday.” All she needed was a thousand dollars to bribe another telex operator. Worley seemed on the verge of panicking. “If you are my friend, then make it happen tomorrow,” he pleaded. “Why are you badgering me with this $1,000? I have gone as far as I will go with this. I am desperate and have nothing else to say at this time. I am emotionally, spiritually, and financially drained.” Nduka answered humbly, calling herself “an ordinary woman” who struggled on four hundred dollars a month. Worley responded that Nduka had “touched my heart.” He wired the thousand dollars on January 30, 2003. The next day, Raymond told Worley that the other check he had deposited at Citizens, the check from Michigan for four hundred thousand dollars, was also phony. Worley knew what that meant, and, according to Raymond, disclosed his suspicion that the Robert Plan check was probably fake, too. When Worley got off the phone with Raymond, he was enraged. “I hate being taken advantage of by you evil bastards,” he wrote to Nduka. “This is all lies?” He went on, “Your day will come that you will be judged by God, and so will I. And I am ashamed, and shamed, and an embarrassment to my family, who are so precious and Godly people. What a terrible model of a Christian that I am. Thoughts of suicide are filling my mind, and I am full of rage at you despicable people. I hate living right now, and I want to die. My whole life is falling apart, my family, my ministry, my reputation and all that I have worked for all my life. Dear God, help me. I am so frightened.” In May, 2005, Worley went on trial in U.S. District Court in Boston on charges of bank fraud, money laundering, and possession of counterfeit checks. Worley’s overseas correspondents, whose real identities he never knew, disappeared, and were never located or charged. With them went more than forty thousand dollars of Worley’s money and nearly six hundred thousand dollars from the checks. Including credit-card interest, money-wiring fees, long-distance telephone charges, and the tax lawyer’s bills, Worley’s losses may have been closer to eighty thousand dollars. The prosecutor, an Assistant U.S. Attorney named Nadine Pellegrini, urged the jury to reject suggestions that Worley had simply been scammed. At best, she said, Worley “got in over his head.” Pellegrini portrayed Worley as the puppeteer, not the puppet, and said that he knowingly passed bad checks, in the belief that he was entering into a “mutually beneficial arrangement.” She focussed on Worley’s recognition at various points that he was dealing with liars, and said that he displayed “willful blindness” by ignoring the warning signs of their criminality and his own. Pellegrini said that Worley’s claims of innocence were undermined by consistent bad conduct—lying to his wife, borrowing from a patient, plotting to avoid taxes, posing as an aviation contractor, claiming to have cancer, and agreeing to bribe Nigerian bank officials. She was unsparing during her cross-examination. “So you don’t have any integrity either, do you, Dr. Worley?” she asked. He answered, “No, I don’t.” “Ladies and gentlemen,” she told the jury, “it’s clear John Worley understands behavior of people and motivation of people, and he could and he can manipulate both behavior and reaction. . . . There is only one story here, and that’s the story of John Worley’s greed.” Worley’s lawyer, a former prosecutor named Thomas Hoopes, cast him as a childlike man who was tricked by sophisticated con artists into a check-cashing scheme. Hoopes stressed that Fleet and Citizens had approved payment on the checks, which, he said, reasonably led Worley to believe they were legitimate. He urged the jury to focus on the final thousand dollars that Worley had sent after he knew an investigation was under way—this was evidence, he said, of Worley’s gullibility. He likened Worley to Marcia Cartwright, whom the government viewed as a victim despite her also having passed a bad check. (Cartwright made partial restitution, testified for the prosecution, and was not charged.) Mostly, Hoopes urged the jury to view Worley’s acts as foolish, not criminal. Hoopes emphasized that Worley had lost heavily in the scam. “It’s not willful blindness,” Hoopes said. “It is blind trust.” In addition to witness testimony and lawyers’ arguments, the jury was given hundreds of e-mails between Worley and the Nigerians which told a story of their own, about a man transformed by his pursuit of riches. Reading the e-mails, in which Worley displays both cunning and credulousness—sometimes in the same message—it is clear that the Nigerians were able to take advantage of his religious convictions, his stubbornness, and his desire to be a hero to Mrs. Abacha and to his family. Patiently and persistently, the Nigerians turned Worley’s skepticism into suspension of disbelief, to the point where he seemed to worry that they might not trust him. They made Worley the perfect mark. The trial took six days, and the jury found Worley guilty on all counts. On February 15th, Worley, now sixty-two, returned to the federal courthouse at the edge of Boston Harbor to face sentencing. Accompanied by more than three dozen family members and friends, he arrived wearing a charcoal suit with a support-the-troops pin on the lapel. U.S. District Judge George O’Toole, Jr., acknowledging the “ordeal” that Worley had been through, said that he was nevertheless bound by the jury’s finding. He sentenced Worley to two years in prison, plus restitution of nearly six hundred thousand dollars, and gave him five weeks to turn himself in. Outside the courtroom, Barbara Worley, a stout woman with blond hair, said they would appeal. (They eventually decided not to.) “My husband is the victim here,” she said. “It’s an atrocity.” One morning a week later, I drove past acres of winter-brown fields to the Worleys’ large, blue-gray house, which was owned by a trust created by the Lawrence family, one of Massachusetts’s nineteenth-century industrial dynasties. (The Worleys, looking for an inexpensive place to live after John left the Army, believe that divine guidance delivered them to the Lawrences, who needed the home restored and overseen.) Barbara, in a white bathrobe, let me in, saying she thought the meeting had been rescheduled. The house was dark, and the hallways were filled with packing boxes: Worley was preparing for prison, and Barbara was moving to a small house in a nearby town. Barbara led the way upstairs to a living room with a brass plaque on the door. “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord,” it read. Worley entered, wearing a red-white-and-blue robe with an eagle on the back. He sat in a green leather chair, and fed treats to Pancake, the family cat. He seemed stunned by his misadventures of the past five years. “The communications that I had with those people were so convincing that I really believed that they were real, they were true,” he said. “I would question them and they would come back with a response that was adequate to cover my concerns each and every time.” Despite everything, he insisted that he still believed he had been dealing with the real Maryam and Mohammed Abacha. “I think they were legitimately trying to use me and my resources to get their funds out of Nigeria into a safe place where they could have access to them,” he said. Worley wasn’t sure whom to blame for the bad checks, though Nduka was suspect. “Somehow there was a buyoff, a payoff, or something that went on there, and then it got switched to the point where I was then dealing with fraudsters,” he said. When I asked Worley what he wished he had done differently, he didn’t answer directly. Instead, he spoke about hoping that the Abachas would get back in touch with him. However, before they could resume work on the multimillion-dollar transfer, he expected them to send the six hundred thousand dollars that he needs for restitution. “What if they sent you a check?” Barbara demanded. “Would you put it in the bank to see if it cleared again?” “Yeah.” “John!” she said. “I don’t know,” Worley said finally, sounding defeated. “I have to have time to think about what I would do in that situation.” “My husband is naïve,” she explained to me. “He trusts people.” A month later, moments after dropping off Worley at a federal prison in Pennsylvania, Barbara called me in tears. “They knew they couldn’t go after the Nigerians, so they just get the person they can reach. They’re trying to stop people in America from getting involved in it by making an example of my husband,” she said. “Why don’t they assign an F.B.I. agent to go after the people who scammed my husband? Where’s the justice?” An enduring trait of Nigerian letter scammers—indeed, of most con artists—is their reluctance to walk away from a mark before his resources are exhausted. On February 5, 2003, several days after the checks were revealed as phony, after Worley was under siege by investigators, after his bank account had been frozen, after he had called his partners “evil bastards,” Worley received one more e-mail from Mercy Nduka. “I am quite sympathetic about all your predicaments,” she wrote, “but the truth is that we are at the final step and I am not willing to let go, especially with all of these amounts of money that you say that you have to pay back.” She needed just one more thing from Worley and the millions would be theirs: another three thousand dollars. “You have to trust somebody at times like this,” she wrote. “I am waiting your response.” May 04, 2006Victor Davis Hanson with a great article again
For now, our best peaceful weapon in the little time that we have left is, oddly, our own quiet and hope that a democratizing Iraq stabilizes, and in turn destabilizes undemocratic Iran. So let the loud Ahmadinejad continue to make our case why such a psychopath cannot be allowed to become nuclear. Meanwhile, give confident multilateral internationalists their long-awaited chance at diplomacy, and prepare for the worst. May 02, 2006Fear, Complexity and Environmental Management in the 21st CenturyI have not read one of Michael Crichton's books, and I realize that he is a controversial figure. But this was a great lecture, and is a valuable antidote to those of us who think that we are smart enough to work out what is happening in the world...
Lou Marinoff - Sacred and Profane ExtremismFriend Lou Marinoff on why we need to chose the middle way. A couple of money quotes: On "Mutual Assured Demonisation" Ever since 9/11, an understandable concern among Americans and others is the specter of radioactive materials if not nuclear weapons falling into the hands of Islamist extremists. Deterrence theory “worked” during the Cold War precisely if perversely because proliferation of nuclear weapons threatened Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). In the last analysis, neither American nor Soviet leaders sought annihilation of their own populaces. However, deterrence works only until it fails; and if it ever fails then it never worked at all. Deterrence may fail spectacularly if applied to the “Mutual Assured Demonization” (the new MAD) between Christian and Islamist extremists. Nuclear terrorism may prove difficult to deter, while Christian extremism is by definition apocalyptic – and therefore prone to regarding nuclear retaliation as a fulfillment of the prophecies of Revelations. Thus a “worst case scenario” in the City of Man becomes grist for the mills of Christian extremists longing for Armageddon. Mutual Assured Demonization – whether an ayatollah’s vilification of America as “the Great Satan” or an Televangelist’s indictment of Islam as “a Satanic cult” – serve only to inflame and not to alleviate the “clash of civilizations.”
Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci theorized that one could bring down a civilization without firing a shot, by commandeering its cultural institutions. This is precisely what European and American neo-Marxists have accomplished, utilizing French postmodern philosophy (thanks to Trotskyite Jean-Francois Lyotard) and its seductive deconstructions of meaning and truth, morality and reality (thanks to Jacques Derrida) to infect millions of university graduates across a spectrum of disciplines with the virus of political correctness. In one of my public Philosopher’s Forums in Manhattan, an Ivy League graduate refused to assert that 1+1=2. She had been taught that all truths are “socially constructed,” and therefore that all assertions are equally valid (or invalid). Moreover, she had been conditioned never to say anything that anyone might find “offensive” – everyone being held accountable for everyone else’s mind-state, but never for their own. Logical anarchy is but a prelude to moral anarchy. For if no equation can be correctly solved, then no moral proposition can be justifiably upheld – demonization of white males and Western civilization excepted. Get it all here, or below Apocalyptic Christianity and Neo-Marxist Deconstruction As globalization unfolds, it reunites disparate cultures, redefines civilizational contours, and recommingles divergent ideologies. In the background of this momentous and often chaotic process, a new and inclusive human paradigm is quietly being forged. But in the foreground, the global village reels from the impact of extremisms – political, religious, tribal, socio-economic, educational, ideological – which are plainly exposed and sometimes exacerbated by globalization’s transcendent recombination of civilizations and cultures. Every person and therefore every nation is capable of manifesting extremisms – Americans included. Yet the happiness and fulfillment of persons, as well as the prosperity and harmony of nations, flow undeniably from moderate (as opposed to extreme) acts of thought, speech and deed. In this article, I will briefly contrast sacred and profane extremes in the USA: apocalyptic Christianity, and neo-Marxist deconstruction. They not only polarize the American polity, but also militate against the emergence of a shared human paradigm for the 21st century. Religious extremism in America contributes to the “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West. Astute political observers such as Lee Kwan Yew recognize that Islamic civilization is struggling both to modernize and yet to retain its identity; and thus that its decisive conflict is internal – between a minority of Islamist extremists and a majority of peace-loving and tolerant Muslims. By contrast, a decisive conflict in the USA – reflected in the pivotal 2004 presidential campaign issue of morality – is between religious fanatics of the Christian right (the “sacred” extreme), and neo-Marxist postmodernists of the deconstructed left (the “profane” extreme). Certain extremists of the Christian right – including sects of Pentecostals, Southern Baptists, Televangelists, elements of the powerful Christian Coalition – are anti-scientific, anti-intellectual, and zealously intolerant of other faiths. One “scholarly” representative of a Southern theological seminary (a Ph.D. and professor no less) recently informed a CNN audience that every non-Christian in the world is in league with the Devil. He specifically demonized Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics, gays and lesbians. While he and his brethren have neither hijacked airplanes nor perpetrated suicide bombings, their self-righteous intolerance is nonetheless anathema to the cultivation of the mind, compassion of the heart, and transcendence of the spirit that all world religions – and secular humanisms alike – teach in their purest and most moderate distillations. Ever since 9/11, an understandable concern among Americans and others is the specter of radioactive materials if not nuclear weapons falling into the hands of Islamist extremists. Deterrence theory “worked” during the Cold War precisely if perversely because proliferation of nuclear weapons threatened Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). In the last analysis, neither American nor Soviet leaders sought annihilation of their own populaces. However, deterrence works only until it fails; and if it ever fails then it never worked at all. Deterrence may fail spectacularly if applied to the “Mutual Assured Demonization” (the new MAD) between Christian and Islamist extremists. Nuclear terrorism may prove difficult to deter, while Christian extremism is by definition apocalyptic – and therefore prone to regarding nuclear retaliation as a fulfillment of the prophecies of Revelations. Thus a “worst case scenario” in the City of Man becomes grist for the mills of Christian extremists longing for Armageddon. Mutual Assured Demonization – whether an ayatollah’s vilification of America as “the Great Satan” or an Televangelist’s indictment of Islam as “a Satanic cult” – serve only to inflame and not to alleviate the “clash of civilizations.” In the past, Christian extremism has helped motivate and justify medieval Crusades, European Inquisitions, New England witch-hunts, and Ku Klux Klan vigilantism, among other sustained outbursts of murderous Western violence tinged with perversions of Jesus’ pacific teachings. Jews and Arabs together endured a bitter expulsion from Iberia, by intolerant Christians, in 1492: the very year Columbus landed in America. To be sure, America has offered sanctuary to millions of devout believers seeking to worship their God or Gods in peace – including ultra-orthodox but non-violent adherents of all Abrahamic persuasions, who pose no threat to anyone. Yet America’s Bill of Rights, and the precious freedom of worship it confers, thereby tolerates religious intolerance’s “sacred extremism” too. This is one paradox of liberty. At the profane extreme, the intelligentsia of the global village, along with observers of American culture, are appalled at the spiraling decline of American education standards, the pervasive cultural illiteracy of American graduates even of formerly world-class universities, and the rabid politicization and deconstruction of the liberal arts curriculum that formerly constituted the foundation of historically and humanistically laudable values in the West – including the liberty, opportunity and hope that were once the envy of the global village. Beginning with the neo-Bolshevik student revolution of the late 1960s, the American Academy has been steadily transformed into an American Gulag. Alan Bloom rang a clarion alarm in his 1980s bestseller “The Closing of the American Mind,” which created a sensation but did not deter the ongoing Stalinization and Maoization of North American university campuses1. The core curriculum of liberal arts – including European and American history, Western philosophy and Great Books – has been systematically replaced with a congeries of vindictive identity politics, mandatory political indoctrination, and coerced political correctness.2 Under the Orwellian banner of “diversity,” students and faculty are compelled to conform to a monolithic set of distorted doctrines, which blame the world’s ills exclusively on Western civilization, and specifically on a reified conspiracy of “white male heterosexual patriarchal hegemonists” – who allegedly and ubiquitously “oppress” humanity on the bases of race, class and gender3. This view is a pretext for perpetuating retributive oppression and ideological terror, precisely on the bases of race, class and gender. Martin Luther King’s celebrated dream “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” has been revoked by the American Gulag. Its political commissars have decreed that race, class and gender are the paramount criteria by which students are judged. To facilitate this injustice, they have purged content and deconstructed character. The American Gulag imposes political rectitude by demonizing white heterosexual and Jewish males, by excluding them from admission and employment on the basis of reverse-racist and reverse-sexist quota systems, by replacing inalienable individual rights with entitlements based on membership in “historically disadvantaged” collectives; by celebrating gay and lesbian orientations as norms while denigrating heterosexuality as socio-pathology; by vilifying science, mathematics and philosophy as “male-dominated” mechanisms of social control and tools of capitalist exploitation; by preaching vituperative hatred of Christianity, Israel and America; by compelling students to attend “sensitivity training” which “corrects” and monitors their views; by suppressing and prohibiting individual freedom of thought, speech and mannerism; by confiscating Christian and conservative student newspapers; by punishing dissenting opinions as thought-crimes against university administrations; by dispensing with presumption of innocence and due process; and by denying the rights of those “denounced” to the Gulag to know the identities of their accusers and the nature of the accusations themselves. Punishments for exercising individual liberties on campus range from suspension to expulsion of students, from summary firing of faculty to sabotage of careers by totalitarian administrators who operate with impunity from justice and immunity from accountability.4 Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci theorized that one could bring down a civilization without firing a shot, by commandeering its cultural institutions. This is precisely what European and American neo-Marxists have accomplished, utilizing French postmodern philosophy (thanks to Trotskyite Jean-Francois Lyotard) and its seductive deconstructions of meaning and truth, morality and reality (thanks to Jacques Derrida) to infect millions of university graduates across a spectrum of disciplines with the virus of political correctness. In one of my public Philosopher’s Forums in Manhattan, an Ivy League graduate refused to assert that 1+1=2. She had been taught that all truths are “socially constructed,” and therefore that all assertions are equally valid (or invalid). Moreover, she had been conditioned never to say anything that anyone might find “offensive” – everyone being held accountable for everyone else’s mind-state, but never for their own. Logical anarchy is but a prelude to moral anarchy. For if no equation can be correctly solved, then no moral proposition can be justifiably upheld – demonization of white males and Western civilization excepted. A generation of such graduates has spread the contagion of political correctness into the general culture: media, civil service, justice system, corporations, and governments. The creators and sustainers of the American Gulag have perpetrated a catastrophic educational fraud on a credulous American public, which in any case spends ten times more money annually on fast food than on education. The American mind politic has been so severely deconstructed that it lacks the capacities to sustain the body politic, as we know it. Thus, as Kishore Mahbubani has observed, 20th century American greatness (“the most benevolent great power in history”)5 has ironically paved the way to a 21st century world that Americans themselves are increasingly ill prepared to understand6. America’s interventions and sacrifices in World War I, World War II, and the Korean War restored and protected the liberty, opportunity and hope so prized by so many peoples. America overcame hard forces of fascism and communism abroad, only to succumb to their softer but not less insidious manifestations from within. America’s sacred and profane extremes – and their associated “culture wars” and “gender wars” – have polarized the nation, robbing its citizens of a common purpose and a shared humanity. Polarizations can be neutralized. Every nation and each person has the power to pursue moderate pathways, for the benefit of one and all. Fortunately, humanity has at its disposal ancient yet ample resources for tempering extremism and engendering moderation7. Three great teachers of antiquity – namely Aristotle, Buddha and Confucius – all discouraged extremism and engendered moderation. Aristotle’s golden mean, Buddha’s middle way, and Confucius’s balanced order neither expediently appease nor violently oppose extremism; rather, they work to dissipate it by transforming human minds and hearts. The ABCs of moderation may contribute vitally to an inclusive human paradigm, in America and throughout the global village of the 21st century.
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| © 2006 Aquamarine Fund |
