Hasta La Gadget!

“What’s a ‘kleptocracy,’ Dad?” asked my 12-year-old son in response to hearing a news story on the car radio. I took the opportunity to explain different types of government to him. Their names roll trippingly off the tongue: monarchy, autocracy, oligarchy, meritocracy, theocracy, democracy.

In the type of democracy we enjoy in the United States, the different branches of government can be controlled by different political parties, as in a Democratic president and a Republican Congress. This system of “checks and balances” designed by the country’s Founding Fathers sometimes results in gridlock, with government unable to enact any significant legislation. That’s the system in which we find ourselves at this point of history. We live in a gridlockracy.

This is not altogether a bad thing. Periods of divided government have produced some notable successes. A reluctant President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform into law amid predictions of it “shredding the safety net,” yet the legislation is now generally regarded as one of the successes of his presidency. In the mid 1980s, the two parties came together to extend the life of the Social Security system.

The senior George Bush, a Republican, worked with Democrats in Congress to legislate modest tax increases and spending cuts. By the end of the decade, these resulted in the first government surplus since 1969. The debt-ceiling and “fiscal cliff” deals of late 2011 and early 2012 resulted in rapid shrinkage of the federal deficit.

What’s common to these cases of successful evasion of grilockracy is that each was enacted in response to necessity. When the status quo is unsustainable, and action is unavoidable, the parties usually come together, even if unwillingly. The recent 113th congress was often chided for inaction, wasting its time on pointless exercises such as the 50 attempts in the House to get Obamacare repealed. When legislators busy themselves with these futile gestures, they occupy the time they would otherwise spend creating dodgy and expensive legislation.

In contrast, periods of united government, in which one party controls both houses of Congress as well as the presidency, can have awful results. The most recent example is the presidency of Bush junior. George W. inherited a budget surplus from Bill Clinton, with projections that the surplus would reach $2 trillion by the end of the decade.

With the help of a Republican congress, he then initiated the biggest spending spree in modern history. Discretionary spending grew by an astonishing 53% during his term in office. He simultaneously cut taxes. On top of that, he launched an unnecessary war with Iraq that ground on for a decade and cost another $2 trillion. Unsurprisingly, the surpluses vanished, to be replaced by staggering deficits.

When president Obama took office shortly after the economic collapse, he was faced with a $1.7 trillion dollar budget deficit. As Patrick Henry might have shouted, “Give me gridlockracy or give me debt!”

So while many pundits bemoan the impossibility that the Democratic president and the Republican 114th congress will “get anything done,” I’m quite sanguine about the years ahead. At least a few of the most pressing problems are likely to get solved. A wave of bad legislation is unlikely. At least for the time being, I’m happy to tell my son we live in a gridlockracy.

Have human rights principles been consigned to a museum because they prevented the combined forces of China’s dictatorship and business community from asserting themselves? That at least is the impression you get from the moral lessons that the Communist Party’s censorship apparatus increasingly deliver in no uncertain terms to Internet freedom advocates.

And yet, by a strange inversion, Internet control zealots have the nerve to invoke laudable ideals in an attempt to silence those who defend freedom of expression and information, as enshrined in article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

During the World Internet Conference that was held in the small city of Wuzhen in eastern China last month, the political leaders of the Chinese censorship apparatus and their accomplices continually used fine-sounding words to impose their sinister vision of the world.

The conference slogan – “an interconnected world shared and governed by all” – had all the appearance of a moving lesson in democracy and was echoed in the message from President Xi Jinping that a spokesman read at the opening, referring to the “principle of mutual respect and mutual trust” and China’s readiness “to deepen international cooperation, respect sovereignty on the Internet [and] uphold cyber security.”

Is a reality check needed here? These words are nothing more than a hollow propaganda exercise by a country that is classified as an “Enemy of the Internet” by Reporters Without Borders and is ranked 175th out of 180 countries in its Press Freedom Index.

The owners of China’s big (but not very independent) Internet companies use Newspeak as if it were their mother tongue. Active contributors to Chinese Internet censorship, Li Yanhong of Baidu, Ma Huateng of Tencent (China’s leading social network) and Cao Guowei of Sina thought out loud about the best way of exporting China’s information control “model.”

About a thousand businessmen from a hundred or so countries, including world leaders in the ICT sector, attended the three-day conference, during which the comments by the representatives of the Communist Party (and Internet giants) were sometimes impenetrable.

Facebook was represented although access to this social network is denied to the entire Chinese population, or at least to those who do not dare or do not know how to use circumvention tools. As no contradiction is too much for the authorities, they lifted censorship for a few days in Wuzhen, allowing foreign visitors to use social networks and post videos on YouTube. This short-lived microclimate of freedom around the conference contrasted starkly with the rest of the country, which remained as overcast as always.

At around 11 p.m. on 20 November, the conference organizers slipped a proposed joint statement – one clearly revealing their intentions – under the hotel room door of every participant with a request for comments… by 8 a.m. the next morning. Posted on the Techcrunch website, it has nine recommendations, including a call to “respect Internet sovereignty of all countries” and “refrain from abusing resources and technological strengths to violate other countries’ Internet sovereignty.”

In other words, China is telling the rest of the world that it will not tolerate any attempts to question its system of generalized censorship, and will not tolerate any circumvention tools or support for human rights defenders or professional or non-professional journalists who try to break the online information blockade.

There was no word in the official programme or even in informal conversations about the fate of the 30 journalists and 70 bloggers who languish in Communist Party jails. But it would not have been absurd to refer to the waves of arrests of netizens such as Guo Feixiong and Xu Zhiyong at the end of last year and again during the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacres, arrests carried out on the pretext of waging a campaign against rumours.

After all, it was Fang Binxing, the former head of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and an ICT expert regarded as the father of the Great Firewall of China, who called the shots. How could you expect such a man to question the need for this gigantic mechanism that isolates China’s Internet users from the rest of the world?

The community of democracies cannot remain passive in the face of such an offensive. Its very principles require that it defend online freedom of information and combat censorship, which doesn’t mean handing over the keys to the Internet to the US government.

The defenders of democracy must oppose China’s growing influence in Internet governance bodies and at future international conferences on this subject when it seeks to legitimize geolocation-based censorship in the name of “national sovereignty” and even exports its repressive practices to other countries. A concerted effort is needed at the next Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing in April 2015.

Imagine this scenario: you’re the head of a household in rural Mexico where the local economy collapsed along with the peso and the jobs never came back. The weakening peso eroded your savings, your purchasing power, but most importantly your dignity. And for being poor, the principal at the public school charges you a tax to keep your kids from the rest of the class–he knows you can’t pay it. But you do. You’re determined to give your kids an education though you can barely keep food on the table.

You have three boys and their appetites are insatiable. You take up a second job washing cars. And then a third job cleaning houses. And then–as is inevitable with all young boys–one of them gets hurt. You borrow money to bring in a doctor but the doctor is in the next town where there is internet and hot water. You curse yourself for not moving earlier like your brother, like your uncles who left for work in the US. But your family is here, your life is here. This is where you are from. You swore to yourself you’d never go undocumented into the US. Like so many transmigrants, you swore you would do things the right way. The legal way. And then one day, someone knocks on your door.

He’s a recruiter, he says. Someone who promises you a visa into the US and good work too. He shows you a mock visa. He lets you touch it even. You rub the ink over the letters–United States of America. And suddenly, here’s a man who promises to solve all your problems. And legally too.

The man says to you that you can have it all–the visa, a contract for work, your dignity–for only a small fee, which wipes out the savings you have. Pesos scraped together over the years. But the man assures you this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. So, you take it. But the man never comes back.

Stories like these are common in rural Mexico where recruitment abuse is big business and one of the more common mechanisms of exploitation used to take advantage of workers in communities with limited access to information and resources. Oftentimes, those who do make it to the U.S. work for limited pay or no pay at all, falling into lives of indentured servitude under the very recruiters who contracted them who also charge workers for their H-2B visas, which are illegal to sell under U.S. law. Oftentimes, worker’s passports are held from them or destroyed altogether to prevent them from going back home. And they become stuck in the U.S., undocumented against their will.

There’s a movement happening in Mexico to fight such abuse. El Centro de Los Derechos Migrante, based in Mexico City, has launched Contratados, a program specifically directed at H-2 and J-1 visa workers to shield them from recruitment abuse. What’s fascinating about Contratados is that the program is an interactive website and hotline that helps workers avoid exploitation, but the program also uses other tools to keep workers informed: comic books and audio novelas among other interactive means to help workers navigate the recruitment and employment process in the United States. Similar to websites and apps like Yelp, Contratados workers can rate and review recruiters and employers to bring some transparency to their decisions.

Check out the video below, directed by Mexico City based Lindsay Van Dyke, of a true story about recruitment abuse:

I’m told I need an exit strategy.

I’m told ad agencies don’t need writers anymore.

I’m told there’s even less need for 44 year old writers. And what do I plan to do in five years when I become 45?

There’s validity to all these statements.

But the truth, the sad truth, is I haven’t made any contingency plans.

I haven’t started studying for my real estate license and have no interest in wasting my weekends at Open Houses entertaining lookyloos while ignoring the awful smells emanating from someone’s unsellable home.

I haven’t been taking classes to get a teaching credential. Nor do I have the patience to deal with witless students.

“What don’t you get? Just do it the way I did. Stop asking questions. And put away the damn iPhone.”

And finally, I haven’t sufficiently funded my 401k plans. In retrospect I should not have sunk my money into Betamax, Netscape and a new Radio Shack franchise. Who could have predicted people would no longer need pocket transistor radios?

I suppose I’m going to have to turn my creative faculties on their head, and using nothing but my perseverance and imagination, figure my way out of this conundrum.

A buddy, a fellow copywriter, had an interesting thought. He suggested getting a full time job again. At this stage in my career it would have to be a high level position with a multi-year contract. Then, knowing how averse I am to being on staff, he suggested I drink myself into a lucrative early termination.

His plan was simple. I would drink. Not a lot at first. A cocktail or two at lunch time. Then a month into the position, I could add a mid-afternoon nip. Followed quickly by morning beers and pre-lunch Bloody Mary’s. A couple of failed new business pitches and the agency would have no choice but to fire me and pay out my remaining contract.

It sounded promising, but I had seen others drink themselves into a daily stupor, only to get promoted and handed more managerial responsibility. And God knows I didn’t want that.

Then he mentioned Clown Make-Up.

The idea was similar and stunningly beautiful. In my first week of steady employment, I would apply an ever-so-slight hint of clown make-up to my face. It would hardly be noticeable. Two weeks later, when my fellow employees had become accustomed to my countenance, I would ramp up the rouge, the lipstick and the eye shadow by a mere 5%. Not enough to set off any alarms, but just enough to ease the transition to the next imperceptible phase.

Week by week, my morning make up ritual would last a little longer. Until at about the 6 month mark, someone would look across the conference room table and notice the Executive Creative Director (me) was in full blown Bozo mode.

This plan is nothing short of genius. And as a bonus will provide me with hours of blogging material.
I better start freshening up my resume.

– See more at: http://roundseventeen.blogspot.com

The Mood Sweater from Sensoree reads emotions and displays the wearer’s feelings. Read on to learn  more about this fascinating, high-tech, fashion innovation.