The new address is http://polycrit.com/time

The new UC Merced wants to be a research university, following the model of other UC campuses, as opposed to the California State University system, which is focused primarily on undergraduate instruction and where professors typically carry a much heavier teaching load. But would top researchers and their spouses (who likely would be career-minded professionals themselves) be willing to move Merced, whose claim to fame is that it's just one hour away from both Fresno and Yosemite National Park. All the other existing UC campuses are closer to larger metropolitan areas with less dependence on the agricultural economy, where professional jobs for faculty spouses would be much more plentiful.

As of 2005, the state of California has spent $427 million on building the Merced campus. See the UC Merced 2005 Budget Report.

For the academic year of 2005-2006, the school has allotted $8.5 million to recruit 30 new faculty members, which comes out to $285,000 per position. That amount does not cover regular faculty salary, but is meant to cover interview and marketing costs, as well "equipment to support academic and research programs, initial summer salary and support for graduate students until grant funds materialize (usually in the first or second year), and relocation costs." (See the 2005 Budget Report).

For 2004-2005, the campus had an operating budget of $23 million. For 2005-2006, its first year of actual instruction, the school has proposed an operating budget of $48 million. Almost all the funding will come from the state government. Since it hopes to enroll only 800-1000 students for its inaugural class, that works out to $48,000-60,000 per student. Once it atracts more students, that per-student cost should come down with the economy of scale, but by how much? According to the LA Times article below, the school "is expected to grow by about 800 students a year, reaching its planned capacity of about 25,000 students by 2035."

October 24, 2002 Lieutenant Governor Cruz M. Bustamante Praises UC Merced Supporters

One of Bustamante's first acts as Assembly speaker was to create a Select Committee on the Development of a 10th University of California campus. In addition, along with the assistance of Assemblyman Dennis Cardoza (D-Merced), Bustamante was able to successfully double state budget funding for UC Merced-from $5 million to $10 million annually-in order to expedite the advancement of the campus.

"UC Merced will be an incredible asset to the long underserved Central Valley-both in expanding educational opportunities and spurring economic development," Bustamante stated. "I'm so proud to be associated with this project."

Bustamante was appointed by Governor Gray Davis in 1999 to serve on the UC Merced "Red Team," a committee charged with coordinating and helping to expedite the development of the campus.

As part of its strategy to increase capacity, the University identified the San Joaquin Valley as the region in which a new campus should be located, because it is the only major region of substantial population without a University of California campus. There is an important statewide interest in increasing the educational attainment and diversity of the economy of this part of the State. At the same time, a tenth campus located in the Valley would bring with it the benefits of economic development that accompany a public graduate education and research university. Finally, the tenth campus would fulfill the University's public service mission under the Master Plan by adding to and building on public service activities already located in the Valley.

And this from a UC spokesperson:

http://www.facilitiesnet.com/bom/Aug03/Aug03construction.shtml
The site was favored for a number of reasons, says James Grant, director of communications for the University of California. California’s Central Valley, which extends from Stockton in the north to Bakersfield in the south, has a population of 3.5 million and is growing 60 percent faster than the state average. The population is expected to surge to 10 million by 2020. What’s more, the Central Valley was the largest population not serviced by a University of California campus. Finally, the campus is being viewed as an economic hook to draw business to the area.

While the San Joaquin Valley enjoys agricultural riches, Grant says, it doesn’t now attract the high-tech businesses where young, educated people want to work. As a result, the area has been experiencing a “brain drain” in which educated residents move to work in San Diego or Silicon Valley.

Grant says there’s evidence that the Merced campus will be able to attract business and the talented workforce needed to give the area an economic boost. San Diego County, home of a University of California campus, experienced an influx of biotech firms when the campus started focusing academic programs in that area. Now, approximately one of every four biotech firms in the world is located in San Diego.

A Degree of Isolation at New UC Merced
By Rebecca Trounson, Los Angeles Times

MERCED, Calif. — Renata Santillan looked out across a broad expanse of pasture, dotted with flowering mustard and more than a dozen cows, toward the construction site several hundred yards away.

"Is it going to be ready in time?" Santillan, a 17-year-old high school senior from San Bruno, asked, sounding doubtful. "It's kind of cool, but what would it really be like to go here?"

Less than five months from its opening day, the newest University of California campus is rising from the gently rolling grasslands near this farming town in the San Joaquin Valley. Construction crews are toiling nearly around the clock to complete its first three academic buildings and put the finishing touches on a cluster of low-slung student residence halls.

At the same time, leaders of the first new UC campus in four decades also are working to attract about 1,000 students to fill those classrooms and dormitories for the inaugural year. Using tours, outreach efforts and personal enthusiasm, they are wooing prospective students with the seemingly boundless promise of a brand-new campus.

Yet they also acknowledge the fears of some students, like Santillan, that the campus may be too new, too isolated and too risky.

"Not everyone wants this sort of experience," said engineering professor Christopher Viney, who at a recent open house demonstrated his own pioneering spirit by donning face paint and a hat with the fuzzy ears of the school's bobcat mascot. "But remember, such a chance comes along once in a generation."

Scheduled to open in September with about 60 faculty and 350 staff members alongside its initial students, UC Merced is the first major American research university to be built this century.

The campus, the 10th in the UC system, will open nearly two decades after the university's regents first authorized it to help cope with an expected boom in the state's college-age population. It also will be the first UC campus in the San Joaquin Valley, where college attendance rates have traditionally lagged behind those of the state's other regions.

Aniket Sharma, 17, had traveled to the open house from his home in Diamond Bar. His father, Surya Sharma, spoke positively of the opportunities at UC Merced, theorizing that membership in its inaugural class might look good on a medical school application. Aniket sat silent, looking glum.

Pressed for an opinion, the teenager finally spoke. "It's too isolated," he said.

The campus is five miles from downtown Merced, a city of about 70,000 an hour north of Fresno. It is surrounded by houses and farms, with cattle grazing on much of the site, which is within view of the Sierra Nevada. Yosemite National Park is about an hour away.

Tomlinson-Keasey, a former UC Riverside psychology professor and an administrator there and at UC Davis, was named chancellor of UC Merced in 1999. Since then, she and the campus have weathered a string of setbacks, including environmental concerns that required a change of site and state fiscal problems that caused a one-year delay.

It remains controversial in some quarters. Patrick M. Callan, president of the San Jose-based National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, criticizes the campus as a costly mismatch with the state's higher-education needs.

"It's going to happen at this point," Callan said. "But it still comes down to whether we need a highly expensive research university in a rural community."

Tomlinson-Keasey said she never feared the campus would be scrapped altogether but did worry that continuing budget woes could push it back by as much as a decade, past the expected peak in California's college-going population.

"But you look at high school enrollment numbers and you know that we need it now, for these next few years," she said at the open house. "This will be a real safety valve for all our other campuses."

Yet as with many new enterprises, much about the campus' initial days is still uncertain.

"We don't really know how many students we'll have, whether the classrooms will be ready or whether the infrastructure will be ready," said Shawn Kantor, an economics professor who is also the head of its faculty senate. "Once we know all that, we'll feel better."

By today prospective students must notify UC Merced and other UC campuses that they are accepting or denying their offers of admission.

The Merced campus extended such offers this year to about 6,000 students, for an initial freshman class of 800 to 1,000. The campus also expects to enroll about 100 transfer students in its first year.

By late last week, admissions officials said about 500 students had committed to the campus, with many others considered likely to turn in their acceptances by mail or e-mail in the final hours before the deadline.

Administrators said they were somewhat disappointed that only about 12% of admitted freshmen came from the San Joaquin Valley; they hope eventually to draw about half the university's students from the area.

Print Insists It's Here to Stay
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE, New York Times
Published: May 2, 2005

Newspapers are generally profitable but they leave Wall Street unenthusiastic. A Goldman, Sachs report last week warned investors that "lackluster ad revenue growth, weak circulation revenues" and "a downward trend in earnings estimates" reinforced its "negative view" of the newspaper industry. And recent disclosures of inflated circulation figures have soured the climate for some advertisers.

Earl C. Cox, who is the Martin Agency's chief executive and is leading the newspapers' public relations campaign, told newspaper executives at a recent conference that the current perception of newspapers among advertisers was that they were "static, inflexible and hard to buy." And, he added, "It doesn't help any that media buyers are under 30 and their focus is elsewhere," mostly on the Internet.

He said newspapers needed to retell their story to remind advertisers that their readers are highly engaged and influential and that they are paying attention, unlike some of the "eyeballs" darting around the Internet.

Magazines are in a somewhat different position. They appear to have recovered from the advertising slump of a few years ago. Ad pages for the industry in March were up 1.2 percent from March 2004. In the first quarter of this year, 76 new magazines appeared.

Of the $141 billion spent on all forms of advertising in 2004, about 17 percent went to magazines, according to TNS Media Intelligence. Newspapers captured 20 percent of that, network television 18 percent, cable television 12 percent and the Internet 6 percent. But the newspaper share was down, the magazine share was flat and the Internet was growing fast. Advertising Age predicted last week that the combined advertising revenue of Google and Yahoo this year would rival those of the big three television networks, marking what it called a "watershed moment" in the evolution of the Internet....

"We're really good at putting out products that consumers love, value and trust, and trust is very hard to find these days," said Jack Kliger, president and chief executive of Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., which publishes Elle, Woman's Day and Car and Driver, among others. "We've not been good at marketing our medium."

Readers of magazines, like readers of newspapers, are highly engaged.

Mr. Kliger said research showed that when people are reading magazines, they are unlikely to be using any other form of media. But when they watch television, listen to the radio or wait to download something from the Internet, they are more likely to be listening, watching or reading something else at the same time. They are also likely to be fast-forwarding through commercials or deleting pop-up ads that they see as intrusions. But, he said, magazine readers often see ads as helpful and as part of the magazine experience.

"Engagement improves return on investment," he said.

- Pictures
- Transcript of Beijing University speech and Q&A (audio recording, WMA format)
- China Radio report, with speech transcript

2005.04.30　 中國時報
本報最新民調 連表現 56%民眾滿意

國民黨主席連戰訪問大陸，行前波折不斷，但是登陸之後的表現，國人多給予肯定的掌聲。依據本報最新民調發現，七成八的受訪者知道連戰訪問大陸，其中五成六滿意他的總體表現，五成四認為此行並未出賣台灣利益，五成的人表示連戰和中共領導人胡錦濤的會面，對兩岸關係有正面影響。

國民黨主席連戰訪問大陸，並於二十九日會見中共國家主席胡錦濤，引起國人高度關注。依據本報於當天完成針對台灣地區七百餘位成人的電話訪問顯示，受訪民眾當中，已經有七成八知道連戰訪中這件事，二成二的人則表示並不知情。

Words Lien Chan presented in Nanjing at the Sun Yat-sen mausoleum and the former seat of the Republic of China government:

2005.04.28　 中國時報
連戰祭國父文

連戰今天代表國民黨前往中山陵致祭，宣讀祭文並獻花。祭文內容如下：

「維民國九十四年四月二十七日，總理孫中山先生逝世八十週年紀念，中國國民黨主席連戰，代表全體黨員，謹以鮮花致祭於總理之靈曰：清季末世，內政失修，外患迭乘，屢訂條約，喪權辱國，生民塗炭，其誰能救？惟我總理，獨抱遠識，洞燭潮流，倡導革命，發明主義，昭蘇民智，呼號奔走，拯民救國。四方賢豪，共矢丹誠，同心同德，一致奮鬥。辛亥雙十，義起武昌，專制覆亡，民國肇建，五色旗揚，開啟共和。偉哉總理，彪炳勳績，謙讓大位，發展實業，建設國家。民國以後，綱常不備，禍亂相尋。帝制復辟，軍閥亂政，列強為倀，內戰不休，民無寧日。總理明鑒，繼續革命，捍衛民國，維護法統，保存正義。北伐統一，和平建設，未竟志業，積勞盡瘁，遽逝北京。緬我總理，大功至德，千古一人，一人千古。凡我黨員，恪遵遺命，共勉振興，再造中華。　伏維　靈鑒」

2005.04.28　 中國時報
謁中山陵 連戰說出中華民國
羅如蘭、王銘義/南京廿七日專電

國民黨主席連戰昨天率領訪問團到南京中山陵，向國民黨的創黨人─國父孫中山致敬。連戰在中山陵博愛廣場向群眾發表演說時，第一次在大陸的土地上高聲說出：「中華民國是亞洲第一個民主共和國。」稍後在參觀仍保留青天白日滿地紅國旗的國民政府時期「總統府」舊址時，連戰親書孫中山先生遺囑「和平、奮鬥、救中國」相贈，落款則寫著「民國九十四年、二○○五、四月廿七日」。

連戰是兩岸分隔近六十年來，第一位到中山陵謁陵的國民黨主席。訪問團成員昨天身著深色西裝，形成一支肅穆的隊伍，沿著中山陵三百九十二級石階而上，先後經過巨大的牌坊分別題著「博愛」、「天下為公」、「民族、民權、民生」等字。

熱情的南京市民夾道歡迎，中共武警的安全戒備也控制不了，他們形成一波又一波包圍訪問團和媒體的超級人牆，人牆不斷湧動在遼闊的中山陵廣場，場面相當壯觀。

連戰在中山陵前的博愛廣場對群眾發表公開談話。「各位市民同胞」，連戰這樣起頭說，今年是國父逝世八十周年，也是對日抗戰勝利六十周年，在此時刻，他代表國民黨率團前來向創建國民黨的總理致上最高敬意，心情非常嚴肅及虔敬。當連戰說到「抗戰勝利」的時侯，在場的大陸群眾也響起了熱烈掌聲。

連戰稱呼孫中山為「兩岸共同尊崇的國族前輩」，並引用大陸的說法也稱孫中山為「革命先行者」，以孫中山聯結兩岸的歷史時空。他說，孫中山領導國民革命、推翻滿清，建立亞洲第一個民主國家「中華民國」，他不只是革命家、更是政治家，以民主、自由、均富的理念追求中華民族的復興與強盛，犧牲奉獻死而後已，「他的生命奮鬥史也是我們民族的生命奮鬥史」。

連戰指出，面對兩岸局勢嚴峻僵持，我們不能忘記孫中山的「和平、奮鬥、救中國」，中華民族要有前途、有自信，更期盼大家本著和平奮鬥的精神，抓住這個時代，讓台灣持續發展均富，也讓大陸快速成長為小康社會，「這是我們念茲在茲的總體目標」。

連戰的談話獲得在場群眾的熱烈掌聲，許多人甚至激動的流下淚來。連戰在中山陵當場揮毫，留下「中山美陵」的墨寶，將來要掛在中山陵的紀念館。中山陵並為連戰的到來特別打開了寫有「天下為公」四個字的陵門，這是六十年來的第一次。

Mrs. Museveni's claim that abstinence had triumphed over AIDS in Uganda is incorrect. Between 1988 and 2001, the average age at which young Ugandan women started sexual activity rose by less than a year, even though the national HIV rate fell by some 70 percent.[4] Most Ugandan girls begin having sex at around age seventeen, a year or so younger than in Zimbabwe, where HIV rates are about five times higher. More than half of all Ugandan women have been pregnant by age nineteen. HIV rates in pregnant teenage Ugandan girls fell rapidly during the first half of the 1990s, but during this time, the rate and ages at which these girls became pregnant—a marker of their sexual activity—barely changed at all.[5] Moreover, a study carried out in a rural area of Uganda found that young women who abstain from sex until they are twenty are just as likely to become infected with HIV by age twenty-four as young women who first had sex in their teens.

But condom programs in Uganda are now threatened. Under pressure from both the Ugandan and US governments, billboards advertising condoms, for years a common sight throughout the country, were taken down in December 2004. Radio ads with such slogans as "LifeGuard condoms! Ribbed for extra pleasure!" were to be replaced with messages from the cardinal of Uganda and the archbishop about the importance of abstinence and faithfulness within marriage. In November 2004, Engabu, a highly popular Ugandan condom brand, was pulled from the shelves because of alleged problems with its manufacture. At the same time, the government now insists that all condoms entering the country be subjected to additional quality control tests. However, Uganda does not have the equipment to carry out such tests, and this has resulted in a shortage of condoms.

Condoms have a controversial history in Uganda, and official attitudes toward them tend to shift with the ebb and flow of US government funds. During the 1980s and early 1990s, condoms were not widely available in Uganda, and many people did not believe they really worked. The government did not promote their use and religious leaders denounced them as immoral and "un-African."[11] Health experts at USAID and other international agencies were concerned about this because they were skeptical that Uganda's existing AIDS programs would work. In 1986, the Ugandan Ministry of Health had launched a campaign known as "Zero Grazing"— Ugandan slang meaning "don't have casual sexual relationships," but did not promote condoms.

Then, in the early 1990s, the World Bank, USAID, and other donor agencies set out to make condoms more appealing, not only to citizens, but also to policymakers and religious leaders. By then, population experts had had considerable success encouraging the use of a variety of contraceptives—all initially unpopular—in other developing countries, with an approach known as "social marketing," which uses advertising and marketing techniques to encourage people to adopt healthful practices. They had found that when condoms and other contraceptives were distributed free of charge in bland medical packaging, people found them unappealing. But when packaged in bright, colorful sleeves, and advertised on billboards and radio spots as sexy and fun, they were much more popular.

Selling condoms in shops, even at very low prices, rather then distributing them free, also added to their cachet. In Uganda, USAID began funding condom social marketing programs in the early 1990s. At the same time, the agency increased funding for the Ministry of Health, the Uganda AIDS Commission, and various church-affiliated organizations run by some of the leaders who most vocally denounced condoms. This new funding had the effect of toning down public criticism of condoms. Meanwhile, the Zero Grazing campaign was gradually phased out.

By the late 1990s, international contractors that specialize in social marketing, such as Population Services International, authors of the comic book that Ssempa complained about, were selling hundreds of millions of condoms each year in Africa. Organizations like PSI don't make money on the condoms they sell, but they do obtain lucrative government contracts to carry out social marketing programs. Uganda's social marketing campaigns were especially dynamic, and, as the Makerere student informed me, condoms had become part of Ugandan culture.

Then, shortly after Mrs. Museveni returned from Washington in 2003, where she had helped Republicans lobby for the $1 billion appropriated for abstinence programs, Ugandan officials resumed denouncing condoms after a ten-year hiatus. In a speech at an international meeting of AIDS experts in 2004, President Museveni said AIDS was "a moral problem," caused by "undisciplined sex," and that condoms should be reserved for prostitutes. Mrs. Museveni has accused those who promote condoms of racism. "They think Africans cannot control their sexual drives," she said in a speech last year. "We will prove them wrong!" She has warned young people that organizations that promote condoms are only after their money. On a similar note, Information Minister James Butoro, like Mrs. Museveni a born-again Christian, accused condom social marketing organizations of "profiteering."

In 1986, Ugandan health officials had not heard of "long-term concurrency" and Professor Morris had not constructed the computer models that traced the transmission of HIV. Nevertheless, the Ugandans knew that HIV was spreading rapidly through networks of sexual relationships, and it was killing people. They also knew it would be unrealistic to insist that all men abandon their extra wives and mistresses, many of whom depend on the men for the opportunity to work on the land and for money and consumer goods for themselves and their children. Zero Grazing was a compromise. It recognized that sexual arrangements in Africa are often different from the Western nuclear ideal and serial monogamy. Zero Grazing was mainly addressed to men, and its real message was:

Try to stick to one partner, but if you have to keep your long-term mistresses and concubines and extra wives, at least avoid short-term casual encounters with bar girls and prostitutes. Also, you mustn't casually seduce and exploit young women, who may be susceptible to your charms and wealth.

During the Zero Grazing campaign, the proportion of Ugandan men and women with casual partners fell by 60 percent. On surveys and in focus groups conducted throughout the country, most people said that they were protecting themselves from HIV by reducing their partners or "sticking to one."[15] By the time the Zero Grazing campaign was replaced by condom promotion and other programs in the early 1990s, the decline in the HIV infection rate was well underway. After 1995, when condom social marketing programs took off, the proportion of men with "non-regular" partners rose again. But HIV rates continued to fall, albeit far more slowly. Then, after 2000, HIV rates rose slightly. The reason HIV rates have not soared, even though more men have multiple partners, is almost certainly that the men are using condoms. The reason HIV rates are no longer falling is probably that these men are not using condoms consistently, especially in the longer-term, concurrent relationships where HIV transmission is most like to occur.

I asked David Apuuli, the affable head of the Uganda AIDS Commission, why the government did not revive the Zero Grazing campaign, which seemed to have been so effective. He giggled, poked me with his elbow, and winked theatrically. "You know what that was all about, don't you?" What Dr. Apuuli meant was this:

What kind of an idiot are you? What do you think the Christians are going to say if we start talking about Zero Grazing? Zero Grazing recognized that polygamy, both formal and informal, was normative and legitimate. That would not fly in the current political and religious climate. Mrs. Museveni would have a fit, and the Bush administration, which pours billions of dollars a year into Uganda, would be very dismayed if the country they hold up as a triumph of abstinence education started promoting Zero Grazing.

But there may be other reasons why Zero Grazing is unlikely to be revived. For one thing, there is no multimillion-dollar bureaucracy to support it. For condoms, there are the large contractors like PSI with headquarters in Washington and thousands of employees in plush offices all over the world. Abstinence-only education is supported by a similarly well-endowed network of faith-based and abstinence-only education organizations, mainly in the US. Zero Grazing was devised by Ugandans in the 1980s, when they were facing a terrible problem, and had to deal with it largely on their own. Now that AIDS is a multibillion-dollar enterprise, donors with vast budgets and highly articulate consultants offer health departments in impoverished developing countries a set menu of HIV prevention programs, which consists mainly of abstinence and condoms. Beleaguered health officials have no time, money, or will to devise programs that might better suit their cultures.

Another reason why abstinence programs are favored over Zero Grazing may have to do with the sexual hypocrisy common to all known societies. The revival of interest in virginity in Africa is not always driven by American money. In southern Africa, many communities have revived the custom of virginity testing—in which older women examine unmarried younger women to ensure their hymens are unbroken. Virginity testing has become so popular among the Zulus that it is sometimes carried out en masse, at football stadiums. Meanwhile, Swaziland's King Mswati III decreed in 2001 that all young, unmarried Swazi women should abstain from sex for five years and wear special tassels in their hair, as a signal to men to leave them alone. Fines were imposed on subjects who broke the rule.

Like other abstinence programs, Swaziland's was not a success. Today, four years after the decree, 40 percent of all Swazi adults are HIV-positive— the highest HIV infection rate in the world. While the King frowns on premarital sex, he tolerates polygamy, and indeed has thirteen wives of his own, at last count. He chooses a new bride each August at the annual Reed Dance Festival, where thousands of topless girls in traditional grass skirts dance and sing his praises. In 2003, when the King chose a seventeen-year-old, he fined himself one cow.

The South African anthropologist Suzanne Leclerc-Madlala attributes the revival of interest in virginity to an increasing sense among elders, especially men, that they are losing control of young people and women. All around they see worsening economic and social conditions and the horror of AIDS, and because they are only human, they blame this state of affairs on the loosening morals of increasingly educated, urbanized women and young people, rather than examining how their own behavior also contributes to these problems.[16]

Roe's Birth, and Death
By DAVID BROOKS, New York Times
Published: April 21, 2005

Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Roe v. Wade decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since, and now threatens to destroy the Senate as we know it.

When Blackmun wrote the Roe decision, it took the abortion issue out of the legislatures and put it into the courts. If it had remained in the legislatures, we would have seen a series of state-by-state compromises reflecting the views of the centrist majority that's always existed on this issue. These legislative compromises wouldn't have pleased everyone, but would have been regarded as legitimate.

Religious conservatives became alienated from their own government, feeling that their democratic rights had been usurped by robed elitists. Liberals lost touch with working-class Americans because they never had to have a conversation about values with those voters; they could just rely on the courts to impose their views. The parties polarized as they each became dominated by absolutist activists.

Unable to lobby for their pro-life or pro-choice views in normal ways, abortion activists focused their attention on judicial nominations. Dozens of groups on the right and left have been created to destroy nominees who might oppose their side of the fight. But abortion is never the explicit subject of these confirmation battles. Instead, the groups try to find some other pretext to destroy their foes....

The fact is, the entire country is trapped. Harry Blackmun and his colleagues suppressed that democratic abortion debate the nation needs to have. The poisons have been building ever since. You can complain about the incivility of politics, but you can't stop the escalation of conflict in the middle. You have to kill it at the root. Unless Roe v. Wade is overturned, politics will never get better.

Hedly Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (1977).

Chapter 4, "Order versus Justice in World Politics"

Consider, again, international law. It is not merely that international law sanctifies the status quo without providing for a legislative process whereby the law can be altered by consent and thus causes the pressures for change to consolidate behind demands that the law should be violated in the name of justice. It is also that when the law is violated, and a new situation is brought about by the triumph not necessarily of justice but of force, international law accepts this new situation as legitimate, and concurs in the means whereby it has been brought about. As Mazrui writes, international law condemns aggression, but once aggression has been successful it ceases to be condemned. The conflict between interational law and international justice is endemic because the situations from which the law takes it point of departure are a series of faits accomplis brought about by force and the threat of force, legitimised by the principle that treaties concluded under duress are valid.

There is no general incompatibility as between order in the abstract, in the sense in which it has been defined, and justice in any of the meanings that have been reviewed. We may imagine, in other words, a society in which there is pattern of activity that sustains elementary or primary goals of social life, and also provides for advanced or secondary goals of justice or equality, for states, for individuals and in terms of the world common good. There is no a priori reason for holding that such a society is unattainable, or that there is any inconsistency in pursuing both world order and world justice. There is, however, incompatibility as between the rules and institutions that now sustain order within the society of states, and demands for world justice, which imply the destruction of this society, demands for human justice, which it can accomodate only in a selective and partial way, and demands for interstate and international justice, to which it is not basically hostile, but to which also it can provide only limited satisfaction.

In the last few years, efforts to find ways to save more marriages and other long-term relationships have increased.

With an experimental approach called integrative behavioral couples therapy, for example, 67 percent of couples significantly improved their relationships for two years, according to a study reported in November to the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy.

Instead of teaching couples how to avoid or solve arguments, as traditional counseling techniques do, the integrative therapy aims to make arguments less hurtful by helping partners accept their differences. It is based on a recent finding that it is not whether a couple fights but how they fight that can destroy a relationship.

Especially encouraging, all of the couples in the study were at high risk of divorce. "Many had been couples therapy failures," said Dr. Andrew Christensen, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles and the lead author of the study.

But Dr. Gottman, who uses marriage education workshops and couples therapy, has found that workshops alone are insufficient for 20 percent to 30 percent of couples in his research. These couples have problems - like a history of infidelity or depression - that can be addressed only in therapy, he said.

Couples therapy, also called marriage counseling and marriage therapy, refers to a number of psychotherapy techniques that aim to help couples understand and overcome conflicts in their relationship.

A relatively new approach that studies have found highly effective is called emotionally focused therapy, with 70 to 73 percent of couples reaching recovery - the point where their satisfaction with their relationship is within normal limits - for up to two years, the length of the studies.

Dr. Johnson, who helped develop emotionally focused therapy in the 1990's, said that it enabled couples to identify and break free of the destructive emotional cycles that they fell into.

"A classic one is that one person criticizes, the other withdraws," she said. "The more I push, the more you withdraw. We talk about how both partners are victims of these cycles."

As the partners reveal their feelings during these cycles, they build trust and strengthen their connection to each other, she said.

Surprisingly, Dr. Johnson said, until emotionally focused therapy came along, therapists were so intent on getting couples to make contracts to change their behavior that they did not delve into the emotional underpinnings of a relationship.

"It was like leaving chicken out of chicken soup," she said.

Dr. Johnson's latest research, completed in January, included 24 of the most at-risk couples, people who were unable to reconcile because their trust in each other had been shattered by extramarital affairs and other serious injuries to their relationship.

"These injuries are like a torpedo," she said. "They take a marriage down."

The study found that after 8 to 12 sessions, a majority of the couples had healed their injuries and rebuilt their trust.

Most important, these gains lasted for three years. "It's very satisfying to know that we can make a difference with these couples and that it sticks," Dr. Johnson said.

Alice, a library program coordinator in Honesdale, Pa., credits her couples therapy, which focused on emotional issues, with getting her and her husband to reunite after a yearlong separation.

"The marriage counselor brought us back together," she said.

Alice, who did not want her last name used out of privacy concerns, said an important catalyst for their reunion was the therapist's asking each to think about the ways that the other person wanted to feel appreciated and loved. Gradually, she said, she has come to see that her husband's needs were different from her own.

"Going back to this exercise is one thing that has gotten us through hard times," she said.

But not all marriages are salvageable, therapists say. "Some people are fundamentally mismatched, and they can't benefit from therapy," Dr. Gottman said.

Others - beyond the scope of couples therapy or marriage education programs - are people with personality disorders and relationships marred by violence and intimidation.

"We have nothing to offer them," he said.

Nationalist lawmakers, headed by a former defense minister, announced plans to visit the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japan's 2.5 million war dead, on Friday, an aide to lawmaker Yasu Kano said on condition of anonymity.

He said the visit was planned well in advance and had nothing to do with the anti-Japanese riots rocking China.

But Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang noted that the dead honored at the Tokyo shrine include executed war criminals, whom he called the "planners and conspirators" of World War II.

"We hope the Japanese leaders could fully respect the people in the victimized countries in Asia, including the Chinese people," Qin said in Beijing. He called on Japanese leaders to "refrain from doing anything that might harm the feelings of Asian people."

The ruling upheld a 1999 lower court ruling that international law barred foreign citizens from seeking compensation from the Japanese government for wartime actions.

Beijing, meanwhile, said Tuesday it wanted U.N. heritage protection for a germ warfare laboratory in northeastern China, to serve as a reminder of "horrible atrocities" committed by Japanese troops.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan urged Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and Chinese President Hu Jintao to meet this weekend in Jakarta, Indonesia, where all three will be attending the Asia-Africa summit.

"They have lots of relationship on all fronts -- political, economic and social -- and I hope those important aspects of their relationship will encourage them to resolve their differences," Annan said Monday.

From Wikipedia's entry on the Yakusuni Shrine

About 1,000 POWs executed for war crimes during World War II are enshrined here. This was not a political issue back then as Yasukuni was supposed to enshrine all Japanese War casualties. However, on October 17, 1978, 13 Class A war criminals (according to the judgement of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East), including Hideki Tojo, were quietly enshrined as "Martyrs of Showa" (昭和殉難者 Shōwa junnansha). They are among the gods that rest peacefully in the shrine, with other heros who fought for Japan. When revealed to the media on April 19, 1979, this started a controversy which rages to this day. The shrine has further angered many with its defiant defense of the war criminals; the same pamphlet mentioned above also claims: "Some 1,068 people, who were wrongly accused as war criminals by the Allied court, were enshrined here." The shrine's English-language website refers to those 1,068 as those "who were cruelly and unjustly tried as war criminals by a sham-like tribunal of the Allied forces." After the revelation of 1979, the Emperor of Japan stopped paying visits to the shrine and this has remained the case ever since. However there are also strong voices amongst the people of Japan in support of the visits [1] (http://www.asahi.com/special/shijiritsu/TKY200404190343.html), including Governor of Tokyo Shintaro Ishihara, who on August 15, 2004, indicated his strong hope for the Emperor to once again start paying visits to the shrine.

The controversial nature of the shrine has figured largely in both domestic Japanese politics and the country's relations with other countries in the region in the years since 1978. Three Japanese prime ministers have caused an uproar by visiting the shrine since then: Yasuhiro Nakasone in 1985, Ryutaro Hashimoto in 1996, and especially Junichiro Koizumi, who visited four times, in August 13, 2001, April 23, 2002, January 15, 2003 and January 1, 2004. Visits by prime ministers to the shrine generally provoke official condemnation by nations in the region, especially the People's Republic of China and South Korea, as they see such action as the the attempt to legitimise Japanese militarism.

Associate Professor of Political Science at the private Soochow University Emile Sheng also said Taiwan had gone through an "enormous upheaval" in the past few months.

He ruled out the possibility that China fever would inflame the Taiwan independence movement in turn."In past years, the situation has changed quite a bit," Sheng said.

Developing economic ties with China has become more important and public perceptions were influenced by business tycoon Shi Wen-long renouncing his belief in Taiwan independence on the eve of a mass demonstration against China's anti-secession law, Sheng said.

"For the short term, mainstream public opinion does not want to see forced reunification but it does not want to see a war either," Sheng said."If China does something outrageous it will give the (pro-independence) fundamentalists ammunition, but so far, aside from the anti-secession law, everything China is showing is goodwill," he said.

He said China was placing less importance on its cherished "one China" principle and the "one country two systems" model for reunification than it had in the past.

Yang said President Chen could not turn his back on Beijing and needed to take the initiative with the Communist power rather than just react to new developments.

He said Soong could sound out Beijing's bottom line on Taiwan if the two sides were to negotiate a peace settlement, adding it most suited Soong's political interests to cooperate with Chen.

"Beijings' objective is to prevent independence and Taiwan's objective is a peace settlement."It's a win-win situation," Yang said.The analyst said the two sides could then create their own status quo which was not supported by the U.S. He said the U.S. would welcome this and not intervene.

Tensions have soared between the two Asian countries since Japan approved a nationalist history textbook this month, leading to sometimes violent anti Japanese demonstrations in China.

Activists have called on the Chinese to stop buying select Japanese brands with alleged links to the textbook campaign and other nationalist causes.

Japan is China's third largest trading partner after the European Union and the United States.

But for Japan, China has replaced the United States as its largest trading partner, with bilateral trade hitting a record US$168 billion in 2004 and seen on the uptrend.

"If Japanese factories shut down in China, it's going to hurt the employment of local people," he said.

Ma also pointed to the negative impact of prolonged anti-Japanese protests on securing employees with higher skills, who might choose to work instead for European and North American companies.

The Medical Money Pit
By PAUL KRUGMAN, New York Times
Published: April 15, 2005

In fact, Britain's system isn't as bad as its reputation - especially for lower-paid workers, whose counterparts in the United States often have no health insurance at all. And the waiting lists have gotten shorter.

But in any case, Britain isn't the country we want to look at, because its health care system is run on the cheap, with total spending per person only 40 percent as high as ours.

The countries that have something to teach us are the nations that don't pinch pennies to the same extent - like France, Germany or Canada - but still spend far less than we do. (Yes, Canada also has waiting lists, but they're much shorter than Britain's - and Canadians overwhelmingly prefer their system to ours. France and Germany don't have a waiting list problem.)

In 2002, the latest year for which comparable data are available, the United States spent $5,267 on health care for each man, woman and child in the population. Of this, $2,364, or 45 percent, was government spending, mainly on Medicare and Medicaid. Canada spent $2,931 per person, of which $2,048 came from the government. France spent $2,736 per person, of which $2,080 was government spending.

Amazing, isn't it? U.S. health care is so expensive that our government spends more on health care than the governments of other advanced countries, even though the private sector pays a far higher share of the bills than anywhere else.

Most Americans probably don't know that we have substantially lower life-expectancy and higher infant-mortality figures than other advanced countries. It would be wrong to jump to the conclusion that this poor performance is entirely the result of a defective health care system; social factors, notably America's high poverty rate, surely play a role. Still, it seems puzzling that we spend so much, with so little return.

A 2003 study published in Health Affairs (one of whose authors is my Princeton colleague Uwe Reinhardt) tried to resolve that puzzle by comparing a number of measures of health services across the advanced world. What the authors found was that the United States scores high on high-tech services - we have lots of M.R.I.'s - but on more prosaic measures, like the number of doctors' visits and number of days spent in hospitals, America is only average, or even below average. There's also direct evidence that identical procedures cost far more in the U.S. than in other advanced countries.

The authors concluded that Americans spend far more on health care than their counterparts abroad - but they don't actually receive more care. The title of their article? "It's the Prices, Stupid."

Why is the price of U.S. health care so high? One answer is doctors' salaries: although average wages in France and the United States are similar, American doctors are paid much more than their French counterparts. Another answer is that America's health care system drives a poor bargain with the pharmaceutical industry.

Above all, a large part of America's health care spending goes into paperwork. A 2003 study in The New England Journal of Medicine estimated that administrative costs took 31 cents out of every dollar the United States spent on health care, compared with only 17 cents in Canada.

Loudly, With a Big Stick
By DAVID BROOKS, New York Times
Published: April 14, 2005

I don't like John Bolton's management style. Nor am I a big fan of his foreign policy views. He doesn't really believe in using U.S. power to end genocide or promote democracy.

But it is ridiculous to say he doesn't believe in the United Nations. This is a canard spread by journalists who haven't bothered to read his stuff and by crafty politicians who aren't willing to say what the Bolton debate is really about.

The Bolton controversy isn't about whether we believe in the U.N. mission. It's about which U.N. mission we believe in.

We'll never accept it, first, because it is undemocratic. It is impossible to set up legitimate global authorities because there is no global democracy, no sense of common peoplehood and trust. So multilateral organizations can never look like legislatures, with open debate, up or down votes and the losers accepting majority decisions.

Instead, they look like meetings of unelected elites, of technocrats who make decisions in secret and who rely upon intentionally impenetrable language, who settle differences through arcane fudges. Americans, like most peoples, will never surrender even a bit of their national democracy for the sake of multilateral technocracy.

Second, we will never accept global governance because it inevitably devolves into corruption. The panoply of U.N. scandals flows from a single source: the lack of democratic accountability. These supranational organizations exist in their own insular, self-indulgent aerie.

We will never accept global governance, third, because we love our Constitution and will never grant any other law supremacy over it. Like most peoples (Europeans are the exception), we will never allow transnational organizations to overrule our own laws, regulations and precedents. We think our Constitution is superior to the sloppy authority granted to, say, the International Criminal Court.

Fourth, we understand that these mushy international organizations liberate the barbaric and handcuff the civilized. Bodies like the U.N. can toss hapless resolutions at the Milosevics, the Saddams or the butchers of Darfur, but they can do nothing to restrain them. Meanwhile, the forces of decency can be paralyzed as they wait for "the international community."

Fifth, we know that when push comes to shove, all the grand talk about international norms is often just a cover for opposing the global elite's bêtes noires of the moment - usually the U.S. or Israel. We will never grant legitimacy to forums that are so often manipulated for partisan ends.

THE NEW PITCH
by KEN AULETTA, New Yorker
Do ads still work?
Issue of 2005-03-28

Broadcasters continue to take steps to accommodate advertisers. ESPN has been experimenting with using a split screen for commercial breaks: ads play on one side while sports action continues, silently, on the other. Network dramas and situation comedies have more sex, more action, more urban appeal. Susan Lyne, the former president of ABC Entertainment, says, “Anything that is complex narrative storytelling—one-hour dramas, narrative miniseries, character-driven movies for television—advertisers don’t believe there is an audience under fifty for these kinds of shows.”

This year, Zazza told me, a billion dollars will be spent on product placement in the United States, up from half a billion last year. Next year, he guessed, the figure will double again, coming to represent a fifth of what is spent on all network television advertising. The challenge for agencies is to figure out how to replace the fees they once earned on thirty-second spots. One method is for advertisers to invest aggressively in programs where they have some control over the scripts. On behalf of Sears and Unilever, for instance, MindShare, WPP’s media-buying arm, has joined with ABC to develop comedies and dramas and share in the profits.

]]> 2005-04-13T02:41:46Z 2005-04-13T00:52:38Z tag:csua.berkeley.edu,2005:/~mrl/mt//1.15 2005-04-13T00:52:38Z

There's a good review of Jeffrey Sachs' new book in the New Yorker. Sachs was involved in designing the economic reform programs in Poland and Russia in the early 1990s and today is heading the UN's Millenial development program. ALWAYS...

mrl http://csua.berkeley.edu/~mrl mrl218@yahoo.comREMOVE Development There's a good review of Jeffrey Sachs' new book in the New Yorker. Sachs was involved in designing the economic reform programs in Poland and Russia in the early 1990s and today is heading the UN's Millenial development program.

ALWAYS WITH US
by JOHN CASSIDY
Jeffrey Sachs's plan to eradicate world poverty.
Issue of 2005-04-11
Jeffrey Sachs "The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time" (Penguin Press; $27.95).

Under the U.N. plan, financial assistance would be extended until 2015, as long as the recipients met certain performance targets. Health care, primary schooling, and other services for the poor would be provided free of charge, reversing the recent trend toward user fees, which the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have encouraged in a misguided effort to improve efficiency. "The extreme poor don't have enough to eat, much less to pay for electricity or water or bed nets or contraceptives," Sachs observes.

]]> He's surely right to emphasize spending on health care, direct poverty relief, and education. For one thing, rates of infection, malnutrition, and enrollment in schools are a lot easier to monitor than over-all economic progress. In Tanzania in 2001, for example, the government more than doubled the education budget and abolished user fees, using aid money to help meet the cost. Since then, the enrollment rate in primary schools has risen from sixty per cent to ninety per cent.

Yet, as the history of development policy suggests, there can be political dangers to overpromising, and Sachs, by placing so much emphasis on geography, underplays other reasons for Africa's stalled development. Most African countries, bequeathed arbitrary borders by their colonial heritages, are ethnically heterogeneous, and that has led to political problems, as groups compete for the spoils of government. Kenya, which contains about forty different ethnic communities, has been plagued by corruption and ethnic conflict, as have many African nations. Congo, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, and several other countries have been riven by what the development economist Paul Collier refers to as resource wars, in which rival ethnic groups compete for control of valuable natural resources.

Sachs, as he did in Poland and Russia, refuses to acknowledge that institutional failures could hobble his ambitious plans. "Africa shows absolutely no tendency to be more or less corrupt than any other countries at the same income level," he writes. Then he presents the results of a study that he and some colleagues carried out recently, using various indicators of quality of governance. Countries they judge to have "average" standards of governance include Chad, Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone—all places that have recently experienced devastating civil conflicts.

Many African scholars, such as the Ghanaian economist George B. N. Ayittey, are far more willing to criticize their kleptocratic governments than Sachs is. Ayittey points out that aid money sometimes helps corrupt and incompetent regimes to remain in power. The World Bank and the I.M.F. extended nine loans to the tyrannical administration of Mobutu Sese Seko, who looted Zaire for decades, at one point taking personal control of an entire gold-mining region. Sweden and other Scandinavian countries supported Julius Nyerere's socialist regime in Tanzania, which almost destroyed the agricultural sector by dragooning scattered bushmen into collective farms.

Sachs also downplays the problem of misappropriated aid. Many African nations are so poor that under the U.N. plan they would probably receive annual aid payments equivalent to fifteen to twenty per cent of their gross domestic product. Without adequate safeguards, one has to wonder how much of this money would end up helping the people it was supposed to reach. Sachs's plan calls for recipient governments to commit to good governance, it's true, but, once the money started flowing, these assurances would need to be supplemented with stringent external supervision.

Here's the Paul Collier article mentioned in the review:

Natural Resources and Conflict in Africa

By Paul Collier
October 2004
[...]

Two contrasting examples help to bring the issues into focus. Thirty years ago Botswana and Sierra Leone had the same level of per capita income. Then they both received enormous diamond income. The government of Botswana succeeded brilliantly in harnessing these revenues for economic growth: for many years Botswana was not just the fastest growing economy in Africa, it was the fastest growing economy in the world. As a landlocked desert, it is easy to imagine Botswana’s fate in the absence of diamonds. Sierra Leone had a dramatically different experience. The diamond revenues fomented violent political contests which destroyed the society. The economy collapsed, and now the country is at the bottom of the Human Development Index. The differential between the two countries in terms of per capita income is now an astonishing ten-to-one. The economic and political governance of natural resource revenues was evidently absolutely vital in producing this massive divergence in outcome. In short, although policies and governance always matter, they matter much more where there are large natural resource rents. Africa needs more Botswanas and fewer Sierra Leones: which of them will Equatorial Guinea, Sao Tome and Principe, Mauritania, and Gambia resemble two decades hence?

If I was a citizen of an African natural resource economy I would want to know how to become Botswana and to avoid the fate of Sierra Leone. I think that the magic ingredient that makes the difference is scrutiny of government by the country’s citizens. Unfortunately, scrutiny is a ‘public good’ – that is, if it is provided, the whole society benefits. The incentives for individual action are thus all wrong – basically, the smart thing to do is to sit back and hope that someone else goes to the trouble of providing public goods such as scrutiny. Societies need ‘collective action’ to overcome the public goods problem and because Africa’s societies are so highly diverse –more ethnically diverse than anywhere else in the world - they find it unusually difficult to supply public goods at the national level.

Of course, people and groups lobby the government, but overwhelmingly this lobbying is not for the national interest but for individual or group advantage. But there are ways around this problem. In an ethnically diverse society it is probably much easier to organize scrutiny at the local or regional level than at the national level – at the local level ethnicity is likely to unite people in collective action, just as at the national level it is likely to divide them and frustrate collective action. If the rents from natural resources could be transparently and fairly distributed to sub-national levels of government there is some hope that such governments would come to face serious citizen scrutiny. The challenge is to get to this stage where rents accruing at the national level are seen to be fairly distributed to the regions.

The Right Agenda for Outsiders

This is where the rest of us come in – those of us who are not African citizens and so have little basis to tell African governments what they should and shouldn’t be doing. What we can legitimately do is to make it easier for African citizens to get to the stage at which they can overcome their collective action problem and scrutinize how resource rents are used at the local level. Specifically, we can help to make natural resource rents transparent at the national level. This has been the agenda of NGOs such as Global Witness – now picked up by the British government’s Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative – and I think that it is the right agenda. At least, it is the right agenda for us. Transparency in reporting revenues is itself only an input into scrutiny – it makes domestic scrutiny easier. It doesn’t make it happen automatically, but without transparency in revenues there can be no scrutiny of how they are used.

Another key area for international action is that banks should be required to cooperate in tracking down misappropriated natural resource rents. For example, the Nigerian government has recently abandoned the attempt to repatriate the vast Abacha wealth from London banks because the process was proving to be an unending legal nightmare. What is the incentive for African societies to scrutinize their leaders if corrupt wealth is so well-defended by Western legal systems?

A further area for international action is the acquisition of natural resource contracts. Too often Western corporations have connived with African political leaders to reach deals that were mutually profitable at the expense of the country. Transparent competitive tendering must become the norm. When North Sea oil concessions were awarded we would not have tolerated an oil company concluding a secret private deal with a minister; we should not tolerate such a practice in Africa.

This, to my mind, is the agenda for corporate social responsibility in Africa: transparency in bidding for resource concessions; transparency in revenue payments to governments; and cooperation by banks in tracking misappropriation of rents. Sadly, it is far from the currently dominant agenda. International resource extraction companies live in terror of two powerful forces – Western consumers who may boycott their products; and the local people living around their installations, who may kidnap employees and damage equipment. They have responded to Western consumer pressure – itself based on a lazy, teenage misdiagnosis of Africa’s ills – by trying to look like good employers and good environmentalists. They have responded to local extortion rackets by providing health and education facilities in the neighborhood of their installations. Frankly, both of these are at best irrelevant. High wages mess up the labour market and so cost jobs; it is governments, not companies, that should be supplying basic social services. What has got lost is the legitimate, indeed essential role that companies can play in helping African societies to scrutinize their governments. Corporate social responsibility in Africa must be radically redefined.