Friday, November 21, 2008

Arab Bloggers size up Obama

Good & relevant comments from real average people in Edypt, Syria, Bahrain, Jordan, Lebanon & Iraq. A hopeful & sobering look at the impact of America's choice of President.

Egyptian Chronicles, Egypt (egyptianchronicles.blogspot.com)

The Egyptian people are glad that Obama won despite their previous knowledge of his bias to Israel, and his V.P. is a Zionist. But still they are happy because they can't stand the Republicans anymore.

Good for the Americans.

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Esra'a, Bahrain (mideastyouth.com)

I can honestly say that we can finally wave goodbye to the overwhelming anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bigotry that we have suffered with for the past eight years under the Bush administration. We can expect less wars, less corruption, less political abuse. It won't be perfect, but it will get better. I am so happy and proud of all the Americans who worked extremely hard for Obama, understanding fully well the importance of change in every sense of the word. This moment is not just historical but crucial to us here in the Middle East.

This is a win for all of us, not just America.

This is a win for civil rights and justice.

For all the pessimists out there, allow us to enjoy this moment. If you learned anything from this campaign, you would learn that it starts with hope - not cynicism. And hope is what I have right now, for America and the Middle East.

We can do it, and this time, we can be sure that we can do it together.

I haven't said this in a really long time, but I am loving America right now.

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The Skeptic, Egypt (elijahzarwan.net/blog)

A new day dawned in Cairo today. As it does every day.

And it started as it always does: with birds, schoolchildren and car horns. No national holiday here.

I'm looking forward to going out in the streets to hear the reaction. The best reaction I've heard so far: "Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job."

Bah humbug. I confess I'm moved.

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Land and People, Lebanon (landandpeople.blogspot.com)

My take on this is that he is the president of the United States, and not Barack Obama. That said, I would really like to hope for change. After all, Obama showed that change was possible: He himself changed from a supporter of Palestinian rights into a man who believes that Jerusalem is the historic capital of Israel. He also changed during his campaign from "No Iraq war for me please, I'm trying to quit" into "All right I'll have some, but a tiny piece please."

People in the Middle East are expecting to see Obama act differently from previous U.S. presidents because he is darker-skinned. Time will show again that the color of the skin has little to do with politics, democracy and equity. Just look at the Arab world with its homegrown dictatorships.

But the question that really interests me is about the relationship between Obama and the true center of world power, Kapital. There was an awful lot of money in Obama's campaign ... A great chunk must have come from carefully planned investments by CEO's and multinationals. Will Obama be able to confront the mega-corporations? Does he want to? The poor and the colored population of the world, including that of the U.S., is the one that suffers most from malnutrition and hunger and food insecurity. We know now that mega-corporations, pushing for more profit at any cost, are responsible for most of the damage. Will Obama do something about that? Does he want to? Can he?

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An Arab Woman Blues, Iraq (arabwomanblues.blogspot.com)

So Obama, the booma, won the elections. I had already predicted that in my post "A long American-Iranian Film."

I said the following, "My hunch is and my hunches are rarely wrong, if Obama the booma wins, and he will, by a small margin, Iraq will be handed over to Iran ..."

I also said that Obama will strike a deal with Ahmadinejad on Iraq and in particular southern Iraq.

And lo and behold, the vice president for the booma Obama is none other than J. Biden. J. Biden, the Zionist, is an ardent supporter of the partition of Iraq into three statelets. No wonder Maliki & Co. were also backing the booma along with Iran. I also know that Iran had generously contributed to the Obama campaign.

... I shall not congratulate you on your 44th president. He will simply finish off what the other Zionists had started - the final partition of my country.

To hell with all of you and all of your presidents.

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Neurotic Iraqi Wife, Iraq (neurotic-iraqi-wife.blogspot.com)

For me, this is not just about history, this is about someone who was able to bring down the very people that broke my country. It's a great punch to the very people that destroyed the individual Iraqi.

And that to me is an enough victory.

I will only have to say to Mr. Obama, don't let us down.

America's outdated Electoral College

Thursday, November 20, 2008

On Dec. 15, the United States will endure a quadrennial ritual born in the economics and politics of slavery and the quill-pen era. Members of the Electoral College are scheduled to meet in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia to formally choose the next president.

There is no real doubt about how the electors will vote, but it is disturbing that they have any role at all in making this vital choice in the 21st century. The Electoral College is more than just an antiquated institution: It actively disenfranchises voters and occasionally (think 2000) makes the candidate with fewer popular votes president. American democracy would be far stronger without it.

There is no reason to feel sentimental about the Electoral College. One of the main reasons the founders created it was slavery. The Southern states liked the fact that their slaves, who would be excluded from a direct vote, would be counted - as three-fifths of a white person - when Electoral College votes were apportioned.

The founders also were concerned, in the day of the wooden printing press, that voters would not have enough information to choose candidates. It was believed that it would be easier for them to vote for local officials, whom they knew more about, to be electors. It is hard to imagine that voters thought they did not know enough about Barack Obama and John McCain by Election Day this year.

And, while these reasons for the Electoral College have lost all relevance, its disadvantages loom ever larger. To start, the system excludes many voters from a meaningful role in presidential elections.

If you live in New York or Texas, for example, it is generally a foregone conclusion which party will win your state's electoral votes, so your vote has less meaning - and it can feel especially meaningless if you vote on the losing side. On the other hand, if you live in Florida or Ohio, where the outcome is less clear, your vote has a greatly magnified importance.

Voters in small states are favored because Electoral College votes are based on the number of senators and representatives a state has.

The Electoral College also makes America seem more divided along blue-red lines than it actually is. If you look at an Electoral College map, California appears solidly blue and Alabama solidly red. But if you look at a map of the popular votes, you see a more nuanced picture. More than 4.5 million Californians voted for McCain (roughly as many votes as he got in Texas), while about 40 percent of voters in Alabama backed Obama.

One of the biggest problems with the Electoral College, of course, is that three times since the Civil War - most recently, with George W. Bush in 2000 - it has awarded the presidency to the loser of the popular vote. The president should be the candidate who wins the votes of the most Americans.

The best way to abolish the Electoral College is to amend the Constitution. Until that happens, a national popular-vote movement is working to get states representing a majority of the electoral votes to agree to award their votes to the candidate who has the most votes nationally. That would effectively end the Electoral College.

When the 2012 presidential election approaches, efforts to reform the system will be viewed through a partisan prism. With the next election still four years away, now is an ideal time to get serious about abolishing the Electoral College.

India's stepchildren, making their way home. by: Anand Giridharadas

Thursday, November 20, 2008

VERLA, India: "What are Papa and I doing here?"

These words, instant-messaged by my mother in a suburb of Washington, D.C., whizzed through the deep-ocean cables and came to me in the village where I'm now living, in the country that she left.

It was five years ago that I left America to come live and work in India. Now, in our family and among our Indian-American friends, other children of immigrants are exploring motherland opportunities. The idea is spreading virally through émigré households across the West.

Which raises a heart-stirring question: If our parents left India and trudged westward for us, if they manufactured from scratch a new life there for us, if they slogged, saved, sacrificed to make our lives lighter than theirs, then what does it mean when we choose to migrate to the place they forsook?

If we are here, what are they doing there?

They came of age in the 1970s, when the "there" seemed paved with possibility and the "here" seemed paved with potholes. As a young trainee, my father felt frustrated in companies that awarded roles based on age, not achievement. He looked at his bosses, 20 years ahead of him in line, and concluded that he didn't want to spend his life becoming them.

My parents married in India and then embarked to America on a lonely, thrilling adventure. They learned together to drive, shop in malls, paint a house. They decided who and how to be. They kept reinventing themselves, discarding the invention, starting anew. My father became a management consultant, an entrepreneur, a human-resources executive, then a Ph.D. candidate. My mother began as a homemaker, learned ceramics, became a ceramics teacher and then the head of the art department at one of the best schools in Washington.

It was extraordinary, and ordinary: This is what America did to people, what it always has done.

My parents brought us to India every few years as children. I relished time with relatives; but India always felt alien, impenetrable, frozen.

Perhaps it was the survivalism born of scarcity: the fierce pushing to get off the plane, the miserliness even of the rich, the obsession with doctors and engineers and the neglect of all others. Perhaps it was the bureaucracy, the need to know someone to do anything. Perhaps it was the culture shock of servitude: a child's horror at reading "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in an American middle school, then seeing servants slapped and degraded in India.

My firsthand impression of India seemed to confirm the rearview immigrant myth of it: a land of impossibilities.

But history bends, and sometimes swerves, and sometimes swivels fully around.

India, having fruitlessly pursued command economics, tried something new: it liberalized, privatized, globalized. The economy boomed, and hope began to course through towns and villages shackled by fatalism and low expectations.

America, meanwhile, floundered. In a short blink of history came 9/11, outsourcing, Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina, emerging economies, rogue nuclear nations, climate change, dwindling oil, a financial crisis.

Pessimism crept into the sunniest nation. A vast majority saw America going astray. Books heralded a "Post-American World."

"In the U.S., there's a crisis of confidence," said Nandan Nilekani, co-chairman of Infosys Technologies, the Indian software giant, and author of a forthcoming book, "Imagining India."

"In India," he added, "for the first time after decades or centuries, there is a sense of optimism about the future, a sense that our children's futures can be better than ours if we try hard enough."

My love for my birth country never flickered. But these new times piqued my interest in my ancestral land. Many of us, the stepchildren of India, felt its change of spirit, felt the gravitational force of condensed hope. And we came.

At first we felt confused by India's formalities and hierarchies, by British phraseology even the British had jettisoned, by the ubiquity of acronyms. We wondered what the newspapers meant when they said "INSAT-4CR in orbit, DTH to get a boost."

Working in offices, some of us were perplexed to be invited to "S&M conferences," only to discover that this denoted sales and marketing.

Several found to their chagrin that it is acceptable for a man to touch your inner thigh when you crack a joke in a meeting.

We learned new expressions: "He is on tour" (means: He is traveling. Doesn't mean: He has joined U2); "What is your native place?" (means: Where did your ancestors live? Doesn't mean: What hospital delivered you?); "Two minutes" (means: An hour. Doesn't mean: Two minutes).

We tried to reinvent ourselves, as our parents had, but now in reverse. Some studied Hindi, others yoga. Some visited the Ganges to find themselves; others tried days-long Vipassana meditations.

Many of us who shunned Indian clothes in youth began wearing kurtas and chappals, saris and churidars. There was a sad truth in this: We waited for our heritage to become cool to the world before we draped its colors and textures on our own backs.

We learned how to make friends here, and that to make friends requires befriending families. We learned to love here: men found fondness for the elusive Indian woman; women surprised themselves in succumbing to chauvinistic, mother-spoiled men.

We forged dual-use accents. We spoke in foreign accents by default. But when it came to arguing with accountants or ordering takeout kebabs, we went sing-song Indian.

We gravitated to work specially suited to us. If there is a creative class, in Richard Florida's phrase, there is also emerging what might be called the fusion class: people well positioned to mediate among the multiple societies that claim them.

India's second-generation returnees have built boutiques fusing Indian fabrics with Western cuts, founded companies that train a new generation to work in Western companies, become deal makers in investment firms that need to speak equally to Wall Street and Dalal Street, mixed albums that combine throbbing tabla with Western melodies.

Our parents' generation helped India from afar. They sent money, advised charities, guided hedge-fund dollars into the Bombay Stock Exchange. But most were too implicated in India to return. Our generation, unscathed by it, was freer to embrace it.

Countries like India once fretted about a "brain drain." We are learning now that "brain circulation," as some call it, may be more apt.

India was not exporting brains, but investing them. It sent millions away. In the freedom of new soil, they flowered. They seeded a new generation that, having blossomed, did what humans have always done: chase the frontier of the future.

Which just happened, for many of us, to be the frontier of our own pasts.

I invite you to join the conversation at www.anand-g.com