The Great Debate UK
from The Great Debate:
The key to understanding the ‘Arab Spring’
The United States has been unable to develop a clear national policy about the Arab Spring largely because Washington does not fully understand what’s happening in the Middle East.
The term, “Arab Spring” is itself misleading. The changes over the past 20 months have produced a fundamental transformation of the region – but not in the way most outside observers anticipated: They reflect the replacement of the dominant Arab national identity by a more Islamic identity.
This change has been evolving for more than 40 years and did not begin in January 2011 with the demonstrations across the Middle East.
The Middle East today is less Arab and more Muslim. It was clear from the start of last year’s protests that the successor governments would be less Arab nationalist and secular, and more Islamic.
from The Great Debate:
Is it Ahmadinejad’s last hurrah?
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the impenitent president of Iran, arrived in New York for his eighth, and presumably last, official visit on a late September Saturday night. The media hung on his every belligerent, homophobic or anti-Israeli word -- while at the same time dismissing him as a lame duck, irrelevant to Iran’s future. But missing in all the coverage was what Ahmadinejad’s legacy may be and whether he’ll have a political future beyond Iran’s presidential election in June.
Beleaguered at home by infighting and the dire economic situation – due to sanctions, but also his administration’s mismanagement – Ahmadinejad seemed even more eager to enjoy his usual week of Western media attention. His schedule was packed – not just with media appearances but also meetings with peace groups, anti-capitalist protest groups and scholars.
from The Great Debate:
The great paradox of Hobsbawm’s choice
The words “communist” and “socialist” are now used so recklessly in the United States that their meaning has been devalued. But Eric Hobsbawm, the British historian who died Oct. 1, was the real deal.
Born in 1917, the year of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Hobsbawm used Karl Marx as the inspiration for both his personal politics and his successful transformation of our understanding of history. He was an unabashed and unwavering supporter of communism in theory and practice, who only let his party membership lapse at the final moment, when the Berlin Wall fell.
Ways to power an always-on world
–Cyrille Brisson is EMEA Vice President of Power Quality, Eaton Corporation. The opinions expressed are his own.–
A recent New York Times article suggested that most modern data centres are hugely inefficient — so inefficient, in fact, that they waste 90 per cent or more of the electricity that they take from the grid. If you are a data centre manager, your employment is directly linked to your ability to keep things running. In this context, it is understandable that the efficient use of energy has historically been a secondary concern for data centre operators.
from The Great Debate:
Punch Sulzberger and the trouble with media dynasties
It is easy to imagine the look on the faces of Rupert Murdoch’s children when they read the obituaries of New York Times owner Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger, whose father thought him too stupid to run the company. Particularly when they came to the line: “It’s impossible to be an assistant to your father.”
Rupert Murdoch’s eldest son, Lachlan, is exiled to Australia after complaining his father wouldn’t let him do his job at News Corp. His daughter Elisabeth’s movie company, Shine, may be owned by News Corp, but she lives in London and keeps her interfering father at arm’s length. And after disappointing his old man by failing to smother the phone-hacking scandal at his British papers, James is scrabbling around at corporate headquarters on Sixth Avenue in New York, trying to make it work at his new job leading the company’s television interests – everything, that is, except his father’s “fair and balanced” baby, Fox News.
from The Great Debate:
Romney is powerless against Murdoch’s lash
Mitt Romney must be wondering where it all went wrong. With the president presiding over a jobless, barely perceptible recovery, with most Americans thinking Obama is on the wrong track, and with his healthcare legislation widely derided, the Republican champion should be coasting by now. Yet Romney has been languishing in the head-to-head polls for almost a year, and prominent conservative commentators are complaining.
It is rare to hear such a concerted chorus of disapproval, not least with the election just six weeks away. Rupert Murdoch, at least, can say to Romney, “I told you so!” In July, he warned on Twitter: “Tough O Chicago pros will be hard to beat unless he drops old friends from team and hires some real pros. Doubtful.” It was advice Romney could afford neither to accept nor refuse. To fire his staff at the behest of the media boss who controls the nation’s most unforgiving conservative news outlets would be to follow successive weak British leaders who bent to Murdoch’s will, with tragic results. Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron, to name just three prime ministers, are still trying to rid themselves of the taint.
from The Great Debate:
The verdict that shook Iran and Europe
They say a good news story is like an onion. The more one peels it, the newer and fresher are the layers that surface. If depth and longevity are the gold standards for a news story, then the assassinations of four Iranian opposition members at the Mykonos Restaurant in Berlin in September 1992 surpasses that standard. That story is more like a cluster bomb: 20 years later, it continues to explode. The verdict that was issued in Germany five years after the killings, and the subsequent decision by the European Union to cut ties with Tehran in 1997, achieved what perpetual threats of war have not.
What was the achievement? To a multitude of Iranian exiles, first and foremost, it was the bestowing of an elemental human gift – safety. Since the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini’s henchmen were methodically killing a list of 500 dissidents – artists, writers, intellectuals and opposition members – against whom the Ayatollah had issued fatwas. These “anointed” individuals were not safe whether they were in Washington, Rome, Paris or Geneva.
from The Great Debate:
Why doesn’t Mitt Romney contribute to his own campaign?
Lately, Mitt Romney has been so consumed with fundraising that his aides have had to defend his absence from the stump. Like his foe, the Republican nominee is in the midst of a frenzied financial arms race. But one hugely wealthy individual has not yet been persuaded to part with much cash to support the Republican cause: Mitt Romney himself.
Mitt Romney is hardly the first wealthy individual to seek the White House. John F. Kennedy once quipped he had received a telegram from his father: “Don’t buy another vote. I won’t pay for a landslide.” But Romney, for whatever reason, has failed to use his personal wealth to pay his campaign’s bills. His refusal to self-finance is one of the mysteries of this campaign.
from The Great Debate:
Romney’s campaign into oblivion
Willard Mitt Romney was born with a silver foot in his mouth.
It is possible to forgive it as a congenital trait. After all, his Dad, the genial George Romney, successful head of the American Motor Corp and governor of Michigan (1963-69), lost his bid for the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1968 by setting a world record for the mass manufacture of gaffes. He had such a penchant for saying one thing and then retracting it, the reporter Jack Germond announced he was fixing his keyboard so that one keystroke produced “Romney later explained…” It was charming for a time to hear what George had said lately, but when he came back from a look at the Vietnam War, he announced he’d had “the greatest brainwashing anyone could get.” His rival Eugene McCarthy cracked that a light rinse would have been enough to relieve George’s neurological condition, but this time George had gone a gaffe too far. Some American prisoners released by the Chinese had renounced their U.S. citizenship, saying they’d been brainwashed, and primary voters had no enthusiasm for electing a president who might turn out to have been the Manchurian candidate. So we got Nixon and Agnew instead. Thanks, George.
Mitt was on a similar jag through the nomination process. “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me… My wife drives a couple of Cadillacs… I’m not concerned about the very poor, we have a safety net…” Men and women who’ve been looking for work for a year are supposed to appreciate the irony when he opens up: “I should tell my story. I’m also unemployed.”
Why the employment law review won’t work
–Ben Stepney is a solicitor in the Employment Team at Thomson Snell & Passmore.–
The most significant of Business Secretary Vince Cable’s 14th Septmeber proposals as part of the government’s Employment Law Review is the dropping of “no fault dismissals”, as proposed by Adrian Beecroft in his government commissioned report. This would have enabled small businesses to bypass the unfair dismissal rules by making a relatively modest compensation payment to the employee, which could have seriously undermined the relationship of trust and confidence necessary for an effective employment relationship, as employees would know that they could lose their job at a moment’s notice without the employer being required to have a valid reason for doing so.
