Winston Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried.” He almost got it right, but not quite.
I, personally, look at governments based on three criteria— the economic and health-based well-being of the citizens, the level of civility and mutual tolerance in the behavior of the populace, and a peaceful and positive relationship with other countries. Using those criteria, the very best governments on earth are all kingdoms— primarily those in Scandinavia as well as the progressive Arab kingdoms like Dubai and Abu Dabi. The next tier of governments (based on my criteria) are the majority of the world’s democracies typified by the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and the majority of the western European countries. Below those democracies, I would rank the oppressive kingdoms and theocracies which are found throughout the Middle East and the South Pacific. At the bottom of my list would be the Islamic democracies like Pakistan and Indonesia. I also include the democracy of India in this bottom tier, even though India is my favorite place in the world to visit. India is better for tourists than it is for Indians. My wife and I have been to 120 countries, and my personal opinions are based on what I’ve seen for myself.
I think that the reason why democracies don’t rank at the top is that democratic leaders must always do what’s acceptable, and they don’t feel constrained to do what’s best. I write about this, now, because I see Sarah Palin as an “acceptable” candidate. By no stretch of the imagination is she the “best” candidate. McCain gets a pass on this whimsical choice of his because he only needs to pass the “maverick” test. The Republican Party, now, is all about having a maverick on board. It can be argued that Bush and Cheney are mavericks, too. Starting a needless and unprovoked war, and becoming an aggressor nation is certainly a “maverick” thing to do by United States standards. As long as we maintain the delusion that having “maverick” leadership is automatically a positive thing, the progressive kingdoms of the world will stay unchallenged in their ranking at the top.
Showing posts with label India. Show all posts
Showing posts with label India. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
What You May Not Know About Outsourcing
Here’s the question for the day. If you managed a business and needed to hire people you could depend on to help make you successful, would you prefer someone with a poor education who demanded a high salary, or would you prefer someone with a better education who would work for a lower wage? A question similar to this was posed to me (as part of a group discussion) by John Sculley, past CEO of PepsiCo and Apple Computer.
We were sailing on the same ship together with a final destination of Bombay, India. From Bombay, my wife and I were flying back to the U.S., and Sculley was going on to Bangalore to have a firsthand look at the outsource-phone-center capital of the world. He explained that there were five reasons why American companies should outsource to India, and low wages was down at the bottom on that list. Here’s Sculley’s five reasons to outsource.
1. A better educated pool of people from which to hire. This is especially true for engineering and technical jobs since five of the six best scientific schools on earth are in India.
2. Eliminates office politics. There seems to be something in the culture of India, probably related to Hinduism, that inhibits people from the backstabbing ploys like credit stealing and rumor mongering which you see so often in the American workplace.
3. Outsourcing breaks the tyranny of the Human Resource department. (I loved this reason in particular. You’d need to have firsthand experience in an American corporation to fully appreciate this).
4. Prevents union and other organized labor problems.
5. Low wages. Scully said that this advantage is only temporary. With American wages declining and Indian wages rising rapidly, wage parity will be achieved, probably within ten years.
John Sculley was of the opinion that outsourcing to India is so beneficial to the productivity of an American company that any CEO would be remiss for not, at least, considering this option. And in his book, “The Earth is Flat,” writer and thinker, Thomas Friedman, claimed that the Intel Corporation has positioned itself to thrive for another 50 years without hiring any American workers. That’s not to say that Intel won’t hire Americans if they have the education and work ethic, but Intel is not willing to tie itself down to an all-American workforce. I know that other major corporations have a similar mind-set, even though they want to stay under the radar for PR reasons.
American patriots want you to believe that all of this is driven by the rise of China and India as economic powers. What nobody talks about is the fact that— for the first time in modern world history— the next generation of Americans will NOT be better educated than the generation previous to them. Within the developed world, the unbroken record of each generation improving on what they inherited— that record has now been broken in the United States of America. Corporation heads are not stupid. They know this and acknowledge it even if the politicians avoid it.
It’s another election year. Here’s a tip for evaluating candidates. If a politician tells us that they will keep American jobs from going overseas, he or she is delusional. And if a politician says that they will bring outsourced jobs back from overseas, they are telling you an outright lie.
We were sailing on the same ship together with a final destination of Bombay, India. From Bombay, my wife and I were flying back to the U.S., and Sculley was going on to Bangalore to have a firsthand look at the outsource-phone-center capital of the world. He explained that there were five reasons why American companies should outsource to India, and low wages was down at the bottom on that list. Here’s Sculley’s five reasons to outsource.
1. A better educated pool of people from which to hire. This is especially true for engineering and technical jobs since five of the six best scientific schools on earth are in India.
2. Eliminates office politics. There seems to be something in the culture of India, probably related to Hinduism, that inhibits people from the backstabbing ploys like credit stealing and rumor mongering which you see so often in the American workplace.
3. Outsourcing breaks the tyranny of the Human Resource department. (I loved this reason in particular. You’d need to have firsthand experience in an American corporation to fully appreciate this).
4. Prevents union and other organized labor problems.
5. Low wages. Scully said that this advantage is only temporary. With American wages declining and Indian wages rising rapidly, wage parity will be achieved, probably within ten years.
John Sculley was of the opinion that outsourcing to India is so beneficial to the productivity of an American company that any CEO would be remiss for not, at least, considering this option. And in his book, “The Earth is Flat,” writer and thinker, Thomas Friedman, claimed that the Intel Corporation has positioned itself to thrive for another 50 years without hiring any American workers. That’s not to say that Intel won’t hire Americans if they have the education and work ethic, but Intel is not willing to tie itself down to an all-American workforce. I know that other major corporations have a similar mind-set, even though they want to stay under the radar for PR reasons.
American patriots want you to believe that all of this is driven by the rise of China and India as economic powers. What nobody talks about is the fact that— for the first time in modern world history— the next generation of Americans will NOT be better educated than the generation previous to them. Within the developed world, the unbroken record of each generation improving on what they inherited— that record has now been broken in the United States of America. Corporation heads are not stupid. They know this and acknowledge it even if the politicians avoid it.
It’s another election year. Here’s a tip for evaluating candidates. If a politician tells us that they will keep American jobs from going overseas, he or she is delusional. And if a politician says that they will bring outsourced jobs back from overseas, they are telling you an outright lie.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
The Modern-Day Version of Cleopatra's Barge
Five months to go until the 2008 election, and new polls show that 82% of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. This causes me to ask two questions. The first and most obvious question is, “What the hell is going through the optimistic minds of the 18% who still don’t get it?” And the second and more subtle question is, “Would the 82% do what was necessary to turn things around if they knew what it would take?” Would they ever vote for a candidate who wanted to cut the defense budget by 70%? Would they follow a leader who suggested mothballing our carrier fleet? Could they ever be seduced away from the national love affair with the military?
It’s no secret to most Americans that we spend more on our military-industrial machine than the entire rest of the world spends on their combined armaments. We have a military presence in 130 foreign countries. These are supposed to be sovereign nations, but we figure our invasiveness should be okay with everyone because we’re the good guys. Anyway, that’s our story, and we’re sticking to it. The funny thing is, the ancient Romans viewed the world the same way. So how did we get to this point?
In 1947, the War Department and the Department of the Navy merged into what we now call the Department of Defense. The primary reason for this consolidation was to raise the status and clout of the military arm of Government so that it could compete for funding with State Department. In 1947, State had seven times the budget of Defense. And for the next 44 years of the Cold War, the strategy made sense. The problem is, the Cold War ended. But nothing changed militarily for the United States. And now the iconic personal image that America presents to the rest of the world is not that of a businessman or scientist or statesman, but the image of a fully-battle-armored Marine. The U.S. State Department is now nothing but a footnote. As for the rest of the world, they are too busy making America irrelevant to care what we do militarily. They know that global influence no longer correlates with military power.
The world’s largest publically-traded corporation and the world’s tallest skyscraper are both Chinese. In neighboring India, Bollywood has passed Hollywood as the film capital of the world. Six universities in India provide graduate education in science and engineering that surpasses MIT and Cal Tech. At least three dozen industrialized nations have a lower mortality rate than the U.S. because of better healthcare systems. Toyota is now the most successful car maker, and 54 nations have more efficient railroad and airline infrastructures. The ten largest shopping malls on earth are outside of the United States. Most multi-billionaires are foreign, not American. And the American dollar is quickly losing status as the major global currency. Quite simply, the rest of the world looked at everything that projected American dominance- all of our financial and cultural and technological triumphs- and they worked diligently to surpass us in these areas. But the most visible icon that was intended to project American dominance, our Naval super-carrier fleet, was profoundly ignored by the rest of the world. Nobody outside of the United States considers an aircraft carrier to be anything but a truculent modern-day version of Cleopatra’s barge.
And here’s the final irony. The United States has the raw power to destroy every human being on earth, but our Pentagon can’t win a modern 4th generation war. For those countries and cultures that still believe in projecting themselves through violence, they have learned during the last seven years that their wars can be waged on the cheap, using nothing more than brilliant imagination and handmade explosive weapons, and sometimes just suicidal commitment. Trying to intimidate that kind of enemy with an aircraft carrier is like threatening a pesky house fly with a ball-peen hammer.
In early 2007, the Pentagon released an estimate that the insurgents spend about $100 to kill one of our boys. Their costs are so artificially low because the insurgents use captured U.S. military hardware, and arms that have been diverted from supplies given to the Iraqi army, and residue from pre-invasion stockpiles, and, of course, munitions supplied by Iran. They fight their side of the war in the same way that the “good guys” in Star Wars fight The Evil Empire. This is what’s meant by 4th generation warfare. 9/11 was another example of this. By way of comparison, we spend about 50 million dollars to kill one of them (the trillion-dollar cost of the war divided by the 20,000 that we’ve killed so far).
All of this takes us back to the idea that America is on the wrong track. It’s not that we can’t afford our huge military expenditures. We actually spend a lower percentage of GDP on defense now than we did in the late 1950s. It’s wasted money, but we can still afford the cost. What we can’t afford is the global perception that we, as a country, are just big and stupid. To use an analogy from the school environment, the rest of the world is hitting the books and excelling at extra-curricular activities, and The United States is bulked up on steroids and focused only on the Friday night game.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Fear and the Loss of Freedom
Freedom is a little bit like virginity. You don’t just helplessly lose it like some risky financial investment in a down market. Freedom is something that you willingly surrender to somebody who‘s out to screw you, and then sometime later, down the line, you wonder what it might be like to have it back.
The travesties of the Bush Administration will be recited and debated well into the next century, and only the hindsight of history will tell us how bad it really was. Even a short list will certainly include the following: Squandering a trillion dollars of our national wealth. Failing to address problems on our southern border. Initiating an unjust and needless war. Trampling on the United States Constitution by attempting to render the Congress irrelevant. And cynically exploiting the trust of Christians and conservatives. To me, however, the most lasting damage inflicted by Bush and Cheney was this: They made us change our understanding of the word, freedom.
Every dead Marine who comes home from Iraq is eulogized with the words, “He died for our freedom.” Nothing could be further from the truth, although I completely sympathize with the need for the dead man’s family to believe this. The fact is, our freedom was never threatened by Iraq. Our freedom has never been actually threatened in a military way by any outside power since 1945. We can’t ever lose our freedom to foreign enemies by force of arms because our military is too powerful. Instead, we give it away willingly to leaders who know how to manipulate us. And Bush and Cheney are the best that there has ever been at taking what we willingly gave them.
My perspective is that of a travel writer who has spent time in 110 foreign countries. Among these countries are India, Ireland, Great Britain, Spain, Indonesia, and several of the breakaway republics that were formally part of the Soviet Union. All of these nations have one thing in common: They have experienced repeated attacks of terrorism that were, collectively, far worse than 9/11. In the case of India and Indonesia, they have been fighting militant Islamic extremism for over half a century, with their loss of life counted in the tens of thousands. All of these terrorist-target countries have something else in common. None of their populations went insane with fear, surrendering much of their own freedom to their own governments. None of their governing bodies have initiated anything like our Patriot Act and our Homeland Security Department. The terrorists repeatedly inflicted death and destruction, but the people and the governments of these countries never “freaked out” like we did in the United States.
Why not? Are the foreign populations idiotic? Are their governments reckless and uncaring about the people’s safety? Are Americans cowards? The answer to all of these questions is, “No.” The difference is this. For one thing, their leaders didn’t use the opportunity to seize additional power in a time of peril. But the deeper reason is that these terrorist-target countries have a certain wisdom which is lacking in America. They understand that fundamental Islam seeks to use jihad to make target populations philosophically surrender intellectual freedom and embrace Islam, and you don’t counter that threat by simply surrendering your freedom to an alternate threat and embracing a different power that also seeks to dominate. It is useless for us to throw our Marines into battle against an Islamic jihad while, at the same time, we knuckle under to things like the Patriot Act without so much as a whimper. The Islamic terrorists know that the Bush Administration will be out of power in 2009, but now they also know that the American people will willingly give away personal freedom if sufficiently intimidated. And God knows, Americans are easily intimidated. George W. Bush gave them that example, and in doing so he altered our notion of what freedom really is. That’s his tragic legacy.
The travesties of the Bush Administration will be recited and debated well into the next century, and only the hindsight of history will tell us how bad it really was. Even a short list will certainly include the following: Squandering a trillion dollars of our national wealth. Failing to address problems on our southern border. Initiating an unjust and needless war. Trampling on the United States Constitution by attempting to render the Congress irrelevant. And cynically exploiting the trust of Christians and conservatives. To me, however, the most lasting damage inflicted by Bush and Cheney was this: They made us change our understanding of the word, freedom.
Every dead Marine who comes home from Iraq is eulogized with the words, “He died for our freedom.” Nothing could be further from the truth, although I completely sympathize with the need for the dead man’s family to believe this. The fact is, our freedom was never threatened by Iraq. Our freedom has never been actually threatened in a military way by any outside power since 1945. We can’t ever lose our freedom to foreign enemies by force of arms because our military is too powerful. Instead, we give it away willingly to leaders who know how to manipulate us. And Bush and Cheney are the best that there has ever been at taking what we willingly gave them.
My perspective is that of a travel writer who has spent time in 110 foreign countries. Among these countries are India, Ireland, Great Britain, Spain, Indonesia, and several of the breakaway republics that were formally part of the Soviet Union. All of these nations have one thing in common: They have experienced repeated attacks of terrorism that were, collectively, far worse than 9/11. In the case of India and Indonesia, they have been fighting militant Islamic extremism for over half a century, with their loss of life counted in the tens of thousands. All of these terrorist-target countries have something else in common. None of their populations went insane with fear, surrendering much of their own freedom to their own governments. None of their governing bodies have initiated anything like our Patriot Act and our Homeland Security Department. The terrorists repeatedly inflicted death and destruction, but the people and the governments of these countries never “freaked out” like we did in the United States.
Why not? Are the foreign populations idiotic? Are their governments reckless and uncaring about the people’s safety? Are Americans cowards? The answer to all of these questions is, “No.” The difference is this. For one thing, their leaders didn’t use the opportunity to seize additional power in a time of peril. But the deeper reason is that these terrorist-target countries have a certain wisdom which is lacking in America. They understand that fundamental Islam seeks to use jihad to make target populations philosophically surrender intellectual freedom and embrace Islam, and you don’t counter that threat by simply surrendering your freedom to an alternate threat and embracing a different power that also seeks to dominate. It is useless for us to throw our Marines into battle against an Islamic jihad while, at the same time, we knuckle under to things like the Patriot Act without so much as a whimper. The Islamic terrorists know that the Bush Administration will be out of power in 2009, but now they also know that the American people will willingly give away personal freedom if sufficiently intimidated. And God knows, Americans are easily intimidated. George W. Bush gave them that example, and in doing so he altered our notion of what freedom really is. That’s his tragic legacy.
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