The only way to make sense of Dubai is to never forget that it isn’t real. It’s a fable, a fairy tale, like The Arabian Nights. More correctly, it’s a cautionary tale. Dubai is the story of the three wishes, where, as every kid knows, with the third wish you demand three more wishes. And as every genie knows, more wishes lead to more greed, more misery, more bad credit, and much, much, much more bad taste. Dubai is Las Vegas without the showgirls, the gambling, or Elvis. Dubai is a financial Disneyland without the fun. It’s a holiday resort with the worst climate in the world. It boils. It’s humid. And the constant wind is full of sand. The first thing you see when you arrive is the airport, with its echoing marble halls. It’s big enough to be the hub of a continent. Dubai suffers from gigantism—a national inferiority complex that has to make everything bigger and biggest. This includes their financial crisis.

In just one life span, Dubai has gone from sitting on a rug to swiveling on a fake Eames chair 100 stories up. And not a single local has had to lift a finger to make it happen. That’s not quite fair—of course they’ve lifted a finger; to call the waiter, berate the busboy. The money seeped out of the ground and they spent it. Pretty much all of it. You look at this place and you realize not a single thing is indigenous, not one of this culture’s goods and chattels originated here. Even the goats have gone. This was a civilization that was bought wholesale. The Gulf is the proof of Carnegie’s warning about wealth: “There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.”

The Arabs live in their own ghettos, large, dull containments of big houses that are half garage behind security walls, weighed down with satellite dishes. We drive by an empty lot, and my driver tells me that this was the site of the house of the second son of a high-ranking official. Daddy had it bulldozed when his boy was caught having a Western-style rich-brats’ party. There is a growing, unspoken problem with the indigenous youth here. Fat, and spoiled beyond reason, they are titanically rude. They have reportedly taken to forming slovenly gangs that have been responsible for random attacks on foreign workers and women simply for the computer-game fun of it. This is a generation of kids who expect to never seriously work—but do expect secure jobs. An Indian manager who runs hotels in Dubai told me that everybody dreads the call from some royal Arab telling them to expect a nephew who will be coming to work. The boy will demand an office, a secretary, a car, wages, deference, and an empty schedule. It’s a sort of protection shakedown that you pay to do business here.

Dubai is the parable of what money makes when it has no purpose but its own multiplication and grandeur. When the culture that holds it is too frail to contain it. Dubai is a place that doesn’t just know the price of everything and the value of nothing but makes everything worthless. The answer to everything in Dubai is money. In the darkness of the hot night, the motorways roar with Ferraris and Porsches and Lamborghinis; the fat boys are befuddled and stupefied by sports cars they race around on nowhere roads, going nowhere. Taxi drivers of their ambitionless, all-consuming entitlement. Shortchanged by being given everything. Cursed with money.

[Vanity Fair]

Many of the factors behind the current protests — high unemployment, large income disparities, rising costs of living (especially for food), and ruling gerontocracies and kleptocracies — have their roots in the emergence of the region’s petro-states, a process that was cemented that year.

Then the price of oil began a nearly two-decade slide. Between 1981 and 1985, the price of oil fell from $35 a barrel to $10, and then stabilized at around $20 a barrel for much of the 1990s (although it did plunge once again in 1998 to $10). Over the same period, the populations of OPEC countries started to mushroom, as both life expectancy and fertility rates rose. With oil revenues falling and populations growing, per capita income began to decline. Yet governments did little to diversify their economies; in fact, oil-producing states did not begin to invest in diversification and increase spending on social welfare until the spectacular rise in oil prices. (Other oil producers, Libya among them, did not even try.)
This neglect contributed to the many factors underlying the current wave of civil unrest, especially to the region’s stagnant incomes and unemployment rates. Now, with the contagion spreading to the oil-congested area of the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf, the likelihood of an oil apocalypse is no longer implausible: in such a scenario, domestic upheaval would bring civil strife and violence, which in turn would lead to a reduction or cessation of oil production. A true apocalyptic scenario would see these events take place in major producers such as Saudi Arabia.

The many domestic factors that have led to the recent turmoil across the region are not going to disappear in 2011. Virtually no oil-producing country in the region has been able to diversify its economy away from oil. Almost all are seeing domestic oil consumption rising rapidly as governments subsidize gasoline, diesel, and power in an attempt to deliver material well-being to their citizens. Cheap energy is critical to the legitimacy of these regimes, making price spikes politically difficult. So far, only Iran has been able to raise domestic gasoline prices — and that is only because of its lack of refining capacity and the squeeze of the U.S.-led embargo on gasoline deliveries to the country. Oil consumption within the Gulf countries rose from 4.8 million barrels a day in 2000 to 7.8 million in 2010, eroding exports and raising the minimum price of oil needed for oil-producing states to break even on their extraction and production costs. As a result, those states dependent on oil from the region are facing troubling prospects: a near-term loss of supply due to the current disruption and a longer-term loss of supply due to growth in domestic consumption.

[Foreign Affairs]

]]> http://brunogsales.com/2011/03/09/oil-and-unrest-what-uprising-in-the-arab-world-means-for-energy-supplies/feed/ 0 phreelosophy http://brunogsales.com/2011/03/03/wadah-khanfar-a-historic-moment-in-the-arab-world/ http://brunogsales.com/2011/03/03/wadah-khanfar-a-historic-moment-in-the-arab-world/#comments Fri, 04 Mar 2011 04:34:04 +0000 Bruno http://brunogsales.com/?p=202 ]]>

[Ted Talk]

]]> http://brunogsales.com/2011/03/03/wadah-khanfar-a-historic-moment-in-the-arab-world/feed/ 0 phreelosophy http://brunogsales.com/2011/02/04/american-decline-this-time-is-for-real/ http://brunogsales.com/2011/02/04/american-decline-this-time-is-for-real/#comments Sat, 05 Feb 2011 03:36:59 +0000 Bruno http://brunogsales.com/?p=197 ]]>

China’s economic prowess is already allowing Beijing to challenge American influence all over the world. The Chinese are the preferred partners of many African governments and the biggest trading partner of other emerging powers, such as Brazil and South Africa. China is also stepping in to buy the bonds of financially strapped members of the eurozone, such as Greece and Portugal.
And China is only the largest part of a bigger story about the rise of new economic and political players. America’s traditional allies in Europe — Britain, France, Italy, even Germany — are slipping down the economic ranks. New powers are on the rise: India, Brazil, Turkey. They each have their own foreign-policy preferences, which collectively constrain America’s ability to shape the world. Think of how India and Brazil sided with China at the global climate-change talks. Or the votes by Turkey and Brazil against America at the United Nations on sanctions against Iran. That is just a taste of things to come.

Of course, it would be absurd to pretend that China does not face major challenges. In the short term, there is plenty of evidence that a property bubble is building in big cities like Shanghai, and inflation is on the rise. Over the long term, China has alarming political and economic transitions to navigate. The Communist Party is unlikely to be able to maintain its monopoly on political power forever. And the country’s traditional dependence on exports and an undervalued currency are coming under increasing criticism from the United States and other international actors demanding a “rebalancing” of China’s export-driven economy. The country also faces major demographic and environmental challenges: The population is aging rapidly as a result of the one-child policy, and China is threatened by water shortages and pollution.
Yet even if you factor in considerable future economic and political turbulence, it would be a big mistake to assume that the Chinese challenge to U.S. power will simply disappear. Once countries get the hang of economic growth, it takes a great deal to throw them off course.

American universities remain a formidable asset. But if the U.S. economy is not generating jobs, then those bright Asian graduate students who fill up the engineering and computer-science departments at Stanford University and MIT will return home in larger numbers. Fortune’s latest ranking of the world’s largest companies has only two American firms in the top 10 — Walmart at No. 1 and ExxonMobil at No. 3. There are already three Chinese firms in the top 10: Sinopec, State Grid, and China National Petroleum. America’s appeal might also diminish if the country is no longer so closely associated with opportunity, prosperity, and success. And though many foreigners are deeply attracted to the American Dream, there is also a deep well of anti-American sentiment in the world that al Qaeda and others have skillfully exploited, Obama or no Obama.

Both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton took a similar view that globalization and free trade would serve as a vehicle for the export of American values. In 1999, two years before China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, Bush argued, “Economic freedom creates habits of liberty. And habits of liberty create expectations of democracy.… Trade freely with China, and time is on our side.”
There were two important misunderstandings buried in this theorizing. The first was that economic growth would inevitably — and fairly swiftly — lead to democratization. The second was that new democracies would inevitably be more friendly and helpful toward the United States. Neither assumption is working out.

And when it comes to the broader geopolitical picture, the world of the future looks even more like a zero-sum game, despite the gauzy rhetoric of globalization that comforted the last generation of American politicians. For the United States has been acting as if the mutual interests created by globalization have repealed one of the oldest laws of international politics: the notion that rising players eventually clash with established powers.
In fact, rivalry between a rising China and a weakened America is now apparent across a whole range of issues, from territorial disputes in Asia to human rights. It is mercifully unlikely that the United States and China would ever actually go to war, but that is because both sides have nuclear weapons, not because globalization has magically dissolved their differences.

[Foreign Policy]

Lockheed Martin doesn’t actually run the U.S. government, but sometimes it seems as if it might as well. After all, it received $36 billion in government contracts in 2008 alone, more than any company in history. It now does work for more than two dozen government agencies from the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy to the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency. It’s involved in surveillance and information processing for the CIA, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Pentagon, the Census Bureau, and the Postal Service.

(…)the company receives one of every 14 dollars doled out by the Pentagon. In fact, its government contracts, thought about another way, amount to a “Lockheed Martin tax” of $260 per taxpaying household in the United States, and no weapons contractor has more power or money to wield to defend its turf. It spent $12 million on congressional lobbying and campaign contributions in 2009 alone. Not surprisingly, it’s the top contributor to the incoming House Armed Services Committee chairman, Republican Howard P. “Buck” McKeon of California, giving more than $50,000 in the most recent election cycle. It also tops the list of donors to Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI), the powerful chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and the self-described “#1 earmarks guy in the U.S. Congress.

If it seems a little creepy to you that the same company making ballistic missiles is also processing your taxes, accessing your fingerprints, scanning your packages, ensuring that it’s easier than ever to collect your DNA, and counting you for the census, rest assured: Lockheed Martin’s interest in getting inside your private life via intelligence collection and surveillance has remained remarkably undiminished in the twenty-first century. (…)
As far back as 2002, the company plunged into the “Total Information Awareness” (TIA) program that was former National Security Advisor Admiral John Poindexter’s pet project. A giant database to collect telephone numbers, credit cards, and reams of other personal data from U.S. citizens in the name of fighting terrorism, the program was de-funded by Congress the following year, but concerns remain that the National Security Agency is now running a similar secret program.(…)
since at least 2004, Lockheed Martin has been involved in the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), which collected personal data on American citizens for storage in a database known as “Threat and Local Observation Notice” (and far more dramatically by the acronym TALON).

Lockheed Martin is also intimately bound up in the workings of the National Security Agency, America’s largest spy outfit. In addition to producing spy satellites for the NSA, the company is in charge of “Project Groundbreaker,” a $5 billion, ten-year effort to upgrade the agency’s internal telephone and computer networks.

[Guernica]

Holden Caulfield, and the pages that held him, had been the author’s constant companion for most of his adult life. Those pages, the first of them written in his mid-20s, just before he shipped off to Europe as an army sergeant, were so precious to Salinger that he carried them on his person throughout the Second World War. Pages of The Catcher in the Rye had stormed the beach at Normandy; they had paraded down the streets of Paris, been present at the deaths of countless soldiers in countless places, and been carried through the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. In bits and pieces they had been re-written, put aside, and re-written again, the nature of the story changing as the author himself was changed. Now, in Connecticut, Salinger placed the final line on the final chapter of the book. It is with Salinger’s experience of the Second World War in mind that we should understand Holden Caulfield’s insight at the Central Park carousel, and the parting words of The Catcher in the Rye: “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” All the dead soldiers.

On D-day he had six unpublished Caulfield stories in his possession, stories that would form the spine of The Catcher in the Rye. The experience of war gave his writing a depth and maturity it had lacked; the legacy of that experience is present even in work that is not about war at all. In later life, Salinger frequently mentioned Normandy, but he never spoke of the details—“as if,” his daughter later recalled, “I understood the implications, the unspoken.”

Salinger fought, but he also wrote—wrote constantly, from war’s start to war’s finish. He had begun to write seriously in 1939, as a student at Columbia, under the guidance of a professor, Whit Burnett, who also happened to be the editor of Story magazine, and who became for Salinger a mentor and near father figure. (…) Holden is the first character in whom Salinger embedded himself, and their lives would be joined: whatever happened to Salinger would, in a sense, also happen to Holden. Whit Burnett pushed Salinger repeatedly to place Holden Caulfield into a novel, and he kept prodding him even after he was drafted, in 1942.

On August 25, 1944, the Germans surrendered Paris. (…) Salinger was in Paris for only a few days, but they were the happiest days he would experience during the war. His recollection of them is contained in a letter to Whit Burnett. The high point was a meeting with Ernest Hemingway, who was a war correspondent for Collier’s. There was no question in Salinger’s mind where Hemingway would be found. He jumped into his jeep and made for the Ritz. Hemingway greeted Salinger like an old friend. He claimed to be familiar with his writing, and asked if he had any new stories on him. Salinger managed to locate a copy of The Saturday Evening Post containing “Last Day of the Last Furlough,” which had been published that summer. Hemingway read it and was impressed. The two men talked shop over drinks.

After the liberation of Paris, General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s chief of staff declared that “militarily, the war is over.” Salinger’s division would have the honor of being the first to enter Germany. (…) From Hürtgen, Salinger sent a letter to his friend Elizabeth Murray, saying that he had been writing as much as possible. He claimed to have completed five stories since January and to be in the process of finishing another three. Years later, Salinger’s counter-intelligence colleagues would remember him as constantly stealing away to write. One recalled a time when the unit came under heavy fire. Everyone began ducking for cover. Glancing over, the soldiers caught sight of Salinger typing away under a table.

His intelligence duties brought Salinger face-to-face with the Holocaust. (…) Salinger’s wartime experiences eventually brought on a deep depression. When the German Army surrendered, on May 8, 1945, the world erupted in celebration. Salinger spent the day alone, sitting on his bed, staring at a .45-caliber pistol clutched in his hands. What would it feel like, he wondered, if he were to fire the gun through his left palm? Salinger recognized the potential danger of his state of mind. In July, he checked himself into a hospital in Nuremberg for treatment.

When Salinger returned home from the war, he resumed his life as a writer of short stories, many of which appeared in The New Yorker. But he never lost sight of Holden Caulfield. What Salinger had of the novel was a tangle of stories written as far back as 1941. The challenge was to weave the strands together into a unified work of art. He took up the task early in 1949.

The war changed Holden. He had first appeared in the pre-war story “Slight Rebellion off Madison,” which would be absorbed into Catcher. But the passage of time and events completely transformed the episode—Salinger’s own experiences melted into the retelling. In “Slight Rebellion,” Holden is pointedly selfish and confused; he is presented in a third-person voice, far removed from the reader. The same scene in The Catcher in the Rye conveys an impression of nobility. Holden’s words are largely the same, but in the novel his selfishness has evaporated and he seems to be speaking a larger truth. The third-person voice is gone—the reader has direct access to Holden’s thoughts and words.

For Salinger himself, writing The Catcher in the Rye was an act of liberation. The bruising of Salinger’s faith by the terrible events of war is reflected in Holden’s loss of faith, caused by the death of his brother Allie. The memory of fallen friends haunted Salinger for years, just as Holden was haunted by the ghost of his brother. The struggle of Holden Caulfield echoes the spiritual journey of the author. In both author and character, the tragedy is the same: a shattered innocence. Holden’s reaction is shown through his scorn of adult phoniness and compromise. Salinger’s reaction was personal despondency, through which his eyes were opened to the darker forces of human nature.

[Vanity Fair]