Francis Fukuyama wrote in Sunday's Washington Post Outlook that, since the Cold War ended, there's not much out there to challenge globalization's two defining big ideas: capitalism and democracy. You've got your nationalistic autocrats, sure, but they are hard-pressed to offer an competing big idea that appeals across borders.

The one place globalization does find some ideological competition, says Fukuyama, is in the Muslim World. That's why I was intrigued to see the findings of a poll from World Public Opinion that surveyed six Muslim-majority publics. As you see in the graphic above, views about the economic aspects of globalization are far and away positive most of the countries surveyed. The poll did not measure democratic leanings.

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This blog is a place where we talk about a reciprocal relationship with constituents: policy-makers and experts learn from the public as they figure out how to engage non-experts on specific issues, and the public learns from the experts about what's going on the in world and why it matters. But it's a two-way street, and as soon as this feedback loop breaks down, you're left with an uninformed and listless public on one hand and a disconnected, preachy bunch of know-it-alls on the other.

This is an age-old political dynamic in America. Our politicians are forever doing silly things like adopting colloquial nicknames (i.e. "Chip", "Tad", "Buster" are a few of my current Congressional favorites), kissing babies and wearing cowboy boots to convince the public that they are "in touch." Railing against Washington is an old campaign trope. And it's a silly gripe. Our politicians had better understand Washington; this is where decisions are made and problems are grappled with, sometimes ably, sometimes not. John McCain should not be one bit ashamed of the fact that he's spent 27 years in Washington. Whatever your views of his campaign, he has worked hard and accomplished much during that time.

But it seems that we're always disparaging one side or the other of that crucial feedback loop that keeps democracies healthy. Despite the "Washington is broken" refrain, commenatators and constituents alike regard with skepticism those who haven't spent their formative years cutting their teeth in DC. Our political dialogue cannot bring itself to accept experience gained outside this city as legitimate.

This is what irked me about Charles Krauthammer's column in today's Washington Post, "The Perfect Stranger." Krauthammer argues that Obama is, for all his talents and charisma, a stranger with little in the way of track record to commend him to our nation's highest office. I may be mistaken, but to my ears, Krauthammer's column sounds the alarm bell signaling a broken feedback loop. His disdain for Obama's non-political accomplishments is palpable. To Krauthammer, Obama's time spent in community organizing, law, academia and state politics doesn't even register. Obama's effort to grapple with a difficult racial divide at church casts suspicion rather than instilling confidence. His global roots are moot. None of it happened in Washington, and there is no voting record. Obama is still a stranger.

By all means, let's have a debate about whether McCain's distinguished record on Capitol Hill would enable him to lead the country more ably than Barack Obama's eclectic formative years. One can make a powerful case for McCain's know-how when it comes to dealing with crises abroad like Georgia's current situation. On the other hand, Obama's entirely different set of experiences allows him to emphasize communal and individual responsibility as complementary pieces to solve some of the United States' most intractable social problems. That simple admition has eluded Washington-savvy Republicans and Democrats alike for years.

The bottom line is that discounting Obama's experience entirely just confirms old stereotypes about Washington insiders. If we take Krauthammer's point, Washington really is broken and out of touch.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 9:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My earlier post about I.O.U.S.A. got me thinking. If governments can become as leveraged (read: dangerously indebted) as ours without triggering any corrective measures, how effective can they be as financial arbiters in the new global economy?

I came across an interesting article in this month's Harvard Business Review by Diana Farrell of the McKinsey Global Institute (to which goes credit for the image above) that broaches the topic of how to go about crafting rules for a global economy that is leaving governments (and even GDP output) behind (see remarkable graphic above).

National governments are clearly still important to the world financial system, but their ability to unilaterally manage and regulate financial activity is diminishing. Instead, as global capital markets grow, they are dispersing financial power. The United States remains the world's biggest economy and home to the largest financial markets, but the influence of Europe, China, and the Middle East (among others) now extends globally. Investment of trade surpluses by Asian countries and of petrodollars by oil exporters has pumped liquidity into global capital markets, lowered interest rates in developed countries, fueled a new wave of leveraged financial activity, and propped up struggling Wall Street investment banks.

There is no shortage of talk about how outdated the Bretton Woods financial institutions--including the World Bank, IMF, WTO, etc.-- are now that global asset flows between private investors and sovereign wealth funds dwarf trade and other traditional international financial flows. New Rules for Global Finance has even pulled together a nonprofit "coalition of development, human rights, labor, environmental, and religious organizations and scholars dedicated to the reform of the global financial architecture in order to stabilize the world economy, reduce poverty and inequality, uphold fundamental rights, and protect the environment."

No doubt the McKinsey Global Institute and the New Rules group would approach the problem from a somewhat different vantage point. What they both agree on, however, is that governments have less and less to do with these new rules; civic and business communities will shape them.

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In our evaluation work with clients, we often start by examining how a project's inputs affect its outputs, and, stepping back once more, whether these activities are ultimately contributing to desirable outcomes. That "outputs to outcomes" relationship is among the most difficult to measure. But it's even more difficult to take an honest look at what turns up and, sometimes, acknowledge that the outputs that are being touted are hurting the outcomes being sought.

Such is often the case with foreign assistance funding. Homi Kharas, Senior Fellow for Global Economy and Development at the Brookings Institute, recently released a study titled "Measuring the Cost of Aid Volatility." Advocates for dignified employment and social opportunities for the global poor may not immediately sit up and take notice upon reading that title. But dig down a bit; this report re-frames the "outputs to outcomes" relationship behind the international system for distributing global goodwill through foreign aid programs.

We're used to hearing aid skeptics fault donors for creating an endless cycle of dependency; thus the rise of social enterprise, which takes as a core tenet the need to guide social projects toward self-sustaining business models after an initial seed phase. The subject of this report, however, is much more seldom discussed: even when aid money really is needed, donors still reserve the right to allocate funds if and when they wish. This results in a sporadic funding cycle that accentuates the very volatility and uncertainty that aid money is supposed to diminish in poor countries with little infrastructure, employment or industry. Kharas' report indicates that for all our short-term projects and outputs, the outcomes that donors' uneven and unpredictable funding practices have on the economies we're trying to help can be disastrous, making the situation more unstable than it would be without any aid.

Aid volatility is similar for low and middle income countries; weak states and strong states; aid dependent and low-aid countries; and across regions. Aid volatility differs substantially, however, by donor. We infer that donor policies contribute to volatility and that they should make reducing volatility a strong priority.

The key findings, in particular, are sobering:

• ODA is much more volatile than major macro variables: five times as volatile as GDP and three times as volatile as exports for the average recipient. ODA typically magnifies real business cycles in recipient countries.
• The aid system generates massive negative income shocks to some developing countries (on rare occasions). These large negative shocks account for the high cost of volatility. The impact of aid shocks has been as large and as frequent as income shocks faced by developed countries during the two World Wars, the Great Depression and the Spanish Civil War.
• The deadweight loss associated with aid volatility is between 15 and 20 percent of the total value of aid in recent years. At current aid levels, this loss is about $16 billion.
• From the average recipient's perspective, the deadweight loss is about 1.9 percent of GDP.
• Volatility costs between $0.07 and $0.28 per dollar of aid, depending on the donor.

It's no wonder the countries that receive most foreign aid often wind up needing immense amounts more in perpetuity. And it's no wonder that these places remain too volatile to do business for all but the bravest. Donors' volatility has hardwired that trend into the economy and thereby into the political dynamic as well.

It would not be easy (or necessarily desirable) to police the pace at which donors give. But that last bullet is particularly illustrative of the power that donors themselves (governments included) have to make better or worse use of their own foreign assistance spending. Donors who are serious about putting aid beneficiaries first by enabling a stable, sustainable local economy should take note.

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If you're like me, you know that the United States is in a heap of fiscal trouble (something about Americans spending more than they produce and China buying all our T-bills to pay for it...), but you're fuzzy on the particulars. Which debts/deficits are growing and by how much? And how do they/will they affect us? Because it seems like Americans have been subject to plenty of warnings about our nation's finances over the last decade or two, but the fallout has yet to really fall out. Granted, our economy is at a standstill and debt-wracked families, over-leveraged banks and a falling dollar fit in here somewhere, but more often than not the federal government (and Federal Reserve) is looked to during our financial crises as the ultimate guarantor--the bailout (more financial stimulus!) when our consumer and banking sectors are in trouble.

A new documentary that's getting rave reviews, I.O.U.S.A. presents a different perspective: The federal government itself has accumulated crippling debts and deficits (helped along by consumer and banking habits) that put its solvency at issue. The answer is that the government must do both more (it must make hard decisions) and less (it must spend less). The film walks viewers through "four key deficits: budget, savings, balance of payments/trade, and worst of all, our leadership deficit."

By very nature of the fact that both parties get elected to office and satisfy most constituents based on promises that involve spending money, "The film is nonpartisan and nonideological." It's supported by a thorough financial reporting effort by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. Its impressive cast of contributors bears its independently salient message out: Warren Buffett, Alan Greenspan, Paul Volcker, Pete Peterson, Sens. Kent Conrad and Judd Gregg, former Treasury Secretaries Paul O'Neill and Robert Rubin, former CBO chief Alice Rivlin, Rep. Ron Paul, Bob Bixby, and others talk through these deficits.

Where does advocacy come into all this? The answer is much the same for a problem on this scale as it is for climate change: civic action (for political change) and individual behavior change reinforce each other. After watching I.O.U.S.A., one critic commented, "There's no quick fix for a culture 'addicted to debt,' as one wag puts it in the film. But watching I.O.U.S.A. is a good place to start."

The film has been compared to "An Inconvenient Truth" for good reason. Advocacy answers are complex for problems like climate change and national fiscal habits. Progress will take action on many fronts. But, as with climate change, communicating clearly about the problem and the path to solutions is the first step. That maze of numbers is much more approachable as a result of I.O.U.S.A.

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As stirring as the giant windfarms and solar arrays getting splashed around on TV these days are, the most impactful image when it comes to overhauling our energy use may be the little gadget you see above. Sure, we all get mildly (some of us passionately) upset when we think about America's dependence on foreign oil. It's nice to imagine making use of our wind, sunlight and waves instead, but this is all in the abstract.

But what if your electricity meter was equipped to show you exactly how much energy your new solar panels are generating, how much your household is burning through, and how much you have left over to sell back to the utility company? That's a whole different ballgame. Now you're not only looking at a real-time visual readout on how much you're spending on power; you're also looking at how much income you might generate by installing an extra solar array and conserving a little more, then selling that back to the energy hogs out there.

Tip to Wired Magazine for its creative visual reporting on the evolution of power meters since their inception. Following are excerpts relating to the images above:

Wind and solar, unlike coal, do not produce power at the same rate at all times. If they are adopted at scale, the grid infrastructure and the meters like this one will have to be much more flexible than what we built 100 years ago.

Power generation has been centralized since the very early days of the industry, but now, wind and solar open the possibility to generate power right on or near your home. But to make economic sense, we need meters and grid tie-ins that can easily accomplish this type of "reverse billing"...

So, we find ourselves in a new era of electric meter innovation. A host of companies is trying to find just the right mix of features that will satisfy utilities and provide consumers with more flexibility in how they make, buy and use power.

Like everything else in the internet age, electricity-billing systems are about to make the transition from a centralized, one-way mode of operation to two-way systems that are connected to the internet. In addition to the back-end differences, the next generation of meters has received a facelift that will let consumers see their energy usage in near real-time.

Of course, people have been talking about "smart meters" for years. But after years of delayed rollouts, utilities finally appear ready to scale them up.

This electronic meter [pictured above]from Tendril is slated for a massive rollout with five major utilities that the company says will reach 2 million homes.

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I'm not sure how an American with access to media of any flavor could avoid the publicity onslaught of Michael Phelps. When Phelps passes through the "mixed zone" of Beijing's Olympic Water Cube, where reporters get to holler questions at the swimmers, the effect is reportedly not unlike posting up on Charles Barkley back in the day: scrappy. Americans, and indeed, many other countries, are pretty amazed by the prospect of someone who has a shot at eight Olympic medals.

But, oddly enough, according to the New York Times, the Chinese are not. Phelps' fifth gold medal and world record made pages 30 and 32, respectively, in China's leading sports papers. One technician at the Olympics had never even heard of him.

Now, I'm not one to get worked up about this. China is by no means obligated to hold its collective breath for Phelps. But it is instructive. It's a little metaphor for why it can be such a diplomatic challenge when two countries try to come to agreement about a big event. When Americans think about the 2008 Olympics, they will think of Michael Phelps, among other things. When Chinese think about these games, Phelps may not even register. That may change if he wins even more golds, but even then, the narratives will be different.

I suppose the bottom line is one that communications people try to impress on issue experts all the time: information means little; narratives mean a lot. The world may be getting "flat" information-wise, but it's still a pretty bumpy place in other ways.

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The Chinese have an interesting conundrum on their hands with the Olympics. The billions of dollars the country has spent preparing for the games and staging the remarkable opening ceremony last Friday are paying for what amounts to a huge coming out party for the country: "Time to take us seriously and put away your stereotypes," or something like that. But what does a serious country look like? For instance, it probably doesn't enlist "uniformed goose-stepping soldiers to raise the Olympic flag." A correspondent from the Economist, documenting his experiences at the games each day, makes some interesting observations on that score:

The Olympics are perhaps an odd battleground for Chinese patriotism. They are a Western invention, as are many of their sports. Yet staging the games has long been a Chinese dream, a way of showing that the country is a respected member of the international community and of showing off that it has become a sporting giant. If, on August 24th when the games end, China is not at the top of the medal table and Westerners are seen as ungrateful for China's hospitality, expect a lot of sullenness...

The opening ceremony at the bird's nest this evening is spectacular, but with touches of the authoritarian. Zhang Yimou, a filmmaker who once pushed the boundaries of artistic freedom in China but is now an establishment favourite, directed the spectacle.

The display begins with 2,008 soldiers dressed in traditional (civilian) gowns banging in unison on drums. It sets an uncomfortably martial tone (more than half of the 14,000 performers this evening are troops). The uniformed goose-stepping soldiers who raise the Olympic flag do not help alleviate this.

Neither do China's leaders, who watch impassively from a podium in the sweltering heat dressed in near identical suits. Performers move in perfect unison or in regimented choreography in a way that would make North Korea, a master of such extravaganzas, envious.

China is missing its chance to smash stereotypes: the opening ceremony displays a nation marching in lockstep. It avoids overt political references, but does little to refute Mr Ai's criticisms that the Beijing games are, for China, about politics. A normally vibrant city feels stifled. Dissenting voices are subdued.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When was the last time you read about an out and out tank battle? I recognize I fall on the younger end of people who pay attention to such things, but for me, tank battles are a distinctly 20th century phenomenon. We're in the information age. Conflicts, to me, play out between terrorist nodes, networked special forces teams and house-to-house efforts to win over the locals. Tank warfare between two sovereign states (I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt, Georgia) is downright retro.

I don't mean to be glib about the reality or brutality of what's happening in Georgia and South Ossetia. This past week has been a tragedy for families in those areas. But how did we regress back to tank battles in Eastern Europe? An article in the Economist exploring the roots of the conflict in Georgia brings to my mind a history lesson I think I heard when a sophomore in high school, about World War I. The thing that stuck out to me about The Great War, I remember, is how many petty, almost personal, were the rivalries and feuds that drove it from the beginning. Unlike World War II or the Cold War, it was "Great" only in the sense that it entailed massive loss of life, not because it bore out a huge gulf between opposing ideals.

So too, in Georgia, we find pettiness and national pride at mostly at stake on both sides. Writes the Economist:

Georgia was once the jewel of its empire, and Russia has never psychologically accepted it as a sovereign state. Nostalgia for the Soviet empire has long been the leitmotif of Russia's ideology. This month it re-enacted its fantasy with aircraft and ground troops...

The fact that Georgia is backed by the West made it a particularly appealing target. In fighting Georgia, Russia fought a proxy war with the West--especially with America (which had upgraded the Georgian army). All this was a payback for the humiliation that Russia suffered in the 1990s, and its answer to NATO's bombing of Belgrade in 1999 and to America's invasion of Iraq. "If you can do it, so can we," was the logic.

Russia was also drawing a thick red line on the map of Europe which the West and NATO should not cross. And, as in any war, there were powerful subjective reasons in play. Mr Putin's personal hatred of Mr Saakashvili, and his ability to deploy the entire Russian army to fulfil his vendetta, made war all but inevitable.

I suspect it would be a shock to most Americans that Russia sees in Georgia a proxy for its grievances with the West, particularly the United States; as President Bush has repeatedly said over the past few days, "the Cold War is over." But this is one example of many, I fear, in which the United States will pay dearly for its actions in Iraq; in Russia's eyes, we have no right to rebuke other countries for acting aggressively in pursuit of our national interest. Not to say that U.S. actions in Iraq are comparable with Russia's in Georgia--that's simply not the case. But it doesn't matter. The damage is done and Russia can get away with murder now. Again, from the Economist article cited above:

While its forces were dropping bombs on Georgia, the Kremlin bombarded its own population with an astonishing, even by Soviet standards, propaganda campaign. One Russian deputy reflected the mood: "Today, it is quite obvious who the parties in the conflict are. They are the US, UK, Israel who participated in training the Georgian army, Ukraine who supplied it with weapons. We are facing a situation where there is a NATO aggression against us."

In blue jeans and a sports jacket, Mr Putin, cast as the hero of the war, flew to the Russian side of the Caucasus mountain range to hear, first-hand, hair-raising stories from refugees that ranged from burning young girls alive to stabbing babies and running tanks over old women and children. These stories were whipped up into anti-Georgian and anti-Western hysteria. Russian politicians compared Mr Saakashvili to Saddam Hussein and Hitler and demanded that he face an international tribunal. What Russia was doing, it seemed, was no different from what the West had done in its "humanitarian" interventions.

There was one difference, however. Russia was dealing with a crisis that it had deliberately created. Its biggest justification for military intervention was that it was formally protecting its own citizens. Soon after Mr Putin's arrival in the Kremlin in 2000, Russia started to hand out passports to Abkhaz and South Ossetians, while also claiming the role of a neutral peacekeeper in the region. When the fighting broke out between Georgia and South Ossetia, Russia, which had killed tens of thousands of its own citizens in Chechnya, argued that it had to defend its nationals.

But as Mr Bildt argues, "we have reason to remember how Hitler used this very doctrine little more than half a century ago to undermine and attack substantial parts of central Europe." In the process of portraying Georgia as a fascist-led country, Russia was displaying the syndrome it was condemning.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This just in:

Lopez Lomong, one of the Sudanese "Lost Boys" and a member of the anti-genocide group Team Darfur, has been chosen by his 595 U.S. Olympic teammates to carry our flag on Friday. What, we couldn't find a Tibetan monk on the team?

...Just hours before U.S. team captains met to decide on the flag carrier, Chinese officials rescinded the visa of Joey Cheek, a speedskating gold medalist who carried the U.S. flag at the Closing Ceremonies at the 2006 Winter Games and later co-founded Team Darfur. After that slap at Cheek, U.S. athletes here had almost nothing to say on the topic. One even referred to the subject as "the question they warned us about."

Perhaps they didn't answer individually. But the entire U.S. team gave its answer -- as a group and in capital letters -- with Lomong's selection. You jerk Cheek's visa. We put Lomong in your face. And do it proudly.

You have to hand it to the Chinese Communist Party: They certainly know how to muzzle Americans. Cheek, a Princeton grad, might have held a seminar. Four billion people around the world will see Lomong carrying our flag.

Far more than that, untold millions of people, in the next few days, will hear Lomong's life story, in his own words. In a half-hour monologue here on Friday, just 10 hours before he was to carry the flag, Lomong told a tale of grief, endurance, redemption and almost unimaginable hardship that captures in human terms every aspect of the Darfur tragedy. And without Lomong saying a single "controversial" political word, he highlighted China's culpability by cynically supporting the Sudanese regime as partner in the vast oil company PetroChina.

I feel proud.

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With presidential campaign cabinets growing and shifting at an unprecedented rate, it can be a challenge to keep track of who is responsible for speaking for and to Barack Obama and John McCain on foreign policy issues. The Connect US Fund is maintaining a great tool to keep you up to date, though, that lists for each candidate:

• Foreign Policy and National Security advisors
• Foreign Economic Policy advisors
• Environment/ Energy advisors (currently only for Senator Obama, though reports suggest that economic advisors for Senator McCain seem also to be advising on environment/energy issues).

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So who really has the best energy policy? Well Paris Hilton, of course, writes Newsweek's Howard Fineman. "Paris's message: don't stress, don't dis each other's ideas, let's just try everything! It doesn't get any smarter than that," Fineman writes. John McCain and Barack Obama "by contrast, are engaged in a phony war that refuses to accept the Hiltonian point: we need every tactic in this new energy war. We need all the production, conservation and research strategies we can imagine. Nothing should be belittled, or dismissed; everything should be attempted. We can't afford to think otherwise."

There it is in a nutshell, straight from Paris to the WSJ to the Exchange to you.

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When you consider the state of TV news, it's strange that discussions about the direction of the news media focus so often on whether blogs can be considered real news sources--whether "real" journalism will survive their onslaught. The barriers to blogosphere entry are so low, goes the argument, how will we ever sift the credible sources? Meanwhile, TV news, which has the highest barriers to entry, is in an abysmal state. We've all heard complaints about partisan rants by talking heads taking over real reportage, but no one levels so thorough an indictment as Kieren McCarthy does, writing for The Guardian: "Why TV news in the US is utter rubbish."

McCarthy's sample dialogue is note-perfect:

It's not the absolute dearth of real news that is the problem, however. It's the fact that the news that is presented isn't news but mindless, misleading gossip. The clearest example of this is when one of the (between two and six) commentators on any given story provides their "analysis".

This comprises of showing a video clip and then talking with the assumed voice of the person in the clip. So, for example, Barack Obama gave a press conference. A clip of around four or five seconds of what he said is shown and then the TV studio people take over.

News anchor: "So what he's saying is 'Hey, I'm the guy in charge here - I'm the person who decides what to do, not you.' Is that right?"

Commentator: "I think what he was saying was: 'If I become president, then I'll be the person that calls the shots.'"

Commentator Two: "I don't agree. He's saying: 'I am going to listen to others - that's what I'll do - but make no mistake I'll be the person who makes the final decision.'"

This goes on and on with people making up dialogue and pretending to be Obama (or John McCain or anyone else that comes to mind) rather than broadcasting what was actually said.

This is just one piece of the vacuous approach favored by TV news outlets, writes McCarthy, who leads the reader through a litany of sins (click through to read his analysis of each one in detail):

• Unfair comment: The analysis of what someone has said is clearly bent by the reporters themselves along ideological lines.

• Tail-chasing and navel gazing: The media reports constantly on itself.

• Never let the story get in the way: The focus is entirely on the back story, and the actual news is given lip-service.

• The Jerry Springer school of journalism: There is never a neutral statement - it is always an extreme perspective.

• The gold(fish) rush: There is absolutely no effort to provide historical context.

• When did you stop beating your wife? Coverage is deeply cynical in the sense that people are assumed to have a hidden and planned agenda even when the connection drawn would have been impossible to predict as it doesn't follow logical reasoning.

• Fight! Fight! Fight! There is no effort to reach a greater understanding.

I would like to provide some point-counterpoint to McCarthy's indictment, but I am hard-pressed to marshal those counterpoints. There are a few bright spots--PBS news coverage, 60 Minutes (sometimes), and probably a few others--but for the most part I fear he's right. TV news talks more emphatically all the time about less and less.

It's like Stephen Colbert isn't a joke, a corrective to the system, but rather a model, a catalyst. This calls for a massive Edward R. Murrow fan club...

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As we noted on Friday, our own David Devlin-Foltz traveled to Mexico City this week to co-lead an advocacy evaluation workshop at the XVIIth International AIDS Conference. The global AIDS conference serves as a clearing house for the wide range of people and professions--scientists, doctors, clinicians, aid workers, philanthropists, activists, evaluators, etc.--who are working on pieces of the AIDS epidemic around the world. You can imagine the vast cultural and communication gaps that plague such a varied group. It's hard to assess or agree on how the overall effort is going.

Fairly well, says The Economist. For one thing, just look at the graph above: we've begun treating, in the course of a few years, a lot of people who would otherwise be dying of AIDS around the world. There have been some dead ends and disappointments since the last such conference two years ago in Toronto, but the AIDS issue is one area in which the United States has stepped up in a big way. PEPFAR "provides for $39 billion to be spent on AIDS over the next five years, up from $15 billion for the past five." While vaccine trials have proved disappointing and squabbles persist over approaches to prevention, ARV treatments that not long ago were regarded as just that--treatment--are proving to have some remarkable preventative effects. What's more, low-tech measures are proving to be some of the most effective for cutting rates of transmission (circumcision decreases transmission by 50-60%). Even the politically sensitive strategy of behavioral change (i.e. telling people to be faithful) is demonstrably cutting transmission rates:

One reason for the orphan status of behaviour change is that it is seen as slightly unscientific. Dr Gayle and her colleagues are trying to change that. They have been looking at research in the field and discovered a lot of trials that attempt to borrow the methodology of medicine by using control groups. These trials quantify everyday experience and, in the round, suggest that campaigns to promote condom use, to curb promiscuity and to promote the use by drug takers of clean needles can reduce infection rates in the groups they are aimed at by 20-30%.

A lot of money has been spent on AIDS. It is no small matter that we're seeing not only treatment increase but also prospects for prevention. Bottom line: this broad coalition of players and approaches is having a positive effect. "The watchword now is 'combination prevention' to go along with combination therapy. If AIDS is to be beaten back without a vaccine--which is still a big if--that is the only sensible way forward."

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One thing I love about this country is that we can and do examine our candidates for president very closely. We do this as opposition research, sure, but many groups do it as a genuine service to voters--a way to uncover an essence of character that underlies crafted campaign messages. The Pew Center for Religion and Public Life has done this with respect to the role that religion has played in shaping the candidates. We all scoff (right?) at rumors that Barack Obama is a closet Muslim. Reverend Jeremiah Wright clearly isn't the whole story either. We know that there is more to McCain than the by-now comfortable mantle of war hero. So who or what influenced the way these two men think about religion and public life? How do they see their own faith? Where does that history take them as they come down on particular issues?

The Pew Forum has put together religious biographies on both candidates that dig beyond the episodic and sensationalist picture that we get from news clips.

John McCain was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam when a captor showed him unexpected mercy, which affirmed his faith. Barack Obama was a community organizer in Chicago when a black church helped him embrace faith despite his serious doubts. Religion & Politics '08 now offers in-depth profiles that tell the candidates' faith stories and explain their views of how religion should impact public life.

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I love the Olympics (image above courtesy of the beautiful NYT Magazine spread on Sunday). You see, growing up in my house, we had a TV but no cable or channels to speak of. Once every four years, though, my parents would bend their stringent objections, contact the cable company (we lived way out beyond antenna range), and spring for one glorious month of cable (followed by several months of squabbling with the cable company, which never actually believed my parents about only wanting to sign up for a single month of service).

As a kid, one month of cable every four years is like having Christmas only on leap years: excruciatingly joyous during and terribly sad when it's done and you have to wait for the next one. It also served to exalt Olympic periods to something of the stature that eclipses and other solar phenomena must have had in ancient societies: the Olympics were among the milestones of life in my growing-up mind. And my family wasn't even that sports-crazy; we just loved the stories and the fact that everyone around the world could agree on something.

Sure, there's lots of talk about China's political ambitions. About smog and pollution in Beijing. About medal counts and projections. World records. But make no mistake, these worthy news hooks notwithstanding, the Olympics' ace-in-the-hole, from a communications perspective, is its platform to tell unlikely and moving stories. Like this one in the NY Times today about Congolese runner Gary Kikaya (pictured).

The story reminds me: there's more to these games than China's obsession with its image or even U.S. activists' efforts to point out the flaws in that image. These are stories of human flourishing and defeat, the sort that stick with you from childhood and form one's image of the world.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 3:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Progress toward best-practice foreign assistance is often two steps forward, one step back. Well, here we are stepping back, again, from the only large-scale government attempt to re-tool foreign aid with an eye toward long term effectiveness: last week the Senate appropriated only $254 million to the Millennium Challenge Account, a cut of $1.97 billion from the administration's request. This essentially means that the MCA is frozen in 2009, unable to sign any additional compacts with countries that have been working diligently to meet the eligibility requirements for funding (thereby rendering moot the "challenge" part).

It's got to be grating to those who've worked so long and hard to make the case for what the MCA can and should be--the Center for Global Development's Sheila Herrling chief among them--to see the rug pulled from under it before it finds its legs. The MCA is not dead in the water--it can still carry forward on its present compacts with appropriated funds. But, as Herrling points out in a blog entry addressing the Senate's three stated reservations with the program (1. The MCC not spending what is has; 2. MCC has delivered few tangible results; 3. The U.S. must address more immediate and pressing needs.), the entire point of the MCC is that it was created outside of the established aid framework to do something different (than pursuing donor fads and political objectives) over the long term by rewarding good governance and giving recipient countries the time and space to design their own project and implement it as they wish.

...For someone who believes that U.S. interests are served by investing in global poverty reduction and economic growth and applying the lessons we have learned about investing in well-governed countries that can own and drive their own development, it makes little sense to kill -- or "pause" -- the one experiment we have.

Despite language in the report that suggests good intent and support of the MCC model, pausing the program for a year will send a signal to countries that have worked hard to meet the eligibilty criteria and design credible programs that the U.S. doesn't follow through on its commitments. A $1 billion appropriation would at least have saved face. And language that suggests the MCC should reprogram assistance to "countries important to U.S. interests" takes the poverty focus of the MCC political, thereby casting doubt on the degree of real support for the model.

And, finally, the larger question: what are the chances of reaching a grand bargain between Congress and the Executive Branch on 21st Century foreign aid reform that would embody what we know enhances development effectiveness -- multi-year strategic budgeting, long-term commitment to economic growth and poverty reduction, country-ownership, attention to impact results not disbursements -- when the one model we have is being sacrificed?

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 2:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you or colleagues are attending the International HIV/AIDS Conference in Mexico City next week, join David Devlin-Foltz and a terrific group of international panelists for a workshop Monday from 2:30 - 6:00 PM in SBR8 on "The Challenges of Monitoring and Evaluating Community Sector Advocacy."

This semi-annual conference has become a global agenda-setting event (Measha Brueggergosman performance at the 2006 International HIV/AIDS conference in Toronto pictured above to prove it). The Monday session should be an illuminating look at real-world advocacy evaluation scenarios from around the globe; the conversation will bring in representatives from advocacy projects in Argentina, Vietnam, Ecuador and Costa Rica, among others. Slowly but surely, the GII, along with many other players, is helping to build an international community of practice in the field of advocacy evaluation. More next week.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 1:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I wrote yesterday about the McCain campaign's unenviable (and in my opinion, so far, botched) attempt to find some serious flaws in Barack Obama as a presidential candidate. Obama has become such a compelling candidate for many reasons (not all of them his doing) that McCain finds himself overmatched--or at least mismatched. This is amazing, because McCain is one hell of a presidential candidate, and if he were running against any of the past half dozen Democratic nominees for president, I would probably cast my vote for him. The United States presidential race should come down to two terrific candidates; finally, it has. But in many ways it kills me that we couldn't have had someone of John McCain's stature and maturity (I use that word in the the real sense, not the "he's too old" sense) in office over the past years.

All this rumination is brought on by the Washington Post's fascinating in-depth exploration of John McCain's history, nature and temperament, "The Curious Mind of John McCain." The piece confirms much that I respect about the man, not least his honesty and fondness of heated debate and disagreement as a tool for learning and refining his views (sound unfamiliar?) Political figures in America spend so much time polishing their homespun down-to-earthness that it almost becomes hard to imagine what a non-concocted version of these traits looks like. I appreciated these bits from the Post's exploration of John McCain.

The first excerpt, particularly, goes a long way to explain how it can be that McCain is such a compelling and admired figure, yet might very well lose his bid to be president anyway:

McCain is a figure from an old-fashioned America that is out of fashion in our most cosmopolitan precincts -- the America of "Gunsmoke" and Gary Cooper, not "The Daily Show" and George Clooney. For McCain, "Duty, Honor, Country" isn't patriotic pablum but a credo to live by. And he has worked out a way to apply the credo to politics. He summarized it in a commencement address at Johns Hopkins in 1999, when he gave the graduates this advice:

"Enter public life determined to tell the truth; to put problem-solving ahead of partisanship; to defend the public interest against the special interests; to risk your personal ambitions for the sake of the country and the ideals that make her great. Keep your promise to America, and you will keep your honor. You will know a happiness far more sublime than pleasure."

"That's what it's all about," McCain said in the interview.

But such high-mindedness can be difficult to sustain, and when he fails to do so, McCain's self-criticism can be devastating.

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"I think his mind is visceral," [Former Senator Gary] Hart said, "driven less by thought and more by feelings. This doesn't mean he's totally reactive or without logic or thought processes; it just means he's a fighter pilot. He reacts to circumstances."

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McCain has repeatedly lambasted Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) for failing to understand the Iraq war. McCain was asked about Obama's warnings in 2002 that a war against Iraq was a bad idea that would require a U.S. "occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences." Wasn't Obama more prescient than McCain, who gave repeated prewar assurances such as "the Iraqi people will greet us as liberators" and "we will win it easily"? McCain replied: "I think that's a legitimate question." Then he added: "But the fact is, we did win easily. It was terribly mismanaged."

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"What he really enjoys, although the witnesses seldom do, is to put opposing witnesses on the same panel, and sit back and watch them fight, and see who has the best argument," [longtime friend and biographer Mark] Salter said. The Senate Commerce Committee chaired by McCain did this in 2001-02 during hearings on global warming, convincing the chairman that the scientific debate was settled -- the Earth is warming. Learning from conflict is a method McCain happily defends.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The New York Times is reporting that "American intelligence agencies have concluded that members of Pakistan's powerful spy service helped plan the deadly July 7 bombing of India's embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan." The ISI, Packistan's intelligence service, is also "increasingly providing militants with details about the American campaign against them, in some cases allowing militants to avoid American missile strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas."

Pakistan has long been a conundrum in U.S. foreign policy. On the one hand: it's hard to dismiss the age old truism, "hold your friends close and your enemies even closer," especially if our policies drive a wedge into the power base of Pakistani hard-liners, who might otherwise run away with the government. On the other: how far can we stretch our credibility when the United States has proclaimed a global war on terror, but much of our foreign aid budget goes to financing a government that is essentially a state sponsor of terrorism?

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)