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Tech Delegation Goes To Russia To Carry Out 21st Century Statecraft
February 23rd, 2010 - 5:14pm
Filed under International Security
Silicon Valley and the State Department are getting along quite well under the Obama Administration. Last year, a tech delegation traveled with the State Department to Iraq and Mexico City to see how technology can help aid the countries. As a result of those trips, the Iraqi government set up a YouTube channel
and digitized the contents of its looted national museum, while Mexico set up an SMS hotline for reporting crimes anonymously. In January, Sec. Hillary Clinton held a dinner in Washington D.C. for tech innovators and luminaries to discuss how to harness the power of technology tools to promote diplomacy around the globe, what Secretary Clinton calls "21st Century Statecraft."
Today, a group of leaders in the tech sector is joining the State Department on a trip to Russia to discuss how communications technologies and social media can be used to strengthen and broaden the ties between the United States and Russia. The State Department has recruited some big names to join the trip, including actor and social media lover Ashton Kutcher, eBay CEO John Donahoe, Twitter co-founder and Square founder Jack Dorsey, and Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior. We hear one of Kutcher's responsibilities will be to Tweet about the trip. Topics which will be explored include how to foster entrepreneurship and how to use the Web to combat child trafficking and corruption, and use it to improve training, distance learning for remote populations, e-government initiatives, and cultural exchanges.
The delegation is led by Jared Cohen, a State Department policy staffer, Howard Solomon of the National Security Council and White House Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra. The full list of tech leaders on the trip include John Donahoe, Jack Dorsey, Padmasree Warrior, Shervin Pishevar, executive chairman and founder of Social Gaming Network; Jason Liebman, CEO and cofounder of Howcast; Esther Dyson, prolific investor and leader; Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation; and Ellis Rubinstein, president and CEO of New York Academy of Sciences.
Kutcher, along with his actress wife, Demi Moore, are the founders of the Demi and Ashton Foundation, which works on anti-trafficking issues. Kutcher also founded production company Katalyst and has been active in promoting and furthering social media initiatives.
"They are taking off their commercial hat, putting on their expert hats and becoming part-time diplomats," Cohen tells TechCrunch. "The State Department is a connector here. Statecraft is as much about building connections as doing negotiations."
The delegation is tentatively scheduled to meet with the Russian Ministers of Communications, Health and Education; with advisors to President Medvedev; with leaders of Russian technology and telecommunications companies; with cultural and educational leaders; and with civil society organizations concerned with health, child welfare anti-trafficking, and anti-corruption efforts. - Tech Crunch
Silicon Valley Luminaries Become Technology Ambassadors to Russia
February 23rd, 2010 - 5:10pm
Filed under Economy
Silicon Valley is playing a much larger role in international diplomacy in the Obama administration than in the Bush administration. That's in large part thanks to Jared Cohen, who has played a role in both.
Cohen joined Condoleezza Rice's State Department policy planning staff as its youngest member in 2006. A Stanford University graduate who won a Rhodes Scholarship and earned a master's degree in international relations at Oxford, Cohen advised the State Department on youth and education, particularly in the Muslim world. He gained notice for his book: "Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East," which was based on his travels there. He advised Rice on how to reach young people in the Middle East who were increasingly using social media tools.
Now Cohen is on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's team and helped with her speech on Internet freedom. I spoke with him while he was waiting at the airport to board a flight for Moscow. He's part of an effort that Secretary Clinton calls "21st Century Statecraft." In January, Clinton held a dinner in Washington to explore how to use technology to promote diplomacy.
"Statecraft as much about building connections as it is about negotiating," Cohen said.
That's what Cohen will be doing for the next five days. He has teamed with Howard Solomon of the National Security Council and White House Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra to lead an all-star U.S. delegation to Russia to see how technology can mutually benefit both countries.
The State Department has always sent business delegations to other countries. But sending technology delegations is something new. Last year, a tech delegation traveled to Iraq and Mexico. After the Iraq trip, the government there set up a YouTube channel and tech companies helped set up a website to catalog arts and artifacts in the national museum that was looted after the U.S. invasion. After the Mexico trip, the country set up an SMS hotline to report crimes anonymously.
Cohen's contention: The U.S. can open doors to other countries and cultures through its technology sector that produces many of the tools that young people around the world use to connect with one another.
Among the luminaries headed to Russia with Cohen are actor Ashton Kutcher; EBay CEO John Donahoe; Shervin Pishevar, executive chairman and founder of Social Gaming Network; Twitter co-founder and Square founder Jack Dorsey; Mozilla Foundation chair Mitchell Baker; and Cisco System CTO Padmasree Warrior. They will meet with Russian ministers of health and education, advisors to President Dimitry Medvedev, leaders of technology companies and more. They will tackle issues such as encouraging entrepreneurship and e-government initiatives and combating child trafficking and corruption.
The participants were chosen because they represent a microcosm of the technology industry and they make efforts to do social good. Kutcher, and his actress wife Demi Moore, for example, have a foundation that works on trafficking issues. Kutcher is also active in social media.
"They are taking off their CEO and commercial hats and putting on their expert hats," Cohen said. - L.A. Times, Jessica Guynn
Why Aren't we Learning From Japan's "Lost Decade"?
February 18th, 2010 - 11:57am
Filed under Economy
President Obama has requested another round of stimulus spending with expanded unemployment benefits and additional money for infrastructure projects to jump-start economic growth and reduce unemployment. Although this stimulus package is meeting with more opposition than the first, our elected officials do not seem to have learned anything from other countries who have unsuccessfully tried similar stimulus policies in the past. Take Japan for example.
Following strong economic growth and low interest rates in the 1980's, an asset bubble developed in the Japanese economy consisting of inflated real estate and securities prices. Recognizing that this bubble was unsustainable, the Japanese central bank raised interest rates in 1989, leading to a massive sell-off in securities and a dramatic decline in real estate values. In short, the bubble burst.
The government responded with several rounds of stimulus which consisted of massive infrastructure spending. All over Japan, roads were paved, dams were built and bridges were erected to connect numerous land masses all in an effort to stimulate the economy. In the process, Japan accumulated trillions in national debt which now totals 180% of it's nearly $6 trillion dollar economy. So large is Japan's debt that it now ranks number one of the developed countries in terms of leverage.
So how well did this entire stimulus program work? Well, economists generally refer to this period in Japan's history as the "lost decade" because the policies failed. Miserably.
Between 1989 and 2003, the Nikkei Index fell by 80% and real estate declined by 50%. Homeless camps sprung up on the banks of many rivers as people abandoned their homes due to foreclosure activity of the banks. The suicide rate skyrocketed when unemployment doubled. Even today, exports still continue their downward spiral, prompting fears of a second wave of recession for the Japanese economy.
The Heritage Foundation says that no nation is sorrier than Japan for endorsing John Maynard Keynes brand of economics and for squandering vast sums of national wealth in a vain attempt to stimulate their economy.
It now appears that these policy mistakes cost Japan the chance to lead the world in economic growth. Indeed, The Japan That Can Say "No" learned the hard way that fiscal stimulus programs financed by debt won't stop bankruptcies, declining real estate values, foreclosures, job losses or a falling stock market.
Richard Koo, the chief economist at Nomura Research Institute calls our current recession "a balance sheet recession." In the United States, the housing and credit bubble created several trillion in assets. It also created several trillion in debt. When the bubble burst, the value of the assets declined as housing prices plummeted and mortgage backed securities became worthless. Unfortunately, the debt remains.
The only solution now is for banks to remove these assets from their balance sheet by taking the write-offs. Likewise, individuals and business have no choice but to pay down their debt. This reduction in debt takes huge sums of money out of the economy. Koo maintains that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and popular left-of-center economist Paul Krugman, who often writes for The New York Times, do not understand this yet as demonstrated by their vain attempts to prop this bubble up even more through massive government stimulus plans financed by equally massive increases to the national debt.
When one compares one financial indicator: The Nikkei 225 Index to the Standard and Poor's 500 Index, there is a frightening similarity. If the United States stays on its current course, we are likely to suffer the same fate as Japan, and perhaps even more so, because while the savings rate cushion in Japan was 17%, the United States savings rate is considerably lower.
Furthermore, Japan had very little population growth during this period while the United States continues to grow from substantial immigration, both legal and illegal. Where most of the bad debts in Japan have been written off and removed from balance sheets, most banks in the U.S. have not written off their bad debts and we continue to prop up vast sums now owned or backed by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
American businesses are truly beginning to see the same level of declines that the Japanese experience. Brian Dunn, the President of Best Buy, recently commented: "In 42 years, we have never seen such difficult times for the American consumer." If the United States does not curtail its current government spending frenzy and stabilize our sovereign debt level, we are destined to suffer a period of low economic growth, historically high unemployment, stagnating living standards, all while the world around us resumes prosperous growth.
In short, we, too, will experience our own "lost decade." - John Ridings Lee
U.S. Girds for a Fight for Internet Freedom
February 11th, 2010 - 1:44pm
Filed under International Security
By Ken Stier
During the Cold War, Soviet bloc dissidents had to rely on primitive printing technologies to reproduce samizdat literature in tiny quantities. Today's dissidents living under authoritarian regimes around the world can disseminate their message world wide with the click of a mouse, through blog postings and viral videos. And, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced in a recent speech, the United States plans to champion their cause by enabling unprecedented freedom of speech on the Internet, in defiance of all political censorship.
"While it is clear that the spread of [new communication] technologies is transforming our world, it is still unclear how that transformation will affect the human rights and human welfare of the world's population," noted Clinton. That's because "on their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, but the United States does; we stand for a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas." (Read about internet searches in China.)
In the U.S., the notion of unfettered access to communications is so uncontroversial as to seem almost trite, but it is a revolutionary demand in countries such as Iran and China where it threatens the regimes' hold on power. That's the reason that one third of the world that has any access to internet sees a version censored by their governments. Declaring a kind of soft war on this new information curtain being drawn across the "new iconic infrastructure of our age", the U.S. is now committing itself to actively undermining censorship. In China, that means going up against some 50,000 government employees and the '50 Cent Party' - the many thousands of youths alleged to be paid 50 cents for each pro-government comment they post on-line.
The State Department is already working to enhance digital communications capabilities in some 40 countries, but not all of those efforts are aimed at subverting dictatorships. Some further development ends, such as mobile banking systems the U.S. has helped deploy in Afghanistan, and for demobilized militia members in the Congo. Others address urgent social problems. In Mexico, local mobile phone carriers are working with a U.S.-sponsored technical team to enable citizens to text information about crimes to police - the anonymity of the source would help protect informants from retribution. And in Pakistan, the U.S. helped establish the nation's first ever text-messaging system, allowing real-time information exchanges all across the country, according to Mobile Accord's James Eberhard, who has also been instrumental raising donations for Haiti through text messages. (See the top 10 banned books.)
The State Department's more sensitive efforts are those that seek to empower grassroots organizations, such as the $5 million Civil Society Initiative 2.0, officially launched in Morocco last November to work with local NGOs in North Africa and the Middle East. An even broader effort, the Alliance of Youth Movements, mentors activists from around the globe using annual summits and a bulging library of how-to videos such as How to Create a Grassroots Movement for Change. "Mostly these are one or two people doing amazing things on their own, who often did not appreciate the full significance of what they were doing, so we brought them all together," says Jason Liebman, co-founder of the AYM and Howcast, which produces the videos. "For most of them this was a first time on an airplane." (Read "A Coming Chill Over Internet Freedom?")
Having seen the potential of new communications platforms and social media to spread information and organize action, the State Department has assembled a team of tech-savvy twenty- and thirty-somethings to train activists, nurture networks and even innovate new technologies. To do this, it plans to sponsor competitions and partner with universities and companies, which Clinton called upon to "be part of our national brand" campaigning against Internet censorship.
Clinton recently hosted a dinner where her senior staff met with CEOs of leading technology companies, as part of an effort to shake up her own organization. That means ditching its 20th century habits for a culture of innovation, explains Andrew Rasiej, of the Personal Democracy Forum, who has periodically offered Clinton advice on IT issues. "Whereas the Internet may have been looked at as ancillary to her campaign when she was running for president, it is no longer, it is now integral to her vision for a successful tenure as Secretary of State," he added.
Internationally, the new emphasis on enabling the skirting of Internet censorship amounts to a shift from traditional public diplomacy to a kind of Internet democracy activism. Where the former relied on tools such as Voice of America radio broadcasts to all corners of the globe, the latter emphasizes the U.S. promoting indigenous voice in countries that curb free speech, says NYU telecommunications professor Clay Shirky, adding that enabling citizens to express themselves "is way more threatening than Voice of America-style broadcasts, and autocratic governments will react to that."
Thus far, authoritarian governments have largely managed to control the Internet in their countries, argues Hal Roberts, a researcher with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "Actually I think the story of the first 15 years of the widespread use of the Internet is that it is deeply embedded with local mechanisms of control and that governments can control the Internet pretty well," he says. That's only likely to change if the U.S. is willing to match the new inspirational rhetoric about Internet freedom with actions that could be deemed hostile by the regimes concerned. Time Magazine.