Democratic Tyranny: The Case of Ukraine

Is democratic tyranny an oxymoron? If it were, why then did the delegates at the American Constitutional Convention go to such pains to carve up public or governmental power between the states and the federal government, as well as between three “arms,” or “branches,” of the federal government. Moreover, pitting ambition against ambition points to just how dangerous ambition itself can be. When it is legitimated under the auspices of democracy, democrats may have trouble coming up with justifications for removing a democratically-elected tyrant. In this essay, I draw on the case of Ukraine in early 2014 to suggest a few possible rationales.

Would it make a difference if the protesters were hitting other citizens rather than governmental forces? (Image Source: GlobalPost)

On February 19, 2014, violence erupted between the police and the protesters bent on toppling the democratically-elected president. Twenty died on that day, and over seventy on the following day. While it might be tempting to focus on “who started it,” a higher-yielding strategy goes after the means used by the government to end the protests. Such means need not involve violence. For example, after the second day of violence raging in Kiev, the president took part in a fruitful “all-nighter” negotiation session with the protest leaders and E.U. officials. 

To be sure, the president had an incentive to negotiate then, for his backing in the parliament was weakening. Violence rather than compromise had been his preference. Behind the scenes, the government had been paying titushki men to attack protesters whether they were being violent or not. Heather McGill of the Europe and Central Asia Regional Program at Amnesty International points to various reports of armed men carrying bats and other makeshift weapons roaming around Kiev in organized groups and attacking citizens presumed to be protesters.[1] “(W)e have seen interviews with titushki where they admitted they were being paid—there is definitely a body of young, athletic men being paid by the government.”[2] This practice obviously goes well beyond hiring people as counter-protesters, and this distinction is vital in forming an argument founded on human rights that can be used as a basis to re-conceptualize national sovereignty as inherently limited rather than absolute.

Specifically, in sanctioning payments to young athletic men tasked with hurting and even killing citizens who are not being violent at the time of attack, the Ukrainian president violated his governmental obligation to protect the citizenry. This duty goes back to the social contract between kings and subjects wherein the latter agreed to be ruled by the former, who in turn obligated himself to protecting the subjects. This social contract survives in the norm held around the world that a government is obliged to protect its citizenry (including residents). Put another way, a government that violently turns on its own people is typically viewed as having over-reached in a way that violates a major postulate of its monopoly on legitimate force. When people are themselves being violent against each other or their respective property, or are destroying public property, military or police force does not involve such a violation of the conditions of governmental sovereignty because protecting the citizenry includes stopping violence within the citizenry and a government acts legitimately to protect public goods.[3]

Besides being a case of over-kill, paying thugs to wander around Kiev (and other cities) to beat or kill citizens thought to have been in the protests or to be protesting non-violently at the time exceeds and thus violates a government’s legitimate use of force, which in turn comes out of the concept of governmental sovereignty and thus national sovereignty. Such a violation invalidates a government’s claim to the rights the sovereignty. Crucially, this human-rights and sovereignty based argument applies to any government official, regardless of how he or she gained power. Hence, tyranny invalidates even a democratically-elected government. Just as governmental and national sovereignty are subject to limits based on the normative social contract and the human right to life (which itself may be limited by committing violence), democratic government also faces limits at the expense of unlimited license.

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[1] Olga Rudenko and Jennifer Collins, “Thugs Said to Roam in Ukraine,” USA TODAY, February 20, 2014.

[2] Ibid.

[3] I am assuming here that the case of citizens paid by the government to inflict harm on other citizens pertains to governmental power rather than violence between citizens. 

On the Democratization of Credibility: Global Warming Experts

Even as late as 2013, as if the mounting evidence of global warming and our carbon footprint were some new kind of faith narrative whose white-coated high priests preside over a new political religion distinctly American, some members of Congress, political commentators, and lay apostates recoiled with the declaration, "I don't believe in global warming." Epistemologically, to believe is less rigorous than to know. Actually, what they mean is that they know that our industries and carbon-emitting vehicles are blameless, even pure. It is the sheer declarativeness and the underlying epistemological assumption that I want to make transparent, as being inherently problematic and yet likely "hard-wired" in the very fabric of human brain.

The entire essay is at "On the Democratization of Credibility"

Digital-Journalism Entrepreneurs: Lured by Technology or Fleeing Journalistic Decadence?

How does a business model premised on abundance rather than scarcity look? Will the budding journalistic entrepreneurs end up freely adding to the trove of abundance subtly yet indelibly points to selective scarcity, or will the sea of free abundance dry up once the economic need for a viable revenue stream finally calls in the loan? If only we had infallible crystal balls capable of showing us the future. Rather than staring into the still-foggy abyss, let’s try breaking off pieces of the mammoth digital-media revolution that can be answered.  In this essay, I tackle the question of whether the expansion of online journalism has been primarily chasing the open-ended promise of the burgeoning technology, or pushing away from increasingly decadence in the traditional media. In investigating this question, I do not mean to imply a direct relation to the broader question. Putting GlobalPost under the microscope, I contend that shortcomings increasingly evident in the traditional media have been giving the online revolution a “shot in the arm” in the form of a transfer of talent.  

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business: A Malignant Mentality of Mendacity, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.

Global Warming: Has China Done Enough?

Whereas the Montreal Protocol in 1985 created a fund to reimburse countries for the incremental costs of banning ozone-depleting chemicals, later international agreements, such as the Kyoto Protocol, oriented to reducing global warming have not given countries, including developing nations such as China, a financial incentive to reduce carbon emissions. In fact, the U.S. Government rejected the Kyoto Protocol because the reductions only applied to developed countries. Even though China reduced its carbon emissions per unit of GNP by half from 1990 to 2010 by investing in alternative energy sources and mandating that polluting companies publicly disclose their respective emissions, the amount of emissions continued to increase dramatically through the period. How do we discern whether the Chinese government has done enough? Furthermore, are other countries enabling China and thus indirectly responsible and thus culpable too?

The steep rise in carbon emissions in China from 2003 demonstrate just how misleading incremental, or marginal, changes can be. Even China's goal of a 20% reduction in emissions by 2020 may not mean much in terms of the total amounts emitted. 

Because CO2 is a “stock” pollutant—meaning that global warming is a function of the total amount of accumulated CO2 in the planet’s atmosphere (regardless of when added)—a country’s total emissions figure is key (total accumulated as well as annual amounts). As the following graph shows, China would have to do much more than it had accomplished during the first decade of the twenty-first century.

By 2010, industrialized countries had become large net-importers of products such as steel whose manufacture involves sizable CO2 emissions. 

Developed countries have enabled China’s emissions to the extent that they are “contained” in products exported. The increase for China from 1990 to 2010 (blue and red bars in the bar-graph below) is astonishing. So too is the increase in carbon emissions “embodied” in products imported by developed countries. Interestingly, the E.U. imported more product-emissions than did the U.S. both in 1990 and 2010. The larger manufacturing output of the U.S. may explain much of the difference in the respective nets. Europeans critical of the U.S. for walking away from the Kyoto Protocol may be surprised to learn that their country has been enabling foreign carbon-emissions more.  

The thick black lines heading to China from Australia and Indonesia stand out in this map, suggesting just how much carbon China emitted in 2011. 

Coal exports to China can be understood as another instance of enabling. As global shipping costs for bulk commodities such as coal dropped significantly, the amount of the commodity traded increased significantly. Obviously, major exporters have a financial incentive to oppose global carbon-emissions limits being written into multilateral treaties. In 2011, Australian companies extracted a lot of coal, a majority of which went to China. Indeed, the sheer magnitude of coal imported into China can tell us a lot about just how much carbon China continued to emit in spite of the government’s forays into alternative energy sources. Even though parts of Australia had been burned by the hole in the ozone layer decades before 2011, the continent’s government and mining companies have had a financial incentive to keep China from shifting to wind and solar energy sources sufficiently even to level-off China’s annual carbon emissions.

Had the Kyoto Protocol included carbon limits for developing countries, complete with “self-enforcing” financial incentives (e.g., an international fund to cover incremental costs of compliance) and disincentives (e.g., other countries in the treaty can boycott trade with non-compliers), in spite of opposition from major coal-exporters, perhaps China would have curtailed the upward trend in the country’s total carbon-emissions even by 2010.  Lest it be thought that the dictatorship in China has far outpaced the world’s largest democracy (i.e., India) as a “global citizen” enabling our species to have a future, keeping global warming to within 2 degrees (C) will require much more from China, and indeed the world.

The Swiss Vote to Restrict Immigration: Direct Democracy in Action

On February 9, 2014, the Swiss voted in a non-binding referendum by a narrow margin (50.3%) in favor of immigration quotas and an end to “mass immigration.”[1] This result took the government by surprise; officials had been urging the people to vote no. So too had the Swiss bankers—only coincidentally of course. Just enough voters rebuffed the establishment of power and wealth for the referendum to pass. Johann Schneider-Ammane, the Swiss Economy Minister, suggested that a “culture of excess” in the pursuit of profit sometimes at the expense of the common good had discredited the political and business elite in the eyes of ordinary people.

From: "The Swiss Vote to Restrict Immigration"

Congressional Statements on Obamacare: A Crack in Representative Democracy

Even as democracy has many virtues, the political system is not without its own weaknesses. In times of economic crisis, such as Germany in the 1930s, stressors can “fan the flames” such that a few opportunistic people can exploit the vulnerability to the extent that the democracy itself collapses. The “rising phoenix” is often much worse than the original weakness. In this essay, I analyze how a congressional report on “Obamacare,” or the Affordable [health] Care Act, triggered a chain reaction that brought a weakness of representative democracy to the surface. Unfortunately, I do not believe many people thought it very serious (i.e., systemic implications); most Americans probably did not even notice the brief rupture on the skin of the U.S. body politic. For my “microscope slide” of the underlying “virus,” I have carefully selected a slice of the relevant “biomass” in which the pathogen can be most easily seen; it is hardly partisan in nature even though it tends to manifest as such. While you examine my “slide” below, I recommend that you ignore the partisan puss lest you miss the proverbial “fly in the ointment.” Once you have detected the rascal, you might want to ask yourself whether the lapse in representative democracy now rendered transparent is sourced in the people or their respective representatives.

On February 4, 2014, the Congressional Budget Office released a report that mentions in a “oh, by the way” fashion a novel twist in how Obamacare could be expected to impact jobs. Whether out of sheer gamesmanship or ignorance (of whom?), some of the public conclusions from Congressional leaders show more generally the gulf between what the public “is fed” by elected representatives and the actual content they claim is behind their interpretations.

Providing a succinct account of the “twist,” congressional budget analysts said that 2.3 million Americans “who would otherwise rely on a job for health insurance will quit working, reduce their hours or stop looking for employment because of new health benefits available under the Affordable Care Act.[1]

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s first statement on the report, however, concludes that the report proves that the health care law “will push 2.3 million people out of the workforce.”[2] At the time, many of Ryan’s Republican colleagues were making similar claims. I want to isolate the word push here, for it is logically incompatible with the report’s claim that people staying in a job only for the health-insurance benefit will no longer have to continue in the job to receive affordable health-insurance.

Notably, some influential conservatives were cautioning Republican members of Congress to be careful with their own nterpretations, lest constituents and even the public at large (domestic and even global) catch a glimpse of the proverbial “man behind the curtain.[3] Writing in POLITICO magazine on February 4th, National Review editor Rich Lowry notes that “we aren’t talking about jobs that are eliminated in the usual sense of discouraging employers from hiring, as some Republican talking points suggested.”[4] Yet this warning did not stop Rep. Lynn Westmoreland from referencing the CBO report on February 11th as Janet Yellen, the new chair of the Federal Reserve, faced a House committee. Adopting a factual tone, Westmoreland told the Fed chair that the Affordable Care Act "is estimated to cost more than 2.5 million jobs over the next decade." He then asked her whether she thought Obamacare would have an impact on "economic growth and job creation."[5] Lest I belabor the obvious, 2.3 million is less than 2.5 million, and, moreover, the report does not claim the jobs would be lost, as implied by "cost" and "job creation." 

Notice that Rep. Paul Ryan is using "props" (e.g., gray suit, button, flag, and the all-caps title) that add to the visual impression of authoritative fact rather than opinion, ideology, and interpretation. (Image Source: CNN)

Rep. Ryan had at least gone out of his way on February 5th during a hearing on the report to “clarify” his initial statement. “So just to understand this," he said, "it’s not that employers are laying people off, it’s that people aren’t working in the workforce, aren’t supplying labor to the effect of 2 and half million jobs in 2024, and as a result that lower workforce participation rate, that less labor supplied, lowers economic growth?” he asked CBO director Doug Elmendorf.[6] The easy pivot may have saved the Budget Committee chairman his credibility, yet Westmoreland's statement and question demonstrate that disinformation can have considerable staying power, even becoming the default, nonetheless.

I submit that the misinformation had been so glaring that even the general public, otherwise occupied with life, might notice the sheer distance between Ryan’s conclusion and what credible experts were saying of the report. Do we know what is really going on? If not, how can we make good judgments in voting?

In other words, the democratic premise of viable self-governance by a virtuous and educated citizenry may contain an inherent weakness in as much as the electors rely on their respective representatives for information translated for general consumption via interpretation. As the number of electors per representative increases (i.e., larger districts, especially if in an empire-scale republic of republics and citizens), the reliance increases, exponentially I suspect. For one thing, the constituents must rely increasingly on the media to transmit (and shape) their respective representative’s interpretations.

Furthermore, “official” misrepresentations by elected representatives can mask for many voters the value to the individuals who no longer have to work in a (second) job they hate, the companies for whom motivated employees are an asset, and even society itself (happier people). To be sure, a lower labor-force participation rate in a particular job category means higher wages (to attract potential workers), other things equal. Some employers may find that the increased commitment is not worth the more tangible monthly cost.

In fact, Obamacare may not even be the primary culprit behind relatively fewer people seeking employment.  According to The Washington Post, CBO’s analysis points out that “the upward pressure on [the labor participation] rate from improvements in the economy will be more than offset by downward pressure from demographic trends, especially the aging of the baby-boom generation.”[7] By implication, the downward pressure from Obamacare come in second, at best. As part of her congressional testimony on February 11th, Fed chair Yellen did not even mention the Affordable Care Act as a factor in the downward pressure; rather, she pointed to the aging population as the main contributor in the downward trend, with structurally and cyclically unemployed giving up playing a secondary role.[8]  

That the 66% participation rate held from 2004 to 2008 suggests that sustained increases in GDP can counter the huge aging factor as the unemployment rate falls. However, as shown in 2010-2012, both rates can fall concurrently, suggesting an impact from the long-term, or structurally, unemployed losing unemployment compensation and even finding further job-hunting to be futile.

Lest business managers fear a spike in wage rates, the report projects that the unemployment rate will decline only gradually, not dropping to 5.8 percent until 2017 and 5.5 percent in 2024. “Factors such as obsolescent skill-sets and the spread of automation that have fed into the persistently high long-term unemployment are expected to have diminishing effects on the unemployment rate after 2017.[9] We can expect, therefore, that the positions freed up by demographic changes and Obamacare will not go vacant for long; as pointed out above, it is not as though the positions themselves are to be sacrificed on the altar designated by the O-god.

In short, Ryan’s initial statement suggests not just that elected representatives are capable of putting out blatantly false “information” on a policy or new law (this is hardly a revelation), but also that electors may make electoral and public-policy judgments on the false assertions. Especially in a large, empire-scale republic like the U.S., the E.U., or India, the citizenry may have to rely so much on media-shaped sound-bites that the pronouncements are instantly stamped not only with legitimacy, but also as the default. In other words, an interpretation said into a microphone and then broadcast by the media enjoys the presumption of being true even if it is blatantly false. Falsity as truth coming from elected officials is not necessarily checked, since no other quarter in the public discourse has so much authoritative status. Furthermore, the media no longer speaks with one voice, so any “truth correction” may be eclipsed by rhetoric or assumed to be mere partisanship. In terms of representative democracy itself, the representatives may be able to exploit the inherent informational-difference that exists between them and their respective electors.

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1. Zachary A. Goldfarb and Amy Goldstein, “Health-care Law Will Prompt over 2 Million to Quit Jobs or Cut Hours, a CBO Report Says,” The Washington Post, February 4, 2014.

2. David Nather, “Both Parties Keep Cherry-picking CBO Report,” Politico, February 8, 2014. See also "ObamaCare Could Lead to Loss of Nearly 2.3 Million Jobs, Report Says," Fox News, February 4, 2014.

3. This reference is to the Wizard working the controls behind a curtain in the film, The Wizard of Oz.

4. Zachary A. Goldfarb and Amy Goldstein, “Health-care Law Will Prompt over 2 Million to Quit Jobs or Cut Hours, a CBO Report Says,” The Washington Post, February 4, 2014.

5. "Economy & Monetary Policy," U.S. House Financial Services Committee, February 11, 2014.

6. Zachary A. Goldfarb and Amy Goldstein, “Health-care Law Will Prompt over 2 Million to Quit Jobs or Cut Hours, a CBO Report Says,” The Washington Post, February 4, 2014.

7. Ibid.
8."Economy & Monetary Policy," U.S. House Financial Services Committee, February 11, 2014.
9..Zachary A. Goldfarb and Amy Goldstein, “Health-care Law Will Prompt over 2 Million to Quit Jobs or Cut Hours, a CBO Report Says,” The Washington Post, February 4, 2014.

The 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia: “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire”

In the weeks leading us to watch the Olympics, I suspect I was not alone in thinking, “I just don't like what I see here." Why was I resisting paying even scant attention to the pre-Olympics "coverage" (a.k.a. advertising) as NBC, the American broadcast network covering the games, was getting rather publicly revved up on the upcoming media event. In this essay, I briefly survey the external stimuli, leaving the self-analysis to the analyst’s couch.[1]

First, as the American press reported before NBC began promoting the games in earnest (hmm), there is the “whole gay thing” and Putin. I really think that's a non-issue with regard to the Olympics, given the uniqueness of the Olympic Village. I would not be surprised were the Russian police of the mind that “What goes on in Vegas stays in Vegas,” at least as far as vacations are concerned.

Now, the "not fit for primetime viewing" conditions of some of the hotels putting up the foreign press strikes me as more substantive because of the implicit and likely even explicit rudeness does not go down well, even at a distance. Relatedly, I suspect, the sheer amount of money "padded" into the construction projects, including hotel construction, for kick-backs undoubtedly directed to Putin's major political supporters eviscerates any possible excuse in the tardiness.

In fact, associating Putin at all with the Olympics comes off to me like associating liver with dinner; I instinctively spit out immediately any hint of liver-taste. I must admit I am glad the U.S. State Department put out a travel warning for Americans going to the games. I was also amused to read of the low numbers of non-Russians arriving from abroad in Sochi as of the first day of games.[2] Of course, the modern Olympics hinges on the broadcasts around the world, rather than attendance numbers.

 Even though NBC's studio in the Olympic Village is transparent, the network's tactics may be anything but. (Image Source: David Johnson)

Interestingly, as part of its rather obvious devices to remind/manipulate its general viewership to watch the approaching games (including inserting reporters live from Sochi into CNBC's coverage of the financial markets), NBC strategists may actually have been fomenting the security story in order to draw viewers' attention to the fact that the games would soon begin. Stirring up fear and the hope of visual voyeurism of others’ tragedies is a sure bet for news reporting as advertising.  However, overdoing it can be counterproductive if too much of the ploy is visible on the surface as a duplicitous, otherwise stealth agenda. Yearning to turn the subtropical town on the Black Sea into an international resort, Putin could not have been very happy about the coverage, though may have realized the importance of a huge broadcast viewership even for himself, not to mention covering some of the kick-backs.

   

Finally, starting particular events including skating the day before the OPENING ceremony may stand out among the various points of smoke above in being indicative of fire skipping fire lines below. Even though Chris Chase of USA Today concludes “it’s a small price to pay for the overall improvement of the Winter Games,” he admits “it still feels strange to start the Olympics before the Olympics technically start.”[3] In the film, Inglourious Basterds, Lt. Aldo Raine wryly clarifies the matter of something seeming odd (or strange).  “Yeah, we got a word for that in English. It’s called suspicious.” 

In spite of his conclusion (i.e., small price to pay), Chase provides a credible case for suspicion. “Television rules all." he states up front as if it were a natural law. "Adding another day of Olympic competition means adding another day of Olympic telecasts. Thursday is traditionally one of the biggest television nights (along with Sunday). With all the money being paid to cover the games by networks across the world, turning 17 days of Olympic coverage into 18 days is a nice bonus.”[4] Regarding the addition of a program of skating, Chase points to a five day interim within the two weeks without any skating scheduled.

In closing, I must let the philosopher in me have a few words (no philosopher ever has just a few words, so please take a bathroom break if you need to). From sheer logic, to begin something before it has begun is a blatant contradiction. As per his categorical imperative, Kant would call the practice unethical. Were everyone to adopt the maxim, “I will start activities before the start time,” it would not make sense to have a start time for anything. The maxim is thus self-contradictory if it (like reason itself) is universalized.

Hume would point out that Kant relies too much on logic and reason more generally in assessing whether a given practice is ethical. A person reading U.N.’s condemnation of the Vatican in February 2014  for having been more concerned about the reputation of the Church as a whole than children’s welfare—a priority that Rev. Joe Ratzinger, or Benedict XVI, put in a letter while archbishop of Munich—may think through the theological implications of priests covering for each other. However, the sentiment of disapprobation (think of my expression as I spit out odious liver) is likely, excepting sociopaths, to be the principal reaction. Emotive rather than of Reason.

When I read of the sports beginning a day before the opening ceremony, I felt a sentiment of disapprobation well up inside me. Because I had been feeling that something just isn’t right about the upcoming games, especially from an vague intuitive sense of NBC’s manipulative tactics as over-reaching at best, I suspected that the rather odd placement of some events before the ceremony also came from the mentality that wants incessantly to squeeze out a few more drops of lemon juice from lemon that has already shed enough.  The sight of this childish demeanor in action is enough for any non-manipulative person to resist going where the manipulations point.

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[1] I have in mind here Nietzsche’s thesis that reasoning is really a person’s instinctual urges tussling for dominance—that which overcomes the others (here as obstacles) reaches the surface of consciousness as an idea. I do think about this point regarding philosophy (and particular philosophical systems) in general and how my own psychological background fuels or is otherwise expressed in the ideas and related theories I “intuit” and “create.”

[2] Associated Press, “Sochi Olympics Still Waiting for Spectators from Abroad,” The Huffington Post, February 6, 2014.

[3] Chris Chase, “Why Do the Winter Olympics Start before the Opening Ceremony?” USA Today, February 6, 2014.

[4] Ibid.

From Ground Zero to 1776 Feet

The glass exterior gives the Freedom Tower a look of unity, such as that which occurred on September 11, 2001. (Image Source: USA Today)

Aspiring to hope again, against the pull of the annualized calls to remember, yet again, a tragedy whose villain had met his fitting end, America could dare to inhale a fresh sense of pride instead of the stale bad air of vulnerability and death that stubbornly would not die under the cover of mourning. New Yorkers with an even longer memory could feel a sense of payback on behalf of their proud city, which had lost the World's Fair to Chicago in 1893. New York's press had dubbed the metropolis of the Midwest "the windy city" for all the bragging there for having been selected over Wall Street's locale. In 2013, New York's bewindowed Temple of Independence beat out the Sears, or "Willis," Tower in Chitown (pronounced shy-town, not shit-own, or, even worse, own-shit) as the tallest building in the Western hemisphere on account of a spire. 

Lest it be said that the sky is the limit for the perpetual Union of shimmering unity, the laws of nature do not allow a Rome or a Washington to rise forever. as if social organization were somehow not mortal. As between us and God, our cultural artifices are unfortunately on our side of the ledger. They are also in continuity with Nature, into whose embrace we mere mortals cannot evade. So what does Nature have in store for the American experiment of a general republic within whose borders semi-sovereign republics reside as though tamed members? Will the U.S. collapse from its own weight, or become increasingly susceptible to enemies foreign and even domestic? 

Our lot is not to know what lies beyond the horizon reflected in the unscratched glass of freedom's tower. We can, however, marvel at the sheer tenacity of a people whose hope, whose light, will not go quietly under the ashes at Pearl Harbor and Ground Zero. For from the extraordinary hardships of brave colonists in the wilderness, on the periphery of the known world, came bubbling to the surface the idea of self-governance, whose practicability and unity require the self-discipline of virtue and civic knowledge,  in 1776.

Target Intimidating Customers by Impersonating Police: Nietzsche on Weakness Seeking to Dominate

In the PBS series Downton Abbey, the Victorian countess, magnificently played by Maggie Smith, delivers a reverberating line as fit for my hometown in the second decade of the twenty-first century as for a village in Britain a century earlier. Referring to the local physician, who had just been raised to the position of military manager of convalescent centers during World War I, the countess remarks in frustration after a rejected request, “We give these little people power and it goes to their heads like strong drink.” This poignant quote fits like a glove in the case of the typical store manager and assistant managers, especially in my decaying hometown in the U.S. a century after World War I. In this essay, I apply Nietzsche's philosophy to a rather distinct pattern that I discovered there decades after I had left for college.

The full essay has been incorporated into (or swallowed up by) On the Arrogance of False Entitlement: A Nietzschean Critique of Business Ethics and Management, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.

Corporate Social Responsibility at Walmart

Is it not an outright oxymoron for a company such as Walmart to pinch pennies when it comes to its non-supervisory employees even as it is oriented to the social good of society through its "corporate social responsibility" (CSR) programs? Leslie Dach, a former executive at Walmart who had been behind several such initiatives liked to make the point that striving to make a dent in societal problems can dovetail with a company’s own financial interests. The two need not conflict. I submit that this is not good enough for a company's management authentically into "giving something back." Specifically, the social-good initiatives should be integrated with company operations. Walmart can indeed be criticized from this standpoint, particular since Sam Walton's sons cut non-supervisory employee sickness and vacation days. I suspect that the illusion foisted on the general public is likely to burst one day as the bones of the stores' operations are laid bare (i.e., the curtain is pulled back to reveal for the public the proverbial man behind the curtain). Let's hope that other companies can learn from, and thus improve on Walmart's dual strategies.

The full essay is at "Walmart: Beneath the Corporate Social Responsibility."

Strategic Leadership: Disentangling Strategy and Leadership

Strategic leadership relates an organization’s differentiated core competencies to its ideologies, identity, mission and view of the macro environment system. Relates implies that strategic elements are not identical with a vision containing values. In fact, a tension can be involved, as interest applies one way to core competencies and another to the social reality that a leader promotes in line with an organizational mission (and identity). For one thing, the basis of a competitive advantage can be rather limited temporally, due to technological changes, for example, while values espoused are presumably long-lasting in their validity and thus not easily changed. 

Ethical leadership as a means of managing strategic leadership (Worden, 2003a and 2003b)   
   

 Material from this essay has been incorporated into The Essence of Leadership: A Cross-Cultural Foundation, which is available in print and as an ebook at Amazon. 

Sun Tzu's Art of War: A Recipe for Leadership in Business

According to Master Sun in The Art of War, “Leadership is a matter of intelligence, trustworthiness, humaneness, courage, and sternness.”[1] Although Sun Tzu is referring mainly to military (and related political) leadership, lessons can be learned for exercising business leadership.

1. Sun Tzu, The Art of War: Complete Texts and Commentaries (Boston: Shambhala, 2003), p. 44.


Material from this essay has been incorporated into The Essence of Leadership: A Cross-Cultural Foundation, which is available in print and as an ebook at Amazon. 

Google Jettisons Motorola: A Jack of All Trades Is a Master of None

Managers tasked with the overall management of a company may thirst for additional lines of business, particularly those that are related to any of the company’s existing lines. Lest it be concluded that an expansive tendency flows straight out of a business calculus, the infamous “empire-building” urge, which is premised on the assumption of being capable of managing or doing anything, is often also in play. Interestingly, this instinct can operate even at the expense of profit satisficing or maximizing. In this essay, I assess Google’s sale of its Motorola (cellular phone manufacturing) unit.


The full essay is at Institutional Conflicts of Interest, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.

The State of the Union Address: The Presidency as Visionary or Bureaucratic Leadership?

Just after President Obama’s 2014 State of the Union Address, CNN found that among the Americans who had watched the speech, 76 percent had a “ total positive” reaction, 44 percent of which being “very positive,” and 22 percent had a negative reaction.[1] What is left unsaid can be even more useful than what is reported. In this case, the poll does not reveal the criteria used by the respondents to assess the speech. The devil lies in the details here, in not only the actual criteria used, but also the very content of the speech. In this essay, I investigate the suitability of the criterion that can be labeled “extent of detail in the speech,” given the purpose of the speech as laid out in the U.S. Constitution and, moreover, the presidential office.

In his 2014 address, Barak Obama stayed largely away from “the vision thing.” This point is significant to the extent that “presiding over the whole” is an important feature of his office. Even realistic bipartisan legislative items, such as immigration and trade reform, received only cursory mention. This is understandable, given the gridlock that had made 2013 one of the least productive Congresses in U.S. history. Under the circumstances, the president could have done worse than lean on his constitutional obligation “to give to the Congress information of the state of the Union.” Pursuing this tract may have given the president (and the office) more reputational capital (e.g., standing above the fray; not being partisan). Sadly, he truncated that duty to sell his executive actions to a weary citizenry and Congress. In other words, like presidents before him, Barak Obama chose to make the speech fit almost exclusively within the second part of the constitutional obligation—to “recommend to [Congress’s] consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”[2] To be sure, he did push a few “incrementalist” legislative proposals, such as increasing the minimum wage a few dollars and extending unemployment compensation three months. Unfortunately, the public seemed to recognize the partisan nature of these “agenda items.”

Perhaps the main thrust of the address fell on announcements of, and justifications for executive actions, including tightening industrial carbon-emission limits, increasing the minimum wage that federal contractors would have to pay their workers as a condition of accepting contracts in the future, and providing a new retirement-savings device for any employees without an employer-based plan. The White House readily admitted the diminished returns afforded by executive orders relative to legislation. “I wouldn’t tell you that executive action is a substitute for major bipartisan legislation; it’s not,” Dan Pfeiffer, a senior advisor to the president, admitted.[3]

The implication that the state of the Union hinged on such “micro” measures somehow escaped the notice of viewers, the media, and the political elite. By the time the president got to his “achievement” in having secured the voluntary agreement of several CEOs not to discriminate against the long-term unemployed, he was past even the encroachments of the recommendations part. The showcasing of hand-picked people in the gallery entirely bypasses the constitutional purpose of the report and recommendations.

To be sure, Barak Obama was hardly alone among U.S. presidents in steering the address toward partisan recommendations. In fact, by the time of the 2014 address, most Americans probably expected a partisan list of proposals. His contribution may have been in moving the de facto standard for what counts as a State of the Union Address even further along in terms future expectations of presidents using the address to sell their respective agendas. In the context of legislative gridlock and perhaps even a media-fomented general sense that the stuff of visionary leadership must finally bow down to American pragmatism in the era of managerialism, the president’s addition of executive actions took the address even further from the “big picture” inherent in the condition of the Union itself—that is to say, further away from transformational and visionary leadership and closer to bureaucratic and politicized management. This is bad news for the presidency if the presiding role of the office (e.g., looking out for the good of the whole systemically) is as much a part of the job as are commanding the military and acting as chief executive.

Burns’ distinction between transactional and transformational leadership may shed some light here. Burns classifies both types under moral leadership in his definitive work, Leadership.[4] The transactional leader takes the followers’ needs as given and attends, via particular (i.e., incrementalist) transactions with the followers, to the extant lower needs already preoccupying the followers as well as the leader (e.g., raising the minimum wage). In contrast, the transformational leader raises, or transforms, the needs that the followers consider the most important to higher, distinctively moral, needs that would transform both the followers and the leader, even if merely in looking at a problem in a new light (i.e., through the lenses of a novel paradigm). It should come as no surprise that “the vision thing” and charisma have great value in transformational leadership and none at all in the transactional sort. For example, the president could have inserted his recommendation for a raise in the minimum wage within a vision of sustenance as a fundamental, and thus unconditional, human right. The transformation would involve raising the perceived need at issue from that of negotiating a new conditional set of terms for domestic food aid (“food stamps”) and a maximum in unemployment compensation to replacing that mindset among leaders and followers alike with one that is rooted and justified in basic (i.e., unconditional) human rights.

In conclusion, the gradual shift in emphasis that has gone virtually unnoticed at the societal level as Americans have critiqued State of the Union addresses is “the canary in the coal mine” already letting us know that both the presiding and related non-partisan leadership roles of the U.S. presidency are well on their way to extinction. Unfortunately, many Americans seem to have been pegging their assessment criteria to what the address itself has become—even if this means validating successive presidential lapses. Lest shirking the presiding and “big picture” leadership roles of the office in favor of getting as much of a partisan agenda put into law as possible is not sufficiently narcissistic, the presumptuousness involved in feeling free to “tweak” the office in a more convenient direction surely suffices. Yet such gradual moves effectively evade notice as if by stealth.

I submit for your wise consideration, therefore, the following question: Is democracy unknowingly susceptible to death by increments? If so, republics may be destined by the fates, or, more likely, inherent design to unwittingly suffer a prolonged decline without any awareness that the anchors are being gradually moved down the hill. The lack of recognition that the markers have been moved means that the new positions are taken to be the old default. Accordingly, no serial decline is discerned; no “big picture” vision that is historically as well as idealistically informed breaks through the ice, as the marker on what counts as leadership has shifted too over time. It is difficult to follow the bread crumbs if they are being eaten by birds. By yet another analogy, the state of the Union might include the point that we are skiing downhill in “white-out” conditions, utterly clueless as to where we, the self-governing people (ideally), are going until it is too late.

See "The State of the Union Address: The Presidency as Presiding or Partisan?" in The Essence of Leadership, which is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook.

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1. Ariel Edwards-Levy and Mark Blumenthal, “State of the Union Poll Gives Obama Positive Marks,” The Huffington Post, January 29, 2014.

2. The U.S. Constitution, Article 2, Section 3.

3.Susan Page, “Speech-wise: What a Difference [a] Year Makes,” USA Today, January 29, 2014.

4. James M. Burns, Leadership (New York: HarperCollins, 1978). 

The State of the Union Address: The Presidency as Presiding or Partisan?

On The O’Reilly Factor on the evening of Obama’s health-care “summit” at the White House in 2009, Bill O’Reilly told Laura Ingrahams that the president had done an adequate job in moderating the discussion.  Laura replied, “He is not a moderator; he is the President of the United States.”  O'Reilly provided his own perspective, in admitting that “moderating is not enough in the long-run because the country wants leadership.” The host was only partially correct.

Material from this essay has been incorporated in The Essence of Leadership, which is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook.