Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth

By David C. Korten

Chapter 1

Looking Upstream

A man was standing beside a stream when he saw a baby struggling in the water. Without a thought he jumped in and saved it. No sooner had he placed it gently on the shore than he saw another and jumped in to save it, then another and another. Totally focused on saving babies, he never thought to look upstream to answer the obvious question: Where were the babies coming from, and how did they get in the water?
—Anonymous

Our economic system has failed in every dimension: financial, environmental, and social. And the current financial collapse provides an incontestable demonstration that it has failed even on its own terms. Spending trillions of dollars in an effort to restore this system to its previous condition is a reckless waste of time and resources and may be the greatest misuse of federal government credit in history. The more intelligent course is to acknowledge the failure and to set about redesigning our economic system from the bottom up to align with the realities and opportunities of the twenty-first century.

The Bush administration’s strategy focused on bailing out the Wall Street institutions that bore primary responsibility for creating the crisis; its hope was that if the government picked up enough of those institutions’ losses and toxic assets, they might decide to open the tap and get credit flowing again. The Obama administration has come into office with a strong focus on economic stimulus, and particularly on green jobs—by far a more thoughtful and appropriate approach.

The real need, however, goes far beyond pumping new money into the economy to alleviate the consequences of the credit squeeze. We need to rebuild the system from the bottom up. Read More

The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women

By Jessica Valenti

Introduction

There is a moral panic in America over young women’s sexuality—and it’s entirely misplaced. Girls “going wild” aren’t damaging a generation of women, the myth of sexual purity is. The lie of virginity—the idea that such a thing even exists—is ensuring that young women’s perception of themselves is inextricable from their bodies, and that their ability to be moral actors is absolutely dependent on their sexuality. It’s time to teach our daughters that their ability to be good people depends on their being good people, not on whether or not they’re sexually active.

A combination of forces—our media- and society-driven virginity fetish, an increase in abstinence-only education, and the strategic political rollback of women’s rights among the primary culprits—has created a juggernaut of introduction unrealistic sexual expectations for young women. Unable to live up to the ideal of purity that’s forced upon them in one aspect of their lives, many young women are choosing the hypersexualized alternative that’s offered to them everywhere else as the easier—and more attractive—option.

More than 1,400 purity balls, where young girls pledge their virginity to their fathers at a promlike event, were held in 2006 (the balls are federally funded). Facebook is peppered with purity groups that exist to support girls trying to “save it.” Schools hold abstinence rallies and assemblies featuring hip-hop dancers and comedians alongside religious leaders. Virginity and chastity are reemerging as a trend in pop culture, in our schools, in the media, and even in legislation. So while young women are subject to overt sexual messages every day, they’re simultaneously being taught—by the people who are supposed to care for their personal and moral development, no less—that their only real worth is their virginity and ability to remain “pure.” Read More

My Hope for Peace

By Jehan Sadat

Introduction

Peace. This word, this idea—this goal—is the defining theme of my life.

First, and perhaps most obvious, I refer to the ongoing struggle for peace in the Middle East: a just, comprehensive settlement between Arabs and Israelis, one that will help to eliminate at least one source of hatred, extremism, and misery in the world; one that will allow the inhabitants of these most holy places to live side by side, amicably, securely, productively. This is the cause for which my husband, Anwar Sadat, gave his life. On October 6, 1981, he was assassinated by Islamic fanatics who believed that the peace he forged with Israel would perish along with him. They were wrong. The 1979 Egyptian-Israeli treaty, signed as a direct result of the Camp David Accords of 1978, has endured some thirty years, a reminder of the fact that seemingly insuperable rifts can be bridged and a foundation for a just resolution can be constructed. In one of his last interviews, my husband was asked what three wishes he would like to see fulfilled in his lifetime. He answered, “One, peace in the Middle East. Two, peace in the Middle East. Three, peace in the Middle East.” For him, this dream is finished. His dream is now mine.

Since 1985, I have been lecturing, teaching, and fund-raising to further that dream. Living in both my native Cairo and in a suburb of Washington, D.C., and being a professor, a peace activist, a former first lady, and a private citizen, I have had a front-row seat to the agonizing cycle of progress and setback in the Middle East and noted how my husband’s ideas, once unilaterally rejected by the Arab world, have come to be widely accepted. Now, with the thirtieth anniversary of his historic trip to Jerusalem just behind us and the urgent need for a new paradigm all too plainly before us, it’s high time we reexamine his legacy. Read More

The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity

By Nicholas Stern

From the Introduction

How did an economist who had worked on public policy, growth, and development for most of his career come to work on policy on climate change? The logic of the problem, the relationship between economic development and climate change, and a little history can explain. My first fieldwork at the end of the 1960s had been on tea smallholdings in Africa, which profoundly influenced my thinking on public policy, as it showed what could happen if the entrepreneurship of the farmer was combined with the skills of the private tea factory in an environment shaped by sound policy, good infrastructure and effective agricultural extension. Of particular importance to me has been my work over more than three decades with splendid collaborators, in the village of Palanpur in India. I have been following Palanpur and its economic and social change since I first went there in 1974–5 to study the effects of the Green Revolution, witnessing both the vulnerability and creativity of those in poor rural areas at first hand. Good policy unleashes entrepreneurship and achievement. I had been an academic for twenty-five years, from 1969 until the end of 1993. After ten years lecturing at Oxford, I had become a professor at Warwick and then at the London School of Economics, and also led a very international life teaching and researching in India, China and Africa as well as the École Polytechnique in Paris and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA.

Since 1993, I had been more directly involved in the making of public policy as chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank, and then head of the Government Economic Service in the UK and second permanent secretary at the Treasury—positions I occupied whilst writing the Report of the Commission for Africa. I am now an academic economist again, as I. G. Patel Professor of Economics and Government at the London School of Economics, Chairman of the Grantham Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and Director of the India Observatory. I am an economist, a researcher and a writer.

In 2005 I was asked by Gordon Brown, then the UK Finance Minister, and Tony Blair, then its Prime Minister, to undertake an economic analysis of climate change. I hoped to determine the magnitudes, in economic terms, of the risks which the science had identified, and the policies and strategies that could help us manage those risks. These were the basic questions at the heart of what became known as The Stern Review. They required both a strongly international perspective, and the rigorous toolbox of the modern economics of public policy. I had no special knowledge, beyond that of a concerned citizen anywhere, of the science of climate change. Read More

The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier’s Education

By Craig M. Mullaney

From Chapter 1

Reception Day

In case of Sudden and Temporary Immersion, the Important Thing is to keep the Head Above Water.—A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“Get off my bus!” screamed the cadet in charge.

“You’re not moving fast enough. Move it. Move it. Move it!” We stampeded from the bus like a startled herd of wildebeest, clutching our small gym bags with white-knuckled grips. As we poured into the hot July sunlight, chiseled senior cadet cadre aligned our crooked ranks.

“Left, face.”

Forty eighteen-year-olds turned at different speeds toward another white-starched cadet cadre. We must have looked ridiculous—a ragtag collection of shorts, untucked T-shirts, and long hair. Read More

Sag Harbor

by Colson Whitehead

Notions of Roller-Rink Infinity

First you had to settle the question of out. When did you get out? Asking this was showing off, even though anyone you could brag to had received the same gift and had come by it the same way you did. Same sun wrapped in shiny paper, same soft benevolent sky, same gravel road that sooner or later skinned you. It was hard not to believe it belonged to you more than anyone else, made for you and waiting all these years for you to come along. Everyone felt that way. We were grateful just to be standing there in that heat after such a long bleak year in the city. When did you get out? was the sound of our trap biting shut; we took the bait year after year, pure pinned joy in the town of Sag Harbor.

Then there was the next out: How long are you out for?—and the competition had begun. The magic answer was Through Labor Day or The Whole Summer. Anything less was to signal misfortune. Out for a weekend at the start of the season, to open up the house, sweep cracks, that was okay. But only coming out for a month? A week? What was wrong, were you having financial difficulties? Everyone had financial difficulties, sure, but to let it interfere with Sag, your shit was seriously amiss. Out for a week, a month, and you were allowing yourself to be cheated by life. Ask, How long are you out for? and a cloud wiped the sun. The question trailed a whiff of autumn. All answers contemplated the end, the death of summer at its very beginning. Still waiting for the bay to warm up so you could go for a swim and already picturing it frozen over. Labor Day suddenly not so far off at all.

The final out was one-half information-gathering and one-half prayer: Who else is out? The season had begun, we were proof of it, instrument of it, but things couldn’t really get started until all the players took their marks, bounding down driveways, all gimme-fives. The others were necessary, and we needed word. The person standing before you in pleated salmon shorts might say, “I talked to him on Wednesday and he said they were coming out.” They were always the first ones out, never missed June like their lives depended on it. (This was true.) Someone might offer, “Their lawn was cut.” A cut lawn was an undeniable omen of impending habitation, today or tomorrow. “Saw a car in their driveway.” Even better. There was no greater truth than a car in a driveway. A car in the driveway was an invitation to knock on the door and get down to the business of summer. Knock on that door and watch it relent under your knuckles—once you were out, the door stayed unlocked until you closed up the house. Read More

Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press

By Eric Boehlert

As a kid, [Glenn] Greenwald was destined to become an attorney. Precocious and boasting a healthy argumentative streak, he enjoyed being in the spotlight during his high school debate team matches. Growing up in the south Florida town of Lauderdale Lakes, the grandson of a political junkie, Greenwald ran for city council when he turned 18. He campaigned against the local condominium power structure but couldn’t knock off any of the incumbents.

A curious contradiction, Greenwald sports a boyish look and appears ten years younger than his actual age of 41. But in terms of his personality, he is very much all business, and he carries himself like a man 10 years his senior. Whereas lots of bloggers embrace a Peter Pan outlook on life, Greenwald is the opposite. He’s the one providing constant adult supervision over the blogosphere. His posts are deadly serious and often much more earnest than those of his colleagues. The illustration of Greenwald that appears on his site, which has been affiliated with Salon since 2007, shows him sitting ramrod straight with his arms crossed and wearing a dress shirt and tie. Very unbloggy.

After graduating from George Washington University, Greenwald studied law at New York University and became a constitutional attorney in 1994. His work was at times political in the sense that he took on unpopular clients in free speech cases that spotlighted the practical tensions between the rights of individuals and the collective urges of the community. In 2002 he defended a strident anti-immigration group, National Alliance, in a New York civil rights lawsuit after two Mexican day workers were beaten and stabbed on Long Island by two men posing as contractors in search of laborers. The victims claimed that the anti-immigration rhetoric of National Alliance, which urged racist violence against Latino immigrants and other racial minorities, was partly to blame for the beatings. Greenwald argued that the case represented a misguided attempt to impose liability and punishment on groups because of their political and religious views. A federal judge threw out the case. Read More

Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone

By Eduardo Galeano

MEXICANS

Tlazoltéotl, Mexico’s moon, goddess of the Huasteca night, managed to elbow her way into the macho pantheon of the Aztecs.

She was the most mothering of mothers, who protected women in labor and their midwives, and guided seeds on their voyage to becoming plants. Goddess of love and also of garbage, condemned to eat shit, she embodied fertility and lust.

Like Eve, like Pandora, Tlazoltéotl bore the guilt for men’s perdition; women born in her times lived condemned to pleasure.

And when the earth trembled, in soft vibrations or devastating earthquakes, no one doubted: “It is she.”

***

DJANGO

Born in a gypsy caravan, he spent his early years on the road in Belgium, playing the banjo for a dancing bear and a goat.

He was eighteen when his wagon caught fire and he was left for dead. He lost a leg, a hand. Goodbye road, goodbye music.

But when they were about to amputate, he regained the use of his leg. And from his lost hand he managed to save two fingers and become one of the best jazz guitarists in history.

There was a secret pact between Django Reinhardt and his guitar. If he would play her, she would lend him the fingers he was missing.

***

LOST AND FOUND

The twentieth century, which was born proclaiming peace and justice, died bathed in blood. It passed on a world much more unjust than the one it inherited.

The twenty-first century, which also arrived heralding peace and justice, is following in its predecessor’s footsteps.

In my childhood, I was convinced that everything that went astray on earth ended up on the moon.

But the astronauts found no sign of dangerous dreams or broken promises or hopes betrayed.

If not on the moon, where might they be?

Perhaps they were never misplaced.

Perhaps they are in hiding here on earth. Waiting.

From Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, by Eduardo Galeano. Excerpted by arrangement with Nation Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2009 by Eduardo Galeano. English translation copyright © 2009 by Mark Fried.

Nature’s Second Chance: Restoring the Ecology of Stone Prairie Farm

by Steven I. Apfelbaum

Chapter 1

A Place to Settle

What I remember most is falling in love with the place. Instantly. I recall the minute details as well—the scent of moist hay, the hiss of the radiator as the engine of my mother’s 1974 Toyota Celica cooled, the warm July sun against my skin, the feel of rich, fertile dirt under my feet, the rustle of wind through the rows of corn planted nearby. But mostly these particulars blended together into an exhilarating, unexpected sense of being deeply at home on this land I’d never before seen.

Stepping away from the car, I looked around, taking in the gentle roll of the land from north to south. The earth was lush and green in the early summer, cleared of large trees in most areas, with scatterings of gangly oaks and box elders, and a stand of what looked like young pines in the distance. An immense weeping willow arched over a large wooden farmhouse in front of me. Beyond it was a weathered wooden barn and, farther off, several dilapidated outbuildings teetered on the hillside. Beside them were a couple of old, cobweb-covered tractors. The distance in between was carpeted with plush foliage dotted by unruly patches of prairie wildflowers in their last stages of bloom, many already gone to seed. Next to me I could almost sense my mother thinking, “We’ll get this place cleaned up and orderly in no time.” Inside I reveled in its anarchic disarray.

The buildings were separated from the rest of the 80-acre farm with a fence of posts and barbed wire. A two-track dirt driveway ran between the house and the outbuildings and led to a gated pasture where I could see, hear, and smell a herd of black-and-white Holstein dairy cows, their tails in constant motion, swishing at flies. They had grazed the vegetation to ankle height. On this side of the fence the mix of weeds and unkempt former lawn grasses past the height of the house foundation, largely obscuring the front door. Read More

The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America

By Steven Johnson

Epilogue

The first sign of a waterspout forming is a dark stain on the surface of the sea, like a circle of black ink. Within a matter of minutes, if atmospheric conditions are right, a spiral of light and dark streaks begins to spin around the circle. Soon a ring of spray rises up into the air, water molecules propelled aloft by the accelerating winds at its periphery. And then the spout surges to life, a whirling line drawn from sea to sky, sustained by rotational winds that have been measured at up to 150 miles per hour.

Unlike land-based tornados, waterspouts often form in fair weather: a vortex of wind, capable of destroying small vessels, that appears, literally, out of the blue. While it is not nearly as dangerous as a traditional tornado, the waterspout was long a figure of fear and wonder in mariner tales of life on the open sea. In the first century B.C., Lucretius described “a kind of column [that] lets down from the sky into the sea, around which the waters boil, stirred up by the heavy blast of the winds, and if any ships are caught in that tumult, they are tossed about and come into great peril.” Sailors would pour vinegar into the sea and pound on drums to frighten off the spirits that they imagined lurking in the spout. They had good reason to be mystified by these apparitions. The upward pull of the vortex is strong enough to suck fish, frogs, or jellyfish out of the water and carry them into the clouds, sometimes depositing them miles from their original location. Scientists now believe that apocryphal-sounding stories of fish and frogs raining from the sky were actually cases where waterspouts gulped up a menagerie of creatures straight out of the water, and then deposited them on the heads of bewildered humans when the spout crossed over onto land and dissipated.

A waterspout sighting is a meteorological rarity, even in the tropical waters where spouts are most often seen. Ships in the colder waters of the North Atlantic, particularly during early spring, almost never encounter them. So it was more than a little surprising that, on one extraordinary day in the spring of 1794, the hundred-odd passengers en route to New York aboard the merchant ship Samson caught sight of four distinct waterspouts simultaneously drifting their way across the sea. Read More