Thanks, Sanjeev, for the heads up on this one.
Monthly Archives: October 2008
With God’s Blessing, inshallah
In Arabic, all statements about the future are tempered by adding the phrase inshallah, meaning “God willing”. This comes from the Muslim precept that only God knows and determines the future; and therefore, it is a sign of arrogance and blasphemy to speak of the future without conditioning it on God’s will. Examples would include: I will see you later, inshallah; tomorrow I have an exam, inshallah; or I am going to Florida for Christmas, inshallah. Furthermore, its use is widely accepted by all Arabic speakers regardless of their religion (Islam, Christianity or Judaism). Even Spanish, heavily influenced by Arabic, adopted its own version of the expression — ojalá— to denote when one hopes for something to occur, i.e., ojalá que llueva café.
I wasn’t sure whether we had something similar in English until this morning when I heard Sarah Palin’s recent CNN interview. When asked what her role would be as vice president, Sarah Palin responded,
Well, we’ve talked a lot about that, John McCain and I have, about the missions that I’ll get to embark on if we are so blessed to be hired by the American people to work for them.
The “if we are so blessed” expression in American English is most commonly used by fundamentalist Christians to show that same degree of humbleness before God as does the Arabic inshallah. While I won’t doubt Sarah Palin’s sincerity, I can only imagine that by saying “if we are so blessed” she was also giving a wink out to her Christian voters.
Here’s what I would have liked to ask Sarah Palin in response. If ultimately you are not “so blessed”, but rather the will of God and that of a majority of American voters determine Barack Obama to be the next president, does that mean that Obama and Biden “are so blessed”? Could an Obama presidency be God’s will? And if so, wouldn’t you then have to accept God’s will and give Obama your full support?
Filed under Digressions, Essays, Obama 08
20th Century Rhetoric for the 21st Century
As an American living in Europe where the root word “social” is considered a democratic value, I often tell people about how growing up in the U.S. in the 1970s and 80s we were taught to fear all things “social” as dangerous manifestations of Soviet communism. Being called a “commie” or a “socialist” was an insult, for everyone knew that “commies eat your mommies”.
So it’s is kind of funny to hear, almost twenty years after the so called “Fall of Communism”, the Republicans accusing Barack Obama of being a socialist. Sarah Palin recently said on the campaign trail that Joe the Plumber thought Obama’s tax plan sounded like socialism, as if either Sarah or Joe actually knew the definition of socialism. The bailout is wealth redistribution, and taxes, by definition, are wealth redistribution.
But when I thought about it more closely, I wondered, why are the Republicans so obsessed with reliving the Cold War? Between the time they have dedicated to Bill Ayers, the anti-Vietnam War terrorist from when Obama was eight, and now this absurd fear of socialism, you’d think that McCain Palin wanted to go back to 20th Century and fight the spread of communism all over again. Maybe with a new surge we could finally claim victory in Vietnam.
McCain would obviously rather cast himself as a Reagan than a Bush. But does that really justify revisiting 20th Century rhetoric for addressing 21 Century reality.
Dans le sud de la France
I took a two day petit séjour from my election obsession to go to Hyères in the south of France for my first authentic French wedding . On Friday afternoon, we took the train from Paris to Zizou’s hometown, Marseille. On the train, believe it or not, I dreamt that I was writing a detailed post about how the government bailout was essentially a subprime loan — we lend money we don’t have, borrow from abroad to pay for it, and hope that a different party will be in power when the day of reckoning comes and taxes need to be raised to pay for it. Continue reading
Filed under Digressions, Friends / Family
The Real Voter Fraud
If you’ve been concerned by the Republican cry of fraud over Acorn, maybe it’s time to think again (or think twice — he who casts the first stone). Acorn is a non-issue. It’s a ruse, a disguise, one in a series of tactics to distract voters and to rally Republicans to cry “foul play” in the event of an Obama victory. Not only was John McCain Acorn’s key note speaker in 2006, Acorn was the one who brought into question some of the goofy registrations in the first place.
As Mark Crispin Miller indicated on this week’s Bill Moyers Journal, we should be concerned, not by Acorn, but by two other types of activities. The first are the well-orchestrated and systematic attempts by Republican groups to suppress voter turn out. What is voter suppression?
Well, it means various dirty tricks and tactics and legal devices used to shrink the size of the electorate before Election Day. So here we’re talking about, for example, interfering with registration drives or making them vulnerable to partisan challenges or passing laws requiring certain kinds of documentation at polling places. You know, stuff that harks back to Reconstruction and the Jim Crow laws. Caging voters, which is sending them registered letters with forms that if they don’t fill them out, their names will be stricken from the voter rolls. Voter purges. There’s a whole huge menu of extremely ingenious devices now being used I think with unprecedented brazenness to try to make the electorate as small as possible in advance of Election Day.
The second is through actual voter fraud.
This means using the computerized voting systems which we now have in place in at least 80% of the country. Using those systems through black box technology, precisely because it is so technical and it’s so opaque and it’s all run by private companies, private companies that have close ties to the Republican Party, the use of this kind of voting apparatus is extremely worrisome and something that we should be watching very carefully.
Why should we be concerned?
Well, I, in the aggregate, it does and could easily add up to millions of voters because we’re talking about a very, very broad range of devices, you know, both legal and illegal that will have a dramatic effect and that will add up. If hundreds of thousands of people are disenfranchised nationwide simply through voter purges alone, you see? That is significant. If the caging of voters results in the disenfranchisement of another 200,000, 300,000, we’re talking here about numbers that definitely do add up, you see, and that make a difference, are meant to make a difference come Election Day.
Soon will come the day when the U.S. will need U.N. election monitors to validate our elections. I suggest you watch the entire interview.
Joe Plumber and Anti-Freeze
What’s all this about Joe the Plumber? Must he spread his wealth, will he be prejudiced if he buys the company, earning more than $250,000. The truth is that no one is being fully straight with us. Let’s think about it. Continue reading
The Final Presidential Debate
Here is my “two cents” on last night’s final presidential debate. In general, I would say that John McCain came off as the better debater, more forceful, but ultimately failed to convince. While he did a formidable job of distancing himself from President Bush with a few good one-liners and his senate record, ironically, he was undone by the dissonance within his own campaign. Continue reading
Is McCain being Mistreated?
I have heard a lot of commentary over the past few days about how the McCain campaign is furious, feeling that it has been mistreated by the press. The argument goes something like this: Obama is playing filthy politics while McCain is getting all of the blame. I even read that it is not the McCain people but the “Obamamedia” who are gripped by insane rage”. Obviously, I am not completely objective here and am not going to pretend to be. But let’s look at the facts. Continue reading
Angel Cabrera, Leadership, Education and the Crisis
During my early days working at the Instituto de Empresa Business School (“IE”) in Madrid, Spain, I had the great pleasure to learn from and become friends with Angel Cabrera, the former IE dean and now the current president of the Thunderbird School of Global Management. Angel (I sound like Sarah Palin, “do you mind if I call you Angel?”) recently created his Global Leaders Can Be Made blog.
Since the Enron scandal, Angel has been a key figure in rethinking business education to focus on breeding professionally responsible leaders. With that in mind, I wrote him an email the other day about the financial crisis and the implications for leadership training, saying,
In a sense, the financial crisis is an extension of Enron. Now more than ever in globalized markets where average citizens, businesses, and financial institutions are all dependent on one another (think about the credit interdependence that has caused the crash), we need better leaders. Leaders need to step up to the plate. The whole paradigm of corporations defined exclusively by their profits alone can no longer be seen as valuable to society. Transparency, sustainability, even paying taxes (the new patriotism) are now vital both to capitalism (finally) and society’s survival.
Angel kindly gave Grave Error a well needed plug by directly responding to my email in a post about whether business schools are responsible for the current financial mess, writing
Eric, as you would guess, I couldn’t agree with you more. We need better leaders. Leaders who understand and accept the professional responsibilities of managing a public corporation, to create true lasting value to society at large while providing competitive returns to investors that are commensurate with the risks they assume.
Some journalists are asking whether business schools may have some responsibility in the current financial mess for the way we have trained business leaders in the last two decades. My answer: absolutely!
It is refreshing to see someone out there asking to being held accountable for the mess and responsible for the clean up, as opposed to the easy blame Wall Street, blame Washington game.
Back in December 2001 just prior to getting a job at IE, I was completing IE’s International MBA program. I already had a JD and had worked as an attorney, but I thought that a master’s degree in business administration would give me that added insight into managers’ business concerns needed to become a more effective advocate. Throughout the MBA program, though, two things surprised me, making me believe that my JD was by far a more valuable degree, at least from an intellectual perspective:
- An ignorance on the part of the students and an absence in the course work about what a corporation really is, and
- A failure to instill a “managerial” identity and spirit in the MBA candidates. Continue reading
Filed under Essays, Friends / Family
Grave Error 