Category: Digital Article

Over the last 75 years, confidence in American institutions has waxed and waned. It was low during the 1930’s, during the years of the Great Depression, but after that things improved. The year 1965 was a high point, the great majority of the American people giving consistently positive evaluations of American institutions nearly across the board.

Since then, things have gone more or less steadily downhill. Our confidence in American institutions has continued to decline, even, or especially, during the last several decades. The numbers are grim, the long term trend being relentlessly down, with new lows recorded only recently for Americans’ confidence in schools, churches, banks and television news.

Media have been especially hard hit. Not only have old media had to contend with the decline in confidence, they have had to contend with new media, with on line media, which have threatened their predecessors to the point of near extinction.

All this came inevitably to mind yesterday, when the news came out that one of the most venerable of old media institutions, the Washington Post, was sold to one of the most original of new media moguls, Jeff Bezos. Of the media transitions concluded only recently – including the sale of the Boston Globe to John Henry, principal owner of the Boston Red Sox – the sale of the Post was the most emblematic. Though Post stalwarts such as iconic journalist Bob Woodward put their best faces forward – saying how great it all was, that someone as perfectly wonderful as Bezos was now in a position to make the decisions – the fact of the matter is there was sadness that so great a paper as the Post had hemorrhaged so much cash and so much circulation it could not continue.

To most rules there is an exception – in this case is the New York Times. It is impossible to exaggerate each of the following: 1) how singularly superb remains the paper of record; 2) how singular sturdy remains the paper of record (it has stemmed the tide sweeping away other media family dynasties); and 3) how singularly nimble remains the paper of record (it has adapted to the changing times in spite of its own significant losses). It was, in fact, the New York Times Company that sold the Globe to Henry, having clearly concluded it should shed whatever was extraneous to concentrate on its core mission – a single publication to crush the competition.

For those of us old enough to remember a time when Americans were less cynical and not so jaded, it’s a relief that one of the greatest of all American institutions endures. The Times carries now as it did then “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” And it carries now, as it did not then, “All the News That’s Fit to Click.” The paper remains as it has for well over a century in the Ochs/Sulzberger family, which clearly considers the paper a national trust. Following industry trends, the Times’ weekday circulation has fallen. But, bucking industry trends, its website has emerged as America’s most successful. Each month it receives upwards of 30 million unique visitors – a feat in a media environment that is nothing if not hostile. And an exception in an institutional environment that is nothing if not depressing.

I eat meat. I use mousetraps. I swat mosquitoes. And I wear leather.

So sue me for being two-faced – but still I believe passionately in animal rights.

I bring this up for two reasons. First, a new film, “Blackfish,” and a recent column in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof titled “Can We See Our Hypocrisy to Animals?” both raise with fresh urgency the question of how “good and decent people” in the early 21st century can be oblivious to the unethical treatment of animals.

“Blackfish” is about the wretched effects on whales (specifically orcas) of being kept in captivity. Like the 2009 Oscar-winning documentary “The Cove,” about the indecent acquisition of dolphins for use in amusement parks, “Blackfish” questions whether keeping any of these mammals confined for our own amusement is morally defensible. Kristof raises the stakes higher by taking on the bigger issue, certainly numerically, of how we can stand by and do nothing while billions of animals are suffering in factory farms.

Kristof is correct to point out that on animal rights there has been some progress. Since Peter Singer’s seminal volume, “Animal Liberation,” published in 1975, attitudes have changed, which explains why in this country, and in Europe, and even in China are now significant animal rights movements.

This brings me to the second reason I raise this now. The juxtaposition of the film and the column make this a right time to remind readers that whatever the progress that has been made, the bulk of the work remains to be done. Moreover this is the kind of work that gets done not from the top down, but from the bottom up. Public pressure is key – which is why animal rights depend on us. Animal rights – progress toward recognizing that animals have rights – depends on our willingness to put our money where our mouths are. Literally.

In 1927 Time magazine started an annual tradition it called “Man of the Year.” More recently this was changed to “Person of the Year who, “for better or for worse has done the most to influence events of the year.”

As I write in early August, I cannot of course know who will do what between now and the end of 2013. But the editors of the magazine might be hard pressed to find anyone between now and then who has done more to “influence events of the year” than the man who came out of nowhere, Edward Snowden.

Until recently, Edward Snowden was never known by anyone for much of anything. He was not in any case, by any definition, a leader. He was entirely without power, without authority, and without influence. But by leaking U. S. intelligence data he has become, “for better or for worse,” a person of great influence, a person who has changed the conversation at home and abroad. Leaders as conventionally defined – including the president of the United States, members of Congress, heads of various agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency – have had no choice to bend to the man from nowhere, to change course in response to what he did.

When I say that Snowden changed the conversation I do not exaggerate. To be sure, the tension between our privacy interests and our security interests goes all the way back, and after the attacks on 9/11 it heightened. Still, more often than not it was a simmering issue, not a burning one. More often than not neither the American government nor the American people paid the debate much mind.

Until Snowden. It’s fair to say that since Snowden’s renegade decision to reveal the vast scope of the NSA’s electronic surveillance, the debate over this issue has been revived and, to understate it, reinvigorated. Moreover the government, the Obama administration, has been forced to backtrack at near warp speed. The Justice Department just acknowledged that even in a terrorism prosecution it must tell defendants when sweeping snooping is being used to build a case against them. The administration just declassified and released documents that describe past violations by the National Security Agency of a secret court order. And James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, was caught lying to the Congress. Well, maybe not lying, exactly. Here is James Banford on the putative distinction between an outright lie and doublethink. “Following the revelations of the phone-log program in which the NSA collects telephone data – the numbers of both callers and the length of the calls – on hundreds of millions of Americans, Clapper switched to doublethink. He said that his previous answer was not a lie; he just chose to respond in the ‘least truthful manner.’ With such an Orwellian concept of the truth now being used, it is useful to take a look at what the government has been telling the public about its surveillance activities over the years, and compare it with what we know now as a result of the top secret documents and other information released by, among others, the former NSA contract employee Edward Snowden.” (New York Review, 8/15/13)

For once members of Congress veritably sprang into action, quick to take up the issues that Snowden’s revelations had brought to the forefront. The movement to crack down on government surveillance began with two Congressmen from Michigan, who normally are at odds, but not on this. In short order so many other members of the House rushed to join them, that a vote to defund the NSA’s telephone data collection program was just seven short of passage. The press was similarly beginning to question if it made sense to vilify Snowden, when it was he who revealed information that the American people arguably should have had in the first place. And, the American people themselves were largely in support of Snowden. Over 55% thought him a whistleblower and only 34 % a traitor – though this was before he was given a year’s asylum in Russia.

This moves us from domestic to foreign affairs. Snowden did not just change the national debate he changed the international one as well, particularly as it pertains to the relationship between the United States and Russia. One of my very favorites, Vladimir Putin, gave the OK for Snowden to get the protection of the Kremlin. So, what to do now? How should the Obama administration respond to yet another Putin snub, yet another embarrassing blow to the president’s now nearly forgotten effort to “reset” the relationship between the Washington and Moscow?

Whatever his ultimate fate – and in spite of his dubious decision to seek comfort from a thug – Edward Snowden has made his mark. It is impossible to imagine a simple reversion to what was – just as it is impossible to imagine the Obama administration will be spared the judgment of history by so aggressively pursuing those who leak government secrets that do not in any clear and obvious way aid the enemy.

In fairness, for anyone in a position of authority, this is a devilishly difficult call. Just today the State Department issued a heightened terror alert, a reminder if any were needed of threat. As well, the alert is itself testimony to how people with power as conventionally understood have become highly vulnerable to those without – to those like candidate for person of the year, Edward Snowden.

On this one I need hardly lift a finger. Actor and playwright Harvey Fierstein did my work for me.

What follows is an excerpt from his column titled “Russia’s Anti-Gay Crackdown,” as it appeared on July 22nd in the New York Times. The piece speaks for itself. But notice that Fierstein points his finger not only at Putin, but also at us. He wonders aloud if the world will continue to stay silent while Putin continues to punish what he deems “pro-gay.”

“Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, has declared war on homosexuals. [His] campaign against lesbian, gay and bisexual people is one of distraction, a strategy of demonizing a minority for political gain taken straight from the Nazi playbook. Can we allow this war against human rights to go unanswered?…

With Russia about to hold the [Olympic] Winter Games in Sochi, the country is open to pressure. American and world leaders must speak out against Mr. Putin’s attacks and the violence they foster. The Olympic Committee must demand the retraction of these [anti-homosexual] laws under the threat of boycott.”

While I agree with Fierstein’s every sentiment – I would offer a friendly amendment. If we wait for “world leaders” actually to lead, we will wait indefinitely. If we really want them to stand up and be counted, to stand up to Russia’s strong man, we ourselves will have to get out front. We followers will have to lead the fight for human rights in the future, as always we have in the past.

Item # 1:

The story of Egypt’s most recent revolution is not new. But there’s a level of detail in an article in the New Yorker, about how exactly events unfolded, that’s astonishing. (Peter Hessler, “The Showdown,” July 22.)

So how did revolution that toppled President Mohammed Morsi early this month start? Here’s what happened.

It began last April with all of five activists, ranging in age from twenty-two to thirty, who came up with the idea of a petition campaign to reject the Morsi presidency. Just two months later, by June, they had collected more than fifteen million signatures, each reputedly on a separate sheet of paper. Notwithstanding these astonishingly impressive numbers, the activists seemed still so amateurish that political elites across the spectrum never took them seriously. The American Ambassador to Egypt, Anne Patterson, was typical. She gave a speech in the middle of the month in which she dismissed the activists’ efforts, “Some say that street action will produce better results than elections,” said Patterson. But, “to be honest, my government and I are deeply skeptical.”

On the last day of June, the small group of activists who had named themselves Tamarrod – it means “Rebellion” – publicly called for large demonstrations. I have to wonder if they had any idea of what they would unleash. Hessler writes the protests that followed were even larger than the ones that had toppled Mubarak two and a half years earlier. “Huge crowds filled Tahrir and the streets around Cairo’s Presidential Palace, and there were protests in every major Egyptian city, with plans to hold sit-ins until Morsi left. A military source said that as many as fourteen million people had participated, out of a population of eighty-three million.” Just one day after the protests started, the military issued an ultimatum: either Morsi would make concessions or he would be out. By July 5th Morsi was history.

Item # 2:

In the past two years, more than one hundred Tibetans have set themselves aflame in protest against Chinese rule. These numbers are not, of themselves, large. But they have spread across the Tibetan plateau, and they are growing. In 2011, a dozen Tibetans immolated themselves, most of them monks or former monks. In 2012, there were more than eighty, some of them monks and nuns, others nomads and students. The oldest of the self-immolators was in his early sixties, the youngest was fifteen.

Item # 3:

The Pope is in Rio and the demonstrations in Brazil have for now subsided. But every indication is that President Dilma Rousseff’s several attempts to placate the protesters have failed. More than a month after the demonstrations erupted – over everything from corruption to overspending on the forthcoming World Cup and Summer Olympics to police brutality to poor public health care to equally poor public schools – there is no sign that Rousseff’s government has been able even to begin effectively to address the nation’s woes. Brazil has long had one of the world’s highest levels of income inequality. So the rich have generally been protected against what’s gone wrong. But the poor and, more importantly, the middle class, have not. Despite Brazil’s especially impressive economic development in the last ten years, those other than the rich and powerful feel shut out. Even the middle class, despite their increased incomes, feels shut out of a system in which living conditions are more evocative of a developing country than a developed one.

Item 4:

Young people have been, under certain circumstances, delighted to work as interns. Even though interns are typically unpaid, a certain demographic has seen them as portals to better jobs, to paying jobs, at a later point in their lives. Now things are changing, at least slightly. Interns are fighting back, fighting against a system that many are coming to believe exploits them by failing to provide wages and, simultaneously, failing to provide the educational benefits that supposedly justify internships in the first place. While this is hardly a mass movement, attention should be paid when a group as bereft of resources as interns tries to wrest for itself some measure of power. Interns are now filing lawsuits – occasionally actually winning. (In June, a federal judge ruled that interns working on the movie “Black Swan” should have received at least a minimum wage.) They are drafting petitions. (Two students at New York University recently drafted a petition that called for the University to stop advertising unpaid internships. Within days, more than a thousand people had signed.) And Intern Labor Rights, which lobbies for the cause its name implies, is joining with other, similar groups, in countries that include Canada, France, and the Netherlands, to make common cause, to ensure they either get paid, or benefit from training that contributes to their professional development.

Item 5:

As a write, the Dream Defenders are in their seventh day. For seven days this band of protesters has been sitting outside the office of Florida Governor Rick Scott, demanding that he call a special session of the Florida legislature to review Stand Your Ground laws. In the wake of the searing national soul-searching that has been in the aftermath of the trial of Georg Zimmerman, the Dream Defenders figure he has a moral obligation to do at least this.

Some of you who read this blog must wonder why I’m so tirelessly interested in this man – so fixated on Putin particularly.

Two reasons, one somewhat personal, the other purely professional. The first is because my Master’s degree was in Russian and East European Studies – and I’ve never lost interest. The second is because Vladimir Putin is only the most recent in a long, long, long line of Russian autocrats – but he is the first to be tested in the 21st century. He is the first Russian leader to lead in a time during which, as I argue, leaders generally are getting weaker and followers stronger. Putin, moreover, is leader not of some minor nation, some national backwater, but of a major nation, with roots that are as long and strong in the West as they are in the East.

What we have had in Russia during the time of Putin – now well over a decade in duration – is an ongoing tension: between the old Russia on the one hand, and the new one on the other. This new Russia is not altogether democratic as opposed to autocratic. But increasingly it is filled with the young and and the restless (mainly middle class), who refuse to go gently, who refuse to bestow on Putin whatever it is he wants whenever he wants it. Put differently, in Russia, more than in any other country in the world, there is a palpable tension between the old leadership model and the new. On the one hand is Putin, who constantly testing the limits of his authority, pulling back only when he’s worried he’s gone too far. On the other hand is a potentially powerful minority of Russians who intermittently at least seem to be seriously fed up.

To be sure, Putin is not Stalin. Putin does not, does not generally dare terrorize his enemies by eliminating them. Nevertheless he is ruthless: he does not brook dissent unless he thinks he must.

The most famous of his opponents is a man about whom I’ve written before: Alexei Navalny. Navalny has been a thorn in Putin’s side for years: he has been Putin’s best known. most persistent, and, most intrepid critic, using new media and old persistently to poke at the Kremlin.

Just a few days ago it seemed Putin had finally got his man. Navalny was sentenced to a five-year term in prison, ostensibly for embezzlement. But guess what! Less than 24 hours after his conviction Navalny was set free! He was free at least temporarily, at least pending an appeal.

This raises the question of why? Why was Navalny released just when it seemed Putin had him where he wanted him, locked away long years? The answer is easy. No sooner was the verdict declared than all hell broke loose in Moscow. There was opprobrium from abroad, of course. Much more importantly though, was protest, large public protests, at home.

It’s important to understand that Navalny’s release in the immediate aftermath of his conviction is virtually unprecedented. It’s obvious then what happened: Putin and his henchmen ran scared. They got scared that the thousands who took to the streets to protest against Nalalny’s extended sentence represented a threat, a threat to the authorities themselves. Recent history has shown full well what can happen when an initially small group grows in size and in the level of its outrage – it spell big trouble, particularly for those in positions of power.

What happens to Navalny down the line is unclear. He says he’s running for political office, for mayor of Moscow. So either one of two scenarios is possible. The first is he ends up being put away, locked away for years to come. The second is he is allowed to go free, to continue his remarkably bold assault on Russia’s political system – and on the man who has come to personify it.

To read about the “unstoppable climb in CEO pay” is to be disheartened. Notwithstanding censorious public opinion, and increasing income inequity, and even some times their professional performances, CEOs’ median pay package in 2012 was 16 percent higher than in 2011. Corporate boards moreover are tone deaf – or maybe simply indifferent to what shareholders say on executive pay.

But the status of business leaders in 21st century America is more tenuous than these astronomical earnings – the median is over $15 million a year – would seem to suggest. CEOs are not as vulnerable to slings and arrows as their political counterparts. But neither they are invulnerable, impervious to the temper of the times.

Let me name just four ways in which corporate leaders are more precariously perched than they were, say, a decade ago.

First among them is a level of anger against corporate America that while not generally in evidence in the streets, nevertheless is palpable. A 2013 survey of trust in the professions found that business people and bankers ranked last, along with politicians.

Second is the way leaders in business are being constrained. CEOs are being watched as never before. They are being monitored as never before. And they are being tethered as never before. As an example of the last, in 2012, more than 20 percent of companies in the S&P 500 Index reported appointing an independent outsider as their chairman, up from 12 percent in 2007. And as another example, the Shareholder Rights Project, located in the Harvard Business School, is working with some measure of success to persuade companies to eliminate classified boards – boards whose directors do not have to stand for election each year.

Third is the stakeholder situation, much more complex than it used to be. Corporate leaders currently have to cope with stakeholders more numerous as well as more demanding. Among them are boards, customers, employees, governments, regulators, industry watchdogs, special interest groups, consumer groups, and the public at large.

And fourth is the larger global context about which I regularly write – in which leaders generally are getting weaker and followers stronger. Suffice it to say here that the tenure of CEO’s has been halved, from about ten years in the last decade of the 20th century to about five and a half in the first decade of the 21st.

So whatever the level of their material success, America’s corporate elite is not exempt from the larger forces that impinge on their power, authority, and influence. They would do well to bear in mind this bigger picture, as they sit in the counting house counting out their money.

…it’s a coup! What happened in Egypt is, by conventional standards, just that – a forcible seizure of power by the military of a democratically elected president.

But… the Obama administration is loathe to call it a coup because if it did, Egypt would be ineligible for the fat check the president wants in fact to bestow. So for the moment he is content to defer to Egyptian officials who are calling what just happened a popular uprising.

But wait just a minute! Hold on! Isn’t that exactly what took place in the streets of Cairo and elsewhere across Egypt? Isn’t that what it was – a popular uprising, not a coup in any usual use of this word? President Morsi did not wake up one fine day and ask to be ejected from office. The Egyptian military did not wake up one fine day and ask to run the government. No. What transpired instead is that ordinary Egyptians, huge numbers of ordinary Egyptians, made their preference plain. When they refused to shut up and go home, certain of Egypt’s leaders finally felt they had no choice but to follow Egypt’s followers.

My strong interest in followership – as opposed to only in leadership – began about ten years ago. I was writing my book Bad Leadership, when it became evident that there were no bad leaders without bad followers. The former simply did not, could not, function without the support of the latter. Since then, I have nearly never talked about leadership without, simultaneously, referencing followership.

Only in the last few years though did something else become apparent: leaders are getting weaker and followers stronger. Not a day goes by without evidence that testifies to events driven as much from the bottom up as from the top down. It’s not that leaders have become unimportant or irrelevant. But in the 21^st century most followers make it hard for most leaders to get so much done. And in the 21^st century followers feel empowered and emboldened to a degree that historically is unprecedented. While this phenomenon appears at first glance to be primarily political, it is not. It is evidenced in every sector; and it is evidenced worldwide, in the United States certainly, but equally in places like China, and Brazil, and Bangladesh, in effect, everywhere.

This change in the way the world works is so blatantly obvious, at least to me, it’s a mystery, at least to me, that anyone anywhere can any longer teach leadership without teaching followership. But, there it is. For whatever constellation of reasons the study of leadership remains a bull market, while the study of followership still languishes. Maybe some day this will change. Maybe some day people will realize that the way the world works in the present, as opposed to the way the world worked in the past, mandates we pay attention to those in the middle and at the bottom, as well as to those at the top.

Meantime here is evidence – none more than a week old – of the importance of being a follower.          

• The press was focused on the nine members of the Supreme Court and what they would have to say about gay marriage. But the real story of course – the real story behind this week’s victory for equal rights – was not about the nine but about the many thousands of ordinary Americans who fought the good fight. And it was about the many millions of ordinary Americans who came in the last decade to believe that there was no reason that everyone should be entitled to the benefits of marriage – save those who were gay. As George Chauncey pointed out in the New York Times (“The Long Road to Marriage Equality”) the marriage movement emerged out of the maelstrom that was the AIDS epidemic (in the 1980s). But it was about more, much more, than legal benefits. Gays and others fought for the right for gays to marry because denial of marriage rights has always been a “powerful symbol of people’s exclusion from full citizenship.”  The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) finally became intolerable, legally, morally, because so many Americans came to believe, along with Justice Anthony Kennedy, that “DOMA’s principal effect is to identify a subset of state-sanctioned marriages and make them unequal.” I might add that the woman who sued to have DOMA overturned, the woman who led the charge, Edith Windsor, is a woman now over 80 years old, who no one had previously heard of, a woman who until now was without any apparent power, authority, or influence.
• Until a few weeks ago Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, seemed untouchable, impervious to political problems. In fact, both domestically and internationally Erdogan was one of the few political leaders who was riding high, credited with transforming Turkey into a regional power, and into a model that other countries would do well to emulate. Where else had the mix of Islam and democracy seemed to work so well? But then, seemingly out of the blue, began widespread public protests that convulsed the country. Out of the blue, in other words, there came followers who previously had stayed silent, as in recent years Erdogan became increasingly autocratic, determined to have things his way and to brook no dissent. Like most such protests it began small, a dispute over a park, and then it spread, finally requiring or seeming to hordes of riot police to restore order. As it stands now, Erdogan is back in control – but the price has been high. Some 7,000 protesters and more than a dozen journalists were injured. Five people died, and several remain in critical condition. A witch hunt has begun for so-called provocateurs. Hundreds of demonstrators have been detained, and even jailed for such “crimes” as tending to the wounded. And there have been international consequences as well. Germany, for example, Turkey’s largest trading partner, is now trying to block new talks about its entering the European Union. One could argue that the protests are signs that Turkey is maturing as a democracy. But one could as easily argue that whatever the signs, so long as Erdogan remains in power, so long will democracy be suppressed. As we have seen in Putin’s Russia, fledgling democracy movements are fragile. Even the bravest, most determined followers are vulnerable to leaders who would as soon destroy them.
•  Brazil is a different story. And Brazil is the same story. Brazil is the same in that an apparently small and simple protest, in this case over an increase in bus fares, led out of the blue to complete chaos, to an ostensibly thriving, developing country in the grip of a level of unrest that only a week earlier was all but inconceivable. Hundreds of protesters became thousands, and then tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands. Finally a million ordinary Brazilians vented their various frustrations, furious at their leaders for a range of offenses, most of them centering on income inequities, corruption, and spending that was perceived to be excessive on everything (including next year’s World Cup) but basic services. The point is that “all of a sudden, a country that was once viewed as a stellar example of a rising, democratic power found itself upended by an amorphous, leaderless popular uprising with one unifying theme: an angry, and sometimes violent rejection of politics as usual” (New York Times, June 21.)  What was different about Brazil – different from Turkey – is that Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff quickly did what she could to mollify the masses. To be sure, in week one the authorities tried cracking down. But when that didn’t work, the government changed course. Instead of in any obvious way punishing their followers, Brazil’s leaders tried rewarding them. Rouseff promised improvements in transportation and health services, she insisted that she would spend all of Brazil’s expected revenue from massive new finds of offshore oil on education, and finally she promised to reconfigure the country’s entire political system by convening a constituent assembly that could overhaul both the Congress and campaign-finance methods. How this will all come out in the end is impossible now to say. In any case the difference between what happened in Turkey and what happened in Brazil is palpable, save in one all-important way. Both countries were upturned not by leaders, but by followers.
• After a building collapse in Bangladesh in April killed well over a thousand garment workers, it became rapidly clear that something big would have to be change. In particular, the authorities in Bangladesh were increasingly concerned over the backlash both at home and abroad. At home there were the predictable but nevertheless impassioned protests, masses of ordinary people incensed by the manifest failure of government to regulate factories, workplaces of countless workers. And abroad there was growing disquiet, fear that, for example, Americans would finally be put off by garments that while dirt cheap, were being made by men, women, and children far from home, exploited for their dirt cheap labor. In fact, not only were leaders in Bangladesh worried, so were leaders in the U. S., corporate leaders concerned their goods would no longer sell so well, and, in a worst case scenario, actively be boycotted by consumers who would rather pay a dollar more for a tee shirt than tote a guilty conscience. Therefore, again as a result of pressure from below, it was revealed this week that Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., Gap, Inc, and other large U.S. retailers were nearing an agreement to establish a $50 million, five-year fund to improve safety conditions in Bangladesh garment factories. (The agreement was contingent on the government in Bangladesh meeting criteria for accountability.) This on the heels of other retailers – in particular dozens of large European companies – who had earlier already adopted a legally binding pact to improve worker safety in Bangladesh. Activists have tried for years to improve factory conditions in Bangladesh, which has grown to one of the world’s largest apparel producers, precisely because of its low costs. But it took another catastrophe – the one in April was by no means the first – to heighten public awareness, especially outside Bangladesh, to the point where followers were seen by leaders as a likely threat.          
• About Wendy Davis you could say that before this week she was already a leader. She was, after all, a Texas state senator. However as such she had precious little of what leaders value – precious little power, authority, or influence. A couple of days ago that changed – likely forever. It was her own doing, her own willingness to speak to power, to stand up to power in the State Capitol in Austin by daring in dramatic fashion to filibuster. Ultimately, though her filibustering was under grueling, one might even say draconian conditions, it lasted more than eleven hours. And it transformed her into a political phenomenon, first on line then in real time she became an overnight star who likely will shine for some time to come. I don’t want to get trapped by word play on this one – a week ago was Senator Davis a leader or a follower? My point is that a week ago scarcely anyone had heard of her outside the state of Texas. My point is that for various cultural and technological reasons she was able to capitalize on what she accomplished in a way that would have been impossible even a decade ago, rocketing from obscurity to fame in the proverbial heartbeat.
• Is there anything left to say at this time that hasn’t already been said about Edward Snowden? Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old so-called hacker who turned America’s political establishment, especially its security establishment, on its head by leaking? Not really, except to point out that his particular trajectory is a sign of the times. It is a sign of how now a single individual can engage in role reversal – can oblige those we call leaders into following his lead.       

Who knew? Who knew that a small and simple protest would lead to a public outburst? Who knew that resistance to destroying a park would lead to resistance to the nation’s highest political authority? Who knew that the lavishly praised Turkish Prime Minister, Recip Tayyip Erdogan, was so vulnerable to the passions of his own people?

Who knew? Who knew that a small and simple protest would lead to a public outburst? Who knew that resistance to an increase in bus fares would lead to resistance to the nation’s ruling class? Who knew that Latin America’s success story, the nation of Brazil, was ready to erupt at what appears to outsiders a slight provocation?

Wake up boys and girls! Get real! Go where the action is, in the middle and at the bottom, not so much at the top.