Category: Digital Article

On January 25, 2012, the New York Times published the first of a two-part series headlined, “In China, Human Costs are Built Into an iPad.” The articles were landmark investigative journalism.

Before they were published, it seemed no one had thought much about how Apple’s iconic line of products was actually made. Instead, they simply appeared on a regular basis, almost like magic, emanations from the fervid, fervent brain of singular Steve Jobs. However, once the information contained in the Times became public knowledge, our collective disinterest came to a crashing halt.

The Times minced no words in disclosing Apple’s reprehensible labor practices. (Need I add that technology companies other than Apple, such as Dell, for example, and Hewlett-Packard, were no better?) Here is an excerpt from the Times’ original piece.

“Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records….More troubling [advocacy groups] say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories… killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions….”

The Times story broke not long after Jobs’ death, and the succession as CEO of Tim Cook. His initial response to the expose was to play defense, insisting the charges against Apple were “patently false and offensive.” Still, he did go on to say that the company would not turn a blind eye to whatever any problems, adding that “on this you have my word.”

Cook was as good as his word – if only because the media and the public held his feet to the fire. The Times had uncovered the blatant disparity between Apple’s shiny new products, and the wretched conditions under which they were made. So this was a story that had legs. Within a month after the series saw the light of day, Cook took his first conciliatory step: he requested that the Fair Labor Association audit Apple’s labor practices.

Less than one year after the original Times piece came out, there was a second front page story on Apple. This one was published on December 27 under the headline, “Signs of Changes Taking Hold in Electronic Factories in China.” The article describes how during the last several months high ranking Apple executives had become directly and deeply involved in how Apple products are made. As a result, the company publicly committed itself to several wide-ranging reforms, including curtailing workers’ hours and increasing their wages. Moreover the changes within Apple extend to California, where the company is based. In the last year, Apple has “tripled its corporate social responsibility staff, has re-evaluated how it works with manufacturers, has asked competitors to help curb excessive overtime in China and has reached out to advocacy groups it once rebuffed.”

What explains this dramatic change? It was not that Tim Cook – not to speak of his predecessor Steve Jobs – woke up one morning saying, “Golly, gee, I’ve seen the light! Apple has to be nicer and kinder and more generous to those in its employ!” Hardly. Rather it was first and foremost the Times’ expose – an invaluable reminder of how vital to a healthy society is investigative journalism. Second it was the public response to what the Times had disclosed. The revelations regarding Apple did not fall on deaf hears. Rather they spoke to ordinary people, who were coming to conclude it was dishonorable to delight in a device manufactured under conditions described as Dickensian.

Once word got out about Apple – it got to the point of being skewered on “Saturday Night Live” – the downside risk was so great there was no choice. There was no choice for Apple’s leaders but to follow Apple’s followers.

She died last night. The woman who was brutally gang-raped on a bus in India, finally succumbed to injuries sustained in the attack.

Her death will trigger more public protests. But the ferocity of the attack has already inflamed people across India, normally inured to assaults against women.

The government was actually taken aback by the riots, surprised that what it at first considered no more than yet another rape case, should trigger such widespread public outrage. But this was different – this was a single case that was so obviously heinous a crime it could not be ignored. It could not be ignored even in a country in which violence against women is commonplace.

As a result of rioting that was larger and lasted longer than anyone originally anticipated, the government agreed to establish a commission to investigate the situation. But, whether this incident will lead to real change – as opposed merely to apparent change – depends only on one thing. It depends on followers continuing to press leaders finally to take meaningful action, not only in the courts, but in homes and schools and in every other institution in addition. What is required here is a cultural shift, which is never accomplished from the top down, only from the bottom up. .

It seems to me so apparent that Washington is suffering from a crisis of bad followership – as opposed to bad leadership – I wonder that no one sees it as I do. (Though I do know the reason – we’re leader-centric. We’re so fixated on leaders we scarcely notice followers.)

Once again the evidence is compelling. In just the last week both Speaker of the House John Boehner and President Barack Obama have again been diminished by followers refusing to follow. The inability of the Congress and the Executive to avert the threat of the fiscal cliff in a judicious and timely manner testifies less to the weaknesses of the speaker and the president, than to the recalcitrance of legislators who simply refuse to compromise, as if compromise was weakness. It’s all about the inability of the governing class to go along to get along – to follow someone else’s lead when to follow someone else’s lead is necessary to the greater good. Put differently, what’s happened this month in DC is not so much about individual leaders falling down on the job, as it is about a political cadre that dreads following and so insists on leading or, at least, tries to.

Not incidentally, the same syndrome surfaced as soon as the president started to name his new cabinet. Two of his trial balloons were shot down with a ferocity and alacrity that threw into question the administration’s ability to manage its own affairs. Both Susan Rice and Chuck Hagel were the president’s preferences, she for Secretary of State, he for Secretary of Defense. Instead of a deliberate approval process, we had, in both cases, a bit of a fiasco, in which Rice and Hagel were hit by brickbats thrown from every direction, demeaning not only them, but the man who wanted them as members of his team.

Whether or not Rice and Hagel would have made good appointments is not here the question. Nor is whether or not it was smart for the Obama administration to float their names in such a target-rich environment. Rather what I am pointing to is the free-for- all that now passes for business as usual in Washington. When everyone wants to play the part of leader, and no one is willing to play the part of follower, the unhappy result is an unholy mess.

We are taught that one of Lincoln’s countless virtues was his patience. “Look to Lincoln for how to lead,” we are instructed. Go see Spielberg’s hit film “Lincoln” – and you too will see evidence of how politically advantageous is limitless patience.

But that was then – and this is now. The second decade of the 21st century is radically different from the seventh decade of the 19th. This is an era in which events seemingly move at warp speed, when technology governs communication and dissemination of information, when the rush to judgment is more hasty than before, and when leaders have less power and influence and followers more. The task of getting political work done – for example, of drafting a new law and getting it passed – is therefore different, more onerous, than it was 150 years earlier.

In the last several weeks have been two catastrophes – one at home, the other abroad – both of which demand remedial action. The first was the massacre (26 died) in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut; the second was the fatal fire (112 died) at a garment factory in Bangladesh. In both cases disaster was followed by an outcry. In the U. S. were immediate calls for change ranging from new gun control laws lo greater national attention to mental health. In Bangladesh was an immediate government inquiry, charging “unpardonable negligence” and demanding new public sector controls over private sector enterprises.

The presumption is that a leader like Lincoln would, even under these circumstances, counsel patience . But the question is whether in this day and age patience is the political virtue that it is said to have been at an earlier time. It could be that circumstances now dictate just the opposite. It could be that unless leaders and followers press the issue in the immediate wake of disaster, the opposition will harden and the moment for change will have come and then gone.

By curious coincidence investigations into two recent scandals – one in England, one in the U.S. – found that those in charge were sorely lacking. It’s similarly a coincidence that those in charge got away with a slap on the wrist at most.

In the Jimmy Savile sex abuse case, “rigid management chains” reportedly left the British Broadcasting Corporation “completely incapable” of dealing with the recent crisis that tarnished the network. There was no charge of a cover-up. But the report did describe a “chain of events that was to prove disastrous for the BBC.” Not good.

Yet the price paid by the BBC’s senior executives for their “disastrous” mismanagement was minimal to nonexistent. Some got off the hook completely, while others resigned or were reassigned, none seriously suffering, certainly not financially. In response to charges in some quarters that such meager punishments did not fit the crime, the CEO of the BBC trust told an interviewer that while management problems had to be addressed, they did not call for “putting heads on spikes.”

As the result of an independent report that criticized the “grossly inadequate” security in Benghazi, where four Americans were killed on September 11, four State Department officials were removed from their posts. They were charged with a “lack of proactive leadership” and a “lack of ownership of Benghazi’s security issues.” However, for reasons that escape me entirely, the report did not criticize more senior officials, such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or Patrick Kennedy, the Under Secretary for management. So they, like their senior counterparts at the BBC, have not so far had to pay any obvious price for falling down on the job.

Funny, I seem to remember learning about leadership that those at the top are ultimately responsible. When things go well, they get the credit. When things go badly, they get, or they take, the blame. Maybe I remember wrong.

Remember the blog I wrote on December 7? It was titled, “Boehner’s Followers Finally Following”.? Well, scratch it. I was wrong. And so was John Boehner..

My analysis wasn’t off – the context has changed. What this means is that if this fiscal deal doesn’t get done just before or soon after the first of the year – which I still think it will – the Republican Party will take another hit, and a bad one at that. What was off was my obviously mistaken assumption that Boehner could count – that he knew in advance of his negotiations with the White House who he could rely on to follow his lead.

Well, guess what. He didn’t. He miscalculated. And so therefore did I. Silly me. Given my own arguments – as in Followership and The End of Leadership – I should’ve known better.

It would appear that the second half of 2012 was considerably better for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin than the first. Demonstrations against him and his autocratic regime have not come to a screeching halt – but they have become less frequent in number and less threatening in nature. Moreover in the biggest oil industry deal in a decade, Russia’s massive, largely state-owned oil company, Rosneft, has positioned itself to become an energy power on a massive global scale.

Additionally, Putin’s shift to the right is finding resonance among large numbers of Russians who, since the collapse of communism, have been on the hunt for an ideology with national resonance. St. Petersburg, for example, long regarded as a bastion of Russian liberalism, has recently been described as a testing ground for a “wave of conservative, Orthodox churchgoing, pro-Kremlin patriotism that has gripped much of Russian officialdom.” (Financial Times, 10/24/12.) Similarly, just recently, Putin called on Russians to look to their nation’s past for guidance to the future, to Russia’s historic, national, and traditional values – as opposed to the materialist West, with its false promises and decadent habits. Nor has Russia become any more conciliatory on the international stage. To the contrary, on the issue of Syria for example, Putin’s intransigence, his refusal to in any way collaborate with the West in accelerating the departure of President Bashar al-Assad, signals that Putin is determined now as before to steer his own course in foreign affairs – to avoid any suggestion he’s anything other than his own man.

Still, there is every indication that he knows full well that the political culture of Russia has changed with the changing times. Not only is he carefully controlling his own troops, curtailing their excesses and warning them that from here on in their spending will be carefully monitored. (Putin has been embarrassed by corruption cases against several high ranking officials.) He is also more than mindful of how relatively fragile is his position – at least in comparison with that of his Soviet predecessors. Leading oppositionist Aleksei Navalny is himself aware that the time has come and now gone for massive protests against the incumbent government. But this has not precluded Navalny from finding other ways to remain relevant, and to continue to consider the current government highly sensitive to a deep vein of public anger – both over policy failures and egregious seizures of personal power.

For months I have raised in this space the question of why I was virtually alone in pointing to Hillary Clinton as culpable in the miserable matter of the attack in Benghazi.

As of last night I’m in good company. The role in the debacle of the Department of State – which Clinton led for the past four years – has finally been made blindingly clear. Here are the lead sentences in today’s New York Times lead story: “An independent inquiry into the attack on the United States diplomatic mission in Libya that killed four Americans on Sept. 11 sharply criticized the Sate Department for a lack of seasoned security personnel and for relying on untested local militias to safeguard the compound…. Systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels … [were] inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attacks that took place.”

The Secretary of State had been slated to testify on Benghazi before Congress this week. But, a few days ago, it was reported that Clinton could not do so because she had suffered a concussion as the result of a fall – an injury that purportedly precluded her testimony.

However in one month’s time Hillary Clinton will no longer be State’s leader. So if she is to avoid being haunted by Benghazi long after she leaves office, she has no choice but finally to come clean. Before – not after – she leaves her post she should own the errors of her ways. She should publicly acknowledge her responsibility in the personal, professional, and political failure that was in Libya.

Every now and then there is an event so significant, and so traumatic, that near everyone is permanently and profoundly affected. The Catastrophe in Connecticut appears at this moment to be such a happening.

How is this calamity different from other, similar, ones that have preceded it – say the massacre at the high school in Colorado, or at the shopping mall in Oregon? Several differences come immediately to mind. First, of the 28 total dead (including the shooter), 20 were children of either six and seven. Second, the slaughter took place at an apparently idyllic elementary school in an apparently idyllic New England town. Third, it occurred right smack in the middle of the holiday season, when supposedly we’re making merry. Fourth, the killer got his weapons from a gun enthusiast – who happened in this case to be his own mother. Fifth, the event included, also, matricide.

But if in the wake of this particular calamity there is policy change – for example, an executive order or new legislation on gun control, or video violence – it will be the result not of the specifics of Newtown, but of critical mass. The extent of the collective carnage, and the number of those shot dead, have simply reached unacceptable levels – unacceptable to a clear and increasingly angry and articulate majority. Since the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in the spring of 1968, some one million Americans have been killed by guns. So, finally, from the president on down, from the people on up, we are disgusted and disgraced – which is why something, as opposed to nothing, might this time be done.

It happens that the massacre of 20 children and 6 adults took place at a school not far from where I live. Take it from me – the closer such a calamity the more intense the shock and subsequent grief.

My intention was to write about how gun violence, rather like, say, climate change, is one of those policy problems on which most Americans know full well change is required – but on which they have been unable so far to act. Gun control has been the obvious answer, at least some legislation that would bring the U. S. more closely in line with the most other countries in the so-called developed world. Moreover in his heartfelt statement of yesterday, President Barack Obama, who on this particular issue has been somewhere between sluggish and inert, seemed to imply he would now take the lead.

But a day later we’re a lot smarter – or, at least, we know more. What we know now is that the two semiautomatic pistols and the one semiautomatic rifle that were used in the Connecticut killings were all owned by the shooter’s mother.

Before the slaughter at the school there was matricide in the home. So it’s possible we’ll never know exactly why this particular woman kept these particular weapons in her handsome house, which was occupied also by her seriously sick son. But what we might be able to conclude even now is that notwithstanding the personal, psychological, and policy dissections that will in the coming days take place, sometimes what happens is beyond our comprehension. Sometimes it’s a matter rather of the human heart – which history tells us is sometimes black.