SATURDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2008

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Be Afraid. No, Really. Cybercriminals Are Winning The Internet War By JOHN MARKOFF

San FranciSco

I

NTERNET SECURITY IS broken, and nobody seems to know quite how to fix it. Despite the efforts of the computer security industry and a half-decade struggle by Microsoft to protect its Windows operating system, malicious software is spreading faster than ever. The so-called malware secretly takes over a PC and then uses that computer to spread more malware to other machines exponentially. Computer scientists and security researchers acknowledge they cannot get ahead of As many as 10 the onslaught. million computers Criminals thrivare infected by ing on an undermalicious software. ground economy of credit card thefts, A screen shows a bank fraud and other cluster of victims. scams rob computer users of an estimated $100 billion a year, according to a conservative estimate by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. A Russian company that sells fake antivirus software that actually takes over a computer pays its illicit distributors as much as $5 million a year. With vast resources from stolen credit card and other financial information, the cyberattackers are easily winning a technology arms race. “Right now the bad guys are improving more quickly than the good guys,’’ said Patrick Lincoln, director of the computer science laboratory Continued on Page 4

STUART ISETT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

TO OUR READERS

This is the last issue of the International Weekly this year. Publication will resume on January 17.

WORLD TRENDS

Corporations feel the Kremlin’s hand.

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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Say hi to Grandma, over the Web.

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ARTS & STYLES

When the revolution comes, and goes.

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I NTELLIGENCE: Ro b e r t Re i c h o n ba i l o u t s, Page 3.

Shamans and Witches Make a Comeback We live in a time when frenzied consumers worship at the altar of materialism and rely on hand-held gadgets to do the tricks once reserved for wizards. So there would seem to be little role left for ancient beliefs in LENS magic, spirits, tribes and monks. Indeed, age-old traditions are often discarded like outmoded computer operating systems. But in some places, the otherworldly ways of the ancients are gaining new relevance, especially as faith in modern ways erodes. For centuries in rural Taiwan, village shamans, or jitong, were thought For comments, write to nytweekly@ nytimes.com.

to channel spirits and heal the sick. But as Taiwan became less poor and more urban, the jitong faded. Now a new breed of jitong is adapting to the needs of city dwellers, as Jonathan Adams reported in The Times. They work in high-rise buildings instead of huts and offer suggestions — via disembodied spirits, of course — on problems as diverse as the office, money and marriage. Chang Yin, a shaman in Taipei who channels the advice of a liquor-swilling Buddhist monk from the 12th century, assured Mr. Adams that “the gods have changed along with the times and kept up with the trends.” One 40-year-old financial worker visited Ms. Chang recently. “In the U.S. or the West, people go to a psychologist,’’ he told Mr. Adams. “The jitong plays the same role.’’ In Estonia, the population is among the most secular anywhere, surveys

have found. Many reject not only Christianity, but also, as Ellen Barry reported in the Times, the atheism that Soviet domination imposed on them. Today though, some are reconnecting to the pre-Christian animist religions that celebrate nature, witches and wood elves. “Estonia is full of natural magic,’’ Mari-Liis Roos, 37, a translator, told Ms. Barry while she visited the Witches Well of Tuhala recently during one of its occasional eruptions of water and vapor. Geologists say that the well overflows when underground water pressure builds up, but many Estonians prefer the ancient explanation: witches are taking a vigorous sauna. Some visit the well for its legendary healing qualities. In the Americas, where native cultures have long struggled to survive, some novel ways of honoring the past have emerged. In Puerto Rico, an annual beauty

LONNIE SCHLEIN/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Monks in Luang Prabang, Laos, have become a tourist attraction. pageant emphasizes the traditions of the Taíno, the island’s native tribe. And in the American state of New Mexico, young Navajos are keeping their tribe’s folklore alive in a gritty art form usually found in America’s urban centers:

CAHIER DU « MONDE » DATÉ SAMEDI 13 DÉCEMBRE 2008, NO 19870. NE PEUT ÊTRE VENDU SÉPARÉMENT

“slam” poetry. “For the kids, spoken word is a reconnection with the oral tradition, a return to the origin of language, its sound, its music,’’ Tim McLaughlin, a writing teacher at the Indian School in Santa Fe, told The Times’s Dan Frosch. Inevitably, when ancient meets modern, tensions arise. As Laos hurtles headlong into the 21st century, it often tramples the culture of its past. The 700-year-old town of Luang Prabang, a mountainous enclave for Buddhist monks, has escaped that fate, but just barely. The town was designated a World Heritage Site in 1995 but is now inundated with camera-toting tourists. “Now we see the safari,’’ said Nithakhong Somsanith, an artist who works to preserve Laotian traditions, told Seth Mydans of The Times. “They come in buses. They look at the monks the same as a monkey, a buffalo. It is theater.’’

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le monde

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2008 o p i n i o n & C o m m e n Ta Ry Thomas l. fRiedman

editorials of the times

New Leaders Face Gloom, But Not Doom There’s been a fair amount of worrying since the nation’s intelligence community surveyed the world of 2025: America losing dominance; China and India rising; fierce competition for water, food and energy; increased danger that terrorists will get a nuclear weapon. That’s all sobering. But the headlines from “Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World,” published by the National Intelligence Council, are not the whole story. President-elect Barack Obama is inheriting a world that is more complicated and more frightening than the one George W. Bush found in 2001. But while the trends may be apparent, the end results are not inevitable. Decisions Mr. Obama and other leaders make will matter more. Take the assertion that the world is on a path to a multipolar system with China, India and Russia plus various businesses, tribes, religious groups — even criminal networks — vying for influence. Commentators have been predicting this dreaded multipolarity since the end of the cold war. And Vice President Dick Cheney and former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz vowed to do everything they could to stop it — up to and including ensuring that close European allies never aspired to power and influence to rival the United States. That arrogance and stubbornness has instead weakened the United States — creating new enemies and making it harder to win cooperation on important challenges, like the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. If there is one clear lesson from the last eight years, it is that bullying other countries and positioning for zero-sum gains doesn’t work. It also is the new conventional wisdom that this will be the century of China or India. But both face serious economic, demographic and other challenges — including the threat of terrorism, as the Mumbai attacks so tragically demonstrated. A relative decline in power also does not mean that the United States will not remain powerful. The country can and must continue to lead. There will be a particular premium on quick, nimble and farsighted decisionmaking and cooperation. Giving rising powers a bigger role — in the United Nations Security Council, for instance — could help persuade them to take more responsibility for problems like terrorism, climate change, nonproliferation and energy security. The report suggests that Al Qaeda’s indiscriminate use of violence and its failure to focus on problems like poverty and unemployment could diminish its appeal. But other extremist groups that curry favor with social programs will likely have more staying power. The next administration will have to counter their influence by promoting economic development in the Middle East as well as a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Warnings that terrorists will have an easier time acquiring nuclear, biological and advanced conventional weapons argue for serious new initiatives to control the spread of these horrifying weapons. Mr. Obama appears to understand the challenges. So do some of the experts who are expected to be part of his administration, including Susan Rice, his choice for ambassador to the United Nations, and James Steinberg, reported to be on the short list for deputy secretary of state. As members of a group called the Phoenix Initiative, they spent several years formulating a concept of American strategic leadership for the 21st century. Their report states that “leadership is not an entitlement; it has to be earned and sustained. Leadership that serves common goals is the best way to inspire the many different peoples of the world to make shared commitments.” That is a good place to start.

Calling All Pakistanis On February 6, 2006, three Pakistanis died in Peshawar and Lahore during violent street protests against Danish cartoons that had satirized the Prophet Muhammad. More such mass protests followed weeks later. When Pakistanis and other Muslims are willing to take to the streets, even suffer death, to protest an insulting cartoon published in Denmark, is it fair to ask: Who in the Muslim world, who in Pakistan, is ready to take to the streets to protest the mass murders of real people, not cartoon characters, right next door in Mumbai? After all, if 10 young Indians from a splinter wing of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party traveled by boat to Pakistan, shot up two hotels in Karachi and the central train station, killed at least 173 people, and then, for good measure, murdered the imam and his wife at a Saudi-financed mosque while they were cradling their 2-year-old son — purely because they were Sunni Muslims — where would we be today? The entire Muslim world would be aflame and in the streets. So what can we expect from Pakistan and the wider Muslim world after Mumbai? India says its interrogation of the surviving terrorist indicates that all 10 men come from the Pakistani port of Karachi, and at least one, if not all 10, were Pakistani nationals. First of all, it seems to me that the Pakistani government, which is extremely weak to begin with, has been taking this mass murder very seriously, and, for now, no official connection between the terrorists and elements of the Pakistani security services has been uncovered. At the same time, any reading of the Pakistani

Continuity We Can Believe In The 2008 election results did not fundamentally change American foreign policy. The real change began a few years ago in Afghanistan and Iraq. It began with colonels and captains fighting terror on the ground. They found they could clear a town of the bad guys, but they had little capacity to establish rule of law or quality of life for the people they were trying to help. They quickly realized that the big challenge in this new era is not killing the enemy, it’s repairing the zones of chaos where enemies grow and breed. They realized, too, that Washington wasn’t providing them with the tools they needed. Their observations and arguments filtered through military channels and back home, producing serious rethinking at the highest levels. On January 18, 2006, Condoleezza Rice delivered a policy address at Georgetown University in Washington in which she argued that the fundamental threats now come from weak and failed states, not enemy powers. In this new world, she continued, it is impossible to draw neat lines between security, democratization and development efforts. She called for a transformational diplomacy, in which State Department employees would be out in towns and villages doing broad campaign planning with military colleagues, strengthening local governments and implementing development projects. Over the past year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has delivered a series of remarkable speeches echoing and advancing Rice’s themes. “In recent years, the lines separating war, peace, diplomacy and development have become more blurred and no longer fit the neat organizational

lexique

Dans l’article “Calls for Change Inspire a Deluge of Job Seekers,” page 5: penT-up: réprimé, refoulé BounTy: générosité, abondance To swaRm: pulluler Dans l’article “Revolution Without All the Messy Parts,” page 8: GRim: sombre, sinistre To Be maliGned: être diffamé, calomnié To lop off: trancher

when the community as a whole says: “No more. What you have done in murdering defenseless men, women and children has brought shame on us and on you.” Why should Pakistanis do that? Because you can’t have a healthy society that tolerates in any way its own sons going into a modern city, anywhere, and just murdering everyone in sight — including some 40 other Muslims. If you do that with enemies abroad, you will do that with enemies at home and destroy your own society in the process. “I often make the comparison to Catholics during the pedophile priest scandal,” a Muslim woman friend wrote me. “Those Catholics that left the church or spoke out against the church were not trying to prove to anyone that they are anti-pedophile. Nor were they apologizing for Catholics, or trying to make the point that this is not Catholicism to the non-Catholic world. They spoke out because they wanted to influence the church. They wanted to fix a terrible problem” in their own religious community. We know from the Danish cartoons affair that Pakistanis and other Muslims know how to mobilize quickly to express their heartfelt feelings, not just as individuals, but as a powerful collective. That is what is needed here. Because, I repeat, this kind of murderous violence only stops when the village — all the good people in Pakistan — declares, as a collective, that those who carry out such murders are shameful unbelievers who will not dance with virgins in heaven but burn in hell. And they do it with the same vehemence with which they denounce Danish cartoons.

david BRooks

: aide a la leCTuRe Pour aider à la lecture de l’anglais et familiariser nos lecteurs avec certaines expressions américaines, Le Monde publie ci-dessous la traduction de quelques mots et idiomes contenus dans les articles de ce supplément. Par Dominique Chevallier, agrégée d’anglais.

Dans l’article “Obama’s Bid to Left, Right and Center,” page 5: Bid: annonce, enchère, pari To BoasT: se glorifier de, se vanter ReappRaisal: réévaluation puRveyoR: fournisseur

English-language press reveals Pakistani voices expressing real anguish and horror over this incident. Take for instance the Inter Press Service news agency article of November 29 from Karachi: “ ‘I feel a great fear that [the Mumbai violence] will adversely affect Pakistan and India relations,’ the prominent Karachi-based feminist poet and writer Attiya Dawood told I.P.S. ‘I can’t say whether Pakistan is involved or not, but whoever is involved, it is not the ordinary people of Pakistan, like myself, or my daughters. We are with our Indian brothers and sisters in their pain and sorrow.’ ” But while the Pakistani government’s sober response is important, and the sincere expressions of outrage by individual Pakistanis are critical, I am still hoping for more. I am still hoping — just once — for that mass demonstration of “ordinary people” against the Mumbai bombers, not for my sake, not for India’s sake, but for Pakistan’s sake. Why? Because it takes a village. The best defense against this kind of murderous violence is to limit the pool of recruits, and the only way to do that is for the home society to isolate, condemn and denounce publicly and repeatedly the murderers — and not amplify, ignore, glorify, justify or “explain” their activities. Sure, better intelligence is important. And, yes, better SWAT teams are critical to defeating the perpetrators quickly before they can do much damage. But at the end of the day, terrorists often are just acting on what they sense the majority really wants but doesn’t dare do or say. That is why the most powerful deterrent to their behavior is

Dans l’article “Sexy Scandinavia? Don’t Believe the Hype,” page 8: waRy: méfiant, circonspect nauGhTy: ici, coquin wholesome: sain, bon pour la santé To Take a swipe aT: flanquer une baffe TeeToTalinG: sobriété absolue

expRessions Dans l’article “For Some in Washington, Inauguration Brings a Windfall,” page 5: windfall: cela signifie tout d’abord fruit tombé de l’arbre du fait du vent; le sens figuré implique: aubaine financière, gros avantage financier acquis sans rien faire. wishful ThinkinG: prendre ses désirs pour des réalités.

charts of the 20th century,” he said in Washington in July. Gates does not talk about spreading democracy, at least in the short run. He talks about using integrated federal agencies to help locals improve the quality and responsiveness of governments in trouble spots around the world. Gates has developed a way of talking about security and foreign policy that is now the lingua franca in government and think-tank circles. He has told West Point cadets that more regime change is unlikely but that they may spend parts of their careers training soldiers in allied nations. He has called for more spending on the State Department, foreign aid and a revitalized U.S. Information Agency. He’s spawned a flow of think-tank reports on how to marry hard and soft pre-emption. The Bush administration began to implement these ideas, but in small and symbolic ways. President Bush called for a civilian corps to do nation-building. National Security Presidential Directive 44 laid out a framework so different agencies could coordinate foreign reconstruction and stabilization. The Millennium Challenge Account program created a method for measuring effective governance. Actual progress was slow, but the ideas developed during the second Bush term have taken hold. Some theoreticians may still talk about Platonic concepts like realism and neoconservatism, but the actual foreign policy doctrine of the future will be hammered out in a bottom-up process as the United States and its allies use their varied tools to build government capacity in Afghani-

RÉfÉRenCes Dans l’article “For Some in Washington, Inauguration Brings a Windfall,” page 5: maRyland: Cet Etat, grand à peu près comme la Belgique, fait partie des treize premières colonies. Dès 1632, il est colonisé par le deuxième Lord Baltimore, Cecilius Calvert, qui en fait un refuge pour les Catholiques persécutés, et le nomme ainsi en l’honneur d’Henriette Marie de France, fille d’Henri IV, et épouse de Charles I. Sa frontière nord avec la Pennsylvanie est la fameuse MasonDixon line, qui marquait la frontière entre Etats du Nord et Etats du Sud, au moment de la guerre de Sécession. Le Maryland fait donc techniquement partie des Etats du Sud, et son économie d’alors, fondée sur le tabac, le rapproche sans doute de la Virginie, mais il n’a jamais fait sécession. C’est un Etat géographiquement coupé en deux par la baie de la Chesapeake, qui fournit une grande part de l’économie piscicole de l’Etat (crabes et huitres notamment) surtout depuis ces dernières années où de gros efforts de dépollution ont été entrepris. L’économie s’articule autour des deux pôles urbains: Baltimore (activités de transport

stan, Pakistan, Lebanon, the Philippines and beyond. Grand strategists may imagine a new global architecture built at high-level summits, but the real global architecture of the future will emerge organically from these day-to-day nation-building operations. During the campaign, Barack Obama embraced Gates’s language. During a press conference recently, he used all the right code words, speaking of integrating and rebalancing the nation’s foreign policy capacities. He nominated Hillary Clinton and James Jones, who have been champions of this approach, and retained Gates. Their cooperation on an integrated strategy might prevent some of the perennial feuding between the Pentagon, the State Department and the National Security Council. As Stephen Flanagan of the Center for Strategic and International Studies notes, Obama’s challenge will be to actually implement the change. That would include increasing the size of the State Department, building a civilian corps that can do development in dangerous parts of the world, creating interagency nation-building institutions, helping local reformers build governing capacity in fragile places like Pakistan and the Palestinian territories and exporting American universities while importing more foreign students. Given the events of the past years, the United States is not about to begin another explicit crusade to spread democracy. But decent, effective and responsive government would be a start. Obama and his team didn’t invent this approach. But if they can put it into action, that would be continuity we can believe in.

maritime, routier, ferroviaire, mais aussi recherche biomédicale) et Washington D.C., qui a été construite sur du terrain cédé par le Maryland et qui concentre l’activité tertiaire (administration et éducation). 5.6 millions d’Américains vivent dans le Maryland (capitale Annapolis), dont une forte population noire (30 percent); le revenu médian des ménages est le plus élevé de tous les Etats Unis, malgré des poches de pauvreté impressionnantes dans certains quartiers de Baltimore. Dans l’article “A tropical Paradise for Indie Rockers,” page 8: CBGB: Club mythique situé dans le quartier du Bowery au sud de Manhattan, ouvert en 1973 et définitivement fermé pour cause de loyers impayés en 2007. Le nom est un sigle (Country, BlueGrass & Blues); le nom complet rajoutant OMFUG (and Other Musics for Uplifting Gormandizers). Le CBGB se revendiquait comme le lieu de naissance du rock underground; c’est sans doute exagéré, mais cela a été un repaire musical incontournable des années 1970, où Patti Smith se produisait régulièrement, et certainement un des tous premiers lieux à diffuser et promouvoir le mouvement punk.

The new yoRk Times is puBlished weekly in The followinG newspapeRs: ClaRín, aRGenTina ● deR sTandaRd, ausTRia ● folha, BRazil ● la seGunda, Chile ● el espeCTadoR, ColomBia ● lisTin diaRio, dominiCan RepuBliC ● el univeRso, eCuadoR le monde, fRanCe ● sÜddeuTsChe zeiTunG, GeRmany ● pRensa liBRe, GuaTemala ● The asian aGe, india ● la RepuBBliCa, iTaly ● asahi shimBun, japan ● sunday naTion, kenya ● koha diToRe, kosovo ● RefoRma GRoup, mexiCo ● vijesTi, monTeneGRo la pRensa, panama ● expReso, peRu ● manila BulleTin, philippines ● el país, spain ● The Times, souTh afRiCa ● uniTed daily news, Taiwan ● sunday moniToR, uGanda ● The oBseRveR, uniTed kinGdom ● The koRea Times, u.s. ● el naCional, venezuela

le monde

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2008

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world trends

IntellIGenCe robert reich

The Wrong Bailout

The Kremlin took greater control of Norilsk Nickel, left, when the finances of its main stockholders were ailing.

JAMES HILL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

over financially weakened industries that it has long coveted, particularly those in natural resources. Last month, for example, the government assumed greater influence over Norilsk Nickel, the world’s biggest nickel producer, whose large shareholders, two billionaire oligarchs, have ailing finances. And on December 4, Mr. Putin said that he was considering other such interventions. Yet the Uralkali affair illustrates with rare clarity the willingness of the authorities to use whatever means necessary to obtain these assets, including subjecting companies to questionable investigations that they have little chance

of resisting, financial analysts here say. At the forefront of these efforts is Mr. Sechin, 48, a deputy prime minister who has been a Putin confidant since the two served in the St. Petersburg city government in the early 1990s. Mr. Sechin almost never gives interviews or speaks publicly, but he is believed to lead the use of the secret services and other government arms to capture companies. “He is the state’s main raider,” said Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a prominent Kremlin expert at the Center for the Study of Elites in Moscow. “He organizes these raider seizures, sometimes to the benefit of the state, or sometimes to the benefit of companies that are

friendly to him.” Mr. Sechin’s role in the Uralkali inquiry immediately caused analysts and investors to presume that the company was in peril. Uralkali’s stock, once highly prized by fund managers, has plunged more than 60 percent since the inquiry began, far more than the broader Russian stock market. That has caused steep losses for Mr. Rybolovlev, 42, a former medical student who is known as Russia’s fertilizer king because of his dominance of the business of mining potash, a principal fertilizer component. The Kremlin has not said when there will be a decision on Uralkali, and the company is hoping to negotiate a settlement that would include a fine of a few hundred million dollars. Analysts emphasized that there was still a chance that Mr. Sechin might pull back after seeing the stock market react with such hostility to the inquiry. Mr. Rybolovlev and other Uralkali executives declined to be interviewed for this article. Mr. Sechin would not comment on the investigation, but last month, a first deputy prime minister, Igor I. Shuvalov, dismissed concerns about the government’s intent. “No one is going to destroy the company — we need strong business units,” Mr. Shuvalov said. “If after payments the company goes bankrupt, that won’t stop the government. A new owner will be found for Uralkali.”

In Brutal Regime’s Legacy, Fertile Hope for the Future By THOMAS FULLER

BARAY, Cambodia — The dry season has taken hold here, but water is everywhere. It pours out of sluice gates with the roar of an alpine torrent. Children do backflips into the ubiquitous canals and then pull their friends in with them. Fishermen cast their nets for minnows, and villagers wash their Chinese-made motorcycles. “It’s never dry here,” said Chan Mo, a 36-year-old rice farmer standing on top of a dike. The Khmer Rouge canals have come back to life. By the time the brutal government of Pol Pot was toppled three decades ago, 1.7 million Cambodians were dead from overwork, starvation and disease, and the country was a ruin. But the forced labor of millions of Cambodians left behind something useful — or that is how the current government here sees it. The Khmer Rouge leaders were obsessed with canals, embankments and dams. They presided over hundreds of irrigation projects to revive the country’s glorious but perhaps mythical past of an agrarian wonderland. “There has never been a modern regime that placed more emphasis and resources towards developing irrigation,” wrote Jeffrey Himel, a water resource engineer, in a recent study of Cambodia’s irrigation system. “The Khmer Rouge emptied all cities and towns, and put practically the entire population to work planting rice and digging irrigation dikes and canals.” Some of the canals were poorly designed — “hydraulic nonsense,” says Alain Goffeau, a French irrigation expert with the Asian Development Bank. But many were viable. The Khmer Rouge built around 70 percent of Cambodia’s more than 800 canal networks, according to a survey commissioned by the United Nations in the 1990s. Now, across this impoverished nation of 14 million people, the canals are being rebuilt by a government hoping to take advantage of the world’s increasing demand for rice. The Asian Development Bank is helping finance the rehabilitation of a dozen canals, adding to projects financed by Japan and South Korea. “There’s a lot of possibility,” Mr. Goffeau said. For older Cambodians, the canals are a source of ambivalence. Men like Loh Thoeun, a 61-year-old rice farmer, think back to the basketfuls of dirt they carried away hour after hour. He recalled

r ive gR

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is “Supercapitalism.” Send comments to [email protected].

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY

BEREZNIKI, Russia — In late October, one of Vladimir V. Putin’s top lieutenants abruptly summoned a billionaire mining oligarch to a private meeting. The official, Igor I. Sechin, had taken a sudden interest in a two-year-old accident at the oligarch’s highly lucrative mining operations here in Russia’s industrial heartland. Mr. Sechin, who is a leader of a shadowy Kremlin faction tied to the state security services, said he was ordering a new inquiry into the mishap, according to minutes of the meeting. With a deputy interior minister who investigates financial crime at his side, Mr. Sechin threatened crippling fines against the company, Uralkali. Startled, the oligarch, Dmitri E. Rybolovlev, pointed out that the government had already examined the incident thoroughly and had cleared the company of responsibility. He further sought to fend off the inquiry by saying he would pay for some of the damage to infrastructure from the accident, a mine collapse that injured no one but left a gaping sinkhole. His offer was rebuffed, and it seemed clear why: the Kremlin was maneuvering to seize Uralkali outright. Mr. Putin, the former president and current prime minister, has long maintained that Russia made a colossal error in the 1990s by allowing its enormous reserves of oil, gas and other natural resources to fall into private hands. He has acted uncompromisingly — most notably in the case of the Yukos Oil Company in 2003 — to get them back. Now, the Kremlin seems to be capitalizing on the economic crisis, exploiting the opportunity to establish more control

n Meko

The United States is reputed to be the most free-market-oriented nation of all, the country that best epitomizes sink-orswim capitalism. So it may seem odd that a furious debate is going on not about whether big companies should be bailed out by the government, but about which companies deserve to be. And the debate has worldwide implications. Citigroup, once the biggest American bank, has been given tens of billions of dollars by the United States government to avoid bankruptcy, yet questions arise about whether General Motors, once the biggest automaker in the world, should be bailed out at all — beyond the money that Congress is providing to keep G.M. afloat until January. Americans don’t like the idea of bailing out any big company. They’ve gone along with the Wall Street bailout mainly because they don’t understand finance and are easily intimidated by words like “credit default swaps” or “collateralized debt instruments.” Yet when the nation’s highest financial officials warn of dire consequences unless taxpayers keep Wall Street going, Americans reluctantly agree. But they know cars. Most people have one. And they believe that over the last several decades the Big Three have done a lousy job making them. So why bail them out? In reality, though, the Big Three probably have a better case for bailout than the big banks, while global financial markets would do better if Wall Street were subject to bankruptcy. Chapter 11 of America’s bankruptcy code allows companies that can’t pay their bills to reorganize themselves under court protection, pay off what they can, and clean up their balance sheets. This is the best way to get global credit moving again. Even if it means that global creditors of Wall Street have to settle for 30 cents on the dollar of debt they’re owed, they’re better off getting paid something than continuing to endure a worldwide financial freeze. Wall Street’s own shareholders and executives may have to sacrifice even more. But why shouldn’t they? Wall Street’s creditors, shareholders, and executives were paid to take risks. There’s no apparent reason why American taxpayers should rescue them. Chapter 11, alone, might not work as well for the Big Three and their parts suppliers. If they were to shrink as a result, many millions of people could lose their jobs. The potential social costs would include unemployment insurance, lost tax revenue, pension benefits that would have to be paid by the government, families suddenly without health insurance, and entire communities whose infrastructure and housing could become nearly worthless. The best result, in my view, would be for G.M., Ford and Chrysler to be offered a hybrid of bailout and Chapter 11 bankruptcy. For every taxpayer dollar, the Big Three would have to come up with $2 of sacrifices from their executives, employees, creditors, and shareholders. For Citigroup and the other Wall Street banks, though, the answer from here on should be Chapter 11.

In Hard Times, Kremlin Moves to Seize Industries

LAOS

THAILAND

VIETNAM Tonle Sap

CAMBODIA Baray

Phnom Penh Gulf of Thailand

Ho Chi Minh City South China Sea Kms.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Khmer Rouge built irrigation projects with forced labor. the horrors of the Khmer Rouge — the laborers, hands tied behind their backs, who were “dragged away like cows” and never returned; the Muslim families who were thrown down a nearby well. The foremen of the irrigation project in Baray were killed after the canals and embankments were completed. Mr. Loh Thoeun said he once saw Pol Pot inspect the canals on what he described as a “speedboat.” Mr. Loh Thoeun had a particularly wide view of the Khmer Rouge earthworks: when he was not digging, he was assigned to collect the sweet sap from the tops of towering palm trees. All of the work was done by hand here in Baray, a two-hour drive north of the capital, Phnom Penh. There was no talking allowed among laborers. The Khmer Rouge played revolutionary songs and banged hubcaps to encourage the workers. “The earth here is very hard, and when we dug deeper we got to the hardest part — the most compact ground,” Mr. Loh Thoeun said. “We had to hammer at it. It was like cutting down a tree.” For so many Cambodians, the Khmer Rouge years, from 1975 to 1979, were about digging. Villagers and residents of Phnom Penh, who were forced to move to the countryside, were organized in small work units. “I was a slave,” said Ang Mongkol, now the deputy director general of the Interior Ministry, who was a law student when the Khmer Rouge came to power and forced him to haul dirt. He is leading an experimental project that uses water from the canal to irri-

THOMAS FULLER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Cambodia is counting on its more than 800 canal networks to help grow rice for export. A boy played in a recently restored waterway in Baray. gate fields of hybrid rice varieties that promise to yield four times as much as the variety traditionally grown here. Because only about 20 percent of Cambodia’s fields are irrigated, its rice farmers harvest on average half of Vietnam’s yields and one-third of China’s. The irrigation system in Baray functioned for several years after the Khmer Rouge were forced out. But in the mid1980s it fell into disrepair. It was only

in 2005 that the government began rebuilding it. Today, the local municipality hires a maintenance crew to keep the water flowing. Mr. Loh Thoeun hopes the canals he built will help double or triple his rice output. “I always recall the past to my children,” he said. “I say, ‘We have water from this canal that was built by the people. And many of them died.’ ”

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le monde

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2008 world trends

Stirring Up Fear Everywhere You Look Every modern recession includes a media discussion about how horrible things are and how much worse they will be, but there have never been so many ways for the fear to leak in. The same digital dynamics that drove the irrational exuberance — and marketed the loans to help it happen — are now driving essAy the downside in unprecedented ways. The recession was actually not officially declared until early December, but the psychology that drives it had already been e-mailed, blogged and broadcast for months. The other day, I got in a cab and there was a news report on the back seat television about soaring unemployment in New York. An info-screen on an ascending elevator ride in Manhattan suggested that we were all only going one way — down. The news zippers in Times Square were full of reports of crumbling consumer confidence. “When everyone is talking about recession, we all feel like something has to change, even if nothing has changed for

DAVID CARR

us,” said Dan Ariely, author of “Predictably Irrational,” a book that explains why people do things that defy explanation. “The media messages that are repeating doom and gloom affect every one, not just people who really have trouble and should make changes, but people who are fine. That has a devastating effect on the economy.” With unemployment, auto sales, home foreclosures and consumer confidence in the United States all at historic levels of distress, news outlets are hardly making it up. But the machinery of the economy began to freeze in place far more quickly than it has in the past, in part because so much scary data is circulating so much faster than it used to. This recession got deeper faster because we knew more bad stuff quickly. “Our collective hive-mind gets into a tizzy over other things that suddenly zoom into focus,” said Xeni Jardin, one of the editors of the blog Boing-Boing. “It’s a hurricane! OMG, salmonella in the hamburgers! Wait, we’re all fat! There is an escalation of attention that feeds itself, because this recession is appearing throughout all forms of digital hu-

man expression. And unlike any of those other topics, this affects everyone.” Nobody fears getting caught in a down cycle more than those who run public companies, and defensive layoffs — not based so much on current realities but on horrors to come — have become the norm. Speaking at the Reuters Media Summit recently, Barry Diller, the chief executive of IAC/Interactive, chided the leaders of entertainment economies for the kind of panic and greed-driven right-sizing that was anything but. “The idea of a company that’s earning money, not losing money, that’s not, let’s say, ‘industrially endangered,’ to have just cutbacks so they can earn another $12 million or $20 million or $40 million in a year where no one’s counting is really a horrible act when you think about it on every level,” he said. “First of all, it’s certainly not necessary. It’s doing it at the worst time. It’s throwing people out to a larger, what is inevitably a larger, unemployment heap for frankly no good reason.” Media companies have been hammered during a recession because they

run on advertising, a discretionary expenditure that always is among the first things to go. Viacom had third-quarter earnings of over $400 million in 2008, down 37 percent compared with the same quarter last year, but it was still

Gloomy news that is quickly relayed is feeding our angst. nicely profitable. Nonetheless, the company laid off 850 people. Michelle Rabinowitz, a producer at MTV News, was one of them. A Web and pop-cult savvy journalist who has covered everything from Britney Spears to the shootings at Virginia Tech, she is, at 28, just the kind of talent media companies fought over in the last couple of years and will again in the future. But for now, they’re dumping bodies off the

back of the truck. “A lot of young people had to find jobs after 9/11, so we know about tough times, but at least we know what that was about,” she said. “I go outside and the sky is not falling, but my job is not there, the value of the apartment that I bought is not there, my 401(k) is not there. It’s weird, it’s like somebody made a bad decision somewhere — the Federal Reserve, a media company, an executive, who knows? Everything sort of looks the same, but everything has changed.” There is a kind of emotional contagion. James H. Fowler, an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, recently co-wrote a study looking at how happiness can be spread among friends. The opposite is true as well. “There are studies on bank runs, and it shows that people who know others who have taken their money out of the bank are much more likely to do it as well,” he said. “We always overshoot the upside and, because of the same contagious effects, we overshoot the downside. Everything is fine, and then all of the sudden we are looking for water and supplies to ride out the coming storm.”

Cybercriminals Are Winning The War Over the Internet From Page 1 at SRI International, a science and technology research group in Menlo Park, California. A well-financed computer underground has built an advantage by working in countries that have global Internet connections but authorities with little appetite for prosecuting offenders who are bringing in significant amounts of foreign currency. That was emphasized in late October when RSA FraudAction Research Lab, a security consulting group based in Bedford, Massachusetts, discovered a cache of half a million credit card numbers and bank account log-ins that had been stolen by a network of so-called zombie computers remotely controlled by an online gang. In October, researchers at the Georgia Tech Information Security Center reported that the percentage of online computers worldwide infected by

A moving target The amount of malicious software, known as malware, detected on the Internet has risen sharply over the last two years. Total unique malware programs discovered by F-Secure, an Internet security provider

15

MONTHLY, IN MILLIONS

10

5

0 2007

2008

Source: F-Secure The New York Times

botnets — networks of programs connected via the Internet that send spam or disrupt Internet-based services — is likely to increase to 15 percent by the end of this year, from 10 percent in 2007. That suggests a staggering number of infected computers, as many as 10 million, being used to distribute spam and malware over the Internet each day, according to research by PandaLabs. Security researchers concede that their efforts are largely futile because botnets that distribute malware like worms, the programs that can move from computer to computer, are still relatively invisible to commercial antivirus software. A research report in November by Stuart Staniford, chief scientist of FireEye, a Silicon Valley computer security firm, indicated that in tests of 36 commercial antivirus products, fewer than half of the newest malicious software programs were identified.

There have been some recent successes, but they are short-lived. On November 11, the volume of spam, which transports the malware, dropped by half around the globe after an Internet service provider disconnected the Mycolo Corporation, an American firm with Russian ties, from the Internet. But the respite is not expected to last long as cybercriminals regain control of their spam-generating computers. “Modern worms are stealthier and they are professionally written,’’ said Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer for British Telecom. “The criminals have gone upmarket, and they’re organized and international because there is real money to be made.’’ The gangs keep improving their malware, and now programs can be written to hunt for a specific type of information stored on a personal computer. For example, some malware uses the operating system to look for recent documents created by a user, on the assumption they will be more valuable. Some routinely watch for and then steal log-in and password information, specifically consumer financial information. The sophistication of the programs has in the last two years begun to give them almost lifelike capabilities. For example, malware programs now infect computers and then routinely use their own antivirus capabilities to not only disable antivirus software but also remove competing malware programs. Recently, Microsoft antimalware researchers disassembled an infecting program and were stunned to discover that it was programmed to turn on the Windows Update feature after it took over the user’s computer. The infection was ensuring that it was protected from other criminal attackers. The biggest problem may be that people cannot tell if their computers are infected because the malware often masks its presence from antivirus software. Beyond the billions of dollars lost in theft of money and data is another, deeper impact. Many Internet executives fear that basic trust in what has become the foundation of 21st century commerce is rapidly eroding. “There’s an increasing trend to depend on the Internet for a wide range of applications, many of them having to deal with financial institutions,’’ said Vinton G. Cerf, one of the original designers of the Internet, who is now Google’s “chief Internet evangelist.’’ “The more we depend on these types of systems, the more vulnerable we become,’’ he said. Security researchers at SRI International are now collecting over 10,000 unique samples of malware daily from around the globe. “To me it feels like job security,’’ said Phillip Porras, an SRI program director and the computer security expert who led the design of the company’s Bot hunter program, available free at www. bothunter.net. “This is always an arm race, as long as it gets into your machine faster than the update to detect it, the bad guys win,’’ said Mr. Schneier.

RUTH FREMSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES

A woman tried to sell incense to a passenger in Mumbai, where the wealthy have a new sense of vulnerability.

Mumbai Siege Politicizes Long-Isolated Elite By SOMINI SENGUPTA

MUMBAI, India — The three-day siege of Mumbai was a watershed for India’s prosperous classes. It prompted many of those who live in their own private Indias, largely insulated from the country’s dysfunction, to demand a vital public service: safety. An extraordinary public interest lawsuit was filed in this city’s highest court on December 3. It charged that the government had lagged in its constitutional duty to protect its citizens’ right to life, and it pressed the state to modernize and upgrade its security forces. The lawsuit was striking mainly for the people behind it: investment bankers, corporate lawyers and representatives of some of India’s largest companies, which have their headquarters here in the country’s financial capital, also known as Bombay. The Bombay Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the city’s largest business association, joined as a petitioner. It was the first time it had lent its name to litigation in the public interest. Since the attacks on November 26, which killed 163 people, plus nine gunmen, there has been an outpouring of anger from unlikely quarters. On December 3, tens of thousands of urban, English-speaking citizens stormed the Gateway of India, a famed waterfront monument, venting anger at their elected leaders. There were similar protests in the capital, New Delhi, and the southern technology hubs, Bangalore and Hyderabad. All were organized spontaneously, with word spread through text messages and Facebook pages. Social networking sites were ablaze with memorials and citizens’ action groups, including one that advocated refraining from voting altogether as an act of civil disobedience. Never mind that in India, voter turnout among the rich is far lower than among the poor. And there were countless condemnations of how democracy had failed in this, the world’s largest democracy. Those condemnations led Vir Sanghvi, a colum-

nist writing in the financial newspaper Mint, to remind his readers of 1975, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed emergency rule. Mr. Sanghvi wrote, “I am beginning to hear the same kind of middle-class murmurs and whines about the ineffectual nature of democracy and the need for authoritarian government.” Perhaps the most striking development was the lawsuit because it represented a rare example of corporate India’s confronting the government outright rather than making back-room deals. “It says in a nutshell, ‘Enough is enough,’ ” said Cyrus Guzder, who owns a logistics company. “More precisely, it tells us that citizens of all levels in the country believe their government has let them down and believe that it now needs

Attacks on luxury hotels spur questions about India’s democracy. to be held accountable.” In India’s city of gold, the distinction between public and private can be bewildering. For members of the working class, who often cannot afford housing, public sidewalks become living rooms. In the morning, commuters from gated communities in the suburbs pass children brushing their teeth at the edge of the street. Women are forced to relieve themselves on the railway tracks. None of the previous terrorist attacks, even in Mumbai, had so struck the top of Bombay society. Bombs have been planted on commuter trains in the past, but few people who regularly dine at the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel, one of the worst-hit sites, travel by train. “It has touched a raw nerve,” said Amit Chandra, who runs a prominent investment

firm. “People have lost friends. Everyone would visit these places.” In any event, public anger could not have come at a worse time for incumbent politicians. National elections are due next spring, and security is likely to be one of the top issues in the vote, particularly among the urban middle class. It remains to be seen whether outrage will prompt them to turn out to vote in higher numbers or whether politicians will be compelled to pay greater attention to them than in the past. “There’s a revulsion against the political class I have never seen before,” said Gerson D’Cunha, a former advertising executive whose civic group, A.G.N.I., presses for better governing. “The middle class that is laid back, lethargic, indolent, they’ve been galvanized.” The three-day standoff with terrorists was neither the deadliest that India has seen, nor the most protracted; there have been other extended convulsions of violence, including mass killings of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 and of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. Yet, the recent attacks, which Indian police say were the work of a Pakistanbased terrorist group called Lashkar-eTaiba, were profoundly different. Two of the four main targets were luxury hotels frequented by the city’s wealthy elite: the Taj, facing the Gateway of India, and the twin Oberoi and Trident hotels. They were the elite’s gathering spots and business dinner destinations. In The Indian Express newspaper on December 5, a columnist named Vinay Sitapati wrote a pointed open letter to “South Bombay,” shorthand for the city’s most wealthy enclave. The column first berated the rich for lecturing at Davos and failing in Hindi exams. “You refer to your part of the city simply as ‘town,’ ” he wrote, and then he begged: “Vote in person. But vote in spirit, too: use your clout to demand better politicians, not pliant ones.” “In your hour of need today,” he added, “it is India that needs your help.”

le monde

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2008

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the obama presidency news analysis

Obama’s Bid to Left, Right and Center By JOHN HARWOOD

PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The ‘‘Plum Book’’ lists the job openings in the new presidential administration. But applicants far outnumber available positions.

Calls for Change Inspire A Deluge of Job Seekers By NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON — Brenda Benton, a veteran media relations employee with the Los Angeles Police Department, is now part of a record-breaking political phenomenon. Ms. Benton was so thrilled with the election of Barack Obama as president that she has become one of about 300,000 people who have, so far, put themselves forward for posts in the new administration. At the equivalent time in the George W. Bush transition eight years ago, with his election still in dispute, there were about 44,000 applicants, according to Clay Johnson, who led the Bush transition effort. Mr. Johnson said the final figure was about 90,000. In 1968, President-elect Richard M. Nixon’s aides were so uncertain about the availability and willingness of people to take administration jobs that they sent more than 70,000 letters to everyone listed in Who’s Who in America, a reference guide, seeking potential federal appointees. But that is surely not a problem at Obama transition headquarters in Washington, where more than 50 staff aides have been busily classifying and downloading résumés into a computer system that lists applicants’ special skills and, one official said, what notable political sponsors they might have. The excitement about an Obama administration along with the cyclical pent-up eagerness of Democrats denied the employment bounty of the executive branch for eight years has fueled the surge, although the unraveling economy may be adding its own boost. The presidential historian Michael R. Beschloss said that “it’s hard to find a parallel in modern times to this degree of enthusiasm for going into government,” all the more striking in a period previously known for cynicism

about government employment. Ms. Benton, an African-American who is well-known in Los Angeles political circles, said she would love to work in some way for the future first lady, Michelle Obama, because she is greatly impressed “with her style and the dignified way she handles situations.” Ms. Benton has sent her résumé to www.change.gov, the transition clearinghouse, and has begun thinking about who she knows who could put in a recommendation. Obama officials have said they might have more than double their current number of applications by Inauguration Day. “There are a lot of people who want to work in the administration,” David Axelrod, a senior Obama aide, exulted to reporters recently. “That’s great. That’s great for the country.” But not necessarily great for the job seekers because there are actually only about 3,300 positions an incoming administration gets to fill. That means that despite the appealing notion of hordes of eager newcomers swarming to change Washington, the vast majority of those seeking jobs will be disappointed. Mr. Johnson, who is now deputy director for management at the Office and Management and Budget, said most people were stunned to learn that the percentage of politically appointed employees in the federal government is so small, a mere 0.17 percent of the civilian work force of 1.9 million. One route for applicants is to begin with an elected Democratic official. Aides to Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York said they had, so far, about 100 requests to forward expressions of interest in jobs at all levels of government. Mr. Schumer himself added another explanation for the flood of job seekers: Democrats, he said, are more likely to believe in the power of government to improve things.

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama can already boast one striking accomplishment: persuading partisan, ideological adversaries to see him in a less partisan, less ideological light. The reappraisal runs deeper than Mr. Obama’s public pleasantries with Senator John McCain. Derided during the campaign as a purveyor of “socialism” who was guilty of “palling around with terrorists,” he has since won praise from conservatives for retaining Robert Gates as defense secretary, for naming General James L. Jones as his national security adviser and for selecting the moderate Timothy F. Geithner, who helped draw up the Bush administration’s Wall Street bailout plan, as his Treasury secretary. Karl Rove, President Bush’s former aide, has called Mr. Obama’s economic team “reassuring,” and other Bush alumni agree. “Obama is doing something marvelously right,” Michael Gerson, Mr. Bush’s onetime senior speechwriter, wrote in The Washington Post. “He is disappointing the ideologues.” More remarkably, Mr. Obama has reaped those plaudits without seeming to abandon his commitment to the same policies that conservatives routinely attacked during the campaign — his pledge to expand health care coverage, to withdraw troops from Iraq and to increase government spending on infrastructure and alternative energy projects. On the contrary, Mr. Obama has indicated that he will follow his belief in activist government with an economic stimulus package much larger than what he proposed in the campaign. All this raises the question: can Mr. Obama indeed be forging the new style of politics he invoked so often during the election — one that transcends the partisan divisions that have marked recent administrations? If so, what will he replace it with, a bipartisan style of governance that splits the differences between competing ideological camps, or a “post-partisan” politics that narrows gaps or even renders them irrelevant? Actually, insiders in Mr. Obama’s emerging team foresee a third option: a series of left-leaning programs that draw on Americans’ desire for action and also on Mr. Obama’s moderate, even conservative, temperament, to hurdle the ideological obstacles that have lately paralyzed Washington. Not that he is the first president-elect to offer soothing words. “We are all Republicans, we are all Democrats,” Jefferson declared in his Inaugural Address in 1801, before the modern party system had taken root. Later presidents have said much the same thing. But time and again, ideological divisions have thwarted the promise of nonideological problem-solving. In all three presidential elections of the 21st century, voters have split along clear ideological lines. Last month’s exit polls showed Mr. Obama winning the votes of just one in

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

homes, rooms, sofas and even spots on the basement floor. All of this enterprise has prompted complaints that some are exploiting the historic moment by price-gouging. Such high prices are “barring earnest people who want to witness and participate in something remarkable, positive, and promising” from coming to the capital, wrote one poster on Craigslist, who had rented his or her home for “a very modest sum” and urged others to do the same. But another poster responded that it cost money to rent out one’s house. Besides, this poster added: “Do I deserve to avail myself to a little windfall profit from the smart investment I made and sacrifice for to live so centrally? Darn right I do. So get over it.” One of the highest prices obtained so far appears to be $57,000 for a week in a three-bedroom home near Chantilly, Virginia, about 39 kilometers from Washington. At least that is the amount Keith Bell said he had heard from the lawyer who reviewed the contract signed by the renter, who is coming from overseas.

President-elect Barack Obama, at a 2006 meeting with President Bush, has promised that his administration will move beyond partisan politics. 10 Republicans and one in 5 conservatives. But the tone of political discussion in recent weeks suggests several reasons to expect something new. Beyond the appointments, Mr. Obama has persuaded some conservatives, at least for now, that he really is open to their ideas. Meeting with the nation’s governors in Philadelphia, he pointedly reached out to the Republican executives. “As long as he’s smart and he listens and he sets a big table, we have a chance to do business,” said Bernadette Budde of the Business-Industry Political Action Committee, an influential voice for corporate America in Washington. There is also the boost Mr. Obama has received from Republican disarray. “I don’t think there is such a thing as postpartisan or post-ideological politics, but there is such a thing as one side being so shell-shocked and/or incompetent that it is incapable of presenting an alternative vision,” said Dan Mitchell, a conservative analyst at the Cato Institute.

The economic downturn is breeding defections from the ranks of ideological purists. The former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has said the crisis caused him to re-examine his free market views. Martin Feldstein, a top economic adviser to Ronald Reagan, now advocates big federal spending. As a result, said Peter Wehner, a onetime deputy to Mr. Rove who is now a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, “Obama has more latitude when it comes to the role of government in the economy.” His hopes for Mr. Obama are pinned, to some extent, on hints that he will forgo tax increases on affluent Americans. But that is precisely the kind of shift that worries a very different but also ideologically inflected group: Obama backers on the progressive left, particularly the legions who embraced his campaign on the Internet. As Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, founder of the influential Web site DailyKos, says, “I don’t want him to split the difference.”

Washington-area residents are renting out their homes at premium rates to people coming to town for the Obama inauguration.

For Some in Washington, Inauguration Brings a Windfall WASHINGTON — A three-bedroom house in Virginia is said to have been rented for $57,000 for inauguration week in January. A week at a four-bedroom house in Maryland was listed at $60,000, though that, like other offerings, may be wishful thinking. As Washington prepares for the historic inauguration of Barack Obama, the first African-American president, more than one million people are expected to descend on the capital. Yet the fivecounty metropolitan area has just 95,000 hotel rooms. The demand for hotels outstripped the supply more than two months before the January 20 inauguration, not just in Washington and environs but as far away as Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Even campsites are filling up. At this late date, finding a place to stay for the swearing-in will come down to luck — and the ability and willingness to pay. While many people who own or rent here are putting up family and friends without charge, many others smell profit and are auctioning off their

TIM SLOAN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Learning of that price prompted Mr. Bell, a 42-year-old lawyer for the federal government, to think he might get even more for his four-bedroom home in Lanham, Maryland, which is about 18 kilometers from Washington. He posted an offer on the online forum Craigslist: $60,000 for the week. “After hearing the ridiculous amounts that people were renting their houses/

section of Washington is going for $350 a night, minimum two nights, plus $50 for each additional person. But visitors can also pay a lot more — $25,000 for a “weekend rental” for a one-bedroom apartment in Arlington, Virginia (“luxurious air mattress available”). The private rentals flourished as hotel space MICHAEL TEMCHINE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES dwindled. Online travel apartments for,” he said, “I decided to sites show that almost every hotel room post this ad to see if it would generate in the metropolitan area is booked for the day of the inauguration and several any interest at all.” It did not. A couple of days later, Mr. days before. The presidential suite at the Ritz Bell altered his pricing structure to $6,000 a night, which, he said, was “more Carlton Georgetown, however, is still available: four nights for $99,000 (that in line with market rates.” Well, that depends. Inauguration-week includes a post-inaugural three-night visitors can spend a lot less than that. A stay at the Ritz on Grand Cayman in the three-bedroom home in the Brookland Caribbean).

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2008 MONEY & BUSINESS

Responding To a Bad Work Review By MATT VILLANO Q. For the first time in your career, your

boss has given you a negative performance review. How should you react? a. It’s only natural for a negative performance review to hurt, but try to maintain your composure during the review and focus on the message. “It’s important to see bad reviews as wonderful gifts,” said Wendy Kaufman, chief executive of Balancing Life’s Issues, a corporate training firm in Ossining, New York. “At the very least, they are going to make you stronger and give you a road map of strategies to do your job better down the road.” Q. What are the potential ramifications of a negative review? a. If your review is tied to salary increases, you could be looking at a lower raise or no raise. But, often, one bad review is nothing more than a wake-up call. Strung together, however, a series of negative assessments could be seen as a pattern of underperformance and could lead to demotion, or, eventually, dismissal, said Scott I. Barer, a labor and employment lawyer in Woodland Hills, California. “From a legal perspective, the review process exists to create a paper trail to call upon if they need to put an employee on notice,” Mr. Barer said. From a practical perspective, he added, most review processes are intended to promote career development by providing employees with feedback on how they can improve performance over time. “It’s in the company’s best interest to give every employee a chance to right his or her ship,” he said. Q. Should you ask your manager to de-

tail the concerns? a. Asking for additional information

Chinese government analysts are looking to consumers, like these shoppers in Beijing, for help as the nation’s exportdriven economy slows. SHIHO FUKADA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

China Finds Its Thrifty Ways Hobble the Economy By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — He does not know it yet, but Dang Fu has been chosen to save the Chinese economy. A millet farmer from northeast China, Mr. Dang, 56, has managed to save two-thirds of his family’s $2,200 annual income in recent years. He grows much of his own food, wears a winter coat until it is ready for the rag heap and buys niceties only when his wife’s nagging becomes intolerable. Last year’s indulgence, a new television, still makes him wince. “It was painful to spend so much money,” he said. But such tenacious thrift, once an admirable quality here, has become a liability as the nation’s export-driven economy slows, a prospect that has stoked the government’s fear of unemployment and social instability, and that could threaten the Communist Party’s hold on power. In recent weeks China’s once unstoppable economy has slowed sharply. Export growth, one of the main contributors to China’s expansion over the past decade, has receded and seems likely to reduce overall growth next year, according to the World Bank. The stock market is in a lull and property values in many cities are off 30 to 40 percent. China’s annualized growth rate, which stood at 12 percent during the Olympics, has already slid to 9 percent, an admirable number by any standard but ominously close to the 8 percent fig-

ure that Chinese economists say is required to provide jobs to the 20 million people who enter the work force every year. J.P. Morgan recently cut its fourthquarter growth forecast for China to 7.7 percent, and other analysts predict that number could hit 5 percent next year. Government analysts are looking to consumers, especially the country’s hundreds of millions of high-saving peasants, to help solve the problem. “If we can boost people’s confidence and they spend more money, it will not only be beneficial to China but it will help stabilize the world’s economy,” Zhu Guangyao, the assistant finance minister, said. But getting people to spend more, especially in the face of an economic slowdown, may be difficult. Consumer spending makes up 35 percent of China’s gross domestic product, and that number has been dropping since the 1980s, when it stood at 50 percent; consumer activity in the United States, by contrast, is responsible for more than two-thirds of the economy. Western economists suggest that to offset slumping exports and a slowdown in construction, Chinese consumers would have to increase their spending by a third. “I’m not sure they’re capable of doing that as quickly as the government would like,” said Michael Pettis, a professor of finance at Peking University. Realistic or not, Beijing seems determined to give it a try. Although it is

weighted toward bridge-building and highway-paving initiatives, the $586 billion stimulus package announced by the government in November includes a range of incentives intended to get Mr. Dang and people like him to spend money. The measures include subsidized housing to persuade homebuyers to fill their new dwellings with furniture, and rural electrification projects that will give farmers access to affordable power. On December 1, the government

Memories of scarcity turn many Chinese into stubborn savers. introduced a subsidy in 14 provinces that would make it cheaper for people to buy cellphones, washing machines and flat-screen televisions. Mr. Dang and his wife, Zhang Fengxia, 52, are the apotheosis of Chinese thrift. They do not use banks — “better to keep money at home,” Ms. Zhang said — and the couple’s biggest expenditure was a used tractor they bought for $1,200 a few years ago. Everything else is set aside for their retirement and

for potential medical costs. Asked if she would use a credit card if one were given to her, Ms. Zhang looked confounded. “What’s a credit card?” she asked, adding, “We have everything we need.” Although high savings rates can be found across Asia, the Chinese propensity to save is rooted in deep-seated memories of scarcity and a tattered social safety net that forces people to save up for education, retirement and medical costs. “Health care is so expensive and distorted that no matter how much you save, if you get sick you’re going to end up poor,” said Wang Tao, a Beijing-based analyst at USB Securities. “America’s health care problems can’t even compare.” For the moment, it is people like Li Xiuqing who hold the greatest promise for China’s emerging consumer economy. A secretary in a Beijing accounting firm, Ms. Li, 28, makes less than $600 a month but she spends almost every yuan on stylish clothing, restaurant meals and minutes for her fuchsia-andgold Nokia cellphone. Raised on a hog farm in Hunan Province, she laughs off the penurious ways of her parents and grandparents. “The most expensive thing my father ever bought was a wristwatch,” she said as she picked up a $100 pair of stilettos at one of the capital’s ubiquitous malls. “China’s days of starvation are over.”

Translating Behavior Into Smart Economics CHRIS REED

is perfectly acceptable, so long as you phrase your requests the right way. Teri Hires, a senior vice president at Personnel Decisions International, a leadership consulting firm in Minneapolis, noted that employees should be careful not to sound accusatory in their follow-up questions, avoiding those that challenge the boss’s judgment. Instead, she said, follow-ups should focus squarely on particular missteps, and on specific actions the employee can take to improve. Q. After the review, how should you go about rebuilding credibility at work? a. First, meet with your manager to lay out a step-by-step checklist for improvement. Next, deliver weekly status reports to keep your manager apprised of short-term performance achievements. Finally, request periodic meetings with the manager to discuss cumulative development. Ronald Mitchell, chief executive and co-founder of Gotta Mentor, a career mentoring and career coaching company in New York, says it’s a good idea to get everything in writing, so you can quantify the ways your performance has changed. “When someone outlines the ways in which you need to improve, the very last thing you want to do is seem passive and disinterested,” he said. “Going out of your way to show your manager that you’ve heard the criticisms and you’re ready to take them seriously speaks volumes about how committed you are to long-term success.”

WASHINGTON — The United States deficit in the current fiscal year could end up approaching $1 trillion, which is roughly equal to the combined budgets of the military and Medicare. Given the depth of the current crisis, running a big deficit makes perfect sense. But the government also needs to have long-term plans to reESSaY duce it. And the sort of deficit the United States is now facing will require some pretty creative plans. Fortunately, there is a group of economists who are almost ideally suited to help Barack Obama with this task. They’re called behavioral economists. Behavioral economics sprang up about three decades ago as a radical critique of the standard assumption that human beings behaved in economically rational ways. The behaviorialists, as they’re known, pointed out that this assumption was ridiculous. People who say they want to lose weight pay $100 a month to belong to a gym they rarely visit. Borrowers get fooled into taking out a loan with an appealing introductory rate. Patients fail to follow even a basic regimen of prescribed drugs — a failure that can leave them with serious medical complications and Medicare with big hospital bills. Thanks to insights like these, behavioral economics has entered the mainstream. In this year’s campaign, Mr. Obama signaled an interest in the field

DAVID LEONHARDT

by surrounding himself with advisers who were quite sympathetic to it. Of course, this was before the financial crisis became so serious that it overwhelmed everything else. That’s why some economists are now talking about whether Mr. Obama should add a new kind of adviser to his team, one specifically charged with translating the lessons of the behavioral revolution into real-world policies. This person would work with Medicare officials

How people truly act can inform policies that save money. to improve drug compliance. He or she would think about how mortgage regulations should be rewritten, how health insurance choices should be presented and how carbon emissions might be cut. “The issues we struggle with today are inherently behavioral as never before,” Sendhil Mullainathan, a behavioral economist at Harvard University, said. “It’s impossible to think of the current mortgage crisis without thinking seriously about underlying consumer psychology. And it’s impossible to think of future regulatory fixes

without thinking seriously about that issue.” Behavioral economics is the study of everyday life as it actually happens, not as some textbook says it should. It offers economic policy makers a new set of options — a more subtle, psychological set — beyond tax rates, interest rates and other traditional tools. And it can already claim one big policy success. In 2006, Congress passed a pension bill with a clause that came straight out of research on savings by Richard Thaler, a behavioral pioneer, and others. (Mr. Thaler and Cass Sunstein recently wrote “Nudge,” a book advocating behavioral policies, and both were informal advisers to the Obama campaign.) The savings research had found that many more people saved money in a retirement investment plan if they didn’t have to take active steps to join the plan. In one study, only 45 percent of a company’s new employees participated in the plan when doing so required them to take some kind of action, like filling out a form. Eighty-six percent participated when doing so was the default option. The new pension law gave companies a small incentive to make employees opt out of a plan, rather than opt in. The law doesn’t restrict employees’ choices in any way. It simply encourages a more sensible default. Peter Orszag, Mr. Obama’s nominee for budget director, has called the law “a tangible example of how economic research can be rapidly translated into

concrete policy changes that should improve people’s lives.” Mr. Orszag’s interest in behavioral work, together with the reach of the budget office, makes it the obvious place for a behavioral maven to be based. An outside committee of experts may also make sense. Mr. Obama’s aides have learned that they have a better chance of persuading him of an argument when they tell him that they’ve spoken with the top experts in a given field. The group would have plenty of work. A behaviorally savvy Social Security Administration, for example, could help people make better choices about when to start receiving checks. (Many now do so at age 62, the earliest possible date, which is generally a mistake.) Banking regulators could devise a standard, default mortgage that didn’t involve an introductory rate or other gimmicks. The promise of behavioral economics is that it can help create a better government, one that wastes less money and does more to improve people’s lives. “Everybody is preoccupied, as they should be, with preventing the next Great Depression,” as Mr. Thaler, an economist at the University of Chicago, says. “But it will be important for the administration to have people tasked with thinking long term — like, once it’s not O.K. to spend $100 billion on a whim, how do you get our budget under control?”

le monde

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2008

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s c i e n c e & t e c h n o l o gy: g a d g e t s

New Technology Shows Signals Beyond Just Talk By ANNE EISENBERG

School of Government at Harvard University. Mr. Lazer praised “the richness of the data” captured by the process — the “minute-by-minute, fine-grained data on whether you are talking, whom you prefer to talk with, what your tone is, and if you interrupt, for instance.” That kind of tool is rare, Mr. Lazer said. “Our existing research tools for gathering this kind of data aren’t very good” — for example, questionnaires in which people self-report on conversations. Reality mining may be more accurate, he said. Many of Dr. Pentland’s research studies with smartphones and badges with embedded sensors are discussed in his new book, “Honest Signals,” recently published by MIT Press. The badges use tools including infrared sensors to tell when people are facing one another, accelerometers to record gestures, and microphones and audio signal-processing to capture the tone of voice. With the array of sensors, the badges can detect what Dr. Pentland calls “honest signals, unconscious face-to-face signaling behavior” that suggest, for example, when people are active, energetic followers of what other people are saying, and when they are not. He argues that these underlying signals are often as important in communication as words and logic. For example, the badges register when listeners respond with regular nods or short acknowledgments like, “Right.” Such responses, he argues, are a kind of mirroring behavior that may help build empathy between speaker and listener. He also examines patterns of turn-taking in conversations, as well as gestures and RICK FRIEDMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES other, often unconscious signals. Dr. Alex Pentland and researchers with Future smartphones that devices they used to study conversation. take advantage of his technology may act as friendly perties of face-to-face and group interac- sonal assistants, automatically putting tions — or at least stop dominating the through calls from friends and family, but sending all others straight through show at committee meetings. With the help of his students, Dr. to voice mail. “The phone can be like a butler who Pentland, a professor of media arts and sciences at M.I.T., has been equipping really gets to know you,” he said, by depeople in banks, universities and other ciding to ring brightly for an urgent call places with customized smartphones when its owner has forgotten to turn on or thin badges packed with sensors the ringer. In the research, many steps are takthat they wear for days or even months. As these people talk with one another, en to make sure the identities of particithe sensors collect data on the timing, pants remain anonymous, said Anmol energy and variability of their speech. Madan, a graduate student of Dr. PentDr. Pentland, known as Sandy, calls land. For instance, when microphone his gleaning and processing of conver- audio data is collected, the microphone sational and other data “reality min- picks up tone and the length of speaking — using data mining algorithms ing time but does not record any of the to parse the real life, analog world of actual words spoken. So far, Mr. Madan has found that the social interactions.” The tools he has developed might data gathered by mobile phones is far help people change their communica- more accurate than accounts of the tion tactics, including those that lead same information reported by particito unproductive workplace dynamics, pants. “Humans have a lot of bias when they said David Lazer, an associate professor of public policy at the Kennedy recall their behavior,” he said. People who want to improve their communication skills may one day have an unusual helper: software programs that analyze the tone, turntaking behavior and other qualities of a conversation. The programs would then tell the speakers whether they tend to interrupt others, for example, or whether they dominate meetings with monologues, or appear inattentive when others are talking. The inventor of this technology is Alex Pentland of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has developed cellphone-like gadgets to listen to people as they chat, and computer programs that sift through these conversational cadences, studying communication signals that lie beneath the words. If commercialized, such tools could help users better handle many subtle-

JAMES ESTRIN/THE NEW YORK TIMES; BELOW, PHILLIPPE DIEDRICH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Booting Up to Visit the Grandparents By AMY HARMON

DEER PARK, New York — Her grandfather wanted to play tea party, but Alexandra Geosits, 2, insisted she had only apple juice. She held out a plastic cup, giggling as she waited to see if he would accept the substitute. That they were over a thousand kilometers apart, their weekly visit unfolding over computer screens in their respective homes, did not faze either one. Like many other grandchildren and grandparents who live far apart, Alex and Joe Geosits, 69, have become fluent in the ways of the Web cam. “Delicious,” Mr. Geosits exclaimed from Florida, pretending to take a sip from the cup, which remained clasped here in Alex’s small hand. Video calling, long anticipated by science fiction, is filtering into everyday use. And two demographic groups not particularly known for being high-tech are among the earliest adopters. In a way that even e-mailed photos never could, the Web cam promises to transcend both distance and the inability of toddlers to hold up their end of a phone conversation. Some grandparent enthusiasts say this latest form of virtual communication makes the actual separation harder. Others are so sustained by Web cam visits with services like Skype and iChat that they visit less in person. And no one quite knows what it means to a generation of 2-year-olds to have slightly pixelated versions of their grandparents as regular fixtures in their lives. But at a time when millions of people around the world are beginning to beam themselves across the ether, the Web cam adventures of the nursery school set and their grandparents offer a glimpse at what can be gained — and what may be lost — by almost-being there. “We would be strangers to them if we didn’t have the Web cam,” said Susan Pierce, 61, of Shreveport, Louisiana, about her grandchildren in Jersey City, New Jersey. Over the last year, Ms. Pierce and her husband watched Dylan, 17 months, learn to walk and talk over the Web cam,

A Robot Era, But Not Like The Movies By NATALIE ANGIER

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts — Today’s experimental robots bear little resemblance to the androids of our fantasies. That reflects a larger truth in the field of robotics, the attempt to build thinking machines that can perceive the world around them and then act on that awareness. Researchers are far, far from being able to design a robot with human capabilities. Ask a human toddler to bring you the red ball from behind the sofa, and the toddler will comply. Ask a machine to perform the same seemingly mundane task? “We’re not even close,” said Seth Teller of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We can’t do a dog,” said his colleague Leslie P. Kaelbling. “We’d all be so happy

C. J. GUNTHER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

if we could do something with the fetching skills of a dog.” But they can do helicopters, of a sort. In the robotics laboratory at M.I.T., Dr. Nicholas Roy described one of his team’s most promising projects, a line of “intelligent helicopters” that could be used to help out at disaster sites or war zones. The airborne robots are designed to

operate autonomously, he explained, to maneuver through urban environments, fly around in buildings and show you what’s inside. “Do you want to see what one looks like?” he asked and darted off to another room. A moment later he returned with something cute and bouncy balanced on the palm of his hand. It was basically a

Alexandra Geosits’s father kept his laptop’s Web cam on her as she played recently in their New York home. At home in Florida, Alex and Joe Geosits enjoy Alexandra’s Web cam visits every Sunday. and witnessed his 4-year-old sister Kelsie’s drawings of people evolve from indeterminate blobs to figures with arms and fingers and toes. But the powerful illusion of physical proximity also sharpens their ache for the real thing. “You just wish you could reach out and cuddle them,” said Ms. Pierce, a nursing professor. “Seeing them makes you miss them more.” Nearly half of American grandparents live more than 320 kilometers from at least one of their grandchildren, according to American Association of Retired People. Professor Merril Silverstein, a sociologist at the University of Southern California, has found that about twothirds of grandchildren see one set of grandparents only a few times a year, if that. But many grandparents find that the Web cam eases the transition during inperson visits, when grandchildren may refuse to sit on their laps or may reject their hugs because they do not recognize them. The adult children in a family have their own reasons for encouraging the Web cam enthusiasm of the younger and older generations. When Martha Rodenborn discovered that Elena, now 4, would sit happily in front of the computer in their New York City apartment while her grandmother read her piles of picture books from Ohio, the Web cam quickly became a vehicle for remote

baby-sitting. “It was a lifesaver,” said Ms. Rodenborn, who graduated from Columbia Law School in New York last spring. Because the Web cam connection is free, parents often keep it on as long as a grandparent is willing to make funny faces and animal sounds. The recent inclusion of Web cams in most laptops helps account for the 20 percent growth in video calling over the last year, said Rebecca Swensen, an analyst at the technology research firm IDC. About 20 million people around the world have made a video call for personal communication in the last month, Ms. Swensen said. American soldiers in Iraq beam themselves home over Web cams; parents on business trips (including President-elect Barack Obama) bid goodnight to their children, face-to-onscreen-face. Grandparents also use their own children as surrogates to close the tactile gap. Barbara Turner once sang her fussing newborn grandson to sleep from Ottawa, watching as her son rocked him in Indiana. She said she could almost feel the baby snuggling against her shoulder. But recently Ms. Turner and her husband rushed to Indiana to be on hand for the birth of her second grandchild. “Some things you just can’t do over the Web cam,” she said. “You make the trip.”

Robots are involved in “everyday aspects of life,” like helping to water tomato plants.

operated vehicles rove the surface of Mars. At M.I.T.’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, researchers are striving both to improve existing approaches to robotics and to make great leaps forward. In Dr. Rus’s advanced robotics class, students are designing a robotics garden, a plot of a half-dozen or so tomato plants serviced entirely by robots. Next to each plant is a wireless router that measures soil humidity every 10 seconds and is programmed with a computer model of how tomato plants grow. That information is conveyed to surveillance robots that wheel around the perimeter of the plot, each bearing a metal arm threaded through with a watering tube and a pincered hand for weeding, cleaning away dead leaves and plucking off the tomatoes as they ripen. A plant can call a robot over and complain that its soil is not moist enough, Dr. Rus said. The project is in its early stages, but her hopes are high. As she sees it, the agricultural industry, with its backbreaking tasks and its reliance on pesticides and fertilizers, could use the methodical touch of a robot tuned to hear the plants cry.

little cube attached to a cross, outfitted with a series of small plastic propellers, some lights and wires and a rudder that looked like a popsicle stick. So this was a model of the robotic helicopter? “No, this is it,” Dr. Roy said. “This is the robot itself.” Sure enough, after Dr. Roy’s students had tinkered with the settings and circuits on one of their smart cubes, the copterette shuddered to life, its propellers buzzed, and it began to jerkily, chirpily, rise up and fly. “It may not look like Hollywood, but the age of robotics is upon us,” said Daniela Rus of M.I.T. “Robots are involved in many everyday aspects of life, even if we don’t realize it.” The word comes from the Czech “robota,” meaning slave, and, yes, we have our robot slaves. Factory robots encapsulate our drugs, sequence our genes, fabricate our chips, monitor our radiation, spot weld and spray paint our cars, load bricks, rivet bolts, run nuts, make glass, die cast, sand blast. Remotely

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le monde

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2008 arts & styles

Revolution, Without All the Messy Parts

MORTEN ANDERSEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Sexy Scandinavia? Don’t Believe the Hype OSLO — Despite its irresistible title, the show here called “Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia?” turns out to be not quite as advertised. It’s as erotic as pickled herring. It’s a good question, though. What did happen to the image of Scandinavia as the frigid tundra of hot essay sex? The show is organized by the Office for Contemporary Art. Call it a virtuous mess, really an essay masquerading as an exhibition, unearthing a wealth of historic information. It tracks the roots of sexual liberation in Scandinavia to longstanding state-sponsored social movements, like women’s rights, sex education, health care and freedom of expression. Naturally, when the cold war arrived, the United States began casting an increasingly wary eye on this calm, liberal, peace-loving region of saunas, socialism and smorgasbord, neighboring the Soviet Union. In some countries just the idea of showing naked sculptures in public would invite a scandal. Here, Gustav Vigeland filled a park in the middle of Oslo during the early decades of the last century with hundreds of his sculptures of naked men and women, young and old. A “lack of moderation discernible on all fronts” is how Dwight D. Eisenhower assessed Sweden in 1960, seeing Scandinavia in general as a cautionary tale about extended social welfare. “We don’t sin any more than other people, but we probably sin more openly,” responded an irate Swedish baker, when approached by a journalist. Other Swedes noted that the Kinsey Reports, studies of sexual behavior done in the 1940s and 1950s, exposed an America no less fixated on sex than Scandinavia, only more furtive and hypocritical about it. But calling out American criticism of Scandinavia for its hypocrisy missed

MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

CINECITTA STUDIOS/REUTERS

In the 1960s, Scandinavian stars like Anita Ekberg defined sex appeal. Top, Vigeland Park in Oslo is filled with sculptures of naked people, young and old. one point: to many Americans, procreation aside, sex was supposed to be naughty. Making it wholesome spoiled the fun. While Eisenhower was taking his swipe at Scandinavia, Federico Fellini was casting the Swedish actress Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain in “La Dolce Vita.” Too bad the show doesn’t deign to examine sexploitation films like “The Seduction of Inga,” “Maid in Sweden” and “My Swedish Cousins,” which flooded the American marketplace. Now dimly recalled for the American censorship battle over its full-frontal male nudity, “I Am Curious (Yellow),” released in 1967, became the ultimate Scandinavian sex film. Its naked couplings were

punctuated by ponderous disquisitions on Swedish labor law. How did Scandinavia turn from “Maid in Sweden” to Ikea, from the purveyor of earnest free love into the purveyor of affordable love seats? Berge Ragnar Furre, a Norwegian historian, theologian and a politician in the Socialist Left Party, now on the Nobel Committee, offered this thought: “You have to remember that here in Norway we have also had a strong tradition of liberal democracy that is against sexuality, so we are historically divided as a liberal society.” In other words, Norwegians have long split between being sexually liberated and puritanical, while remaining politically liberal in both cases. Havard Nilsen, a fellow historian specializing in Wilhelm Reich, the psychiatrist and sexologist, nodded. “There has always been a moral high-mindedness here about sexuality, connected, like the labor movement and teetotaling, with issues of reform and salvation,” he said. But already by the late 1970s, as Wencke Mühleisen, who teaches women’s studies at the University of Oslo, pointed out, “feminism in Norway turned against sexuality and toward the family, the winning political line cooperating with the state in looking for equality laws that meant a gradual cleansing of sexual promiscuity.” Culture generally became more globalized in the following years, along with patterns of social behavior, meaning that “while it was normal to see women here in the ’70s on the beach without a bikini top, now it is very seldom,” Ms. Mühleisen added. “The commercial ideal body has replaced the desexualized healthy body.” At the same time the role of the blueeyed blond in the sexual pantheon of pornographic commerce has been diluted by the Web and multiculturalism. Which is to say that Scandinavia has become more like everywhere else.

By TERRENCE RAFFERTY the (permanent) struggle. That’s as “We only won the war,” Comman- true of Cuba in the past half-century dante Ernesto Guevara says a couple as it was of the Soviet Union in the of hours into the movie that bears his 70-plus years between the Bolshevik memorable nickname, “Che.” “The revolution and perestroika, though the early Soviet filmmakers did a revolution begins now.” Not in this picture, though. Steven much, much better job of mythologizSoderbergh’s ambitious new film, ing their cause. Sergei Eisenstein’s first two films, opening in the United States this month and elsewhere this winter, consists of “Strike” (1924) and “The Battleship two parts (each running 131 minutes). Potemkin” (1925), are, despite the The first is set in Cuba, where Guevara crudeness of their propaganda, fiercehelped Fidel Castro overthrow the dic- ly exciting as cinema, full of eloquent tator Fulgencio Batista in a long guer- compositions and startlingly invenrilla campaign that ended in December tive editing. Mr. Castro’s Cuba never 1958; the second takes place in Bolivia, enjoyed that sort of cinematic renaiswhere Guevara went in 1966 to start a sance, not even for a short time. This would probably have been the revolution that he hoped would spread throughout Latin America (he was Ar- case in the French Revolution too, had gentine by birth) and where he died a the movies been invented in time for the year later. What’s missing in the film likes of Robespierre to lop off the heads is the very revolution whose beginning of pesky auteurs. And although France is at this point pretty definitively posthe has so solemnly announced. This is odd but somehow not surpris- revolutionary, it’s still uncommon to ing, because movies about revolutions see a French film that does full justice do tend to focus on the fighting and to to the bloodbath in which the republic ignore the duller, often grimmer busi- was born. The most penetrating movie ness of actually governing in a revolutionary way. Guevara’s revolution-beginsnow statement is something he really said, and it was stirring enough to reappear, paraphrased, as the wisdom of an Algerian insurgent in Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic 1966 “Battle of Algiers.” “It’s hard enough to start a revolution, even harder to sustain it, and hardest of all to win it,” says one of the more TERESA ISASI intellectual leaders of the militants in that film. “But it’s only Movies tend to romanticize revolution. afterward, once we’ve won, that Steven Soderbergh, left, with Benicio the real difficulties begin.” Del Toro, center, the star of “Che.” Both Guevara and his North African counterpart are, of course, absolutely right: what hap- about the French Revolution, “Danton” pens after the battles have been won (1983), was directed by a Pole, Andrzej is indeed the most difficult part of the Wajda. So it could be a while before we get strange, inherently improvisatory process of revolution — so tricky that many the whole story of Guevara, Mr. Castro leaders, Mr. Castro among them, man- and the Cuban revolution; and when age to maintain power only by declar- we do, it’s sure to come from outside ing a kind of eternal state of revolution. Cuba. Probably not from Hollywood, And because this strategy is neither which hasn’t had much success with dramatically nor humanly very satis- this piece of history, the most notable fying, the movies have rarely shown attempt being Sydney Pollack’s expenmuch interest in the internal dynamics sive flop “Havana” (1990). You can get a little more of the sad of revolutionary governments. But weirdly, Richard Fleischer’s story from Julian Schnabel’s moving much maligned 1969 “Che!,” with its “Before Night Falls” (2000), about the ridiculous exclamation point, does persecution of the gay Cuban novelist make at least an attempt to deal with and poet Reinaldo Arenas, and more the first few years of the Castro regime, still from Néstor Almendros’s blisterto examine the peculiar relationship ing documentaries “Improper Conbetween the Maximum Leader, Fidel, duct” (1984) and “Nobody Listened” and the ideological hard-liner Che, and (1987). But that’s if you’re interested in even to acknowledge Guevara’s complicity in the orgy of executions that something like the truth, and truth accompanied the new government’s isn’t always of paramount importance when it comes to revolution (or movascension to power. Naturally, you never see anything ies, for that matter). Revolution is, in of that sort in films made under the many people’s minds, more about ideauspices of the revolutionary regimes als, wild hopes, romance; too many themselves, for which art exists only facts, and the world looks impossible to perpetuate the heroic mythology of to change.

A Tropical Paradise for Indie Rockers By EVELYN MCDONNELL

MIAMI — On a balmy November night here, Rachel Goodrich was playing to a rapt moonlit crowd in a courtyard of Churchill’s Pub. The ramshackle space in the Little Haiti neighborhood was full of fans and fellow musicians, who sang along with Ms. Goodrich’s gin-clear voice as she led her band through the kind of controlled hootenanny that has made her the queen of the Miami indie rock scene. Her handcrafted songs stand out in a town known for machined bass and dance beats, but she is not alone. “Rachel has everything: the band, the look, the sound,” said Nick Scapa, 25, a local musician and one of several young entrepreneurs trying to put Miami on the musical map. Thanks to talents like Ms. Goodrich, Miami’s reputation as a dead zone for live music may be changing. A spate of CDs by Miami artists, propelled by local promoters and backed with national tours, are poised to raise the city’s profile. Ms. Goodrich released “Tinker Toys,” her charming debut album, on her own Yellow Bear label in October. Rough Guide has compiled the independent CDs by the Spam Allstars, the Latin-funk band that is a veteran of the

international festival circuit. Jacob Jeffries, a 20-year-old pianist, bandleader and singer-songwriter, is recording the final disc of a trilogy. And record labels and music publishers are starting to pay attention. Miami is “striving to find an independent music scene,” said Barbara Cane, vice president and general manager for writer and publisher relations at BMI, who is working with Mr. Jeffries. “It’s going to take one little person like Jacob to open doors to all those other Jacobs down there.” The indie music scene is also getting a lift from the increasing reputation of Miami’s visual arts scene. “I have faith that eventually the international respect being paid to the art scene will carry over to the music scene,” said Michael-John Hancock, the singer of ANR. It may not seem surprising for a metropolitan area the size of South Florida to have a thriving rock scene. But Miami has never been a typical American city; as the joke goes, “It’s lovely, and so close to the U.S.” While Miami has countless dance clubs, there are very few establishments that support live local music. For bands the city’s physical isolation presents obstacles. It’s about an 11-hour drive to Atlanta, the next

Miami is better known for its dance music, but the city’s alternative rock scene is getting a boost from rising stars like Rachel Goodrich.

OSCAR HIDALGO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

musical mecca. “Geographically it’s a struggle to get out of South Florida,” Mr. Jeffries said. And the transient nature of a city full of tourists and immigrants fosters a nightlife that’s built around partying. The music that D.J.’s spin in local clubs is heavily beat driven: hip-hop, techno, trance. Until recently, the primary outlet for the alternative crowd was the experimental electronic genre called intelligent dance music. Fortunately for Miami rock fans there

is Churchill’s. In 1979 David Daniels, an expat veteran of England’s northern soul scene, founded the club that — from its grotty interior to its Bowery-esque surroundings — is the CBGB of Miami. Mr. Daniels rents the adjacent space to Sweat Records, a store and coffeehouse whose owner, Lauren Reskin, is a funnel for information on the local art and music scene. “Everything happens at Churchill’s,” Ms. Goodrich said. “It’s so real. It’s old and it’s magical, and there’s a lot of se-

crets there.” Ms. Goodrich is eager to hit the road and see the world, but she always wants to come home, to thrive on the ambience of a metropolis that is still rapidly becoming. “I love being here,” she said. “It feels so free outside. I don’t have to put on a million things to get around. I enjoy the blue sky and the rain. I go to the beach. The colors here are amazing. And the characters down here. There’s a constant flow of people.”