Taking It to the Streets - Harvard Magazine

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by Nell Porter Brown

DaviD C. grew up in Providence, Rhode Island. With no father around and a drug-addicted mother, he moved through foster homes, gathering a fragile sense of worth from a gang of friends. “All I aspired to was being important on the street,” he says. “There was nothing about a future.” He spent five years in juvenile detention and a few in prison, and still has a reputation among local cops for living up to his nickname, “Devious,” for once escaping through the police-station roof.

At 37, he is still hanging out with the kids—in the schools, at their homes, the hospital, or the mall. But as a street worker with the city’s Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence, he now prevents the very violence he once provoked.

Like David, most of the street workers are ex-gang members or former local criminals, says Teny Oded Gross, M.T.S. ’01, the institute’s founding executive director. Their backgrounds make them uniquely suited for what it takes to thwart a single act of violence: hours of face-to-face counseling of kids during their most heated, impulsive moments—when they might otherwise pull out a gun and do irreversible damage. “My job is not pretty—it’s not sending kids to Harvard, or anything fancy,” Gross explains. “It’s about keeping kids in this city alive between the ages of 14 and 23.”

The kids are even willing to die for their housing projects. “These beefs are territorial, not ethnic or racial,” David explains on a drive through the darkened streets to visit kids at the Chad Brown Housing Development. A group of teenagers eyes the passing car. “They look at every occupant, every car,” he says. “If you see one slow down with people inside wearing hoods, then you worry. That makes your hair stand on end.”

This fall, gunmen on foot shot a six-year-old boy, reportedly while aiming for his mother’s girlfriend because she was in a rival project—an accident racked up to “the cost of the game,” David says. “I tell them, ‘You’re willing to go down for something that doesn’t even belong to you—a building made of bricks, and land owned by the government—nothing you can even pass on to your kids. Why would you do that? Does that make sense?’ But it gives them a sense of purpose when there is nothing for these kids to do. If it were not for Teny and the institute, there would be no role models or people to help kids like I was.”

Gross is a philosophically minded, longtime street worker himself. During the 1990s anti-violence campaign known as the Boston Miracle, he was active in the Dorchester neighborhood, doing community outreach, gang mediation, job creation, and skills training. He also taught kids to document their lives with photography. Building partnerships—with the police, for example, despite local animosities—is a particular strength.

Being a former Israeli Army sergeant helps. “I’ve been both a victim of violence through [the legacy of] the Holocaust and then was top dog when it came to the Palestinians. I’m part of the weak and part of the strong; that’s a very humbling experience,” says Gross, who moved to Boston to be near his sister in 1989. “I always see things through the eyes of the kids and through the eyes of the police. Keeping those tensions in your head—some people would say that is what makes you good at this kind of work.”

The institute where he works now was established in 2001 by Father Ray Malm and Sister Ann Keefe, the pastoral team at St. Michael’s Church, in the poor neighborhood of South Providence. Catalyzed by growing youth violence and the death of 15-year-old Jennifer Rivera—shot in the head in front of her house to prevent her from testifying in a pending murder case—they drafted a broad mission: “To teach by word and example the principles of nonviolence and to foster a community that addresses potentially violent situations with nonviolent solutions” based on the work of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

Gross has built the nonprofit organization from a few unpaid nonviolence trainers into a $1.2-million agency with a 28-member team. By the end of the year, he plans to open a four-story headquarters in St. Michael’s vacant convent, with tutors, a gym, art and theater classes, and plenty of musical outlets—including a sound- and video-recording studio—thanks to $4.5 million in contributions from private donors, foundations, the city, and the state. “We’re really good at going in and intervening,” Gross says, “but to do the work of really transforming someone takes a longer time. This building will focus on youth development.” Besides running the street crew, institute staff members operate a nonviolence training program (Gross has worked with young people from as far away as Belfast and Guatemala) and a victims’ support center; they also mediate conflicts in families and schools and coordinate a summer-jobs program.

“Teny is the single most important partnership we have to fight crime and violence,” says Providence police chief Dean M. Esserman, a former prosecutor and Dartmouth graduate. “Everywhere I go—to every shooting, the ER, in the classrooms, to every wake, to every funeral—I see Teny, even if it’s two o’clock in the morning. He and the street workers are about building sustained relationships of trust. The kids know that they love them—they don’t get that from many adults.”

With a diverse population of 175,000, Providence is a small city in a tiny state. But it has the third-highest child-poverty rate in America (tied with New Orleans); more than half the city’s public-school children qualify for free lunches. Moreover, the state topped the nation for unemployment this fall, with an 8.8 percent rate, and reported a record number of home foreclosures. “We are two cities—one of wealth and one of poverty,” Gross says, “and they rarely meet.” Violence, he asserts, is sparked by environmental, not biological, factors: “In my mind it’s very clear: There is not a lot of opportunity—economic or otherwise—and these kids see failure all around them all the time. It’s traumatizing. They feel pushed into a corner and sometimes violence is the only way they feel they have some control over their lives.”

Violent crime in Providence fell overall between 2002 and 2007; Esserman attributes that to community policing, increased accountability—and the work of the institute. The hottest spot is in the West End, where most of the city’s 40 gangs (with their estimated 1,600 members) stake out their claims among the largest concentration of poor and minority families. “The problem is not all gangs—that is just the People magazine view,” cautions Esserman. “The problem is that the new drug in American culture is violence. Our children are growing up with it all around them—the media, the video arcade, in their neighborhoods. Their homes are not sanctuaries.” With the economy spiraling downward, Gross worries about the coming year. “Every day we see people just out of jail, trying to get out of gangs, and it’s extremely desperate for them to even find work,” he says. “We’ve got our finger in the dike now, but the pressure could be too much.”

Gangs aren’t the sole focus. Plenty of kids need helping staying in school and coping with family troubles. One night in November, a mother came to the institute with her 12-year-old son, who was being bullied by his older half-brother—recently returned from the Dominican Republic and on the cusp of joining a gang. As she met privately with David, Gross talked to the boy about cartoons and art, and they went through a book of photographs of Rhode Island’s civic and community leaders. “He’s hungry for this kind of interaction; he’s very sensitive,” Gross says later. “He would probably do well in a middle-class, artistic life. But he’s being harassed, and if you fail to protect him the way adults are supposed to, he could become very tough very quickly.” (Gross has since contacted the chairman of the board of the community art center to get the boy into some classes.)

He believes in the redemptive powers of art and culture. Just as Gross used to ferry Boston youth to hockey games, then over to Harvard Square’s bookstores and cafés, now David routinely takes his charges to museums, concerts, and to Brown University events. Often, a simple jaunt to suburbia “can be a revelation for these kids,” says David. “I like to show them how people can get along and shop in stores and feel free and happy without looking over their shoulders and worrying about getting shot at. To the kids, this life is like TV.” Adds Gross, “Becoming middle class and learning just takes thousands of interactions. It’s all about exposure.”

Gross’s home is filled with etchings, paintings, and sculptures from his family, friends, and wife, Julia Clinker, a photographer who teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design and takes primary care of their two young sons. It was while earning a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Tufts and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1990 that Gross, who had plans “to photograph how the police treated people,” first met Boston community activist Reverend Eugene F. Rivers III ’83; he ended up teaching art to kids through the Azusa Christian Community (begun as a Harvard student group in the 1980s), where Rivers was pastor, and its affiliated Ella J. Baker House, which serves high-risk families in Dorchester. During the next decade, he was based primarily at Baker House as a teacher, street worker, and community organizer.

The work was faith-based, but “whether you believe in God or not was (and is) not critical,” says Gross, who is basically agnostic after years of studying religion. “I believe that people are capable of living up to their potential if given love and attention and opportunities. I connect with the communities of faith because they are dedicated around principles that I agree with—that every human life is worth something and worth doing something about.”

Divinity School “was a great place for me to ask new questions; I’m a much more lethal debater thanks to Harvard,” he says. He was especially drawn to professors Harvey Cox and Kevin Madigan and former faculty member Father J. Bryan Hehir. He took “Justice” with Bass professor of government Michael Sandel and still listens to the lectures through his iPod while jogging. “Harvard was a respite from the streets,” he continues, “and it renewed me to come and do this”: move to Providence (where his wife grew up) and take on the job of building up the nascent institute.

Gross’s own religious background is complicated. His mother, a Serb, deplored organized religion. His father, a Croatian Jew, once aspired to become a Catholic priest largely because he was hidden in a monastery during World War II (his mother died in the Holocaust); his eventual move to Israel was to be near his sole remaining relative, a sister. “My father’s the one who taught me all about Jesus,” Gross says. “It was not an observant Jewish household; we also celebrated Christmas. But in Israel, you begin to absorb the culture and I did. I still love the slowing down on Fridays. I really miss that.”

Though far from being a violent young man, Gross says he has always tended to “question everything” and was somewhat rebellious. He recalls breaking a window, slapping a teacher, throwing a kid over a table—“typical, aggressive kid stuff”—and says fighting at school and on the playground was the norm. “In the U.S. now, these juvenile actions would have resulted in a criminal record,” he adds. “But I was also full of life and was interested in philosophy and ethics and the world. I read literature and studied in school.”

Childhood, he thinks, should be about making mistakes, and about adults helping you learn. Tightening the grip of authority rarely helps. “The British got tough on the Irish—and you got a rebellion. We got tough on the Palestinians and we got a rebellion,” he asserts. “You put someone to the wall and usually they will have to act back.”

Violence and aggression are inherently exciting, he notes, especially to young men. He recalls driving a van-load of Boston kids home once: they saw their enemies out the window and “It was like a battalion reaction—they got all excited and started talking about who they were and what they did, and how they were going to get them,” he reports. “These crews challenge each other like military units. They have their enemies and their friends, their fights, and their girlfriends, and the drugs and the drinking—it’s these same things that excite people all around the world.”

In such an environment, how does nonviolence compete? Gross mentions the case of one 19-year-old in Providence, “VA,” a suspected murderer assigned to David. VA’s mother is in federal prison on drug charges and his best friend was ambushed and killed last summer while sneaking up on a rival crew. “VA is a real leader,” Gross points out. “What would he be if he’d grown up in an affluent suburb? A jock, a star athlete, captain of the team. The kids who go to Harvard are not passive wimps—they’re very aggressive, very driven.”

But for street kids, he says, that sense of power too often “comes through mowing people down with an Uzi. I think what we’re pushing for is a more evolved form of aggression.”

"Working Sisters" - Harvard Magazine

Greg Girard

Factory girls in their dormitory, Guangdong Province

Leslie T. Chang ’91 Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (Spiegel & Grau, $26)

The massive rural-to-urban labor migration that has been transforming China since the late 1980s—an estimated 130 million people—is unprecedented in that nation’s history. Unprompted by direct ecological or political factors such as famine, war, or the forced relocation of population groups under draconian state policy, migration in post-Mao China is more likely to be instead the result of structural forces (economic need and consequences of agricultural reform) that are beyond the control of individual farmers. Motivated by the search for opportunities to improve their own lives, rural people have taken the initiative, making decisions to shape their own destinies—and fostering unforeseen entrepreneurial individualism in the process. Above all, restless young village women have assumed a major role in the current population shift, establishing a brand-new identity as dagongmei (literally, “working sisters”) in the booming industrial cities in China’s coastal areas, contributing to what sociologists call the “feminization of the global workforce.”

In Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China, Leslie T. Chang ’91, who spent a decade in China as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, delivers a vivid portrayal both of the dynamics of this internal migration and of women migrants as active players in globalization and local social and economic change. More often than not, factory girls have been depicted as defenseless victims of ruthless exploitation who must work in unsafe and unhealthy conditions, at low pay, with little job security, while enduring discrimination from urban residents and authorities—as nothing more, in fact, than cogs in a “world factory” machine that manufactures Barbie dolls, Nike shoes, Coach bags, computer microchips, and other material goods for Western customers. Now Chang sheds new light on the nature of everyday life for these workers. Dissatisfied with what she had read about them, she conducted three years of field research within the fluid community of migrant women in the city of Dongguan, a massive manufacturing and industrial center southeast of Guangzhou.

Chang focuses on Min and Chunming, two factory girls whose personal narratives form the core of her book. The strong rapport she developed with them allowed her access to their diaries, letters, cell phone text-messages, and even online chat-room exchanges. By truthfully recording their individual voices, as well as those of their friends and colleagues, Chang was able to penetrate the social universe of migrant women, which included their immediate surroundings and circle of friends: from assembly-line workshops to dormitories, self-help courses (such as “White-Collar” classes) taught at evening schools they attended, restaurants and cafés, speed-dating clubs, and back to the village communities where they grew up.

Her relentless attempt to represent the factory girls’ points of view has given her remarkable insight into the intimate and minute details of their daily lives, as when she writes: “[T]he migrant women I knew never complained about the unfairness of being a woman. Parents might favor sons over daughters, bosses prefer pretty secretaries, and job ads discriminate openly, but they took all of these injustices in stride—over three years in Dongguan, I never heard a single person express anything like a feminist sentiment.” Such candor is absent in much of the academic discourse on gender inequality and the feminization of the workforce in China and other parts of the developing world.

Instead of resorting to feminist rhetoric, Chang demonstrates a high level of ethnographic skill (rare among journalists) in recounting the personal details of private life that migrant women shared with her. The tone of the book reflects the author’s growing appreciation for the resilience and strength of these factory girls who have managed to overcome the difficulties of adapting to the anonymity and rapid pace of city life. Chang does not lose sight of their dilemmas about dating and finding marriageable partners, the “bitterness” they have had to “eat” in the process of asserting new identities, and the moral and ethical challenges they have confronted about engaging in such business practices as pyramid sales of health products.

The factory girls usually earned and saved more than their brothers, and thus sent more remittances home to their parents as properly filial daughters. Despite the significant improvement in their economic status, they took pains to renegotiate relationships with their parents and relatives back home who were reluctant to give up traditional world-views and lifestyles. Yet the factory girls often found that the words of wisdom inculcated as they grew up could not help them make sense of the harsh conditions they faced in their new urban circumstances. Chang’s examples are often blunt and powerful: after pointing out that mobile phones have become the primary means of interpersonal communication for migrant workers (a major reason why China has the world’s largest mobile market), she shows how the loss of a cell phone can effectively sever its owner’s link to the city in which she worked and the network of social relationships she had established.

The book’s organization enables the reader to journey with the author from the migrants’ rural communities to China’s rapidly growing coastal cities. In the opening chapter, Chang explains that country people, especially the young, experience the desire to “go out” (chuqu) not simply because of the availability of city jobs and expectations about the quality of urban life, but also because there is nothing to do at home. Chang also devotes chapters to Dongguan itself, a city of contradictions and a “place without memory,” and to the inner workings of Yue Yuen, a mammoth Taiwanese-owned factory in that sprawling city that is the world’s biggest manufacturer of footwear for brand names such as Nike, Adidas, and Reebok.

The way Yue Yuen is run and managed bears a resemblance not only to the legendary assembly-line mode of production pioneered by the Ford Motor Company, but also to a state-owned, socialist enterprise. For young migrants, Yue Yuen offers both stability and opportunities for upward mobility. Chang found that almost all the managers in this factory of 70,000 people, “from supervisors of single lines to the heads of whole factories, are rural immigrants who started out on the assembly line.” Its employees could expect to receive basic services and benefits based on a 13-grade hierarchical managerial system. This chapter is an eye-opening experience, especially for those who believe that anything made in China is produced in sweatshops that ignore fair-labor standards and violate human rights.

But most of the book focuses on the factory girls themselves. Making ingenious use of quotes from Chunming’s diary, Chang documents the struggles the young woman went through upon entering the unfamiliar if not hostile world of corporate capitalism, and the steps in her decision to embrace an indigenous version of Max Weber’s Protestant ethic (e.g., “Benjamin Franklin’s Thirteen Rules of Morality” and Mary Kay’s Nine Leadership Keys to Success) in order to make it in the workplace. In tracing Min’s progress as she is promoted from assembly-line jobs to positions in the human-resources department, Chang seems to remind us that migrant women do not exist in a world of dead-end jobs: upward mobility is in fact an attainable dream.

In several chapters, Chang surprises the reader with stories of her own extended family’s immigrant experiences, as if to juxtapose multiple and diverse voices, locations, and situations. Chang feels that she has a strong link to the factory girls because she herself left home after graduating from college and “lived abroad for fifteen years, going home to see my family once every couple of years, like the migrants did.” The average reader may find it difficult to appreciate her effort to draw parallels between historical memories and recent events as she recounts the story of her grandfather, one of China’s first professional mining engineers, who was trained in the United States in the early 1920s. These digressions are relatively minor, but sometimes disrupt the main flow of the book. (On the other hand, the fascinating details of Chang’s family history could be the basis for a different project, with the potential to become a bestseller such as Jung Chang’s Wild Swans or Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai.)

The great contribution of Leslie Chang’s book lies in its attempt to contextualize and broaden our understanding of how women migrants are reshaping relations and contemporary morality in rural and urban China. Researchers and students interested in “things Chinese” will find this book a wonderful resource and a most engaging read in which we hear the unfiltered voices of migrant women, who are too often either absent or underrepresented in scholarly works on gender and labor.

Pan Tianshu, Ph.D. ’02, is an associate professor of cultural anthropology at Fudan University’s School of Social Development and Public Policy, in Shanghai.

• Purchase the book Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China

Al Qaeda in Afghanistan - Nation

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On Friday President Obama said he was "surprised" to win the Nobel Peace Prize and doesn't "view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments."

Here's hoping he will feel more worthy after announcing a new strategy for Afghanistan.

Wednesday marked the beginning of Year Nine of the war. In the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Senator John Kerry, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee and a Vietnam vet who knows a thing or two about the costs and consequences of a quagmire, convened a hearing titled "Confronting Al Qaeda: Understanding the Threat in Afghanistan and Beyond."

It was timely, considering the United States went to war with the express purpose of "disrupting, dismantling and defeating the terrorist organization that attacked us on September 11," Kerry said. Timely too because the president now faces increasing pressure to double down on US military presence there, rather than seek alternatives to escalation, including a drawdown of US forces. Two of the witnesses, Robert Grenier and Dr. Marc Sageman--both of whom served in the CIA, as station chief in Pakistan and on the Afghan Task Force, respectively--concurred that escalation would only further spread anti-American sentiment among Afghans and other Muslims, and that nonmilitary initiatives to contain Al Qaeda and foster civic development in Afghanistan would prove far more effective.

Kerry began the Q&A of the three witnesses by soliciting an update on how Al Qaeda is faring in Afghanistan eight years after the invasion. "The president's strategy is to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Afghanistan," he said. "Is it a fair judgment to say that that has happened?... They're not in Afghanistan?"

Sageman and Grenier agreed with that assessment. (The third witness, Peter Bergen, a journalist and senior fellow with the New America Foundation, said the number of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan wasn't as important as "their influence ideologically and tactically." As the lone witness who is a proponent of an increased military presence, it is striking that Bergen had the least amount of on-the-ground experience on the panel.)

Kerry also raised the issue of denying Al Qaeda a safe haven so that it can't "plot at will against the United States." He asked whether there is legitimate concern about "a new union [between Al Qaeda and] the Taliban."

Sageman didn't perceive such a threat.

"A Taliban return to power does not automatically mean an invitation to Al Qaeda to return to Afghanistan," Sageman said. "The relationship between Al Qaeda and...[the] Taliban has always been strained." In the event that the Taliban did extend such an invitation, Sageman noted in written testimony, "there are many ways to prevent the return of Al Qaeda...besides a national counterinsurgency strategy. Vigilance through electronic monitoring, spatial surveillance, a network of informants in contested territory, combined with the nearby stationing of a small force dedicated to physically eradicate any visible Al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan will prevent the return of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan."

Republican ranking member Richard Lugar then turned to Gen. Stanley McCrystal's call for up to 60,000 additional US troops. "Who would we be surging against [in Afghanistan]?" he asked. "How would this have any effect whatever on the incidences of terrorism in the United States, Western Europe or what have you?"

"Let me answer that with an old Middle Eastern proverb," Sageman replied. "'It's me and my brother against my cousin. But it's me and my cousin against a foreigner.' So if we send 40,000 Americans...that will coalesce every local rivalry; they will put their local rivalry aside to actually shoot the foreigners and then they'll resume their own internecine fight.... Sending troops with weapons just will unify everybody against those troops, unfortunately."

Grenier emphasized that a surge would turn not only Afghans against the United States but also Pakistanis. "A large increase in the US presence in Afghanistan would not be welcomed by the majority of Pakistanis," he said. "It would make the struggle seem all the more starkly as one of the US versus Muslims, as opposed to the US supporting Afghans in their own struggle."

Senator Russ Feingold--who supported the decision to go to war but now calls for a flexible timetable for withdrawal, who recently introduced an amendment requiring the president to provide Congress with information regarding the cost, estimated duration and possible destabilizing impact of any increase in troop levels before authorization--honed in on what it is exactly that we are trying to accomplish in Afghanistan and how it fits into our larger objectives.

"Do you believe that completely denying Al Qaeda access to Afghanistan is an achievable objective?" Feingold asked. "Is [this] goal...distracting us from a broader goal [of] relentlessly pursuing Al Qaeda and its affiliates globally and ensuring that they can't conduct training and plotting in Afghanistan and elsewhere?"

"Right now, as I said, they are in Pakistan; and even if they return to Afghanistan, I think they will return in the same way they now are in Pakistan--in hiding," Sageman said. "Things have changed; it's not going to be the types of huge training camps that we saw in the 1990s. Right now what we see...are really small rented houses, half a dozen people, who get a few days' training, and they're not as well trained as the previous [guys] in the 1990s. You're talking about a very different threat. So even if they do come back...their threat...is still not going to be what it was."

Feingold pointed out that devoting so many resources to preventing Al Qaeda from returning to Afghanistan detracts from the broader fight against present and future safe havens elsewhere.

"All we get is this simplistic notion that if we don't stay in Afghanistan for a very long term, Al Qaeda will be right back," Feingold said. "[But] what happens if they go to Yemen? What happens if they go to Somalia? What happens if they stay in Pakistan? How can it be that an international strategy against a global network can be that heavily concentrated on one place on the assumption that they will reconstitute themselves in a way that is exactly the same and allowed them to conduct the 9/11 attacks? It's far too simplistic."

Feingold said that polls now show the majority of Afghans want all foreign troops to leave within two years, and only 18 percent support an increase in foreign troops. He wanted to know "what impact these public attitudes [are] likely to have on the viability of any plan that involves a massive, open-ended foreign military presence."

"There is a high degree of xenophobia that is endemic among the Afghans," Grenier said, "and they do tend to coalesce against what is perceived as an outsider. The best that we can hope for is not a permanent elimination of safe haven, or the opportunity for safe haven for Al Qaeda, but rather the elimination of uncontested safe haven.... That needs to be a sustainable effort. What we are currently doing, I believe, is not sustainable either by us or by the Afghans."

Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen then asked the million-dollar question: "What would a fully resourced, non-military-focused campaign against Al Qaeda look like?"

"We have to start relying on the Afghans themselves and not so much on American troops," Sageman replied. "We have to almost remove ourselves.... You have to gradually shift it to an Afghanized strategy."

"Are you suggesting then that we don't need to continue a campaign in Afghanistan in order to address Al Qaeda?" Shaheen pressed.

"That's correct," Sageman said. "A nonmilitary campaign would be to try to flip some of the locals who are hiding [and] protecting Al Qaeda to betray them, and allow us to either arrest them or eliminate them through other means."

Sageman and Grenier also said there are nonmilitary options to deal with the Taliban.

"I think many of them are young men who could be won over," said Grenier, "and who would just as soon take a paycheck from the local governor and serve in his militia as they would serve with the Taliban. Or if you had more constructive engagements that benefited them, they would pursue those instead."

"We make a mistake labeling everyone that is not for us with the same name," said Sageman. "On the ground what you have is a collection of a lot of young people who resist central government. Those [people] really are not ideologically motivated. I don't think we can cut a deal with Mullah Omar, but we certainly can take most of his followers away from him."

I spoke to Sageman after the hearing to get a better sense of what he envisions as an effective US presence in the region. He spoke of utilizing a small "cadre of folks" that understands Afghanistan and can "cut deals with local power brokers to make the peace." He believes we need "a small military presence" in the region for "focused action" when needed against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. He said we need to "Afghanize" economic development and work with NGOs and local entrepreneurs to "do things in their own communities" rather than using "outside contractors, [where] all the money for development ends up in their pocket or in Switzerland."

For those who agree with Sageman and Grenier that any escalation or continuation of the current counterinsurgency strategy is exactly the wrong way to go, there are some Congressional efforts promoting these alternative ideas. Congresswoman Barbara Lee has introduced HR 3699 to prohibit funding for any increase in US troop levels in Afghanistan. Congressman Jim McGovern and ninety-nine co-sponsors have reintroduced HR 2404 requiring Defense Secretary Gates to submit an exit strategy to Congress--something even President Obama said is needed but has failed to deliver. The Feingold amendment never received a vote, and it should be reintroduced so that it can.

There are clear alternatives to staying the course or escalating--ideas that could not only save Obama's presidency but justify the peace prize he seemed to suggest is premature.

About Greg Kaufmann

Greg Kaufmann is a Nation contributor living in his disenfranchised hometown of Washington, DC

Baucus Committee OKs a Health Bill, But Not Reform - Nation

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posted by John Nichols on 10/13/2009

If every kid in class finishes their homework except for one, guess which kid will get the most attention. That's right, the slacker.

And, when the slacker finally does turn in the assignment, it is invariably a slapdash job that fails to meet minimum standards.

So it is in the U.S. Senate, where the Finance Committee finally got around to finishing its health care reform assignment.

The vote on the measure -- which does not include a public option to hold insurance companies to account -- was 14-9, with all Democrats on the committee and Maine Republican Olympia Snowe voting Tuesday to toss the measure into the legislative sausage-grinder that will eventually produce final legislation for the Senate to consider.

The important thing to remember is that for all of Tuesday's attention to the finance committee vote, the full Senate will never vote on this particular measure.

Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee chair Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, has said throughout the process that "the bill that (the Finance Committee) proposes is just that – a proposal."

Harkin is too polite to state the obvious: The Finance Committee proposal is no more likely to become law than the slacker student's last-to-be-handed-in homework assignment is to be awarded academic honors.

That's a good thing because the Finance Committee bill falls far short of real health care reform. It steers billions of taxpayer dollars into the accounts of insurance companies while failing to provide a realistic, humane or fiscally-responsible alternative to their profiteering.

Of course, that embarrassing omission did not prevent the committee's chairman, Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat whose campaign accounts are overflowing with insurance-industry contributions, from hailing his "accomplishment."

Baucus has always fancied himself as the man who would define the parameters of reform. On the committee, he set up an elaborate process for achieving bipartisan "buy-in." He assured everyone that he would get all the warring camps of the Senate Democratic Caucus behind one bill. And he promised that it would be a good bill.

Baucus failed on all three counts:

1. He blew deadline after deadline, delaying action for so long that the entire reform initiative was put in jeopardy.

Baucus patted himself on the back at the start of Tuesday's final finance committee session for puttering away on the project "for 2 years now," as if that was some kind of accomplishment. It wasn't.

Instead of making it possible for the Congress to craft comprehensive legislation before the August break – and giving Americans something real to consider – Baucus delayed for so long and created so much confusion that extremists were able to take advantage of the recess to spin fantasies about "death panels," "massive tax increases" and "creeping socialism."

2. He never achieved meaningful consensus – between Democrats and Republicans and even on some issues among Democrats.

Comically, the chairman bragged on Tuesday that, "Six Members of the Committee – three Republicans and three Democrats -- held 31 meetings to try to come to consensus. We held exhaustive meetings. We met for more than 61 hours. We went the extra mile."

What Baucus did not mention was that the Democrats and Republicans who went through the "exhaustive" and time-consuming exercise did not come to any kind of consensus. (Only Snowe, a regular renegade from the Republican camp, sided with the Democrats on the committee.) In other words, it was a waste of time.

3. He produced a bill that satisfies no one and should infuriate everyone.

Even Snowe, in announcing she would vote for the measure, said: "Is this bill all that I would want? Far from it..."

The ranking Republican on the committee, Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, said that "What this mark up has shown is that there is a clear and significant philosophical difference between the two sides."

Grassley's right, up to a point.

The point that the Iowan misses is that neither side – Republicans who oppose real reform and Democrats who favor it – look kindly on the Baucus bill. There's been every bit as much criticism of it from the Congressional Progressive Caucus members as from Grassley's "party of no" colleagues.

Even some key members of the Finance Committee -- such as West Virginia Democrat Jay Rockefeller -- did so over their own strong objections to the absence of a public option.

The problems with the Finance Committee's proposal extend far beyond the fact that it fails to establish a government-run alternative to compete with the private insurers that will be ridiculously enriched by it.

But the lack of a "public option" should make the Baucus bill a nonstarter. As insurance-industry insider turned whistleblower Wendell Potter explained in an advertisement produced by MoveOn.org, the Baucus bill would, if enacted effectively, "kill health reform."

"Take it from me," argues Potter, "the Senate Finance bill is a dream come true of the health insurance industry. If there is no public option insurance companies aren't going to change. The choice of a public health insurance option is the only way to keep insurance companies honest."

Potter's right.

And a lot of senators know that he is right.

That's why 30 senators have signed a letter declaring their steadfast support for a robust public option. Many senators who did not sign the letter have indicated that they will back the public option that Baucus has sought to block.

There is even broader support for a public option in the House.

Perhaps that is why the other four congressional committees that produced health-care reform bills – three in the House and the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee -- have included far more robust language with regard to alternatives to for-profit insurance companies.

HELP Committee chair Harkin has not gotten as much attention as Baucus.

But Harkin got his homework done on time – his committee got its work done in July and earned compliments from the late Senator Ted Kennedy, who said: "I could not be prouder of our committee. We have done the hard work that the American people sent us here to do."

It is Harkin, not Baucus, who is the serious health-care reformer in the Senate.

It is Harkin, not Baucus, who has consistently promoted the public option and who continues to argue that it can and will be a part of any final legislation. "Look," says Harkin, "five committees have reported a bill out on healthcare. Four of them have a public option. One doesn't. So you would think the weight would be on the side of having a public option in the bill – and that's where it is."

And it is Harkin, the chairman who gets his work done on time and right, that we should be paying attention to now that Baucus has finally finished his silly sideshow.

Kurdistan Halts Oil Exports - NYTimes.com

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By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

BAGHDAD — The semiautonomous Kurdish region has reopened a rift with the central government after announcing that it had halted all petroleum exports from Kurdistan until Baghdad pays the international companies that are pumping oil in the region.

Oil extracted in Kurdistan can be exported only through Iraqi government pipelines running to Turkey, giving Baghdad a stranglehold on the transport of oil produced there. At the same time, the government needs all the revenue it can get to pay for a host of pressing needs.

The amount of oil involved currently, about 100,000 barrels a day, is relatively small compared with Iraq’s total production of 2.4 million barrels a day. But with production from the Kurdish areas likely to increase markedly in coming years, the dispute has taken on added importance.

Kurdistan’s minister of natural resources, Ashti Hawrami, said in a letter dated Oct. 9 and posted on the Kurdish government’s Web site Monday that the decision to stop exports had been made in concert with the two international companies now extracting oil there.

“We have jointly agreed that no free oil will be pumped for export, and payments have to be made,” Dr. Hawrami wrote in the letter. “We will only resume exports with guaranteed payments.”

Kurdistan has awarded more than 30 contracts to international oil companies during the past few years over the objections of Baghdad, which has barred international companies working in Kurdistan from competing for oil contracts in the rest of Iraq.

Kurdistan began signing its own deals with foreign oil companies after becoming impatient with the central government’s inability to adopt a national oil law that would regulate the industry. The Iraqi Parliament still has not approved an oil law, but earlier this year Baghdad began seeking oil production deals of its own with international companies, including a preliminary agreement with a consortium of British Petroleum and the Chinese National Petroleum Company to develop the enormous Rumalia field in southern Iraq.

After DNO, a Norwegian company, and Genel Energy, a Turkish company, struck oil at the Tawke field in Kurdistan this year, Baghdad originally refused to export their production over its pipelines. The cash-poor government eventually relented, however, giving its approval in late May.

Exports from Tawke and from a second site in Kurdistan, at the Taq Taq field, started June 1, but Baghdad has refused to pay the companies for the oil because it continues to regard their contracts with Kurdistan as illegal.

Meanwhile, officials in Kurdistan said they could not afford to pay because revenue from the fields went directly to Baghdad.

DNO has a 55 percent share in the Tawke field; Genel Energy owns 25 percent; the remainder is owned by the Kurdish government.

Dr. Hawrami, who oversees Kurdistan’s oil sector, said the Norwegian and Turkish companies, which had invested $500 million in Kurdistan, had not received a penny so far for their exports.

Khalid Saleh, an adviser to Hussain al-Shahristani, Iraq’s oil minister, confirmed Monday that oil exports from Kurdistan had stopped. He said the government had no plans to abide by the terms of the Kurdish contracts.

“At this moment, the government is not willing to pay,” he said.

Dr. Hawrami also acknowledged in the letter a complex web of financial arrangements that the Kurdish government had with the two companies, including secret government investments and loans of as much as $50 million.

The deals, which were negotiated with the permission of the president of Kurdistan, Masoud Barzani, were intended to bolster the financially strained oil companies so they could continue exploration in Kurdistan, according to the letter.

Duraid Adnan and Sa’ad al-Izzi contributed reporting.

Pakistan Court Drops Charges Against Lashkar-e-Taiba Founder - NYTimes.com

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By SALMAN MASOOD

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Criminal charges against Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the man Indian and Western officials accuse of masterminding the terrorist siege of Mumbai last year, were dismissed Monday by a court in Lahore.

Although Pakistan has been pressed to charge Mr. Saeed with involvement in the Mumbai attacks, Pakistan insists that it lacks enough evidence linking him to the attacks and that the charges dismissed Monday were not directly related to them.

The charges were dismissed for lack of evidence, his lawyer said. It was the second time that Mr. Saeed had been held on lesser charges that did not hold up in court.

Mr. Saeed is the founder of the banned militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, 10 of whose members killed 163 people in a rampage in Mumbai in November.

Seven other members — including the man Pakistan says actually masterminded the Mumbai attacks, Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi — are on trial in Rawalpindi, the garrison city adjacent to Islamabad, the capital.

India has given Pakistan evidence, based on its intelligence and the testimony of the sole surviving gunman, that it says showed that Mr. Saeed provided detailed instructions to the militants who carried out the attack. But Pakistan says there is not enough evidence to charge him.

This weekend, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said Pakistan would not “take any dictation from India” regarding Mr. Saeed.

In the case dismissed Monday, Mr. Saeed was accused of using inflammatory language criticizing Pakistan, which falls under an antiterrorism statute, in September at a gathering in Punjab Province. He was also accused of appealing for funds for a banned group. Mr. Saeed currently leads Jamat-ud-Dawa, an Islamic charity widely viewed as a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba.

His lawyer, A. K. Dogar, said he had argued that the government had not banned Jamat-ud-Dawa and therefore it was legal to solicit donations for it. “The court accepted my contention,” he was quoted by news media as saying outside the court.

Mr. Saeed was placed under house arrest last month. But the step was seen as a gesture to placate international criticism over the slow pace of the trial against the seven militants.

Mr. Saeed, a cleric who fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, formed Lashkar-e-Taiba, vowing to free the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, which is claimed by both India and Pakistan.

Lashkar-e-Taiba has enjoyed the support of the Pakistani intelligence agencies in the past and is often described in Pakistan as the military’s fifth column.

General Lays Out Pace of Iraq Pullout - NYTimes.com

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By ROD NORDLAND

BAGHDAD — By the end of October, American troop strength in Iraq will be 120,000, a decrease of 23,000 since January, the top United States military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Stephen R. Lanza, said Monday. The next big reduction will not come until well after the national elections in January, he added.

General Lanza referred repeatedly to a “responsible drawdown.” It was his first full-scale news conference since May, when he addressed reporters in advance of Iraqi security forces’ taking the lead in security operations on June 30.

“I really think the elections will be a point of departure by which we look at an assessment of true drawdown and really start moving our numbers from, let’s say, somewhere between 120,000 and 110,000 by the election, and then getting at that 50,000 by August 2010,” he said Monday.

The United States has pledged to remove all combat troops from Iraq by next August, leaving 50,000 troops to advise and support the Iraqis.

General Lanza released statistics showing a large reduction in war-related violence of all types since June 30, with civilian and military deaths down by 80 to 90 percent compared with the same period in 2008.

There has not been as great a reduction in United States troop forces, however, despite their withdrawal from combat duties in the cities.

“The key to us is to be flexible in our drawdown,” General Lanza said. “We want to have the right capability to support the government of Iraq as a sovereign partner.”

He added, “I would envision sometime after the election, perhaps in 30 to 60 days, there would be another decision point based on another assessment of the security environment, and we would then look at moving more forces out of the country.”

Troops remaining after August 2010 would be focused on training missions, with the goal of leaving Iraq entirely by the end of 2011.

Already, the first so-called advise and assist brigade, devoted exclusively to training Iraqi troops, has arrived in Anbar Province, he said. That is the First Brigade of the army’s 82nd Airborne Division. It will eventually be joined by five more such brigades.

Meanwhile, Iraqi security forces, including the police and the army, have reached a total of 663,000 members. The increase has made it possible for the police to take over security duties in many cities from the United States and the Iraqi militaries, General Lanza said. Iraq’s budget provides for security forces totaling 720,000, including 253,002 in the military.

Riyadh Mohammed contributed reporting.

Putin’s Party Wins in Regional Elections Across Russia - NYTimes.com

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By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY

MOSCOW — The pro-Kremlin party United Russia swept regional elections across Russia, strengthening its political power nationwide while also dominating the voting for the Moscow city government, according to results released Monday.

Opposition leaders complained about electoral fraud, and disturbances were reported in the North Caucasus region of Dagestan because of problems at the voting sites.

Votes were held Sunday in 75 of Russia’s 83 regions, for positions varying from mayor to representative in the local legislatures. United Russia, led by Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, who is also the party chairman, called its nationwide success a vote of confidence in its economic policies.

“We can say that the voters of Russia, in a situation where we are battling the global economic crisis, are for stabilization of the political situation, for the right to realize those plans that have been set forth,” said Boris V. Gryzlov, chairman of the party’s Supreme Council.

Among the more than 7,000 local elections were races conducted in Chechnya, Ingushetia and other regions of the Caucasus.

Elections to the Moscow city government were the most closely watched. With 99 percent of the vote counted on Monday, United Russia, with 66 percent of the vote, was poised to win 32 of 35 seats in the legislature; the Communist Party, with 13 percent of the vote, was expected to win 3.

By contrast, the liberal party Yabloko, which has provided the most vocal opposition to Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov of Moscow, did not meet the 7 percent threshold of votes necessary for a seat.

Ilya Yashin, a former youth leader of Yabloko who joined the more radical opposition movement Solidarity, was taken off the ballot in Moscow for the city Duma, the local legislature, along with other Solidarity members, including the party’s leader, Boris Y. Nemtsov, for reported irregularities.

Mr. Yashin lamented on his blog Monday that Moscow had joined regions like the Caucasus as a place where United Russia had an unchallenged grasp on power.

Vladimir Y. Churov, chairman of the Central Election Commission, speaking to reporters on Sunday, rejected charges of electoral fraud. “Statements about mass violations, these are of course hysteria and an attempt to exert unlawful moral pressure during the counting of votes,” he said. “This is moral terror.”

Mr. Churov acknowledged but played down the extent of difficulties in Derbent, a town in Dagestan where one-third of the polling places never opened. The town’s mayor, who supports the Kremlin, won with 68 percent of the vote.

Mr. Yashin reported on his blog that about 100 activists of the Solidarity movement held a protest in central Moscow on Monday evening, claiming falsification of the Moscow election results. More than 40 people were detained by the police, the Ekho Moskvy radio station reported. The Associated Press reported that police officers in riot gear broke up a small demonstration, dragging people away.

China Court Sentences 6 to Death in Rioting - NYTimes.com

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By EDWARD WONG

BEIJING — A Chinese court sentenced six men to death and a seventh to life in prison on Monday for their roles in the deadly ethnic rioting that convulsed the western regional capital of Urumqi in July, according to Xinhua, the state news agency.

All seven had names that suggested they were Uighurs, the largest ethnic group in the vast region of Xinjiang. All were convicted of murder, and some were also found guilty of arson and robbery, Xinhua reported.

The sentences were the first to be handed down by a court in response to the rioting of July 5, in which enraged Uighurs went on a rampage against Han, the dominant ethnic group in China, in the streets of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. At least 197 people were killed, most of them Han civilians, and 1,600 injured, the government announced. The ethnic rioting was the worst in decades in China and prompted cycles of retaliation as well as protests against the regional government.

Uighurs in Xinjiang have long complained of discrimination against them and of mass migrations to Xinjiang by the Han that have changed society in parts of the region they once dominated.

The six sentenced to death by the Intermediate People’s Court in Urumqi were Abdukerim Abduwayit, Gheni Yusup, Abdulla Mettohti, Adil Rozi, Nureli Wuxiu’er and Alim Metyusup, according to Xinhua. The seventh, Tayirejan Abulimit, was given a life sentence because he had confessed to murder and robbery and helped in the arrest of Alim Metyusup, Xinhua reported.

The English-language version of the Xinhua report did not provide details of the crimes. However, the Chinese-language version said that Abdukerim Abduwayit killed five people by stabbing them or beating them with an iron pipe, and that he helped set fire to buildings that forced 13 people to jump from their windows. Most of the men were convicted of similar crimes, according to the Xinhua report.

The trial on Monday was held without any prior announcement. In late August, China Daily, an official English-language newspaper, reported that trials would start that week, but regional authorities quickly said after the article appeared that a trial date had not been set.

The sentences in Urumqi were handed down just two days after two courts in southern China sentenced 11 people for their roles in the ethnic melee at a toy factory that served as a spark of the Xinjiang rioting. Xiao Jianhua, a Han man identified by a court as the “principal instigator” of that brawl, received a death sentence, another man received life in prison and nine others were given shorter prison terms.

Zhang Jing contributed research.

Iranian Journalists Flee, Fearing Retribution for Covering Protests - NYTimes.com

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By NAZILA FATHI

TORONTO — For two months Ehsan Maleki traveled around Iran with a backpack containing his cameras, a few pieces of clothing and his laptop computer, taking pictures of the reformist candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi during the presidential campaign. He did not know that his backpack and his cameras would soon become his only possessions, or that he would be forced to crawl out of the country hiding in a herd of sheep.

Mr. Maleki, 29, is one of dozens of reporters, photographers and bloggers who have either fled Iran or are trying to flee in the aftermath of the disputed June presidential election. Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based organization that promotes press freedom and monitors the safety of journalists, said the number of journalists leaving Iran was the largest since the years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The wave of departures reflects the journalists’ anxiety over the retribution many of them have faced for reporting on the government’s violent suppression of the post-election protests. As bloody clashes unfolded in the streets of Tehran, the government went to great lengths to restrict the flow of information to the outside world. Foreign journalists were banned, and local reporters and photographers were warned to stay at home.

A number of Iranian journalists defied those orders, disseminating information in phone interviews, on Internet sites and through pictures sent to photo agencies. Now, they say, they are paying the price.

Many journalists in Tehran, including a Newsweek reporter, Maziar Bahari, who is also an independent filmmaker, were among the hundreds of Iranians arrested and jailed. Some are defendants in the mass trials the government is conducting. The wife of one journalist, Ahmad Zeidabadi, said he had been tortured while in prison.

The editors of some opposition blogs, which reported the killings and the mass burial of protesters, have gone into hiding, and their whereabouts are not clear. The homes of some journalists, like Mr. Maleki, have been ransacked.

Mahmoud Shamsolvaezin, a veteran journalist and media expert in Tehran, estimated that 2,000 Iranian journalists had lost their jobs recently. He said about 400 of them had approached him for reference letters so they could get work abroad. “Journalists are leaving more than other groups because the government has closed newspapers and it has intimidated and terrorized them,” he said in an interview.

The government, which has closed at least six newspapers in the past three months, has accused the media of lying about the protests. Last week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the media a major weapon, “worse than nuclear weapons,” in the hands of Western countries, according to the Fars news agency. Almost all news agencies in Iran are affiliated with the government and rely on it for financing. The state news agencies IRNA and Fars are run by arms of the government.

Mr. Maleki was covering a demonstration on June 20 when he and dozens of protesters were chased by members of the Basij paramilitary force. They fled to an apartment building, where Mr. Maleki had enough time to hide his camera inside a chimney before members of the militia arrested them. He was jailed with hundreds of others for a day. Without his camera, authorities could not identify him as a photographer, but they recorded his national identity number.

Mr. Maleki never went home. A few days later a neighbor told him that his house had been ransacked and that his computer and personal documents, including his passport, had been taken. “They found out that I was sending pictures to Sipa,” he said, referring to an international photo agency.

He said he slept in a different place every night and continued to take photos of the protests, but finally decided it was too risky to stay. He paid $150 to a smuggler who drove him to Kheneryeh, near the border with Turkey and Iraq. Accompanied by a Kurdish guide, he crawled among a large herd of sheep for half an hour until they crossed the Iranian border and reached a steep cliff.

“It took us seven hours to climb down and reach a road in northern Iraq,” he said in a telephone interview from Iraq. He would not disclose which city he was in for security reasons.

The journalists leaving Iran come from a range of news organizations, not just those sympathetic to the opposition. A Web site supportive of Mr. Ahmadinejad, Parcham.ir, reported last week that two journalists for state-run television had defected to Italy and Britain. At least two photographers who worked for Fars have also left. Among the journalists who have left is this reporter, who covered the election and subsequent protests before leaving Iran in early July because she felt her safety was threatened.

The exact number of journalists who have left is not clear. Some worry that their families could be harassed if the government learns they are gone. Others are reluctant to reveal their locations in neighboring countries like Turkey and Iraq, fearing that government agents might find them and return them to Iran. Reza Moghimi, a photographer who worked for Fars, acknowledged that he became emotionally invested in the protests.

“The protesters were young, just like me,” Mr. Moghimi, 24, said in a telephone interview from Turkey. “It was impossible to be indifferent. I felt it was my duty to take pictures and reflect their voices abroad.”

With the camera given to him by Fars he began taking pictures every day. He said one of his pictures appeared on the cover of Time magazine anonymously, but he never told anyone he had taken it.

Mr. Moghimi said his fear increased after he saw a former colleague, Majid Saeedi, who was jailed for a month. Mr. Moghimi said he looked terrorized.

A few days later the director of Fars delivered a stern warning. “We have learned two of our photographers have been taking pictures secretly and sending them to foreign media,” he said. “We are just waiting for more information and will confront them soon.”

Mr. Moghimi got on the first plane to Turkey the next day and has applied for asylum.

Advertising - In New Campaigns, Spots Take On a Rosier Hue - NYTimes.com

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By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

The American economy is back — or so some of the country’s biggest advertisers are saying in new campaigns.

It may be a sign that the recession is ending, or it may be a sign that consumers are sick of hearing about it.

While economists and investors study housing starts and gross domestic product predictions to measure economic vibrancy, General Electric, Bank of America and other companies are using commercials to proclaim that America’s future is bright. And that may be something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“These are big companies demonstrating market leadership that will help shape public opinion,” Robert Scalea, chief executive for North America at the Brand Union, a branding firm that is part of the WPP Group, said. “Marketing is always a reflection of societal values, and many times, for smarter marketers, is a driver of them.”

The ads do not equivocate. “The American renewal is happening right now,” G.E. spots say. Bank of America closes its commercial with: “America. Growing stronger every day.” Ads for Levi’s quote Walt Whitman’s “America” and “Pioneers! O Pioneers!”

Marketers, by definition, sell things, but they are sometimes able to capture the mood of a country as they do so. Last fall, when stalwart firms like Lehman Brothers disappeared almost overnight, companies emphasized their trustworthiness and lengthy histories in commercials. In the spring, when it seemed as if the recession would go on endlessly, companies compared this era to the Depression and discussed how they had weathered that period. Now, marketers’ emphasis on American pride and an economic comeback suggests that the air is starting to crackle with optimism.

On a more functional level, once banks like Bank of America begin lending again, corporations like General Electric begin hiring again and everyone begins advertising again, the economic recovery will have some fuel.

But a message that economic woes are over may seem insensitive to some viewers. “I was looking at the G.E. one, and my first reaction was, everyone in there is smiling and happy, and it’s a very bright scene,” said Timothy B. Heath, a marketing professor at Miami University’s business school. “It seemed almost too cheery, given where a lot of people are right now.”

Bank of America’s spot begins with lights turning on all over the country in quick succession — at museums, at stadiums, in small towns. “Every business day, Bank of America lends nearly $3 billion,” the narrator says, “in every corner of the economy.” It is the first spot in an estimated $40 million campaign that will run through early next year and include more television commercials, along with print and online ads.

The spot was completed this summer, but Bank of America held it until about two weeks ago.

“We really waited for the proper time to put it on air, and we believe the time is now,” said Meredith Verdone, brand, advertising and research executive for Bank of America. She checked with the bank’s economists, and public policy and public relations executives to make sure they thought a recovery was beginning, she said.

Another part of the bank’s decision was sensing the national mood.

“A lot of that is just gut,” David Lubars, chairman and chief creative officer of the advertising agency BBDO North America, part of the Omnicom Group, which created the ad, said. “People are starting to look for opportunities to help them move ahead, and this feels like the right time to talk about that.”

Of course, from some perspectives, Bank of America contributed to the economy’s skid in the first place. Its chief executive, Kenneth D. Lewis, who recently announced his resignation, agreed last fall to acquire the faltering Merrill Lynch, but did not disclose some information about bonuses and losses at Merrill to shareholders. The decisions have made him and the company the subject of investigations by the New York attorney general and regulators. And the company accepted funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, opening it to some criticism.

“There were a lot of question marks, particularly when we took the TARP dollars, and everyone was questioning what we were doing with those dollars,” Ms. Verdone said. Now, “that is not as much of an overhang as it was,” she said, but “the headwinds are pretty strong — it’s hard to get our voice heard. So this was an opportunity for us to tell the role that we’re playing in the country’s recovery.”

G.E. is taking a similar approach. Television ads show G.E. employees working in labs and factories. “Manufacturing is part of G.E.’s belief that the American renewal is making things right here in America,” says one spot. Another talks about G.E.’s “creating the advanced technologies that create jobs.”

“We really wanted to focus on the idea that G.E.’s creating and manufacturing key technologies in America that are helping to drive and build the U.S. economy,” Judy Hu, global executive director of advertising and branding for G.E., said.

G.E. declined to discuss the cost of the campaign, but its advertising spending rose 5.1 percent in the first six months of this year, compared with the same period last year, to about $550 million, according to TNS Media Intelligence. The campaign, created by BBDO, will continue with ads in print, on television and online throughout the fall.

Smaller advertisers, too, are picking up the pro-America theme. In July, Levi’s began a campaign about a redefined America, running ads on television, in print, outdoor and online that “bring out the pioneering spirit of Levi’s and America today,” said Megan O’Connor, director of digital marketing for Levi’s, part of Levi Strauss & Company. Created by Wieden & Kennedy, the spots show images of young people set to recordings of Whitman’s poems. Tag lines in the print and outdoor campaigns are even more specific to the economy, including “Will work for better times.”

Also over the summer — on Flag Day, patriotically — New Balance began running a spot filmed in Skowhegan, Me., where it has a shoe factory.

“We’re here to stay,” a worker says over sun-soaked shots of forests, green fields and American flags. “Here we are, 2009, still making shoes in the U.S.A.”

Christine Madigan, the director of global marketing and brand management for New Balance, said the company had long emphasized its made-in-America shoes, and older consumers had liked the message. But this campaign seemed to find a new audience.

“What’s new is, it’s actually younger consumers,” she said.

And although the commercial is upbeat, the reason it is resounding with consumers may not be.

“For the first time in a long time, younger consumers are coming out of high school, out of universities, and are not able to get a job,” Ms. Madigan said. “They are saying, ‘Wow, I can’t believe there aren’t any jobs in the United States of America.’ ”

The depressing realities may partly explain why these upbeat ads appeal to marketers.

“The truth is, we want to believe they’re right,” Mr. Heath of Miami University said. “Deep down inside, even skeptics want to be hopeful.”