Ammunition sales hit record high in first year of Obama administration - washingtonpost.com

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By David A. Fahrenthold and Fredrick Kunkle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 2, 2009 4:42 PM

In a year of job losses, foreclosures and bag lunches, Americans have spent record-breaking amounts of money on guns and ammunition. The most obvious sign of their demand: empty ammunition shelves.

At points during the past year, bullets have been selling faster than factories could make them.

Gun owners have bought about 12 billion rounds of ammunition in the past year, industry officials estimate. That's up from 7 billion to 10 billion in a normal year.

It's happened, oddly, at a time when the two concerns that usually make people buy guns and bullets -- crime and increased gun control -- seem less threatening than usual.

The explanation for the run on bullets lies partly in economics: Once rounds were scarce, people hoarded them, which made them scarcer.

But the rush for bullets, like this year's increase in gun sales, also says something about how suspicious the two sides of the gun-control debate are of one another, even at a time when the issue is on Washington's back burner.

The run started, observers say, as people heeded warnings from the gun-rights lobby that a new Democratic administration would make bullets more expensive or harder to get. Now that the shortage is starting to ease, gun-control groups are voicing their own dark worries about stockpiled ammunition.

In between, in the 12 months since last October, gun shops sold enough bullets to give every American 38 of them.

"We've had people buy ammunition for calibers they don't even have the gun for: 'Oh, I want to get this gun eventually. And when I get it, ammunition may be hard to get,' " said Michael Tenny, who runs a Fort Worth-based Internet sporting goods store called Cheaper Than Dirt.

Tenny said some of his ammunition tripled in price, but he still sold it: "It's just like playoff tickets."

It was already a political truism that Democrats prompt sales of both guns and ammo. The U.S. government taxes both to support wildlife conservation, and those receipts jumped after Bill Clinton was elected and after Democrats retook Congress in 2006.

But the spike under Obama seems to be on a different scale: The receipts are on pace to set a record in 2009, according to U.S. Treasury Department data, with tax revenue due from guns up 42 percent and revenue due from ammunition at 49 percent. Recently, analysts have said earnings reports from gunmakers seem to show demand for weapons slackening.

The increase in gun buying during the past year explains a large part of the increase in ammunition sales to the private market, experts on the industry say -- but probably not all of it.

They say that bullets were bought not just by new gun owners, but also by those who already owned weapons. And they say bullet sales might have increased even faster if supply had kept up with demand.

Bullet makers say the reasons for these shortages include the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have made bullet components such as copper and brass more expensive.

For gun owners in the Washington area and elsewhere, the run on ammunition has created shortages and price increases on everything from cheap .22-caliber bullets used for target shooting to the expensive hollow-point 9mm rounds bought for home defense.

In Maryland and Virginia, as in many states, anyone over 21 can buy an unlimited amount of ammunition without a special license or background check. The District has tighter rules for its one licensed ammunition dealer: gun owners can buy bullets only in the same caliber as their registered gun.

The high sales have alarmed some anti-gun groups. Josh Sugarmann, of the Violence Policy Center said he worried about a revival of the anti-government militia movement of the Clinton era.

"This is a pattern that is repeating itself, and it is a pattern that has tremendous risk attached to it," Sugarmann said.

But gun-rights groups say the buyers are law-abiding, and responding to legitimate concerns.

"I think it's Katrina. I think it's terrorism. I think it's crime. And I also think that it's people worrying about [whether] they'll be attacked by politicians," said Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association. "They're suspicious, and justifiably so."

But the most recent FBI crime statistics, from 2008, showed that violent crime rates were the lowest since 1989. The numbers for this year have not been assembled yet, but police groups say violent crime still appears to be down, although there may have been an uptick in property crimes.

As for the subject of gun control, experts say that far from being under attack, groups opposed to gun control have won a remarkable string of victories. Clinton's ban on assault weapons expired in 2004. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the District's restrictions on handguns, ruling that the Second Amendment creates an individual right to gun ownership.

Under Obama, the White House has said it wants to stop the illegal flow of U.S. guns to Mexican drug cartels, and directed Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to review the way current gun laws are being enforced.

But a spokesman said that "the president respects and supports the Second Amendment and the tradition of gun ownership in this country." In the biggest gun-related debate of his tenure, Obama sided with gun groups, signing a bill to loosen the rules on firearms in national parks.

Still, in interviews with gun owners and ammunition dealers, many said the run on bullets was sparked by worries about what Obama might do.

"It was just logical, based on his record as a state senator and his record in the U.S. Senate," said Dave Sugg, 37, a consultant in Ashburn, after taking target practice with a .22 caliber semi-automatic Ruger rifle at a shooting range.

Chandrahas Choudhury on how globalization changed the Indian novel - Foreign Policy

How globalization is changing the Indian novel.

BY CHANDRAHAS CHOUDHURY | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2009

In a scene early in Vikram Chandra's massive 2006 cops-and-robbers novel Sacred Games, the small-time gangster Ganesh Gaitonde sells some stolen gold and feels, for the first time in his life, wealthy and powerful. He goes looking for pleasure on the streets, and a pimp offers him "a high-class cheez." But no sooner is Gaitonde left alone with the prostitute than he begins to feel set up. He has only one way of finding out whether his "cheez" is as high-class as promised. "Speak English," he orders the woman. When she complies, Gaitonde cannot understand the words, but it doesn't matter. "I knew that they were really English," he thinks to himself. "I felt it in the crack of the consonants."

The prostitute's utterances in English earn her fee, just as the Indian novelist who chooses to write in English has often been accused, especially by readers and critics at home, of being inauthentic or a sellout, forcing characters with their roots in the words and worldview of some other Indian language to "speak English." The debate, of course, is old, fraught with the historical baggage of India's British colonial past. In fact, the book now considered the first Indian novel, Rajmohan's Wife, was written in English in 1864 by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, a young magistrate of the Raj.

But the tension has taken on a new form amid the growing appeal of the "global novel" -- a story that is pitched not just to a national but a worldwide audience, and thereby necessarily written in English. As the Indian novel in English, assisted by India's rising profile in global affairs, finds an audience wherever English is spoken, it often seems to sacrifice the particularities of Indian experience for a watered-down idiom that can speak to readers across the globe.

Often such books are received very differently by those at home and those away. For instance, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (2008), the story of an antihero and a cutthroat new culture that rests upon and often perpetuates the inequities of the old India, won the Man Booker Prize and is now a global hit. Yet within India, the best-selling book did not make the short list for the Vodafone Crossword Book Award, the country's most prestigious prize for novels in English.

The use of English -- which often makes the Indian novelist both writer and translator-generates major problems of language and perspective that can be off-putting for Indian readers. Sacred Games is written in high-flown and lyrical English, but even so, the reader is persuaded that its narrator is an uneducated gangster because Chandra flecks his English with resonant Hindi words that he leaves untranslated. The novel generates, like Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children did a generation ago, its own tongue, neither wholly imitative nor entirely invented.

But in the hands of lesser writers, much of the specificity and charge of Indian life is simply lost when rendered in English, becoming paler, weaker, and more simplistic. So what readers around the world frequently find instructive, fresh, and moving about Indian novels available to them in English is often experienced by Indian readers as dull, clichéd, and superficial.

Indeed, globalization has spawned a kind of hackneyed Indian (really, South Asian) novel that, even as it tells a story, acts as a primer on Indian and Pakistani history, politics, and culture, self-consciously offering bits of potted history and contextual explanation that seem absurd coming from characters rooted in a particular world. Such novels typically use history as a crutch, pegging their tales to wars of independence, revolutions, famous assassinations, or other public events. But for all their epic canvas, they are often novelistically banal and unambitious, content for the most part to repeat the familiar gestures of an enervated realism. The result, in books like Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva (2007) or Ali Sethi's The Wish Maker (2009), is homogenized, almost cynically calculated works that inhibit the power of the novel to illuminate a particular view of life or moment in history, and that seem, like any other consumer good, to want to stupefy rather than activate the imagination and intelligence of the receiver.

In contrast, some of the best Indian novels of the last two decades, whether in English or in translation, are largely unknown to American readers. A classic example is Kiran Nagarkar's Cuckold (1997), which is set in the royal court of the 16th-century Rajput kingdom of Mewar and told in a rich and powerful English that is easily the equal of the best Indian prose writing in English today. Another example is Fakir Mohan Senapati's Six Acres and a Third, first published more than a hundred years ago but only recently translated into an English worthy of its original Oriya. A riotously satiric village comedy, it is one of the earliest and greatest Indian novels, but it appeared in the United States in 2005 to no reviews and no press.

The response of Indian critics to the so-called global novel has frequently been to invest the fiction of regional (or in Indian parlance "vernacular") Indian languages with the magic tag of "the authentic." But this perspective itself is an instance of simplistic binary thinking. Not all Indian writing in English panders to a Western audience or reduces the gold of Indian life into the base metal of English; nor does all vernacular literature deserve the aesthetic label of authenticity.

India is so multilingual and multicultural that it might be more truthful to think of every Indian novelist, whether writing in English, Urdu, Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Kannada, Telugu, or Gujarati, as a kind of translator. No novelists, whatever language they work in, can be said presumptively to be "authentic," as they sometimes are in the literary-critical wars in India today. Rather, novels earn their authenticity through their attention to specific details of character and situation and through the ingenuity of their problem-solving.

A better measure to judge the Indian novel in English should perhaps be "the specific," which is a less barbed and problematic concept than "the authentic." For it is in the details presented and the others left out, that any novel reveals the quality of its engagement with life and the presumptions it makes about its audience. All too often these days, the slice of Indian literature available to Western readers is at once too specific -- excelling in stating the obvious -- and not specific enough. The "global novel" has had to make many compromises to ensure its dominion.

Illustration by EDEL RODRIGUEZ

Chandrahas Choudhury is author of the novel Arzee the Dwarf and book critic for the Indian newspaper Mint. He also writes the literary weblog The Middle Stage.

The only two Westerners living on their own in Kandahar reveal what they've learned about the war in Afghanistan - Foreign Policy

The only two Westerners living on their own in Kandahar have been bombed, ambushed, and nearly sold to kidnappers. Here's what they've learned about the country where war just won't end.

BY ALEX STRICK VAN LINSCHOTEN, FELIX KUEHN | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2009

For a split second the room seems to vibrate under the pressure of the shock wave. Ears ring, heads retract, and muscles contract. Your mind jump-starts: Did the explosion sound big or small? Where did it come from? You hesitate, wait for another sound, but hear nothing. You jump to your feet, grabbing a camera on the way to the terrace.

Barely a half-mile away, the cloud of debris billows into the sky. The air fills with sirens, and people pour into the street, climbing on top of otherwise never-used pedestrian bridges, craning to make out something in the distance. A pickup truck piled with bloody bodies passes by from the site of the explosion as the cloud slowly descends, losing its shape and covering the city with a new layer of dust and sand.

This is Kandahar, and no one is surprised anymore. Seven times during the past year, blast waves from huge car bombs have ripped through town, shattering windows and throwing up similar clouds of debris. A few weeks ago, a bomb targeting a police convoy tore a huge crater into the street just outside our door. Not long after that, a massive car explosion devastated downtown Kandahar, killing more than 40 and wounding dozens. It was 20 minutes after the call to prayer, when everyone in Kandahar was sitting down to break the Ramadan fast. The blast blew out our windows, shaking plaster from the ceiling and sending glass flying through the room in thousands of pieces. Gunfire ensued. Once the dust settled, you could see the bomb site, just three blocks from our house, streaks of flames shooting into the night sky.

This is our life, and as the only two Westerners living permanently in Kandahar without blast walls and intrusive security restrictions to protect us, it has been a mix of isolation, boredom, disarmingly potent realizations, and outright depression in the face of what is happening. In our 18 months here, we have witnessed up close the ruinous consequences of a conflict in which no party has clean hands. We have spent countless hours talking with people of all persuasions in Kandahar, from mujahedeen who fought against the Soviets in the 1980s, to guerrillas who fought alongside the Taliban in the 1990s, to Afghans who fight against the Kabul government and foreign forces today. And we have learned that Kandahar defies simple categorization; far more understanding is necessary before we can appreciate how (and how many) mistakes have been made by the Western countries waging war here, let alone begin crafting a vision for the future.

Our Kandahar has many faces, though, not all branded by conflict. Life here is also about swimming in the nearby Arghandab River, enjoying the cool caramel taste of sheer yakh, and sitting among the branches of a friend's pomegranate orchard. It's listening to tales of the past 30 years told by those who directly influenced the course of history, and it's watching the traditional atan dance at wedding celebrations.

Still, violence affects most aspects of life in Kandahar now, and the city has become used to the bombings. For smaller attacks it takes less than an hour for things to return to normal; the people absorb violence like a sponge. After the recent blast that blew out our windows, one of our Afghan friends turned to us and said, "There are those Afghans who migrated to the West who say they miss Afghanistan." He burst into laughter. "This is what they are missing!"

On our first trip to Kandahar together, back in 2004, a friend took us to meet Akhtar Mohammad. Slightly taller than most, with a scruffy beard, a turban, and dark-rimmed eyes, he was in charge of a small police post in one of the city's dicier districts. Over tea, Mohammad offered $50,000 to our friend for the two of us. This was more than five years ago. Today, he could easily pay four times this amount and still make a more than reasonable return on his investment in ransom money.

Over the following years we made many trips around Afghanistan, but Kandahar had become the place we were most interested in: a seemingly insular and ancient society trying to come to terms with a foreign military presence and the perceived corruptions of a globalized culture.

So in the spring of 2008 we set up residence here full-time. Looking back, moving to Kandahar was actually our real arrival in Afghanistan. Away from the isolation and dislocation of the "Kabul bubble," where expats tend to congregate in heavily secured compounds, we started to live among friends, conducting our own research and editing the memoirs of Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan.

There is a sense of timelessness about Kandahar, not just with its look and feel but its importance. The city straddles Afghanistan's southern trade route to Pakistan and Iran and is considered the heartland of Afghanistan's millions of ethnic Pashtuns. The Afghan state was founded here in the mid-18th century, and the country's leaders have invariably been drawn from the tribal stock of the south. By the 1970s, Kandahar was known among foreigners as a peaceful oasis stop on the hippie trail to Kabul, and many residents still remember the music parties hosted in nearby villages, where Afghans, Europeans, and Americans would congregate for days at a time.

During the 1980s war against the Soviets, southern Afghanistan saw some of the worst fighting, and it was among the resistance groups there that the seeds of the Taliban were sown. Although Kandahar had become the de facto capital of the country by the late 1990s, it was still an isolated backwater very much removed from anything going on around it. That changed after America ousted the Taliban eight years ago, and since then, Kandahar has grown into a bustling city of nearly 1 million. Nonetheless, it still has the feel of a big village, where everyone knows everyone else's secrets and rumors spread within hours.

As foreigners, our only option is to live in downtown Kandahar, which is still relatively safe -- that is, if you discount the bomb blasts, assassinations, and occasional rocket attacks. Even so, sharing an apartment with Afghan friends and living among the local community -- we don't know any other foreigners in town -- is what allows us a measure of safety. We spend a lot of our time talking with the Pashtun tribal elders who are still left here, and there's also a certain amount of protection for us in that. We don't pay anyone anything to guard our lives.

When we first came to Kandahar, the city's violent underbelly was mostly out of sight. Now, violence is so common that it's somehow less shocking for its frequency. One day you might sit with the victim of a roadside bombing; another day you'll talk to a construction company owner who muses that he wants to hire a contract killer to eliminate his competition.

The fallout from the war in the south -- and it is very much a war -- is never far away. We rarely venture beyond city limits these days, for a trip to most of Kandahar's surrounding districts holds the real possibility of never coming back. Most people you meet are subject to some tragedy or other: The little girl who used to work as a cleaner in our building lost her father and sister in an IED attack on Canadian forces in the city; our office assistant's brother was kidnapped more than a year ago; the father of another young friend was killed by a bomb attack in a Lashkar Gah mosque last year; the list goes on and on.

The social effects of this constant bombardment -- literal and figurative -- are deeply corrosive. A common saying on parting company these days is, "I'll see you soon, if we're still alive." The assumption that you might be killed at any moment is one of the most pervasive and disruptive of mentalities. It means that you cannot think forward more than a day or two. The biggest gain in the shortest amount of time is the usual attitude to most things. With this mindset, it is almost impossible to work, let alone try to build any sort of political consensus.

The nature of the security threat means it is best to keep most activities unplanned. The same goes for extended trips outside the city. The threat from kidnapping gangs -- many of whom work in cooperation with (or from within) the police -- is very real, and to walk around the city two or three times in a row would almost certainly invite that possibility. For that reason we bought, with much hesitation and regret, a treadmill and a weight bench. For just over $1,000, we chose a middle-of-the-line new Japanese model from the 20-odd machines on display at one sports shop. Occasionally, five days will pass in which neither of us can leave the house. A treadmill is a completely unnatural proposition, but Kandahar has forced us to appreciate the value of a long run leading nowhere.

Security permitting, swimming is also a nice break from it all. Somewhat surprisingly, given that relatively few people in Kandahar know how to swim, there are many opportunities here to do so. Various friends have pools in town, shallow ponds for the most part, or sometimes on a Friday afternoon we travel just outside the city, where thousands congregate to piknik, eating fruit and cooling themselves in the chilly streams and canals of the Arghandab River.

But everything in Kandahar is a trade-off. Whatever you do, wherever you go, there is always something you will have to give up for doing it. You trade your security for a good opportunity for firsthand research, or you trade several days of relatively safe seclusion at home for the restless frustration it breeds. Something of value always has to give. We could not remain living in the city without knowing that lesson. For a while we've been considering traveling to one of Kandahar province's western districts, perhaps the most dangerous place in the country, to find out what exactly is taking place between U.S. troops and Taliban fighters. The downside: We might be captured, beheaded, or worse.

As the west's political and military leaders are only now starting to realize, greater Kandahar is and has always been the key battlefield for Afghanistan's future. The international community paid little attention to the south during the first half-dozen years following the Taliban's fall, and that neglect is now being paid back with a vengeance.

Before moving to Kandahar in early 2008, we used to take the ring road, the main thoroughfare that circles Afghanistan's perimeter, when traveling to Kabul and back. Friends in Kabul, working from behind concrete blast walls, would often show us their security briefings saying that to take the ring road meant almost certain death. Twice, armed fighters stopped one of us on the road south at an improvised checkpoint. Thankfully, the same excuse worked both times as several years of university Arabic proved persuasive enough to convince them that a European researcher was really a Syrian doctor returning from a health program down south.

Another time we drove to the desert south of Kandahar city for a picnic with friends. Word spread that some musicians had come to perform at the shrine of a local saint. We sat next to the head of one of Kandahar's government departments, who received a call from a police checkpoint farther north.

"I have eight Taliban with weapons in a car who say that they want to come to the shrine. What should we do with them?" the policeman asked.

"Let them come!" the government official replied. "They're probably just coming to enjoy the music. Who are we to stop them?" So they came. And nobody sitting there in the desert seemed the least bit worried.

In Kandahar, the Taliban are a fact of life -- not necessarily liked, but present nonetheless. The traditional Pashtun recourse to healthy dollops of pragmatism means that a government official can enjoy live music with a Talib, even while each has full knowledge of who the other is. These lines are blurred and the tectonics shift constantly wherever you go in Kandahar. The government is apparently fighting "the Taliban," this amorphous force that everybody has so much trouble defining, but with whom, at an individual level, there seems to be plenty of room to sit and do business. Indeed, previous governors of Kandahar regularly called and conferred with their ostensible enemy, the Taliban "shadow governor." More than once, we have sat down to dinner with Afghans who had been fighting Canadians or Americans in neighboring districts earlier that afternoon.

The Taliban are a mixed bunch of characters, and most Afghans here have some link to them. Everyday fighters are drawn from the huge numbers of unemployed, uneducated young men who dominate the rural population, and commanders often are the same figures who fought against the Soviets in the 1980s. Some join the Taliban because they lack a better occupation or a forward-looking vision in their lives; others, out of revenge, religious nationalism, or the simple wish to be left alone. But whatever the motivation, their reasons should be heard.

And if there's one thing we spend a lot of our time in Kandahar doing, it's sitting in on Pashtun tribal meetings, listening. When we first arrived in town, speaking barely three words of Pashto, it was easy to be awed by the long speeches that elders would frequently make, sometimes lasting almost an hour uninterrupted. These old, white-bearded Pashtuns offer a mix of respect and strong opinions. Everyone is given a chance to speak, even on occasion the two foreigners sitting in the room. Decisions are made on the basis of a complex matrix of overlapping priorities -- survival to the next day being the most important, followed closely by tribal loyalties, professional affiliation, and religion.

These meetings offer an important window into how Pashtuns approach conflict in general, how they resolve it, and how the war affects their daily lives. And though in many ways we still feel we are on a crash course in Pashtun culture, a few important takeaways are starting to emerge. Perhaps most notably, we've seen that the Pashtun tribal system, still damaged from years of war and foreign interference, is again becoming the first point of call to settle disputes between locals and others -- be they the government or the Taliban. Honor is the cornerstone of Pashtunwali, the famed tribal code meant to govern all Pashtun conduct from land disputes to revenge, but so, it seems, is survival.

We've also learned that the Taliban transcend Pashtun culture, though they came from the midst of it; their ideology and goals are not formed by their tribal or ethnic identity. And we have worked hard to start to understand how the Taliban have shaped Kandahar's recent history, conducting dozens of interviews with Afghans who played key roles in the conflicts of the past 30 years and working with Mullah Zaeef to edit and explain his life story.

Indeed, Mullah Zaeef's life offers many examples of the searing effects of decades of war. At 15, he joined the jihad, leaving his family and the refugee camp back in Pakistan. In reality just a boy, he fought alongside many of those who would later become the founders of the Taliban. His life, since before he was born, has been inscribed with the lines of conflict and loss, betrayal and sacrifice. Today, he is unable to live in Kandahar on accounts of threats from all sides, and he spends much of his time in Kabul explaining and advocating the Taliban position.

When journalist friends come to Kandahar for a few days to report a story, many ask the same question: After all the bombings, in the face of so much personal risk, why on earth do we remain in Kandahar?

This place fascinates and frustrates in equal measure, but it often feels like watching history unfold. This is the fault line, and Pashtun lands have a seemingly disproportionate role to play in the modern world: How will NATO -- or U.S. President Barack Obama, for that matter -- survive its encounter with southern Afghanistan? If the international community fails in Afghanistan, what does that mean for potential future interventions and nation-building?

The way this grand drama plays out in front of us is both captivating and addictive, but it is increasingly difficult to remain here. More than once this year we have had long discussions about how much longer we can stay. Nothing has happened to us so far, but with people being snatched from the roads and assassinated in the light of day, with a growing number of IED attacks and suicide bombings within city limits, and with the Taliban openly fighting on the streets on the outskirts, a steep paranoia occasionally pounces. In those moments everything feels like a threat.

Charles Kenny on why TV, not Facebook or Twitter, is going to revolutionize the world - Foreign Policy

It's not Twitter or Facebook that's reinventing the planet. Eighty years after the first commercial broadcast crackled to life, television still rules our world. And let's hear it for the growing legions of couch potatoes: All those soap operas might be the ticket to a better future after all.

BY CHARLES KENNY | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2009

"The television," science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury lamented in 1953, is "that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little." Bradbury wasn't alone in his angst: Television has been as reviled as it has been welcomed since the first broadcasts began in 1928. Critics of television, from disgusted defenders of the politically correct to outraged conservative culture warriors, blame it for poor health, ignorance, and moral decline, among other assorted ills. Some go further: According to a recent fatwa in India, television is "nearly impossible to use … without a sin." Last year, a top Saudi cleric declared it permissible to kill the executives of television stations for spreading sedition and immorality.

So will the rapid, planetwide proliferation of television sets and digital and satellite channels, to corners of the world where the Internet is yet unheard of, be the cause of global decay such critics fear? Hardly. A world of couch potatoes in front of digital sets will have its downsides -- fewer bowling clubs, more Wii bowling. It may or may not be a world of greater obesity, depending on whom you ask. But it could also be a world more equal for women, healthier, better governed, more united in response to global tragedy, and more likely to vote for local versions of American Idol than shoot at people.

Indeed, television, that 1920s technology so many of us take for granted, is still coming to tens of millions with a transformative power -- for the good -- that the world is only now coming to understand. The potential scope of this transformation is enormous: By 2007, there was more than one television set for every four people on the planet, and 1.1 billion households had one. Another 150 million-plus households will be tuned in by 2013.

In our collective enthusiasm for whiz-bang new social-networking tools like Twitter and Facebook, the implications of this next television age -- from lower birthrates among poor women to decreased corruption to higher school enrollment rates -- have largely gone overlooked despite their much more sweeping impact. And it's not earnest educational programming that's reshaping the world on all those TV sets. The programs that so many dismiss as junk -- from song-and-dance shows to Desperate Housewives -- are being eagerly consumed by poor people everywhere who are just now getting access to television for the first time. That's a powerful force for spreading glitz and drama -- but also social change.

Television, it turns out, is the kudzu of consumer durables. It spreads across communities with incredible speed. Just look at the story of expanding TV access in the rural areas of one poor country, Indonesia: Within two years of village electrification, average television ownership rates reached 30 percent. Within seven years, 60 percent of households had TVs -- this in areas where average surveyed incomes were about $2 a day. Fewer than 5 percent of these same households owned refrigerators. Television is so beloved that in the vast swaths of the world where there is still no electricity network, people hook up their TVs to batteries -- indeed, in a number of poor countries, such as Peru, more homes have televisions than electricity.

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What They're Watching

Soaps, soaps, and more soaps. But not all of the dramas are created equal.

As a result, the television is fast approaching global ubiquity. About half of Indian households have a television, up from less than a third in 2001; the figure for Brazil is more than four-fifths. (In comparison, just 7 percent of Indians use the Internet, and about one-third of Brazilians do.) In places like Europe and North America, 90-plus percent of households have a TV. Even in countries as poor as Vietnam and Algeria, rates are above 80 percent. But the potential for real growth in access (and impact) is in the least-developed countries, like Nigeria and Bangladesh, where penetration rates are still well below 30 percent.

If an explosion of access is the first global television revolution, then an explosion of choice will be the second. By 2013, half of the world's televisions will be receiving digital signals, which means access to many more channels. Digital broadcast builds on considerably expanded viewing options delivered through cable or satellite. Indeed, nearly two-thirds of households in India with a TV already have a cable or satellite connection. And in the United States, a bellwether for global television trends, the spread of cable since 1970 has meant an increasing number of broadcast channels are sharing a declining proportion of the audience -- down from 80 percent to 40 percent over the last 35 years. The average American household now has access to 119 channels, and a similar phenomenon is spreading rapidly around the globe.

The explosion of choice is loosening the grip of bureaucrats the world over, who in many countries have either run or controlled programming directly, or heavily regulated the few stations available. A 97-country survey carried out a few years ago found that an average of 60 percent of the top five television stations in each country were owned by the state, with 32 percent in the hands of small family groupings. Programming in developing countries in particular has often been slanted toward decidedly practical topics -- rural TV in China, for example, frequently covers the latest advances in pig breeding. And coverage of politics has often strayed from the balanced. Think Hugo Chávez, who refused to renew the license of RCTV, Venezuela's most popular TV network, after it broadcast commentary critical of his government. He regularly appears on the state channel in his own TV show Aló Presidente -- episodes of which last anywhere from six to a record 96 hours.

But increasingly, the days when presidential speechmaking and pig breeding were must-see TV are behind us. As choices in what to watch expand, people will have access both to a wider range of voices and to a growing number of channels keen to give the audience what it really wants. And what it wants seems to be pretty much the same everywhere -- sports, reality shows, and, yes, soap operas. Some 715 million people worldwide watched the finals of the 2006 soccer World Cup, for example. More than a third of Afghanistan's population tunes into that country's version of American Idol -- Afghan Star. The biggest television series ever worldwide is Baywatch, an everyday tale of lifesaving folk based on and around the beaches of Santa Monica, Calif. The show has been broadcast in 142 countries, and at its peak it had an audience estimated north of 1 billion. (Today, the world's most popular TV show is the medical drama House, which according to media consulting firm Eurodata TV Worldwide was watched by 82 million people last year in 66 countries, edging out CSI and Desperate Housewives.)

Ghulam Nabi Azad, India's health and family welfare minister, has even taken to promoting TV as a form of birth control. "In olden days people had no other entertainment but sex, which is why they produced so many children," he mused publicly in July. "Today, TV is the biggest source of entertainment. Hence, it is important that there is electricity in every village so that people watch TV till late in the night. By the time the serials are over, they'll be too tired to have sex and will fall asleep." Azad is certainly right that television helps slow birthrates, though experience from his own country and elsewhere suggests that it is by example, not exhaustion, that TV programs manage such a dramatic effect.

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The World's Most Popular
TV Shows

What does the world love to watch?

Since the 1970s, Brazil's Rede Globo network has been providing a steady diet of locally produced soaps, some of which are watched by as many as 80 million people. The programs are no more tales of everyday life in Brazil than Desperate Housewives is an accurate representation of a typical U.S. suburb. In a country where divorce was only legalized in 1977, nearly a fifth of the main female characters were divorced (and about a quarter were unfaithful). What's more, 72 percent of the main female characters on the Globo soaps had no kids, and only 7 percent had more than one. In 1970, the average Brazilian woman, in contrast, had given birth nearly six times.

But the soaps clearly resonated with viewers. As the Globo network expanded to new areas in the 1970s and 1980s, according to researchers at the Inter-American Development Bank, parents began naming their kids after soap-opera characters. And women in those parts of the country -- especially poor women -- started having fewer babies. Being in an area covered by the Globo network had the same effect on a woman's fertility as two additional years of education. This wasn't the result of what was shown during commercial breaks -- for most of the time, contraceptive advertising was banned, and there was no government population-control policy at all. The portrayal of plausible female characters with few children, apparently, was an important social cue.

Cable and satellite television may be having an even bigger impact on fertility in rural India. As in Brazil, popular programming there includes soaps that focus on urban life. Many women on these serials work outside the home, run businesses, and control money. In addition, soap characters are typically well-educated and have few children. And they prove to be extraordinarily powerful role models: Simply giving a village access to cable TV, research by scholars Robert Jensen and Emily Oster has found, has the same effect on fertility rates as increasing by five years the length of time girls stay in school.

The soaps in Brazil and India provided images of women who were empowered to make decisions affecting not only childbirth, but a range of household activities. The introduction of cable or satellite services in a village, Jensen and Oster found, goes along with higher girls' school enrollment rates and increased female autonomy. Within two years of getting cable or satellite, between 45 and 70 percent of the difference between urban and rural areas on these measures disappears. In Brazil, it wasn't just birthrates that changed as Globo's signal spread -- divorce rates went up, too. There may be something to the boast of one of the directors of the company that owns Afghan Star. When a woman reached the final five this year, the director suggested it would "do more for women's rights than all the millions of dollars we have spent on public service announcements for women's rights on TV."

TV's salutary effects extend far beyond reproduction and gender equality. Kids who watch TV out of school, according to a World Bank survey of young people in the shantytowns of Fortaleza in Brazil, are considerably less likely to consume drugs (or, for that matter, get pregnant). TV's power to reduce youth drug use was two times larger than having a comparatively well-educated mother. And though they might not be as subtly persuasive as telenovelas or reality shows, well-designed broadcast campaigns can also make a difference. In Ghana, where as few as 4 percent of mothers were found to wash their hands with soap after defecating and less than 1 percent before feeding their children, reported hand-washing rates shot up in response to a broadcast campaign emphasizing that people eat "more than just rice" if preparers don't wash their hands properly before dinner.

Indeed, TV is its own kind of education -- and rather than clash with schooling, as years of parental nagging would suggest, it can even enhance it. U.S. kids with access to a TV signal in the 1950s, for instance -- think toddlers watching quality educational programming like I Love Lucy -- tended to have higher test scores in 1964, according to research by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro of the University of Chicago. Today, more than 700,000 secondary-school students in remote Mexican villages watch the Telesecundaria program of televised classes. Although students enter the program with below-average test scores in mathematics and language, by graduation they have caught up in math and halved the language-score deficit.

Similarly, evidence that television is responsible for the grim state of civic discourse is mixed, at best. Better television reception in Javanese villages in Indonesia, according to research by Ben Olken, comes with substantially lower levels of participation in social activities and with lower measures of trust in others. Villages with access to an extra TV channel see a decline of about 7 percent in the number of social groups. Similar outcomes have been found in the United States. But improved television reception did not appear to affect the level of discussion in village meetings or levels of corruption in a village road project undertaken during Olken's study. And an examination of the early history of television in the United States by Markus Prior suggests that regions that saw access to more channels in the 1950s and 1960s witnessed increases in political knowledge, interest, and turnout, especially among less-educated TV viewers.

What about television's broader impact on governance? Here, it's the level of competition that seems to matter -- a hopeful sign given that the future of global TV is likely to be considerably more competitive. If the only channel that viewers watch is biased in its coverage, then, unsurprisingly, they are likely to be swayed toward that viewpoint. Brazil's Globo channel, for all its positive impact on fertility rates, has played a less positive role in terms of bias-free reporting. It has long had a close relationship with government, as well as a dominant market share. In Brazil's 1989 election -- a race in which Globo was squarely behind right-leaning presidential candidate Fernando Collor de Mello -- the difference between people who never watched television and those who watched it frequently was a 13 percentage-point increase in the likelihood of voting for Collor, scholar Taylor Boas found. But with channels proliferating nearly everywhere, television controllers may have much less power to sway elections today. In the choice-rich United States, for example, there is no simple relation between hours watched and voting patterns, even if those who watch particular channels are more likely to vote Republican or Democrat.

Then there's corruption. Consider the bribes that Peruvian secret-police chief Vladimiro Montesinos had to pay to subvert competitive newsmaking during the 1990s. It cost only $300,000 per month for Montesinos to bribe most of the congressmen in Peru's government, and about $250,000 a month to bribe the judges -- a real bargain. But Montesinos had to spend about $3 million a month to subvert six of the seven available television channels to ensure friendly coverage for the government. The good news here is that competition in the electronic Fourth Estate can apparently make it more expensive to run a country corruptly.

Corruption is one thing, but could television help solve a problem we've had since before Sumer and Elam battled it out around Basra in 2700 B.C. -- keeping countries from fighting each other? Maybe.

U.S. researchers who study violence on TV battle viciously themselves over whether it translates into more aggressive behavior in real life. But at least from a broader perspective, television might play a role in stemming the global threat of war. It isn't that TV reporting of death and destruction necessarily reduces support for wars already begun -- that's an argument that has raged over conflicts from Vietnam to the Iraq war. It is more that, by fostering a growing global cosmopolitanism, television might make war less attractive to begin with. Indeed, the idea that communications are central to building cross-cultural goodwill is an old one. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels suggested in the 19th century that railways were vital in rapidly cementing the union of the working class: "that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years," they wrote in The Communist Manifesto. If the Amtraks of the world can have such an impact, surely the Hallmark Channel can do even better.

The fact that Kobe Bryant (born in Philadelphia, plays for the Los Angeles Lakers) sees his basketball shirt considerably outsell those of Yao Ming (born in Shanghai, plays for the Houston Rockets) in China suggests something of that growing global cosmopolitanism at work. The considerable response of global television viewers to images of famine in Ethiopia, or the tsunami in Asia, also shows how TV is a powerful force for shrinking the emotional distance between peoples within and between countries. In the United States, an additional minute of nightly news coverage of the Asian tsunami increased online donation levels to charities involved in relief efforts by 13 percent, according to research from the William Davidson Institute. And analysis of U.S. public opinion indicates that more coverage of a country on evening news shows is related to increased sympathy and support for that country.

Of course, the extent to which television helps foster cosmopolitanism depends on what people are watching. People in the Middle East who only watched Arab news channels were considerably less likely to agree that the September 11 attacks were carried out by Arab terrorists than those exposed to Western media coverage, researchers Gentzkow and Shapiro found, even after taking into account other characteristics likely to shape their views such as education, language, and age. Similarly, the tone and content of coverage of the ground invasion of Iraq was notably different on Al Jazeera than it was on U.S. and British network broadcasts in the spring of 2003 -- and surely this helped sustain notably different attitudes toward the war. But with the growing reach of BBC World News and CNN in the Middle East, and the growing reach of Al Jazeera in the West, there is at least a greater potential to understand how the other side thinks.

Just because soap operas and reality shows can help solve real-world problems doesn't mean the world's politicians should now embrace TV as the ultimate policy prescription. There are of course a few things governments could do to harness television's power for good, such as supporting well-designed public service announcements. But for the most part, politicians ought to be paying less attention to TV, not more. They shouldn't be limiting the number of channels or interfering in the news. A vibrant, competitive television market playing Days of Our Lives or Días de Nuestras Vidas on loop might have a bigger impact even than well-meaning educational programs. And competition is critical to ensuring that television helps inform voters, not just indoctrinate them.

In the not-too-distant future, it is quite possible that the world will be watching 24 billion hours of TV a day -- an average of close to four hours for each person in the world. Some of those hours could surely be better spent -- planting trees, helping old ladies cross the road, or playing cricket, perhaps. But watching TV exposes people to new ideas and different people. With that will come greater opportunity, growing equality, a better understanding of the world, and a new appreciation of the complexities of life for a wannabe Afghan woman pop star. Not bad for a siren Medusa supposedly giving so little.

Reality Check: The Hermit Kingdom by Christian Caryl - Foreign Policy

An unchanging, irrational Stalinist dictatorship? Not so much.

BY CHRISTIAN CARYL | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2009

Forget the hairdos and the funny suits. Kim Jong Il is no madman.

We don't have access to his shrink, of course, but there's absolutely no evidence to suggest that he's irrational. In terms of judging his own people and the international community, he seems to have done a remarkable job with what he has been given. One reason: cold-eyed awareness of the reality of his position. He has told at least one reliable source that his own regime's propaganda is all lies, and he surely knows -- given that he maintains constant access to the Internet and CNN -- that his economy is a basket case and his country is an international pariah.

He also knows that it's almost impossible for him to reform without putting his own government (and probably his life) at risk. While Chinese communist leader Deng Xiaoping was able to allow in investors from Taiwan and Hong Kong to jump-start his economy without having to worry that they would end up calling the shots, Kim faces an unhappy neighbor in South Korea whose economic strength means that any sort of perestroika-style economic modernization could quickly lead to loss of political control. Indeed, Kim is thought to have circulated videotapes of the execution of Romania's communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu to North Korean communist party members, just to make sure they get the point.

Given such constraints, Kim's hysterical rhetoric, missile launches, and stentorian nuclear threats look like a cynical but logical strategy for blackmailing the world into handing over adequate food and money for him to keep his regime in business. Kim may be a dictator, but he's not deluded.

What's more, it's not just about Kim. No one should be expecting the regime to change even if Kim himself departs (a prospect much discussed since his recent bout of poor health). Although Kim has reportedly tapped his third son as his official heir, the day-to-day affairs of the country have been run for years by the Kim-headed National Defense Commission, and Kim's powerful brother-in-law, who recently joined it, is already positioned to act as regent should Kim Senior pass away. Even if 26-year-old Kim Jong Un actually becomes the putative new Great Dear Bright Amazing Leader, he's likely -- given his youth and inexperience -- to be a figurehead.

And even if this latest Kim is granted some measure of real power, you can forget all those hopeful news reports about the presumably liberalizing effect of his purported Swiss education. For Kim 3.0 will face the brutal reality that his father does: Any substantial opening will entail ceding control to the much more powerful South. For the moment, though, the North is gradually moving toward some form of collective leadership. Its aging members will be reluctant to vote for any sort of drastic reform, but they'll face the same sort of pressures that Kim does today.

Those pressures are only increasing as North Korea grows more open to the world than at any point in its 60-year history. Notwithstanding ritual media references to North Korea as "static" and "Orwellian," today's North Korea is a place where people make a living off private markets and international trade. In the mid-1990s the North's economic mismanagement compounded the damage from flooding, triggering an epochal famine that killed as many as 2 million people. The corresponding collapse of state-managed networks for the production and distribution of food forced many North Koreans -- including party members -- to look to their own devices to keep themselves fed (and the government increasingly looked away). In 2002 Kim's government tacitly acknowledged this when it pushed through a series of tentative economic reforms that essentially allowed this minimal market sector to continue existing.

Under the "sunshine policy" instituted by the late South Korean President Kim Dae Jung at the beginning of this century, the North and South dramatically boosted economic cooperation, spurring trade and travel and even creating two enclaves inside the North where Southern managers and tourists mingled with Northerners. The North did its best to restrict access, but knowledge and goods from both zones have spilled out -- perhaps one reason why Pyongyang has seen fit to crack down on both of them in recent months. One defector told Los Angeles Times correspondent Barbara Demick in 2005: "It is not the same old North Korea anymore except in name."

Lately, according to scholars such as Andrei Lankov at South Korea's Kookmin University, the government has been struggling to push back against the unwanted consequences of this reluctant liberalization. Not long ago a Japanese newspaper reported a new wave of raids by so-called "109 squads," special police units that sweep through villages in search of illicit videos and music from the South. As recently noted by members of parliament in Seoul, smuggled South Korean ramen noodles and whoopie pies are particularly prized by those in the North who can afford them. Kim Jong Il has reason to take such trifles seriously. The number of North Koreans who have voted with their feet over the past decade, leaving the country for economic and political reasons, is now probably in the hundreds of thousands.

Of course, North Korea still maintains a vast police state that includes a network of concentration camps spanning the country. And yet there are also intriguing signs that the government's power is no longer unlimited. As part of the campaign to reassert its authority, the central government has repeatedly tried to crack down on the grass-roots private markets that serve as the main source of sustenance for ordinary folk, but so far it has notably failed to make the measures stick. An attempt to close a key market in the city of Chongjin last year actually set off public protests. And a new set of tough regulations this year has proven mysteriously hard to implement -- perhaps because communist party officials now rely on the markets to stay alive themselves.

Yet the idea that the North has enclosed itself in an airtight seal remains a staple of international coverage. That may have been accurate in the past. But over the last 10 years the country's trade with China has mushroomed, and with the inflow of Chinese goods have also come video players, South Korean DVDs, and illicit Bibles. Defectors report the popularity of everything from South Korean boy bands to the movie Titanic. As a result, the regime's propaganda has largely lost its punch.

North Korea's growing dependence on cross-border trade also means that it's much more vulnerable to external pressure than is commonly recognized. Many North Korea watchers think that sanctions imposed by the administration of George W. Bush in 2005 played a crucial role in bringing Pyongyang back to the six-party talks a few months later; the sanctions proved effective because many Chinese banks shut down their business with the North for fear of losing access to the U.S. financial sector. And this year trade between China and North Korea has slipped perceptibly -- perhaps because a new round of U.N. sanctions, imposed after Pyongyang tested a nuclear weapon last year, has also affected the North's financial dealings with Chinese partners. That could be one reason why Pyongyang has suddenly started making overtures to the international community again after months of saber rattling.

So let's try to forget the lazy assumption that Kim is simply unhinged. (For what it's worth, at least one of the U.S. officials to have dealt directly with him, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, has repeatedly insisted that "Kim is not a nut.") There's no question that the regime remains extremely dangerous to its own citizens -- and potentially to the outside world as well, through proliferation or desperate acts of aggression. And many experts warn that it's highly unlikely that Pyongyang will ever give up its nukes. The nuclear program is the only national success story that Kim Jong Il can really call his own, making it a key source of legitimacy at a time when his standing is weaker than ever. But that doesn't mean that outside powers should take off the pressure. Containing North Korea's threats to international security will continue to be a full-time job.

It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Pork! - BusinessWeek

Image via Wikipedia

Boeing's C-17 cargo aircraft cost $250 million apiece. The Pentagon says it has plenty. But it's nearly impossible for Obama to kill a project that provides jobs in 43 states

By Ben Elgin and Keith Epstein

President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates want to leave the Cold War in the past—finally—and reshape the U.S. military into more of a counterinsurgency force. They have made reforming weapons acquisition a major priority, saying that some hardware designed for battling Soviet armies or other massive foes in vast open-field clashes ought to be replaced by lighter, less expensive gear. The Administration has pared billions from the budget for the Lockheed Martin (LMT) F-22 fighter, a super-sophisticated plane conceived in the 1980s for dogfights against Moscow's best. The Pentagon has also reined in a sprawling high-tech infantry project called Future Combat Systems that Boeing (BA) oversees. All told, a half-dozen major weapons systems have been eliminated for an estimated savings of more than $100 billion over coming decades.

But it's not like military spending is actually going down. At a projected $107 billion for 2010 alone—a 5% rise over this year—the Pentagon's base budget for planes, ships, missiles, and guns has grown more than 50% since 2000. Reforming and redirecting military procurement always riles members of Congress trying to protect jobs in their home districts. Lawmakers are teaming up with Lockheed, Boeing, and other defense contractors to push back fiercely on certain targeted programs, even when the Pentagon says it doesn't need the weaponry in question. In some areas, organized labor has joined the fight.

The C-17 Globemaster offers one illustration of successful opposition to the Obama-Gates push for control of weapons spending. C-17s are large cargo planes produced by Boeing that cost $250 million apiece. They have been used heavily since 1993 to transport troops, tanks, and supplies. Every year since 2006, the Pentagon has said that it has enough C-17s. And every year, Congress overrules the military and authorizes funds for additional planes. In October the Senate approved $2.5 billion in the 2010 budget for 10 more C-17s, which would bring the fleet to 215.

"It's about political engineering," says Mandy Smithberger, a national security staff member of the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington nonprofit. "Companies design weapons systems to make them difficult to kill."

The C-17 by most accounts has served the Pentagon reliably and well. The cavernous Globemaster is flying in both Iraq and Afghanistan. But the real reason Congress wants more of them has little to do with military need. Boeing has built the C-17's industrial base for political survivability.

The company has spread manufacturing across no fewer than 43 states. C-17 production lines employ more than 30,000 workers, many of them relatively well paid by factory-wage standards. Many of those jobs would be at risk if C-17 work ground to a halt.

The White House understands the challenge. "The impulse in Washington is to protect jobs back home, building things we don't need at a cost we can't afford," President Obama said in August in a speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention in Phoenix. "The special interests, contractors, and entrenched lobbyists—they're invested in the status quo, and they're putting up a fight."

Enthusiasm for the Globemaster crosses political lines. "We're fighting two wars and meeting humanitarian needs; we need these planes," says Senator Kit Bond (R-Mo.). "It is a defense industrial-base issue, too. It produces jobs in 43 states. But that is secondary. We wouldn't push that unless there is a real need." Boeing's defense business has its headquarters in St. Louis.

Bond, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), and 16 colleagues began circulating a letter in April urging members of the Senate Appropriations Committee to keep funding the plane despite clearly stated objections from the White House and Pentagon. In California, C-17 production employs 5,000 workers at a final assembly plant in Long Beach.

Bond's fellow Missourian, Senator Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, however, evinced ambivalence in comments to the media earlier this year about earmarking money for more Globemasters. Boeing noted that she didn't sign the letter to the Appropriations Committee. So the company mobilized to change her mind.

The aircraft manufacturer convened a strategy meeting with local labor leaders in mid-spring at its St. Louis offices. George C. Roman, a Boeing vice-president for government operations, helped lead the discussion. A key challenge described by the Boeing side was the need to shore up wavering support from legislators, including McCaskill, according to Robert A. Soutier, president of the Greater St. Louis Labor Council, who attended the gathering.

Shortly after the meeting, Soutier criticized McCaskill in the St. Louis media, questioning her support for thousands of local jobs. McCaskill responded quickly. She defended her C-17 bona fides and in May announced she was sending a letter to Obama and Gates emphasizing her backing for the Boeing cargo aircraft.

Since then, she has showed up at machinist rallies, met Boeing officials, and spoken out forcefully on the plane's behalf. Adrianne Marsh, a spokeswoman for McCaskill, called the earlier discord "a misunderstanding" and says the senator has advocated the program all along. McCaskill "believes the C-17 can stand on its own and compete for these dollars based on its merits," says Marsh.

Soutier says that communication has improved between Boeing and McCaskill and that he's pleased with the senator's support for the C-17. A Boeing spokesman declined to discuss the company's lobbying but said in a prepared statement: "We routinely meet with our employees, their representatives, elected officials, and other key stakeholders to provide updates on our business operations." The spokesman added: "We greatly appreciate the support the C-17 continues to receive. We look forward to continuing to work with both our customer and the Congress to ensure this valuable airlifter is available to support our war fighters and our nation's future airlift requirements."

In late September, as Congress restored money for 10 additional C-17s, the Administration stated that "it strongly objects to" the funding. White House spokesman Thomas Victor told BusinessWeek: "The President never thought this was going to be easy, but he and Secretary Gates are committed to pushing for these reforms."

Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), a prominent critic of Pentagon spending, went to the Senate floor on Oct. 5 to make a last-minute effort to strip funds from the defense budget for the new C-17s. "One would have expected the President and Secretary Gates to be outraged," he said. "However, we have heard barely a word of opposition from them." The next day, McCain's motion was defeated, 68 to 30.

John Murtha (D-Pa.), the powerful chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, said on Oct. 21 that he expects the fiscal 2010 budget to provide for the 10 additional Globemasters. He urged Boeing to trim the price of the plane to about $200 million each, but it remains to be seen whether the manufacturer will lower its bill.

Business Exchange: Read, save, and add content on BW's new Web 2.0 topic network

Machinists Throw a Wrench

While it fights to preserve the Pentagon budget for more C-17 cargo planes, Boeing is struggling with International Assn. of Machinists leaders over a proposed no-strike agreement in connection with the 787 passenger liner. According to the Seattle Times, talks are "deadlocked and hindered by distrust on each side." The Machinists have said they would agree to a no-strike deal through 2020 if Boeing guarantees a second 787 assembly line in Everett, Wash., among other conditions, the Times reported.

For more on Boeing's labor situation, go to http://bx.businessweek.com/Boeing/reference/

Elgin is a correspondent in BusinessWeek's Silicon Valley bureau. Epstein is a correspondent in BusinessWeek's Washington bureau.

Gelato U. - Time

Image via Wikipedia

By Nina Burleigh / Bologna

Some students arrive in Bologna, Italy, with just a secret indulgence — without shop locations, business plans or $70,000 on hand for must-have machinery. They head to Carpigiani Gelato University to learn how to turn sacks of sugar and crates of oranges, kiwis, lemons and persimmons into spoonfuls of earthly bliss.

Gelato is the ultimate refinement of a Mediterranean flavored-ice tradition that supposedly dates back to the ancient Egyptians. In the past half-century, Italians have designed machines — engineered and produced in the same region as Ferraris and Lamborghinis — that can produce ever tinier crystals of ice, allowing for less water, less air and more taste. (See pictures of Gelato University.)

For three weeks every month, 20 to 30 students from the world over gather in Bologna inside a tiered lecture room in a Jetsons-style building erected in the early 1960s for the brothers Carpigiani, who perfected the first electric gelato machine. There, a gelato maestro shows them how to transform lowly buckets of cream or bags of fruit into cold, concentrated flavor that often has half the fat of American ice cream.

Besides the secret of perfect gelato, many students are attracted by the sweet dream of self-employment. Gelato is a major growth business worldwide, a cheap luxury defying the recession as people turn to smaller pleasures. And despite the $1,052 tuition for a weeklong session, so far this year enrollment at Gelato U is up 87% compared with the same period in 2008. Who's signing up? "Mostly 40-year-olds looking for a new life," says Patrick Hopkins, director of the six-year-old educational offshoot of the Carpigiani company, which produces a majority of the world's gelato machines. (See gelato recipes from a Gelato University maestro.)

"About eight years ago, I got the idea" to become a gelato artisan, says a 45-year-old student, a European executive who asked not to be identified by name or even home country for fear of tipping off employers to a possible midcareer switch. "I figure I have about 15 years of energy left. Do I want to spend it climbing the corporate ladder? Or do I finally do this?"

Maestro Gianpaolo Valli whips such students into shape. "You need to know what makes a strawberry!" he shouts. His lively lectures, delivered in deliriously Italian-cadenced, non sequitur — studded English, cover such topics as how to identify a fruit's sugar content and how to do the surprisingly complicated math of balancing sugar (an antifreeze) and fat (the opposite): "You increase the fat content, but it freezes. So you need to compensate with sugar. You say, 'Maestro, not possible!' Yes, it is possible! I show you!"

Students attending Gelato U aim to build their gelaterias in far corners of the globe. They know that real gelato is a delicate thing that cannot survive being taken out and put back into a freezer, that it is best consumed where it is made. That's what Melissa Green, 36, an HR manager in Tampico, Ill., learned in September during her first trip to Italy, when she consumed her first gelato. After a few bites of green apple, a light went on, illuminating her future: "I tasted this, and I was like, We have got to bring this back home."

See pictures of Italian coffee.

See the top 10 food trends of 2008.

Skype and Job Interviews: Webcam Meetings on the Rise - Time

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By Barbara Kiviat

Get ready for a closeup: your next job interview might be on webcam. Looking to save time and money, companies are turning to video-chat software as a cheap, low-hassle way to vet job candidates. That means a growing number of people looking for work are meeting their prospective new bosses not at the office but in the comfort of their own home.

Naturally, the transition from in-person to online isn't without its hiccups. Fuzzy transmissions, dropped calls (especially on wireless networks) and unusual disruptions are all par for the course. Tip No. 1: Get your dog out of barking range before you start the interview. (We'll return to the pointers in a bit.) (See pictures of the history of the cell phone.)

What's the draw? Largely money. Last year, as executives at online retailer Zappos.com looked to cut expenses, they noticed how much the firm spent on travel. In HR alone, it easily cost $1,000 a pop to fly out job candidates and put them up for the night. The firm had used Skype internally, so about six months ago, recruiters started trying it for interviews. (Watch TIME's video "How to Ace a Job Interview on Skype.")

Their opinion: a video link does a pretty good job of replacing an in-person meeting — and in a way that a phone call can't. "If you see facial expressions and body language, you have a different sense of what a person is saying," says recruiting manager Christa Foley. Now, instead of flying out 20 finalists for a job, the company first screens with Skype and then brings in only the best two or three candidates. (See 10 ways Twitter will change American business.)

Job seekers are hopping on board too. Last spring, after Stephen Bhadran got laid off, he quickly realized there were more openings for computer programmers in Dallas, Atlanta and Los Angeles than in South Florida, where he lived. So he cast a wide net — and got a bite from the University of California, Los Angeles. The university wanted to interview him but wouldn't pay the airfare. "I was laid off and running out of funds," says Bhadran. "I couldn't fly on my own dime." He suggested interviewing by Skype. He got his request — and the job. (See the best social-networking applications.)

Things don't always run smoothly. Bobby Fitzgerald, a restaurateur who has been interviewing job candidates by Skype since March, has had his share of amusements. For instance: the candidate who leaned forward while he spoke, giving Fitzgerald an intimate view of his nose. Another, a college senior, didn't bother cleaning up his dorm room before the interview; the mess was painfully visible in the background.

And then there was the dog that wouldn't stop barking. Fitzgerald cut the interview short and said he'd have to reschedule. Did the disruption influence his decision? "Well," he says, "a big part of management is handling problems as they arise."

Still, webcam interviews are entirely worth it, he says. Fitzgerald runs restaurants in four states and likes to hire from the nation's top culinary and hospitality schools. It's rare that he, the job candidate and the job are all in the same time zone. And the benefit of video-interviewing for him isn't just saved money — it's also saved time. "More than once, I've flown someone in and within an hour, I realize it's not a fit," he says. "But I'm stuck with that person for six more hours." (See 25 must-have travel gadgets.)

So what should you do if you're asked to interview by Skype — or even brave enough to suggest it yourself?

First off, realize that we perceive people differently through a camera than we do in person. Bill McGowan, a former news anchor who now trains people to go on TV, starts his list of pointers with lighting: whether you're sitting in your kitchen or an office borrowed from a friend, make sure there's no bright light (like from a window) behind you. That will only darken your face. When your interviewer is talking, it's fine to look at his image on the screen, but when you answer, look at the camera. That's how to make "eye contact." Avoid wearing patterns and the color white, since we notice white spots on a screen first — you want your interviewer drawn to your teeth and eyes, not to your shirt. And don't forget that what's behind you is visible too. "It's best to put away the Mad Men bar," says McGowan.

Next, think about framing. Sitting flush with a plain white wall will make you look like you're in a police lineup, so angle your knees to the corner of your computer screen, and then turn your head slightly back to look at the camera. Sit tall in your chair, but not too close to the camera: the first three buttons of your shirt should be visible, or else you risk looking like a floating head, counsels Priscilla Shanks, a coach for broadcast journalists and public speakers. Most important, do a dry run with a friend to check your color, sound and facial expressions — neutral often comes off as glum onscreen. (See pictures of vintage computers.)

After all that, don't forget that this is still a job interview. Even though you're not meeting face to face, dress as though you are. When you "walk in," have your résumé ready — this time, as an e-mail attachment. And don't forget to do all the standard prep work. Are you ready to talk about your greatest weakness? "This adds another layer, but people will still expect you to be prepared to have a conversation with them," says career counselor Judith Gerberg.

Though that's not to say you can't acknowledge the medium. This past summer, Deanna Reed, principal of the Marie Murphy School in suburban Chicago, started doing Skype interviews and has already considered candidates from as far away as Asia. "The time difference was so great, it was like 1 in the morning for him," she says about a teacher in Japan. "I said, 'Oh, you had to get on your suit in the middle of the night?' And he said, 'No, I have my pajamas on the bottom.' He was fun — he had a real sense of humor." Even over video, it's possible to make a great first impression.