World Beat Archives - Page 50 of 140 - Foreign Policy In Focus

What’s So Funny about Outsourcing?

by John Feffer | Oct 26, 2010

What were NBC executives thinking? The unemployment rate remains near double digits, and many Americans have simply stopped looking for work. And what does the network premier this fall but a sitcom called Outsourced about an American manager sent to run a call center in India. The jokes revolve around funny names, unappetizing food, Sikh turbans, arranged marriages. “It’s hard to know what a normal smell is here and what isn’t,” says Todd Dempsy, the culturally insensitive manager played by Ben Rappaport, in last week’s “Touched by an Anglo” episode. And there’s indeed something fishy about a show that capitalizes on U.S. jobs going overseas during an economic downturn.

Not-So-Magical Realism

by John Feffer | Oct 19, 2010

Writing about it didn’t, alas, prevent it from happening.

In the late 1940s, Gore Vidal lived in Guatemala, where he shared a house with the writer Anaïs Nin, lived on the cheap, and wrote Dark Green, Bright Red. Published in 1950, this undeservedly obscure novel describes how the operatives of the World Banana Company work behind the scenes in an unnamed Central American country to help a smooth-talking dictator depose a president committed to land reform and free elections.

The White Noise of War

by John Feffer | Oct 12, 2010

In the high-vaulted main hall of Union Station in Washington, DC, the sound of a drone attack interrupts the morning rush hour. A dozen people suddenly freeze in place. Some point up into the air. Others crouch with hands over their heads in a vain attempt at self-protection. The commuters on their way to and from the trains pause to look at the stationary figures. After a minute or so, the leaf-blower sound of the drone attack cuts off, and the figures crumple to the ground, crying out in pain. As the cries of the victims fade, two attendants cover the bodies with blood-stained sheets.

Take This Job and…

by John Feffer | Oct 5, 2010

The song Take This Job and Shove It hit No. 1 on the country music charts in 1978. The blue-collar worker in the song that Johnny Paycheck made famous was working up the nerve to leave the factory after 15 years on the production line. It wasn’t necessarily the best time to mouth off at the line boss. The U.S. economy wasn’t so hot. Unemployment was 6.1 percent, which politicians considered unacceptable. Real wages, which peaked in 1973, were in a long tailspin. Unions continued to hemorrhage members. Workers were angry, and the song captured some of that feeling.

Gorbachev of the Pentagon?

by John Feffer | Sep 28, 2010

The United States is facing a Soviet-sized crisis. Where is the Gorbachev who can rein in our military?

‘They’ Are Not Taking ‘Our’ Jobs

by John Feffer | Sep 21, 2010

My neighbor two doors down flies a Confederate flag alongside his more conventional stars and stripes. He drives a pickup truck, sports a number of provocative tattoos, and is about as white as Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich. I don’t know if he would vote for either Sarah or Newt, but he’s a pretty conservative guy. Still, he gets along reasonably well with the interracial couple who lives between us. And his son-in-law, an immigrant from El Salvador, just spent the last two weekends replacing our damaged shed with one that looks a whole lot better than anything Home Depot offers.

Dealing With Iran

by John Feffer | Sep 14, 2010

It seems to be an open-and-shut case. Nuclear weapons are bad. It’s best for the world if no more countries acquire nuclear weapons. Iran is currently engaged in uranium enrichment that could eventually produce a nuclear weapon. It built a secret facility to advance this program and might now be building another one. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government makes all sorts of threatening statements about Israel, the United States, the West. We should therefore do everything possible to prevent Iran from going nuclear.

Repackaging Assassination

by John Feffer | Sep 7, 2010

Greetings from Yemen. It’s been a year since I corresponded directly with you. Perhaps you remember my 2009 memo in which I recommended outsourcing our assassinations – er, sorry, our “targeted killings” – to China. I suggested that China would do a better job of it than Blackwater. I never received a reply from you. I trust that this memo had nothing to do with my transfer from Shanghai to Sana’a. Don’t get me wrong. It’s good to be in the thick of things here in Yemen. But I sometimes miss pork dumplings as well as reliable electricity and running water.

My Weak Muslim President

by John Feffer | Aug 31, 2010

Except for a few residual Know-Nothings, Americans wouldn’t think twice about voting for a Catholic president. In the last election, President Obama abolished the presidential race taboo. And we’re likely to have a woman president in the next decade or so. Of course, we haven’t elected a Catholic since Kennedy, we might not break the race barrier again for a while, and let’s hope our first woman president isn’t Mama Grizzly herself.

Can We Talk?

by John Feffer | Aug 24, 2010

Law became sexy in the mid-1980s. I still find this a bewildering transformation in American society. At the time, I thought that there could be nothing quite so boring as a court case or a legal brief. But then the TV show L.A. Law debuted in 1986, and lawyers never looked so good. The following year, Scott Turow published Presumed Innocent, and several years after that John Grisham brought out his second novel, The Firm. U.S. publishing was never the same.