Crossposted with TomDispatch.com
Afghanistan still awaits final results from the nationwide election held last month to fill the 249 seats of the lower house of parliament. Deciding which of the more than 2,500 candidates won takes time because the Electoral Complaints Commission that investigates voting irregularities, made up of five men handpicked by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, was swamped by more than 4,200 complaints.
Last year, when Karzai himself ran for reelection, he busied himself with backroom deals, while his supporters were caught red-handed stuffing ballot boxes and having a good laugh. Every Afghan knew that the president who had been foisted on them by foreigners in 2001 was stealing the election. Yet the international community, led by the United States, proclaimed the process if not exactly “free and fair,” at least “credible” -- which is to say: Hey, what’s a little fraud among friends?
With that experience so fresh in memory, the current Electoral Complaints Commission went to work with unusual efficiency, resolving most complaints with unaccustomed speed. And last week the chairman of the Independent Election Commission, an oversight body also selected by President Karzai, announced that it would throw out as invalid almost a quarter of the 5.6 million votes cast. Until that moment Afghans, who aspire to democracy, had hoped for a more honest election than the charade that returned Karzai to power in 2009. No such luck. The partial results of this one look just as bad as the presidential vote, with roughly the same percentage of ballots invalidated.
While dumping fraudulent votes may give the appearance of rigorous oversight, the numbers raise a new mystery: where did those votes come from? In the two days following the election last month, the running total of votes cast rose from 3.6 million to 4.4 million. Now, it has suddenly jumped again to 5.6 million -- of which 1.3 million ballots have been discarded, leaving a total of 4.3 million valid votes. Election-watcher Martine van Bijlert of the Afghanistan Analysts Network described the attitude of the Independent Election Commission this way: “If you want to know where the additional votes came from: They were added fraudulently, now they have been removed, and that is really all you need to know.”
Perhaps noting that the fraud factor was holding steady, a spokesman for the Independent Election Commission declared that a level of fraud with more than one in five votes considered phony is “normal” in an election.
Thus do official bodies in Afghanistan’s widely advertised new democracy -- the one for which our troops are fighting -- smooth over all irregularities and make short work of making do, of overseeing elections as usual: not free, not fair, just good enough for Afghans?
But are they?
Without waiting for final results, what passes for “the international community” has already pronounced the elections a “success,” but an email from a parliamentary candidate, a woman I know named Mahbouba Seraj, tells a different story:
I honestly don’t know from where to start. My frustration, disappointment, and anger are so great I am afraid they might get the better of me. I was involved in the first presidential election of Afghanistan in 2004 and the first parliamentary election in 2005, but oh how different those elections were. I won’t say they were better because they too were captured by the War Lords, Commanders, and criminals -- just like this election -- but the level of fraud and corruption was nothing compared to this. Those men used force and got elected by their rifles and machine guns, but this election was… unbelievable. I have no other word to use.
Many “unbelievable” stories litter this election, but Seraj’s tale is especially instructive because, in the end, it is all too believable. In fact, it’s a pretty simple story of courageous idealism confounded by big men with money.
On the Campaign Trail
When I last saw candidate Seraj in Kabul, the Afghan capital, in July, she was about to leave for Nuristan Province to campaign. It was a brave undertaking. Nuristan lies in the northeast of the country, sandwiched between Panshir Province and Pakistan, along the southern face of the Hindu Kush, a monumental sub-range of the Himalayas. Its precipitous slopes and high valleys are so forbidding and remote that even Islam did not reach Nuristanis until the late nineteenth century, and they are to this day considered a unique people.
The Taliban move freely in Nuristan. In 2008, they almost overran a U.S. base there, killing nine American soldiers. Then-Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal responded by withdrawing American troops from all four of their major bases in the province. The U.S. military high command has given up on certain Afghan locales -- in 2010, American troops notably left the deadly and unattainable Korengal Valley, not far from Nuristan -- but never before to my knowledge had they given up on a whole province.
Nevertheless, Seraj, a woman of fierce energy, wanted to represent the people of the Duaba and Mondawel districts in western Nuristan, where her grandmother was born. She put it this way to me: “I believe in democracy so much. I want it so much for Afghanistan. I tell my constituents, ‘I don’t believe in buying votes as so many candidates do. Please give them to me willingly, because then you will have your representative in Parliament who will truly serve you.’”
Worried for her safety, I reminded her that, during the 2005 parliamentary campaign in her province, another female candidate, Hawa Nuristani, and several of her staff had been shot.
“Yes,” Seraj agreed, “but she survived, and she won.”
Mahbouba Seraj’s recent email about her election race was not meant for me alone. It was addressed this way: “To my beautiful and forgotten province and its lovely and amazing people.” It was an English translation of an open letter she had written to her constituents explaining why, in this important election, they had not been able to vote at all. Reading it made clear why she considered the election of 2010 even more outrageous than previous shameful Afghan escapades in electioneering and fraud.
In 2005, the men in power in Nuristan had tried to murder the candidate they opposed. Since then they have learned that the internationals -- read Americans -- will accept any results as long as the election process looks reasonably good. In 2010, far more sophisticated, they murdered democracy simply by killing time.
As Seraj wrote:
First of all, Nuristan had not been made ready for an election. They didn’t have Army and police personnel to provide security as promised. Then the hard-working head of the election committee of Nuristan was fired two weeks before polling day because some powerful candidates complained about him to the Election Commission. The young man who replaced him seemed to have no idea what his job was, yet he made sure the ballot boxes didn’t get to Mondawel and Duaba districts, which very conveniently happened to be my constituencies.
The most incredible part of the story is that this young man had the power to stop a plane that was ready to take off to deliver the ballot boxes. He refused to hand over the ballot boxes for Mondawel district to the official in charge of the district and the staff of armed men designated to carry the ballots through the mountains to all the remote polling centers in Mondawel. He created delays and made excuses for days until it was too late.
Officials in Kabul were also well-versed in the technique. When Seraj tried to contact the head of the Independent Election Commission in Kabul, she reported:
His very polite assistant would talk to me and tell me, ‘I will ask Mr. So-and-so to call you back,’ but he never did. Finally, I had to leave Nuristan and come to Kabul to meet with him, but when I arrived for our appointment, he had left the city to take care of other problems, and somehow I had not been notified.
That day I tried to get in touch with anyone I could think of who might be able to help -- the Minister of Defense, the Head of the United Nations in Kabul, Mr. de Mistura, and other officials at UNAMA [The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan] -- but everyone was engaged. By then I knew the level of fraud and corruption in Nuristan was going to hit the roof, and it did. Ballots were stolen from polling stations and scattered on the mountainsides or taken to people’s houses and filled out. To the last minute, people were offering to buy and sell voting cards and votes. What could we do? My campaign manager and I filled out complaints to the Election Complaints Commissions in both Nuristan and Kabul.
Those complaints must now be among the thousands filed by people all over the country with similar disappointed dreams of real Afghan democracy -- the very complaints now being so efficiently dealt with in Kabul even as disgruntled voters take to the streets of Herat, Kunduz, Paktia, Ghor, and other cities to protest mass disqualifications that seem to fall inequitably on certain areas or ethnic groups. Yet angry voters and candidates are turned away from the Election Complaints Commission with useless, unregistered receipts. Recognizing election proceedings that look “eerily familiar,” analyst van Bijlert notes: “The processes that are aimed at cleaning up the vote and dismissing fraudulent ballots have become so murky that they themselves are now widely seen as simply the next phase of manipulation.”
Democratic Dreaming
Mahbouba Seraj acquired her dreams of democracy from her ancestors -- and from America. She is the granddaughter of Habibullah, who was the progressive amir or king of Afghanistan from 1901 to 1919, and the great granddaughter of Abdur Rahman, the amir of Afghanistan from 1880 to 1901. He introduced Islam to Nuristanis, gave Afghanistan its present borders, and for the first time subdued its disparate tribes, bringing them under centralized rule. She is also the niece of Amanullah, the modernizing amir who ruled from 1919 to 1929, pioneering in the fields of education and women’s rights, winning a war against the British, and gaining the country its independence.
Seraj herself graduated from Kabul University before being thrown into prison with her family after the monarchy was overthrown in 1973. The family fled the country in 1978 before the impending Soviet invasion and took refuge in the United States where, Seraj says, “I lived, learned, worked, and in the end buried both my parents.” Her life changed completely when she saw an Afghan video of the Taliban executing a woman, clad in a faded blue burqa, in Kabul Stadium where, as a girl, she had happily watched games of soccer and buzkashi -- Afghan polo -- and had once attended a concert given by Duke Ellington.
When the Taliban fell, she returned to Kabul and went to work as a volunteer. She trained young diplomats for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; she trained women parliamentary candidates in the arts of political campaigning and, after they were elected in 2005, in the arts of legislation. She also created and hosted a national public-service radio program called "Our Beloved Afghanistan" and taught aspiring Afghan businesswomen at the American University of Afghanistan.
Then, last summer she went to Nuristan to campaign. To her supporters back in Kabul she then wrote:
I want to help the most underserved people in the whole of Afghanistan, the Nuristanis. If only the world knew how these magnificent people live in these great valleys of Nuristan, without roads, schools, hospitals, electricity, or any of the basic necessities of life. The women of Nuristan do all the difficult physical work. They gather wood, they pick the fruit from the trees, they tend their animals and their children and their husbands, and they walk for miles, climbing steep mountains with huge loads on their backs and their kids in their arms. I want to be a voice for Nuristan. I want to put it back on the map of Afghanistan.
In her most recent message to her constituents, she wrote:
Now, I have no idea how the Election Complaints Commission is going to decide who has won this election. The ECC keeps saying, ‘We have criteria and will decide accordingly.’ But I wonder what criteria they will apply to candidates who have not received votes from their constituencies because some few people got paid to prevent the votes from being cast. Perhaps the government will abandon Nuristan, or perhaps it will pick its own winner and call this “A SUCCESSFUL AND JUST ELECTION SPECIALLY FOR NURISTAN PROVINCE, THE MOST BACKWARD, POOR, BEAUTIFUL, AND FORGOTTEN PROVINCE OF AFGHANISTAN.
Such a conclusion might be good enough for many Afghans whose dreams of democracy faded even before last year’s presidential election when word first began to circulate nationwide that the fix was in for Karzai. At least it would be no more than they have come to expect from repeated exercises in counterfeit democracy staged, it seems, more for the benefit of international audiences (and voters) than for the Afghan electorate.
Here’s a question for Americans: Would such a conclusion be good enough for us? We are, after all, citizens of the democracy that installed the largely fundamentalist government of Afghanistan in the first place, labeled it “democratic,” and staged the first Afghan presidential election in 2004 with unseemly haste as George W. Bush eyed his own run for reelection. Assuming command in Afghanistan in 2010, General David Petraeus was careful to set American expectations low: "We're not trying to turn Afghanistan into Switzerland in five years or less," he said. "What's good enough, traditional organizing structures and so forth are certainly fine."
International apologists for “good enough” who foot the bill and stage Afghan elections no longer even pretend to aim for standards like those of Switzerland -- standards that nonetheless enter the democratic dreams of a great many Afghans. They assume instead that Afghans naturally cheat. As it happens, Mahbouba Seraj does not. And while it may be unreasonable to expect perfection, the fact that Afghan elections grow ever more crooked as the years pass, and Afghan voters increasingly disillusioned, suggests that Afghans are learning to play (if they care to play at all) by what they take to be American rules.
Put yourself in the place of an Afghan for a moment. When you see photographs of President Karzai’s men stuffing ballot boxes, and a U.S. president not only telephones to congratulate him on his victory, while admitting that the election was “a little messy,” but also sends more troops to shore up his government, what are you to make of it? What else could you make of it but that Americans are complicit in the whole corrupt and costly enterprise? If you were a Nuristani, eager to cast a vote for a splendid woman candidate, and the ballots never came, what in the world would you make of that?
If you were Mahbouba Seraj, believing fervently in democracy, such things might break your heart. If you are an American voter uneasy about the course of our democracy, well, maybe you ought to give some thought to this other Afghan democracy: the one we’ve set up, paid for, and sent our soldiers to fight for as an example to the world -- a small but increasingly transparent replica of our own.
Ann Jones, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan and the just published War Is Not Over When It’s Over: Women Speak Out from the Ruins of War (Metropolitan 2010). Having returned temporarily from conflict zones, she is undergoing culture shock as a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Copyright 2010 Ann Jones
ZeroHedge reports that Ken Heeber, has nearly emptied his coffer of Apple stock: Abandon Apple Ship? Ken Heebner Dumps Almost Entire Apple Stake
In a just released 13F filing,
Ken Heebner’s Capital Growth Management has disclosed that he has
reduced his holdings in Apple almost to zero. After holding 1.15 million
AAPL shares as of June 30 (which made him holder #100 in the name
sorted by size), Ken Heebner who is a regular guest on CNBC courtesy of
his bullish tendencies, sold virtually his entire stake, leaving him
with just 111,000 shares.
I’m not going to got through a whole bunch of “I told you so’s”, but
Heebner knows how to count, and probably sees the margin writing on the
wall: A Quick Peek Into the REAL WORLD Logic That Went Into Building the BoomBustBlog Apple Model: It’s Called Compression!!! Tuesday, October 19th, 2010
Add to that the fact that he probably realizes
How Google is Looking to Cut Apple’s Margin and How the
Sell Side of Wall Street Will Enable This Without Sheeple
Investor’s Having a Clue. Of course, like me he may have seen Empirical Evidence of Android Eating Apple! After all, Reggie Middleton Wasn’t the ONLY Openly Apple Bear in the Blogoshpere, Was He?
Heebner is not the only one reading BoomBustBlog and/or deciding to leave the Apple cult, as excerpted from the “Peek Into the REAL WORLD Logic” link above:
“The rising popularity of devices
using Google’s Android software may hurt Apple in the long term, said
Michael Obuchowski, chief investment officer of First Empire Asset
Management, which holds Apple shares. “Everyone is closing in and it’s a
huge question of how they are going to respond,” said Obuchowski,
whose firm oversees $4 billion. “I’m really worried about Apple; I’m not convinced that I’m going to hold Apple two years from now.””
“‘Commodity’ Experience
Jobs dismissed the threat of rivals. Apple’s approach of designing the
software and hardware for its devices results in a better user
experience, he said. By contrast, Google gives Android free to handset
makers including Motorola Inc. and HTC Corp., creating a “commodity” experience,
he said. “We are very committed to the integrated approach, no matter
how many times Google tries to characterize it as closed,” Jobs said.
He said Apple is outselling BlackBerry-maker RIM and he doesn’t “see
them catching up with us in the foreseeable future.””
Notice how he failed to say Apple was
outselling Android. This is material, because they were materially
outselling Android 2 and 3 quarters ago. Androids growth rate is simply
phenomenal, and its business model may prove unassailable unless Apple
makes some drastic changes (ex. allowing cloning) – changes that I
doubt management will be willing to make. Jobs also (understandably)
failed to mention that the “commodity’ Androids materially outperform
the iOS products in terms of features and functionality. This is pretty
much in direct contravention to the concept of the term “commodity”,
isn’t it???? I don’t think many Samsung Galaxy S, Droid X or HTC Evo
owners will characterize their devices as “commodities”.
“Munster, who estimated Apple would
sell 11 million iPhones, said last week that supply shortages likely
held back sales of both the smartphone and iPad. The cost of making the
iPhone may be increasing, said Andy Hargreaves, an analyst at Pacific
Crest Securities in Portland, Oregon. The device accounts for 43 percent
of Apple’s revenue [and much more of their profit!!!].
‘‘We saw what we think is a pretty remarkable increase in iPhone
costs,” and that’s fueled concern over margins, Hargreaves said in an
interview with Bloomberg Television.”
Good to know he’s been reading
BoomBustBlog. Remember, supply shortages can very well stem from
competition for suppliers and supplier’s attention. Is it Android
again??? Here’s a hint… Does the sole patent holder and sole
manufacturer of Apple’s branded IPS Retina Screen plan to become one of
the most prolific Android phone vendor’s in the world? If so, where
does that leave Apple? Margin compression!!! Or worse. Read up on your
proprietary Apple content BoombBustBlog subscribers!
“Verizon Phone – Even so, competition
is increasing. The Android operating system was the most popular
smartphone software in the U.S. in the second quarter, according to
Gartner Inc. Samsung, HTC, Motorola and Dell Inc. are among the
companies using Android in tablet computers to rival the iPad.
Hewlett-Packard Co., the largest computer maker, is developing a tablet
computer.
Apple may get a sales boost by expanding the availability of the iPhone
in the U.S. Verizon Wireless may begin selling it in January, two
people familiar with the matter said in June.”
You can bet your left nostril hairs that
the deal Verizon cut is NO WHERE near as sweet as the one AT&T gave
Apple. What does this spell? Margin COMPRESSION in the quest for wider
distribution to prevent Android (to late) from gaining critical mass
and taking over.
There’s just so many reasons for the big Apple dumpt. Of course,
there is no reason to liquidate nearly all of such a large position for
liquidity reasons unless you feel it has run its course, or worse.
Then again… What do I know?
Below is a graph showing the longer term trend of Apple market share
in the smart phone space. It illustrates the explosive growth Apple has
had through its iPhone series, and it also shows some seasonality (ex.
lull before hardware upgrade season, etc.). As you can see, the growth
trend, viewed either directly or as a moving average, shows marked
downward momentum. Of course, it is highly unreasonable to expect a
company to continue to grow at the pace that Apple has, but that is
exactly what many Apple valuation models that I have come across have –
literally hard-coded in. This is folly, in my opinion – particularly
considering the effect of the Android competition that is already
showing up. If you look closely, Apple’s smart phone market share is
already showing NEGATIVE growth!
Since I know that the chart may be a little difficult to read at the
tail end encompassing several years of data, I have taken the liberty
to drill down to the past year to get a closer look. Remember, Android
sales didn’t really get started until 8 months ago, and the big surge
didn’t occur until the Evo/Droid X/Samsung Galaxy series were launched
in June, July and August – most of which is not captured here. The same
is to be said for Apple and the iPhone 4.
Click to enlarge to printer size!
Despite increases in both the overall mobile market and more importantly, the smart phone contingent’s penetration of said market:
- Apple’s smart phone shipments are showing a negative growth trend
- and more importantly, Apple’s smart phone market share is
experiencing a very sharp downward trend as shown by both direct
observation and that of the 2 period moving average
I am bullish on certain tech companies, but I am bearish on the US
equity markets in general, as I warned in my latest Google Quarterly
opinion: Google Q3 2010 review for all paying subscribers (click here to subscribe):
eric seiger
Atlanta Hawks: Off Day <b>News</b> and Notes - Peachtree Hoops
News and Notes from following the Atlanta Hawks games against the Bucks and the Jazz.
Denver Broncos <b>News</b>: Horse Tracks - 11/13/10 - Mile High Report
Your Daily Cup of Orange and Blue Coffee .. Horse Tracks!
Peggle bounces onto PSP next week PSP <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our PSP news of Peggle bounces onto PSP next week.
eric seiger
Crossposted with TomDispatch.com
Afghanistan still awaits final results from the nationwide election held last month to fill the 249 seats of the lower house of parliament. Deciding which of the more than 2,500 candidates won takes time because the Electoral Complaints Commission that investigates voting irregularities, made up of five men handpicked by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, was swamped by more than 4,200 complaints.
Last year, when Karzai himself ran for reelection, he busied himself with backroom deals, while his supporters were caught red-handed stuffing ballot boxes and having a good laugh. Every Afghan knew that the president who had been foisted on them by foreigners in 2001 was stealing the election. Yet the international community, led by the United States, proclaimed the process if not exactly “free and fair,” at least “credible” -- which is to say: Hey, what’s a little fraud among friends?
With that experience so fresh in memory, the current Electoral Complaints Commission went to work with unusual efficiency, resolving most complaints with unaccustomed speed. And last week the chairman of the Independent Election Commission, an oversight body also selected by President Karzai, announced that it would throw out as invalid almost a quarter of the 5.6 million votes cast. Until that moment Afghans, who aspire to democracy, had hoped for a more honest election than the charade that returned Karzai to power in 2009. No such luck. The partial results of this one look just as bad as the presidential vote, with roughly the same percentage of ballots invalidated.
While dumping fraudulent votes may give the appearance of rigorous oversight, the numbers raise a new mystery: where did those votes come from? In the two days following the election last month, the running total of votes cast rose from 3.6 million to 4.4 million. Now, it has suddenly jumped again to 5.6 million -- of which 1.3 million ballots have been discarded, leaving a total of 4.3 million valid votes. Election-watcher Martine van Bijlert of the Afghanistan Analysts Network described the attitude of the Independent Election Commission this way: “If you want to know where the additional votes came from: They were added fraudulently, now they have been removed, and that is really all you need to know.”
Perhaps noting that the fraud factor was holding steady, a spokesman for the Independent Election Commission declared that a level of fraud with more than one in five votes considered phony is “normal” in an election.
Thus do official bodies in Afghanistan’s widely advertised new democracy -- the one for which our troops are fighting -- smooth over all irregularities and make short work of making do, of overseeing elections as usual: not free, not fair, just good enough for Afghans?
But are they?
Without waiting for final results, what passes for “the international community” has already pronounced the elections a “success,” but an email from a parliamentary candidate, a woman I know named Mahbouba Seraj, tells a different story:
I honestly don’t know from where to start. My frustration, disappointment, and anger are so great I am afraid they might get the better of me. I was involved in the first presidential election of Afghanistan in 2004 and the first parliamentary election in 2005, but oh how different those elections were. I won’t say they were better because they too were captured by the War Lords, Commanders, and criminals -- just like this election -- but the level of fraud and corruption was nothing compared to this. Those men used force and got elected by their rifles and machine guns, but this election was… unbelievable. I have no other word to use.
Many “unbelievable” stories litter this election, but Seraj’s tale is especially instructive because, in the end, it is all too believable. In fact, it’s a pretty simple story of courageous idealism confounded by big men with money.
On the Campaign Trail
When I last saw candidate Seraj in Kabul, the Afghan capital, in July, she was about to leave for Nuristan Province to campaign. It was a brave undertaking. Nuristan lies in the northeast of the country, sandwiched between Panshir Province and Pakistan, along the southern face of the Hindu Kush, a monumental sub-range of the Himalayas. Its precipitous slopes and high valleys are so forbidding and remote that even Islam did not reach Nuristanis until the late nineteenth century, and they are to this day considered a unique people.
The Taliban move freely in Nuristan. In 2008, they almost overran a U.S. base there, killing nine American soldiers. Then-Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal responded by withdrawing American troops from all four of their major bases in the province. The U.S. military high command has given up on certain Afghan locales -- in 2010, American troops notably left the deadly and unattainable Korengal Valley, not far from Nuristan -- but never before to my knowledge had they given up on a whole province.
Nevertheless, Seraj, a woman of fierce energy, wanted to represent the people of the Duaba and Mondawel districts in western Nuristan, where her grandmother was born. She put it this way to me: “I believe in democracy so much. I want it so much for Afghanistan. I tell my constituents, ‘I don’t believe in buying votes as so many candidates do. Please give them to me willingly, because then you will have your representative in Parliament who will truly serve you.’”
Worried for her safety, I reminded her that, during the 2005 parliamentary campaign in her province, another female candidate, Hawa Nuristani, and several of her staff had been shot.
“Yes,” Seraj agreed, “but she survived, and she won.”
Mahbouba Seraj’s recent email about her election race was not meant for me alone. It was addressed this way: “To my beautiful and forgotten province and its lovely and amazing people.” It was an English translation of an open letter she had written to her constituents explaining why, in this important election, they had not been able to vote at all. Reading it made clear why she considered the election of 2010 even more outrageous than previous shameful Afghan escapades in electioneering and fraud.
In 2005, the men in power in Nuristan had tried to murder the candidate they opposed. Since then they have learned that the internationals -- read Americans -- will accept any results as long as the election process looks reasonably good. In 2010, far more sophisticated, they murdered democracy simply by killing time.
As Seraj wrote:
First of all, Nuristan had not been made ready for an election. They didn’t have Army and police personnel to provide security as promised. Then the hard-working head of the election committee of Nuristan was fired two weeks before polling day because some powerful candidates complained about him to the Election Commission. The young man who replaced him seemed to have no idea what his job was, yet he made sure the ballot boxes didn’t get to Mondawel and Duaba districts, which very conveniently happened to be my constituencies.
The most incredible part of the story is that this young man had the power to stop a plane that was ready to take off to deliver the ballot boxes. He refused to hand over the ballot boxes for Mondawel district to the official in charge of the district and the staff of armed men designated to carry the ballots through the mountains to all the remote polling centers in Mondawel. He created delays and made excuses for days until it was too late.
Officials in Kabul were also well-versed in the technique. When Seraj tried to contact the head of the Independent Election Commission in Kabul, she reported:
His very polite assistant would talk to me and tell me, ‘I will ask Mr. So-and-so to call you back,’ but he never did. Finally, I had to leave Nuristan and come to Kabul to meet with him, but when I arrived for our appointment, he had left the city to take care of other problems, and somehow I had not been notified.
That day I tried to get in touch with anyone I could think of who might be able to help -- the Minister of Defense, the Head of the United Nations in Kabul, Mr. de Mistura, and other officials at UNAMA [The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan] -- but everyone was engaged. By then I knew the level of fraud and corruption in Nuristan was going to hit the roof, and it did. Ballots were stolen from polling stations and scattered on the mountainsides or taken to people’s houses and filled out. To the last minute, people were offering to buy and sell voting cards and votes. What could we do? My campaign manager and I filled out complaints to the Election Complaints Commissions in both Nuristan and Kabul.
Those complaints must now be among the thousands filed by people all over the country with similar disappointed dreams of real Afghan democracy -- the very complaints now being so efficiently dealt with in Kabul even as disgruntled voters take to the streets of Herat, Kunduz, Paktia, Ghor, and other cities to protest mass disqualifications that seem to fall inequitably on certain areas or ethnic groups. Yet angry voters and candidates are turned away from the Election Complaints Commission with useless, unregistered receipts. Recognizing election proceedings that look “eerily familiar,” analyst van Bijlert notes: “The processes that are aimed at cleaning up the vote and dismissing fraudulent ballots have become so murky that they themselves are now widely seen as simply the next phase of manipulation.”
Democratic Dreaming
Mahbouba Seraj acquired her dreams of democracy from her ancestors -- and from America. She is the granddaughter of Habibullah, who was the progressive amir or king of Afghanistan from 1901 to 1919, and the great granddaughter of Abdur Rahman, the amir of Afghanistan from 1880 to 1901. He introduced Islam to Nuristanis, gave Afghanistan its present borders, and for the first time subdued its disparate tribes, bringing them under centralized rule. She is also the niece of Amanullah, the modernizing amir who ruled from 1919 to 1929, pioneering in the fields of education and women’s rights, winning a war against the British, and gaining the country its independence.
Seraj herself graduated from Kabul University before being thrown into prison with her family after the monarchy was overthrown in 1973. The family fled the country in 1978 before the impending Soviet invasion and took refuge in the United States where, Seraj says, “I lived, learned, worked, and in the end buried both my parents.” Her life changed completely when she saw an Afghan video of the Taliban executing a woman, clad in a faded blue burqa, in Kabul Stadium where, as a girl, she had happily watched games of soccer and buzkashi -- Afghan polo -- and had once attended a concert given by Duke Ellington.
When the Taliban fell, she returned to Kabul and went to work as a volunteer. She trained young diplomats for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; she trained women parliamentary candidates in the arts of political campaigning and, after they were elected in 2005, in the arts of legislation. She also created and hosted a national public-service radio program called "Our Beloved Afghanistan" and taught aspiring Afghan businesswomen at the American University of Afghanistan.
Then, last summer she went to Nuristan to campaign. To her supporters back in Kabul she then wrote:
I want to help the most underserved people in the whole of Afghanistan, the Nuristanis. If only the world knew how these magnificent people live in these great valleys of Nuristan, without roads, schools, hospitals, electricity, or any of the basic necessities of life. The women of Nuristan do all the difficult physical work. They gather wood, they pick the fruit from the trees, they tend their animals and their children and their husbands, and they walk for miles, climbing steep mountains with huge loads on their backs and their kids in their arms. I want to be a voice for Nuristan. I want to put it back on the map of Afghanistan.
In her most recent message to her constituents, she wrote:
Now, I have no idea how the Election Complaints Commission is going to decide who has won this election. The ECC keeps saying, ‘We have criteria and will decide accordingly.’ But I wonder what criteria they will apply to candidates who have not received votes from their constituencies because some few people got paid to prevent the votes from being cast. Perhaps the government will abandon Nuristan, or perhaps it will pick its own winner and call this “A SUCCESSFUL AND JUST ELECTION SPECIALLY FOR NURISTAN PROVINCE, THE MOST BACKWARD, POOR, BEAUTIFUL, AND FORGOTTEN PROVINCE OF AFGHANISTAN.
Such a conclusion might be good enough for many Afghans whose dreams of democracy faded even before last year’s presidential election when word first began to circulate nationwide that the fix was in for Karzai. At least it would be no more than they have come to expect from repeated exercises in counterfeit democracy staged, it seems, more for the benefit of international audiences (and voters) than for the Afghan electorate.
Here’s a question for Americans: Would such a conclusion be good enough for us? We are, after all, citizens of the democracy that installed the largely fundamentalist government of Afghanistan in the first place, labeled it “democratic,” and staged the first Afghan presidential election in 2004 with unseemly haste as George W. Bush eyed his own run for reelection. Assuming command in Afghanistan in 2010, General David Petraeus was careful to set American expectations low: "We're not trying to turn Afghanistan into Switzerland in five years or less," he said. "What's good enough, traditional organizing structures and so forth are certainly fine."
International apologists for “good enough” who foot the bill and stage Afghan elections no longer even pretend to aim for standards like those of Switzerland -- standards that nonetheless enter the democratic dreams of a great many Afghans. They assume instead that Afghans naturally cheat. As it happens, Mahbouba Seraj does not. And while it may be unreasonable to expect perfection, the fact that Afghan elections grow ever more crooked as the years pass, and Afghan voters increasingly disillusioned, suggests that Afghans are learning to play (if they care to play at all) by what they take to be American rules.
Put yourself in the place of an Afghan for a moment. When you see photographs of President Karzai’s men stuffing ballot boxes, and a U.S. president not only telephones to congratulate him on his victory, while admitting that the election was “a little messy,” but also sends more troops to shore up his government, what are you to make of it? What else could you make of it but that Americans are complicit in the whole corrupt and costly enterprise? If you were a Nuristani, eager to cast a vote for a splendid woman candidate, and the ballots never came, what in the world would you make of that?
If you were Mahbouba Seraj, believing fervently in democracy, such things might break your heart. If you are an American voter uneasy about the course of our democracy, well, maybe you ought to give some thought to this other Afghan democracy: the one we’ve set up, paid for, and sent our soldiers to fight for as an example to the world -- a small but increasingly transparent replica of our own.
Ann Jones, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan and the just published War Is Not Over When It’s Over: Women Speak Out from the Ruins of War (Metropolitan 2010). Having returned temporarily from conflict zones, she is undergoing culture shock as a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Copyright 2010 Ann Jones
ZeroHedge reports that Ken Heeber, has nearly emptied his coffer of Apple stock: Abandon Apple Ship? Ken Heebner Dumps Almost Entire Apple Stake
In a just released 13F filing,
Ken Heebner’s Capital Growth Management has disclosed that he has
reduced his holdings in Apple almost to zero. After holding 1.15 million
AAPL shares as of June 30 (which made him holder #100 in the name
sorted by size), Ken Heebner who is a regular guest on CNBC courtesy of
his bullish tendencies, sold virtually his entire stake, leaving him
with just 111,000 shares.
I’m not going to got through a whole bunch of “I told you so’s”, but
Heebner knows how to count, and probably sees the margin writing on the
wall: A Quick Peek Into the REAL WORLD Logic That Went Into Building the BoomBustBlog Apple Model: It’s Called Compression!!! Tuesday, October 19th, 2010
Add to that the fact that he probably realizes
How Google is Looking to Cut Apple’s Margin and How the
Sell Side of Wall Street Will Enable This Without Sheeple
Investor’s Having a Clue. Of course, like me he may have seen Empirical Evidence of Android Eating Apple! After all, Reggie Middleton Wasn’t the ONLY Openly Apple Bear in the Blogoshpere, Was He?
Heebner is not the only one reading BoomBustBlog and/or deciding to leave the Apple cult, as excerpted from the “Peek Into the REAL WORLD Logic” link above:
“The rising popularity of devices
using Google’s Android software may hurt Apple in the long term, said
Michael Obuchowski, chief investment officer of First Empire Asset
Management, which holds Apple shares. “Everyone is closing in and it’s a
huge question of how they are going to respond,” said Obuchowski,
whose firm oversees $4 billion. “I’m really worried about Apple; I’m not convinced that I’m going to hold Apple two years from now.””
“‘Commodity’ Experience
Jobs dismissed the threat of rivals. Apple’s approach of designing the
software and hardware for its devices results in a better user
experience, he said. By contrast, Google gives Android free to handset
makers including Motorola Inc. and HTC Corp., creating a “commodity” experience,
he said. “We are very committed to the integrated approach, no matter
how many times Google tries to characterize it as closed,” Jobs said.
He said Apple is outselling BlackBerry-maker RIM and he doesn’t “see
them catching up with us in the foreseeable future.””
Notice how he failed to say Apple was
outselling Android. This is material, because they were materially
outselling Android 2 and 3 quarters ago. Androids growth rate is simply
phenomenal, and its business model may prove unassailable unless Apple
makes some drastic changes (ex. allowing cloning) – changes that I
doubt management will be willing to make. Jobs also (understandably)
failed to mention that the “commodity’ Androids materially outperform
the iOS products in terms of features and functionality. This is pretty
much in direct contravention to the concept of the term “commodity”,
isn’t it???? I don’t think many Samsung Galaxy S, Droid X or HTC Evo
owners will characterize their devices as “commodities”.
“Munster, who estimated Apple would
sell 11 million iPhones, said last week that supply shortages likely
held back sales of both the smartphone and iPad. The cost of making the
iPhone may be increasing, said Andy Hargreaves, an analyst at Pacific
Crest Securities in Portland, Oregon. The device accounts for 43 percent
of Apple’s revenue [and much more of their profit!!!].
‘‘We saw what we think is a pretty remarkable increase in iPhone
costs,” and that’s fueled concern over margins, Hargreaves said in an
interview with Bloomberg Television.”
Good to know he’s been reading
BoomBustBlog. Remember, supply shortages can very well stem from
competition for suppliers and supplier’s attention. Is it Android
again??? Here’s a hint… Does the sole patent holder and sole
manufacturer of Apple’s branded IPS Retina Screen plan to become one of
the most prolific Android phone vendor’s in the world? If so, where
does that leave Apple? Margin compression!!! Or worse. Read up on your
proprietary Apple content BoombBustBlog subscribers!
“Verizon Phone – Even so, competition
is increasing. The Android operating system was the most popular
smartphone software in the U.S. in the second quarter, according to
Gartner Inc. Samsung, HTC, Motorola and Dell Inc. are among the
companies using Android in tablet computers to rival the iPad.
Hewlett-Packard Co., the largest computer maker, is developing a tablet
computer.
Apple may get a sales boost by expanding the availability of the iPhone
in the U.S. Verizon Wireless may begin selling it in January, two
people familiar with the matter said in June.”
You can bet your left nostril hairs that
the deal Verizon cut is NO WHERE near as sweet as the one AT&T gave
Apple. What does this spell? Margin COMPRESSION in the quest for wider
distribution to prevent Android (to late) from gaining critical mass
and taking over.
There’s just so many reasons for the big Apple dumpt. Of course,
there is no reason to liquidate nearly all of such a large position for
liquidity reasons unless you feel it has run its course, or worse.
Then again… What do I know?
Below is a graph showing the longer term trend of Apple market share
in the smart phone space. It illustrates the explosive growth Apple has
had through its iPhone series, and it also shows some seasonality (ex.
lull before hardware upgrade season, etc.). As you can see, the growth
trend, viewed either directly or as a moving average, shows marked
downward momentum. Of course, it is highly unreasonable to expect a
company to continue to grow at the pace that Apple has, but that is
exactly what many Apple valuation models that I have come across have –
literally hard-coded in. This is folly, in my opinion – particularly
considering the effect of the Android competition that is already
showing up. If you look closely, Apple’s smart phone market share is
already showing NEGATIVE growth!
Since I know that the chart may be a little difficult to read at the
tail end encompassing several years of data, I have taken the liberty
to drill down to the past year to get a closer look. Remember, Android
sales didn’t really get started until 8 months ago, and the big surge
didn’t occur until the Evo/Droid X/Samsung Galaxy series were launched
in June, July and August – most of which is not captured here. The same
is to be said for Apple and the iPhone 4.
Click to enlarge to printer size!
Despite increases in both the overall mobile market and more importantly, the smart phone contingent’s penetration of said market:
- Apple’s smart phone shipments are showing a negative growth trend
- and more importantly, Apple’s smart phone market share is
experiencing a very sharp downward trend as shown by both direct
observation and that of the 2 period moving average
I am bullish on certain tech companies, but I am bearish on the US
equity markets in general, as I warned in my latest Google Quarterly
opinion: Google Q3 2010 review for all paying subscribers (click here to subscribe):
eric seiger
Atlanta Hawks: Off Day <b>News</b> and Notes - Peachtree Hoops
News and Notes from following the Atlanta Hawks games against the Bucks and the Jazz.
Denver Broncos <b>News</b>: Horse Tracks - 11/13/10 - Mile High Report
Your Daily Cup of Orange and Blue Coffee .. Horse Tracks!
Peggle bounces onto PSP next week PSP <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our PSP news of Peggle bounces onto PSP next week.
eric seiger
eric seiger
eric seiger
Atlanta Hawks: Off Day <b>News</b> and Notes - Peachtree Hoops
News and Notes from following the Atlanta Hawks games against the Bucks and the Jazz.
Denver Broncos <b>News</b>: Horse Tracks - 11/13/10 - Mile High Report
Your Daily Cup of Orange and Blue Coffee .. Horse Tracks!
Peggle bounces onto PSP next week PSP <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our PSP news of Peggle bounces onto PSP next week.
eric seiger
Crossposted with TomDispatch.com
Afghanistan still awaits final results from the nationwide election held last month to fill the 249 seats of the lower house of parliament. Deciding which of the more than 2,500 candidates won takes time because the Electoral Complaints Commission that investigates voting irregularities, made up of five men handpicked by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, was swamped by more than 4,200 complaints.
Last year, when Karzai himself ran for reelection, he busied himself with backroom deals, while his supporters were caught red-handed stuffing ballot boxes and having a good laugh. Every Afghan knew that the president who had been foisted on them by foreigners in 2001 was stealing the election. Yet the international community, led by the United States, proclaimed the process if not exactly “free and fair,” at least “credible” -- which is to say: Hey, what’s a little fraud among friends?
With that experience so fresh in memory, the current Electoral Complaints Commission went to work with unusual efficiency, resolving most complaints with unaccustomed speed. And last week the chairman of the Independent Election Commission, an oversight body also selected by President Karzai, announced that it would throw out as invalid almost a quarter of the 5.6 million votes cast. Until that moment Afghans, who aspire to democracy, had hoped for a more honest election than the charade that returned Karzai to power in 2009. No such luck. The partial results of this one look just as bad as the presidential vote, with roughly the same percentage of ballots invalidated.
While dumping fraudulent votes may give the appearance of rigorous oversight, the numbers raise a new mystery: where did those votes come from? In the two days following the election last month, the running total of votes cast rose from 3.6 million to 4.4 million. Now, it has suddenly jumped again to 5.6 million -- of which 1.3 million ballots have been discarded, leaving a total of 4.3 million valid votes. Election-watcher Martine van Bijlert of the Afghanistan Analysts Network described the attitude of the Independent Election Commission this way: “If you want to know where the additional votes came from: They were added fraudulently, now they have been removed, and that is really all you need to know.”
Perhaps noting that the fraud factor was holding steady, a spokesman for the Independent Election Commission declared that a level of fraud with more than one in five votes considered phony is “normal” in an election.
Thus do official bodies in Afghanistan’s widely advertised new democracy -- the one for which our troops are fighting -- smooth over all irregularities and make short work of making do, of overseeing elections as usual: not free, not fair, just good enough for Afghans?
But are they?
Without waiting for final results, what passes for “the international community” has already pronounced the elections a “success,” but an email from a parliamentary candidate, a woman I know named Mahbouba Seraj, tells a different story:
I honestly don’t know from where to start. My frustration, disappointment, and anger are so great I am afraid they might get the better of me. I was involved in the first presidential election of Afghanistan in 2004 and the first parliamentary election in 2005, but oh how different those elections were. I won’t say they were better because they too were captured by the War Lords, Commanders, and criminals -- just like this election -- but the level of fraud and corruption was nothing compared to this. Those men used force and got elected by their rifles and machine guns, but this election was… unbelievable. I have no other word to use.
Many “unbelievable” stories litter this election, but Seraj’s tale is especially instructive because, in the end, it is all too believable. In fact, it’s a pretty simple story of courageous idealism confounded by big men with money.
On the Campaign Trail
When I last saw candidate Seraj in Kabul, the Afghan capital, in July, she was about to leave for Nuristan Province to campaign. It was a brave undertaking. Nuristan lies in the northeast of the country, sandwiched between Panshir Province and Pakistan, along the southern face of the Hindu Kush, a monumental sub-range of the Himalayas. Its precipitous slopes and high valleys are so forbidding and remote that even Islam did not reach Nuristanis until the late nineteenth century, and they are to this day considered a unique people.
The Taliban move freely in Nuristan. In 2008, they almost overran a U.S. base there, killing nine American soldiers. Then-Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal responded by withdrawing American troops from all four of their major bases in the province. The U.S. military high command has given up on certain Afghan locales -- in 2010, American troops notably left the deadly and unattainable Korengal Valley, not far from Nuristan -- but never before to my knowledge had they given up on a whole province.
Nevertheless, Seraj, a woman of fierce energy, wanted to represent the people of the Duaba and Mondawel districts in western Nuristan, where her grandmother was born. She put it this way to me: “I believe in democracy so much. I want it so much for Afghanistan. I tell my constituents, ‘I don’t believe in buying votes as so many candidates do. Please give them to me willingly, because then you will have your representative in Parliament who will truly serve you.’”
Worried for her safety, I reminded her that, during the 2005 parliamentary campaign in her province, another female candidate, Hawa Nuristani, and several of her staff had been shot.
“Yes,” Seraj agreed, “but she survived, and she won.”
Mahbouba Seraj’s recent email about her election race was not meant for me alone. It was addressed this way: “To my beautiful and forgotten province and its lovely and amazing people.” It was an English translation of an open letter she had written to her constituents explaining why, in this important election, they had not been able to vote at all. Reading it made clear why she considered the election of 2010 even more outrageous than previous shameful Afghan escapades in electioneering and fraud.
In 2005, the men in power in Nuristan had tried to murder the candidate they opposed. Since then they have learned that the internationals -- read Americans -- will accept any results as long as the election process looks reasonably good. In 2010, far more sophisticated, they murdered democracy simply by killing time.
As Seraj wrote:
First of all, Nuristan had not been made ready for an election. They didn’t have Army and police personnel to provide security as promised. Then the hard-working head of the election committee of Nuristan was fired two weeks before polling day because some powerful candidates complained about him to the Election Commission. The young man who replaced him seemed to have no idea what his job was, yet he made sure the ballot boxes didn’t get to Mondawel and Duaba districts, which very conveniently happened to be my constituencies.
The most incredible part of the story is that this young man had the power to stop a plane that was ready to take off to deliver the ballot boxes. He refused to hand over the ballot boxes for Mondawel district to the official in charge of the district and the staff of armed men designated to carry the ballots through the mountains to all the remote polling centers in Mondawel. He created delays and made excuses for days until it was too late.
Officials in Kabul were also well-versed in the technique. When Seraj tried to contact the head of the Independent Election Commission in Kabul, she reported:
His very polite assistant would talk to me and tell me, ‘I will ask Mr. So-and-so to call you back,’ but he never did. Finally, I had to leave Nuristan and come to Kabul to meet with him, but when I arrived for our appointment, he had left the city to take care of other problems, and somehow I had not been notified.
That day I tried to get in touch with anyone I could think of who might be able to help -- the Minister of Defense, the Head of the United Nations in Kabul, Mr. de Mistura, and other officials at UNAMA [The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan] -- but everyone was engaged. By then I knew the level of fraud and corruption in Nuristan was going to hit the roof, and it did. Ballots were stolen from polling stations and scattered on the mountainsides or taken to people’s houses and filled out. To the last minute, people were offering to buy and sell voting cards and votes. What could we do? My campaign manager and I filled out complaints to the Election Complaints Commissions in both Nuristan and Kabul.
Those complaints must now be among the thousands filed by people all over the country with similar disappointed dreams of real Afghan democracy -- the very complaints now being so efficiently dealt with in Kabul even as disgruntled voters take to the streets of Herat, Kunduz, Paktia, Ghor, and other cities to protest mass disqualifications that seem to fall inequitably on certain areas or ethnic groups. Yet angry voters and candidates are turned away from the Election Complaints Commission with useless, unregistered receipts. Recognizing election proceedings that look “eerily familiar,” analyst van Bijlert notes: “The processes that are aimed at cleaning up the vote and dismissing fraudulent ballots have become so murky that they themselves are now widely seen as simply the next phase of manipulation.”
Democratic Dreaming
Mahbouba Seraj acquired her dreams of democracy from her ancestors -- and from America. She is the granddaughter of Habibullah, who was the progressive amir or king of Afghanistan from 1901 to 1919, and the great granddaughter of Abdur Rahman, the amir of Afghanistan from 1880 to 1901. He introduced Islam to Nuristanis, gave Afghanistan its present borders, and for the first time subdued its disparate tribes, bringing them under centralized rule. She is also the niece of Amanullah, the modernizing amir who ruled from 1919 to 1929, pioneering in the fields of education and women’s rights, winning a war against the British, and gaining the country its independence.
Seraj herself graduated from Kabul University before being thrown into prison with her family after the monarchy was overthrown in 1973. The family fled the country in 1978 before the impending Soviet invasion and took refuge in the United States where, Seraj says, “I lived, learned, worked, and in the end buried both my parents.” Her life changed completely when she saw an Afghan video of the Taliban executing a woman, clad in a faded blue burqa, in Kabul Stadium where, as a girl, she had happily watched games of soccer and buzkashi -- Afghan polo -- and had once attended a concert given by Duke Ellington.
When the Taliban fell, she returned to Kabul and went to work as a volunteer. She trained young diplomats for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; she trained women parliamentary candidates in the arts of political campaigning and, after they were elected in 2005, in the arts of legislation. She also created and hosted a national public-service radio program called "Our Beloved Afghanistan" and taught aspiring Afghan businesswomen at the American University of Afghanistan.
Then, last summer she went to Nuristan to campaign. To her supporters back in Kabul she then wrote:
I want to help the most underserved people in the whole of Afghanistan, the Nuristanis. If only the world knew how these magnificent people live in these great valleys of Nuristan, without roads, schools, hospitals, electricity, or any of the basic necessities of life. The women of Nuristan do all the difficult physical work. They gather wood, they pick the fruit from the trees, they tend their animals and their children and their husbands, and they walk for miles, climbing steep mountains with huge loads on their backs and their kids in their arms. I want to be a voice for Nuristan. I want to put it back on the map of Afghanistan.
In her most recent message to her constituents, she wrote:
Now, I have no idea how the Election Complaints Commission is going to decide who has won this election. The ECC keeps saying, ‘We have criteria and will decide accordingly.’ But I wonder what criteria they will apply to candidates who have not received votes from their constituencies because some few people got paid to prevent the votes from being cast. Perhaps the government will abandon Nuristan, or perhaps it will pick its own winner and call this “A SUCCESSFUL AND JUST ELECTION SPECIALLY FOR NURISTAN PROVINCE, THE MOST BACKWARD, POOR, BEAUTIFUL, AND FORGOTTEN PROVINCE OF AFGHANISTAN.
Such a conclusion might be good enough for many Afghans whose dreams of democracy faded even before last year’s presidential election when word first began to circulate nationwide that the fix was in for Karzai. At least it would be no more than they have come to expect from repeated exercises in counterfeit democracy staged, it seems, more for the benefit of international audiences (and voters) than for the Afghan electorate.
Here’s a question for Americans: Would such a conclusion be good enough for us? We are, after all, citizens of the democracy that installed the largely fundamentalist government of Afghanistan in the first place, labeled it “democratic,” and staged the first Afghan presidential election in 2004 with unseemly haste as George W. Bush eyed his own run for reelection. Assuming command in Afghanistan in 2010, General David Petraeus was careful to set American expectations low: "We're not trying to turn Afghanistan into Switzerland in five years or less," he said. "What's good enough, traditional organizing structures and so forth are certainly fine."
International apologists for “good enough” who foot the bill and stage Afghan elections no longer even pretend to aim for standards like those of Switzerland -- standards that nonetheless enter the democratic dreams of a great many Afghans. They assume instead that Afghans naturally cheat. As it happens, Mahbouba Seraj does not. And while it may be unreasonable to expect perfection, the fact that Afghan elections grow ever more crooked as the years pass, and Afghan voters increasingly disillusioned, suggests that Afghans are learning to play (if they care to play at all) by what they take to be American rules.
Put yourself in the place of an Afghan for a moment. When you see photographs of President Karzai’s men stuffing ballot boxes, and a U.S. president not only telephones to congratulate him on his victory, while admitting that the election was “a little messy,” but also sends more troops to shore up his government, what are you to make of it? What else could you make of it but that Americans are complicit in the whole corrupt and costly enterprise? If you were a Nuristani, eager to cast a vote for a splendid woman candidate, and the ballots never came, what in the world would you make of that?
If you were Mahbouba Seraj, believing fervently in democracy, such things might break your heart. If you are an American voter uneasy about the course of our democracy, well, maybe you ought to give some thought to this other Afghan democracy: the one we’ve set up, paid for, and sent our soldiers to fight for as an example to the world -- a small but increasingly transparent replica of our own.
Ann Jones, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan and the just published War Is Not Over When It’s Over: Women Speak Out from the Ruins of War (Metropolitan 2010). Having returned temporarily from conflict zones, she is undergoing culture shock as a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Copyright 2010 Ann Jones
ZeroHedge reports that Ken Heeber, has nearly emptied his coffer of Apple stock: Abandon Apple Ship? Ken Heebner Dumps Almost Entire Apple Stake
In a just released 13F filing,
Ken Heebner’s Capital Growth Management has disclosed that he has
reduced his holdings in Apple almost to zero. After holding 1.15 million
AAPL shares as of June 30 (which made him holder #100 in the name
sorted by size), Ken Heebner who is a regular guest on CNBC courtesy of
his bullish tendencies, sold virtually his entire stake, leaving him
with just 111,000 shares.
I’m not going to got through a whole bunch of “I told you so’s”, but
Heebner knows how to count, and probably sees the margin writing on the
wall: A Quick Peek Into the REAL WORLD Logic That Went Into Building the BoomBustBlog Apple Model: It’s Called Compression!!! Tuesday, October 19th, 2010
Add to that the fact that he probably realizes
How Google is Looking to Cut Apple’s Margin and How the
Sell Side of Wall Street Will Enable This Without Sheeple
Investor’s Having a Clue. Of course, like me he may have seen Empirical Evidence of Android Eating Apple! After all, Reggie Middleton Wasn’t the ONLY Openly Apple Bear in the Blogoshpere, Was He?
Heebner is not the only one reading BoomBustBlog and/or deciding to leave the Apple cult, as excerpted from the “Peek Into the REAL WORLD Logic” link above:
“The rising popularity of devices
using Google’s Android software may hurt Apple in the long term, said
Michael Obuchowski, chief investment officer of First Empire Asset
Management, which holds Apple shares. “Everyone is closing in and it’s a
huge question of how they are going to respond,” said Obuchowski,
whose firm oversees $4 billion. “I’m really worried about Apple; I’m not convinced that I’m going to hold Apple two years from now.””
“‘Commodity’ Experience
Jobs dismissed the threat of rivals. Apple’s approach of designing the
software and hardware for its devices results in a better user
experience, he said. By contrast, Google gives Android free to handset
makers including Motorola Inc. and HTC Corp., creating a “commodity” experience,
he said. “We are very committed to the integrated approach, no matter
how many times Google tries to characterize it as closed,” Jobs said.
He said Apple is outselling BlackBerry-maker RIM and he doesn’t “see
them catching up with us in the foreseeable future.””
Notice how he failed to say Apple was
outselling Android. This is material, because they were materially
outselling Android 2 and 3 quarters ago. Androids growth rate is simply
phenomenal, and its business model may prove unassailable unless Apple
makes some drastic changes (ex. allowing cloning) – changes that I
doubt management will be willing to make. Jobs also (understandably)
failed to mention that the “commodity’ Androids materially outperform
the iOS products in terms of features and functionality. This is pretty
much in direct contravention to the concept of the term “commodity”,
isn’t it???? I don’t think many Samsung Galaxy S, Droid X or HTC Evo
owners will characterize their devices as “commodities”.
“Munster, who estimated Apple would
sell 11 million iPhones, said last week that supply shortages likely
held back sales of both the smartphone and iPad. The cost of making the
iPhone may be increasing, said Andy Hargreaves, an analyst at Pacific
Crest Securities in Portland, Oregon. The device accounts for 43 percent
of Apple’s revenue [and much more of their profit!!!].
‘‘We saw what we think is a pretty remarkable increase in iPhone
costs,” and that’s fueled concern over margins, Hargreaves said in an
interview with Bloomberg Television.”
Good to know he’s been reading
BoomBustBlog. Remember, supply shortages can very well stem from
competition for suppliers and supplier’s attention. Is it Android
again??? Here’s a hint… Does the sole patent holder and sole
manufacturer of Apple’s branded IPS Retina Screen plan to become one of
the most prolific Android phone vendor’s in the world? If so, where
does that leave Apple? Margin compression!!! Or worse. Read up on your
proprietary Apple content BoombBustBlog subscribers!
“Verizon Phone – Even so, competition
is increasing. The Android operating system was the most popular
smartphone software in the U.S. in the second quarter, according to
Gartner Inc. Samsung, HTC, Motorola and Dell Inc. are among the
companies using Android in tablet computers to rival the iPad.
Hewlett-Packard Co., the largest computer maker, is developing a tablet
computer.
Apple may get a sales boost by expanding the availability of the iPhone
in the U.S. Verizon Wireless may begin selling it in January, two
people familiar with the matter said in June.”
You can bet your left nostril hairs that
the deal Verizon cut is NO WHERE near as sweet as the one AT&T gave
Apple. What does this spell? Margin COMPRESSION in the quest for wider
distribution to prevent Android (to late) from gaining critical mass
and taking over.
There’s just so many reasons for the big Apple dumpt. Of course,
there is no reason to liquidate nearly all of such a large position for
liquidity reasons unless you feel it has run its course, or worse.
Then again… What do I know?
Below is a graph showing the longer term trend of Apple market share
in the smart phone space. It illustrates the explosive growth Apple has
had through its iPhone series, and it also shows some seasonality (ex.
lull before hardware upgrade season, etc.). As you can see, the growth
trend, viewed either directly or as a moving average, shows marked
downward momentum. Of course, it is highly unreasonable to expect a
company to continue to grow at the pace that Apple has, but that is
exactly what many Apple valuation models that I have come across have –
literally hard-coded in. This is folly, in my opinion – particularly
considering the effect of the Android competition that is already
showing up. If you look closely, Apple’s smart phone market share is
already showing NEGATIVE growth!
Since I know that the chart may be a little difficult to read at the
tail end encompassing several years of data, I have taken the liberty
to drill down to the past year to get a closer look. Remember, Android
sales didn’t really get started until 8 months ago, and the big surge
didn’t occur until the Evo/Droid X/Samsung Galaxy series were launched
in June, July and August – most of which is not captured here. The same
is to be said for Apple and the iPhone 4.
Click to enlarge to printer size!
Despite increases in both the overall mobile market and more importantly, the smart phone contingent’s penetration of said market:
- Apple’s smart phone shipments are showing a negative growth trend
- and more importantly, Apple’s smart phone market share is
experiencing a very sharp downward trend as shown by both direct
observation and that of the 2 period moving average
I am bullish on certain tech companies, but I am bearish on the US
equity markets in general, as I warned in my latest Google Quarterly
opinion: Google Q3 2010 review for all paying subscribers (click here to subscribe):
eric seiger
eric seiger
Atlanta Hawks: Off Day <b>News</b> and Notes - Peachtree Hoops
News and Notes from following the Atlanta Hawks games against the Bucks and the Jazz.
Denver Broncos <b>News</b>: Horse Tracks - 11/13/10 - Mile High Report
Your Daily Cup of Orange and Blue Coffee .. Horse Tracks!
Peggle bounces onto PSP next week PSP <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our PSP news of Peggle bounces onto PSP next week.
eric seiger
eric seiger
Atlanta Hawks: Off Day <b>News</b> and Notes - Peachtree Hoops
News and Notes from following the Atlanta Hawks games against the Bucks and the Jazz.
Denver Broncos <b>News</b>: Horse Tracks - 11/13/10 - Mile High Report
Your Daily Cup of Orange and Blue Coffee .. Horse Tracks!
Peggle bounces onto PSP next week PSP <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our PSP news of Peggle bounces onto PSP next week.
eric seiger
Atlanta Hawks: Off Day <b>News</b> and Notes - Peachtree Hoops
News and Notes from following the Atlanta Hawks games against the Bucks and the Jazz.
Denver Broncos <b>News</b>: Horse Tracks - 11/13/10 - Mile High Report
Your Daily Cup of Orange and Blue Coffee .. Horse Tracks!
Peggle bounces onto PSP next week PSP <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our PSP news of Peggle bounces onto PSP next week.
eric seiger
Atlanta Hawks: Off Day <b>News</b> and Notes - Peachtree Hoops
News and Notes from following the Atlanta Hawks games against the Bucks and the Jazz.
Denver Broncos <b>News</b>: Horse Tracks - 11/13/10 - Mile High Report
Your Daily Cup of Orange and Blue Coffee .. Horse Tracks!
Peggle bounces onto PSP next week PSP <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our PSP news of Peggle bounces onto PSP next week.
eric seiger eric seiger
eric seiger
eric seiger
eric seiger
Atlanta Hawks: Off Day <b>News</b> and Notes - Peachtree Hoops
News and Notes from following the Atlanta Hawks games against the Bucks and the Jazz.
Denver Broncos <b>News</b>: Horse Tracks - 11/13/10 - Mile High Report
Your Daily Cup of Orange and Blue Coffee .. Horse Tracks!
Peggle bounces onto PSP next week PSP <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our PSP news of Peggle bounces onto PSP next week.
The idea of making money on line is always welcomed by most people. Who wouldn't want to earn on-line and to be getting an income from this source hence, improving financial freedom? There are just lots of methods that one can come out with when it comes to on-line money making. First of all, it's important to research the sites that you are going to join or participate. Are they legit sites, need a minimum sum or stuff like that.
In any situation for on-line money making, organizing one's interests would be very helpful to shortlist the different methods available. There are lots of methods like getting paid to blog, writing articles and gaining from ad revenue, being paid a revenue share for writing, writing sites for clients to outsource, writing letters to submit to a bank of other letters for customers to choose from, paid to review sites, affiliate programs and many more. The list is just endless and there are just enormous ways of on-line money making. In my own personal observation, I notice that there are lots of people liking the idea of paid to blog. That is one of the best methods of earning money.
A lot of people are saying that it's best to not invest in any money at all for your on-line quest. To shed your dollar means something is not right. That's the general rule. There are perhaps lots of people out there making it in their best interest to only participate in free to join websites. However, I think there are legit sites out there with a low minimal fee like for instance, to purchase referrals and gain a bigger ads view per day. This is evident in PTC or what they call Paid to Click programs. There are just aplenty; some are still running while others are either already closed down or total scams. Therefore, be vigilant when choosing your programs. Next off will be the payment options. Choose the right kind of option. There are lots of people using Pay-Pal as well as Alert-Pay. Read the FAQs of each site and get to know their policy and what kind of payment options they are offering. Some only pay in checks so do take note in this kind of situation, you cannot use your Pay-Pal account to receive earnings.
In a way, this on-line money making method and/or various free to join websites can be your ideal work from home idea and some people are so successful that they have been making it their full-time job. However, if you are starting out, it's best to not resign your job for different people success vary definitely. Normally for a site that you are going to work for, say in writing sites, forums or anything at all, there will most probably be a community talk there. It can either be through their Help section, special forum panel and there are even some sites where members can leave testimonials. You can roughly estimate from there; whether the site is worth working for or not. Most sites cite in their terms and conditions that the registered member is an independent contractor. Read the clause and make yourself understand all the terms and words being used. In other words, do your research well.
Some money making sites are even providing a chart on article statistics or traffic coming to which article of yours. This instance is very familiar with Associated Content website and I totally dig this feature. It is a great analyzer for me, really. Summarily, with a little or lots of efforts, honest sites are there and they do pay members whom work hard. Do your research and never give up. Good luck for your quest..
eric seiger
Atlanta Hawks: Off Day <b>News</b> and Notes - Peachtree Hoops
News and Notes from following the Atlanta Hawks games against the Bucks and the Jazz.
Denver Broncos <b>News</b>: Horse Tracks - 11/13/10 - Mile High Report
Your Daily Cup of Orange and Blue Coffee .. Horse Tracks!
Peggle bounces onto PSP next week PSP <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our PSP news of Peggle bounces onto PSP next week.
eric seiger
Atlanta Hawks: Off Day <b>News</b> and Notes - Peachtree Hoops
News and Notes from following the Atlanta Hawks games against the Bucks and the Jazz.
Denver Broncos <b>News</b>: Horse Tracks - 11/13/10 - Mile High Report
Your Daily Cup of Orange and Blue Coffee .. Horse Tracks!
Peggle bounces onto PSP next week PSP <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our PSP news of Peggle bounces onto PSP next week.
eric seiger
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