Heat 2

The Arab world "did not set out to trade the tyranny of a dictator for the tyranny of a mob," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told global heads of state, philanthropists, CEOs and celebrities attending Day 2 of this year's Clinton Global Initiative. In a 30-minute speech, Clinton offered a clear rebuke to Muslim extremists behind the September 11th attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi that killed U.S. Libyan Ambassador Chris Stevens and his colleagues Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods and Sean Smith. 

"Human dignity doesn't come from avenging insults, especially with violence that can never be justified," Clinton said, referring to the anti-Muslim video that has sparked recent riots around the world, including the one that preceded the attack in Benghazi. "...Countries focused more on fostering growth than fomenting grievances are racing ahead, building schools instead of burning them; investing in their peoples' creativity, not inciting their rage; opening their economies and societies to have more connections with the wider world, not shutting off the Internet or attacking embassies," Clinton said.

Many leaders from around the world — including the foreign minister of Tunisia, where the Arab Spring originated — have expressed their stance against violence in the wake of the attacks, she told CGI delegates. "All of us need to stand together to resist these forces of violence and oppression to support democratic transitions underway across Africa and around the world. Unity on this throughout the international community is crucial because extremists around the world are working hard to drive us apart."

Clinton also spoke broadly about global development and her agency's work to overhaul the U.S. foreign aid system, saying that "we need to move from development aid to investments." She took dead aim at what she called "the elites in every country" who, Clinton said, do not pay their fair share of taxes to support government investment in their local communities. "I'm out of American politics," she said, "but it is a fact that around the world, the elites of every country are making money. There are rich people everywhere, and yet they do not contribute to the growth of their own countries. They do not invest in public schools and public hospitals and other kinds of development internally." She called on government and advocacy leaders around the world "to start telling powerful people things they don't want to hear" about the need to create transparency in governmental budgets and revenues, to work toward political reforms, to bring corruption to light, and create fair taxation models that mobilize resources and establish regulations designed to attract and protect investment.

"There are rich people everywhere, and yet they do not contribute to the growth of their own countries." - Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at CGI2012

"My goal is to put us out of the aid business," Clinton said, and to expand strategic aid partnerships beyond NGOs, to include businesses, other governments and innovative nonprofits and social entrepreneurs. As an example of this new collaboration, Clinton cited the development of Haiti's first business development park and a recent shipment of sewing machines to that country that is creating thousands of jobs there for women who had not worked previously. "You cannot have development in today's world without partnering with the private sector," Clinton said. She further cited a program in Sierra Leone in which more than 1,700 women serve as health monitors, checking up on clinics and reporting problems to the government so they can be resolved.

Clinton said her agency will continue working to encourage developing countries to pay for more of their own development, and to create impact measurements to ensure greater accountability and efficiency for their efforts to improve conditions on the ground.  "I hear from leaders all over the world that ultimately, it must be their responsibility to provide economic opportunity, health care, and good schools to their people. They don't want to turn to other nations forever for assistance. I look forward to the day when our assistance is no longer needed," Clinton said.

In other Day 2 highlights:

* In a panel moderated by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, participants discussed the need to give women around the world the rights to more land so that more buildings and initiatives needed to help them rise out of poverty can —literally—get off the ground. "Only 1 percent of the land titles on earth is owned by women," said Joan Clos, the Under-Secretary General and Executive Director of UN-HABITAT, "and only about 18 to 20 percent of the land on Earth is titled. People want to build but there is no way to register the land, or to use much of it, he said. "There are ancestral ways to register the land that does not end up in the legal system and we need to create institutions for proper land registration that gives more access to women and to everyone," he said. Jonathan Reckford, the CEO of Habitat for Humanity International, said that in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami, Habitat built 10,000 homes on the southeast Indian coast and titled all of them in women's names, then worked with local government to change local landholding policy, which has had the effect of involving women in local policy decisions that previously did not include their input. "Worldwide, currently, only 1-2 percent of titled land is in the hands of women," Kristof said. "This needs to change."

* Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Chair of the Albright Stonebridge Group, hosted a panel of three social innovators who have used the power of partnerships to make change around the world — Yemeni journalist Tawakkol Karman, co-founder of Women Journalists Without Chains and a 2011 Nobel Peace Prize winner, who is using new media to document human rights violations; Paul Farmer, chair of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard and Founding Director of Partners in Health, and Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. Karman said her group's goal for Yemen is to "build our countries up from what revolution has destroyed" to include sustainable development and the rule of law, so as to keep new dictators from taking charge. "We have to work with each other, with the international community, to help people in the Arab region, as there is no peace without development and no development without peace." Farmer, whose public health work in Haiti was profiled in the 2003 book, Mountains Beyond Mountains, acknowledged that the last two post-earthquake years in Haiti "have been difficult; Haitians tend to be resistant to change." But Farmer urged tenacity and improved outputs within the development community. "We need to stick with it for some decades to come" but change the way aid advocates engage in Haiti and involve more Haitians in rebuilding for themsleves.  

CGI continues through Tuesday. Watch this space for updates.

—Marcia Stepanek

[Photograph of a segment of the Berlin Wall by Knud Nielsen for istock.com]

Wirearchy

Today is the official one-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, and supporters are congratulating themselves, with birthday cakes and marathon choruses of "Happy Occupy to You" from Manhattan's Zuccotti Park. But the movement's staying power should come as no surprise. What has been unexpected? Since the Tweet that started it all went viral July 15 -- "Sept. 17. Wall St. Bring Tent." -- the movement it catalyzed has appeared to kindle more heat globally than nationally. The New York Times journalist Nick Kristof, in a column Sunday titled America's Primal Scream, wrote how "it's fascinating that many Americans intuitively understood the outrage and frustration that drove Egyptians to protest at Tahrir Square, but don't seem to comprehend similar resentments that drive disgruntled fellow citizens to 'occupy' Wall Street."

Indeed, the #OWS movement had its largest single day of protests Saturday not in New York but far from Wall Street. Writes blogger Nate Silver: "In Europe, crowds in cities like Rome, Barcelona, and Madrid were estimated at 200,000 to 500,000 per city -- more, probably, than the protests in the U.S. combined." [See Cause Global's coverage of the rally in Times Square here.] Silver, who analyzed crowd turnout numbers and the distribution of the October 15th protests worldwide, also found that "despite Occupy Wall Street's name, its energy in the U.S. seems to be coming from the left coast" -- and apparently from people who didn't vote in the 2010 mid-term elections.

But it would be foolish to underestimate the movement's ideological diversity, its staying power, or its organizational savvy. This is not, as protester Justin Strekal told The Associated Press over the weekend, simply "a participatory democracy in a little park" near Wall Street. On the contrary, Occupy Wall Street has become a global franchise, backed by an impressively horizontal "wire-archy" of digitally connected strategy, media, and community organizing professionals, volunteers, sympathetic tech startups and consultants, online petition groups and other pro bono-minded social enterprises and innovators -- all of whom say they are working to redefine for the digital age what is meant by economic sustainability and participatory leadership (not to mention strategic planning).

For its part, the Zuccotti Park "branch" of the movement is continuing to meet daily in a general assembly and has aggregated nearly $300,000 of hundreds of individual donations into an Amalgamated Bank account. It has a local finance committee -- which, according to The New York Observer, just voted to turn down a donation from music mogul Russell Simmons because he wanted to help the group shape specific demands. (Victoria Sobel, 21, Occupy Wall Street's CFO, told The Observer Sunday that organizers are almost "obsessively sensitive" to any one individual or organization trying to exert leadership over Occupy; she said finance committee members are taking crash courses in money management to make sure the movement's books remain transparent and unfettered by New Age lobbyists.)

The Zuccotti Park installation also has its own newspaper, published in two languages, and a library, an infirmary, a rotating set of showers and rooms-for-no-rent in the area, and a waste disposal system set up by a social enterprise called Mobile Design Lab. And more widely, it has media savvy by the boatload, thanks to a real-time line-up of global PR volunteers and liasons who have, so far, managed the message cross-culture. People in London, Madrid, South Korea, Japan, Sydney and Stockholm, for example, were carrying similar signs and wearing similar t-shirts on October 15, all claiming membership in the "99 Per Cent." Meanwhile, multiple networks of crowdsourced "hackathon" techies are working to better connect sympathizers near and far, and more than 100 lawyers are donating their services to aid the arrested. Most protesters and their supporters, of course, don't live outside in parks, but rather in houses and apartments in multiple cities and countries. [Like the Arab Spring protests, this movement depends on people aggregating both geographically and online to continuously catalyze multiple communities while also populating a geographical "center" for public reference.]

And politically, at least for now, Occupy Wall Street is trending in the mainstream, if not on Twitter, among some of the movement's most unlikely supporters. The GOP-appointed Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told a recent hearing of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress that "at some level, I can't blame them (the protesters)" for "blaming, with some justification, the financial sector for getting us into this mess."

In the words of New Yorker Senior Editor Amy Davidson, "this is a global conversation going on now, and it would be foolish not to listen. ...Wall Street has long been a multinational brand name; now Occupy is, too. ...For an anti-corporate movement, OWS has a good sense of franchising -- and more importantly, it has something to say about enfranchisement."

No doubt. Occupy, perhaps most significantly, offers yet another example of how the Internet is profoundly enabling people to reshape the status quo at multiple levels of society. Occupy's loose-knit, distributed networks of hyper-agile, group-led "adhocracies" are -- thanks to our growing addiction to social media -- both inevitable and impossible to ignore. Can such digital organizations and movements topple governments as we know them? If you count the Arab Spring demonstrations, they already have. What's not so obvious is what comes next.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photo of Occupy demonstrator by Reuters, with permission. Illustration: Cover of the October 24, 2011 issue of The New Yorker]