January 25, 2009
Green-Light Specials, Now at Wal-Mart

By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM and MICHAEL BARBARO
IT was billed the Choice Meeting: a secret two-day conference in Arkansas in 2005 pairing Wal-Mart Stores, a symbol of scorched-earth global capitalism, with some of the nation’s most influential environmentalists. And it began with a zinger.

“Tell me why I should care about an endangered mouse in Arizona?” asked H. Lee Scott Jr., the retail giant’s chief executive, only partly in jest.

At the time, Wal-Mart was the target of a well-orchestrated assault focusing on its labor practices and environmental record. It was also straining to keep its legendary growth on track. Mr. Scott, hungry for ways to protect and transform his company, began to see environmental sustainability as a way to achieve two goals: improve Wal-Mart’s bottom line and its reputation.

So he presented his colleagues with a radical option — the “choice” that gave the meeting its name — encouraging them to adopt a sustainability program to remake the entire company, from the materials used to build stores to the light bulbs stocked on its shelves. Although participants were conflicted, a vote on the initiative was unanimous: Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer and biggest buyer of manufactured goods, would go green.

By virtue of its herculean size, Wal-Mart eventually dragged much of corporate America along with it, leading mighty suppliers like General Electric and Procter & Gamble to transform their own business practices.

Under Mr. Scott, who is retiring this month at the age of 59, the company that democratized consumption in the United States — enabling working-class families to buy former luxuries like inexpensive flat-screen televisions, down comforters and porterhouse steaks — has begun to democratize environmental sustainability.

For decades, many consumers felt that going green was a luxury, too, reserved primarily for those with enough money — and time on their hands — to buy groceries at natural food stores and organic clothing from specialty retailers.

Today, the roughly 200 million customers who pass through Wal-Mart’s doors each year buy fluorescent light bulbs that use up to 75 percent less electricity than incandescent bulbs, concentrated laundry detergent that uses 50 percent less water and prescription drugs that contain 50 percent less packaging.

“If all this sustainability stuff is just for the well-to-do, it’s not going to make a difference,” said Jib Ellison, the founder of Blu Skye, a sustainability consultant who has worked with Wal-Mart.

As the saying goes, Wal-Mart has also done well by doing good. Along with the McDonald’s Corporation, it was one of only two companies in the Dow Jones industrial average whose share price rose last year.

When Wal-Mart first embraced green initiatives, its fortunes were sagging. After blanketing the country with its giant, all-in-one stores, it began cannibalizing its own sales. Older stores looked tattered and tired, and Wal-Mart’s flirtation with higher-end merchandise, like skinny jeans with fur trim, alienated low-income shoppers who preferred unadorned basics.

By renovating thousands of its stores, ratcheting down the pace of its breakneck expansion and all but abandoning its upscale ambitions, it turned around its lagging sales. But its deft financial rejiggering still didn’t burnish its reputation, which had become a business problem, too.

A confidential 2004 report, prepared by McKinsey & Company for Wal-Mart, found that 2 percent to 8 percent of Wal-Mart consumers surveyed had ceased shopping at the chain because of “negative press they have heard.” Wal-Mart executives and Wall Street analysts began referring to the problem as “headline risk.”

So the company, known for bitterly rebutting critics or simply ignoring them, began working closely with activists to improve its labor, health care and environmental records.

It is hard to measure the financial return of a good image. But no one at Wal-Mart talks about headline risk anymore because the headlines have become largely positive.

Profits climbed to $12.7 billion in the 2008 fiscal year, from $11.2 billion in the 2006 fiscal year, while sales jumped to $375 billion, from $312.4 billion, during the same period. The percentage of employees on Wal-Mart’s health insurance plan rose to 50.2 percent, from 44 percent.

And since the Choice Meeting, sustainability efforts have saved Wal-Mart hundreds of millions of dollars, according to people familiar with the company’s environmental initiatives. Wal-Mart declined to provide exact figures about its savings.

“It wasn’t a matter of telling our story better,” said Mr. Scott said in recent interview. “We had to create a better story.”

WAL-MART, of course, didn’t change overnight. It was pushed — or, more accurately, shoved — into wrenching reforms.

When Mr. Scott became chief executive in 2000, the company was a Wall Street darling. With nearly 4,000 stores and more than a million employees, it had edged out Goliaths like Sears and Kmart. But its size and success invited scrutiny. In 2005, two union-backed groups, Wal-Mart Watch and Wake Up Wal-Mart, set up shop in Washington and started a public relations assault against the company.

At one point, Wal-Mart Watch set up an automated phone system to recruit whistle-blowers to share secrets about the retailer.

In 2005, Wal-Mart Watch obtained an internal memorandum showing that 46 percent of Wal-Mart workers’ children were uninsured or on Medicaid. The memo proposed further ways to cut employees’ health and retiree benefits — at a time when the company was ringing up annual earnings of more than $11 billion.

Meanwhile, environmental groups accused Wal-Mart of being a polluter. Mr. Scott and his team hunkered down, hurling back a litany of statistics and facts in Wal-Mart’s defense.

As the company’s reputation unwound, so did its business. Its stock price fell roughly 20 percent between 2000 and 2005, a drop that executives and analysts attributed, in part, to investors’ anxieties about Wal-Mart’s image. Sales growth lagged behind that of its chief rival, Target, and Wal-Mart faced growing resistance to its expansion.

Inside Wal-Mart headquarters, in Bentonville, Ark., rumors swirled about Mr. Scott’s future, and board members became restless. In the end, directors stood by Mr. Scott, but told him he had to overhaul Wal-Mart’s image.

“What I would tell Lee is that there was a great deal of misunderstanding about the company and that we had to address it head on,” said Jose H. Villarreal, a director from 1998 to 2006 and a partner in the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.

MR. SCOTT — the son of a gas-station owner — joined Wal-Mart’s trucking department in 1979 and rose to the C.E.O. post in 2000. He acknowledged in an interview that while he was running Wal-Mart, his board “sensitized” him to critics.

He began meeting with minority groups, politicians and environmentalists. Some meetings were awkward; others were punctuated by tirades. But as it turned out, most critics did not want Wal-Mart to disappear. They wanted it to be better.

Mr. Scott used some of his opponents’ ideas to make that happen, believing that sustainability could become an advantage — saving the company money, reinvigorating its culture, allowing it to sell better merchandise and attracting and retaining talent.

Engaging outside consultants and critics to help with that transformation was a huge change for the retailer, which prized its independence. To outsiders, it was a sign that Wal-Mart was adopting a new attitude.

“There was a time where people in business believed all they had to do was run their business,” said David D. Glass, Mr. Scott’s predecessor as C.E.O. “But it doesn’t work that way anymore. There is an accountability that goes way beyond that.”

After the Choice Meeting, Mr. Scott went through a kind of Outward Bound phase, known within Wal-Mart as “Eat What You Cook” — a mantra that encourages executives to experience firsthand the impact of their decisions.

For Mr. Scott, that meant driving to a New Hampshire mountaintop to discuss climate change with scientists. He slept on a bunk bed in submarine-size quarters with visitors including Steven Hamburg, then an environmental studies professor at Brown University and author of a 1994 report criticizing Wal-Mart’s environmental efforts.

Mr. Hamburg, now chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, told Mr. Scott that Wal-Mart’s earlier green initiatives were just window dressing. “So he challenged me back and said, ‘Well, we’ve taken another run at this and we’d love to have your input,’ ” Mr. Hamburg recalls.

Shortly after that conversation, Mr. Scott told the world that Wal-Mart was embracing sustainability. He laid out ambitious, possibly unattainable, long-term goals for the company: running its operations solely on renewable energy, creating zero waste and selling products that sustain the earth’s resources and environment.

Wal-Mart’s suppliers had little choice but to follow its lead.

In came the fluorescent bulbs. In 2007 alone, Wal-Mart sold more than 100 million of them. For a manufacturer, selling a bulb that lasts longer means fewer sold. But it would hurt to lose Wal-Mart as a customer. So G.E. and others ramped up production of fluorescent bulbs.

By selling only concentrated liquid laundry detergent, an effort it began last year, Wal-Mart says, its customers will save more than 400 million gallons of water, 95 million pounds of plastic resin, 125 million pounds of cardboard and 520,000 gallons of diesel fuel over three years.

“Lee pushed me,” said A. G. Lafley, chief executive of Procter & Gamble, and “we totally, totally changed the way we manufacture liquid laundry detergents in the U.S. and, now, around the world.”

Wal-Mart says it now saves itself $3.5 million a year just by recycling loose plastic and selling it to processors. After changing the design of its trucks and how efficiently it loads them, its fleet had a 25 percent improvement in fuel efficiency. Amory B. Lovins, a MacArthur fellow and chairman and chief scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit research organization, said Wal-Mart would save nearly $500 million a year in fuel costs by 2020.

While environmentalists give Wal-Mart kudos for the changes it has made, they say that much of what it has achieved so far amounts to collecting low-hanging fruit. The company sells tens of thousands of products, and has demanded the overhaul of only a handful, they say. “The jury’s out in the long term,” Mr. Hamburg says.

Wal-Mart has revised health care plans and labor practices in recent years, also important facets of its makeover.

In the last few years, it has helped its employees get access to lower-cost prescription drugs and taken steps to prevent labor abuses. For years, some store managers forced employees to work without pay, after clocking out, according to scores of lawsuits. To prevent this, Wal-Mart has programmed cash registers to shut down after an employee has exceeded a certain number of hours. It has also told managers to make sure that employees take lunch and rest breaks.

Last month, Wal-Mart settled dozens of lawsuits contending that it forced employees to work off the clock. The settlement will cost Wal-Mart at least $352 million, possibly far more, according to the company.

Still, many activists, especially in the labor world, remain deeply dissatisfied.

A major class-action sexual discrimination lawsuit is pending against the company. And labor leaders argue that Wal-Mart has simply found new ways to fatten its profits without tangibly improving the lives of its employees. It pays its workers, on average, less than $20,000 a year, and many of them pay thousands of dollars a year in medical bills.

“He had the chance to be the Henry Ford of his generation, especially in the last few years, as the stock price soared,” said Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, of Mr. Scott. “He could have found a way to share the wealth. Instead, he became the epitome of the greed that has brought our economy to where it is today.”

Mr. Scott declined to comment. But Wal-Mart says that its average wage, $10.83 an hour for full-time workers, are competitive in the retailing industry, and that its health plans are accessible to a wider range of workers than those of some of its rivals.

Wal-Mart will need to keep building on its recent successes. While most retail chains have had double-digit declines during the current economic turndown, Wal-Mart had a 1.7 percent sales increase in December at stores open at least a year.

Yet that number was lower than analysts’ expectations, leading some to predict more trouble ahead for Wal-Mart and the rest of the retail industry.

Come February, it will be the job of Michael T. Duke, 58, who has led Wal-Mart’s international operations since 2005, to steer the company through the downturn.

As for Mr. Scott, he will serve as chairman of the executive committee of Wal-Mart’s board until 2011. And he intends to increase the retailer’s lobbying muscle in Washington, especially regarding health care, energy and sustainability.

“As businesses, we have a responsibility to society,” he said this month, speaking to members of the National Retail Federation in his last public speech as Wal-Mart chief. “Let me be clear about this point. There is no conflict between delivering value to shareholders, and helping solve bigger societal problems.”

Iraq's Good Example
By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, February 8, 2009; B07

A new Iraq is emerging from five years of American invasion and occupation, and at first glance it looks distressingly like the old Iraq: Its people are still bound by the barbed wire of suspicion and hatred as much as by any sense of common purpose and history.

But the new Iraq is clearly a nation in ways that the old Iraq -- long considered by experts as an artificial creation that would fly apart under the pressure of outside intervention -- was not. It did not fly apart and has in fact undergone significant, positive mutations as a result of a soon-to-subside U.S. presence.

The provincial elections held a week ago were far from perfect, and personal relationships among the country's Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds still range from malignant to murderous. In Anbar province, disgruntled Sunni sheiks didn't ask for recounts or fire their political consultants. They unleashed threats of new mayhem unless they were immediately declared the winners. Old habits die hard in Iraq, too.

But by the standards of the past -- and of the rough neighborhood in which Iraqis still live -- the two general elections that Iraq has held in four years stand as paragons of progress and adaptation that others in the region should aim to emulate. That development should not be ignored or minimized, particularly as the United States and Europe wrestle with analogous problems that confront a newly besieged Afghanistan. Even more important than shifting troops from Iraq to Afghanistan may be shifting counterinsurgency lessons learned.

Another signpost suggests that Iraq is closer today to being a source of regional stability than it ever was in its pre-American era, when Saddam Hussein repeatedly threatened (and at times tried) to annihilate Iraq's Arab and Iranian neighbors as well as Israel. That signpost is the growing acceptance by the region's Sunni Arab regimes of the central Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose Shiite-based State of Law coalition scored the biggest victories in the election results released Thursday.

Just a few years ago, Jordan's leaders were ominously warning that they would not accept Iraq's becoming part of a "Shiite crescent" of subversion. Today, Amman leads the way in establishing improved diplomatic relations, economic cooperation and security ties with Baghdad. Abu Dhabi and other Gulf states, as well as Egypt, have also upgraded their relations with Iraq, as Maliki and his aides have established some distance from both the United States and Iran.

"President Bush made many mistakes in occupying Iraq," one Arab official told me recently. "But he did the right thing in staying with the surge and giving the Iraqi government time to show it could sustain itself. The results of the past 18 months have persuaded many of us that Iraq's civilian government is here to stay, and it is time to cooperate" with Baghdad, rather than push for a return to domination of Iraq by the Sunni Arab minority.

Saudi Arabia is the most notable holdout from this trend, in part, it seems, because of poor personal relations between Maliki and the royal family. But the Saudis should not feel comfortable in remaining isolated on this issue in the face of Maliki's solid electoral victories last week over his more religiously minded rivals in Iraq's southern provinces.

A continuing argument here over whether the surge worked misses the significance of the broader, still-unfolding historical changes brought by the 2003 toppling of Saddam Hussein. The internalizing of Iraq's strife -- as horrible as that strife can be on any given day for Iraqis -- makes the region less of a global tinderbox than it was. That the country's Kurds no longer live under the threat of genocide directed from Baghdad and that the Shiites no longer have to submit to state-organized mass murder on a routine basis constitutes real progress for them and for humanity.

For too long, Bush resisted letting the Iraqis find their own way -- however messy or even brutal -- to reconcile their differences. President Obama should reflect on that as he develops a new approach to the conflict in Afghanistan, another "new" country that looks very familiar as corruption, drug dealing and Taliban control mount.

Reflect on this part of the Iraqi example as well, Mr. President: American power was able to shock Iraqis. But it did not awe them. They are returning quickly to old habits, to their own moral and social compasses. But they do not return unchanged by the experience. Nor do their neighbors.

jimhoagland@washpost.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/magazine/25bloggers-t.html?_r=1&ref=technology&pagewanted=print

January 25, 2009
Revolution, Facebook-Style

By SAMANTHA M. SHAPIRO
Only a few hours after Israel’s first air strike against Hamas positions in the Gaza Strip late last month, more than 2,000 protesters marched through the streets of downtown Cairo, carrying Palestinian flags. This began what would become weeks of protests, in which thousands of Egyptians of all different political leanings gathered in Egypt’s main cities, in public squares and at mosques and universities. Hundreds were arrested. In every city, the biggest presence at the protests was the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist political organization, active in many countries throughout the Middle East, that seeks to govern according to Islamic law. Other, smaller demonstrations were put together, sometimes spontaneously, by leftist groups and student organizations.

Anti-Israel demonstrations in Arab capitals are nothing new. From Amman to Riyadh, governments have long viewed protests against Israel as a useful safety valve to allow citizens to let off steam without addressing grievances closer to home. But in Egypt, this time, the protests were different: some of the anger was aimed directly at the government of President Hosni Mubarak. In defiance of threats from the police, and in contravention of a national taboo, some demonstrators chanted slogans against Mubarak, condemning his government for maintaining diplomatic relations with Israel, for exporting natural gas to the country and for restricting movement through Egypt’s border with Gaza.

As the street protests went on, young Egyptians also were mobilizing and venting their anger over Gaza on what would, until recently, have seemed an unlikely venue: Facebook, the social-networking site. In most countries in the Arab world, Facebook is now one of the 10 most-visited Web sites, and in Egypt it ranks third, after Google and Yahoo. About one in nine Egyptians has Internet access, and around 9 percent of that group are on Facebook — a total of almost 800,000 members. This month, hundreds of Egyptian Facebook members, in private homes and at Internet cafes, have set up Gaza-related “groups.” Most expressed hatred for Israel and the United States, but each one had its own focus. Some sought to coordinate humanitarian aid to Gaza, some criticized the Egyptian government, some criticized other Arab countries for blaming Egypt for the conflict and still others railed against Hamas. When I sat down in the middle of January with an Arabic-language translator to look through Facebook, we found one new group with almost 2,000 members called “I’m sure I can find 1,000,000 members who hate Israel!!!” and another called “With all due respect, Gaza, I don’t support you,” which blamed Palestinian suffering on Hamas and lamented the recent shooting of two Egyptian border guards, which had been attributed to Hamas fire. Another group implored God to “destroy and burn the hearts of the Zionists.” Some Egyptian Facebook users had joined all three groups.

Freedom of speech and the right to assemble are limited in Egypt, which since 1981 has been ruled by Mubarak’s National Democratic Party under a permanent state-of-emergency law. An estimated 18,000 Egyptians are imprisoned under the law, which allows the police to arrest people without charges, allows the government to ban political organizations and makes it illegal for more than five people to gather without a license from the government. Newspapers are monitored by the Ministry of Information and generally refrain from directly criticizing Mubarak. And so for young people in Egypt, Facebook, which allows users to speak freely to one another and encourages them to form groups, is irresistible as a platform not only for social interaction but also for dissent.

Although there are countless political Facebook groups in Egypt, many of which flare up and fall into disuse in a matter of days, the one with the most dynamic debates is that of the April 6 Youth Movement, a group of 70,000 mostly young and educated Egyptians, most of whom had never been involved with politics before joining the group. The movement is less than a year old; it formed more or less spontaneously on Facebook last spring around an effort to stage a general nationwide strike. Members coalesce around a few issues — free speech, economic stagnation and government nepotism — and they share their ideas for improving Egypt. But they do more than just chat: they have tried to organize street protests to free jailed journalists, and this month, hundreds of young people from the April 6 group participated in demonstrations about Gaza, some of which were coordinated on Facebook, and at least eight members of the group were detained by police.

As with any group on Facebook, members can post comments or share news articles, videos or notes on the group’s communal “wall.” The wall of the April 6 group is constantly being updated with new posts, and the talk is often heated and intense. On a recent afternoon, members were discussing photographs that had just been posted on the Muslim Brotherhood Web site of a mass protest in Alexandria against Israel’s actions in Gaza, in which thousands of members of the brotherhood took to the streets.

“They are real men!” posted a young woman using the alias Mona Liza.

“Something like this should happen in Cairo,” another member typed. “People should go to the streets of Cairo until the Jewish crusaders’ government falls.”

Another member dissented: “We need strong actions, not protests like the brotherhood’s where they sing religious songs and go home.”

Ahmed Maher, a 28-year-old engineer who is one of the group’s unofficial leaders, weighed in. “There are ideas about a big protest for Gaza right now,” he wrote. The April 6 group should join that protest, he agreed, but “we should link it to our demands, which are of course different from other peoples’ demands, like those of the brotherhood.” It was a crucial point: unlike many protest groups in Egypt that were angry about Gaza, Maher saw Gaza as a way to stoke and focus discontent against Mubarak and his government. Maher saw Egypt’s relationship with Israel as one symptom of a larger set of problems — censorship, corruption, joblessness and government incompetence — whose solution would lie not in resistance in Gaza but in democratization at home. “We should link politics with economic and social problems to show that our suffering is caused by a corrupt regime,” Maher wrote.

The fact that tens of thousands of disaffected young Egyptians unhappy with their government meet online to debate and plan events is remarkable, given the context of political repression in which it is occurring. Organized groups opposed to Mubarak’s National Democratic Party have long lived under constant surveillance by the government; their leaders are regularly jailed. As a result, most Egyptian opposition groups remain small and are often plagued by infighting. And although about a third of Egypt’s population is between 15 and 29, young Egyptians have for years been politically disengaged. A 2004 study by the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies found that 67 percent of young people weren’t registered to vote, and 84 percent had never participated in a public demonstration.

In its official statement, the April 6 movement takes pains to emphasize that it isn’t a political party. But the movement has provided a structure for a new generation of Egyptians, who aren’t part of the nation’s small coterie of activists and opinion-makers, to assemble virtually and communicate freely about their grievances. When I spoke earlier this month to Samer Shehata, an assistant professor of Arab politics at Georgetown University, he said that it was no surprise that young Egyptians have chosen to put their political energy into a group that is not part of the Egyptian political process. “The state of the opposition in Egypt is so pathetic that existing parties have lost all credibility,” he told me. “They’ve been around for a long time and produced nothing.” The April 6 Facebook group, he said, “has credibility because it hasn’t sold out to the regime or played the pathetic, limited game of politics the regime engages in.”

ON A THURSDAY AFTERNOON last fall, I made my way to a Cinnabon cafe in Nasr City, a well-to-do district of Cairo, to meet with one of the founders of the April 6 Facebook group, a 30-year-old woman named Esraa Abdel Fattah Ahmed Rashid, who works as a training coordinator for a company that makes Islamic DVDs. The Cinnabon was subdued: a few pairs of young women and one or two married couples were scattered around the seating area with open laptops and frothy, sweet drinks. Sean Paul’s “Temperature” played at a tasteful volume, low enough that the dance-hall lyrics about “the right tactics to turn you on” were nearly indecipherable. Rashid was wearing a meticulously coordinated outfit: brown pants, sandals, T-shirt, eyeliner and a baby blue tunic with overlapping light blue and brown head scarves.

Rashid has a round face, a high-pitched voice and a plucky sense of determination — Reese Witherspoon in a hijab. Her husband works in Dubai most of the year, and while he is away, she lives with her mother. She originally joined Facebook to keep up with friends; she joined groups for fans of the Egyptian singer Mohammed Mounir and the national soccer team, another for discussions of the Koran and others that offered updates on the latest styles in pajamas and modest wedding dresses. But her relationship with Facebook evolved in ways she could not have predicted. Last spring, the general strike that Rashid and her friends organized on Facebook landed her in jail, on talk shows and in newspapers around Egypt and abroad. She was now widely known around Egypt — even by people who didn’t use the Internet — as the Facebook Girl, and she told me that she was logged into the site pretty much any time she wasn’t working or sleeping. (Like most of the Internet activists I met in Egypt, Rashid spoke little English, and we communicated mostly through an interpreter.)

The April 6 movement has its roots in Egypt’s brief burst of political freedom in 2005 and 2006, which came after the Bush administration put pressure on the Mubarak regime to hold its first multiparty election. Although the election was far from free, it created new opportunities for activists to organize and demonstrate, and out of the campaign a loose coalition of socialist, leftist and Islamist groups emerged called Kefaya (“enough” in Arabic). They focused on direct action and rarely discussed ideology, but they were united on one issue: that Hosni Mubarak should not be allowed to transfer power to his son Gamal. Kefaya organized street protests to pressure Mubarak to step down, hold free elections and allow the Egyptian judiciary to remain independent. Some demonstrations attracted as many as 10,000 people.

This flare-up of political activity coincided with the moment Egyptians were starting to gain access to the Internet in large numbers. Home computers and Internet cafes were becoming more popular, and the cost of getting online was dropping, thanks to a government initiative intended to encourage technological innovation in Egypt. The new technologies and political movements grew symbiotically. Shortly before Kefaya started, Wael Abbas, who is now one of Egypt’s most influential bloggers, set up a Web site called Egyptian Awareness, and it quickly became the main source of information on Kefaya’s activities, which were largely ignored by the state-run media.

Abbas and a few other early adopters of blog technology worked simultaneously as political advocates and crusading journalists. In 2006, Abbas posted cellphone-video footage of a police officer sodomizing a screaming minibus driver with an iron rod, which ultimately led to the officer’s conviction. Another prominent blogger and friend of Abbas’s, a woman in her early 30s named Nora Younis, posted stories about sexual harassment of women who participated in street demonstrations, which helped spur Egypt’s mainstream media to cover the issue. (Younis worked briefly for The New York Times as a stringer.) Political blogs became essential reading for opposition parties; in 2005, Al Dustur, a weekly paper opposed to the regime, started a blog page, which reprinted important posts for readers without Internet access.

During the 2005 election campaign, Esraa Rashid started volunteering at the headquarters of El Ghad, a liberal democratic party that was founded in 2004 by Ayman Nour, a wealthy lawyer and member of Parliament. Nour came in second in the election, behind Mubarak, with 7 percent of the vote; he is currently in jail for forgery charges that his supporters insist are bogus. Rashid told me that she loved working at the Ghad office, but she and some of her friends in the youth wing grew impatient with the party bureaucracy. Like most political parties in Egypt, El Ghad has a strict hierarchy, and before deciding to stage an event, the leaders would carefully weigh a number of factors, including internal office politics and their current standing with the Mubarak regime. Members of the youth wing, Rashid told me, didn’t have much say in that process, or much interest in the endless deliberations. So she and some friends turned to Facebook as a quicker, easier way to plan their own events and protests. Rashid’s first foray into using Facebook for organizing was to coordinate a small demonstration around the opening of a movie about corruption and torture called “Heya Fawda” or “This Is Chaos.” Rashid invited all her friends on Facebook to the event; they invited more friends; and in the end, about 100 people showed up. To Rashid, the event was a huge success; exhilarated, she and friends from El Ghad planned a few more events the same way.

THEN LAST MARCH, Rashid got a text message on her phone from Maher, the 28-year-old engineer and activist, suggesting that young Egyptians should do something to support the workers in Mahalla al-Kobra, an industrial town, who were planning to strike on April 6. For more than a year, workers around Egypt had been striking, periodically, to protest high rates of inflation and unemployment, but they never coordinated their protests. Rashid and Maher met when they were both part of the Ghad youth wing, but Maher had left the party to devote himself more fully to the youth movement of Kefaya. Unlike Rashid, he had been active in street protests and had been arrested. Rashid loved the idea of doing something to support the workers, and she called Maher immediately. She suggested they create an open group on Facebook to brainstorm ideas. On March 23, Rashid set up the April 6 Strike group on Facebook with herself and Maher as administrators.

Rashid expected this protest would develop more or less like her movie outing. But almost as soon as she set up the group, there were 16 members; when she refreshed the page a few minutes later, there were more than 60. The next day, more than 1,000. Rashid watched with fear and excitement as thousands of people, then tens of thousands, started joining and posting to the group. Eventually, the number reached 76,000. As the group’s administrators, she and Maher could approve messages as they were posted, and it was their responsibility to delete spam or inappropriate posts; the two took turns monitoring the site day and night.

The group never developed a unified plan of action for April 6. Rashid initially proposed that people stay home and not buy anything in solidarity with the workers — unless they weren’t afraid of protesting, in which case they should take to the streets. One girl suggested that everyone who protested on the street should give flowers to the security forces to disarm them, an idea Rashid supported. Maher started sending so many messages to the group that Facebook canceled his account; the site’s automated filters presumed him to be a spammer. That left Rashid as the group’s sole administrator. As the April 6 group grew, its call for a strike was endorsed by a variety of groups — political parties, labor groups, the Muslim Brotherhood, student organizations, the Kefaya movement. On the streets, supporters handed out leaflets and sprayed graffiti to make non-Internet users aware of the action.

Members who identified themselves as government security agents joined the April 6 group, too, posting comments under the insignia of the Egyptian police, and as April 6 approached, the government issued a strong warning against participation in the strike. Rashid told me that she was scared to go out on the street that day. She would have stayed home, she said, but she felt she owed it to all the people she’d been communicating with to come out. She posted her plans on Facebook; on the day of the strike, she said, she’d meet people at the Kentucky Fried Chicken in Tahrir Square downtown. She told people what she’d be wearing and gave out her cellphone number.

On April 6 in Mahalla, thousands of workers rioted, tearing down a Mubarak billboard. There were many arrests and at least three deaths. When Rashid headed out toward Tahrir Square, she was shocked to see police and military vehicles blocking off streets; soldiers and police officers, it seemed, were everywhere. As Rashid approached the Kentucky Fried Chicken, she found it was surrounded by police. She called some friends and told them to meet her at a nearby cafe to decide what to do next. Police swept in and arrested Rashid at the cafe; they took her to jail, where she stayed for more than two weeks.

Rashid was not prepared for a jail term. She had never been away from her mother for even a day without checking in, and although her mother knew she did clerical work for El Ghad, she had no idea that Rashid had been involved in organizing a general strike. Rashid’s mother was beside herself, and she appeared on TV, begging the authorities to release her daughter.

While Rashid was in prison, members of the April 6 Strike Facebook group replaced their profile pictures with an image of Rashid with the words “Free Esraa!” printed below. And when Egypt’s prime minister, Ahmed Nazif, came to speak at Cairo University about the government’s technology initiatives, a 20-year-old member of the April 6 group named Blal Diab stood up and heckled him, urging him to free Rashid and other jailed activists from the April 6 movement. “They are the same young people who used the Internet to express their opinions!” he yelled, to thunderous applause. (One of Diab’s friends captured the whole thing on his cellphone, and the video was shared widely over YouTube and on blogs.)

Rashid’s release from prison was shown on live television, and it was quite a show. She ran out the door of the jail into her mother’s arms, wailing. An unbelievable amount of screaming and crying ensued. Rashid’s mother tilted her face to the sky and issued a continuous stream of praise and thanks to Allah. Rashid said, tearfully, that she didn’t expect that posting on the Internet would get her sent to jail, and that if she’d known what would happen, she wouldn’t have done it. “They treated me well!” she sobbed. “They let me remain a girl. I missed you, Mom. I prayed to God every day.”

When Rashid started playing the video on her laptop for me, she had to get up and walk away. Watching it still makes her cry.

ETHAN ZUCKERMAN, a research fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, told me that the April 6 movement illustrates what he calls the “cute-cat theory of digital activism.” Web sites or proxy servers created specifically for activists are easy for a government to shut down, Zuckerman says, but around the world, dissidents thrive on sites, like Facebook, that are used primarily for more mundane purposes (like exchanging pictures of cute cats). Authoritarian regimes can’t block political Facebook groups without blocking all the “American Idol” fans and cat lovers as well. “The government can’t simply shut down Facebook, because doing so would alert a large group of people who they can’t afford to radicalize,” Zuckerman explained.

When I spoke to Wael Nawara, a 47-year-old Ghad activist who is a co-founder of the party, he explained why, for him, getting on Facebook was such a big eye-opener. If you look at Egyptian politics on the surface, he said, you might think that the Muslim Brotherhood is the only alternative to the Mubarak regime. But “Facebook revealed a liberal undercurrent in Egyptian society,” Nawara said. “In general, there’s this kind of apathy, a sense that there is nothing we can do to change the situation. But with Facebook you realize there are others who think alike and share the same ideals. You can find Islamists there, but it is really dominated by liberal voices.”

Interestingly, young Islamists in Egypt have also started blogging in ways that challenge their elders, often posting critical comments about the senior leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the past, this kind of internal dialogue was suppressed by the brotherhood’s leadership, or at least hidden from view, since the brotherhood’s newspapers were outlawed. But the official leaders of the brotherhood and younger malcontents have both found a happy home on the Internet. Abdel Monem Mahmoud, one of the most prominent young Muslim Brotherhood bloggers, recently wrote a scathing critique of an article by a brotherhood leader arguing that all politicians must be devoted Muslims. And when the brotherhood circulated a draft of a political platform — the first step toward becoming an official political party — a 28-year-old brotherhood member named Mustafa Naggar used his blog to publish critiques of the platform’s prohibition against electing women or Coptic Christians to the presidency.

A somewhat-grudging alliance has developed among some of the young Islamist bloggers and their secular-liberal compatriots over issues of free speech and the rights of opposition parties. I met Naggar one afternoon in a Cairo coffee shop just after he had recited the midday prayer. He told me Wael Abbas and Nora Younis’s blogs are required reading for him; he visits them every day to stay current, although, he said, it really bothers him that Abbas often uses curse words in his posts. When I spoke to Asmaa Aly, a feminist blogger, she said that she was put off by the practice of many brotherhood members never to touch women other than their wives. “I could never be friends with someone who won’t shake my hand!” she said emphatically. But she added that if a brotherhood blogger was jailed, she would definitely show up for a protest.

In Washington, there is increasing interest in the April 6 Youth Movement. James Glassman, the outgoing under secretary of state for public diplomacy, told me he followed the group closely. “It’s not easy in Egypt, and in other countries in the Middle East, to form robust civil-society organizations,” he said. “And in a way that’s what these groups are doing, although they’re certainly unconventional.”

Other State Department officials told me they believe that social-networking software like Facebook’s has the potential to become a powerful pro-democracy tool. They pointed to recent developments in Saudi Arabia, where in November a Facebook group helped organize a national hunger strike against the kingdom’s imprisonment of political opponents, and in Colombia, where activists last February used Facebook to organize one of the largest protests ever held in that country, a nationwide series of demonstrations against the FARC insurgency. Not long ago, the State Department created its own group on Facebook called “Alliance of Youth Movements,” a coalition of groups from a dozen countries who use Facebook for political organizing. Last month, they brought an international collection of young online political activists, including one from the April 6 group, as well as Facebook executives and representatives from Google and MTV, to New York for a three-day conference.

IN RECENT MONTHS, Ahmed Maher has edged Rashid out of the leadership role they initially shared. When she was in jail, Rashid gave Maher the password to be the administrator of the April 6 Facebook group. He changed it, and ever since, he has declined to tell her the new password. Soon after Rashid was released from jail, she was married and left for her honeymoon. In May, Maher says, state-security officers picked him up and beat him intermittently for 12 hours to try to get him to give up the password for the Facebook group. Abbas posted pictures of Maher’s bruised back on his blog, and an opposition newspaper printed Maher’s account of the incident. Maher and other April 6 members set up a variety of steering groups for the movement, each of which is also on Facebook; using the wall, steering-group members discuss and vote on the direction the movement should go next. The new steering groups are not open to everyone, as the original group is, and Rashid has not been invited to join.

Some Egyptian bloggers and activists told me they resented Rashid’s emotional display when she was released from jail — particularly the fact that she said she wouldn’t have organized the protest if she’d known she would be arrested for it. (Rashid later recanted that apology at a meeting of the April 6 group; she quoted a lyric from a Mohammed Mounir song: “I didn’t need to repent; loving Egypt is not a sin.”) Abbas told me that other female activists, including the blogger Asmaa Aly, had been arrested before — Aly spent a month in jail in 2006 for participating in a Kefaya-organized sit-in for judicial independence — and when they were released, they didn’t cry or apologize.

“What the hell was she saying?” Abbas asked, referring to Rashid’s televised apology. “The girl is chicken. I am sorry to say stuff like that, but people are going to think that everyone who is active online is chicken like her. We are in the streets taking videos and photos. We aren’t only sitting in our bedroom in our pajamas.” (Once, looking at Rashid’s Facebook profile with her, I pointed out that Facebook’s software had included Wael Abbas on her page, under a tab labeled “People You May Know.” Rashid looked at his picture and shook her head. “We will not be friends,” she said firmly.)

Ahmed Maher and a number of his friends in the activist-blogger community spoke with respect about what Rashid had accomplished, but they agreed with Abbas that she didn’t have the right stuff to run the movement. Some activists working with Maher questioned her lack of experience and said it wouldn’t be appropriate for a woman to lead the group, given that the government had tortured Ahmed Maher and sent Rashid to prison once already.

Rashid says she is not happy about any of this. When she and I met in early October, she said that a month earlier, at the beginning of Ramadan, she told Maher he had until the end of the holiday to give her back the password. Now Ramadan had just ended. “The longer he takes, the more forceful my response will be,” she said fiercely.

It was in many ways the unideological, unedited voice that Rashid represented — someone who described herself as “a girl who loves Egypt” and who thought giving flowers to the police might be a good idea — that attracted people to the April 6 movement in such numbers. Young people were drawn to the fact that the movement wasn’t part of Egypt’s calcified party politics. (“I am involved in no parties, never,” one teenage boy told me at a protest. “I just go to Facebook events, wherever they are. I’m in the Facebook Party.”) But for April 6 to keep growing, some say, that may have to change. As Amr Hamzawy, an Egyptian political scientist who is currently a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me: “Just saying you are against Mubarak automatically gets a certain number of people behind you, but it’s not enough. Kefaya wasn’t capable and ready for the next step. They needed to put forth a positive platform as well as a critique of Mubarak in order to move beyond the base of elites in Cairo. April 6 will have to do this. It will have to become more organized in order to succeed where Kefaya failed.”

THE APRIL 6 STRIKE was a success partly because it had its roots offline, among a cohesive, organized group of laborers; their protest was then vastly amplified by the Facebook activists. A number of the events created last summer and fall by the April 6 Youth Movement did not succeed in the same way. Protests were typically attended by only a few dozen of the group’s supporters and often shut down by the police before they even began. Back in July, Maher tried to organize a “flash mob” on the beach in Alexandria that would sing patriotic songs and fly a kite with the Egyptian flag painted on it. But on the day of the protest, Maher and his crew of about 30 young people were stopped by the police before they were even able to finish unfurling their kite.

This month, as the university exam period began to cut into members’ free time, the group’s involvement in Gaza protests seemed to diminish. The decline in turnout led to a flurry of accusations, reflections and recriminations on Facebook. On Jan. 10, a young woman named Asmaa Mahfouz posted an angry screed on the April 6 site titled, “Are you all fed up, or what?” She accused members of opting out of protests because they thought things couldn’t change, no matter how many strikes and demonstrations were organized. “Is this a reasonable way of thinking???!!!” she wrote, punctuation marks flying. “Is it reasonable???? No, no, no, nooooo, absolutely not!”

A young man named Mahmoud Dahshan Ahmed replied that he thought the group needed to coordinate with the Muslim Brotherhood if they were to have an impact. “Frankly, I am fed up,” he wrote. “What is the point of us demonstrating and marching from noon till 6 p.m., when nothing ever changes?”

By organizing online, the April 6 movement avoids some of the pitfalls of party politics in Egypt — censorship, bureaucracy, compromise with the regime. But whenever the movement’s members try to migrate offline, they find they are still playing by Egypt’s rules. They almost never meet in real life, certainly not in large groups, and when they do, the police often show up.

Online, members of the movement are casting votes on the Web site’s walls, publishing notes with their views on the political situation and creating groups to draft a constitution for their movement. But what does it mean to have a vibrant civil society on your computer screen and a police state in the street? When I spoke to Nora Younis, she described the April 6 strike as a practice session for the new generation. “It’s a rehearsal for a bigger thing,” she said. “Right now, we are just testing the power of each other.”

Samantha M. Shapiro is a contributing writer who frequently reports for the magazine from the Middle East

February 25, 2009
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Paging Uncle Sam

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Seoul, South Korea

It is very useful to come to Asia to be reminded about America’s standing in the world these days. For all the talk in recent years about America’s inevitable decline, all eyes are not now on Tokyo, Beijing, Brussels or Moscow — nor on any other pretenders to the world heavyweight crown. All eyes are on Washington to pull the world out of its economic tailspin. At no time in the last 50 years have we ever felt weaker, and at no time in the last 50 years has the world ever seen us as more important.

While it is true that since the end of the cold war global leaders and intellectuals often complained about a world of too much American power, one doesn’t hear much of that grumbling today when most people recognize that only an economically revitalized America has the power to prevent the world economy from going into a global depression. It was always easy to complain about a world of too much American power as long as you didn’t have to live in a world of too little American power. And right now, that is the danger: a world of too little American power.

Somewhere in the back of their minds, a lot of people seem to be realizing that the alternative to a U.S.-dominated world is not a world dominated by someone else or someone better. It is a leaderless world. Neither Russia nor China has the will or the way to provide the global public goods that America — at its best — consistently has. The European Union right now is so split that it cannot even agree on an effective stimulus package.

No wonder then that even though this economic crisis began in America, with American bad borrowing and bad lending practices, people have nevertheless fled to the U.S. dollar. Case in point: South Korea’s currency has lost roughly 40 percent against the dollar in just the last six months.

“No other country can substitute for the U.S.,” a senior Korean official remarked to me. “The U.S. is still No. 1 in military, No. 1 in economy, No. 1 in promoting human rights and No. 1 in idealism. Only the U.S. can lead the world. No other country can. China can’t. The E.U. is too divided, and Europe is militarily far behind the U.S. So it is only the United States ... We have never had a more unipolar world than we have today.”

Yes, many Asians resent the fact that Americans scolded them about their banking crisis in the 1990s, and now we’ve made many of the same mistakes. But that schadenfreude doesn’t last long. In random conversations here in Seoul with Korean and Asian thinkers, journalists and business executives, I found people really worried: Could it be, they ask, that the Americans don’t know what they are doing, or, worse, that they know what they are doing but the problem is just so much bigger than anything we’ve ever seen?

This is a region where Western brands carry great weight, and for people to see giant U.S. financial brands like Citigroup and A.I.G. teetering is deeply unnerving.

The big trading nations, like South Korea, are particularly nervous that America will succumb to economic protectionism, which would undermine the global trading system.

“There is no one who can replace America. Without American leadership, there is no leadership,” said Lee Hong-koo, South Korea’s former ambassador to Washington. “That puts a tremendous burden on the American people to do something positive. You can’t be tempted by the usual nationalism. When things don’t go well, most people become nationalistic. And in the economic world, that is protectionism ... We are pleased to see President Obama is not doing that. Americans, as a people, should realize how many hopes and expectations other people are putting on their shoulders.”

And that’s just on economics. President Obama’s first big security test could come here — and soon. North Korea has gotten crazier than ever; it has been made even poorer by the global economic crisis and by the withdrawal of aid by the new South Korean government. Now the North is threatening to test one of its Taepodong-2 long-range missiles, which may have the capacity to hit Hawaii, Alaska or beyond.

The North last tried such a test in 2006, but the rocket exploded 40 seconds after its launch. If the North does test such an intercontinental ballistic missile again, American forces will have to consider blowing it up on the launch pad or shooting it out of the sky. We never should have allowed the North to get a nuclear warhead; we certainly don’t want it testing a long-range missile that could deliver that nuclear warhead to our shores, or anywhere else.

Never more inward-looking, never more in demand: that’s America today. This moment recalls a point raised by the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum in his book, “The Case for Goliath.” When it comes to the way other countries view America’s pre-eminent role in the world, he wrote, “whatever its life span, three things can be safely predicted: they will not pay for it; they will continue to criticize it; and they will miss it when it is gone.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/opinion/24brooks.html?pagewanted=print

OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Big Test

By DAVID BROOKS
“We cannot successfully address any of our problems without addressing all of them.”
Barack Obama, Feb. 21, 2009
When I was a freshman in college, I was assigned “Reflections on the Revolution in France” by Edmund Burke. I loathed the book. Burke argued that each individual’s private stock of reason is small and that political decisions should be guided by the accumulated wisdom of the ages. Change is necessary, Burke continued, but it should be gradual, not disruptive. For a young democratic socialist, hoping to help begin the world anew, this seemed like a reactionary retreat into passivity.
Over the years, I have come to see that Burke had a point. The political history of the 20th century is the history of social-engineering projects executed by well-intentioned people that began well and ended badly.

There were big errors like communism, but also lesser ones, like a Vietnam War designed by the best and the brightest, urban renewal efforts that decimated neighborhoods, welfare policies that had the unintended effect of weakening families and development programs that left a string of white elephant projects across the world.

These experiences drove me toward the crooked timber school of public philosophy: Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Edward Banfield, Reinhold Niebuhr, Friedrich Hayek, Clinton Rossiter and George Orwell. These writers — some left, some right — had a sense of epistemological modesty. They knew how little we can know. They understood that we are strangers to ourselves and society is an immeasurably complex organism. They tended to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize society from the top down.
Before long, I was no longer a liberal. Liberals are more optimistic about the capacity of individual reason and the government’s ability to execute transformational change. They have more faith in the power of social science, macroeconomic models and 10-point programs.

Readers of this column know that I am a great admirer of Barack Obama and those around him. And yet the gap between my epistemological modesty and their liberal worldviews has been evident over the past few weeks. The people in the administration are surrounded by a galaxy of unknowns, and yet they see this economic crisis as an opportunity to expand their reach, to take bigger risks and, as Obama said on Saturday, to tackle every major problem at once.

President Obama has concentrated enormous power on a few aides in the West Wing of the White House. These aides are unrolling a rapid string of plans: to create three million jobs, to redesign the health care system, to save the auto industry, to revive the housing industry, to reinvent the energy sector, to revitalize the banks, to reform the schools — and to do it all while cutting the deficit in half.

If ever this kind of domestic revolution were possible, this is the time and these are the people to do it. The crisis demands a large response. The people around Obama are smart and sober.

Their plans are bold but seem supple and chastened by a realistic sensibility.
Yet they set off my Burkean alarm bells. I fear that in trying to do everything at once, they will do nothing well. I fear that we have a group of people who haven’t even learned to use their new phone system trying to redesign half the U.S. economy. I fear they are going to try to undertake the biggest administrative challenge in American history while refusing to hire the people who can help the most: agency veterans who are registered lobbyists.

I worry that we’re operating far beyond our economic knowledge. Every time the administration releases an initiative, I read 20 different economists with 20 different opinions. I worry that we lack the political structures to regain fiscal control. Deficits are exploding, and the president clearly wants to restrain them. But there’s no evidence that Democrats and Republicans in Congress have the courage or the mutual trust required to share the blame when taxes have to rise and benefits have to be cut.

All in all, I can see why the markets are nervous and dropping. And it’s also clear that we’re on the cusp of the biggest political experiment of our lifetimes. If Obama is mostly successful, then the epistemological skepticism natural to conservatives will have been discredited. We will know that highly trained government experts are capable of quickly designing and executing top-down transformational change. If they mostly fail, then liberalism will suffer a grievous blow, and conservatives will be called upon to restore order and sanity.
It’ll be interesting to see who’s right. But I can’t even root for my own vindication. The costs are too high. I have to go to the keyboard each morning hoping Barack Obama is going to prove me wrong.