This is good news if the polling in the report described below is reliable. As I've often remarked, economic and political development is as much a change of "mentality" -- of shifting expectations about how "things are done" or should be done. And that takes a generation or more. For the transition economies, one of the biggest challenges has been to create home-grown constitutencies for meaningful, deep institutional reforms.

A necessary starting point, for both economic and legal reforms, is for a significant portion of the population and the politicians to share a vocabulary with which to discuss what would be a better outcome and what needs to be fixed in order to get that outcome. A broadly shared assessment may be starting to emerge after fifteen years, as more and more of Russia's economic activity has become the province of private entrepreneurs and local businesses -- not just kiosk traders from the Caucasus, a handful of oligarchs, and a few multinationals. Note the emphasis on crime and extortion as major threats to business, as well as the widely shared perception that Russia's laws and regulations are so poorly written that it's impossible for anyone to fully comply with the law.

Some of Putin's second term agenda -- including his recent emphasis on reforms to help SMEs -- can be understood as reflecting these public perceptions. Of course, the splits within both the Kremlin and the government too often result in ineffectual or counter-productive responses. But it's a starting point.

[Via the daily email (No 9150) from Johnson's Russia List. NB: The translation of the article provides little in the way of sources of the opinion polling or the context, but given that the article gives breakdowns of responses to a number of specific questions, the data are unlikely to have been invented from whole cloth. In any event, the article is more interesting for what it says about broad attitudes rather than the detailed composition or movement of opinion on specific issues. Therefore, I've reproduced it in full rather than snip excerpts.]

Novoe Vremya, No. 19, May 8, 2005

A FATEFUL TRIANGLE: BUSINESS, GOVERNMENT, AND THE PEOPLE

Russian citizens are changing their attitude to private enterprise

Author: Nikolai Popov
Translated by Pavel Pushkin
[from WPS Monitoring Agency, www.wps.ru/e_index.html]

[Attitudes to the private sector and businesspeople who make fortunes from it changed significantly in Russia in recent years. Increased personal acquaintance with businesspeople as friends and relatives leads to a situation where attitudes to this group grow more positive.]

Attitudes to the private sector and businesspeople who make fortunes from it changed significantly in Russia during the period of perestroika and market reforms.

Increased personal acquaintance with businesspeople as friends and relatives leads to a situation where attitudes to this group grow more positive. When asked the question "What is you attitude, in general, to the people who run private enterprise (small and medium-sized businesses)?" 36% of respondents said that this attitude is "good," 44% - "rather good," 5% - "bad" and 9% - "rather bad." Only 6% of respondents could not answer.

Attitude to the state structures on which small business depends is mostly negative: 44% of respondents believe that "state officials" hinder development of private enterprise and 27% of respondents believe that they help small businesses.

According to majority of the population, obstacles for small businesses on the part of the state bodies are not the main problems for businesspeople. Fear of gangster or police racket is still widespread, which can be seen in answers to the following question, "Do you think that running of private enterprise is safe now (what is the crime situation)?"

The overwhelming majority of respondents (81%) believe that running business is dangerous and only 15% of respondents think this is safe. It is possible that positive attitude to small businesses is caused partially by sympathy of the people to this dangerous occupation.

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Before there was email, before there were hyperlinks, before we tagged items of interest to share with others, or posted opinions about articles. or attached our own comments along with others' to someone else's post, there was a revolutionary breakthrough in how we communicate. Though a technological innovation, it was remarkable in its simplicity and flexibility. Its take-up had more to do with how users kept coming up with new ways to put the thing to use. Network effects were critical to its success. Marketing relied more on "viral" techniques than advertising.

The controlled circulation magazine for Minnesota, The Rake, celebrates Minnesota's greatest invention by recounting the compleat history of the Post-It Note.

In the wake of the Post-it Note’s huge commercial success and enduring popularity, its development is often cited as a classic example of business innovation. Most of the time, though, the tale is synopsized, elided, reduced to a few efficient paragraphs. On the face of it, this is fitting for a product that helped usher in the era of PowerPoint presentations and instant messaging.

But the story of 3M engineer Art Fry’s invention is a grand chronicle of post-industrial American enterprise. It encompasses skeptical bosses, last-ditch marketing campaigns, and that old Hollywood crowd-pleaser, “inherently tacky elastomeric copolymer microspheres.” It deserves a more in-depth telling than it typically gets.

And a delightful in-depth telling this tale receives, indeed.

Courtesy 3quarksDaily, my favorite eclectic link-blog, dedicated to "science, design, literature, current affairs, art, and anything else we deem inherently fascinating."

Courtesy praktike's burrowing into the bowels of legal reform programs. From the American Bar Association's program on promoting the rule of law in Central and Eastern Europe, Eurasia and the Middle East, the Judicial Reform Index:

Factor 5: Judicial Review of Legislation
A judicial organ has the power to determine the ultimate constitutionality of legislation and official acts, and such decisions are enforced.

Factor 6: Judicial Oversight of Administrative Practice
The judiciary has the power to review administrative acts and to compel the government to act where a legal duty to act exists.

Factor 7: Judicial Jurisdiction over Civil Liberties
The judiciary has exclusive, ultimate jurisdiction over all cases concerning civil rights and liberties.

Factor 8: System of Appellate Review
Judicial decisions may be reversed only through the judicial appellate process.

Brought to our attention by Digby (and Avedon Carol posting on Eschaton), via a post on judicial review on ars technica. From a Congressional Research Service summary of the provisions of the REAL ID Act, which Sensenbrenner in the House has attached to the supplemental budget for Iraq and Afghanistan.

II. Waiver of Laws to Facilitate Barriers at Border44

Section 102 of the IIRIRA generally provides for construction and strengthening of barriers along U.S. land borders and specifically provides for 14 miles of barriers and roads along the border near San Diego, beginning at the Pacific Ocean and extending eastward. IIRIRA § 102(c) provides for a waiver of the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA)45 and the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA)46 to the extent the Attorney General determines is necessary to ensure expeditious construction of barriers and roads...

H.R. 418 [the Real ID Act of 2005] would provide additional waiver authority over laws that might impede the expeditious construction of barriers and roads along the border. H.R. 418 would require the Secretary of Homeland Security to waive any and all laws that he determines necessary, in his sole discretion, to ensure the expeditious construction of barriers and roads under IIRIRA § 102...

Section 102 of H.R. 418 would amend the current provision to require the Secretary of Homeland Security to waive any law upon determining that a waiver is necessary for the expeditious construction of the border barriers. Additionally, it would prohibit judicial review of a waiver decision or action by the Secretary and bar judicially ordered compensation or injunction or other remedy for damages alleged to result from any such decision or action.

Hey, prak, maybe it is time for you to get shrill again, after all.

There's an old joke -- so old I can't quite remember how it goes, other than the punch line. The story has something to do with a scientific discovery about elephants. When the news comes out, the Brits promptly write a white paper on the policy implications for elephant habitats. The Germans produce an encyclopedia covering all things elephant. And the Poles publish a treatise entitled "The Elephant and the Polish Question."

I've been reminded of the punch line more than once over the past several weeks as I've read endless lectures to the Russians on how they should go about remembering the defeat of Nazi Germany sixty years ago. Anne Applebaum's op-ed in the Washington Post fits the almost-universal pattern.

Try, if you can, to picture the scene. A vast crowd in Red Square: Lenin's tomb and Stalin's memorial in the background. Soldiers march in goose step behind rolling tanks, and the air echoes with martial music, occasionally drowned out by the whine of fighter jets. On the reviewing stand, statesmen are gathered: Kim Jong Il, the dictator of North Korea, Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the former dictator of Poland -- and President George W. Bush.

That description may sound fanciful or improbable. It is neither. On the contrary, that is more or less what will appear on your television screen May 9, when the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II is celebrated in Moscow. I have exaggerated only one detail: Although Kim Jong Il has been invited, his attendance has not yet been confirmed. But Jaruzelski is definitely coming, as are Lukashenko, Bush and several dozen other heads of state. President Vladimir Putin of Russia will preside.

Of course, conveniently airbrushed from this Soviet-esque word-picture are the other leaders gathered in Red Square from the wartime allies of America and the USSR. But left out of this picture is also Red Square itself -- its colorful vitality, its glorious collection of ancient and modern symbols, Lenin's tomb and rock concerts. Standing in Red Square, one has the sense of an ageless, changeless society characterized incongruously by its never-ending arduous struggle to remake itself. This is not a place or a people trapped for eternity in a snapshot of politburo members atop a reviewing stand. That fact is, for me, one of the many reasons to celebrate this May 9 and makes Red Square an appropriate venue, among many, for those remembrances.

I've also found remarkable, in the editorials and media coverage leading up to May 9, that the costs borne by all of the Allies in the defeat of Nazi Germany seem to have been overlooked or even lost altogether. Searching for "Stalingrad" or "Leningrad" or the "Eastern Front" produces hardly a single recent item. For that matter, until President Bush appeared on Saturday at an American battlefield cemetery in the Netherlands, virtually nothing has been heard about those who lost their lives fighting the Nazis on the Western Front. That generation, which has been called the "greatest" in the US, endured horrors and made sacrifices that are simply unimaginable today. The last of that generation will be walking proudly to the "echoes of martial music" in Red Square on May 9. While some of them are still with us, we should remember them and the stories they wrote with their lives.

Certainly, we should never dismiss the real problems at the heart of quarrels over several centuries of Central and Eastern European history, including the Cold War period of Soviet domination. Russia itself is suffering from the failure to fill meaningfully huge lacunae in its historical narrative. A number of thoughtful comments have recently been written on the questions of "facing up to history" and reconciliation, and I'll try to take up those themes in a future post. But today I feel like assembling a few of the pictures -- undoubtedly familiar to most of you -- that are part of my impressionistic mental scrapbook but aren't likely to make much of an appearance in the media this VE Day.
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Awhile back I was reminiscing about how so many of today's most heated debates carry rather strong echoes of the past. And now we have further proof that some disputes just can't seem to ever die. The principal of McCord Middle School in Benton Harbor, Michigan has ordered the school band not to perform "Louie, Louie" in Saturday's Grand Floral Parade, held as part of the Blossomtime Festival.

Most readers will be familiar with this staple of raunchy dancing that's part of the repertoire of every band that plays at an American sporting event. What would generations of that soon-to-be-endangered species, "sexy cheerleaders," have done without a bit of bump-and-grind to "Louie, Louie." And Animal House afficianados will recall John Belushi's thoughtful explication of the significance of the lyrics. The website LouieLouie.net -- devoted to the production of a documentary on the history of the song, its composer/lyricist Richard Berry, and many of its performers -- has inventoried more than 1,600 recordings. Wikipedia reports that what is believed to be the world's largest jam session was held in 2003 in Tacoma, Washington, where 754 guitarists played a ten-minute rendition of "Louie, Louie."

For me, however, "Louie, Louie" is simply one of the great urban myths. So where else to look than that cornucopia of cultural artifacts, Urban Legends.

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Gee, when you put it that way ...

DOBBS: Are you surprised when you focus on the two deficits we just talked about, the trade deficit, and the budget deficit? The budget deficit is 3.6 percent of our GDP. The trade deficit is reaching just almost 6 percent of GDP. And the president is talking about reforming Social Security. Does that surprise you?

BUFFETT: Well, it's an interesting idea that a deficit of $100 billion a year, something, 20 years out, seems to terrify the administration. But the $400 plus billion dollars deficit currently does nothing but draw yawns. I mean the idea that this terrible specter looms over us 20 years out which is a small fraction of the deficit we happily run now seems kind of interesting to me.

Note: Warren Buffett is a very rich and successful man. George W. Bush has failed at nearly everything he's tried. To whom would you go for advice?

Yet another sign that The Party is intent on imposing its will:

WASHINGTON, May 1 - The Republican chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is aggressively pressing public television to correct what he and other conservatives consider liberal bias, prompting some public broadcasting leaders - including the chief executive of PBS - to object that his actions pose a threat to editorial independence.

Without the knowledge of his board, the chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, contracted last year with an outside consultant to keep track of the guests' political leanings on one program, "Now With Bill Moyers."

In late March, on the recommendation of administration officials, Mr. Tomlinson hired the director of the White House Office of Global Communications as a senior staff member, corporation officials said. While she was still on the White House staff, she helped draft guidelines governing the work of two ombudsmen whom the corporation recently appointed to review the content of public radio and television broadcasts.

Mr. Tomlinson also encouraged corporation and public broadcasting officials to broadcast "The Journal Editorial Report," whose host, Paul Gigot, is editor of the conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. And while a search firm has been retained to find a successor for Kathleen A. Cox, the corporation's president and chief executive, whose contract was not renewed last month, Mr. Tomlinson has made clear to the board that his choice is Patricia Harrison, a former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee who is now an assistant secretary of state.

It's really hard to see this as benign, as Tomlinson claims. It may be time for me to get shrill again.

For some time, praktike and I have been observing a change in the way the Bush Administration is approaching the Global War on Terrorism, and I promised him I'd try to put some thoughts down in writing. Last week, Jim Hoagland confirmed our observations, flagging a shift underway to a Global War on Extremism, with some reassignment of bureaucratic roles. Then yesterday, Ivo Daalder of Brookings (with whom I am in agreement far more often than not) posted some observations about the changes in Bush's second term foreign policy. He basically concluded that Bush has lost interest in the war on terrorism and has reverted to his pre-9/11 policy priorities and worldview.

Praktike's reaction to Daalder's post was mixed. Among the points prak raises, he hits on the topic I promised to write about:

I also think Daalder is missing the Bush administration's shift away from a "global war on terrorism" to a "global war on extremism," which we've been tracking here. In truth, this change in emphasis from a primarily military to a primarily ideological struggle is what Democrats and counterterrorism experts have been talking about for some time. If done properly (always iffy with the Bush administration), it will be a good thing,..

I agree wholeheartedly. Here's a lengthy very-sketchy-first-draft-essay on why I agree with prak, together with some implications from the view of strategic doctrine.

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Like praktike, I am somewhat disappointed with Ivo Daalder's opening contribution to Josh Marshall's new policy blogging venture. Criticism of the Bush Administration's specific moves on dealing with terrorism are certainly merited. Where Bush's actions (or non-actions) notably diverge from his political rhetoric, he should be especially fair game for his electoral cynicism and fear-mongering.

But Daalder's critique of Bush as "all hat" on terror is pushing us in a direction we don't really want to go. Or rather, it's inadvertently hanging on to a set of Bush-defined narrow policies when Bush has himself begun to shift towards a strategic approach far more in keeping with policies liberals have long advocated. We should get out in front of that process.

The "Global War on Terrorism" as a flawed strategy

From the outset, the "Global War on Terrorism" was widely derided as a strategic concept by scholars and experienced policymakers both in the US and internationally, and within both the foreign policy and military establishments. As emphasized in the report of the 9/11 Commission and the Defense Advisory Board's recommendations on Public Diplomacy, the GWOT is a distinctly unhelpful way of thinking about the complex phenomena of politico-religious extremism which manifest themselves, in part, through terrorist acts aimed at the US or at US friends and interests. A GWOT provides little strategic guidance for defining objectives or for framing policy options, choosing actions, and assessing the effectiveness of those actions (e.g. Rumsfeld's "metrics" problem).

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