Terrorism.  Well, sort of.  At least that’s what our federal government thinks.

CQ Politics revealed earlier this month that the FBI, in 2005 and 2006, mined data from San Francisco-based grocery stores hoping to connect increased sales of Middle Eastern food to the presence of Iranian spies and Hezbollah operatives seeking to attack inside the U.S.  The program has since been nixed, reportedly because higher-ups thought it “ridiculous” and “possibly illegal.”  (The FBI, for the record denied it had such a program.)

But while federal law enforcement agents were (reportedly) engaging in this folly, serious security breaches were growing unchecked in some of the nation’s largest airports and even within the FBI itself.

Today we learned that a Lebanese national somehow managed to arrange a fake marriage and pass an FBI background check that landed her jobs as an FBI agent and later as a CIA case officer.  She then stole classified information on terrorist activities and Lebanese terror group Hezbollah.

And last week the Chicago Tribune reported on a federal raid at O’Hare International Airport that uncovered at least 110 fake security badges issued to an airport contractor and provided to 100 workers assigned to jobs in restricted areas.  At least a quarter of the workers were illegal immigrants.  Most of them were never subjected to background checks or fingerprinted as required by federal authorities.

This follows on news in August that dozens of guns were stolen from checked luggage at O’Hare, Seattle’s Sea-Tac and even Washington Reagan National Airport during the past couple of years – the same period of time the FBI was supposedly running its gastronomic investigations.  Dare we assume that the illegitimate workers and the missing guns might be connected?  Law enforcement isn’t sure, but think the guns were “probably sold or used in crimes.”

Last year, well before last week’s raid, O’Hare spokeswoman Wendy Abrams reportedly said the missing guns – belonging mostly to law enforcement or military personnel – presented “no risk to airport safety and security.”  Yet the tenor of federal officials was decidedly different last week when they admitted that the investigation that netted the illegal workers “identified national security vulnerabilities.”

CQ reported that the FBI’s falafel dragnet… “is a measure of how desperate the FBI is to disrupt domestic terrorism plots,” but maybe, just maybe, they’re just barking up the wrong trees.

I wrote an article this week about how airports are beefing up the amenities for in-transit passengers, which is welcome and well overdue.  But one has to wonder whether they, much like our government has done since 9/11, may just be trying to distract us from the really scary stuff going on behind the scenes.

Sensing the growing skeptisicm and then later hostility, and not wanting to call attention to myself by engaging in a political discussion, I always answered with a quick “no” and then moved on to another topic. 

So it is with interest that I started following Amar Bakshi’s Post Global project called “How the World Sees America.”  Amar examines international opinion about Americans and American policy and finds a striking disconnect.  With polls showing “anti-Americanism reaching all-time highs,” he finds vitriol directed more at American policies than Americans themselves — a small silver lining in a very dark cloud.

Discouragingly, in this country, it seems people have a hard time making this distinction between bad policies and bad people.  I don’t know about you, but this political mailer in Monroe County, NY stikes me as repulsive.   It attempts to conflate Democrats, illegal immigrants, terrorists and even welfare recipients (see background graphic) into one boiling cauldron of fear. 

Interestingly, this same general area of the world (upstate NY) is working hard to bill itself as tolerant.  Sounds to me like they’re trying to convince themselves they’re something they’re not too sure they are.  I’d say they have a long way, a very long way, to go.

 

American politics is not something I typically discuss here, but I couldn’t resist this week when my hometown Congressman, Randy Kuhl, told a Rochester Democrat & Chronicle editorial board member that he “thought about packing” (as in a gun) in response to the arrest of five peace activists in one of his district offices.  “There’s no question this is a coordinated fringe effort,” Mr. Kuhl told another local paper, the Corning Leader, in an effort to justify this vigilante posturing and his request to the federal government to beef up his taxpayer-funded office security at further taxpayer expense.

Access will be limited to those who “have legitimate reasons for being there,” he told the Democrat & Chronicle, which said the protestors “stormed” his office. “We are now making sure appropriate measures are taken so that people who are not authorized to come in can’t come in,” he then explained to the Leader.  And we now know what those measures apparently include.  (Potential future dramitization: Yeeeee haw!  Those peace loving hippies will never see us coming. Ka Pow!  Anyone else want a piece of this gun toting Congresscowboy?)  Only two things could possibly explain this grotesque overreaction: deep paranoia or blatant propaganda.

For the record, news reports indicated that the protestors, several of them from what the right-wing nuts upstate like to call the “People’s Republic of Ithaca,” which is just over the border in a neighboring district, were arrested when they refused to leave the Bath, NY office at closing time.  Yeah, that’s some scary shit.  Although with the little vacation time we Americans get these days, I’m sure Mr. Kuhl’s staff did view the protestors’ sit-in as a bona fide threat to their well-being.

“Politicians cannot afford to cocoon themselves in the inner world of their own imaginings.  They must not confuse the world as it is with the world as they wish it to be,” wrote Michael Ignatieff in the August 5 edition of The New York Times Magazine.  How appropriate I thought that, at the same time this former Harvard Professor was indulging in his mea culpa on Iraq, Randy Kuhl continued to chase chimeras into the lunatic fringe of history.

All kidding aside, there are some serious, serious issues here.  Beside the fact that these inflammatory remarks are meant only to equate these peaceful protestors with dangerous criminals, this folly is but one more reason why American moral authority and respect around the world continues to decline, something those of us who travel frequently know all too well.

Americans are simply delusional, some say.  According to an article in Newsweek, while the American dream used to be a “global fantasy,” today the gap between how we view ourselves and how foreigners view us is positively gaping.

According to a BBC poll released earlier this year, “Fully 71 percent of Americans see the United States as a source of good in the world.  More than half view Bush’s election as positive for global security.  Other studies report that 70 percent have faith in their domestic institutions and nearly 80 percent believe ‘American ideas and customs’ should spread globally.”

“Foreigners take an entirely different view,” according to Newsweek.  In the BBC poll 58 percent “see Bush’s re-election as a threat to world peace.  Among America’s traditional allies, the figure is strikingly higher: 77 percent in Germany, 64 percent in Britain and 82 percent in Turkey.  Among the 1.3 billion members of the Islamic world, public support for the United States is measured in single digits.”  And not surprisingly, the general anti-Bush sentiment is morphing in many parts of the world to “a more general anti-Americanism.”

Others have found an American public that is very aware of our image problem on the global stage.  A recent study conducted by the American Security Project found that “Americans believe our moral authority is in steep decline” and that they consider this a very serious problem.  It also found that the large majority of Americans (68%) want troops out of Iraq within a year or as soon as possible, the very issue Mr. Kuhl’s imprudent comments were meant to de-legitimize.

It’s a shame that Mr. Kuhl’s statements on the arrest controversy serve only to inflame further hatred and distract from his incessant fence-sitting on the Iraq issue, but do nothing to promote the sober dialogue about this conflict we so sorely need.

“Good judgment in politics, it turns out, depends on being a critical judge of yourself,” wrote Mr. Ignatieff.  One has to wonder whether Randy Kuhl is capable of hearing the warning bells inside his own head.  

This post orignally appeared on IMBAblog.When Carolyn invited me to outline my experience with business in Central America, I thought I would discuss the surprisingly sophisticated tourist infrastructure spurred on by the relatively recent boom in ecotourism.  But in the process, I stumbled upon a poignant irony of doing business in areas still recovering from the civil war and economic chaos typical of nations struggling to shed the cocoon of colonialism and foreign control: companies “forced” to break the laws of their own nation to do business in another. 

This week McClatchy Newspapers reported that Ohio-based Chiquita Brands International paid off a Columbian paramilitary group on the U.S. terrorist list to insure its right to continue doing business in the troubled and banana-rich Antioquia province. 

But Chiquita is only the most recent foreign company caught up in an imbroglio far too common among companies whose profits hinge on political and social elements beyond their control.  According to the McClatchy Newspapers report, both Atlanta-based Coca-Cola and Alabama based coal company Drummond Co. also “face civil lawsuits alleging their Columbian operations worked with the same group to kill several trade unionists.” 

And it’s not just the poor little rich companies that are faced with this moral dilemma.  During my most recent visit to Honduras, the charismatic eldest brother of three siblings running a thriving ecotourism business told me of having to hire a group of goons and thugs to put down a rash of thievery perpetrated by residents of the nearby Garifuna village.  There’s just no other way, he said. 

As our nation continues on its recent free trade agreement binge, it’s likely we’ll see even more of this type of corporate rationalization – the when in Rome defense for corporate anarchy. Interestingly, the Chiquita incident will likely delay, at least temporarily, a free trade deal with Columbia.  But the trend of our government steering profits in these countries toward the big multinationals and away from local businesspeople will continue unabated and eventually compromise the very reason entrepreneurial ex pats seek them out – the ability to still achieve the American Dream…south of the border. 

So why do we continue doing business where we are not wanted?  American business can offer so many ways to help the wonderful people and the promising economies of Central America.  Clean diesel technology is one that comes to mind.  While Americans and Europeans continue to flock to these areas for ecotourism, they are in desperate need of measures to protect their environments which are being overrun by hand-me-down, exhaust spewing busses and trucks.

For too long, Central America has been One Way Jesus for foreign businesses.  It’s time we started paying them back for all we’ve taken.

Which reminds me of my friend Michael Winship’s April 4 column, “Roll Away the Stone of Ignorance,” in which he recalls a recent United Airlines flight on which passengers were reseated because of group of Hasidic men refused to share a row with a female passenger.  The attendants asked for cooperation despite the fact that it “probably violates about a dozen interstate commerce and sex discrimination statutes.”In “a world that continues to let religious strife, division and ignorance gnaw away at our basic shared humanity and, yes, faith,” wrote Winship, these kinds of incidents should indeed cause us pause.  But it is also the everyday things we see and hear, such as the golden balls and their accompanying hyper-masculine missive – easily dismissed as simply moronic, insensitive or vulgar – that also contribute to a growing culture of misogyny and intimidation.

This intimidation is also happening increasingly in the most egalitarian of all places on Earth, the Internet.  Jessica Valenti, in the April 6 issue of UK’s The Guardian, recently wrote that, “While no one could deny that men experience abuse online, the sheer vitriol directed at women has become impossible to ignore.” Such abuses as “extreme instances of stalking, death threats and hate speech are now prevelant,” she writes.  Often these hateful epithets involve graphic suggestions of rape and sodomy and “on some online forums anonymity combined with misogyny can make for an almost gang-rape mentality.”

According to Valenti, who herself was subject of an online snear campaign referred to as “boobgate” after being photographed with President Bill Clinton, quoted a recent study showing that “when the gender of an online username appears female, they are 25 times more likely to experience harassment,” to illustrate the pervasiveness of this problem.But an increase in gender insensitivity is not limited to the anonymity of the Web by any means.  Take for instance, the ever-caustic and controversial radio host, Don Imus, who is at this very moment being summarily skewered for calling the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos.”  But even Revs. Sharpton and Jackson et al seem to be mostly upset with the racial connotation of Imus’s comment (nappy) and not the reference to the players’ supposed sexual proclivities (hos).

“Stupid men clap the ghorals in irons.  They close ranks, create religion, create morality, create laws, erect palisades and shut out the mountains.  None will go where they cannot.  The high grounds are lost forever,” wrote Indian novelist Tarun J. Tejpal in “The Alchemy of Desire.”These days there seem to be too many stupid men (and some women too).  Where have all the smart men gone?  Come on.  It’s time to stand up and defend the women you love.

We were robbed in Guatemala City. 

Well technically, we weren’t.  My Aunt and Uncle were.  I got lucky.  Or maybe it was my moxie, or possibly the vestige of my mid-‘90s Washington, D.C the-only-zone-free-parking-is-across-from-a-crack-house tendency to have eyes on the back of my head. 

The warnings were all there.  Get out of Guatemala City as quickly as possible.  Do not stay in Zona 1.  Don’t ride the public busses.  A gracious Guatemalan woman called Roxanna even offered to have us at her home in a “safe” area when we met her on the luxury bus from San Pedro Sula to Copan.  It’s funny how the look of a place doesn’t always belie its hidden dangers.  But when we arrived in Guatemala City it didn’t look so bad.

Then things started to go downhill.  The driver from our booked hotel, Posada Belen, didn’t show at the bus station.  Interestingly, the family-run Posada Belen, which appeared to be a welcoming small inn, bills itself as safe for women traveling alone.  After about an hour we flagged a cab and headed to the Westin in Zona Viva for a budget-busting overnight. 

The next morning we took a taxi to the Linea Dorada bus station back in Zona 1.  Not only was this “luxury” bus station a sty, but confirming my suspicions, there was no bus to our destination, Panajachel, on beautiful Lake Atitlan. 

Soon after, a cab driver offered to take us to the “Pana” bus station, which turned out to be a hole-in-the-wall “chicken bus” station, so called because these exhaust belching decommissioned U.S. school busses often carry baskets of fowl, among other things, on their roofs.  But a sense of whimsy and expediency overcame us and we decided to go with it.  Besides, there was an armed guard outside to protect us from thugs and a nice looking Indian family waiting with us. 

As we left the station, we were told to lie down in our seats to avoid the nosy police.  We thought this kind of quaint at the time, but, then, at the first of many stops, still in Zona 8 in Guatemala City, the driver cut the engine and he and the attendant got off the bus while assorted hawkers got on, flanking us from front and back, selling their goods. 

A kid got on with a rolled package and a man with a cell phone and another man in a denim jacket who took a seat next to my Aunt on the nearly empty bus.  Feeling increasingly uncomfortable I immediately took the seat next to my Aunt when denim coat man exited the bus.  Something was going down.  Then it happened fast. 

The man with the cell phone, talking quickly, muttered the words “Pana” and “gringa.”  Another man, presumably an attendant, came on board and told everyone to put their bags on the upper rack.  (Mine was already up there, tied tightly to the metal bars.).  A truck pulled up alongside the bus to load cargo; someone knocked on my Aunt’s window. Then, denim coat man tapped me on the shoulder, threw money on the floor at my feet and demanded that I pick it up.  I immediately and instinctively called him a thief and kicked his hand away while I held tightly to my bag.  This, after all, was the oldest ruse in the book. 

No sooner had I told my Uncle these men were attempting to rob us than my aunt noticed her bag was missing.  They ran off the bus, the men were gone.  Instantly the bus driver reappeared, started the engine and began to drive away as I yelled “Alto! Alto!”  He stopped.  My Aunt and Uncle caught back up with the bus. 

Brilliant, I thought!  It couldn’t have been clearer at that point.  We were set up – from the minute we walked into that chicken bus station, by everyone from the cab driver to the bus driver.  But we were in Zona 8 and there were no police to be found, so we stayed on board and rode all the way to Pana, the bus driver eyeing us the entire way through his rear view mirror. 

As bad as we felt, it got worse.  Our bus ran over a dog less than an hour later – a piercing yelp and a thump – and I felt like I was going to vomit.  I hadn’t been that on edge since 9/11, but I still had my head about me. Our luggage was still, presumably, on top of the bus and we decided it was best to remain where we were. 

I lost nothing, but my travel companions were taken for $1,000 USD, a digital camera, U.S. passports, credit cards and Honduran ID cards.  As expected the thugs used the credit cards immediately and we suspected, although couldn’t immediately prove, that they used one of the cards to fill the very bus we were traveling on with diesel. 

I have since learned that, much like taxis, chicken bus operators pay a fee or commission to a central authority.  So, it makes sense that a certain number of unscrupulous operators would fund their enterprises by ripping off the gringos who skip the private shuttles for the ambiance of public transportation. 

Later that day, we reached our destination: a beautiful inn with private cabins perched on a hillside overlooking Lake Atitlan, and we reflected on our day from hell and back and the lessons learned.  Private minibuses only and avoid Guatemala City at all costs.  Of course all of this information was readily available online, posted on resources like TripAdvisor.com, a haven for travel “mavens.” 

Maven is a Yiddish word for someone with special knowledge or expertise – an information connoisseur, in other words.   Malcolm Gladwell, in his best-selling marketing tome, “The Tipping Point,” describes these special and sometimes “profoundly weird” people as absolutely essential to successful word-of-mouth marketing campaigns.  What makes these people so important is not only that “they know things that the rest of us don’t,” but how they pass that information along.  “The fact that Mavens want to help, for no other reason than because they like to help, turns out to be an awfully effective way of getting someone’s attention,” Gladwell writes. 

He uses the example of Zagat’s to illustrate the essential and growing influence of mavens.  According to Gladwell, the real power of guides such as Zagat’s “derives from the fact that the reviews are the reports of volunteers – of diners who want to share their opinions with others.  Somehow, that represents a more compelling recommendation than the opinion of an expert who job it is to rate restaurants.”

Gladwell refers to these volunteer-powered guides that allow mavens to gather and share their knowledge as “maven traps” – a way of efficiently figuring out who the mavens are in a particular world.  He posits that in a world where influence is migrating from those with the most wealth to those with the most information, how to set maven traps is one of the central problems facing the modern marketplace. This, indeed, is where the idea of thought leadership comes in.  Information can provide a crucial edge in a crowded marketplace. 

The other thing about maven traps is this:  They attract other mavens.  In fact, because my Aunt and I planned virtually our entire trip through TripAdvisor.com, we both vowed to go back and share our knowledge with others.  Because, while we chose at one crucial point to ignore the good advice we received, we hope we can save others the trouble.  Famous last words, right?

While I’ve visted Central America several times, I was dismayed when I recently read this on the country’s Consular Information Sheet: “Violent criminal activity has been a problem in all parts of Guatemala for years, including murder, rape, and armed assaults against foreigners.  (Gulp!) The police force is inexperienced and under-funded, and the judicial system is weak, overworked, and inefficient.  (Oh, crap!) Well-armed criminals know that there is little chance they will be caught and punished.” (Hmm, sounds like D.C….OK, New Orleans)

It also doesn’t help that I have a dear friend who is worried about my safety on this trip.  Let’s just say he knows more about the intrinsic danger of the place than I.  (I’ll have to kill you if I tell you.) And then there’s my friend from Peru who said she was utterly shocked by the level of violence in Guatemala - albeit experienced only from television news reports she admitted - when she visited her brother who lives in Guatemala City.  But, hey, I’m stubborn and I’m going.  Besides, I’ll be accompanying my Aunt and Uncle who are expats living in Honduras.

One of my funniest memories of my last trip to Honduras was on the first day of our trip.  We were on our way to the Bay Islands, but had to stay over outside La Ceiba for one night at a small eco-lodge on the river.  After a rousing game of “asshole” (a card game for those of you who didn’t practically live in frats in college), one of our hosts, named Darwin, convinced my intoxicated 24-year-old brother to jump off a cliff.  Literally.  In the dark.  Drunk.   I found it poignant that a guy named after the evolutionary biologist who poularized the theory of “survival of the fittest” talked my brother into such a ludicrous act.  He survived.  And I got to thinking about all those risks we’re willing to take on when we travel outside our comfort zone.

So, always the business woman, I got to thinking about the business potential of helping people manage the potential dangers of traveling to developing areas.  Now I’m not talking about the monolithic defense industry, although I’ve dabbled in that area.  And I’m not talking about the politics of fear and the industries that’s spawned, from prison construction to the irrational post-9/11 run on duct tape and plastic sheeting.  That is a subject for many, many other posts.  I’m talking about services to help everyday people manage the risk of travel to unfamiliar places. 

Travel insurance is one of those businesses.  I myself buy it everytime I leave the States.  A good policy will cover in-country health care as well as medical evacuation and kidnap and ransom.  (U.S. health plans DO NOT cover health costs abroad.)  Many travel aggregators are now offering travel insurance every time you book a trip abroad.  I suggest buying it, mostly for the medical benefits.

The business of danger, however, is not limited to insurance.  Recently I was directed to this excellent website: www.comebackalive.com.  The brainchild of self-described “professional adverturer” and author of The World’s Most Dangerous Places, Robert Young Pelton, this site is meant mainly to hawk books and speaking engagements, and guess what else?  Travel insurance.  But it also offers a wealth of free information, including online communites and travel recommendations.  My favorite is a danger rating map, which rates countries from “A Vacation with Grandma” to “Could Be Your Last Trip.”  Much to my relief, Guatemala is rated the same as the entire U.S. (that is the second most safe).  Go figure!

I’ll be keeping an eye on this sector.   Afterall there will always be dangerous places in the world as well as adventurous people who want to conquer them.

Welcome to our blog!  This will be more than a travel log.  It will be a forum to extract the knowledge offered by others who might not think like we do.  Here we will share our (hopefully) insightful thoughts and experiences of traveling and working in a global economy and how we take those experiences and apply them to business to help our clients and ourselves learn from the diversity we experience when immersing ourselves in other cultures.

This knowledge can be particularly helpful when managing organizational change.  In particular, managing communications during times of change is a challenge that all organizations experience at some time or another, whether it is transitioning to a new market or from a private to publicly-traded company and back again. The genesis of Up-Think is wanderlust.  In our free time, we travel as much as we can — to Europe, Asia and Central and South America.  Along the way, we’ve learned that adjusting to other cultures, languages, sights, sounds and smells is a lot like managing the ever-changing nuances of marketing your business – constantly adjusting, interpreting and seeking feedback from those around you.  Adapting in a strange world is as much about getting to know and finding ways to communicate with and read those around you as success in business is knowing your customers and adapting to changing market conditions. With Up-Think you get the benefit of working with people who, despite the challenges of uncharted territory, say, ‘what the heck’ and then jump on the back of a “moto” in Vietnam, or the subway in Tokyo knowing that half the joy is in the experience of learning and taking calculated risks.So, Bon Voyage!  We’re happy you can join us for part of our trip.