Chris Abraham » united states

Thank You To All Of The Team USA Bloggers

Chris Abraham — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:15:56 +0000

Recently, my team over at Abraham Harrison helped the USOC (United States Olympic Committee) reach out to bloggers and others online in order to bring more attention to the Winter Olympic Games. Nearly 300 movers, shakers and influencers responded to our call to action with the placement of banners, tweets, and with blog posts. Thank you to all of the authors of the following posts — thank you so much for being so generous and generally awesome. Here are a list of the posts for you to explore and to maybe offer you a little bit of link love, too.

Loic Le Meur interviews Fabrice Grinda at LeWeb

Chris Abraham — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 22:44:45 +0000

Our client Fabrice Grinda was recently in Paris at LeWeb 09 after spending the last seven months abroad away from his New York City home. While at LeWeb, Loic Le Meur conducted a Fireside Chat with Fabrice Grinda, Co-CEO, OLX, Inc. Please check it out — it is the perfect representation of who Fabrice Grinda is and what his vision is for OLX.com both Internationally and in the United States. Plus, as a bonus, Fabrice is bombastic so he talks cold turkey about what it is like to do business in France, his home, versus in the United States; how simple-minded we indeed are as human creatures, and how much risk and suffering one really must go through to become an overnight success. Enjoy! Via the Fabrice Grinda Blog via Socialmedia.biz and Marketing Conversation.

More Money Doesn’t Hurt Happiness

Chris Abraham — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 17:05:33 +0000

“Although a large body of research does show that people become happier as they move from being very poor to lower middle class, after this point the impact of income on happiness is much weaker. Think of someone who makes $100,000 one year and $110,000 the next—do we really expect this additional income to suddenly make this person fulfilled, without a care in the world? (You can also think about whether such changes in your own income really make you happier with your life on a day-to-day basis: Being informed about a raise certainly makes us happy, but the $10,000 doesn’t make our siblings or in-laws any less difficult to deal with over the course of the following year. …) Although people believe that having money leads to happiness, our research suggests that this is only the case if at least some of that money is given to others.” Via HBS

I feel like money can’t buy you love; however, in the United States, where everything is dependent on cash-in-hand, money does buy you rest, calm, security, and health. In my new home, Berlin, money isn’t a number-one priority because there are social services — a safety net — that takes that baseline level of “what would I do if I lost my insurance/home/car/job feeling that constantly is renting space in all of our heads. Sadly, in America, money is all there is. Cash is the only currency. Social programs are under-funded, neglected, and shameful to actually use. We’re in a country that considers any sort of public funding, subsidies, or support to be part and parcel of a “nanny state,” considered to be a bad thing in this land of the rugged, boot-strapped, self-made, capitalistic, individualist. So, while money can’t buy me love, it can get me married, can subsidize a family, education, insurance, vacations, time off, rest, travel, schools, colleges, cars, medical care, unforeseen expenses, and the kinds of safety next that only money can buy.

Poll: How Much Do You Need to Live Comfortably?

Barack Obama Named Kennedy Heir Apparent

Chris Abraham — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 13:33:44 +0000

My mother endorses Barack Obama, all of my friends endorse Barack Obama, and two Kennedys endorse Barack Obama: Ted Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy both. On the last endorsement, you really need to read Caroline Kennedy’s op-ed piece in the Times. Here’s a choice quote — and she is speaking about Senator Barack Obama, “I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.” Via the New York Times

A President Like My Father
By CAROLINE KENNEDY
Published: January 27, 2008
OVER the years, I’ve been deeply moved by the people who’ve told me they wished they could feel inspired and hopeful about America the way people did when my father was president. This sense is even more profound today. That is why I am supporting a presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama.
My reasons are patriotic, political and personal, and the three are intertwined. All my life, people have told me that my father changed their lives, that they got involved in public service or politics because he asked them to. And the generation he inspired has passed that spirit on to its children. I meet young people who were born long after John F. Kennedy was president, yet who ask me how to live out his ideals.
Sometimes it takes a while to recognize that someone has a special ability to get us to believe in ourselves, to tie that belief to our highest ideals and imagine that together we can do great things. In those rare moments, when such a person comes along, we need to put aside our plans and reach for what we know is possible.
We have that kind of opportunity with Senator Obama. It isn’t that the other candidates are not experienced or knowledgeable. But this year, that may not be enough. We need a change in the leadership of this country — just as we did in 1960.
Most of us would prefer to base our voting decision on policy differences. However, the candidates’ goals are similar. They have all laid out detailed plans on everything from strengthening our middle class to investing in early childhood education. So qualities of leadership, character and judgment play a larger role than usual.
Senator Obama has demonstrated these qualities throughout his more than two decades of public service, not just in the United States Senate but in Illinois, where he helped turn around struggling communities, taught constitutional law and was an elected state official for eight years. And Senator Obama is showing the same qualities today. He has built a movement that is changing the face of politics in this country, and he has demonstrated a special gift for inspiring young people — known for a willingness to volunteer, but an aversion to politics — to become engaged in the political process.
I have spent the past five years working in the New York City public schools and have three teenage children of my own. There is a generation coming of age that is hopeful, hard-working, innovative and imaginative. But too many of them are also hopeless, defeated and disengaged. As parents, we have a responsibility to help our children to believe in themselves and in their power to shape their future. Senator Obama is inspiring my children, my parents’ grandchildren, with that sense of possibility.
Senator Obama is running a dignified and honest campaign. He has spoken eloquently about the role of faith in his life, and opened a window into his character in two compelling books. And when it comes to judgment, Barack Obama made the right call on the most important issue of our time by opposing the war in Iraq from the beginning.
I want a president who understands that his responsibility is to articulate a vision and encourage others to achieve it; who holds himself, and those around him, to the highest ethical standards; who appeals to the hopes of those who still believe in the American Dream, and those around the world who still believe in the American ideal; and who can lift our spirits, and make us believe again that our country needs every one of us to get involved.
I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.
Caroline Kennedy is the author of “A Patriot’s Handbook: Songs, Poems, Stories and Speeches Celebrating the Land We Love.”

America Does Not Go Abroad in Search of Monsters to Destroy

Chris Abraham — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 13:17:06 +0000

Has anyone checked the label on the prescription that we in the United States have been given to treat permanent tyranny around the world? The side effects are much worse than the cure.

The most important side effect is that until the population of a sovereign nation-state is ready to join the emergent worldwide free market economy, any attempt at imposing either democracy or capitalism will fail once external influence is removed. The blowback from this imposition and resulting failure is that the resulting system will be similar or worse than the preceding system, and when it comes to the global balance of power, the devil you know is always better than the devil you don’t.

On the 13th of February Meet the Press, Natan Sharansky debated Pat Buchanan over the book A Case for Democracy, about which President Bush admits he is passionate and which the White House intends to use as a foreign policy roadmap for the next four years. I have yet to read either Mr. Sharansky’s book or Mr. Buchanan’s controversial response, Where the Right Went Wrong, but I do have an opinion based wholly on the debate and the transcript of the debate.

I found myself in strong agreement with a lot of what Pat Buchanan recommended on foreign policy. For example, “In my judgment, what happened on 9/11 was a result of interventionism. Interventionism is the cause of terror. It is not a cure for terror.”

The President’s premise that domestic terrorism is the direct result of envy, jealousy, or insecurity is flawed. As Pat Buchanan states in the interview, “the United States was not attacked because we are free. Bin Laden was not attacking the Bill of Rights. We were attacked because the United–over here because the United States’ military and political presence is massive over there. Bin Laden in his fatwah, his statement of declaration of war on the United States, said the infidels were standing on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia. They want us out of the Middle East. They don’t care whether we have a separation of church and state.”

All systems reject invasion, even our bodies. Even in the case of a transplanted organ which is welcome, one must continue taking medicine for life in order to keep the body from rejecting the invader, even though the invader is pink, healthy, not poisoned and dying like the original. Internationally, it doesn’t matter if our prescription, our pink and healthy liver, our strong heart, is going to cure what ails the world, because that just isn’t the point. Curing the world’s ills requires that we will need to make sure the patient is constantly taking its “for the rest of your life” anti-rejection medications. Even if this is delivered forcibly under restraint, “for your own good” and “it hurts me more than it hurts you.”

One of the obvious outcomes of this stated overt (and not covert) intention “to help democratic institutions in every region in every nation on earth is a formula for permanent war,” says Mr. Buchanan,

Buchanan went on to state very clearly that it is not in America’s best interest to intervene in affairs of sovereign nation-states, governments that are in fact recognized by the world. To again quote Pat Buchanan, paraphrasing John Quincy Adams, “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the champion of freedom everywhere, but the vindicator only of her own.”

John Quincy Adams said it better himself, “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

When it comes down to it, there is no legal mandate that we as a nation or as a member of the world government may aggressively pursue this sort of agenda. Again, Pat Buchanan, “where in the Constitution do we get the right to intervene in the internal affairs of countries that do not threaten us and do not attack us? If they don’t, their internal politics are their own business,” adding that “the president of the United States has no constitutional authority to do this.”

And even after all that, one might realize that the only form of government that can in fact be transplanted like an organ is an authoritarian dictatorship. In this case I will intentionally misappropriate Senator Charles Grassey’s quote when he said, in the same episode of Meet the Press, “I think that there’s a movement towards freedom that people are naturally born free, they want to be free, and you don’t impose democracy. Democracy is natural. You can only impose dictatorship.”

Even though we want to believe that all functioning systems need to have an emergent pattern that is democratic, this is not exclusively the case. Governments are really visible manifestations of their culture. There has never really been a long-lasting government that has been out of step with its mother culture. We know that a family’s culture is deep and very difficult to influence. A company’s takes either a lot of time or a total radical amputation to truly change the culture. Since nation-states are in fact artificial constructs anyway, it is almost impossible to make drastic changes without Draconian measures, the majority of which are morally and ethically offensive and more costly than their intended good.

My interpretation on this quote is that a Vanguard of Democracy is as futile as a Vanguard of the Proletariat. That imposing democracy is as futile and as temporary as imposing Marxist-Leninism, communism, capitalism, or even the free market. And when this Vanguard of Democracy and the free market system was imposed on Russia, the blowback was arguably the complete dissolution of realpolitik, resulting in an entire country run by the Russian Mafia in a very effective and complete power grab. Is this democracy? Where is the Nation-State in a country that can’t even contain its nuclear assets? The biggest weak link in the entire underground weapons-grade plutonium economy? A country that has a larger rift between haves and have nots than ever before, A true playground for the neo robber baron. Where the super rich can ignore traffic laws if they posses the official flashing blue lights on their Mercedes-Benz S600 sedans. In the case of Russia, we have a culture that has never known either democracy or freedom, from the Czars to the Communists. On a systemic level, the Russian system broke under this imposition.

And there are a surplus of sovereign governments worldwide unready or unwilling to accept an imposed “freedom,” “democracy” and “the free market” systemically from the top-down. These desires happen in emergence, through bubbling up from the bottom. From discontent, from desire, from education, and through participation in a global market and global economy. By willing hearts and minds legitimately as opposed to through heavy-handed coercion.

So, in that regard, Natan Sharansky’s naive comment, although correct on the surface, is not a very complex argument, “I believe that all the people, when given opportunity to choose between living in fear or living in freedom, choose to live in freedom,” What he forgot to mention is that his argument doesn’t include a very important missing piece, which is, “all things being equal.”

I agree with the following premise, “All things being equal, I believe that all the people, when given opportunity to choose between living in fear or living in freedom, choose to live in freedom.” But in developing nations, in nations that are still tribal or predominately rural, in nations that don’t have a history of education or are based on tribalism, monarchy, or religion, and in nations that have high scarcities or are under crushing debt, the resulting unintended consequences of imposing democracy, capitalism, or the free market economy usually results in a situation much worse, or at least much less predictable, than the original. I hate to use “better the devil we know than the devil we don’t” but the jury is out as to whether an Iraq with no boarders and a forced, unnatural, system of government will chomp at the bit until it is given an opportunity to revert to something similar but different.

Again, to quote Pat Buchanan in support of the above — the devil we know is better than the devil we don’t theory of foreign policy, “We cannot make the enemy the best of the good . . . we have had occasions, the last great crusade for democracy was Woodrow Wilson going across the sea with an army to make the world safer. We brought down all the monarchs and we got instead Lenin and Stalin and Mussolini and Hitler.”