Word: socialize
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...most convincing writers on this subject was the American political scientist Barrington Moore. In his work on the social origins of dictatorships, Moore coined the phrase "No bourgeois, no democracy." It may be true that a middle class is necessary for the establishment of basic democratic rights, such as the vote. But the events of the past two decades have laid to rest any notion that the enrichment of a country provides an automatic impulse toward greater liberty. Remember the talk, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, about democracy arriving hand in hand with free markets? As people became...
...Russia, Vladimir Putin knows the pact well. Putin has long argued that economic success and social order must come before openness and plurality. Many Russians I know - friends from the early 1990s when we all watched, spellbound, the brief flowering of democracy - have come to agree with him. When I quit as editor of a British political magazine, one Russian friend phoned to declare how happy she was that I would now start doing something worthwhile with my life, like making money. Russians, Chinese and others utter a single word when such a viewpoint is challenged: Gorbachev. Remember, they...
...secret that Twitter can be a tremendous time-suck. But imagine getting paid for wasting those precious minutes of your day. With companies desperate to reach consumers in the social-media crowd, it's now possible to make a buck or two--or much more--on Twitter. A company called Izea, which made its name connecting bloggers with firms willing to compensate them for plugs on their blogs, has set up a similar service for the Twittersphere. At a site called Sponsored Tweets, Twitter users can sign in, set the price they want companies to pay them for tweeting...
...survey last year of 179 Fair Trade coffee farmers in Central America and Mexico, a copy of which TIME obtained, more than half said their families have still been going hungry for several months a year. "When I got the results, I was shocked," says Rick Peyser, director of social advocacy for Green Mountain Coffee Roasters in Vermont, the Fair Trade company that commissioned the survey. "I was ready to quit." Massachusetts Fair Trade firm Equal Exchange spokesman Rodney North admits, "There is a potential disconnect between what the buyer thinks Fair Trade is accomplishing and the situation...
...most coffee growers, Fair Trade is still slightly more lucrative than the open market. Two years ago, the Germany-based Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International (FLO), which sets worldwide prices and standards, raised the minimum per-pound price of nonorganic coffee 9¢, to $1.35 (a dime of which goes to social programs like scholarships for growers' children). That's 15¢ higher than the current market rate. And yet, according to Fair Trade researcher Christopher Bacon of the University of California, Berkeley, the per-pound price that's needed for farmers to rise above subsistence is really more than $2. Farmer advocates...