It may be the circles I run in, but the majority of western Expatriates I know are going to skip the Expo.

We are happy to benefit from all the expo related improvements to infrastructure (some of which have paint peeling off them already in true TIC fashion). Not so pleased about all the bootleg DVD shops getting shut down. X-ray scanning machines are being installed at subway stations for security, as much for show as the TSA airport antics are.

I've been following your reporting on this matter for some months, and have to say, I find the constant vitriol aimed at Ellen Eliasoph particularly disconcerting -- and, dare I say, chauvinistic. She happens to be married to a Commerce official, yes, but anyone who has worked with her can tell you she is extremely formidable in her own right. Perhaps the fact that she worked for an American-based film company makes it easy for you to denigrate her. I have witnessed first-hand her diplomatic dealings and she is brilliantly capable and immensely well regarded. It sounds as if the pavilion might have gone down the toilet completely had she not taken charge of the effort to get it on its feet. The difficulties in fundraising sound, to my ear, valid. I'm not sure I understand why she's become such a perpetual target for you.

Finally, an article in a respected mainstream publication by a respected correspondent-journalist that describes the malfeasances, deliberate misstatements, death-defying maneuvers, and questionable finances that laid the groundwork for 2010's uninspiring, wholly commercialized US Pavilion.

Even worse existentially, however, Adam Minter's article reveals the total absence of the American people during the process of conceiving, awarding, funding, and populating the US Pavilion. It's as if it was conceived in a Hollywood studio -- which, in fact, it was.

That the US Pavilion expresses no authentic public voice, only a contrived narrative intended to please the US Pavilion's corporate sponsors and placate a few wealthy individual contributors, is something the press should have noted long ago, when the process could have been fixed. Now it's too late.

Remember, this Expo is all about better cities, sustainability, dealing with global crises, and the coming together of the world's nations to fight the scourges that nature and political strife will foist on the next generation. Instead, the US Pavilion, converted into a fast-food mall, features a theater telling stories about neat future cities will be, and urban gardening. Well, isn't that something? Just like Aichi....

Before the Aichi Expo in 2005, the US Pavilions were only funded by the US government, or not funded at all. Then, for Aichi, the Bush administration experimented with muscling the Japanese hosts into sponsoring the US Pavilion. The Japanese put up $20 million and a passable, though thematically empty and emotionless pavilion resulted. Diplomatic coercion, insiders allege, became US policy for Expos where maintaining face was important to the hosts.

The problem with Shanghai was that the Rice State Department was incompetent to pull this off smoothly -- not when State mishandled and then aborted its 2007 Expo RFP, nor when the current effort began behind closed doors (as described in Minter's article), nor when the current team resigned in late 2008 and had to be rescued by the US consulate with "mystery money" whose origin remains anyone's guess.

After the current team resigned, every offer by third parties to collaborate on a broader _and more open_ funding solution, including offers by disaffected expats representing major companies doing business in Shanghai, was rejected by the US consulate which by then was running the show. To no one's great surprise, the same individuals who rejected these overtures are now deeply involved in the US Pavilion's mostly privatized operations.

However, it was only when the administrations changed, say the insiders, that the alleged Bush policy was fully institutionalized and obviously, better executed by fundraising veterans. The funding campaign among select corporations began in earnest. It's indicative that the US Pavilion and Secretary Clinton's "Global Partnership Initiative," intended to outsource other State Department activities to the private sector, are often mentioned together in State press releases. It's as if the US Pavilion was a prototype for the GPI....

If Ms. Eliasoph is as smart as anonymous "Interested Observer" alleges, she might have foreseen this outcome and not staked her reputation without upfront assurances. Or her more experienced partners, some of whom had a great deal of diplomatic knowledge regarding US commercial activity in Asia (and I don't mean her husband) -- including first hand knowledge of the Aichi ploy -- might have alerted her to the possibility that she was being used. Unless she thought that she was doing the using. How naive that would be.

It's difficult to plead that the current team remained innocent for long (if at all). After its honest resignation in 2008 and abrupt resurrection in 2009, the team must have realized that more was at stake than its modest plans for a conventionally salable pavilion. Its lineup became visibly more "political."

(It's curious that the current US Pavilion in which public participation has been nil, with its benefits accuring almost totally to corporate sponsors, remains tax exempt. The absence of a public benefit from such a frankly commercial venture must be apparent even to an understaffed IRS.)

Will the US Pavilion's and State's books at last be opened and the pavilion's history revealed, in time to institute reforms? Will the next two Expos -- Korea's pride, the Yeosu Special Expo 2012, and the Universal-class Milan Expo in 2015 -- be protected from enduring similar sad and cynical ends? Expos are the epitome of public diplomacy, as important to our nation's reputation as the conduct of wars and international relief efforts: they're not to be botched.

This is a good article but it misses the extent to which Ellen Eliasoph, Nick Winslow, and Frank Lavin succeeded in totally turning off the US business community in Shanghai. I attended one of their presentations in Shanghai back in 2008. Like many people invited I was predisposed to support the pavilion. But afterwards I left like many others alienated by the arrogance of the organizers Eliasoph and Winslow and their total cluelessness about US business in Shanghai. Why didn't this article mention that the pavilion didn't even have an OFFICE in Shanghai??? Eliasoph was running this thing out of Covington's offices in Beijing! Don't think that wasn't noticed by Am Cham's members.

Eliasoph didn't save the pavillion. She shut the thing down when she couldn't find the money to run it. Jose Villarreal saved it, and everybody knows it.

but everyone should know that the Chief Operating Officer of the U.S. Pavilion is a Canadian Citizen named Mark Germyn. You would think that they could find an American to at least operate the pavilion. Go figure. As usual anything the U.S. Government touches turns to mush no matter what party in in power.

Is the government immune from racketeering laws? Who looks into such things? The Justice Department? Congress? Private taxpayers?

I have read this article and its posts with great interest. What Bob Jacobson fails to communicate (understand?) is that when Secretary Clinton took office, she quickly learned that the US Pavilion was in serious trouble and did something about it. The Bush Administration had done nothing.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/04/world/la-fg-shanghai-expo4-2010mar04

The good news is that this project is on track for success. Secretary Clinton and Commissioner General Jose Villarreal have done a fabulous job of rescuing the US Pavilion by raising the money and recruiting American companies to participate. This could not have been easy, especially given the short timetable, and it clearly was necessary. Kudos to Mr. Villarreal for bringing this one home.

As the article mentions, the Shanghai Expo is a world event that is rivaled only by the Olympics and World Cups. For the USA - the world's largest economical and industrial power - to not partake would be to taint the very mission of the Expo. It would be unacceptable to Americans, the Chinese and all people of the world. I applaud Clinton and Villarreal for their strong efforts to raise funds and resources, under the challenging circumstances of a recession and new Administration, to ensure that the 2010 Expo is, indeed, a World Expo.

Villarreal deserves credit for raising the money that Eliasoph, Winslow, and Lyin' Frank Lavin couldn't raise on their own (did that threesome raise ANYTHING???). But give me a break - Clinton let this thing flounder until the Chinese Foreign Ministry brought it to her attention, personally. By that point the US already owned money to the Chinese for the site prep work, a third-rate CANADIAN architect had come up with a "design" that looks like a 1980's era movie theater, and Frank Lavin, former ambassador and ITC Director, had been caught lying to the press about Congressional endorsement of his group's efforts on behalf of the pavilion. Oh, and the Chinese were talking about diplomatic breaches. In other words, we could only go up. Villarreal has done a fine job under difficult circumstances. But Clinton? Spare me the revisionism. She should've taken control of this much, much earlier, kicked the Bush appointees out of the room, and gotten together a group who know what they were doing involved. The full scale of this disaster isn't apparent yet. Just wait until the media and architecture critics get a load of this thing. It's going to be merciless.