Is Burma the next Mexico?
By Federico Varese The opinions expressed are his own.
Hillary Clinton had many “hard issues” to tackle during her recent visit to Myanmar. Yet there was no mention of one of the most, if not the most, difficult issue Burma faces: their lucrative drug trade.
Northern Burma is the home of the “Golden Triangle,” a hub for opium production and the location of hundreds of heroin and amphetamine refineries. So how do political leaders and the international community plan to tackle this problem in the event that Burma truly becomes a democratic country?
The totalitarian regime which has ruled Burma since 1962 has been, to a point, successful in keeping the production of illicit substances under control. In 1999, Burma’s notorious military junta (which is now dissolved) started a ruthless elimination plan of opium in the Golden Triangle (the Shan State, the Wa Region and the Kachin State). The region produced one-third of the world’s opium in 1998, but that figure was down to about 5% nine years later. From 2006 to 2007, the army eradicated 8,895 acres of opium fields. A 2007 United Nations Report trumpeted that “a decade-long process of drug control is clearly paying off.”
The actual story is a little more complicated. The regime did manage to reduce opium production, but this policy led to an increase in the production of amphetamines, methamphetamine in particular. The U.N. estimated that at least 700 million tablets were shipped from Burma to Thailand in 2003 alone, which is about 20 tons of methamphetamine, or 7.5% of what is manufactured globally.
Most recently, opium production in Burma is on the rise again, pushed by an ever-increasing demand for heroin in China, as documented by an eye-opening report compiled by the Transnational Institute, an NGO based in Amsterdam.
In order to see these developments for myself, I spent time this past summer in Muse, a town in the northeast section of Myanmar, and Ruili, right across the border in the Chinese province of Yunnan. “What you’ll see in Ruili you won’t be able to observe in any other part of China,” the taxi driver told me, surprised to find a foreigner around these parts. The place is reminiscent of a Mediterranean country, a relaxed atmosphere reigning supreme, where it’s hard to come by taxis and open shops in the mornings.
Looking back on my 2011 projections
By Don Tapscott The opinions expressed are his own.
One thing pundits rarely do is review their own prognostications. A year ago I published “10 big themes for 2011” – related to how the digital revolution changes business and society. It’s helpful to review what actually occurred. Below are my projections and some 20-20 hindsight editorializing.
1. “The crisis deepens. Rather than just an economic downturn, more people will recognize that we’re entering an era of profound change. The industrial economy and many of its institutions are reaching the end of their lifecycles — from newspapers and old models of financial services to our energy grid, transportation systems and institutions for global cooperation and problem solving.”
What happened? I think I called that one. A year ago many were saying that we had come out of the global slump and that we were in full recovery, even if it was a “jobless” one. I detest the term “jobless recovery” as an oxymoron. There is no recovery unless it’s inclusive. As the for global crisis, anyone want to debate with me that it’s getting deeper and that we need to rebuild most institutions and industries, like, say, government?
2. “We’ve entered a new period of Global Risks. We are moving into an age where profound threats are emerging to the global economy, society and even the very existence of humanity. Failure of the financial system, weapons of mass destruction, new communicable diseases, collapse of environmental systems, water security and many other threats make the world a volatile place. Leaders unite to build a Global Risk Response System.”
What happened? Possible overstatement. But consider the sovereign debt crisis, America losing its triple A rating, how the Japanese tsunami disrupted the global supply chain, the destabilization of (nuclear power) Pakistan, Iran’s steps towards nuclear weapons and the deepening crisis regarding Israel’s relationship with the Arab world — and a “Global Risk Response System” sounds like a good idea.
Don, I think you pretty much nailed it. The only thing I’d quibble with is the lack of emphasis on mobile: the growth of iPads and smartphones (iPhone and Android), and everything that impacted (mobile commerce, mobile search, etc) could have been emphasized more. Yes, geospatiality is part of that, but just one aspect.
@jimewel
The abyss and our last chance
By Carlo De Benedetti The opinions expressed are his own.
In a magnificent book published a few years ago Cormac McCarthy imagines a man and a child, father and son, pushing a shopping cart containing what little they have left, along a back road somewhere in America. Ten years earlier the world was destroyed by a nameless catastrophe that turned it into a dark, cold place without life.
There is no history and there is no future. But there is an objective: to head south toward the sea. Mythical places, only vaguely perceived, where there might be salvation. The father is getting older and is ever more weary. But he has the child with him. And he has his objective. He wants to take him southward to the sea. Toward a future that may still be possible.
Today, is the western economy, in particular the Italian economy, that world destroyed by an Apocalypse? Are we pushing that cart, containing the few things we have left, toward a mythical sea of which we know nothing, or even what it is like or where it is?
Re-reading the book I was tempted to think this. To think that those pages, written in 2006, were in some way a prophesy of what we are living through today. Never before has an entire productive system, our own, been so fundamentally questioned.
I have been convinced for some time now that the huge financial crisis of the last few years is the litmus test of a deeper crisis to do with the universal economic order that has lasted through the centuries, with a shift of the balance of world wealth toward new countries.
I think the way out of the crisis and out of the debt is easy.
LET´S STOP FINANCING F.E.:
- agricultural grants – let´s cut them to the half – or I see, there is France not willing to do that and start working properly,
- environmental issues – billions of euros so far and the result? China, India etc. producing even more, not caring about pollution – and we take there goods as it is of course cheaper then ours.
- minority issues – why do we spend so much money for minorities integration while these minorities are not even greatful to us for improving their lives? Let´s set the same rules for everyone and if someone doesnt want to respect them, let him-her deport immediately.
Let´s just be more selfish Europeans and give a stop pretending that we can save the world. If the rest of the world will not join us, our attempts will go in vain and our civilization will be killed – by ourselves.
Occupy Wall Street has already beaten the Tea Party
By David Callahan
The views expressed are his own.
Occupy Wall Street protestors are pondering their next steps after police raids this week dismantled more Occupy encampments in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. In some ways, though, the movement has already scored its most important victory: It has changed the “narrative” that frames public debate. Polls show that the Tea Party story – about an America being destroyed by big government – has been pushed aside by the Occupy Wall Street story, which stresses rising inequality and corporate greed.
This is good news for President Obama. While there is little that Obama can do between now and next November to jumpstart the economy, he may have a strong chance at reelection anyway if Americans keep gravitating to a progressive worldview.
In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken earlier this month, 76 percent agreed that the “current economic structure of the country is out of balance and favors a very small proportion of the rich over the rest of the country.” In another recent poll, by The Washington Post/ABC News, respondents were asked: “Do you think the federal government should or should not pursue policies that try to reduce the gap between wealthy and less well-off Americans?” A majority – 60 percent – said the government should pursue such policies.
Meanwhile, public concern about the Tea Party’s linchpin issues – taxes and the deficit – has receded. Asked in late October to name the most important issue facing the country, just 5 percent of respondents to a New York Times/CBS News poll named the budget deficit. A majority said jobs and the economy. This same poll included another result that should give Democrats hope: A strong 69 percent of respondents agreed that the policies of Republicans in Congress “favor the rich” while just 12 percent thought the same thing about Obama’s policies.
There’s only one problem with this article: It’s entire premise that OWS has beaten the Tea Party is entirely false. The simple fact is that this is not born out by any current polling comparing support for the organizations head to head. In fact polling shows the opposite. The article also ignores the fact that the Tea Party now has true political power i.e. seats in congress. OWS, arguably, has none.
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2 011/PPP_Release_US_11161023.pdf
Q7 Do you support or oppose the goals of the Tea
Party movement?
Support 42%
Oppose 45%
Not sure13%
Q8 Do you have a higher opinion of the Occupy
Wall Street movement or the Tea Party
movement?
Occupy Wall St. 37%
Tea Party 43%
Not sure 20%
Q6 Do you support or oppose the goals of the
Occupy Wall Street movement?
Support 33%
Oppose 45%
Not sure 22%
Circumcision is Africa’s best weapon against AIDS
By Ezekiel Emanuel The opinions expressed are his own.
They are sitting on pews. One side of the pews is open to the air and the other side is a non-descript, white closed door. Sitting close to the door is a boy dressed in black sports warm-ups. He has a somewhat anxious look on his face. As I begin to ask him a question, a woman walks toward the pews wearing a bright yellow T-shirt with blue lettering that says: “Want to get smart? Get circumcised.”
I am at the epicenter of the HIV/AIDS epidemic: southern Africa. To be specific this is Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. The HIV/AIDS prevalence is about 25% among young women.
The boy in the track warm-ups tells me he is 17 years old and in high school. At his school, people had presented on male circumcision. His parents approved. Today, a school holiday, he came to wait for his turn to go behind the door. There is only thing he is scared of: the pain.
The door opens, his tall friend comes out not looking any worse or in pain from the procedure. Indeed, he looks as if the only thing that happened was a discussion. As he opens the door, he jokes about his friend being next to get cut.
Several other boys from the same high school class are waiting and give a similar story. While this location is not overflowing, all the seats in the pews are filled with men waiting to go through the door. And if what these high schoolers say is true, all their friends are, if not excited, still planning to come to the center in the next few weeks. Centers like this will take boys as young as 10 years old. Interestingly, there seems not to be a push to circumcise babies yet.
Female genital mutilation may be more disgusting than male genital mutilation, but that doesn’t make it something good.
The American Medical Association’s Policy on Circumcision says the following on the subject of HIV transmission:
“circumcision cannot be responsibly viewed as “protecting” against such infections.”
How Citi sank itself on the Fed’s watch
By Nicholas Dunbar The opinions expressed are his own.
Much of the financial crisis can be blamed on bankers who created complex products that allowed them to exploit and monetize less sophisticated investors, borrowers and bank shareholders. However, no account of the financial crisis is complete without an account of the inept regulators who permitted these activities to flourish, causing the crisis to become much worse than it might have been. Among these regulators, most surprising is the story of the New York Fed, supposedly the most sophisticated in its approach to risk. As I recount in this excerpt from my book, The Devil’s Derivatives and as staff at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington DC discovered, the New York Fed was in thrall to what in 2007 was the largest US bank – Citigroup – with disastrous results. -Nicholas Dunbar
The Federal Reserve may have been at the top of the U.S. regulatory pecking order, but within the Fed itself, the New York branch was top dog when it came to regulating banks. This was hardly surprising given the dual importance of Wall Street as the engine room of the bond markets and as the base for the largest multinational U.S. banks. It was only natural that industry risk-management innovations like VAR were first identified by staff in the New York Fed’s markets divi- sion, such as Peter Fisher, who transmitted the ideas to the rest of the regulatory community.
Ever since the regulatory blessing of VAR in the mid-1990s, the New York–based multinational banks had been growing rapidly. By 2003, when William McDonough retired as New York Fed president and was replaced by Timothy Geithner, an ambitious former Treasury and International Monetary Fund bureaucrat, bank supervision was equally important to markets.
If any U.S. commercial bank needed to be challenged, it was Citigroup. In 1999, when then-chief executive Sandy Weill had needed an act of Congress in order to fuse the SEC-regulated Salomon Brothers with Fed- and OCC-regulated blue-chip lender Citibank, he had taken care to reassure his new shareholders and supervisors about the importance of governance. A veteran ex-AIG and Chemical Bank executive, Petros Sabatacakis, was appointed chief risk officer of the new conglomerate and ordered to rein in the freewheeling Salomon traders. Sabatacakis was so tough in applying position limits that on the trading floor he was known as “Dr. No.”
Then came Enron and the dot-com bust. Sabatacakis may have ensured that the bank (unlike Chase Manhattan) avoided significant losses in the shakeout, but Citigroup’s conflicted role in bond underwriting, derivatives, and investment research left it open to the charge of having facilitated massive fraud at Enron and WorldCom. That led to the New York Fed and the OCC censuring the bank in July 2003, as part of a settlement in which it didn’t have to admit wrongdoing. Weill was forced to quit as chief executive (while remaining chairman).
One year later: three lessons from the Arab Spring
By Stefan Wolff The opinions expressed are his own.
When Mohamed Bouazizi, a jobless graduate in the provincial city of Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia, about 200km southwest of the capital Tunis, set himself on fire on December 18, 2010 after police had confiscated a cart from which he was selling fruit and vegetables, few would have predicted that this event would spark the phenomenon we now refer to as the Arab Spring. Protests quickly escalated in Tunisia and within four weeks Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali had to flee to Saudi Arabia having failed to stop the protests either by repression of promises of reform.
On 17 January, one day after Ben Ali’s departure, another young man set himself afire near the Egyptian parliament. Within a week, coordinated mass protests began in Tahrir Square, and forced the resignation of long-serving Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who handed power to the military on 11 February.
Since then, the transitions in Tunisia and Egypt have made at best incremental progress in some areas. In Tunisia, the first elections anywhere as a result of the Arab Spring went ahead in October and the newly elected parliament had its inaugural session on November 22nd. The election winners, the moderate Islamist party Ennahda (Renaissance) will have a coalition arrangement with a liberal and a centre-left party. While Tunisia avoided the appalling violence that characterised the uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen, the new government and parliament still face an up-hill battle in the transition to a more democratic political system, including drafting a new constitution.
In Egypt, the military was instrumental in pushing Mubarak out of office, but the slow progress towards democratic reforms, several deadly sectarian clashes between Islamists and Christian copts, tensions and violence on the border with Israel, and a heavy-handed police crack-down on continuing protests in Tahrir Square do not bode well for the country’s immediate future—even if parliamentary elections go ahead on 28 November. While the army seems keen not to want to actually govern the country, they seem equally determined not to give up their privileged position that gives them political influence and control over significant economic assets.
Elsewhere in the Arab world, it seems as if the old regimes are determined to hold on to power at all cost, and despite diminishing chances of success. In Yemen, a crisis that had engulfed the regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh long before the Arab Spring began is nowhere closer to a resolution even after Saleh at long last agreed to a transition plan sponsored by the Gulf Cooperation Council. This plan saw Saleh hand over power to his Vice President (not the opposition), allows him to retain the title of President for another three months, guaranteed him immunity, and left his assets untouched and members of his family in charge of most of the government’s hard power. Forcing Saleh out of office does also not address at least two of the country’s major crises—the Houthi rebellion in the North and the secessionist insurgency in the south, the latter of which has formed an alliance of convenience with al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula. Unsurprisingly, violence in Yemen has continued unabated since Saleh signed the GCC transition plan on 23 November.
In Syria, Bashir al-Assad has, so far successfully, clung onto power regardless of the mounting death toll among protesters. Like elsewhere in the Arab Spring, an initially peaceful protest movement has turned into an armed insurgency, but one that lacks a unified political opposition. The Arab League has increased pressure on the Assad regime, albeit not unanimously and so far only threatens sanctions, while France, in an eerie déjà vu of events in Libya, has called for humanitarian corridors and safe zones inside Syria to protect civilians from an ever more violent regime crack-down and has recognised the opposition. All the signs at the moment are pointing at further escalation in Syria and possibly another international military intervention.
The real cost of those Black Friday deals
By Caitlin Kelly The opinions expressed are her own.
Americans shop. It’s what we do. It’s who we are. We’re still an economy powered by consumer spending – 70 percent of it, in fact. It’s an article of faith, for some, that annual Thanksgiving celebrations not only include turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce, but lining up in the cold and dark at their favorite store to snag a Black Friday bargain.
Maybe not this year.
Spurred perhaps by the growing national strength of the Occupy Wall Street movement, two emboldened Target workers, Anthony Hardwick, of Omaha, NE and Seth Coleman, a dockworker from Northfield, MN have collected 180,000 signatures protesting their employer’s unprecedented decision to open their stores to shoppers at midnight. Coleman delivered a bag of signatures gathered on-line to Target headquarters in Minneapolis earlier this week.
Coleman will be working at the Target store in Northfield on Thanksgiving Day, from 4 a.m. to 10:45 a.m. Then he’ll return 12 hours later, to make sure the shelves are stocked for the company’s first ever midnight opening for the Christmas rush, reported Minnesota Public Radio.
There is also some talk of retail workers taking a sick-out to protest retailers’ demands that they leave their own holiday meals in order to be work by midnight or earlier.
Retailers routinely excuse their escalating demands, such as this year’s ever-earlier Black Friday store openings, because their competitors are doing it. They’ll lose business, they argue, if they don’t follow the herd. Retailers defend all corporate decisions — no matter how detrimental they may be to their indispensible low-wage workers or how unpopular they may be with shoppers newly sensitized to the needs of the 99 percent. Retailers claim it’s alright because they have to protect shareholders’ interests by keeping profits high and hitting their quarterly projections.
yes i want to get up at 1am and be at walmart or target and wade into the fray in order to get spayed with pepper spray. tis the season. BRING IT ON.AHHHHH
A new party won’t necessarily be more pure than our existing two
By David Callahan
All views expressed are his own.
One irritating thing about rich people nowadays is their boundless faith that they can solve society’s most daunting problems – whether it’s underperforming schools or the AIDS epidemic. Yet just because someone made a bundle trading stocks or developing software doesn’t mean they’re equally brilliant in other areas.
The latest example is Americans Elect, an ambitious effort by wealthy individuals to circumvent the two-party political system in order to give voters a “centrist” choice in next year’s presidential election. Never mind that we already have a centrist candidate –President Obama, who has repeatedly sold out progressives to cut deals with the GOP. The real problem with Americans Elect is that it exacerbates the biggest flaw in our political system: the dominance of money.
Americans Elect aims to get a nonpartisan candidate on the ballot in all 50 states and has already secured ballot access in 24 states, including Florida and Ohio, by gathering over 2 million signatures.
Collecting signatures is an expensive business. According to Ballotpedia.org, supporters of state ballot initiatives in 2010 paid an average of $3.29 to get each signature. Americans Elect says it has raised over $20 million and, to be sure, some of that money has come in the form of small donations. The group also says that it will repay its major early donors so that no individual gives more than the $10,000. But this whole effort has been instigated by wealthy individuals, most notably the former investment banker Peter Ackerman, who has donated over $1.5 million to Americans Elect.
Occupy Wall St. sounds like the party for me.
The set up operations in several places at once.
They maintained their own finances.
They have a webpage.
Power to the people!
The religion of an increasingly godless America
By Amanda Marcotte The views expressed are her own.
Listening to the national discourse, one could be forgiven for imagining that America is becoming an ever more religious place. The amount of God talk in the public square has dramatically increased in a generation. Prior to the 70s, the concept of “the religious right” had barely existed, but now it’s a powerful lobbying force with multiple groups from Focus on the Family to Concerned Women for America, all sitting on more money than most liberal special interest groups could ever hope to accumulate. Republicans, especially, claw over each other to demonstrate fealty to a very narrow, fundamentalist view of Christianity that forbids gay rights, reproductive rights, and requires you to believe that evolution never happened. A generation ago, most people outside of evangelical Christian circles had never heard of things like “megachurches” or “the Rapture”, but now even people living in the most secularist urban enclaves are familiar with these concepts, if still less than approving. Americans seem not just more religious, but more drawn to reactionary religion than ever before.
That is, until you start to dig into the actual facts. If you poll actual Americans, you’ll find that the trend is not towards more religiosity, but towards less. Much less, in fact. Recent research from the Pew Research Center on politics and generational differences shows that interest in religion is actually declining from one generation to the next, and not only that, but interest in mixing religion and politics is on the decline. When asked which factors are the key to America’s success, fewer than half of Millennials say they believe that religious faith and values are important. They are the first generation to respond in such a way, as a majority of all older generations cite religion as an important factor. Even the generation known for cynicism, Generation X, has 64% of respondents citing religion as an important factor in our nation’s success, a full 18 points over the Millennial generation. Despite myths that people become more religious or more conservative as they age, previous Pew research shows that Xers and Boomers held roughly the same opinions on religion in their youth as they do now.
The research also found that more than one in four Millennials have no religious affiliation at all, the largest of any generation, though only by a small margin, as one in five Gen Xers is also irreligious. The percentage of unaffiliated Americans has grown gradually over the generations, but with the Millennials, we’re seeing a new trend emerge. There is now a large group of Americans who have a faith, but separate it from public life, keeping it in the private sphere.
So how to square away declining rates of belief with the perception that America is a land where the Bible is thumped regularly in the public square? What we’re seeing with the heightened emphasis on religion in politics is the death throes of the old order. After all, in the past, where it was assumed that a vast majority of Americans were not only religious, but Christian, those who wanted Christianity to dominate didn’t feel they had anything to prove. It’s only when they started to feel their power threatened did they become defensive, and in doing so, became much louder.
Right wing Christians would be the first to tell you that they feel that the dominance of traditional Christian values is under threat in this country. If you have any doubt about this, look at the long list of people they consider the enemies, internal and external, to their view of how America should be: atheists, Muslims, feminists, liberals, uncloseted gays and evolutionary biologists, amongst others. They aren’t wrong to believe these groups are growing both in numbers and in influence, as the polling data suggests that they are. The increasing volume and militancy from the religious right is to be expected in light of these changes. Sarah Posner, a senior editor at Religion Dispatches magazine, says the religious right has grown specifically in response to massive social changes. Opposing these changes was “exactly their point,” she told me, and conservative Christians believe that when they see these more secularist worldviews on the rise, they have a duty “to redouble one’s efforts”. She added that, in the eyes of evangelical leaders, “evangelicals had insulated themselves too much from secular society, and that they had a God-given duty to have an impact on the culture, on politics, on the media, and so forth.”
Most importantly, the religious right sees the Millennials as a special threat requiring most of their attention. Abstinence-only education, the attempted defunding of Planned Parenthood, creationism in the schools, and the growth of the home-schooling movement are all aimed at the youth of America. In some cases, as with TLC’s Duggar family, the religious right is going so far as to step up baby-making, hoping to create enough religious youth to curtail the power of the growing cohort of secular youth.
Go away atheists! Keep your godless religion private! Stop shoving the Atheist religion down our throats!
Unlike Thailand, see if you can score drugs on the streets of Burma . . .