Zed Books

Yanis Varoufakis: Canada’s Stark Options: Recovery or Regress?

2012-01-27T16:31:00.000Z

[Here is the speech I intend to give later today at the CCPA workshop on 'Canada: How can we avoid a lost decade?' ]

If everything is (as economists seem to believe) relative, then Canada is doing reasonably well in the aftermath of the Crash of 2008. Its governing politicians are, of course, stretching credulity when congratulating themselves for having overseen a complete recovery (since neither GDP per capita nor the employment rate has recovered to their 2008 levels). Nevertheless, one can see what gives them the green light to boast so rashly: Canada is growing again and a significant part of the losses inflicted upon its social economy by the Crash, and the following Recession, have been pulled back from the abyss.

Our workshop today ought to be about a lot more than measurement of where Canada is today relative to its 2008 position. Let’s just settle on a vague consensus that, while the country is growing again, it is doing so slowly and has not, yet, managed to recover fully. The jobs it has regained are both fewer than necessary (to bring employment levels back up to 2008 standards) and poorer quality-wise.

With this issue settled, we should immediately turn to the pressing questions of the day. There are at least three such questions:

How do we interpret Canada’s recent performance within a context of the global evolution of the Crisis?
What lessons are there to be learnt from this analysis regarding the policies that the Canadian government must implement domestically
In view of Canada’s G20 membership, and disproportionately loud voice in the other pivotal international fora, what should Canada’s position be in the global and regional economic policy debates?

I shall discuss these one at a time:

1. How do we interpret Canada’s recent performance within a context of the global evolution of the Crisis?

To gain a feel of why the Canadian economy behaved the way it did, after 2008, it is important to select a group of comparable countries. If one simply wants to offer a triumphalist take on Canada’s sterling performance, then compare it with Greece, Spain, or some other basket case of the world economy. But if one wants to extract maximum explanatory power from the comparison, I think that Australia and New Zealand are the clear options.

Besides the cultural proximity to the two Oceanic nations, Canada shares with them an impressively similar input-output matrix as well as a comparable position in the network of international trade. Canada and Australia, to narrow the comparison down a little, are resource-rich countries whose land provides the value-added which powers similar welfare systems and similar small but quite dynamic technology sectors.

Following the Crash of 2008, Oceania and Canada had reason to congratulate themselves for their banking systems. For unlike Wall Street, the City of London, and indeed the inane european banks, Canada’s and Australia’s banks, largely due to a sensible regulatory regime, did not fall prey to the implosion of the synthesised derivatives swindle. As a result, these two federal states’ public finances did not have to sustain the massive banking bailouts that put extraordinary pressure on states elsewhere.

To boot, both nations (Canada and Australia) found themselves the beneficiaries of China’s gargantuan fiscal stimulus, the purpose of which was to maintain Chinese growth at a time when the bottom was falling out of its export markets. While neither Australia nor Canada managed to escape unscathed, China’s success in, at least temporarily, maintaining their factories’ production at full capacity (indeed adding in the process brand new infrastructural works) provided the two Commonwealth countries the springboard from which to begin, after a short, sharp fall, the process of gradual recovery. In short, Canada and Australia rode the coattails of a remarkable Keynesian stimulus that has been ongoing in China.

After the Crash of 2008, the world effectively split up in three regions:

(a) The imploding metropolis (US, Britain and the EU)

(b) China (and to a lesser extent India)

The first group had been the locus of financialisation prior to 2008 and, thus, the segment of the global economy in which the pyramids of private (or toxic) money were generated (created by Wall Street, the City and the European banks). Thence, that very peculiar form of money flowed out into the rest of the world, creating wave upon wave of imbalanced yet roaring growth. When the created pyramids of private money burned down, these countries began to melt down too. It started in the guts of their financial system, moved out to the public debt sector (once the states rushed in to save the banks) while, simultaneously, the contagion hit the real economy (via the credit system that went into a prolonged spasm).

The second group, mainly China, was already in a momentum of real growth; that is, it was experiencing something akin to an industrial revolution in its early, rude, stages. Even though it too was indirectly fuelled by the private money that emanated in Wall Street, and financed the US, British and other trade deficits which provided China and India with great demand for their wares, this toxic form of money was once removed from the heart of China’s industrial machinery (and of its state controlled financial sector). To put it simply, China managed to insulate its economy fairly easily simply by going all-out with an, effectively, Keynesian investment-led, New Deal like, stimulus.[1]

The third group comprises primarily Latin America and, to a lesser degree, Africa. These economies jumped on the coattails of China to ride out the Great Recession and, in the process, are now transforming their productive make-up. In Latin America, the industries that had been designed as intermediate good production appendages to US multinationals are closing down one after the other. This form of de-industrialisation (which has hit Mexico very badly) is compensated for by (a) the extraordinary rise in primary commodity exports (e.g. soya, beef, minerals) to China, and (b) the creation of a nascent hi-tech industrial sector (e.g. software and aeronautics) which holds a glimmer of hope that trade will China will not turn simply on ‘stuff’ that comes out of the ground. As for Africa, direct investment from China, Indian investment in software design, and greater demand for specialty food and other agricultural products from Europe, are changing the continent.

Interestingly, Canada, Australia and New Zealand belong to none of these three groups. They are not part of (a) [courtesy of the fact that their pre-2008 growth was not directly financed by private-toxic money creation (unlike Britain or the US)] and, by definition, they are not part of (b). The closest they come to is group (c). Just like Latin America, it is Chinese growth that helped Australia and Canada rise from the 2008 mire the way they did. But unlike Latin America (and Africa), neither Canada nor Australia are experiencing a structural change in their input-output matrix, in the make-up of their productive sectors. In fact, all that is happening to these two countries, and to New Zealand, is that they are being buoyed by a tide of Chinese-stimulus-induced demand.

If I am right, two conclusions are to be drawn from this. First, Canada’s and Australia’s recovery is precarious and highly susceptible to a potential Chinese slowdown. Secondly, Canada has managed the post-2008 period far worse than its government is suggesting. The first conclusion is straightforwardly derived from the above analysis and requires, therefore, no further elucidation. The second conclusion emerges naturally once we compare and contrast Canada’s and Australia’s performance:

Between 2007 and 2011, Canada’s GDP per capital fell by -1.4% while its employment rate also declined by -1.2%. During the same period, Australia’s GDP per capita increased marginally (+0.1%) while its employment rate fell a lot less (-0.4%). So, what explains this significantly inferior performance of these two comparable economies? The answer is that Australia was fortunate to have a government in place, at the time of the slump, that was not naturally disposed to the austerian logic. True, Canada’s conservative government was also shaken by the 2008/9 tumult into stimulating the economy. But, compared to Australia’s Labor government, which remarkably gave thousands of dollars to families no-questions-asked, Canada’s stimulus was meek and short-lived. This is the reason why Australia recovered, at least in terms of GDP per capita, while Canada only pretends that it did.

Looking beyond the present, Canadians ought to worry about their government’s impact on the future. History proves that, after a meltdown, even the best meaning governments tend to withdraw much needed stimuli well before they ought to. President Roosevelt made that mistake in 1936/7, falling prey to the sirens that urged him that it was time to rein in the debt. The result was the second Crash, in 1938; the economic consequences of which would have been horrendous had it not been for the even worse human consequences of World War II. President Obama repeated that mistake in 2009, and left it all to the hapless Mr Bernanke. The Europeans… well, the less we say about the Europeans’ austerian shenanigans since 2009, the better.

In conclusion, Canada was blessed with a position in the global trade networks that allowed it a speedy, if not full, recovery after 2008. Unfortunately, the natural austerian inclinations of its government limited the recovery’s scope and, much worse, is now jeopardising Canada’s short to medium term future. Canada should stop celebrating the fact that it is better off than the US or Europe and draw lessons from its cousin down under.

2. What lessons are there to be learnt from this analysis regarding the policies that the Canadian government must implement domestically?

The first lesson for Canada is that it needs to safeguard those features that allowed the nation to avoid the worst in 2008 and beyond: its strict regulation of the financial sector, the welfare state that kept a lid on inequality (relatively to the US and Britain), the emphasis on making and exporting ‘things’.

Secondly, the government must grasp the fact that its stimulus was insufficient and, moreover, it must understand that turning to austerity and debt-fetishism now will be detrimental not only to growth but also to debt-reduction. This is not the 1990s when the Canadian government successfully run its debt down through ‘fiscal consolidation’. In the 1990s, the world was growing fast. Canada managed to replace public sector with private sector jobs by deflating while in the slipstream of a ‘flying’ US economy. Similar policies today, in the midst of a dearth of global growth, may well lead to an increase in deficits as grows splatters and the tax take dives.

Thirdly, Canada ought to keep its eye on its profound differences with the US economy. Where Mr Bernanke must use quantitative easing (since this is his only weapon against recessionary forces), Canada cannot rely on lax monetary policy. It would be a great error to adopt the queer logic of ‘expansionary-austerity’ which, in simple terms, means: to combine fiscal austerity with ultra-low interest rates. Canada should, instead, keep interest rates relatively high (to prevent bubbles from infecting its real estate and other sectors of the resource-fuelled economy) while adopting an expansionary fiscal policy.

Fourthly, the main game, from a Canadian perspective, must surely be its medium to long term strategy for becoming less dependent on the haphazard demand for primary commodities. This strategy will determine Canada’s future and cannot be designed intelligently without taking into consideration the third and last question below.

3. In view of Canada’s G20 membership, and disproportionately loud voice in the other pivotal international fora, what should Canada’s position be in the global and regional economic policy debates?

Canada takes pride in its internationalism and the fact that it punches above its weight in the various international fora. Rightly so. Today, however, a great burden rests on Canada’s shoulders, in this regard.

Our world is in Crisis because the Global Surplus Recycling Mechanism that came into being in the 1970s, and kept the world economy on a precarious but nevertheless dynamic growth path, broke down irreversibly in 2008. That Crisis never went away. It migrated from one sector to another, from one continent to the next, mutating in the process in ways that fooled some into thinking that the original Crisis subsided. It is my view that the uncertainty facing China, the existentialist crisis of Europe, America’s inability to turn the corner, the Great Boom Crisis in Australia, the debate about Canada that we are having here today, all these are nothing more than manifestations of the absence of a functioning Global Surplus Recycling Mechanism.

Canada’s government is aware of, and angry at, Europe’s spectacular failure to mend its crisis. But is it aware that Europe’s crisis is the result of the fact that Europe never had a proper internal Surplus Recycling Mechanism? And is it aware that this ‘lack’ became apparent when the Global Surplus Recycling Mechanism (i.e. the combination of US deficits and Wall Street’s shady operations) broke down?

Canada’s government understand that the so-called ‘global imbanances’ are the root cause of the global Crisis. But then it turns around and congratulates itself for the fact that internal balances within Canada are in check. Alas, this ignores the fact that the reason for Canada’s low internal imbalances is that Canada benefits from the global imbalances that are, according to the Canadian government, out of control.

In this sense, Canada finds itself in a terrible predicament: To keep its economy balanced and growing, the world must live under substantial global imbalances that are… unsustainable. And why is this so? Why can Canada not grow, with its internal balances intact, while the world returns to a sustainable path, its global imbalances corrected? Because this is not something that can be accomplished by self-regulating markets. This is the task of collective action at the global level. It requires something like a new Bretton Woods. Or at least effective coordination between the G20, the IMF and the World Bank. If Canada is still proud of its loud voice in these fora, there has never been a better time to use it.

Epilogue

Canada has had a bearable Crisis. Only it could have had a much better one. As for the near future, Canada is on the verge not only of another lost opportunity but, I very much fear, of a catastrophic mistake. To keep at bay the prospects of a dystopian future, its government must ignore the sirens of ‘expansionary austerity’ and use its international kudos to help piece together the next global surplus recycling mechanism without which recovery, for Canada and for the rest of the world, will not come for at least a generation.

[1] In the long term, of course, it is unlikely that China will continue to be able to do so. Its consumption rate having crashed (from a low 43% in 2008 to an abysmal 28% in 2011), China’s government is now between a rock (the prospect of a painful slow down, if it lets the stimulus subside) and a hard place (the property market bubble, inflated by the stimulus, bursting).

Steve Keen's article for the World Economic Forum in Davos

2012-01-27T16:28:00.001Z

For its entire history, macroeconomics has been dominated bymathematical models that ignore the existence of money, debt and banking, andthat perceive the economy’s movement through time as transitions from one stateof equilibrium to another.

At any point in history, these would be heroic assumptions.Could it really be true that models without either money or instability areprovably superior at predicting the economy’s future course than models inwhich money and banking exist, and in which the model economy can be out ofequilibrium? If not, is it the case then that such models are simply toodifficult to construct—that the best we can do is pretend that the economydoesn’t have banks or money, and that it’s always in equilibrium, even if weknow these assumptions are false?

Before the crisis of 2007, few non-economists even askedthose questions, because there seemed to be no need to challenge whateconomists did. The economy, after all, was going gangbusters. Professionaleconomists, using the very latest mathematical models of the economy, tookcredit for its sterling performance, and predicted more of the same for theforeseeable future.

Robert Lucas, the father of “Rational ExpectationsMacroeconomics”, asserted that the “macroeconomics … has succeeded. Its centralproblem of depression prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes,and has in fact been solved for many decades.”[1] Ben Bernanke lauded“improved control of inflation” as the cause of “the Great Moderation”, whichhe described as “this welcome change in the economy.” [2] In June 2007, theOECD, guided by its macroeconomic model, opined that “the current economicsituation is in many ways better than what we have experienced in years… Ourcentral forecast remains indeed quite benign”. [3]

Then all hell broke loose, and almost five years later, itshows no signs of abating. Now non-economists are challenging what economistsdo, and finally realizing what a minority of dissidents within economics havelong known: these assumptions are not merely heroic, they are both false andunnecessary. Money, debt and disequilibrium dynamics play crucial roles in theactual behaviour of the economy, and it is relatively easy to developmathematical models which include money and banks, and in which the economy isalways in disequilibrium. I should know: it’s what I do, and it’s why I was oneof two mathematical economists who saw this crisis coming, and warned of itpublicly before it happened (the other was the late Wynne Godley). [4]

For economics to have a future, it has to abandon theobsession with equilibrium modelling, and realistically incorporate money,banking and finance into macroeconomics. Both things are, as I’ve said, nothard to do.

The starting point for modelling any process in a truescience is a position of disequilibrium—Newton, after all, modelled gravity byconsidering a falling apple, not one at rest! Economists have to abandon theirfetish with “comparative statics” and instead model processes of change.Dynamics has to be the core of economic analysis, not equilibrium.

Money is also easily modelled by borrowing the basic tool ofthe accountant, double-entry bookkeeping. [5] Money and debt are created bybookkeeping entries, and the same paradigm can be used to derive dynamic modelsof the flow of money in one direction, propelling the movement of goods andfinancial assets in the other.

The difficulty in developing a monetary dynamicmacroeconomics comes not from the tools themselves, but from the beliefs thathave to be abandoned to employ them sensibly—from other assumptions thatNeoclassical economists have made to “simplify” analysis that instead have madeit almost impossible to understand the real world. There are enough of these toliterally fill a book—to whit, my Debunking Economics [6]—but I’llsingle out just three:

“Rational” expectations—which really means assuming that everyone can accurately predict the future (and therefore avoid any calamities like the one we are in right now);
Representative agents—which really means assuming that there’s only one person in the economy, who produces and consumes just one commodity; and
Perceiving macroeconomics as applied microeconomics

This last false belief, and not a quest for greater realism,was the driving force behind the development of macroeconomics since WWII. Itwas a fool’s errand, since as physicists realized decades ago, “More IsDifferent”—to quote the title of a famous paper from Physics Nobel LaureatePhilip Anderson. [7] Biology cannot be treated as merely applied chemistry,even though the elementary building blocks of living entities are chemicals,because properties emerge from the interactions of these chemicals that can’tbe explained from the chemicals alone.

We call one of these emergent properties “Life”. We know agreat deal about chemistry, but no chemist has as yet created life. The attemptto reduce macroeconomics to applied microeconomics was as futile a quest.

From SteveKeen’s blog, 25 Jan 2012:

Munther Fahmi's Residency Reinstated

2012-01-27T15:13:00.001Z

My dear friends and supporters,

I am thrilled to announce that the Government of Israel hasaccepted the Israeli Supreme Court recommendation that my residency bereinstated.

I have been granted 2 years' residence on the basis of aJerusalem Identity Card, and pending good behavior, shall receive permanentresidence thereafter. I am deeply indebted to all of you and extremely gratefulfor your kind support during this year of particular uncertainty. There is stillmuch work to be done for resolution in line with international law for the130,000+ Palestinians whose residency has been revoked by the Government ofIsrael.

With Best Wishes,

Munther Fahmi
The Bookshop

http://facebook.com/Bookshop1

ThinkAfricaPress: Liberia-US Relations: A Shady Past, A Wary Future

2012-01-27T14:40:00.001Z

Two very significant and interconnected events happened last week in Liberia – President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was inaugurated for a second term with a subdued opposition attending the ceremonies, and former Liberian President Charles Taylor was implicated in a Boston Globe article for serving as a CIA informant beginning in the early 1980s and spanning many decades.

Taylor, Taylor, How Did Your Garden Grow?

Taylor, who currently languishes in a jail cell in The Hague after undergoing trial for 11 counts of crimes against humanity in the Sierra Leonean civil war, has ironically never faced trial for the atrocities that he orchestrated, oversaw, and implemented in Liberia. The bombshell news that he was indeed a CIA informant in the early years of his rise to notoriety calls into question America’s complicity in Taylor’s destruction of Liberia.

America’s facilitation of Taylor’s escape from a maximum security prison in Boston in 1985 – while he was facing extradition to Liberia for allegedly stealing US$1 million from the General Services Agency, which he headed during President Samuel Kanyon Doe’s regime – was always rumoured but never corroborated.

I remember covering the first day of Taylor’s trial in The Hague for Pambazuka News, and interviewing Stephen Rapp, the then chief prosecutor, about whether or not his investigations into Taylor’s exploits in Libya and Sierra Leone ever unearthed the real causes of his ‘escape’ from the maximum security prison in Massachusetts. Rapp was tight-lipped, yet appeared confounded by this mystery as well. When Taylor eventually confessed during the Hague trial that he strolled out of prison after a guard conveniently opened his cell one night, we all knew that something was awry: “I am calling it my release because I didn’t break out,’’ Taylor testified. “I did not pay any money. I did not know the guys who picked me up. I was not hiding [afterwards].’’

The Taylor-CIA connection has re-inscribed for Liberians an age-old dilemma, what to do with our so-called historical relationship with the US, which has been fraught with betrayal after betrayal. Liberians who have been commenting on various notice boards are justifiably angry, upset and disappointed, but not surprised. This is the validation we have been wanting for years, and it comes on the heels of the inauguration for a second term of our head of state, who was ironically pictured dedicating the new US Embassy in Liberia this week, with a smiling US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the foreground.

Some Liberians, under anonymity, are arguing that US authorities who courted Taylor for intelligence be brought to justice for crimes against humanity in the Liberian civil war, that the International Criminal Court – now headed by a female Gambian national – should exhibit blind justice, that instead of hauling African and non-Western leaders to the international body for prosecution, they too should face the full weight of the law. I tend to agree with these arguments, however radical and farfetched they may seem.

Inquiring Liberian Minds Deserve to Know

The Globe article recounts that the CIA has said releasing further information could be a national security threat. A threat to whom, might I ask? Liberians deserve to know the nature, duration, scale, and scope of the CIA-Taylor relationship, it is a part of our national history, and must be recounted in the history books for our children, and our children’s children to remember that a relationship with the US must be monitored at all times.

Liberians are not gullible, nor are we unsophisticated in realising that one plus one equals two. We have always known that the dubiousness surrounding Taylor’s escape from the Massachusetts maximum-security prison was the beginning of the end for us. And if the implications of the Globe article are true, then the CIA could provide more answers.

It is no wonder that the US did not intervene in the Liberian civil war, though Liberians begged and pleaded for its “father/mother” to stop us from killing each other. One US diplomat at the time even said that “Liberia is of no strategic interest to the United States.” It begs the question, if Liberia was of “no strategic interest” during the war, when we were killing ourselves and each other in the name of liberation, what is Liberia’s strategic interest to the US now, when American NGOs and development workers abound, and the Peace Corps has reinserted itself?

Limits of Reciprocity

What Liberians and the Liberian government should be doing is strategising and devising our own “Liberia Policy for the US” which factors in seriously our chequered history with unsentimental bias.

We should also rely on a corpus of intellectual and creative work that has already investigated our ‘limits of reciprocity’ with the US. Liberian filmmaker Nancee Oku Bright’s film, Liberia: America’s Stepchild, explores the torturous relationship between Liberia and the US, with her thesis being that the US sees Liberia as an ‘outside’ child, one who is illegitimate upon conception and can be used and abused at will without consequence. And Liberian academic Dr D. Elwood Dunn also interrogates this relationship in his book, Liberia and the United States During the Cold War: Limits of Reciprocity, showing that the Cold War placed Liberia in a very strategic position to exploit its relationship with the United States, yet with unintended consequences.

In this new political dispensation, it should be clear that Liberia should hold the US at arm’s length, that hosting AFRICOM or any US satellite post is out of the question, that we have to use them just as strategically as they have used us. With the geopolitics of China and other emerging nations, Liberia needs to develop a “Look South Policy,” not because we have become alienated, as in the case of Zimbabwe, but because we have made a conscious decision to explore other options, remembering that the US will act only in its own interest and leave those caught in the crossfire to fend for themselves.

We deserve to know the details of Taylor’s relationship with the CIA. It is crucial to our development planning, historical remembrance, healing and nation-building.

This article was originally published at African Arguments. 25 January 2012

The Economist: Affirming a divide

2012-01-27T12:55:00.001Z

Black Brazilians are much worse off than they should be. But what is the best way to remedy that?

Jan 28th 2012 | RIO DE JANEIRO

IN APRIL 2010, as part of a scheme to beautify the rundown port near the centre of Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Olympic games, workers were replacing the drainage system in a shabby square when they found some old cans. The city called in archaeologists, whose excavations unearthed the ruins of Valongo, once Brazil’s main landing stage for African slaves.

From 1811 to 1843 around 500,000 slaves arrived there, according to Tânia Andrade Lima, the head archaeologist. Valongo was a complex, including warehouses where slaves were sold and a cemetery. Hundreds of plastic bags, stored in shipping containers parked on a corner of the site, hold personal objects lost or hidden by the slaves, or taken from them. They include delicate bracelets and rings woven from vegetable fibre; lumps of amethyst and stones used in African worship; and cowrie shells, a common currency in Africa.

It is a poignant reminder of the scale and duration of the slave trade to Brazil. Of the 10.7m African slaves shipped across the Atlantic between the 16th and 19th centuries, 4.9m landed there. Fewer than 400,000 went to the United States. Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888.

Brazil has long seemed to want to forget this history. In 1843 Valongo was paved over by a grander dock to welcome a Bourbon princess who came to marry Pedro II, the country’s 19th-century emperor. The stone column rising from the square commemorates the empress, not the slaves. Now the city plans to make Valongo an open-air museum of slavery and the African diaspora. “Our work is to give greater visibility to the black community and its ancestors,” says Ms Andrade Lima.

This project is a small example of a much broader re-evaluation of race in Brazil. The pervasiveness of slavery, the lateness of its abolition, and the fact that nothing was done to turn former slaves into citizens all combined to have a profound impact on Brazilian society. They are reasons for the extreme socioeconomic inequality that still scars the country today.

Neither separate nor equal

In the 2010 census some 51% of Brazilians defined themselves as black or brown. On average, the income of whites is slightly more than double that of black or brown Brazilians, according to IPEA, a government-linked think-tank. It finds that blacks are relatively disadvantaged in their level of education and in their access to health and other services. For example, more than half the people in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (slums) are black. The comparable figure in the city’s richer districts is just 7%.

Brazilians have long argued that blacks are poor only because they are at the bottom of the social pyramid—in other words, that society is stratified by class, not race. But a growing number disagree. These “clamorous” differences can only be explained by racism, according to Mário Theodoro of the federal government’s secretariat for racial equality. In a passionate and sometimes angry debate, black Brazilian activists insist that slavery’s legacy of injustice and inequality can only be reversed by affirmative-action policies, of the kind found in the United States.

Their opponents argue that the history of race relations in Brazil is very different, and that such policies risk creating new racial problems. Unlike in the United States, slavery in Brazil never meant segregation. Mixing was the norm, and Brazil had many more free blacks. The result is a spectrum of skin colour rather than a dichotomy.

Few these days still call Brazil a “racial democracy”. As Antonio Riserio, a sociologist from Bahia, put it in a recent book: “It’s clear that racism exists in the US. It’s clear that racism exists in Brazil. But they are different kinds of racism.” In Brazil, he argues, racism is veiled and shamefaced, not open or institutional. Brazil has never had anything like the Ku Klux Klan, or the ban on interracial marriage imposed in 17 American states until 1967.

Importing American-style affirmative action risks forcing Brazilians to place themselves in strict racial categories rather than somewhere along a spectrum, says Peter Fry, a British-born, naturalised-Brazilian anthropologist. Having worked in southern Africa, he says that Brazil’s avoidance of “the crystallising of race as a marker of identity” is a big advantage in creating a democratic society.

But for the proponents of affirmative action, the veiled quality of Brazilian racism explains why racial stratification has been ignored for so long. “In Brazil you have an invisible enemy. Nobody’s racist. But when your daughter goes out with a black, things change,” says Ivanir dos Santos, a black activist in Rio de Janeiro. If black and white youths with equal qualifications apply to be a shop assistant in a Rio mall, the white will get the job, he adds.

The debate over affirmative action splits both left and right. The governments of Dilma Rousseff, the president, and of her two predecessors, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, have all supported such policies. But they have moved cautiously. So far the main battleground has been in universities. Since 2001 more than 70 public universities have introduced racial admissions quotas. In Rio de Janeiro’s state universities, 20% of places are set aside for black students who pass the entrance exam. Another 25% are reserved for a “social quota” of pupils from state schools whose parents’ income is less than twice the minimum wage—who are often black. A big federal programme awards grants to black and brown students at private universities.

These measures are starting to make a difference. Although only 6.3% of black 18- to 24-year-olds were in higher education in 2006, that was double the proportion in 2001, according to IPEA. (The figures for whites were 19.2% in 2006, compared with 14.1% in 2001). “We’re very happy, because in the past five years we’ve placed more blacks in universities than in the previous 500 years,” says Frei David Raimundo dos Santos, a Franciscan friar who runs Educafro, a charity that holds university-entrance classes in poor areas. “Today there’s a revolution in Brazil.”

One of its beneficiaries is Carolina Bras da Silva, a young black woman whose mother was a cleaner. As a teenager she lived for a while on the streets of São Paulo. But she is now in her first year of social sciences at Rio’s Catholic University, on a full grant. “Some of the other students said ‘What are you doing here?’ But it’s getting better,” she says. She wants to study law and become a public prosecutor.

Academics from some of Brazil’s best universities have led a campaign against quotas. They argue firstly that affirmative action starts with an act of racism: the division of a rainbow nation into arbitrary colour categories. Assigning races in Brazil is not always as easy as the activists claim. In 2007 one of two identical twins who both applied to enter the University of Brasília was classified as black, the other as white. All this risks creating racial resentment. Secondly, opponents say affirmative action undermines equality of opportunity and meritocracy—fragile concepts in Brazil, where privilege, nepotism and contacts have long been routes to advancement.

Proponents of affirmative action say these arguments sanctify an unjust status quo. And formally meritocratic university entrance exams have not guaranteed equality of opportunity. A study by Carlos Antonio Costa Ribeiro, a sociologist at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, found that the factors most closely correlated to attending university are having rich parents and studying in private school.

In practice, many of the fears surrounding university quotas have not been borne out. Though still preliminary, studies tend to show that cotistas, as they are known, have performed academically as well as or better than their peers. That may be because they have replaced weaker “white” students who got in merely because they had the money to prepare for the exam.

Nelson do Valle Silva, a sociologist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, says that the backlash against quotas would have been even stronger if access to universities were not growing so fast. For now, almost everyone who passes the exam gets in somewhere. It also helps, he says, that many universities have adopted less controversial “social quotas”. Mr Fry agrees that affirmative action has “become a fait accompli”. He attributes the declining resistance to guilt, indifference and the fear of being accused of racism.

The battle for jobs

For black activists, the next target is the labour market. “As a black man, when I go for a job I start from a disadvantage,” says Mr Theodoro. He notes that the United States, which is only 12% black, has a black president and numerous black politicians and millionaires. In Brazil, in contrast, “we have nobody”. That is not quite true: apart from footballers and singers, Brazil has a black supreme-court justice (appointed by Lula) and senior military and police officers. But they are exceptional. Only one of the 38 members of Ms Rousseff’s cabinet is black (though ten are women). Stand outside the adjacent headquarters of Petrobras, the state oil company, and the National Development Bank in Rio at lunchtime, and “all the managers are white and the cleaners are black,” says Frei David.

Some private-sector bodies are starting to espouse racial diversity in recruitment. The state and city of Rio de Janeiro have both passed laws reserving 20% of posts in civil-service exams for blacks, though they are yet to be implemented. If unemployment rises from today’s record low, job quotas are likely to create even more controversy than university entrance has.

What stands out from a decade of debate about affirmative action is that it is being implemented in a very Brazilian way. Each university has taken its own decisions. The federal government has tried to promote the policy, but not impose it. The supreme court is sitting on three cases addressing racial quotas. Some lawyers suspect it is deliberately dragging its heels in the hope that society can sort the issue out.

Society itself is indeed changing fast. Many of the 30m Brazilians who have left poverty over the past decade are black. Businesses are taking note: many more cosmetics are aimed at blacks, for example. The mix of passengers on internal flights now bears some resemblance to Brazil, rather than Scandinavia. Until recently, the only black actors in television soap operas played maids; now one Globo soap has a black male lead. Much of this might have happened without affirmative action.

The question facing Brazil is whether the best way to repair the legacy of slavery is to give extra rights to darker-skinned Brazilians. Yes, say the government and the black movement. Given the persistence of racial disadvantage that is understandable.

But the approach carries clear risks. Until the invasion of American academic ideas, most Brazilians thought that their country’s racial rainbow was among its main assets. They were not wholly wrong. Mr do Valle Silva, a specialist in social mobility, finds that race affects life chances in Brazil but does not determine them. And if positive discrimination becomes permanent, a publicly funded industry of entitlement may grow up to entrench it and to promote divisive racial politics.

There may be better ways to establish genuine equality of opportunity and rights. Brazil has had anti-discrimination legislation since the 1950s. The 1988 constitution made both racial abuse and racism crimes. But there have been relatively few prosecutions. That is partly because of racism in the judiciary. But it is also because judges and prosecutors think the penalties are too harsh: anyone accused of racism must be held in jail both before and after conviction. And in Rio de Janeiro the black movement’s preference for affirmative action led the state government to lose interest in measures aimed at attacking racial prejudice, according to a study by Fabiano Dias Monteiro, who ran the state’s anti-racist helpline before it was scrapped in 2007.

The hardest task is to change attitudes. Many Brazilians simply assume blacks belong at the bottom of the pile. Supporters of affirmative action are right to say that the country turned its back on the problem. But American-style policies might not be the way to combat Brazil’s specific forms of racism. A combination of stronger legal action against discrimination and quotas for social class in higher education to compensate for weak public schools may work better.

Africa Review: Taylor denies being a US spy and vows to sue US newspaper

2012-01-27T10:27:00.000Z

The imprisoned former Liberian president Charles Taylor has categorically denied working as a United States spy and vows to sue the Boston Globe newspaper that made the revelation.

Reacting to the publication through his Jamaican-born lawyer Courtenay Griffiths, Taylor said he has never worked or played any role on behalf of any US government intelligence agency in his “personal capacity”.

But he acknowledged that the Liberian Security agencies as well as his National Patriotic Party of Liberia worked or associated with US intelligence organs but not himself personally.

Last week, the US-based Boston Globe newspaper exposed Taylor’s past role as a US intelligence informant. The expose had been confirmed by the US Defence Department acting on a Freedom of Information Act inquiry which the newspaper had lodged six years ago.

The Globe indicated that Taylor had been recruited to spy on the late Libyan later Muammar Gaddafi’s networks. Before launching the civil war in Liberia in the 80s, Taylor had been trained as a guerrilla leader in Libya.

Mr Griffiths said his client found it offensive for the Globe to publish what he claimed was “pure speculation”.

Awaiting verdict

Taylor’s reaction was carried prominently by several newspapers in Liberia on Monday. Through his lawyer, he said he was said his client is contemplating on a legal battle with the Boston Globe with the help of American lawyers.

He also insisted that the newspaper present a copy of any correspondence that the US government, the Defence Intelligence Agency or the Central Intelligence Agency sent to the Globe in response to its request either six years ago or recently.

© Africa Review

For more information about Charles Taylor, please read Charles Taylor and Liberia by Colin Waugh

Hein Marais: Sitting it out

2012-01-26T17:35:00.001Z

A short, note-perfect ode to sitting out front and, well, just …

Everyone Forever Now - “Stoop Sitting” from Everynone on Vimeo.

The tone and languid goodwill bears the stamp of the talents behind this video, the superb Everynone collective. You can sample their other work here and here.

In three minutes, “Stoop Sitting” speaks more pointedly of our time than the hyper-feted Tree of Life manages in more than two hours. And its spry humanism puts to shame the labored and hectoring spiritualism of Terrence Mallick’s swan song.

Which maybe is just another way of explaining why Tree of Life will emerge with a cart of Oscars.
More on that, soon.

[Next post: The best film the Oscar hucksters ignored in 2011]

From Hein Marais Blog

The New York Times: In Brazil, Fears of a Slide Back for Amazon Protection

2012-01-26T16:40:00.000Z

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Brazil has made great strides in recent years in slowing Amazon deforestation and showing the world it was serious about protecting the mammoth rain forest.

The government has used police raids, as in the state of Pará, above, to find illegal deforesters.

The rate of deforestation fell by 80 percent over the past six years, as the government carved out about 150 million acres for conservation — an area roughly the size of France — and used police raids and other tactics to crack down on illegal deforesters, according to both environmentalists and the government. Brazil’s former environment minister, Marina Silva, became an internationally respected defender of the Amazon. She ran for president in 2010 on the Green Party ticket and won 19.4 percent of the votes.

But since Dilma Rousseff was elected president in late 2010, there have been signs of a shift in the government’s attitude toward the Amazon. A provisional measure now allows the president to decrease the lands already created for conservation. The government is granting more flexibility for large infrastructure projects during the environmental licensing process. And a proposal would give Brazil’s Congress veto power over the recognition of indigenous territories.

“What is happening in Brazil is the biggest backsliding that we could ever imagine with regards to environmental policies,” said Ms. Silva, who now devotes her time to environmental advocacy.

Now, a bill seeking to overhaul the 47-year-old Forest Code, a central piece of environmental legislation, is the most serious test yet of Ms. Rousseff’s stance on the environment.

The debate over the law has revealed the stark disconnect between a population that is increasingly supportive of conserving the Amazon and a Congress in which agricultural interests in the country’s rural north and northeast still hold sway. The furor comes as Brazil is set to hold a United Nations conference on sustainable development in Rio de Janeiro in June.

Before taking office last January, Ms. Rousseff promised to veto any revision of the Forest Code that granted amnesty to landowners who had previously deforested illegally. Then her government negotiated a version of the code, approved by the Senate in December, that would give amnesty to farmers who broke the law before 2008 — provided they agreed to plant new trees. The House is expected to debate the legislation once again in March, with Ms. Rousseff holding final veto power.

The fight over the Forest Code has stoked the age-old struggle over development versus conservation in Brazil, a country that bears the weight of international pressure to protect the Amazon from deforestation because its sheer scale could affect global climatic conditions. Ms. Rousseff, a former energy minister, has so far flashed a more pro-development stance, environmentalists say, shifting the balance from the administration of her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who appointed Ms. Silva.

Agriculture represents 22 percent of Brazil’s gross domestic product. The so-called ruralists in Congress say that the old code is holding back Brazil’s agricultural potential and that it needs updating to allow more land to be opened up to production. Environmentalists counter that there is already enough land available to double production and that the proposed changes would open the door to a surge in deforestation.

Last May, the House approved a more sweeping amnesty for those who had illegally deforested, outraging environmentalists and scientists. It did not help that the deputies refused to receive a group of respected Brazilian scientists that issued a report condemning the changes.

“In the House, there was very little consultation with scientists,” said Carlos Nobre, a scientist at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research who specializes in climate issues. Still, he said, scientists “waited too long to realize that the House wanted to radically change the Forest Code, creating a broad and unrestricted license to deforest.”

Ms. Silva, who was raised in the Amazon, resigned in 2008 after a backlash by rural governors to restrictions on illegal deforestation she had put in place. But she left what environmentalists consider an effective policy to control Amazon deforestation. Among other tactics, Mr. da Silva’s government used satellite images to home in on deforesters, organized police raids and blacklisted the worst offenders.

“The ruralists have pushed so much to change the Forest Code because the government actually started enforcing it under Marina Silva,” said Stephan Schwartzman, director for tropical forest policy at the Environmental Defense Fund in Washington.

The vote in the House showed how heavily represented the less developed north and northeast are in Brazil’s Congress, a relic of the military dictatorship.

“The skewed proportional representation in Brazil has shown that the environmentalists have much less power in Congress than they have in public opinion,” said Gilberto Câmara, director of the National Institute for Space Research, which monitors Amazon deforestation.

Days after the House vote last May, a poll by Datafolha showed that 85 percent of Brazilians believed the reformed code should prioritize forests and rivers, even if it came at the expense of agricultural production.

After weeks of debate, the bill the Senate approved in December was somewhat more palatable to environmentalists. Rather than outright amnesty for past illegal deforestation, the Senate version lets farmers replant to avoid fines. The legislation now goes back to the House.

“We have to reconcile the generation of income with sustainability,” Izabella Teixeira, the current environment minister, said after the vote.

For Marcos Jank, president of the Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Association, a major reason to change the code is to legalize countless Amazon properties lacking land titles that have complicated the tracking of illegal activity. “When you have a Forest Code that legalizes land titles, then that has the effect of reducing deforestation, not increasing it,” he said.

The government claims the code will reforest about 60 million acres, much of it in the Amazon, which the Environment Ministry calls “the largest reforestation program in the world.” But who will pay for all those new trees? And will the government enforce the replanting requirements?

“The small producers don’t have the money to replant,” Mr. Jank said. “You need to develop programs to help them.”

There are also questions about the size of lands being exempted from the legal requirement to preserve 80 percent of the trees in Amazon properties. The new law would exempt “small” properties of up to four “fiscal modules,” which in the Amazon are almost 1,000 acres combined.

“That is a large property in any part of the world,” Mr. Nobre said. “I see great risk here if this definition is maintained.”

Despite the concerns, there is no denying that deforestation in Brazil, driven largely by clearing land for inefficient cattle grazing, has been on a downward trend. Beyond that, a new generation of satellites over the next two years will give Brazil access to images from seven satellites, up from the current two.

If people abide by the law — a big if — Mr. Câmara and other scientists are predicting that the Brazilian Amazon has a chance by 2020 to become a “carbon sink,” in which the amount of forest being replanted is larger than the amount being deforested.

“President Rousseff is extremely aware of this,” Mr. Câmara said. “When I told her, she almost fell off her chair.”

But to make that happen, “there has to be very strong government financing and support for people to recover the forest,” he said.

Yanis Varoufakis: The Global Minotaur now in German

2012-01-26T16:05:00.002Z

It is with great joy, and some trepidation, that I received the news of the German edition of my Global Minotaur. At this delicate juncture of Europe’s ‘evolution’, the opportunity to speak directly to German readers’ perceptions of the Crisis, and in German, seems significant.

Click here for my presentation of the book at Columbia University, Nov. 2011
Click here for the Kunstmann’s (the German publisher’s) relevant web page
Click here for the Kunstmann catalog in which the German edition is presented

Der Globale Minotaurus

Globalisierung, Gier und fehlende Bankenregulierung – sie alle wurden für die Krise der Weltwirtschaft verantwortlich gemacht. In Wahrheit sind dies nur Nebenschauplätze eines weit größeren Dramas. Eines Dramas, das in der Weltwirtschaftskrise von 1929 wurzelt und bereits seit den 1970-Jahren auf offener Bühne spielt: als die Welt wider besseres Wissen begann, mit ihrem Geld den “Globalen Minotaurus” Amerika zu nähren – so wie einst die Athener dem mythischen Fabeltier auf Kreta Tribute zollten. Heute sind die USA, als Stabilisator der Weltwirtschaft, selbst nachhaltig geschwächt, und die Konsequenzen des Machtvakuums zeigen sich allerorten. Sie machen vor allem eines klar: Stabilität in der Weltwirtschaft ist nicht umsonst zu haben; sie erfordert historische Entscheidungen – wie nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, als die Hegemonialstellung Amerikas begann. Statt hektischer Rettungsaktionen mit immer kürzerem Verfallsdatum ist eine grundlegende Debatte über Stabilitätspolitik, ist ein Neuanfang unvermeidlich.

From Yanis Varoufakis' Blog

Getting Somalia Wrong? Book Launch

2012-01-26T15:42:00.001Z

Times Higher Education: Confronting Managerialism: How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance

2012-01-26T14:33:00.002Z

All mighty historical upheavals are crises of belief and ideas. The present splitting open of neoliberal capitalism is no exception. What happens when an economic system and its political order reach their terminus is that governments will try anything, at whatever human cost, to retain the old system, fighting to the end and at other people's expense to retrieve a familiar world.

These are our circumstances today. Robert Locke and John-Christopher Spender's exemplary little book - written by insiders who got out in order to blow the gaff on all those inside who still believe the old banger can be kept on the road - provides us with a missing history. It is the history of how US and, much later, UK universities were suborned by the all-American belief that there may be invented a metric technology for the enhancement of everybody's personal wealth - and if that isn't a satisfactory meaning to give to life, what is? Eggs will be broken in making this omelette, but hell, that's evolution for you. If you're fit enough, you'll survive.

Locke and Spender find the origins of this bracing ideology a long way back in the making of that old enemy, the American Dream. But it was the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre who taught us that for an ideology to be a living force, it will have three attributes: data, which is to say certain fixed beliefs about the nature of the world; precepts, for the ordering of conduct in light of these beliefs; and finally, institutions, which embody belief and action in structures of what seem to be practical rationalities.

Business rushed to power along the vectors of the post- war boom when the US bent its vast productive energies and mammoth wartime profits to the restoration of a world economy. Colossal sums were disbursed by successive governments on operational research for the winning of the Cold War. Locke and Spender, in a gripping narrative, show how US universities, impelled by the torque of political power upon scientific knowledge, built themselves gorgeous intellectual cathedrals for the apotheosis of "business" (Francis Ford Coppola's film The Godfather, a great work of art if ever there was one, dramatises the deep penetration of that idea, even into the gangster sensibility).

The business schools, led by the old comrades at Harvard University and the Wharton Business School, raced away and reproduced. They already had their prophets - F.W. Taylor, James Burnham (odd that our authors don't seem to know George Orwell's essay on Burnham, predicting in 1946 much of what they document today) - and lapped up the belief of the new leaders that only what is measurable is factual, that numbers, not judgement, must guide decisions, and that mathematical modelling will lead all human societies, but especially their business professors, to the land of plenty and the universality of rational choices.

No sooner was this conceptual victory won than it began to go wrong. Giddily bemused by their detestation of anything smacking of socialism, US business graduates ignored and vilified the working practices of German and Japanese companies precisely while the celebrated "economic miracle" of those countries' post-war revival gradually bankrupted General Motors and Chrysler. Locke and Spender turn this, in their calm, severe way, into a thrilling tragi-comedy. They show plainly how American hubris denied the force of culture and of ethics. Great heavens, German companies not only have employees and trade unionists on their supervisory boards but they also help set salary limits.

In a dignified climax, the authors guide readers through the great crash of 2008, handing down just and earnest sentence on the reckless piracy that transformed itself into a ratified intellectual protocol in the financial industry.

This is by now a familiar argument in this country, but the authors make a new and telling contribution in the responsibility they convincingly put upon universities for so readily fawning at the altars of money, circling them with a devout liturgy and a glossy, stout and self-satisfied order of postulants.

Their concluding remedies are doubtless right and necessary: remoralise the discipline, recover a public conscience, name crime and wickedness for what they are. But what will it take to do these things? It will take a Reformation.

The systems of thought that Locke and Spender chronicle with a Chomskyan bite and fervour are deeply embedded in UK universities. Impact, students as consumers, operationalised outcomes, efficiency savings and all that hateful gibberish all are upon us, gobbling up an ancient patrimony. As the poet said: "Say not the struggle nought availeth..." Interested parties may write in to this magazine to complete the quotation, but only when they have earned it.

To read Confronting Managerialism, check out Zed Books

NorthSouthNews: South Africa Pushed to the Limit: The Political Economy of Change

2012-01-26T14:02:00.001Z

Since 1994, the democratic government in South Africa has worked hard at improving the lives of the black majority, yet close to half the population lives in poverty, jobs are scarce, and the country is more unequal than ever.

For millions, the colour of people’s skin still decides their destiny. In his wide-ranging, incisive and provocative analysis, Hein Marais shows that although the legacies of apartheid and colonialism weigh heavy, many of the strategic choices made since the early 1990s have compounded those handicaps. Many who fought to bring an end to apartheid believed that a new dawn had arrived in South Africa as, briefly, they basked in the euphoria of the Rainbow Society.

Despite all the genuine attempts to solve the many problems facing the poor majority, they had overlooked the basic human qualities in the leadership elite that had brought disappointment to the majority in country after country to the north as they achieved independence. Most important of all was the decision that for South Africa to take its place in a world dominated by capitalism and the capitalist ethos it had to follow the same path and, of course, it inherited the necessary structure to do so. During the apartheid era the ruling white minority was always desperate to link the South African economy with the wider capitalist system and by creating a special market economy based upon the country’s mining wealth indispensable to the wider market economies of the West they prolonged the apartheid system and their power.

The apartheid system was brought to an end not least because the powerful white business community realised they would be destroyed if they tried to hold onto power any longer and so they came to terms with the new order and did so by presenting their successor black rulers with a ready made capitalist infrastructure that would maintain a market economy that would most easily allow the new South Africa to enter the world market system as a significant player.

The majority of the people fit into this system just as they did – at the bottom of the pile – during the apartheid era. This is a deeply researched book that makes a major contribution to an understanding of South Africa today.

Tuesday, 25 October 2011 | NorthSouthNews.com

Hein Marais
Zed Books 2011

Counterpunch: Kristof and the Rescue Industry The Soft Side of Imperialism

2012-01-26T11:47:00.002Z

Reasons abound to be turned off by the New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof. He is too pleased with himself and demonstrates no capacity for self-reflection. He is too earnest. He claims to be in the vanguard of journalism because he tweets. He is said to be Doing Something about human suffering while the rest of us don’t care; he is smarmy. He doesn’t write particularly well. But most important, he is an apologist for a soft form of imperialism.

He poses for photos with the wretched of the earth and Hollywood celebrities in the same breath, and they are a perfect fit. Here he is squatting and grinning at black children, or trying to balance a basket on his head, and there he is with his arm over Mia Farrow’s shoulder in the desert. Here he is beaming down at obedient-looking Cambodian girls, or smiling broadly beside a dour, unclothed black man with a spear, whilst there he is with Ashton and Demi, Brad and Angelina, George Clooney. He professes humility, but his approach to journalistic advocacy makes himself a celebrity. He is the news story: Kristof is visiting, Kristof is doing something.

In interviews, he refers to the need to protect his humanitarian image, and he got one Pulitzer Prize because he “gave voice to the voiceless”. Can there be a more presumptuous claim? Educated at both Harvard and Oxford, he nevertheless appears ignorant of critiques of Empire and grassroots women’s movements alike. Instead, Kristof purports to speak for girls and women and then shows us how grateful they are. His Wikipedia entry reads like hagiography.

Keen to imply that he’s down with youth and hep to the jive, he lamely told one interviewer that “All of us in the news business are wondering what the future is going to be.” He is now venturing into the world of online games, the ones with a so-called moral conscience, like Darfur is Dying, in which players are invited to “Help stop the crisis in Darfur” by identifying with refugee characters and seeing how difficult their lives are. This experience, it is presumed, will teach players about suffering, but it could just as well make refugees seem like small brown toys for people to play with and then close that tab when they get bored. Moral conscience is a flexible term anyway: One click away from Darfur is Dying is a game aimed at helping the Pentagon improve their weapons.
Kristof says his game will be a Facebook app like FarmVille: “You’ll have a village, and in order to nurture this village, you’ll have to look after the women and girls in the village.” The paternalism couldn’t be clearer, and to show it’s all not just a game (because there’s actual money involved), schools and refugee camps get funds if you play well. A nice philanthropic touch.

Welcome to the Rescue Industry, where characters like Kristof get a free pass to act out fun imperialist interventions masked as humanitarianism. No longer claiming openly to carry the White Man’s Burden, rescuers nonetheless embrace the spectacle of themselves rushing in to save miserable victims, whether from famine, flood or the wrong kind of sex. Hollywood westerns lived off the image of white Europeans as civilizing force for decades, depicting the slaughter of redskins in the name of freedom. Their own freedom, that is, in the foundational American myth that settlers were courageous, ingenious, hard-working white men who risked everything and fought a revolution in the name of religious and political liberty.
Odd then, that so many Americans are blind when it comes to what they call humanitarianism, blissfully conscience-free about interfering in other countries’ affairs in order to impose their own way of life and moral standards. The Rescue Industry that has grown up in the past decade around US policy on human trafficking shows how imperialism can work in softer, more palatable ways than military intervention. Relying on a belief in social evolution, development and modernization as objective truths, contemporary rescuers, like John Stuart Mill 150 years ago, consider themselves free, self-governing individuals born in the most civilized lands and therefore entitled to rule people in more backward ones. (Mill required benevolence, but imperialists always claim to have the interests of the conquered at heart.) Here begins colonialism, the day-to-day imposition of value systems from outside, the permanent maintenance of the upper hand. Here is where the Rescue Industry finds its niche; here is where Kristof ingenuously refers to “changing culture”, smugly certain that his own is superior.

In the formation of the 21^st-century anti-trafficking movement, a morally convenient exception is made, as it was made for military actions in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. The exception says This Time It’s Different. This time we have to go in. We have to step up and take the lead, show what real democracy is. In the name of freedom, of course. In the case of trafficking the exception says: We have achieved Equality. We abolished slavery, we had a civil-rights movement and a women’s liberation movement too and now everything is fine here.

With justification firmly in place, the US Rescue Industry imposes itself on the rest of the world through policies against prostitution, on the one hand, and against trafficking, on the other. In their book Half the Sky, Kristof and co-author Sheryl WuDunn liken the emancipation of women to the abolition of slavery, but his own actions –brothel raids, a game teaching players to protect village women – reflect only paternalism.

It may be easier to get away with this approach now than it was when W.T. Stead of London’s Pall Mall Gazette bought a young girl in 1885 to prove the existence of child prostitution. This event set off a panic that evil traders were systematically snatching young girls and carrying them to the continent – a fear that was disproved, although Stead was prosecuted and imprisoned for abduction.
In contrast, in 2004 when Kristof bought two young Cambodians out of a brothel, he took his cameraman to catch one girl’s weepy homecoming. A year later, revisiting the brothel and finding her back, Kristof again filmed a heartwarming reunion, this time between him and the girl. Presuming that being bought out by him was the best chance she could ever get, Kristof now reverted to a journalistic tone, citing hiv-infection rates and this girl’s probable death within a decade. She was not hiv-positive, but he felt fine about stigmatizing her anyway.

Then last November, Kristof live-tweeted a brothel raid in the company of ex-slave Somaly Mam. In “One Brothel Raid at a Time” he describes the excitement:

Riding beside Somaly in her car toward a brothel bristling with AK-47 assault rifles, it was scary. This town of Anlong Veng is in northern Cambodia near the Thai border, with a large military presence; it feels like something out of the Wild West. (New York Times)

There’s the cavalry moment again. A few days later Kristof boasted that six more brothels had closed as a result of the tweeted raid. Focused on out-of-work pimps, he failed to ask the most fundamental question: Where did the women inside those brothels go? The closures made them instantly vulnerable to trafficking, the very scenario Kristof would save them from.

Some Rescuers evoke the Christian mission directly, like Gary Haugen of the International Justice Mission, which accompanies police in raids on brothels. Or like Luis CdeBaca, the US Ambassador-at-Large for Trafficking, who unselfconsciously aligns himself with William Wilberforce, the evangelical Christian rescuers claim ended slavery – as though slaves and freed and escaped slaves had nothing to do with it. CdeBaca talks about the contemporary mission to save slaves as a responsibility uniquely belonging to Britain and the US.

Kristof positions himself as liberal Everyman, middle-class husband and father, rational journalist, transparent advocate for the underdog. But he likes what he calls the law-enforcement model to end slavery, showing no curiosity about police behavior toward victims during frightening raids. Ignoring reports of the negative effects these operations have on women, and the 19^th-century model of moral regeneration forced on them after being rescued, he concentrates on a single well-funded program for his photo-opps, the one showing obedient-looking girls.

Kristof also fails to criticize US blackmail tactics. Issuing an annual report card to the world, the US Office on Trafficking presumes to judge, on evidence produced during investigations whose methodology has never been explained, each country according to its efforts to combat human trafficking. Reprisals follow – loss of aid – for countries not toeing the line. Kristof is an apologist for this manipulative policy.

To criticize the Rescue Industry is not to say that slavery, undocumented migration, human smuggling, trafficking and labor exploitation do not exist or involve egregious injustices. Yet Kristof supporters object to any critique with At least he is Doing Something. What are you doing to stop child rape? and so on. This sort of attempt to deflect all criticism is a hallmark of colonialism, which invokes class and race as reasons for clubbing together against savagery and terrorism. The Rescue Industry, like the war on terrorism, relies on an image of the barbaric Other.

It is important not to take at face value claims to be Helping, Saving or Rescuing just because people say that is what they are doing and feel emotional about it. Like many unreflective father figures, Kristof sees himself as fully benevolent. Claiming to give voice to the voiceless, he does not actually let them speak.

Instead, as we say nowadays, it’s all about Kristof: his experience, terror, angst, confusion, desire. Did anyone rescued in his recent brothel raid want to be saved like that, with the consequences that came afterwards, whatever they were? That is what we do not know and will not find out from Kristof.

Discussing Heart of Darkness, Chinua Achebe said Conrad used Africa

as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril… The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. (Things Fall Apart)

The latest sahib in colonialism’s dismal parade, Kristof is the Rescue Industry at its well-intentioned worst.

by
LAURA AGUSTÍN is author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry (Zed Books). A researcher and analyst of human trafficking, undocumented migration and sex-industry research for the past 20 years, she blogs as the Naked Anthropologist.

NewsTalk: Euro could collapse in 24 hours if a member leaves, warns Athens

2012-01-26T11:39:00.000Z

The on-going efforts by Eurozone countries to secure a deal between Greece and its bondholders continue today.

The talks in Brussels continued into the early hours of this morning.

However there is still no sign of a deal.

European Finance Ministers have today urged Greece to prepare new budget cuts soon and conclude their negotiations within days.

The Euro has slipped from a 3-week peak after the Ministers rejected an offer by private creditors to restructure Greek debt.

Finance ministers sent back the Greek debt swap offer saying the coupon demanded by bondholders was too high.

Private creditors say a 4% coupon is the least they can accept if they are going to write down the nominal value of the debt they hold by a half.

Yanis Varoufakis is Professor of Economics at the University of Athens.

He told Breakfast here on Newstalk that he believes if any member state leaves the Euro the currency will collapse in 24 hours.

Check out The Global Minotaur by Yanis Varoufakis

BBC news: Julia Gillard 'rescued' amid Australia Day protests

2012-01-26T11:16:00.001Z

Australian PM Julia Gillard and leader of the opposition Tony Abbott had to be rescued after becoming trapped by an angry protest, local media reports.

About 50 police escorted the pair from Canberra's Lobby restaurant after it was surrounded by some 200 supporters of the city's Aboriginal Tent Embassy.Mr Abbott had reportedly angered them by suggesting it was time for the camp - marking its 40th year - to come down.The pair had been at a ceremony for the inaugural National Emergency Medals.The honours - presented as the country marked Australia Day - were introduced to recognise those who served their communities during events such as the 2009 bushfires in Victoria and the floods in Queensland in 2010 and 2011.

But Australia's newspapers reported that riot police were called to the restaurant at about 14:30 local time as protesters gathered outside, with people banging on the glass yelling "shame" and "racist".

Ms Gillard and Mr Abbott were reportedly forced to wait 20 minutes before police escorted them through a side door.According to the BBC's Duncan Kennedy, chaos ensued as a bodyguard grabbed Ms Gillard by the shoulders and shoved her into a waiting car.The prime minister appeared to have stumbled in the process and was missing a shoe. Protesters continued to bang on the car's roof and the bonnet as it sped off.

Supporters had gathered for a three-day Corroborree for Sovereignty to mark the 40th anniversary of the tent embassy.Media reports suggested some had been angered by Mr Abbott's suggestion in a TV interview that it was "time to move on" from the camp in light of current plans to recognise indigenous people in the country's constitution.The tent embassy was established in 1972 by four men as a protest against the prime minister of the time's refusal to acknowledge indigenous land rights.

GoogleImage from ForumBodyBuilding.com

Haaretz: Palestinians- Peace negotiations with Israel have ended

2012-01-26T11:07:00.000Z

The time frame that the Palestinians have allowed for talks with Israel in Amman under Jordanian auspices expires on Thursday. According to diplomatic sources associated with the Middle East Quartet - the United States, United Nations, European Union and Russia - last-minute efforts are underway to head off the talks' collapse, but the prospects seem slim.

Photo by: AFP

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's representative to the Amman talks, Isaac Molho, met on Wednesday in the Jordanian capital for a fifth time with the head of the Palestinian negotiating team Saeb Erekat - but at this point no formula has been reached that would enable the talks to continue. Erekat made it clear that because Israel has not presented its position on the issue of borders with a Palestinian state, from the Palestinians' standpoint, the talks have ended.

After Wednesday's meeting, Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh, under whose auspices the five rounds of discussions have taken place, issued a statement in which he did his best to avoid proclaiming the talks a failure. He said the results of the discussions are being evaluated and that consultations would be undertaken with Israel, the Palestinians and members of the Quartet over a future course.

Before the latest Molho-Erekat meeting, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas met in Amman with Jordanian King Abdullah and told the monarch from his standpoint talks with Israel had run their course without results. Abbas said that Israel had refused to recognize the borders of a Palestinian state, but if there was a change there was nothing preventing a return to the negotiating table.

Abbas said he would consult with Arab allies next week to figure out how to proceed. He is under pressure to extend the Jordanian-mediated exploratory talks, which the international community hopes will lead to a resumption of long-stalled formal negotiations on establishing a Palestinian state.

Israel said on Wednesday that it is willing to continue the dialogue. Abbas did not close the door to continued meetings, saying he will decide after consultations with the Arab League on February 4. A Palestinian walkout could cost Abbas international sympathy at a time when he seeks global recognition of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

The gaps between the leaders are vast, and Abbas apparently believes there is no point in returning to formal negotiations without assurances, such as marking the pre-1967 war lines as a basis for border talks and halting Israeli settlement construction. Netanyahu says everything should be discussed in negotiations and insists he is serious about reaching a deal by year's end.

Though there have been talks off and on, the last substantive round was in late 2008, when Israel informally proposed a deal and the Palestinians did not respond. When Netanyahu took office the next year, he took the proposal, including a state in most of the territories the Palestinians claim, off the table. A round of talks started in late 2010 by President Barack Obama quickly sputtered over the settlement issue.

Visiting European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton has also scheduled two separate meetings with Abbas and Netanyahu to try to salvage the exploratory talks. Two officials involved in the contacts said she is trying to put together a package of Israeli incentives that would keep the Palestinians from walking away.

"We need to keep talks going and increase the potential of these talks to become genuine negotiations," Ashton said.

Before his meeting with Ashton, Netanyahu said, "We've been trying to make sure that the talks between us and the Palestinians will continue. That is our desire."

For more information on the history of the Palestinian and Israeli conflict and subsequent negotiations, please read The Palestine Nakba, available from Zed Books

BBC: UK economy shrinks by 0.2% in last three months of 2011

2012-01-25T17:38:00.002Z

UK economic activity shrank by 0.2% in the last three months of last year according to official figures.It marks a sharp drop in economic activity from the third quarter of 2011, when gross domestic product (GDP) expanded by 0.6%. The figures, from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), are a preliminary estimate, which could be revised either up or down by 0.2%. The ONS figures also show that the economy grew by 0.9% during 2011.

The gain for the year is in line with official targets. The Chancellor, George Osborne, said the figures were disappointing but not a surprise. "They are not entirely unexpected because of what's happening in the world and what's happening in the eurozone crisis," he said. "The truth is that dealing with those problems is made more difficult by the situation in the eurozone." Ed Balls MP, Labour's shadow chancellor, said the fall in GDP was linked to the government's cuts in public spending, which was curbing domestic demand: "The British recovery has been stalling since the government's spending review in the autumn of 2010, but now the economy has gone into reverse. "By clobbering the economy with spending cuts and tax rises that go too far and too fast, the government has left us badly exposed if the eurozone crisis deepens this year."

The quarterly fall in GDP is the first since the last three months of 2010, when freezing weather was blamed for a 0.5% drop.The new figure was worse than had been feared, as most economists had pencilled in a 0.1% fall in activity.The contraction was driven by a 0.9% fall in manufacturing, a 4.1% drop in electricity and gas production as the warm weather caused people to turn down heating, and a 0.5% fall in construction sector.Meanwhile, the services sector, which accounts for two-thirds of the economy, ground to a halt.

November's public sector strikes, which took place in the fourth quarter period, losing nearly a million working days, may also have held the economy back.The new figures come a day after the governor of the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn King, said that the UK faces an arduous path to economic recovery. On Tuesday the International Monetary Fund also cut the growth forecast for the UK economy in 2012 to 0.6% from 1.6%.

But Chris Williamson, the chief economist at Markit, said that the downturn was unlikely to last long. "While the UK clearly faces a clear risk of sliding back into another recession, which is commonly defined as two consecutive quarter of declining GDP, there are growing indications that any downturn is likely to be mild and short-lived," he said.

He added, however, that the eurozone was the swing factor, with a further escalation of the crisis likely to the single biggest threat to the UK economy, while an improvement in the euro area could lead to a revival of both business and consumer confidence.

Its chief economic adviser Ian McCafferty warned: "While the acute fears seen at the end of last year over global demand may be subsiding, 2012 will prove to be a difficult year for UK manufacturing, as the crisis in the eurozone - our biggest export market - has yet to reach any definitive resolution."

Graeme Leach, the chief economist at the Institute of Directors, said: "The tightrope walk between recession and recovery continues. We've taken one step towards a double-dip recession, and it's now probably 50-50 as to whether we'll take the second, with a fall in output this quarter as well.

"It's important to stress that the 0.2% fall in GDP is not large and could be reversed as QE2 works through the economy. "But even if output does increase in Q1, we'll continue to experience the feel-bad jobless recovery for some time yet. Indeed, the combination of falling output and today's MPC minutes suggest QE2 could be further expanded in February. "The Federation of Small Business' national chairman, John Walker, agreed the economy would limp on for some time.

"The fall in GDP confirms the ongoing fragile nature of the economy," he said. "The figure is in line with a recent FSB survey which showed that confidence among small businesses plummeted in Q4, recording a score of -24.5, a fall of some 15 points from the previous quarter."

Hugh Pym Chief economics correspondent, BBC News

Analysis

A shrinking economy - it's official. And something similar in the current period, January to March, would take the economy technically back into recession. Politically that would be a big problem for the chancellor. But the underlying reality is a flat economy, bumping along rather than lurching downwards as it did in 2008/09. Germany and France may have fared worse in the fourth quarter of last year. Today's figure is preliminary and could be revised. Business surveys suggest an improvement In confidence in December.

But a flat economy will not generate the job creation needed to bring down unemployment. 2012 could well be another hard slog for workers and businesses. He added, however, that the eurozone was the swing factor, with a further escalation of the crisis likely to the single biggest threat to the UK economy, while an improvement in the euro area could lead to a revival of both business and consumer confidence.

A survey on industrial trends by business body the CBI, found that both domestic and export orders fell in January for the first time in two years, while production weakened sharply over the past three months. Its chief economic adviser Ian McCafferty warned: "While the acute fears seen at the end of last year over global demand may be subsiding, 2012 will prove to be a difficult year for UK manufacturing, as the crisis in the eurozone - our biggest export market - has yet to reach any definitive resolution." Graeme Leach, the chief economist at the Institute of Directors, said: "The tightrope walk between recession and recovery continues. We've taken one step towards a double-dip recession, and it's now probably 50-50 as to whether we'll take the second, with a fall in output this quarter as well."It's important to stress that the 0.2% fall in GDP is not large and could be reversed as QE2 works through the economy. "But even if output does increase in Q1, we'll continue to experience the feel-bad jobless recovery for some time yet. Indeed, the combination of falling output and today's MPC minutes suggest QE2 could be further expanded in February. " The Federation of Small Business' national chairman, John Walker, agreed the economy would limp on for some time."The fall in GDP confirms the ongoing fragile nature of the economy," he said."The figure is in line with a recent FSB survey which showed that confidence among small businesses plummeted in Q4, recording a score of -24.5, a fall of some 15 points from the previous quarter."

From BBC Business 25 January 2012

BBC: Does Africa need an Arab Spring?

2012-01-25T17:24:00.001Z

As the people of Egypt and Tunisia mark the first anniversary of the revolutions which toppled their long-time leaders, leading to popular uprisings elsewhere in the Arab world, Malawian academic Jimmy Kainja asks: Is it time for an African Spring?

Regimes have been shaken, dictators toppled and revolutions televised in ways most people thought was not possible a mere 12 months ago in North Africa and the Middle East. Sub-Saharan Africa is home to some of the world's longest-serving and most autocratic leaders - and that is exactly what residents of some Arab countries have been fighting against.

Yet an African Spring in the exact fashion of the Arab Spring would signify a step backwards - not a step forward.

In fact, it would make a mockery of all that the majority of African countries achieved in the late 1980s and the early 1990s - when they did away with dictators and presidents-for-life in favour of multiparty democracies.

I previously argued that "the protagonists of the Arab Spring have more to learn from their sub-Saharan Africa counterparts than the other way round. The majority of sub-Saharan African countries peacefully did away with one-party-rule in the 1990s."

And now there is no region in the world that holds more elections than sub-Saharan Africa.

'Selfish, greedy leaders'

However, the vote alone is not enough - and democracy does not begin and end with the ballot box, as recently "liberated" Egypt and Tunisia are starting to find out and countries south of the Sahara have known for a long time now.

How free is Africa?

These countries continue to struggle to solidify their democracies - because of the enduring lack of necessary democratic institutions and structures of governance.

And, of course, because of the prevalence of selfish, greedy and opportunistic leaders: Eduardo dos Santos of Angola, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Paul Biya in Cameroon, to name but a few.

Indeed, some of these leaders got extremely nervous in the wake of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions last year.

A political science lecturer at the University of Malawi was summoned for "questioning" after he allegedly compared the social and political situation in Malawi to that of Egypt.

And in Zimbabwe a group of activists are still on charges that originally carried the death sentence but have now been reduced - for allegedly plotting an Egyptian-style revolution in that country.

So, the struggle for democracy in sub-Saharan Africa is certainly not lacking.

But these struggles are very different to what we have seen in parts of the Arab world.

Freedom to protest

These ones are mainly focused on forcing governments to become more accountable and to provide populations with the basics that they need to survive.

The July 2011 demonstrations in Malawi, for instance, was not organised to overthrow the government or to demand that President Bingu wa Mutharika step down.

The protests were about the lack of democratic institutions that have allowed the current administration to rule with total impunity.

In Uganda the "Walk to Work" protests were about exorbitant fuel prices - it was not about overthrowing the government or forcing the president to go.

Nigeria is the same - aside from the separate issue of the recent Boko Haram bombing campaign.

Nigerians have been protesting about the withdrawal of fuel subsidies - they are asking their government to be more considerate but they are not calling for a revolution.

Not one of the Arab countries had such freedoms to protest or even question their government prior to the Tunisian revolution on 14th January 2011.

So why then the calls for an African Spring?

This failure to acknowledge the difference between what is happening south and north of the Sahara may well be a matter of distorted historical perspectives - mainly by Western commentators who were caught off-guard by the Arab Spring and are now eager to spot the next possible spark.

And there is an unfortunate perception that people from sub-Saharan Africa cannot stage any revolt of their own. They have to copy it from elsewhere - in this case, the Arab Spring.

Rather, the growing number of protests and increasing political dissent in sub-Saharan Africa - whether tolerated by respective governments or not - could yet be an indication of a mature democracy. And a sign that the region does not need such a "spring".

It is worth remembering that most of these countries attained democracy only 20 or 30 years ago.

All these protests were unheard of before the dawn of democracy.

Today, ordinary citizens are demanding more of their governments than they have ever done before - and they are refusing to accept any form of mediocrity.

US political scientist Francis Fukuyama argues in The End of History and the Last Man that the striving by citizens for liberal democracy arises as a part of the soul that demands recognition.

"As standards of living increase, as populations become more cosmopolitan and better educated," he says "and as society as a whole achieves a greater equality of condition, people begin to demand not simply more wealth but recognition of their status."

These are exactly the social changes happening in Africa today. Progress has been made - and it can only get better.

These demands and the eagerness by the people to be heard - to hold their governments to account - can only be addressed by developing strong democratic institutions - and not simply by getting rid of presidents and their governments.

This is what is necessary in the next stage of Africa's democracy - not an African Spring in the mould of the Arab Spring.

Al Jazeera: Egyptians mass in Tahrir to honour uprising

2012-01-25T14:36:00.001Z

Protesters in iconic Cairo square demand transition to civilian rule on one-year anniversary of revolution.

Protesters have begun a sit-in in Cairo's Tahrir Square to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Egyptian revolution that toppled their long-time ruler, Hosni Mubarak.

It is a year since Egyptians, inspired by an uprising in Tunisia, took to the streets to call for reform and to demand the resignation of Mubarak, Egypt's president for 30 years.

"Down with military rule" and "Revolution until victory, revolution in all of Egypt's streets" were chanted by one group of mainly youths in an area of Tahrir on Wednesday.

Sherine Tadros, reporting from Tahrir Square, said: "For a section of people demonstrating here, it's really just about military hijacking the revolution, and about Islamist parties and movements now making the gains instead of those who actually initiated the revolution."

"But others say it is a rocky transition but it is still a transition pointing out to the fact that Egypt had first free and fair elections in decades and people’s assembly which reflects will of the people."

Meanwhile, about 3,000 people, who were pardoned by the military rulers coinciding with the anniversary, have reportedly walked out of Tora prison located on the outskirts of Cairo.

In an apparent attempt to appease reformist demands, the military council has in recent days pardoned people convicted in military courts since Mubarak was toppled.

The military, which was handed power as the president stepped down on February 11, has planned mass celebrations with a naval parade in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, air shows in Cairo and fireworks displays around the country.

The ruling military council is also issuing commemorative coins for the occasion and is expected to honour public servants.

It has called on Egyptians to "preserve the spirit of January 25, which united the Egyptian people, men and women, young and old, Muslims and Christians".

Al Jazeera's Tadros said: "What we have right now is their [military] promise. And this was something reiterated by Field Marshal Tantawi on Tuesday."

"Apart from saying that the scope of emergency law would be narrowed, he also said and promised, come July when there is new president in power the military will go back to barracks.

"But the big question is what will be their legacy? What kind of role they want to carve out for themselves? What kind of backroom deal they could have made with the largest force in the parliament [Muslim Brotherhood] so is to guarantee their immunity."

'Objectives of the revolution'

Activists say the revolution has been hijacked by Hussein Tantawi, for two decades Mubarak's defence minister, who now heads the military council.

Wael Khalil, Egyptian blogger and activist, told Al Jazeera: "Definitely, the revolution has not achieved its goal and that’s why the main slogan now on the street is, people going back to Tahrir Square, because the revolution continues until it realises its goal."

"Everything that has been achieved in the past one year was a result of people’s protests and demands.

"The trial of Mubarak, free elections, participation of people in the elections and other demands were not achieved by power from above, not by SCAF, but people pressuring from below."

Prominent novelist and pro-democracy activist Alaa al-Aswani wrote in the independent daily al-Masry al-Youm: "We must take to the streets on Wednesday, not to celebrate a revolution which has not achieved its goals, but to demonstrate peacefully our determination to achieve the objectives of the revolution."

These goals remain to "live in dignity, bring about justice, try the killers of the martyrs and achieve a minimum social justice", he wrote.

Dalia Mogahed, director and senior analyst at the Abu Dhabi Gallup Center, told Al Jazeera "Egyptians are more optimistic about their future than they have been in a very a long time".

According to research done by her group, Mogahed said most Egyptians believe things are getting better and will get better in the future. She said the vast majority of Egyptians still have faith in the military and the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF).

She said Tahrir Square was an important component of the story, but not the entire story. Research shows that more than 85 per cent of Egyptians say they still have confidence in the SCAF.

Partial lifting of emergency

Protesters want Tantawi and the other ruling generals to step down immediately and to stay out of the drafting of the country's new constitution, for fear they may enshrine military powers into the charter.

The military has pledged to cede power to civilian rule when a president is elected by June.

On Tuesday, it announced a partial lifting of a state of emergency, but kept a clause saying emergency laws in place since 1981 would still apply to cases falling into the vague category of "thuggery".

The Muslim Brotherhood, which won the most seats in recent parliamentary elections, has announced it will join the celebrations on Wednesday, without calling for "a second revolution" or demanding that the military give up power.

"The formation of the parliament is the biggest celebration of the anniversary of the revolution," the group said on its website, a day after the lower house convened for the first time since it was dissolved after the uprising.

Leading Muslim Brotherhood member Saad al-Katatni was elected speaker of parliament on Monday, in scenes unthinkable just a year ago when the group was still banned.

Mubarak will spend the anniversary in a Cairo military hospital, where he is in custody accused of involvement in the killing of protesters during the uprising that toppled him.

For further reading on Egypt and the causes leading up to the revolution, please read Egypt: The Moment of Change, available from Zed Books

BBC: Somalia: Western hostages freed in 'US military raid'

2012-01-25T10:49:00.001Z

Two foreign aid workers kidnapped in Somalia three months ago have been freed in a rare US military raid there, officials say.

The overnight operation was carried out by military helicopters and involved US Navy Seals, unidentified Western officials said.

A shoot-out followed but a Danish humanitarian group says the two hostages were unharmed.

The two - a US woman and a Danish man - were seized on 25 October.

They had been working for the Danish Demining Group when they were abducted by gunmen near the north-central town of Galkayo.

The group helps dispose of unexploded bombs and teaches communities about the dangers of land mines.

Other remaining hostages in Somalia include a UK tourist and two Spanish medics who were abducted in neighbouring Kenya.

'Safe location'

The rescue party is said to have landed close to a compound - thought to be just north of the town of Adado - where hostages were being held.

A local security official, Mohamed Nur, told AFP news agency that several of the pirates had been killed.

The freed hostages were believed to have been flown to nearby Djibouti by the rescuers, he said.

They were named as American Jessica Buchanan, 32, and Poul Thisted, 60, of Denmark.

The Danish Refugee Council, which had been involved in efforts to free them via mediation, said they were unharmed and "at a safe location".

The BBC's Steve Kingstone in Washington said the first hint of the successful operation appeared to come from US President Barack Obama himself - as he prepared to give the State of the Union address, he turned to his Defence Secretary Leon Panetta and said "Good job tonight."

The US maintains a military presence in the tiny Horn of Africa state of Djibouti.

The US says Camp Lemonnier "serves as a key location from which US and coalition forces operate in the Horn of Africa".

About 2,500 personnel - including civilians and defence contractors - are based there as well as armour, fighters and drones.

Correspondents say that following the killing in 1993 of 19 US soldiers and the wounding of 70 others in the Somali capital Mogadishu, there is no appetite for full-scale US ground operations in Somalia.

For more information, read Mary Harper's Getting Somalia Wrong? available from Zed Books

Electronic Intifada: Bunker state cemented by new Israeli law against refugees

2012-01-24T16:39:00.000Z

The wheel is turning full circle.

Last week the Israeli parliament updated a 59-year-old law originally intended to prevent hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees from returning to the homes and lands from which they had been expelled as Israel was established. The purpose of the draconian 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law was to lock up any Palestinian who managed to slip past the snipers guarding the new state’s borders. Israel believed only savage punishment and deterrence could ensure it maintained the overwhelming Jewish majority it had recently created through a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Fast forward six decades and Israel is relying on the infiltration law again, this time to prevent a supposedly new threat to its existence: the arrival each year of several thousand desperate African asylum seekers. As it did with the Palestinians many years ago, Israel has criminalized these new refugees — in their case, for fleeing persecution, war or economic collapse.

Whole families can now be locked up, without a trial, for three years while a deportation order is sought and enforced, and Israelis who offer them assistance risk jail sentences of up to 15 years. Israel’s intention is apparently to put as many of these refugees behind bars as possible, and dissuade others from following in their footsteps.

To cope, officials have approved the building of an enormous detention camp, operated by Israel’s prison service, to contain 10,000 of these unwelcome arrivals. That will make it the largest holding facility of its kind in the world — according to Amnesty International, it will be three times bigger than the next largest, in the much more populous, and divine retribution-loving, US state of Texas.

Israeli critics of the law fear their country is failing in its moral duty to help those fleeing persecution, thereby betraying the Jewish people’s own experiences of suffering and oppression. But the Israeli government and the large majority of legislators who backed the law — like their predecessors in the 1950s — have drawn a very different conclusion from history.

“Villa in the jungle”

The new infiltration law is the latest in a set of policies fortifying Israel’s status as the world’s first “bunker state” — and one designed to be as ethnically pure as possible. The concept was expressed most famously by an earlier prime minister, Ehud Barak, now the defense minister, who called Israel “a villa in the jungle,” relegating the country’s neighbors to the status of wild animals. Barak and his successors have been turning this metaphor into a physical reality, slowly sealing off their state from the rest of the region at astronomical cost, much of it subsidized by US taxpayers.

Their ultimate goal is to make Israel so impervious to outside influence that no concessions for peace, such as agreeing to a Palestinian state, need ever be made with the “beasts” around them. The most tangible expression of this mentality has been a frenzy of wall-building. The best-known are those erected around the Palestinian territories: first Gaza, then the areas of the West Bank Israel is not intending to annex — or, at least, not yet. The northern border is already one of the most heavily militarized in the world — as Lebanese and Syrian protesters found to great cost last summer when dozens were shot dead and wounded as they approached or stormed the fences there.

More walls planned

And Israel has a proposal in the drawer for another wall along the border with Jordan, much of which is already mined. The only remaining border, the 260 kilometer one with Egypt, is currently being closed with another gargantuan wall. The plans were agreed before last year’s Arab revolutions but have gained fresh impetus with the overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak.

Israel is not only well advanced on the walls of the bunker; it is also working round the clock on the roof. It has three missile-defense systems in various stages of development, including the revealingly named Iron Dome, as well as US Patriot batteries stationed on its soil. The interception systems are supposed to neutralize any combination of short and long-range missile attacks Israel’s neighbors might launch.

But there is a flaw in the design of this shelter, one that is apparent even to its architects. Israel is sealing itself in with some of the very “animals” the villa is supposed to exclude: not only the African refugees, but also 1.5 million “Israeli Arabs,” descendants of the small number of Palestinians who avoided expulsion in 1948.

This has been the chief motive for the steady stream of anti-democratic measures by the government and parliament that is rapidly turning into a torrent. It is also the reason for the Israeli leadership’s new-found demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel’s Jewishness; its obsessions with loyalty; and the growing appeal of population exchange schemes. In the face of the legislative assault, Israel’s high court has grown ever more complicit.

Ripping families apart

Last week, it sullied its reputation by upholding a law that tears apart families by denying tens of thousands of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship the right to live with their Palestinian spouse in Israel — “ethnic cleansing” by other means, as leading Israeli commentator Gideon Levy noted.

Back in the early 1950s, the Israeli military shot dead thousands of unarmed Palestinians as they tried to reclaim property that had been stolen from them. These many years later, Israel appears no less determined to keep non-Jews out of its precious villa. The bunker state is almost finished, and with it the dream of Israel’s founders is about to be realized.

A version of this article first appeared in The National (Abu Dhabi).

Al Jazeera: A new banking crisis- You can bank on it

2012-01-24T15:12:00.001Z

You can bank on a banking crisis. You can bank on bankers who are primarily interested in their own portfolios.

You can bank on banks remaining key behind-the-scenes players in our politics and outspoken when they sense that regulators are moving in on their permanent party of payouts.

You can bank on their outrage when someone, anyone, suggests that they should pay their fair share or that their greed has to be checked or practices punished.

Bankers are circling their guilded wagons to fight off attacks on many fronts.

In the public arena, they are increasingly fed up with the "imbecilic" - stronger language to come - critics from the likes of Occupy Wall Street that they fear are inspiring public hostility to the lords of finance.

There have even been protests at recruiting conferences on campuses where the MBA's used to stand in line for a chance to rake in the outsized salaries that awaited kids blessed as bankster-worthy.

This is upsetting to Jamie Dimon, the $23m a year CEO of JP Morgan Chase, who is taking umbrage, telling an investor's conference: "Acting like everyone who's been successful is bad and because you're rich you're bad, I don't understand it."

Bernard Marcus, a co-founder of Home Depot, and self-described "job creator" didn't mince his words, according to Bloomberg News.

"If successful business people don't go public to share their stories and talk about their troubles, they deserve what they're going to get." He said he isn't worried that speaking out might make him a target of protesters.

"Who gives a crap about some imbecile?" Marcus said. "Are you kidding me?"

Marcus and Diamon and the small .01 per cent of the one per cent they are part of are not kidding about fighting back either. The protesters may piss them off, but they are fighting a deeper trench warfare now against regulators and central banks who say they want to save them from themselves.

Comments David Dayan on the website Firedog Lake:

It should come as no surprise that this coterie of self-pitying "job creators" lines up pretty perfectly with right-wing Republicans and free-market fundamentalists. Just because this attitude completely crashed the economy about three years ago doesn't mean they should be made to feel bad about it, however.

He cites an article on the Roman Empire which says that, even with all its slaves, it had a more equitable income distribution than the US has today. Writes Tim DeChant:

To determine the size of the Roman economy and the distribution of income, historians Walter Schiedel and Steven Friesen pored over papyri ledgers, previous scholarly estimates, imperial edicts and Biblical passages. Their target was the state of the economy when the empire was at its population zenith, around 150 CE. Schiedel and Friesen estimate that the top one per cent of Roman society controlled 16 per cent of the wealth, less than half of what America's top one per cent control.

Keeping wealth concentrated seems to be what the bankers do - but sometimes with enough excess and irresponsibility to bring themselves down.

In Washington, the Federal Reserve Bank, ironically founded and run by the very banks who have been blessed with secret subsidies in the trillions, fears another financial crisis driven by a banking crisis.

They want American banks to hold more capital - and to keep it more easily accessible. According to the New York Times, they have already compromised with pressure from their clients, adding that "the final capital rules were unlikely to be more stringent than international limits that were still under development. That is a small victory for banks who warned that they would be severely disadvantaged if capital requirements here were stricter than those governing overseas banks."

Meanwhile, overseas, the same battle royale is underway. In England, regulators are considering new rules that would outlaw investment banking by commercial banks. This is the very problem that America's Glass-Steagal Act was passed to prevent in the l930s.

When that law was "modernised" - ie dumped as unnecessary - by Congress with Bill Clinton's blessing, the banks rushed into the game of largely unregulated speculation with disastrous consequences clear for all to see.

The international regulators have their own too big to fail list of 29 banks they call "G Sifis" to insure higher capital levels. The risky banks that first opposed the designation, are now using it to market themselves as safer. Go figure!

While many in the world support a tax on financial transactions, the US bank lobby has killed it here. They also colluded with subprime lenders, and before them, red-lining discriminatory lenders to scalp borrowers and promote fraudulent loans with little push back by politicians who were clearly bought off.

In Switzerland, Europe's bank capital, a central banker trying to make the industry more prudent has come under sustained personal attack by his colleagues.

The New York Times reports:

Mr (Phillip M) Hildebrand, the president of the Swiss central bank, was called "arrogant" and "egotistical" by bankers quoted anonymously in the pages of Swiss newspapers. His supposed sin: Wanting banks to hold extra capital. The fact that Mr Hildebrand was himself a former hedge fund manager in New York seemed only to heighten the sense that he had betrayed his profession.
"He'll never find another job in Switzerland", the Swiss newspaper Der Sonntag quoted an unnamed high-ranking banker as threatening Mr. Hildebrand in 2010.
The unusually bitter attacks on a central bank chief were a measure of what was at stake. Mr Hildebrand, 48, had a high-visibility role in a struggle between bankers trying to preserve their most lucrative business practices and regulators trying to defuse a system that, many believe, nearly blew up the world economy.

This very public food fight offers a window into why bankers are fighting - and often winning their war on politicians and the public. They are relentless in pursuit of their interests and have the ability to pay for the best law firms and PR flacks.

The bankers are trying to come with theories for our depressing economic woes that places the blame on everyone but them. Fedhead Ben Bernanke says it was all a "global savings glut" that did us in. Hence, anyone that was more of a saver than an investor is responsible.

Hyun Song Shin, another Princeton professor, says bullocks to his colleague Benanke in a detailed paper refuting his strawman, arguing the crisis was caused by "a 'global banking glut', ie the rise in cross-border lending, than the 'global savings glut'."

Without falling down the rabbit hole of endless well-footnoted debates, the truth is that millions of savers have seen their savings shrink and most bankers, thanks to bailouts and cheap money, watched their holdings rise.

Blaming the victim for the crime has a long and dishonourable history,

As bad as the economy gets, and most forecasters suggest little hope for a rebound in the year ahead, even as there are blips of "positive data", the bankers seem determined to save themselves if and when the ship sinks.

They already own the lifeboats.

The challenge facing the 99 per cent is how to organise more broadly and build the political muscle to break up the big banks, dissolve the "zombies" (failed banks on borrowed time) among them and rebuild an economy that works for all of us.

BBC: South Sudan- UN condemns refugee camp air raid

2012-01-24T14:54:00.000Z

The UN has denounced the bombing of a camp housing some 5,000 refugees in South Sudan near the border with Sudan.

A boy was injured and 14 other people went missing during the air raid in El Foj in Upper Nile state on Monday, the UN refugee agency said.

A Sudan army spokesman told the BBC that Sudanese forces had not carried out any bombing raids in the area.

South Sudan split from Sudan last July and since then their relationship has deteriorated.

Both countries accuse the other of backing rebels operating in their territories.

The UNHCR says a plane dropped several bombs on Monday morning which landed on the transit site for those who have fled the conflict in Blue Nile over the border in Sudan.

"Bombing of civilian areas must be condemned in the strongest terms," Mireille Girard, UNHCR's representative in South Sudan, said in a statement.

Blue Nile is one of three border areas - along with South Kordofan and Abyei - where fighting has broken out since South Sudan's independence.

Many rebels in these regions fought alongside southerners during the decades-long civil war that ended with Khartoum agreeing to the south's independence.

Sudan's army spokesman Khalid Sawarmi said Sudanese forces had been recently involved in fighting against rebels in Blue Nile in the village of Aroum.

"We attacked them and drove them out of this place. [We] did not use any planes or Antonovs there," he told the BBC.

Following the strike on El Foj, most people have now fled the area or have been helped to relocate by the UN, the agency says.

It is not the first time South Sudan has been bombed - there were attacks in Upper Nile state and Unity state last year.

The BBC's James Copnall in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, says the latest incident highlights the bad relationship between the two countries - not helped by a growing row over oil resources - as well as the difficult situation many refugees face.

The UN says more than 78,000 people have fled Sudan since last August because of fighting in Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile.

Conservation is sexy! What makes this so, and what does this make? An engagement with Celebrity and the environment

2012-01-23T17:18:00.001Z

Introduction: Among the Apes

Page 43 of Daniel Brockington's (2009) book Celebrity and the environment describes the 1930 US release of the box office blockbuster film Ingagi. This was a sensational 'documentary' of a supposedly real expedition to the Belgian Congo, led by hoax British explorer Sir Hubert Winstead. Its original advert proclaimed the camera to faithfully record the expedition's finding of 'wild women who live with gorillas'. Its closing scenes featured a group of scantily-clad women living with said gorillas (actually actors in costumes), and its publicity poster depicted a grinning gorilla carrying off one of these women, his hand cupping her naked breast. As it happens, I recently watched the first episode of Among the apes, a wildlife programme broadcast in the UK in 2009 on Five¹ , presented by British primatologist and presenter, Charlotte Uhlenbroek (tipped at the time to be the next David Attenborough, and appearing in Brockington's list of celebrity wildlife film presenters on p. 61). Ten minutes into the film, Uhlenbroek, standing metres away from 'Bwoba', a rival male chimpanzee in the territory of the Sonso (chimp) community of Uganda's Budongo Forest Reserve, describes the character of the chimp ("supremely confident") and the territorial dynamics of competing males in this location. Speaking quietly into the camera, to a soundtrack of soft trumpet jazz, she tells us, "it's just great when you get to the stage where you really can get… sufficiently close that I could just go and cup his nuts in a sign of submission".

The terms of engagement may be dynamic, but in the modern world wildlife, 'wilderness' and conservation of 'the environment' are portrayed and perceived as exciting, exotic, erotic, and glamorous-as 'sexy'. At the same time, people dwelling in the localities desired for their wildlife, wildness, or rarity, generally are not. Instead, they have tended to be present, and presented, as variously absent, primitive, problematic, impoverished or assistant to the main story; rarely speaking on their own terms or from their own frames of reference, experience and value. ²

In this engagement with Celebrity and the environment, I review some forms and implications of this situation of the 'ins and outs' of conservation. I elaborate several foci of Brockington's book to provide: 1) a contextual exploration of the multifaceted displacement effects that may accompany conservation initiatives under conditions of neoliberal capitalism (with examples drawn from various African contexts in particular); 2) a distillation of Brockington's analysis of the part increasingly played by celebrities, including celebrated conservationists, in mediating and amassing conservation finance; and 3) a consideration of the ways that a celebrity saturated and mass media 'spectacle of conservation' dramatises social and consumptive engagements with non-human nature ³ globally to produce particular social and environmental effects. I close with a disclaimer clarifying my own long-term collaborations with the author of Celebrity and the environment, in acknowledgement of the always present significance of social networks and friendships in shaping conservation perspectives, organisation and critique.

Conservation 'Ins and Outs'

The disembedding of human livelihoods and lifeworlds from landscapes desired for biodiversity conservation has been the subject of, and subjected to, vigorous analysis and debate. Key issues are the existence and extent of such practices, their necessity for conservation success, and the implications for those affected. That this debate is live is indicated by a spate of current publications. A recent issue of this journal (Conservation & Society 2009, Volume 7 Issue 1), for example, provides an informative range of views, debates, and case-studies exploring the controversial issue of human displacement-social, cultural, economic, and epistemological-that might occur as land comes under national and global management to further conservation objectives (also see Brockington & Igoe 2006, and the review article by Adams & Hutton 2007). A special issue of the journal published by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy (Policy Matters 2007, Volume 15), draws attention to human rights issues as they may arise in the creation and policing of conservation areas. A special issue of Biological Conservation elaborates the difficult trade-offs (social, economic, ecological) made in conservation choices, and the ethical issues that thereby arise (opened by Minteer & Miller 2011; see in particular the article by McShane et al. 2011). Cases where local people have lost out in such trade-offs, and where dissent has been variously silenced, are detailed in a recent special issue of Current Conservation (2010, Volume 3 Issue 3 ⁴ ). Other collections draw out the complex displacements effected by proliferating market-oriented demands associated with neoliberal approaches to conservation (see Igoe & Brockington 2007; Brockington & Duffy 2010; and the contributions these papers introduce; also Sullivan 2006; Fletcher 2010; Büscher et al. In press). A new reader on Poverty and biodiversity conservation (Roe & Elliott 2010) collates articles detailing global relationships between biodiversity conservation and 'poor people', many of which highlight displacement issues. While this debate has been bubbling away for years, it currently is being termed 'the new conservation debate' between the protected areas priorities of 'nature protectionists' and the development-oriented concerns of 'social conservationists', accompanied by calls for a 'more explicit discussion of the value and ethical dimensions of this debate' (Miller et al. 2011: 948).

Lands from which dwellings, livelihoods, and different nature values have been removed to create and maintain 'wildlife' and 'wild' landscapes for élite access and resource capture have long characterised societies exhibiting extremes of privilege and poverty. Marx, for example, notes the destruction of 36 villages in 1079 by William the Conqueror of Normandy, so as to create a royal hunting ground of the New Forest in south England [Marx 1974 (1887): 685]. The systematic displacement of dwelling as a zeitgeist of contemporary conservation landscapes is further associated with a particularly European Enlightenment and Utopian ideal that sharply alienates human from non-human natures. A desire for experience of 'wilderness' lands emptied of, or apparently prefiguring, human engagement (West & Carrier 2004: 485), arises in part from this alienation and the socio-ecological transformations with which it is associated [Polanyi 2001 (1944)], including negative impacts on biodiversity. So while the modern science of conservation biology may consider biodiversity conservation implicitly to require the separation of 'wild nature' from people (e.g., Terborgh 1999), this distinguishing of natural history from human dwelling is itself an understanding and orientation associated with the constructions of human-non-human relationships guiding European Enlightenment ideals. It is a particular cultural understanding that, nonetheless, has become universally transmitted and applied via the structures and technologies of modernity, with both ecological and social effects. The outcome has been the enclosure of landscapes from which people are variously excluded as the core method of formal conservation work, alongside the multiple land and resource enclosures that have made possible the structural inequities characterising industrial modernity.

While environmental conservation has a history of seeking to resist and regulate the effects of extractive industry, corporate interests currently are systematically entraining conservation to fit the requirements of business (as described in superb detail in MacDonald 2010a). Élite capture of 'natural resources', including biodiversity, is thereby extended, and both capitalism's and conservation's radical separation of livelihoods and localities are further entrenched (Sullivan 2010, In press). Key to this trajectory is a downplaying of the myriad ways in which nature is understood, utilised, and served by peoples and production practices located in landscapes that become conceived and conserved as 'natural nature'; as nature that somehow is separate from, and even opposed to, culture. The created wild landscapes and wildlife populating national parks and other conservation areas thereby become those encountered only temporarily by people, even where those lands have previously been known, dwelled in, and sustained by, diverse human inhabitants. The US Wilderness Act of 1964 enshrines this ideal by defining 'wilderness' as land where 'man himself is a visitor who does not remain' (in Siurua 2006: 74). A contemporary example of the implications of this ideal can be provided by the Masaola National Park in north-east Madagascar. Comprising an area of around 2,300 sq. km, Masaola was declared a National Park only in 1997, becoming a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) World Heritage Site ten years later. Here, '[a]lmost the entire surface area of the park is designated the... Hard Core' to which access 'is only open to park staff, paying guided tourists, and researchers (also paying), but not to the local population' (Keller 2008: 653). Establishment of the park has entailed the uprooting of settled households and cultivated fields, for which promised compensation was not received, and severe punishment is now authorised for 'illegal' accessing of resources in the park (documented in Keller 2008).

Conservation and displacement scenarios are becoming increasingly complex under contemporary shifts in environmental governance towards valuing and capitalising new measures of environmental health present in biodiverse landscapes. Biodiversity conservation landscapes are being additionally conceived as locales of avoided deforestation, as sinks for carbon emitted via combustion of fossil fuels elsewhere, and as sources of additional financial value via the burgeoning international offsetting trade in carbon and other new global signifiers of environmental health such as 'ecosystem services' (www.un-redd.org; Bekessy & Wintle 2008; Bayon & Jenkins 2010; Roe et al. 2010a; also critique in Böhm & Dabhi 2009; Melick 2010; Phelps et al. 2010; Corbera & Brown 2010). Possible displacements arising via such carbon-conservation landscapes are exemplified by the case of the Mount Elgon National Park in Uganda (Checker 2009; and references therein). In recent years, Mount Elgon National Park has earned saleable carbon credits for northern energy corporations, based on the standing biomass of park woodland. Here, the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) evicted approximately 6,000 people from the Mount Elgon National Park in 1993. Subsequent to this, the UWA partnered with the Forests Absorbing Carbon Dioxide Emissions Foundation (FACE), established by the Dutch Electricity Generating Board to create, maintain, and enhance forests for the absorption of CO ₂ , and to access the tradable carbon credits that would thereby become available. FACE financed the planting of 25,000 hectares of trees inside the Mount Elgon National Park, and maintains the rights to the carbon credits accruing to the plantation. These have been sold to businesses and individuals through voluntary offset markets by its for-profit marketing partners the Climate Neutral Group and GreenSeat (Checker 2009: 45-46). The FACE project and its funding have justified continued evictions and violent conservation policing of the area, and have not met promises to provide beneficial employment to local people (Checker 2009; Roe et al. 2010a: 326).

But this conservation and displacement story does not end here. Tracing the sale of carbon credit offsets from the Mount Elgon National Park illustrates the achingly surreal nature of contemporary global connection and displacement in service to both extractive industry and nature conservation (cf. Tsing 2005). In this case, the purchase of the Mount Elgon plantation carbon credits has permitted the offsetting of sustained emissions by newly established coal-fired power stations in the Netherlands. These in turn are supplied by imported coal, mined through the environmentally tragic practice of blasting away mountaintops in the US Appalachian mountains (Checker 2009: 46-47; Butler & Wuerthner 2009), a landscape also known, inhabited, and valued by diverse indigenous and settler peoples (Cook 2000). The trail in its entirety illustrates the enforced demands on local peoples to exit from lands with which they are entwined productively and in many other ways, so as to service a range of global markets, from tourism to new environmental commodities such as carbon. The punishing irony in this case is that the offsetting trade in carbon is legitimating and sustaining the high energy and other consumption practices of the world's wealthy inhabitants, while displacing local livelihoods that represent relatively minor global environmental impacts.

This production of a non-human nature set aside for enjoyment and consumption by particular sets of people, and increasingly to provide 'sinks' and tradable offsets for the globally problematic pollutions of these same sets of people, arguably has created what Dowie (2009) terms 'conservation refugees'-peoples whose multiple and autonomous means of sustenance and identity have been wrested from them to service conservation effort. ⁵ It is an imaginary that validates and empowers certain knowledges and aesthetics of human and non-human natures over others (as explored and theorised, for example, in Abrams 1996; Hannis 1998; Ingold 2000; Viveiros de Castro 2004; Harvey 2005; Griffiths 2006; Sullivan 2006, 2010; Curry 2008; Keller 2008; Neves 2009). Realities lying outside the conceptual and discursive boundaries of this worldview-whether analytical, epistemological, and/or ontological-thereby become 'displaced and disobedient' in relation to mainstream conservation discourse. As such, they can be subject to dismissal, disrespect, and disciplining (Sullivan 2003; Paudel et al. 2007; Igoe & Sullivan 2009; papers in Current Conservation 2010, Volume 3, Issue 3). Indeed, the modern universalising and transcendent lens through which conservation is approached and rationalised perhaps is intrinsically threatening to 'biocultural diversity', since it requires varied discounting of diverse nature knowledges associated with those who have dwelled in landscapes currently capitalised as conserved nature.

A number of international provisions and resolutions recognise that human rights are damaged through such displacements (summarised in Roe et al. 2010b: 4). A new Conservation Initiative on Human Rights (CIHR) launched in 2010 by the IUCN, in conjunction with the largest international conservation non-governmental organisations (NGOs), appeals to standards in international law in seeking to promote common and consistent human rights principles in conservation work (IUCN 2010). Such 'in-house' initiatives are to be applauded, whilst recognising that legitimisation by yet another modern transcendent and standardising universal category-that of 'human rights'-also can be in tension with the emplaced and idiomatic knowledges of those localised and displaced through global discourses (e.g., Bauman 1998: 2-3; Tsing 2005). Spaces where the views of other actors and commentators can be expressed and heard remain crucial, whilst recognising that possibilities for communication between diverse onto-epistemological realities regarding human-non-human relationships might be circumscribed even in such spaces.

Biodiversity conservation's 'ins and outs' clearly constitute an animated arena for engagement. Brockington's (2009) book is a major contribution to this debate, and it is to this framing of circumstances that I speak here. On the one hand, Brockington (2009) describes and explains in considerable detail some of the reasons why these situations have emerged historically. On the other, he provides extensive clarification of the structuring effects these patterns have and will continue to have in a globalising contemporary world dominated by capitalist social relations and made saleable via mass media representations of mass produced commodities. In doing so, Brockington traces how conservation and environmental causes of necessity have become entrained with broader processes of commodification and accumulation of private material wealth, both of which underlie most of the environmental problems of apparent current concern.

In a world where what is popular is not necessarily what is 'good' (for 'the environment' or anything else), professional environmental conservation walks a path fraught with tensions and contradictions. Should it be financed through engaging with neoliberal processes of creating, packaging, and marketing products to be sold competitively on global markets (Büscher et al. In press), and through forming alliances with corporations and wealthy individuals who have done this so successfully in other fields (detailed in Brockington's (2009) chapter six)? If more conservation consumption amounts to competitive success, then what about the corresponding impacts on that which is being sold? In the case of tourism revenues for conservation, for example, it becomes harder to sell the vision and experience of wilderness or wildlife when hordes of safari trucks and buses carry tourists to consume the same view. How does conservation endeavour reconcile the contradictions raised by the direct impacts that touristic consumption has on other species and landscapes, or the significant indirect impacts that air-travel appears to have on the climate that sustains these (Sullivan 2006: 116; Adams 2008; McDermott Hughes 2008)? Capturing new carbon values from conservation landscapes to facilitate paid mitigation of such effects is an administratively heavy way around this quagmire and, as noted above, may exacerbate conservation's displacement effects. If conservation choice moves increasingly towards generating revenue from high-end, low-impact 'ecotourism' accessed by a global élite, then how can this be equitably aligned with conservation's excluded masses who also are affected by global environmental losses? Structural inequality means that the diverse peoples living somewhat inconveniently alongside or within globally valued conservation landscapes probably can never hope to participate as consumers in the expensive world of global conservation tourism.

As Brockington articulates, celebrity plays a critical role in all of these contradictions, both in their resolution and in their coming into being. In the next two sections I review and summarise Brockington's classification of conservation celebrities, and highlight some associations with conservation finance.

Conservation Celebrities, and Celebrated Conservationists

Celebrity involvement in conservation is diverse. Brockington's (2009) typology of celebrity engagement and impact is incisive and important, and I outline this here.

First are people who already are celebrities who align themselves with conservation and environmental causes, thereby lending charisma to those causes, enhancing their own appeal in the process (Brockington 2009: chapter three). Type specimen here is actor Harrison Ford, who recently championed rainforest conservation for the North American mega-environmental NGO Conservation International (CI) by being filmed having his chest-hair removed with hot wax. In this, his obvious pain becomes the pain experienced by the earth at the clearing of old-growth forests for cattle-ranching, soya bean planting, or oil exploitation, at the same time as being our human pain at such transformations (Brockington 2009: 25).

Second are those who are makers and presenters of wildlife and natural history films, a burgeoning industry that seems to 'reveal' the nature of nature to viewers, at the same time making its own saleable celebrities through the growing popularity of its presenters (Brockington 2009: chapter four). Here Brockington juxtaposes two rather different specimens. First is the refined, well-spoken authority of Sir David Attenborough, inseparable from the high-end, aesthetically beautiful, and expensive authoritative accounts of the natural world produced by the BBC's Natural History Unit in Bristol [known in the industry as 'green Hollywood', and awarding its own 'Green Oscars' in the form of prestigious 'Panda Awards' (Brockington 2009: 142)]. Attenborough's 'antithesis' is Australia's Steve Irwin, whose rugged style involved dressing in 'safari shorts, often much the worse for wear', 'jumping on or picking up animals, particularly if they were dangerous', and the use of 'everyday language and unscripted… exclamations' (Brockington 2009: 48). This contrast is mirrored by Irwin's spearheading of cheap-to-make, 'personality-driven, reality-TV-type programmes' (Brockington 2009: 52) that can be easily purchased by an increasing number of satellite-TV channels able to screen programmes globally with some natural history content. An effect has been the proliferation of a particular media performance of nature, attracting attention through drama and sensation (cf. Tsing 2005: 57), and emphasising charisma, sex, violent kills, and 'warrior'-style encounters with spectacularly dangerous animals in order to sell (Brockington 2009: 46-47). Irwin's own dramatic death by a stingray in 2006 becomes the logical mediagenic endpoint of this trend, being 'the most searched for article on Google for that year' (Brockington 2009: 41). Typical of the opportunistic cynicism of late-capitalism and associated media-driven consumptive frenzies, this spectacular wildlife death has been capitalised through the production of various lucrative commodities. As Brockington (2009: 55-57) describes, the Irwin brand includes a 'Steve Lives Surfware' range, 'Halloween costumes of wetsuits complete with a bloody stingray barb', and new programmes and products that exploit the ensuing celebrity prominence of Irwin's eleven-year old daughter Bindi [amid a flurry of campaigns 'urging that the child be allowed to develop out of the public eye' (Brockington 2009: 56)]. This array of 'goods' is complemented by the work of Irwin's 'conservation company', Wildlife Warriors Worldwide Ltd., and the exhortation that khaki-'the symbol of Steve Irwin'-is '... more than a colour. It is an attitude. It is a stand to do something positive in our world and a passion to make a difference'. ⁶ The presence of this conservation company notwithstanding, and in keeping with the contradictions that characterise much institutionalised conservation work (Adams 2008; Brockington 2009), there is something rather odd here. This is that surely the production and marketing of all the Irwin merchandise actually works against an environmental ethos that might invoke reduced production and consumption of 'stuff' so as to engender reduced environmental impacts?

Brockington's (2009) third and final category is that of the 'conservation celebrity': the celebrity that has become this through their conservation work (Brockington 2009: chapter five). Typical here are the well-known expatriate and European conservationists that populate the environmental sector in the post-colonial world, particularly in East and Southern Africa. Think of Richard Leakey, son of the famous expatriate paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey and head of the Kenyan Wildlife Department throughout the 1990s. As Brockington (2009: 74) recounts, Leakey showed 'brilliant panache' in the staging of media stunts, including the controversial [and ultimately lucrative (Tom 2003: 3)] burning of African ivory valued at a million dollars, in an event designed to highlight the plight of the African elephant due to poaching for ivory. Brockington (2009) throws together some unlikely bedfellows in this chapter. I would not have associated humans rights activists such as Chico Mendes or Ken Saro Wiwa with high-profile expatriate East African conservationists such as Leakey, Iain Douglas-Hamilton (aristocratic founder of the NGO Save the Elephants), and Joy and George Adamson [famous for Joy Adamson's 2000 (1960) portrayal, in books such as Born free, of life as the wife of a game warden in colonial Kenya and the relationships with wildlife this made possible]. Mendes and Saro Wiwa worked for the sustenance of local livelihoods and lifeworlds embedded in landscapes under threat by incursions of industrial capital, becoming internationally famous in part because they were murdered for their political work. The issues they contested were, respectively, the establishment of large-scale cattle-ranching and displacement of rubber tappers in the Brazilian Amazon, and Ogoni displacement through Shell's exploitation of oil in the Niger Delta. Leakey and Co. are conservation heroes for an expatriate and European established wealthy class, associated with conservation work in the spectacular wildlife settings of British ex-colonies, which also are linked with variously severe trajectories of displacement of local peoples. Nevertheless, Brockington (2009) does much here to approach the difficult intersections of wealth, class, race, and gender that structure conservation effort and environmentalism (also see Garland 2008). ⁷

Amasssing Conservation Finance with Mass Media

All these versions of environmental celebrity are indelibly entwined with mass media in the production, distribution, and consumption of conservation commodities. The reasons for, and the structuring implications of, conservation involvement with mass media are Brockington's (2009) key and critical insights.

The reasons for conservation associations with mass media include the apparent need for conservation to function in, and become part of, a capitalist global political economy. Chapter six of Celebrity and the environment provides a thorough summary of some of the emerging and consolidating alliances characterising conservation finance. Conservation-oriented NGOs have proliferated in the wake of the neoliberal environment of the 1980s (Brockington & Scholfield 2010), but financial resources are concentrated in four: the World Wide Fund for Nature, CI, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and The Nature Conservancy (Brockington 2009: 91-97), with the African Wildlife Foundation also visible in these terms (Sachedina et al. 2010). Funding increasingly is sourced from philanthropic foundations, corporations, and seriously wealthy individuals (cf. Chapin 2004; MacDonald 2008). Celebrity endorsement and involvement, accompanied by mediated mass publicity, is significant at every step in producing these alliances. Celebrities sponsor NGOs, use their wealth and public profile to establish their own foundations, or become celebrities by virtue of their commercial success and subsequent philanthropic and conservation work. And in the growing recursive relationship between celebrity and conservation, celebrities (including hyper-wealthy conservation donors and investors) are rewarded with conservation awards (cf. Benjaminsen et al. 2005; Tsing 2005: 266), distributed by the mega-conservation NGOs at mediagenic glamorous events, which themselves use mass media to publicise particular forms of conservation work (Brockington 2009: 90).

This web iterates a nexus of relationships that is concentrating conservation estate and decision-making power in the hands of a few wealthy organisations and in the property portfolios of extremely wealthy individuals. Some of the figures are staggering. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, built from information technology wealth, donated 261 million USD to CI, itself only created in 1987, and with a board consisting largely of corporate representatives (Brockington 2009: 100-101). CI works increasingly with corporations seeking offsetting solutions for their industrial impacts in particular locations, and to realise conservation capital through finding ways of monetising lands owned or purchased that exhibit newly priced 'ecosystems services' (Bishop 2008; MacDonald 2010a). In a classic case of resource capture, media mogul Ted Turner (vice-president of Time-Warner, and founder of CNN), owns hundreds of thousands of hectares of rangeland in the American West, and in Patagonia, the former being home to the largest private bison herd in the world as well as to reintroduced wolves and other threatened species (Brockington 2009: 104). As Brockington (2009: 137) notes, his "extensive rewilded ranches can be fished and hunted for a price, and his private herd of buffalo feed customers eating at a chain of restaurants across sixteen US states". Turner was deployed as a celebrity keynote speaker at the 2008 IUCN World Conservation Congress, not for expertise in biodiversity, but to legitimate IUCN and the World Conservation Congress in broader corporate and media organisational networks (MacDonald 2010a: 544). The African Parks Foundation, established in 2000, is funded through oil wealth garnered by Dutch billionaire Paul van Vlissingen, as well as by Rob Walton, chairman of the global supermarket company Wal-Mart. The Foundation takes an explicitly business-oriented approach to park management in Sudan, Ethiopia, Malawi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia and South Africa, and has been linked with evictions of people from ensuing park lands (Brockington 2009: 105, 107).

Brockington's (2009) chapter seven reviews some of the more problematic outcomes of these alliances. They concentrate power over land and peoples in organisations and individuals that have no democratic mandate for the work they are doing. At the same time, they work to construct and maintain structures that favour élite and powerful views of the world, sustaining the recursive hermeneutic circle that establishes and supports systemic inequality. This is both in terms of the distribution of wealth and access to land and resources, and the distribution of ecological impact-for despite oft-repeated assertions that "it is well-known that the #1 cause of environmental degradation in the emerging world is poverty" (Kiernan 2010, emphasis in original), it surely is the accumulation of wealth and associated consumerism that produce greater per capita environmental effects. The outcome is a masked paradox-the world's most celebrated conservationists and their industry collaborators frequently are also those with relatively high incomes and consumptive impacts on the global environment. As Brockington (2009) notes, this too is a racial politics, such that conservation celebrities, celebrated conservationists, and those in the funding and corporate worlds with whom they frequently are aligned, tend not to be people of colour.

At the same time, to become a competitive rather than a resistant player in modern political economic structures, conservation needs to be packaged and presented in ways that are attractive, consumable, and ultimately profitable. Capitalising pragmatically on the entwined and proliferating phenomena of celebrity and mass media is a way that conservation can play this game. An interrelated phenomenon also drives this movement in conservation. This is the impetus in the current phase of capitalism to capture the material world as digital mass media representations, accompanied by a consumptive shift whereby social and environmental 'reality' increasingly is created so as to conform with expectations shaped by mass produced and consumed images. Brockington (2009) engages with these complex contexts in his final theoretically nuanced chapter. He draws in particular on the influential 1967 text Society of the spectacle by French critical theorist and filmmaker Guy Debord [1992(1967)]; as well as on current work by James Igoe that emphasises Debord's relevance for understanding the current structuring of human-environment relationships through mediation by mass circulated images (Igoe 2010; Igoe et al. 2010). In the next section, I outline some of Debord's propositions and their implications for creating conservation as 'spectacle' [also see Mitman 1999, drawn on extensively in Brockington's (2009) analysis; Tsing 2005; MacDonald 2010b].

Conservation as 'Spectacle'

In Society of the spectacle, Debord [1992(1967)] highlights the ways modern recording technologies and their products, particularly images, generate particular separations and connections between that which is recorded, the ensuing representation (or product), and consumers of that product. He clarifies some of the implications of how new recording technologies are entwined with modern and industrial structures of production, and the replications and distributions that thereby are possible. His argument in part is that mass production, circulation, and shared consumption of replicated and frequently spectacular images, permits these to become in a sense more real, and certainly more immediately accessed and experienced, than the phenomena they represent and mediate. Capitalist production and consumption dynamics, and the social and socio-environmental relationships they engender, thus become increasingly mediated through consumption of representations that are distant from that which is represented-entwined with production and consumption of the affects or emotional experiences reinforced by such representations and their associated social meanings.

Advertising exploits this suite of phenomena to powerful effect. A Porsche may be portrayed as signifying virility, wealth, and desirability; it is these that become desired and seemingly acquired through purchase, the materiality of the Porsche itself perhaps being rather incidental (whilst having significant but masked material effects). To take this a step further, many people currently are becoming entranced by the virtual landscapes they can create in the digital worlds of multiplayer online games. In Second Life, for example, players can purchase and develop 'land', creating fantastic digital representations of landscapes that reflect sublime fantasies that themselves are embedded in the largely unreachable glamours of capitalist wealth and celebrity. ⁸ These virtual worlds are entered through the screen of a computer and experienced by the self in the guise of a digital avatar whose characteristics are likely to bear little relation to the embodiment of a player. A player's online journeys express entertaining relationships with digital representations of desired but immaterial landscapes, whilst simultaneously perhaps stimulating expectations for 'real world' landscapes to conform to those accessible in online fantasies (a point to which I return below). ⁹

Debord [1992(1967)] notes further that relationships of wealth and power structure the processes of media production, such that content reflects choices and perceptions by media producers (often themselves in service to the visions of those hiring them, as is the case in advertising), at the same time as being shaped by what producers think the publics desire and will consume. The whole is entrained by an economic context that requires the endless seduction of consumers to purchase more 'stuff', so as to sustain production, consumption, and economic growth-phenomena that are increasingly mediated and manipulated through the production and consumption of digital representations available en masse.

Capitalist conservation is inseparable from these dynamics and structures of spectacle and virtual worlds. It uses mass media to sell its concerns and wares, reinforcing some versions of nature and of human relationships with non-human worlds over others (cf. Garland 2008; Igoe et al. 2010; Igoe 2010; Büscher & Igoe under review). It orchestrates spectacular events through which ideologically dominant positions within the conservation movement are themselves created, maintained, and 'naturalised' (as analysed by MacDonald (2010b) for the foregrounding of the IUCN's 'Business and Biodiversity' initiative at meetings such as the World Conservation Congress). Wildlife and natural history films, while having clear educational, entertainment and affective value, also tend to dramatise nature, thus permitting consumers to experience this drama vicariously. As such, mass media representations of wildlife convey 'unreal' portrayals of 'nature', focusing on the sensational, the picturesque, the exotic, and the unpeopled. Nature becomes packaged and sold in such a way that it might outcompete all the other products also on offer. The ensuing mass reproduction and distribution of nature's variously constructed simulacra, i.e., superficially similar copies, become perceived and 'known' as real, even as they are unreal and frequently exclusionary. The final twist in the tale is the shaping of real landscapes and relationships between human and non-human worlds, so that they fit the character of marketed and desired representations. As West and Carrier (2004: 485) affirm, this assists a project of creating 'landscapes that conform to important Western idealisations of nature', by transforming landscapes and peoples into conservation and cultural commodities, whose representation and marketing confirms these idealisations.

An example that clarifies these phenomena of separation and reshaping via mass circulated media representations is that of a recent online advertising trailer for Port Lympne Wild Animal and Safari Park in Kent, UK. ¹⁰ Port Lympne is part of a cluster of estates in Kent and Central Africa established by the late John Aspinall, and managed by the Aspinall Foundation, to further the conservation of rare and endangered species. Mimicking the advertising style used to sell high-end African safari experiences, the trailer is designed to convince the viewer that it is possible to experience 'real Africa' in Kent. Against an innocuous soundtrack of sanitised African drumming, an authoritative narrator tells the viewer that they will '[b]e transported into another world on the African safari experience' and will 'hear… amazing stories from our safari rangers', who in the trailer are authenticated with a South African accent, khaki costume, and a long beard. Amidst footage of visitors photographing wildebeest and zebra from open safari vehicles, interviewed tourists exclaim over the close contact they have had with the animals ("You certainly don't need a pair of binoculars here… Very easy to get some good photographs isn't it?"). The narration concludes by describing the experience as "the closest thing to Africa without even going there". But of course this is an Africa populated by a wildlife of large and dramatic animals and devoid of Africans, which nonetheless becomes the experience and expectation of an Africa that somehow is real. ¹¹

The recently released film Hotspots, made by CI under the direction of celebrity conservation biologist Russell Mittermeir, further illustrates the production of conservation as spectacle. The trailer spectacularly dramatises conservation work, using tropes of treasure, rarity, and the exotic in signifying global localities of high biodiversity, and of crisis and threat in specifying the urgency of conservation work. ¹² This sets the scene for the entry of the story's leading actors. These are the heroic, predominantly white and male conservation biologists, whose work is a military-style operation featuring long lensed cameras, helicopters, camouflage fatigues, a racy soundtrack, and machismo. The cinematic experience thereby generated is similar in vision, sound and feeling to that of Hollywood portrayals of contemporary US military engagement in 'Third World' frontiers, echoing, for example, Apocalypse now (Vietnam) and Black hawk down (Somalia). The trailer closes with a deep male voice-over describing the protection of hotspots as 'the mother of all wars'. Occluded are the cultural and linguistic diversities aligned with these same biodiversity 'hotspots' (Loh & Harmon 2005)-diversities that are similarly under threat from the forces that make spectacular conservation at these frontiers both necessary and possible. Absent are voices that might speak of the different nature knowledges and values that have permitted maintenance of biocultural diversities in such localities over millennia. The tragedy is that such 'poor' peoples can become part of what is under attack in this conservation 'war', even though they may hold openings into detailed everyday practices of being human in relationship with non-human natures that are relatively nourishing, sustainable, equitable, and poetic (e.g., Brody 2001; Posey 2002; Harvey 2005; Griffiths 2006; Impey 2009).

The spectacle of conservation sometimes also encourages peoples of conservation landscapes to become commodified, packaged, and presented as saleable; authentic on terms guided by paying customers, and ultimately a performance structured by spectator expectation. In the linkages of cultural tourism with ecotourism and conservation areas, for example, local people may be involved to the extent to which they can sell portrayals of themselves to paying visitors of different cultures and from distant locations. Such initiatives again generate swathes of paradoxes. 'Tradition' becomes commodity, conveyed in forms whose authenticity is structured to varying extents by the desires of consumers (West & Carrier 2004; Peluso & Alexiades 2005). Payments also are linked with manifestations of an additional authenticity, that of the good aspiring participant in modern development and the global market economy (Garland & Gordon 1999; Cohen 2010). Such commodifications direct and discipline embodiments of local landscape and cultural values towards satisfaction of desires welling up in the terrain of the wealthy global consumer, and in the companies that create, represent, and service these desires. In some cases, this has justified manufacture of new 'traditional' land-entwined communities literally as show-pieces for tourists. These capitalise on the popular status of indigenous people as generic 'celebrated conservationists' by creating new communities intended to perform the sorts of ecologically noble traditional practices that tourists expect to see (Brockington 2009: 133). Under a contemporary discourse of empowering indigenous people in a modern world, in the mid-1990s both the luxury Kagga Kamma lodge in South Africa and the foreign-owned private Namibian game park, Intu Afrika, introduced as tourist attractions displaced 'Bushman' communities exhibiting traditional Bushman skills and harmonious relationships with the land (Garland & Gordon 1999: 276-279). Such initiatives extend an impetus inspired by the colonial encounter of the European modern world with its 'primitive other' globally. This was to export and exhibit the spectacle of indigenous peoples, both living and their dead remains, in museums, circuses, and various touring staged performances throughout Europe and North America [as detailed for Australian Aborigines in Poignant (2004) and for southern African KhoeSân peoples in Skotnes (1997)]. In considering these historical precursors, the power relationships, projections, and strange fascinations structuring this encounter become clear. Despite the agency with which local people participate in and self-direct tourism ventures arising in the context of contemporary conservation situations, they tend not to be equal co-authors of the script that makes them variously saleable to conservation consumers from afar.

Conclusion: The Conservation Frontier, and A Disclaimer

Conservation is structuring the world in ways that may be problematic in both ethical and ecological terms. In becoming a competitive player in the capitalist game through uptake of its technologies, assumptions, and celebrities, accompanied by alliances forged with wealthy organisations and individuals, conservation is facilitating capitalist capture of the new wealth found at the conservation frontier. The process is requiring ongoing transformation of the experience of non-human and human worlds into 'sexy', marketable commodities. The poignant existential displacements that flow from this transformation of nature into saleable spectacle, and of immanent ecological experience into manipulated extraneous desire, are well-known. They are articulated beautifully, for example, in the poem Two Bears written in the 1300s by the Persian Sufi poet Hafiz [1999(1300s): 123]:

These transformations are playing significant roles in the ordering of society globally into hybrid arrangements of those able to consume conservation's products, those whose livelihoods are reorganised so that these products can be created and sold, and those profiting from emergent markets at the conservation frontier (Tsing 2005; Marks and Mipashi Associates In press; Sullivan In press). In contemporary circumstances then, and as Brockington's (2009) contribution elaborates, it remains instructive to understand and problematise the rules of the game that conservation spectacle is playing and participating in, and the worlds, knowledges, and experiences it is bringing forth as a result. All of the relationships and outcomes summarised above might be defensible in conservation terms, if indeed they are accompanied by substantive ecological indications of conservation success. At the same time, however, capitalist conservation is promoting consumptive constructions of, and articulations with, 'the global environment', that do not seem to be in keeping with an ethos that might grow life's 'integrity, stability and beauty' [to draw on Aldo Leopold's (1949) famous articulation of a 'land ethic', in A sand county almanac, referred to by Brockington (2009: 64)]. The mass production of environmental merchandise (aka the Irwin brand described above), the mass promotion of long-distance tourism to generate conservation revenues, and the displacing of cultures with different 'nature knowledges' and 'immanent ecologies' (Sullivan 2010) so as to acquire land for conservation consumption as well as for offsetting industrial pollutions, are cases in point. The modern conservation spectacle appeals to, and sustains, the relatively wealthy of the world, who also tend to be those with the greatest per capita global ecological footprint. Intellectually, and pragmatically, how is it possible to square this circle?

The contemporary environmental zeitgeist indeed is characterised by massive global transformations effected through industrial capitalism, and featuring troubling increases in human populations (Zalasiewicz et al. 2010). But this also is a world where grotesque inequality constrains access to land and resources globally, where the majority population occupies and consumes relatively little of the earth's riches per capita, and where these 'poors' (Desai 2002) are squeezed into remnant rural landscapes on the periphery of capital's enclosures, or to sprawling urban slums, only to be blamed and policed for causing environmental degradation. It is shocking that in much conservation discourse it is poverty and not wealth that tends to be constructed as the key problem for global biodiversity conservation (e.g., Sachs et al. 2009). Recent research suggests instead that it is the dysfunctional relationship between wealth and poverty that is of greater environmental concern, with biodiversity loss strongly predicted by measures of within-country inequality (Mikkelson et al. 2007). Indeed, an alternative view might see that a mutually constitutive relationship can exist between biodiversity and the cultural diversity associated with the low consumptive living of 'poor people' (as mapped, for example, in Loh & Harmon 2005; also see Pretty et al. 2009). This is a relationship that contemporary initiatives for low-impact dwelling attempt to replicate, amidst modern planning systems that generally are obstructive towards any re-embedding of low-impact lifestyles with locality and landscape (Hannis In press). If the linguistic and cultural diversities of 'the poor' contribute to sustained biodiversity in remaining biodiverse landscapes, then it is disastrous for both human and non-human natures that these diversities are as displaced as biodiversity (UNESCO 2009) through both extractive industry and conservation business for universalising commodity markets (Peluso & Alexiades 2005; Tsing 2005; Sullivan 2009).

In the conservation and displacement debate, then, these inequities and their associated ethical implications (e.g., Holland & Rawles 1996; Miller et al. 2011), require nuanced engagement beyond categories of biodiversity, poverty, and the population of 'the poor' (also Lambin et al. 2001). They warrant solutions beyond mass media marketing and pricing mechanisms, if relationships between human and non-human natures really are to be refocused towards the humane and equitable sustainability of diversity (Adams & Jeanrenaud 2008). Brockington's (2009) book is an important and welcome contribution towards further opening up the terms and directions of this debate.

In closing this engagement, it would be professional to offer a disclaimer. I have known Brockington, the author of Celebrity and the environment, for many years. In the 1990s we went through the rite of passage of writing anthropology PhDs alongside each other. We shared, via letters written from one side of Africa to another, some of the beautiful, humorous, and more sobering experiences of conducting long-term field research in what for us were remote locations in rural Africa. We survived the writing of our theses in the even more extreme environment of our 'office' in the windowless sub-basement of the Anthropology Department of University College London. Each of us has experienced attempts by conservation organisations to censor work of ours that highlighted displacement issues. And since then we have written and worked collaboratively, becoming part of what has been described in a recent issue of Conservation and Society as '[a]n increasingly vocal group of authors [who] will likely continue to rake international conservation organisations over the coals for their alleged indifference to the plight of human beings, particularly those humans who already face the dust heap of history' (Agrawal & Redford 2009: 7). In other words, critics may see this engagement as part of an effort to consolidate particular views in conservation politics, and perhaps even to acquire some sort of social science 'celebrity' status in this world.

Be that as it may, in summary my views of this significant book are as follows. It is clearly written-distilling complex areas of conceptual work into succinct summaries. It is coherently structured: moving from two introductory chapters introducing key terms and concepts; through three chapters distinguishing the author's three main types of conservation celebrities and clarifying their significance; and closing with three chapters considering the structuring effects of broader contexts and the ways in which celebrity intersects with and reinforces these in the environmental arena. It is original, offering a startling and richly sourced account of the entwined and mutually supportive relationships between various forms of celebrity, environmental causes, and the organisations that support them and are supported by them. It is elegant, being a rare combination of intellectual insight, sensitivity, and artistic flare. I loved the thread of reference to Oscar Wilde's work that runs throughout, and its caustic reminder that it is not unusual for empowered society to discipline its most incisive commentators. And it is wonderfully funny in places; it is not often that I find myself laughing out loud when reading academic books on conservation. The only other comment I wish to make is that, Dan, I salute you!

By Sian Sullivan

Department of Geography, Environment and Development Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London, London, United Kingdom In Conservation&Society

BBC Newshour on Charles Taylor and the CIA

2012-01-23T14:52:00.002Z

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00mwbly

All Africa: Al-Shabab Abducts 200 Teenagers in Southern Somalia Town

2012-01-23T14:48:00.001Z

Afgoye — The Al-Qaeda affiliated militants of Al-shabab have on Saturday forcibly abducted at least 200 young boys in the town of Afgoye, some 30 km away from Somalia capital, Mogadishu, residents confirmed.

Witnesses said, Al-shabab fighters with military vehicles stormed villages in Afgoye town, abducting hundreds of youngsters whom they wanted to join for their fight against Somalia government based in Mogadishu.

Reports said local residents were forced early on Saturday morning to go the squares in the town as to hear and listen to speeches from Al-shabab leaders, who encouraged locals, especially youths to join war against TFG and AMISOM.

Al-shabab senior officials have made presentations about the in front of thousands of local people who gathered at the area to take part what they call a Holy war (Jihad) against African Union Peace keeping troops, and the troops of the transitional federal government of Somalia.

Afgoye town is one of southern areas controlled by Al-Shabab fighters, its residents have witnessed frequent strict measures and orders from the militants linked with Al-Qaeda.

No word so far from Al-shabab officials about the incident which sparked off fear and shock among the residents and parents whose children were forcibly taken away by the militants.

For more information on the current state of affairs in Somalia, please read Getting Somalia Wrong? by Mary Harper

Human Rights Watch: Africa- Violent Elections Underscore Rights Concerns Official Manipulation, Weak Institutions Curtail Democratic Trend

2012-01-23T12:48:00.002Z

Gnews® 2007 - 2012

(Johannesburg) – Elections held throughout sub-Saharan Africa in 2011 signaled a growing formal commitment to democratic rule, but Africa’s leaders deployed violence and curtailed rights during election periods and beyond to hold on to power, Human Rights Watch said today in its World Report 2012.

During 2011, presidential elections were held in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Liberia, Nigeria, Uganda, and Zambia, among other sub-Saharan African countries. State security forces in the DRC and Uganda used excessive force against opposition party supporters, and targeted journalists, opposition party candidates, and civil society activists, as well as ordinary citizens. At least 42 people were killed in the DRC in the days before and soon after the voting, in some cases as a result of soldiers shooting at groups of alleged opposition supporters. In some countries, the difficult aftermath of 2010 elections resounded throughout 2011.

“This past year demonstrated the desire of so many Africans to choose their own leaders peacefully and fairly,” said Daniel Bekele, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Sadly, the votes were often marred by government intimidation, army and police abuses, and conflict incited by politicians. Unless these grave problems are remedied, Africans are likely to see more of the same in future elections.”

In its 676-page report, Human Rights Watch assessed progress on human rights during the past year in more than 90 countries, including popular uprisings in the Arab world that few would have imagined. Given the violent forces resisting the “Arab Spring,” the international community has an important role to play in assisting the birth of rights-respecting democracies in the region, Human Rights Watch said in the report.

In Africa, after Côte d’Ivoire held a presidential run-off in November 2010, former President Laurent Gbagbo refused to step down following his electoral loss to Alassane Ouattara. That sparked six months of violence in which at least 3,000 people were killed. Gbagbo is now awaiting trial in The Hague by the International Criminal Court (ICC), reflecting the extended reach of international justice. However, no effort has been made to punish serious crimes by forces loyal to President Ouattara either in Côte d’Ivoire or at the ICC.

Nigeria’s elections in April 2011 were heralded by many as the fairest in the nation’s history. Still, at least 165 people were killed in campaign violence, and the presidential election set off rioting and sectarian killings in northern Nigeria that left more than 800 dead. Nigeria has not brought to justice those responsible for these crimes.

Guinea and Burundi held elections in 2010, but developments in 2011 showed the need to strengthen their justice systems, rein in chronically abusive members of the security services, and resist the tendency to evolve into one-party states. In Rwanda, intolerance of political opposition was unchanged since the 2010 elections. Kenya, while formally cooperating with the ICC, undertook a series of legal and political maneuvers to prevent prosecutions of six political and opinion leaders accused of fomenting violence around its 2007 elections.

Sudan held a referendum for southern independence in January 2011, when southerners voted overwhelmingly to secede from the north after two decades of war under the terms of a 2005 peace agreement. South Sudan formally gained independence in July, making it Africa’s 54^th country, one that faces enormous political and economic challenges. Although South Sudan seceded relatively peacefully, Sudanese government forces attacked civilians in the disputed border area of Abyei and in two volatile states – Blue Nile and Southern Kordofan – that lie north of the border with the South. Sudan’s government also carried out new attacks on civilians in Darfur. President Omar al-Bashir faces an outstanding arrest warrant from the ICC for atrocities in Darfur.

Throughout the year, armed conflict and humanitarian crises battered Somalia, northern and eastern DRC, and parts of Sudan, intensifying economic hardship and necessitating international peacekeeping by the United Nations and African Union. In South Sudan alone, more than 2,600 people were killed in the fighting. In Somalia, the media reported some 2,500 casualties; undoubtedly, there were more. Human Rights Watch called on these governments, international forces, and opposition armed groups to end abuses by their forces. Governments should investigate and hold accountable those responsible for war crimes. International forces in particular need to devote more energy to protecting civilians from violence and assisting the internally displaced, Human Rights Watch said.

The United States in 2011 sent 100 military advisers to assist regional forces engaged in military operations against the Lord’s Resistance Army, a highly abusive Ugandan rebel group now operating in northeastern DRC, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic. Kenya and Ethiopia sent troops into Somalia to quell al-Shabaab, an Islamist armed group that has imposed harsh rule on large swathes of the country.

“Africa’s armed conflicts are being fought by all sides with little regard for the civilian population,” Bekele said. “Inter-governmental bodies and influential countries should be devoting greater efforts to protecting civilians from the full range of wartime harms.”

The fulfillment of economic and social rights in sub-Saharan Africa remained a great challenge, Human Rights Watch said. Despite stated government commitments to maternal and child health, high rates of childbirth-related deaths and injuries persisted without remedy in countries like South Africa and Kenya, which have the resources to provide better care. Access to children’s health care services is insufficient across the continent, including in Kenya.

Other resource-rich countries like Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Nigeria, and Guinea invested little of their revenue in social welfare or to tackle corruption, at the expense of their residents’ social and economic rights. Rwanda and Ethiopia appeared to make progress on some development indicators. But in both countries, repressive governments cracked down on domestic human rights workers and jailed journalists, opposition party members, and other perceived critics.

A growing number of countries, particularly China and India, deepened their involvement on the continent. While these countries’ rising investment offered economic opportunities for African governments and people, it also raised concerns for particularly disadvantaged populations. In South Sudan and Ethiopia, for instance, land used by local farmers was being forcibly reallocated to investors for commercial agriculture, which could undermine food security.

The mistreatment of workers in Chinese-owned copper mines in Zambia and the exposure of child laborers to mercury in Malian gold mines highlighted the need for more robust protection of workers from dire occupational hazards. African governments, notably, played a leading role in creating an international convention to regulate the treatment of domestic workers. The mistreatment of child domestic workers is an endemic problem on the continent.

The “Arab Spring” reverberated quietly in sub-Saharan Africa as people tried to exercise their rights to freedom of assembly, association, and expression. Without a great deal of international fanfare, protests against authoritarian rule, political injustice, and economic concerns were held in Angola, Guinea, Kenya, Malawi, Senegal, Sudan, Swaziland, and Uganda. All but the protests in Kenya were violently suppressed.

In Zimbabwe, where elections are slated for 2012, the authorities jailed activists for watching a film about the events in the Middle East; many Zimbabweans suffered harassment and arbitrary detention. In Senegal, also gearing up for an election in 2012, there were protests against proposed constitutional changes that would strengthen the president’s hold on power. The government cracked down on civil society leaders, a worrying sign in a country often held up as a model of stable democracy in Africa. In South Africa, another beacon on the continent, the parliament voted to enact the Protection of Information Bill, which threatens to curtail freedom of expression and public access to information if the measure enters into force.

“The Arab Spring showed the world how much the people of the Middle East and North Africa want to be treated with dignity and respect,” Bekele said. “Sub-Saharan Africans have the same aspirations. Governments there and elsewhere need to heed their concerns.”

© Copyright 2012, Human Rights Watch

Afrique en ligne: DR Congo: Over 100,000 flee fresh violence in eastern DRC since November

2012-01-23T12:42:00.000Z

Nairobi, Kenya - The UN refugee agency is concerned about fresh violence in the eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo that has forced more than 100,000 civilians to flee their homes since November.

In North Kivu province, an estimated 35,000 people have been displaced as a result of attacks and clashes between rival militia groups in Walikale and Masisi territories.

At least 22 people were reported killed and an unknown number of women raped during the fighting, UNHCR said in a statement from Kinshasa, DRC, Friday.

Attacks in South Kivu's Shabunda district have displaced some 70,000 people since November. Harassment of the population continues and, according to local sources, some 4,400 civilians are estimated to have fled violent attacks during the past two weeks.

Many of the displaced are reported to be moving towards the neighbouring provinces of Maniema and Katanga, the agency said.

'UNHCR is very concerned about the consequences of this violence on the protection of civilians caught in the fighting,' said Stefano Severe, UNHCR's regional representative. 'For now the people in the east are displaced within the country, but there is a risk that people might cross borders if the situation gets worse.'

Despite limited humanitarian access in the region, UN peacekeepers and staff from UNHCR and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) met some of the displaced during an assessment mission to the affected areas last week.

They found several empty and burned villages, as well as looted health care centres. In Walowa Yungu, for example, 14 of the 18 villages in the area have been virtually deserted by residents.

Most displaced people are either living with host families in overcrowded makeshift settlements, or occupying schools.

Some of them told the assessment team that they have lost access to their farmlands and that they are victims of forced labour, harassment and violence.

'We are working with our partners to address the needs of the displaced as we gain access to them. This includes providing shelter, clean water, food and health care,' UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards said.

'In addition to the material assistance, our colleagues on the ground are also providing psycho-social support to survivors of rape and other traumas caused by the violence,' Edwards said.

Before the current attacks, there were more than 1.1 million people uprooted by years of armed violence in the two Kivus.

In a separate development further south, UNHCR has reported receiving information that more than 12,000 people have been forcibly displaced in central Katanga Province.

An inter-agency mission – that UNHCR is part of – was planned to go to the area this week but had to be postponed for security reasons.

According to initial information received by UNHCR, 65 percent of these displaced are young boys and girls who have sought refuge in 17 villages in Mitwaba territory. They reportedly fled to escape from new militia activities in this relatively stable province.

The DRC's civil war formally ended in 2003, but parts of the country – especially in the east– remain volatile and have been shaken by sporadic outbursts of violence and significant population.

Copyright ©Afriquejet.com

Al Jazeera: Accused war criminal Taylor 'worked with CIA'

2012-01-23T12:33:00.001Z

Liberia's ex-president, now on trial in The Hague, worked with US intelligence agencies, officials admit

He stands accused of funding rebels who hacked the arms off small children, smuggling blood diamonds, keeping sex slaves and torturing his opponents, but former Liberian President Charles Taylor also had another career - providing information to US intelligence agencies, according to information obtained by the Boston Globe newspaper.
Today, Taylor is jailed in The Hague as the first former African leader to face international prosecution from the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone. In the 1990s, he was allegedly responsible for wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, which killed more than 250,000 people.
“It’s an intriguing development,” Will Reno, a professor at Northwestern University who studies political violence in Africa, told Al Jazeera. “Was the US still supporting him when he was responsible for all of these human rights abuses? Did the US contribute to that?”
While the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Pentagon’s spy arm, confirmed its agents and CIA agents worked with Taylor in the 1980s, they would not reveal details of the relationship on national security grounds.

Intelligence asset?
“When he became president [in 2001], George W Bush found out that Taylor was still being paid by CIA and put a stop to it,” Alexander Yearsley, a former investigative campaigner in West Africa with the NGO Global Witness who now works in the private sector, told Al Jazeera.

Yearsley said he learned about Bush’s decision during conversations in Liberia with senior officials from British military intelligence. “It was more an accident that [his relationship with the US] went on so long, he was not a useful source of intelligence for the Americans at that time.”
Al Jazeera could not confirm Yearsley's allegations. Other analysts believe the US had all-but-stopped its relationship with Taylor by the mid-1990s. If true, however, the allegations would mean that Taylor was working for the CIA and DIA while he stoked one of the most brutal conflicts in the last two decades.
In 2009, Joseph Marzah, a former death squad commander, told court officials in The Hague that Taylor ordered forces to engage in cannibalism and the ritualistic eating of enemies during the conflict in Sierra Leone. A woman told the court she was forced to carry a sack full of severed heads, including those of her two children.
Prosecutors say that Taylor – who ruled Liberia from 1997-2003 - financed fighters from the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone by selling blood diamonds and circumventing an international arms embargo. Taylor has vehemently denied the charges, calling them “diabolical lies”.

Cold War politics
Jeffrey Michaels, a professor of war studies at the University of King’s College in London, said US-support for Taylor needs to be viewed in the context of the Cold War.
“I think that they probably recognised there are problems in getting into bed with these dictators and other unsavory people,” Michaels told Al Jazeera. “If you look at the most prominent cases where the US has been involved, such as Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam… and [Manuel] Noriega in Panama – the CIA is there as an adjunct to foreign policy, to keep a leader who is generally aligned with US interests in power.”
Back in 1983, when the US and USSR jockeyed for influence in West Africa, Taylor was a rising political star in Liberia, serving as chief of government procurement in the government of Samuel Doe. He fled in 1983 after a corruption scandal and was jailed by US authorities in 1984, pending extradition to Liberia.
Miraculously, he escaped from the Plymouth House of Correction in 1985. Analysts believe US intelligence operatives helped with the prison break.
In 2009, during testimony at his war crimes trial, Taylor said a jail guard opened his cell door and allowed him to sneak out a window. He then claimed a “government car” drove him to New York, before he made his way to Mexico and eventually back to Liberia.
Intelligence officials were said to have been particularly interested in information Taylor could provide about then-Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

'Moral thresholds'
In 1989, Taylor led a rebel army in an invasion of Liberia from the Ivory Coast and took control over most of the country in a war which killed thousands. “At that time, he was a DIA asset,” Yearsley said, noting that competition between the CIA and the better-funded DIA was often intense.

Taylor was elected president in 1997, after inspiring almost a decade of virtual civil war. “He was being advised [by the US] on how to carry-out the conflict,” Yearsley said.
A period of peace did not follow his election, as various rebel groups fought to oust him from power and he supported RUF fighters in Sierra Leone.
“He launched the invasion of Sierra Leone, and he couldn’t be reigned-in or stopped and they [intelligence agencies] had to work to get rid of him” by supporting another rebel group, Yearsley said. “We saw utter chaos and devastation; the country was ruined.”
Despite Taylor’s actions, analysts do not believe the latest revelations of US-support will cause much embarrassment for intelligence agencies.
“If it turns out he was connected to them [intelligence agencies] beyond a certain point - pick your moral threshold – then it becomes a different thing,” Reno said. “In terms of Washington politics, this will be very quick. Liberia is a small country in Africa. It will be interesting to Liberians but inside the [Washington] beltway, I don’t think this will be a big deal.”

Copyright ©Al Jazeera. All rights reserved.

Check out Charles Taylor and Liberia, available from Zed Books

Australia’s High-Risk Economy

2012-01-23T12:24:00.002Z

The World Bank has issued its latest report, titled “Global Economics Prospects for 2012.” It does not contain good news for Australia.

One source reported that “Australia is in for a tough economic year after the World Bank slashed its global growth forecasts and warned there could be a worldwide recession worse than three years ago” (Australian Associated Press, January 18).

A World Bank press release indicated that “Developing countries should prepare for further downside risks, as euro area debt problems and weakening growth in several big emerging economies are dimming global growth prospects” (January 18).

In an observation that should have Australia’s mining and energy sectors worried, the press release further indicated that “Slower growth is already visible in weakening global trade and commodity prices. … Meanwhile, global prices of energy, metals and minerals, and agricultural products are down 10, 25 and 19 percent respectively since peaks in early 2011,” reflecting ongoing “[d]eclining commodity prices." Akin to other analysts, we have warned of the high risk to Australia’s economy with its economic eggs placed in one mineral resources basket, being marketed to one major customer—China.

Even while the land Down Under was booming along, its economy riding home on the pig’s back of the sale of its massive mineral wealth, we wrote, “The average Aussie may think the massive demand for Australia’s raw materials will bail the country out of any economic hole into which it risks sinking. On the surface that may appear to be so—as long as the demand is spread across a number of customers and as long as the strength in demand continues. Australia’s problem with this is that it has too few eggs in too few baskets” (March 20, 2008).

There’s a famous old Australian saying, “She’ll be right mate.” It reflects the attitude of generations of Aussie battlers that have had to fight drought, fire and flood for the past two centuries and come up smiling. Yet it’s one thing to be stoically optimistic in the face of adversity. It’s another thing altogether to be plain foolhardy in the face of a situation that we should have seen coming decades ago, and for which we should have been well prepared.

The problem with an overly optimistic mindset is that it tends to not prepare for unknowns. Unknowns such as the World Bank highlighted as impacting the East Asian and Pacific region, within which the island continent of Australia nestles: “While the East Asia and Pacific region recovered quickly from the March 2011 Tohoku disaster in Japan, flooding in Thailand and the turmoil in Europe have started to affect regional growth” (ibid).

Given the retracted time of recovery from natural disasters, it’s the man-made crises in the Northern Hemisphere that may pose even greater and more imminent danger to the Australian economy. The ongoing global crisis stemming from a combination of America’s massively escalating debt plus the systemic euro crisis moved Andrew Burns, manager of Global Macroeconomics and lead author of the World Bank report, to warn: “An escalation of the crisis would spare no one. Developed and developing country growth rates could fall by as much or more than in 2008/09. The importance of contingency planning cannot be stressed enough” (emphasis added). And there’s the rub.

There’s little evidence at this stage of an Australian government commitment to a workable contingency plan should its major resource sector fall into an economic hole, let alone adjusting for the ripple effect of the American and European debt crises beginning to bite harder on the Australian economy.

James Fazzino, ceo of Australian Fertilizer company Incitec, recently highlighted the need for Australia to become less dependent on exporting its raw materials, and more oriented to utilizing them for raw materials input to home-based industry. He encouraged “a recognition that manufacturers value-add Australia’s natural resources, with an economic contribution multiplier of up to 12 times more than raw material export. With the right policy settings, Australia can enjoy the benefits of both” (Australian, Dec. 17, 2011).

Geoff Plummer, ceo of Australian steel manufacturer OneSteel, has expressed concern that “Too much reliance is being placed on commodity pricing, which at some point in time will soften.” He has warned that a failure to recognize the nation’s overdependence on income from exporting its raw materials, and insufficient attention to attracting capital to develop Australia’s own manufacturing base, “threatens the long-term success and prosperity of Australia as a nation” (ibid).

America’s real economic troubles were brought to light when its housing bubble began to pop in 2007. The popping of Australia’s own well-publicized housing bubble was delayed till the current year. Come January 2012, the true facts on the extent of Australia’s indebtedness are emerging. The housing bubble is definitely popping, placing the domestic economy at high risk.

A Morgan Stanley report shows that “Mortgage debt is by far the largest component of debt in Australia today—government debt, which is the focus of political debate, is trivial by comparison.” Yet, as Steve Keen, associate professor of economics and finance at the University of Western Sydney, observes, if the Morgan Stanley analysis is correct, of even greater concern is that “finance sector debt may be larger again than mortgage debt … since it shows Australia’s aggregate private debt ratio as almost equal to the usa’s” (Property Observer, January 11).

As per the pattern set by its Anglo-Saxon compatriots in the United States, Australia has been living well beyond its means as a nation for too long.

Aussies would do well to batten down the hatches and prepare for a period of increasing hardship akin to that currently being experienced by their northern cousins.

January 20, 2012 | From theTrumpet.com

By Ron Fraser

Labour delusions and disquiet in the ranks

2012-01-23T12:19:00.000Z

Your leader (Labour party: Battling the bosses, January 18) says the reaction of Len McCluskey and other public sector union leaders to changes in Labour's economic position confronts Ed Miliband with "a Clause IV moment that he did not seek". This is not the case. If the failure to brief the unions in advance of Ed Balls's speech to the Fabians was not incompetence then it was provocation. The Labour leader and the shadow chancellor have engineered a public conflict with the unions that they believe will play well in target seats in the south of England.

But the Labour leadership is asking not only that the unions be publicly humiliated but that they continue paying for the privilege. As the GMB's readiness to reconsider its funding of the party demonstrates, this is dangerous and unrealistic. It is also a continuation of New Labour's neglect of the party's base – a strategy that landed Labour with 29% of the vote at the last election.
Alan Johnson (The union delusion, 18 January) may have been right to challenge the unions' kneejerk rejection of Labour's policy change. But rather than urging Mr Miliband to conclusively bring a section of his own base to heel, perhaps the Guardian could encourage him to show his strength against the banks and the energy companies that are the actual causes of our current economic problems.
Peter Grosvenor
Associate professor, political science department, Pacific Lutheran University

• In response to Barry Norman's prediction of a mass departure from Labour ranks (Letters, 18 January), he should bear in mind that true socialist members remain within the party in an effort to keep it on the right course. Turncoats who give up if they don't get things going their own way are too weak to hold such a course and are a waste of space within the party. If a member of your family makes a mistake and takes the wrong path, you stand firm as a family and seek to bring them back to the true and safe path.
Robin Vyrnwy-Pierce
Redditch, Worcestershire

• I am an Usdaw shop steward. I believe in a civilised public sector, and for precisely that reason wage restraint is a must to sustain this sector and the jobs in it, without placing an onerous burden on us in the private sector. The public sector unions will be better advised to negotiate more support for the Union Learning Fund. Members across the board would benefit (including us in the private sector). The ULF is a wonderful ground-level way of enhancing of members' skills. And thus is also good for the UK economy.
John Barstow
Fittleworth, West Sussex

• The Labour party will never represent the interests of those it was founded to represent so long as there is no realistic challenge from the left. They rightly assume their former adherents will not vote Tory or Lib Dem. The three-party consensus has become such a serious impediment to democracy that bold steps are required from our boldest politicians.
Altruistic MPs like Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell with huge majorities need to make a pact with local Greens to fight the next election, and other decent Labour candidates need to be found to stand aside but help Greens in constituencies where they have a chance. Every member of the Green party, beyond Caroline Lucas, needs to commit to getting stuck into their constituencies with their political message. (Everyone knows their take on green issues.) Twenty of these deals could shift Labour's attention. I suppose it would be asking too much for the far left to end their juvenile, Pythonesque schisms and lend a hand.
Peter Robbins
London

• It is apparent that patience with the Labour party has finally run out. For well over a decade, it has betrayed its core voters, tarnished the reputation of this country, and mismanaged the economy. It is timely therefore that major trade unions have openly criticised Labour's leadership and the fact that it agrees with Tory and Lib Dem economic policy. But the problem with Labour doesn't end with Ed Miliband and Ed Balls. The unsustainable economic policies endorsed by Labour, Lib Dems and Tories mean the same-old-same-old will continue for decades. More austerity measures, more politicians scamming ordinary taxpayers of their money, and more incompetent people supposedly governing our country.
If trade unions disaffiliate from Labour, the Green party welcomes them to join a party that stands up for hardworking people, that has sustainable and sensible economic policies, without being anti-business, and has the conviction to stand up for what it believes in without making promises, then betraying them. We welcome trade unionists to our party and look forward to working with them to better our country's future.
Cllr Adam Pogonowski
Green group leader, Cambridge city council

• As the Labour frontbench and the Guardian join the great European hair-shirt conspiracy, I'm struck again by the effective eradication of the word "tax" from the "tax and spend" equation and the political vocabulary of our rulers, irrespective of party brand. As long as the citizen is conceived primarily as a consumer, and the unstated bottom line of British politics is never to be seen to threaten the consumer's disposable income, we will never hear a politician say the unsayable: "Your tax buys things you rather like having. Here's why you're going to need to pay a bit more for them."
Barry Taylor
Stone, Staffordshire

• Of all the bizarre statements in your anti-union editorial, the most bizarre was the idea that Miliband "didn't seek this fight". He said he was going to freeze the wages of union members. That it didn't occur to him (or you) that leaders elected by those members might actually decide to do what they are paid for, and stand up for them, says everything about the attitudes of Miliband and your leader writer that genuine democrats need to know.
Sam Buckley
Bexhill on Sea, East Sussex

• As a retired Unite Union Official, (often dubbed a "moderate") and a long-standing Labour party member, I found myself agreeing with every word of Len McCluskey's article (17 January) and little of Alan Johnson's reply (18 January). Nowhere in Len's article did he argue against the need to reduce the deficit, but there is a choice to be made about who pays for it and over what timescale. At the moment, ordinary working and non-working people seem to be bearing the brunt, with the disabled, women and young people being particularly badly hit.
The Labour movement needs to have a grown-up debate, not about whether to clear the deficit but how. Why, for example, is no one advocating a temporary increase in income tax by a few points until the deficit is cleared? Everyone who earns enough to pay income tax would then contribute something according to their means and would make the phrase "we're all in this together" more than a cruel soundbite. Surely this would be fairer than throwing thousands of people out of work and leaving a job vacuum for a generation of young people. In the current financial climate, I don't think this would necessarily be the electoral poisoned chalice that it would have been 10 years ago.
Alan Tiplady
Nottingham

• Surely it's time for Messrs Miliband and Balls to face some obvious facts. For example, Nobel prize-winning US economist Paul Krugman calculates that, as a percentage of GDP, UK public debt is at one of its lowest ever levels, perhaps less than a third that of the 1930s. Present government debt only started to grow after the crisis began and, in historical context, it's no more than "an uptick" (Krugman's words). Furthermore, Morgan Stanley has shown that Britain's public debt is dwarfed by its private debt, which they estimate at a truly stunning 950% of GDP.
Steve Keen, one of the very few economists to foresee the world financial crisis, concludes from this: "The UK is the most indebted country in the world." Britain's boom, if ever there was one, was largely based on private borrowing and, as Keen suggests, a day of reckoning is approaching. The genuine, perhaps unavoidable, danger is that of a rapid collapse of the private debt pyramid, with a devastating impact on the real economy.
Labour should be explaining this predicament and developing policies for handling the coming depression. But alas, there's no sign of this – instead we see a revival of Blairite triangulation. The only people talking sense (real-world economists apart) appear to be trade union officials. So congratulations, Len McCluskey and company! In opposing policies that accentuate the ongoing contraction, damage public services and lengthen the dole queue, you and your colleagues are fighting for us all. Sorry, Mr Johnson, you are the one with delusions!
Peter Reed
Former executive member, Labour Finance and Industry Group

• The Eds, Alan Johnson et al are missing a vital point. Continuing to back the cuts in the public sector and to the services they provide is hitting hardest those who can't afford to be hit any more.
This is not about ideology; it is about protecting the right to a fair and decent society. Many public sector workers are badly paid. If they live and work in the north it is likely they are the only wage earner in the family – especially if they are women.
As a trade unionist I respect everything the left has done and continues to do in helping to keep the values of socialism and fairness in this society alive.
More than 30 years of neoliberalism without the dissenting voices from the left would have seen public services, state education and the welfare state absolutely finished when Thatcher was in power. We have a big job ahead of us to stop this government in its tracks – what a pity Labour won't join us in this admirable and necessary fight.
Alexis Chase
Bexleyheath, Kent

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 19 January 2012 20.59 GMT

Monevator: Weekend reading: How governments have previously inflated away debt

2012-01-23T12:14:00.002Z

Good reads from around the web.
I have feared inflation ever since the credit crisis began. Interest rates at multi-century lows, quantitative easing, and the UK government taking on the liabilities of RBS and Lloyds only added to my desire to guard against the erosion of my wealth.

Unlike most inflation paranoiacs, however, who cover their windows in the silver foil and bury gold bars in their basement, I’m pretty optimistic about the global economy and stock market, at least in nominal terms.

This means I’ve been able to meet my fears by being extremely long equities and very light on bonds, together with buying NS&I index-linked certs when available. I am usually a fan of private investors holding a big slug of cash, but outside of the cash-equivalent linkers, my cash allocation is near its all-time low of March 2009.

This stance has been a reasonable one overall – who a decade ago would have thought we’d see inflation breach 5%, yet the Bank of England keep rates at 0.5%? – yet there have definitely been hiccups along the way.

Last year, for instance, was a terrible year to not hold any government bonds. They were the best performing asset class, yet I have long considered over-valued in light of my inflation concerns.

Oops!

Those of you with pure passively managed portfolios that include a good slug of gilts probably beat the majority of active traders in 2011. Not unusual, and why passive approaches are our central recommendation here at Monevator, not my off-piste active shenanigans!

As The Accumulator has reported, gilts saved most of our Slow & Steady Portfolio’s bacon in 2011.
Currency debasement is a long-term game, however – it happens over decades, not quarters. The UK government has every reason to be happy seeing the real value of its debt watered down, provided creditors don’t get the willies. So I’m not running up the white flag just yet!

If you’re not familiar with why massive government debt and inflation so often goes hand in hand, you might want to read How Sneaky Governments Steal Your Money, on The Psy-Fi blog this week.
As author Timmar states, eroding debt through stealthy inflation:

“…relies on the sleight of hand that lies behind money illusion – the idea that people focus on nominal interest rates rather than real ones. Unfortunately, this seems to be hardwired into people.
Of course, if financial repression was on the cards then we might expect to see abnormally low interest rates, stubbornly high inflation rates and governments imposing all sorts of new capital holding requirements on banks and pension funds.
We’d better keep an eye open for those, then…”

For more evidence that inflation is the likely endgame, see this PDF from the Bank of International Settlements on The Liquidation of Government Debt.

I don’t expect we’ll see hyperinflation, or small boys pushing SIM cards around in wheelbarrows in lieu of pocket money.

But I do suspect real interest rates will continue to be low for years.

Note: Don’t take my suspicion for anything other than what it is – a best guess! Nobody knows what interest rates will do next, and the vast bond markets represent huge amounts of money being put where traders’ mouths are.

Still, with the FTSE yielding near 4% and 10-year gilts near 2% – especially against the backdrop discussed above – I know what I think is better value.

Of course, I said something similar last year. Roll on 1% gilt yields, then!

Copyright © 2007-2011 Monevator. All rights reserved.

Steve Keen and the writing off of all debt

2012-01-23T12:12:00.005Z

I don’t usually go in for apocalyptic visions, but if one was looking for intelligent company in the fallout shelter then you could do a lot worse than economist Steve Keen.

Worryingly, Mr Keen and me seem to have a similar opinion of bankers, and of the usefulness of their activities over the past 40 years. Does that mean I also think we need to write off all debts and start again?

Not yet. I still think we’re very different to Japan (let alone Keen’s Ancient Rome) though I’m not quite so confident as I was a year ago.

This interview with Keen is well worth a watch, whatever your perspective: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGkmgnprrIU&feature=player_embedded

If we’re going to write off the debt of companies and citizenry alike, then at least Keen’s version of a debt jubilee has the potential benefit of not utterly punishing savers – since they are allocated the same portion of the free money that Keen would like to print, and they have no debts to pay off with it.
It would still be a nightmare scenario though, financially-speaking – and surely on the streets, too.

Published on MONEYVATOR by The Investor on December 3rd 2011

Of Oil Tankers, China & the economic shift!

2012-01-23T11:22:00.001Z

Oil will continue to power global economies in the main for decades in the absence of a viable alternative taking off meaningfully, but have you given thought to how the crude stuff is moved globally. Odds-on bet would be that an oil tanker springs to mind - that bulky out of sight and out of mind metal behemoth crucial to the movement of oil around the globe. In a fascinating book - Oil on Water by Paul French and Sam Chambers, the reader gets an insight into the tanker transport aspect of the crude supply chain.

As the economic balance of power, most notably manufacturing, shifts to the East, so does traffic in shipping lanes in the general direction of the growing economies of Indian and China, the authors note. Joining their ranks is the age old developed world crude consumer - Japan, and regional oil exporters turned importers from Vietnam to Indonesia.

Club them all together, factor in China's dominance, bring out the empirical and anecdotal evidence, and the rise in South and East Asia's growing imports of the bulk of two trillion tons of black gold moving across global shipping lanes is becoming increasing visible. In this concise book of just over 200 pages, split by 10 chapters, French and Chambers begin by describing why the uninterrupted flow of oil is essential to globalisation and increasingly so as manufacturing and markets move Eastwards to Asia.

The book is part narrative, part reportage, part case study and part history. The authors switch seamlessly between describing their first hand experience on-board a crude carrying vessel, the history of the business and geopolitical concerns. Central to it all are the buzzwords of the modern day crude business - "energy security." It's what makes Indian and Chinese strategic planners wake up and smell the coffee, it's what American politicians are increasingly paranoid about and it's what some regimes bank on as a political tool.

China's cravings are growing by the year. Where and how these tankers are loaded, their modus operandi, security concerns, business hiccups and finally their centrality to the crude business it seems is only in the global subconscious. French and Chambers deserve to be applauded for raising the issue via this book. Both authors have gone one step further; they have raised issues of potential alarm from infrastructure to piracy, from environmental concerns to conflict which could disrupt a crucial traffic flow which we take for granted and seldom see firsthand.

A discussion on life without oil, the economic shift eastwards, piracy and pipeline politics are all there in this book and in some detail accompanied by facts and figures to substantiate the authors' case. It is one the best books the Oilholic has read on the subject and a must read for anyone interested in the energy business, geopolitics and movement of crude oil. It touches on a much ignored yet supremely crucial component of the movement of crude oil. Many make assumptions about it; few care to talk about it. Hence, the authors of this book have done us all a service.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Somalia's al-Shabab hit by major Amisom offensive

2012-01-23T11:02:00.005Z

Pro-government forces have launched a major offensive from the Somali capital, Mogadishu, to seize territory from al-Shabab Islamist militants.

Some 1,000 soldiers backed up by 20 tanks captured three al-Shabab bases, a senior security official said. African Union forces backing the government say they have advanced outside the capital for the first time. Al-Shabab is under attack on several fronts, with troops from Kenya and Ethiopia also gaining ground recently.
Correspondents says this is the biggest joint offensive by the government and the AU force, Amisom, since August 2011.

Troops from Djibouti have recently arrived in Mogadishu to bolster Amisom's 12,000 soldiers, while the AU is asking the UN to approve a further 50% increase in troop numbers.

Al-Shabab controls many southern and central areas of the country. The al-Qaeda linked group made a "tactical withdrawal" from most of the capital last year but has continued to stage suicide attacks in the city. It confirmed that the pro-government forces had gained territory but vowed to hit back.

Six months of famine

A photographer with AFP news agency said he had seen the bodies of three government soldiers and an official after a convoy was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade fired by al-Shabab fighters.
"It was chaotic, most of the trees along the road had been felled by mortar fire and houses were damaged," he said. Witnesses say several al-Shabab fighters died but neither side has confirmed any deaths.

Amisom spokesman Lt Col Paddy Ankunda said pro-government forces had seized Mogadishu University and Barakat cemetery as they advanced north from the city after "intense" fighting.
Hundreds of people have fled the clashes. "This is the first time Amisom has been able to secure an area outside the parameters of the city allowing them to defend greater Mogadishu," said Lt Col Ankunda.

BBC East Africa correspondent Will Ross says the operation appears to be a concerted effort to clear the Islamist militants right away from the Somali capital. But he says this conflict no longer has front lines and, with al-Shabab carrying out suicide bomb attacks, it will still be very difficult to make Mogadishu safe.

Aid hampered

On Thursday, six people were killed by a suicide attack in a refugee camp. The victims included a security guard and a local aid worker, witnesses said. The bomb exploded just 20 minutes after a team of international journalists had left the Mogadishu camp.

They had gone to the city to see the situation six months after the famine was first declared in parts of the country, following the region's worst drought in 60 years. Tens of thousands of people have died, aid workers say. About 300,000 people have flooded into Mogadishu to seek food and shelter, as al-Shabab has banned most international aid agencies from areas they control. The UN says a quarter of a million Somalis are still suffering.

On Thursday, medical charity MSF closed two of its health centres in the centres in response to the killing of two of its workers in the city last year.

Somalia has been wracked by two decades of conflict and lawlessness.

Published 20 January 2012 on BBC News Africa

allAfrica: Liberia- Charles Taylor a CIA Informant - the Need to Retool Nation's Relationship With the U.S.

2012-01-20T15:36:00.002Z

Two very significant and interconnected events happened this week in Liberia - President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was inaugurated for a second term with a subdued opposition attending the ceremonies, and former Liberian President Charles Taylor was implicated in a Boston Globe article for serving as a CIA informant beginning in the early 1980s and spanning many decades.

Taylor, Taylor, How Did Your Garden Grow?


© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or
its affiliated companies. All rights reserved

Taylor, who currently languishes in a jail cell in the Hague after undergoing trial for 11 counts of crimes against humanity in the Sierra Leonean civil war, has ironically never faced trial for the atrocities that he orchestrated, oversaw, and implemented in Liberia. The bombshell news that he was indeed a CIA informant in the early years of his rise to notoriety calls into question America's complicity in Taylor's destruction of Liberia.

America's facilitation of Taylor's escape from a maximum security prison in Boston in 1985 - while he was facing extradition to Liberia for allegedly stealing US$1 million from the General Services Agency, which he headed during President Samuel Kanyon Doe's regime - was always rumored but never corroborated. I remember covering the first day of Taylor's trial in the Hague for Pambazuka News, and interviewing Stephen Rapp, the then chief prosecutor, about whether or not his investigations into Taylor's exploits in Libya and Sierra Leone ever unearthed the real causes of his 'escape' from the maximum security prison in Massachusetts.

Rapp was tight-lipped, yet appeared confounded by this mystery as well. When Taylor eventually confessed during the Hague trial that he strolled out of prison after a guard conveniently opened his cell one night, we all knew that something was awry: "I am calling it my release because I didn't break out," Taylor testified. "I did not pay any money. I did not know the guys who picked me up. I was not hiding [afterwards]."

The Taylor-CIA connection has re-inscribed for Liberians an age-old dilemma, what to do with our so-called historical relationship with the United States, which has been fraught with betrayal after betrayal. Liberians who have been commenting on various notice boards are justifiably angry, upset and disappointed, but not surprised. This is the validation we've been wanting for years, and it comes on the heels of the inauguration for a second term of our head of state, who was ironically pictured dedicating the new U.S. Embassy in Liberia this week, with a smiling Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the foreground.

Some Liberians, under anonymity, are arguing that U.S. authorities who courted Taylor for intelligence be brought to justice for crimes against humanity in the Liberian civil war, that the International Criminal Court - now headed by a female Gambian national - should exhibit blind justice, that instead of hauling African and non-Western leaders to the international body for prosecution, they too should face the full weight of the law. I tend to agree with these arguments, however radical and farfetched they may seem.

Inquiring Liberian Minds Deserve to Know
The Globe article recounts that the CIA has said releasing further information could be a national security threat. A threat to whom, might I ask? Liberians deserve to know the nature, duration, scale, and scope of the CIA-Taylor relationship, it is a part of our national history, and must be recounted in the history books for our children, and our children's children to remember that a relationship with the U.S. must be monitored at all times.

Liberians are not gullible, nor are we unsophisticated in realizing that one plus one equals two. We've always known that the dubiousness surrounding Taylor's escape from the Massachusetts maximum-security prison was the beginning of the end for us. And if the implications of the Globe article are true, then the CIA could provide more answers.

It's no wonder that the U.S. didn't intervene in the Liberian civil war, though Liberians begged and pleaded for its "father/mother" to stop us from killing each other. One U.S. diplomat at the time even said that "Liberia is of no strategic interest to the United States." It begs the question, if Liberia was of "no strategic interest" during the war, when we were killing ourselves and each other in the name of liberation, what is Liberia's strategic interest to the U.S. now, when U.S. NGOs and development workers abound, and the Peace Corps has reinserted itself?

This should send a strong signal to Liberians and Liberia once and for all that America cannot be trusted. From Noriega, to Osama, to Saddam, to Samuel Doe, authoritarian leaders who end up in the U.S.'s good graces are never there for long.

Limits of Reciprocity
What Liberians and the Liberian government should be doing is strategizing, devising our own "Liberia Policy for the U.S." which factors in seriously our checkered history with unsentimental bias.

We should also rely on a corpus of intellectual and creative work that has already investigated our 'limits of reciprocity' with the United States. Liberian filmmaker Nancee Oku Bright's film, Liberia: America's Stepchild, explores the torturous relationship between Liberia and the United States, with her thesis being that the U.S. sees Liberia as an 'outside' child, one who is illegitimate upon conception and can be used and abused at will without consequence. And Liberian academic Dr. D. Elwood Dunn also interrogates this relationship in his book, Liberia and the United States During the Cold War: Limits of Reciprocity, showing that the Cold War placed Liberia in a very strategic position to exploit its relationship with the United States, yet with unintended consequences.

In this new political dispensation, it should be clear that Liberia should hold the U.S. at arm's length, that hosting AFRICOM or any U.S. satellite post is out of the question, that we have to use them just as strategically as they have used us. With the geopolitics of China and other emerging nations, Liberia needs to develop a "Look South Policy," not because we have become alienated, as in the case of Zimbabwe, but because we have made a conscious decision to explore other options, remembering that the U.S. will act only in its interest and leave those caught in the crossfire to fend for themselves.

We deserve to know the details of Taylor's relationship with the CIA. It is crucial to our development planning, historical remembrance, healing and nation-building.

© 2012 African Arguments.

For more information on Liberia and Charles Taylor, please read Colin Waugh's Charles Taylor and Liberia

BBC News: Meghalaya, India: Where women rule, and men are suffragettes

2012-01-20T15:10:00.000Z

In the small hilly Indian state of Meghalaya, a matrilineal system operates with property names and wealth passing from mother to daughter rather than father to son - but some men are campaigning for change.

When early European settlers first arrived here they nicknamed it "the Scotland of the East" on account of its evocative rolling hills.

Coincidentally, today the bustling market in the state capital, Shillong, is awash with tartan in the form of the traditional handloom shawls worn ubiquitously since the autumn chill arrived.

Not far from here the village of Cherrapunji once measured an astonishing 26.5m (87ft) of rain in one year, a fact still acknowledged by the Guinness book as a world record.

But the rainy season is over for the time being and it is Meghalaya's other major claim to fame that I am here to investigate.

It appears that some age-old traditions have been ruffling a few feathers of late, causing the views of a small band of male suffragettes to gain in popularity, reviving some rather outspoken opinions originally started by a small group of intellectuals in the 1960s.

I am sitting across a table from Keith Pariat, President of Syngkhong-Rympei-Thymmai, Meghalaya's very own men's rights movement.

He is quick to assure me that he and his colleagues "do not want to bring women down," as he puts it. "We just want to bring the men up to where the women are."

Mr Pariat, who ignored age-old customs by taking his father's surname is adamant that matriliny is breeding generations of Khasi men who fall short of their inherent potential, citing alcoholism and drug abuse among its negative side-effects.

"If you want to know how much the Khasis favour women just take a trip to the labour ward at the hospital," he says.

"If it's a girl, there will be great cheers from the family outside. If it's a boy, you will hear them mutter politely that, 'Whatever God gives us is quite all right.'"

Mr Pariat cites numerous examples of how his fellow brethren are being demoralised. These include a fascinating theory involving the way that gender in the local Khasi language reflects these basic cultural assumptions.

"A tree is masculine, but when it is turned into wood, it becomes feminine," he begins.
"The same is true of many of the nouns in our language. When something becomes useful, its gender becomes female.

"Matriliny breeds a culture of men who feel useless."

I talk to Patricia Mukkum, the well-respected editor of Shillong's daily newspaper. She assures me that her heritage is only one of the reasons why she has risen to the level she has and points out that the tradition of excluding women from the political decision making process is still very strong in their culture.

As a mother of children by three different Khasi fathers however, she is the first to admit that their societal anomaly has afforded her ample opportunities to be both a mother and a successful career woman.

Making reference to the routine problems facing women just over the border in West Bengal, Miss Mukkum is resolute.

"Our culture offers a very safe sanctuary for women," she declares.

I decide to see for myself in a remote village in the East Khasi Hills. After two hours walking through thick jungle I meet 42-year-old Mary.

She is a "Ka Khadduh", the youngest daughter in her family and consequently, the one destined to live with her parents until she inherits the family house. Her husband, 36-year-old Alfred, lives with them.

When I talk to her inside their home, Mary tells me that women do not trust men to look after their money so they take control of it themselves. I glance at Alfred for a response but he musters only a smile.

Mary goes on: "Most men in our village leave school early to help their fathers in the fields. This is a great detriment to their education."

I turn to Alfred once more. He responds with another shy smile.

Mary admits she has never heard of the men's right's movement, but thinks the system will never change.

Alfred maintains his Mona Lisa smile.

As we are talking, a praying mantis careers into our hut and slams into the side of my head.
After the laughter dies down, I take the opportunity to break the ice with Alfred by pointing out that female mantises eat their mates after sex, making a gesture with my arms mimicking the insect's claws, an action the Khasi called "takor" and one which turns out to be the gesticular equivalent of sticking two fingers up at someone. There is more laughter at my expense.

Forty minutes later however I have yet to get a comment from Mary's husband and all too soon it is time to leave.

I feel that the last word should come from Alfred so I ask my translator to target a simple question directly at him.

"What does he think of the matrilineal system?"

There is a long and considered pause. After what seems like an eternity the silence is finally broken.

"He like," pipes up Mary, and it is time to go.

BBC © 2012

Yanis Varoufakis: Why, for Greece’s and Europe’s sake, the PSI ought to fail

2012-01-20T12:14:00.000Z

Headlines the world over ‘agonise’, on behalf of Greece and Europe, on whether the PSI+ negotiations will come to a conclusion. The presumption is that, if they succeed, Greece will be reprieved and Europe (with France and the EFSF having recently been downgraded) will buy some much needed extra time to put, at long last, its house in order. Nonsense, I say!

This PSI+ is yet another assault on Reason. It constitutes, as I have already argued, a fallacy in search of a rationale. It should be allowed to die a quiet death. Greece should simply announce that its March bond repayments are postponed until a comprehensive solution is found; one that includes a solution not only to the Greek malaise but also to the problems of Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy and, of course, of the French and German banks (not to mention those of the periphery). If anything can persuade Mrs Merkel and Mr Sarkozy to act in a rational manner, it must be an unruly Greek default. Averting that default in March will simply give our leaders yet another excuse to keep fiddling while the eurozone is burning.

But will a Greek default not mean that the CDSs will fire? Yes, it will. Will this not cause our banks big problems? Of course it will. Will the ECB not have a fit at the thought that it will end up with oodles of worthless Greek bonds on its books? It surely will. But these ‘disasters’ are, compared with what is going on presently, blessings in disguise:

The CDS payments will force Europe to end the denial regarding its banks’ state.
The banks will become much more amenable to recapitalisation by the EFSF (as opposed to relying on the ECB’s LTRO and on shrinking their loan books).
As for the ECB itself, it will have to come clean about the true nature of its LTRO and bond purchasing program; to abandon the pretence of having nothing to do with the eurozone’s fiscal side of things.

Europe will be, in summary, forced to look, for the first time since the Crisis erupted, for a comprehensive solution, as opposed for a way of hiding its problems under a very thin carpet.

My rationale is simple: From the beginning, in May 2010, the various Greek bailouts have given Europe an excuse for avoiding the harsh realities of this systemic Crisis. They kept buying time by micromanaging Greece’s debt repayments month-in-month-out. Meanwhile, the Greek social economy was imploding (with investment grinding to an halt and capital flooding out) and the contagion was spreading like a runaway forest fire northwards and westwards. Something has to give. This vicious cycle has to be broken somehow. The announcement of some PSI+ pseudo-deal will feed this cycle, not break it. In contrast, an official PSI+ failure, followed by a Greek default in March, stands a great chance of devastating the vicious cycle currently consuming the eurozone.

To those who argue (especially here in Greece) that Greece can still be saved in the context of the recently agreed policies, my response is: Nonsense! The combination of Greece’s Bailout MkII and of the Greek PSI+, even if it succeeds fully, cannot put Greece back on a sustainable path (to… 120% of debt-to-GDP). That would require not only a 100% participation rate in the PSI+ (something that will simply never occur) but also a growth rate for the Greek economy of at least 2%. Under the current recessionary climate both within and without Greece, the latter is as likely as the prospect of a flood in central Sahara. So, since Greece’s debt is, independently of the PSI+ deal, on an unsustainable path, it is imperative that we stop kicking the proverbial can up the hill and opt for a comprehensive default.

The result will not be pretty. But it will be far preferable to what we are experiencing now. To those who take for granted that a Greek default leads naturally to a Greek exit from the eurozone, I have a simple question: Why? Why can Greece not default within the eurozone? Why can the official sector (the EU-ECB-IMF troika, together with the EFSF) not fund the banks directly (without giving the hedge funds a penny and, instead, letting private investors benefit from the CDSs they have bought)? Indeed, why would the surplus countries want to throw Greece out of the eurozone when it is abundantly clear that this move would start a short, sharp process of disintegration (with Portugal and Ireland following suit)? By what legal means will the surplus countries force Greece out, even if they choose to do so? And why would Greece choose to leave if it can default within the eurozone?

In short, any jovial announcement of the PSI+’s success will be detrimental to Europe. On the other hand, an official failure of the PSI+ negotiations, followed by a temporary cessation of payments by Greece to its creditors (until a genuinely comprehensive solution is found for the Euro Crisis as a whole), appears as possibly the eurozone’s last chance for arresting this agonisingly slow slide into oblivion.

From Yanis Varoufakis' Blog

Yanis Varoufakis: Complexity Fetishism, the Euro Crisis and a worthy challenge for 2012: Part B

2012-01-20T12:03:00.002Z

**Part B: The lure of naive models in the era of financialisation (*)**

[(*) For the rationale of this four-part series of posts, as well as for Part A of the series, click here.]

Preface: Part A of this four-part series of posts began by focusing on the problematic application of the analytic-synthetic method to socio-economic interactions. It argued that the economists’ penchant for ‘analysing’ complexity (through a process of breaking it down to its ‘constituent parts’, before synthesising the knowledge of those parts into a macro theory of the whole) delivers logically incoherent insights regarding the phenomena under study. But, remarkably, because the analysis itself is so complex (from a mathematical perspective), few can see through these models and realise their inanity. And given that the economists’ models have a great deal of utility for politicians and financiers, they become established as ‘conventional wisdom’.

B1. It is a matter of dishonesty? On the process by which the economics’ profession becomes ‘captured’ by its theoretical artefacts

If I am right (that the analytic-synthetic approach of mainstream economics produces logical incoherence of untold complexity), how come so many smart economists pursue this practice, building on it fabulous careers in the best universities? Is there a conspiracy? No and no, is the simple answer. There is no conspiracy and it would be absurd to think that the economists involved knowingly indulge in theoretical subterfuge. So, what is going on? Here is what I think the answer is:

Economists are, by and large, an exceptionally open-minded people, willing to countenance any proposition, however farfetched, weird or even… leftwing. All they ask for in return is that the said proposition is embedded within their models. This ‘openness’ is made all the more significant by the fact that, undoubtedly, any conceivable ‘story’ can be told by tinkering with the economists’ axioms and hypotheses. Enticed by the prospect of unbounded theoretical possibility, the aspiring young economist delights in tinkering her way into the infinite vistas of potential economic narratives of everything and anything; she even revels in sailing the oceans of indeterminacy stirred up by her tinkering.

At some point, however, the fun must give way to publications, appointments and full induction into the profession. At that point, the lurking gatekeepers (supervisor, referees, Head of Department etc.) present her with a fresh condition: To be allowed into the priesthood, her models must have first achieved ‘closure’ (i.e. a restricted set of solutions, or ‘equilibria’ as economists call them); she must, in effect, submit them to the merciless tightening of her axioms in order to produce an ‘orderly’ narrative on what her model actually predicts.

The problem with squeezing a determinate solution out of her models is that to do so she must tighten her axioms in a manner that, at some level, defies logic. In the example mentioned in Section A2 of Part A the hapless economist must assume that certain unknowable probabilities are not only known but that everyone shares precisely the same estimate of them. But how can the unknowable be commonly known? The only answer the economist has is that, if the unknowable is not commonly known, then there can be no solution to her model (and no prediction of what will transpire). The honest retort, at that point, is to say: So what? If this is how things are, then clearly the model cannot predict anything.

Alas, the cost of admitting this is too great. Having already invested great energy and hope in her modelling, it takes a brave and tragic theorist to make this confession and call it quits. For if she does make this admission, her model will not be ‘closed’ neatly, her paper will not be published and her career will not take off. What tends to happen in the economics’ profession is the following:

a tiny minority of practitioners ‘close’ their models reluctantly, tucking critical comments away in their papers’ footnotes, biding their time and, once tenured, turn into resident critics.
some ‘close’ their models and steer clear of any controversy but, nonetheless, manage to retain the memory of how their profession’s imperatives whipped them back, from a complex and rewarding inquiry, to a paradigm devised for arid theorizing in the context of which a sophisticated theory of behaviour, of price formation, of crises etc. is as viable as a fire under a mighty waterfall
the vast majority not only leave no stone unturned to ‘close’ their models, often with moral enthusiasm, but also sweep under the emotional carpet any memory of how their models’ ‘closure’ was bought at the price of a ‘haircut’ on logic.

Once young economists have compromised themselves in this manner, in order to become established in the academic profession (usually at Graduate School), they soon discover that they must do so again and again and again, if they are to stay the professional course. For once they are called upon to impart their wisdom in the amphitheatres, or to ‘advise’ government, business etc., their audiences demand a nuanced story of how their ‘closed’ models apply to the real world. Telling them that you can have either such a nuanced narrative or determinate models but never both requires the combination of intellectual honesty, mathematical acumen, and secure academic employment that only exceedingly rare birds have ever possessed. In their absence, the vast majority sustain the illusion of a nuanced, determinate theory by keeping shifting backwards and forwards between (A) ‘closed’ oversimplifications and (B) complex-yet-indeterminate models; and, last but not least, by (sub-intentionally) hiding all this under a rhetorical cloak which gives (even to themselves) the impression of a serene, unchallenged scientific authority.

B2. How the failed models became functional to the most toxic aspects of politics and financialisation

It is of course true that the very sight of a system of equations inspires a natural urge to solve it (and a feeling of disappointment when it proves over-determined). However, the economists’ zeal goes beyond that natural urge. The reason they are so hell bent on the endogenous determination of all variables (prices, quantities, wages, profits, but even social norms, moral entitlements, psychological utilities) exclusively on the basis of the initial, primitive data of their mathematical model, is that they understand the great rewards they have been receiving in the universities from having convinced the powers that be that they, the economists, are the only genuine social scientists. They have tasted the large rewards from ‘going it alone’; from appearing to be self-sufficient social scientists; ‘scientists of society’ who need no help from historians, psychologists, anthropologists or, God forbid, sociologists.

In this sense, economics’ closed-model approach is enforced by the invisible hand of academic rent seeking. This is how the (unseen to most) logical incoherence of their models (which is necessary in order to close them) is compensated for: By large academic research projects, salaries well above those of other social theorists and, importantly, an open communications’ channel with those in authority both in the financial sector and in government. Let us focus on these two channels: the one linking economic theorists to the world of political authority and the one connecting them to Wall Street et al.

Starting with the link between the economists’ models and financialisation, have you ever wondered where the financial engineers found the courage to argue that their own models could value the toxic derivatives that they were creating? The answer is devastatingly simple: The pricing models they used could only work (i.e. come up with a number denoting the ‘value’ of the CDO under construction) if their author imposed upon them the sort of tight axioms (or farfetched hypotheses) which the economists had learnt to adopt (against logic and reason) in order to ‘close’ their own economic models (in pursuit of academic success). Thus emerged a commonality of purpose: The most highly regarded mathematical economists, who turned a blind eye to the lack of logical coherence of certain assumptions necessary to ‘close’ their models, discovered that financial engineers who adopted these same assumptions made a bundle of money (by managing to turn their CDOs into tradable commodities). And the financial engineers, when needing to justify their models, pointed to the similar assumptions made by the best economists in the universities; indeed, by Nobel Prize winners…

Suddenly, economists bending the rules of logic in order to ‘close’ their models (for the sake of deriving determinate economic forecasts from them) entered into a loop of positive mutual reinforcement with the financial engineers who copied the economists’ axioms to compute the value of their financial products, and thus to enrich themselves and their employers. This feedback effect between economists and financial engineers proved exceedingly strong and highly lucrative for both. The economists involved, significantly, became all the rage in Wall Street. Guess which type of economist (the latter or those who kept questioning the logic of the said axioms) got all the perks, the large research budgets, a free pass to come-and-go between their University and some great bank at will and, lastly, the kudos within academia: Yes, the ones with a greater propensity to turn a blind eye to the logical flimsiness of the axioms necessary to ‘close’ the models.

Turning now to the link between these economic models and the political currents of the era, it is helpful to begin with an observation: Politicians who wanted to ride the wave of financialisation had a natural tendency to suggest to the electorate that what was going on was natural, that there were no risks involved of some Crisis (like that which, eventually, hit us), that even observed unemployment was OK, natural, part of the adjustment process that the labour market must go through. In technical language, mainstream politicians who posed as Wall Street’s blue eyed boys, had an interest in presenting current prices and interest rates are sufficient statistics by which to estimate the future as a linear extrapolation of the present. Financial markets were, thus, axiomatically conceived of as efficient mechanisms for spreading risk and distributing capital that no humble intellect could plausibly doubt or second-guess.

In all this, any serious discussion of the possibility of some Crisis was dismissed as non-sensical. And when one asked “Why is it non-sensical?” the answer took the form of a recapitulation of the models on which the forecasts and the valuations were predicated, without of course ever delving into the logically incoherent assumptions that most could not even discern.

In this sense, the economics profession’s ostracism of any analysis that ventures beyond the economists’ hidden axioms was tantamount to a subconscious strategy that brought great rewards to the economists involved, wonderful profits for the financial engineers that copied the same hidden axioms into the formulae that priced their derivatives and, lastly, re-election and long terms in office for the politicians whose policies were based on these models.

While the world is currently struggling to make sense of the tumult visited upon it by a particular strand of globalising capitalism, the latter’s best defence comes in the form of thousands of young economists being quickmarched headlong into academic obscurantism and socio-economic irrelevance. Instead of acting as the avant guard that will prise out the truth about the causes and nature of the current crisis, they are conscripted to this perpetual feedback mechanism which mutually reinforces (a) the current economic order and (b) the core of mainstream economics. Future historians undoubtedly will mark this out as our era’s most fascinating, and most tragic, evolutionary social dynamic.

B3. Epilogue: The curious success of theoretical and practical failure

Perhaps the greatest puzzle for our post-2008 times concerns the curious fact that nothing succeeds these days like grand failure. Economists draw their immense narrative power from an audaciously circular process of mutual reinforcement: faithful to its constitutive analytic method, which they juggle continuously in a manner that hides their implications (and, often, their logical incoherence), toxic economics retains its hold over the economics mainstream and rules itself out of engagement with the logic of really existing capitalism. Then, those who manage the latter supposedly on our behalf (politicians, bureaucrats, Wall Street), supra-intentionally, reward toxic economics with institutional power which helps it maintain a strict embargo on any serious scrutiny of either its own foundations or of really-existing capitalism.

It seems almost indelicate to point out that, while this feedback mechanism remains opaque and unexamined by the rest of us, the crony capitalism we live under and the toxic economics that supposedly sheds light on it will remain strangers who reinforce each other’s dominance as long as (a) economics remains, courtesy of its ‘closed’ model methods, innocent of the logic of crony capitalism and (b) the logic of crony capitalism spreads faster and deeper when economics’ method help it remain toxic.

NEXT: The next part in this series, Part C, will be entitled “Crisis and the temptation of Complexity Fetishism: The eurozone caseThe next part in this series, Part B, will be entitled “The political lure of naive models in the era of financialisation”.

Further reading:

Yanis Varoufakis (2008). ‘Game Theory: Can it unify the social sciences?’, Organisational Studies, 29, 1255-77
Yanis Varoufakis (2006). ‘Rational Rules of Thumb in Finite Dynamic Games: N-person backward induction with inconsistently aligned beliefs and full rationality’, American Journal of Applied Science, 2 (Special Issue), 57-60
Shaun Hargreaves-Heap and Yanis Varoufakis (2004). Game Theory: A Critical Text, London and New York: Routledge
Abstractions and morality in modern finance, Posted by Lisa Pollack on 23^rd December 2011, FTAlphaville http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2011/12/23/814381/abstractions-and-morality-in-modern-finance/

From Yanis Varoufakis' Blog

Check out Yanis Varoufakis' book, The Global Minotaur, available from Zed Books

Zed Books

Yanis Varoufakis: Canada’s Stark Options: Recovery or Regress?

Steve Keen's article for the World Economic Forum in Davos

Munther Fahmi's Residency Reinstated

My dear friends and supporters,

I am thrilled to announce that the Government of Israel hasaccepted the Israeli Supreme Court recommendation that my residency bereinstated.

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Taylor, Taylor, How Did Your Garden Grow?

Inquiring Liberian Minds Deserve to Know

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Of Oil Tankers, China & the economic shift!

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Oilholics Synonymous Report

© Gaurav Sharma 2011. Photo: Front Cover - Oil on Water © Zed Books

Somalia's al-Shabab hit by major Amisom offensive

allAfrica: Liberia- Charles Taylor a CIA Informant - the Need to Retool Nation's Relationship With the U.S.

BBC News: Meghalaya, India: Where women rule, and men are suffragettes

Yanis Varoufakis: Why, for Greece’s and Europe’s sake, the PSI ought to fail

Yanis Varoufakis: Complexity Fetishism, the Euro Crisis and a worthy challenge for 2012: Part B

Part B: The lure of naive models in the era of financialisation (*)

**Part B: The lure of naive models in the era of financialisation (*)**