outsidein »

• Di-Aping, climate change and the Holocaust

  December 21, 2009 @ 8:28 am | by Bryan

  

  [The Copenhagen Accord] asks Africa to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries. It is a solution based on values, the very same values in our opinion that funnelled six million people in Europe into furnaces. – Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping (Chief negotiator for the G77 at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen).

  You’ve got to hand it to the Sudanese chair of the G77. Europe is still pretty touchy about the holocaust, and the suggestion that the continent is helping to get the gas chambers cranked up was always going to evoke a response. Di-Aping knows how to make headline grabbing statements, but is there any substance to his charge?

  First of all, there’s the suicide pact stuff. On that, I’m with Di-Aping. The smaller countries don’t really get much consideration (and that’s me trying to be as generous as possible to the rich and powerful ones). Barack Obama didn’t take Malawi, Bangladeshi, a couple of Pacific Island nations and Paraguay into a private room to discuss their grievances. Part of that is Malawi et. al. aren’t responsible for much of the greenhouse gases the world produces so they can’t be expected to be at the forefront of a new green revolution. That said, because they aren’t very well off and don’t have much political clout, the views of Malawi et. al. aren’t going to be seriously considered. Let’s face it, Greenpeace have a better chance of getting a hearing from the Obama administration on the effects of climate change than Malawi. I’m not the only one who thinks as much. According to Michael Levi of the Council for Foreign Relations, “The climate treaty process isn’t going to die, but the real work of coordinating international efforts to reduce emissions will primarily occur elsewhere.” “That elsewhere,” speculates the New York Times, “will likely be a much smaller group of nations, roughly 30 countries responsible for 90 percent of global warming emissions,” i.e. the 30 most powerful nations. As for the weak, heard of Darwin?

  Then there’s the values stuff. What values led to the holocaust? I’m no expert in this area. On some level, ‘The Pearl’ must be right – there was money to be made in the exploitation and murder of millions of innocents. More interesting philosophical and sociological explanations have been put forward, but when all is said and done, most come down to the fact that we (people) like situations that work to our favour, especially if the consequences (or victims) are safely out of sight. The structure of the global political economy, for example, is such that I can easily afford to buy a cup of coffee most mornings, while the farmer who grew and harvested that coffee might struggle to feed her family. The distance between us allows me to sleep peacefully at night.

  So maybe Di-Aping is right on both counts. Maybe the small and vulnerable will continue to pay the price for the short-sightedness of the rich and powerful so long as ‘the dollar bill’ lies at the centre of our global value system.

• Hooray for the G20?

  September 25, 2009 @ 1:50 pm | by Bryan

  

  “The fact that 20 or so individuals right now are determining economic trade policies for four to five billion people just isn’t right,” Mr. Griffith said. “That’s why we’re here.”

  Most news organisations are making a big deal over the fact that the G8 is being replaced by the G20. The fact that a handful of the most powerful ‘developing nations’ are being added to the elite club that gets to set the economic rules for the rest is supposed to represent the dawn of a new inclusive era or something. It does no such thing.

  Let’s take a look at some of these ‘developing nations’. China. India. South Africa. Turkey. Brazil. These aren’t exactly the nations that I would pick were I trying to get a good understanding of the concerns of the typical state in the South. China is China. India, while being home to some of the world’s poorest people, is also incredibly wealthy. So much so, the Indians not only sent a rocket to the moon, they were also the ones who recently discovered water there. They’re not exactly Malawi or Haiti – nations trying to come up with a formula for growing enough food to meet domestic needs. As for Brazil, the OECD has been trying to woo them for a while. The OECD, you may have noticed, have not expressed much interest in Cuba or Paraguayi. The G20 is so inclusive that neither Nigeria nor Egypt, Africa’s second and third wealthiest nations, were deemed worthy. And yet, just about all of Europe is represented there by the EU. But just to make sure, France, Germany, Italy and Britain get their own special seats. The same is true of North America – the US, Canada and Mexico are all members.

  So just to re-cap, the G20 is made up of Europe, North America, and everyone else with too much economic clout to ignore. And what happens when only the powerful get to make the rules? Let’s look at the response to the recent financial crisis, shall we? As was recently demonstrated on the excellent three part BBC television series, The Love of Money, the politically powerful got together with the economically powerful to craft a solution to the crisis. Unsurprisingly, it was decided that to avoid catastrophe, the economically powerful could not be allowed to fail. Equally unsurprisingly, the chosen mechanism of their rescue was a transfer of wealth from the rest, to those deemed to large to fail. Could it be that the proposal to transfer wealth to struggling mortgage holders instead of, or in tandem with the banks bailout, would have got more of a hearing were struggling mortgage holders part of the deliberations? Hoping that China, Brazil or even South Africa will represent Malawi’s economic interests is like expecting AIB or Bank of Ireland to ask the Finance Minister to consider my local credit union’s needs, and give some of the taxpayer money allocated to the banks to St. Anthony’s Credit Union instead. I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

  Like Trevor Griffith, I have serious problems with a small group from the most powerful nations making potentially life and death decisions for the rest of the planet. If however, that’s the direction the world is going to take, then at least let’s be completely honest about it and get rid of the charade that is the United Nations General Assembly. Maybe let’s get rid of the UN altogether? It can’t be that important if the real decision makers use it as a pit stop en-route to G20 meetings.

• A German view of the world?

  March 26, 2009 @ 3:26 pm | by Bryan

  

  German Minster of Finance, Peer Steinbrück. Photograph: Jakub Szypulka

  I am fast becoming a fan of Peer Steinbrück, Germany’s Finance Minister. Anyone who has the sense to invite his fiercest critic over to discuss differences of opinion, and potentially iron some of them out, is worth listening to.

  In an interview about six months ago, Steinbrück said,
  “We are experiencing the most severe financial crisis in decades, although one should be careful about historic comparisons with 1929. One thing is clear: After this crisis, the world will no longer be the same. The financial architecture will change globally … There will be shifts in terms of the importance and status of New York and London as the two main financial centers. State-owned banks and funds, as well as commercial banks from Europe, China, Russia and the Arab world will close the gaps, creating new centers of power in the financial world.”

  At an event last night, a London based banker said something similar. He mentioned that he was in the process of moving to a Singapore and taking up a new job there. In his opinion, based on anecdotal evidence, the financial centre of gravity is shifting from London, and he is convinced that in a few years, Shangai will take up the role historically played by London and New York.

  In his at times difficult to read but extraordinarily insightful 1944 book, The Great Transformation, Karl Polyani chronicles introduction of the market-based economy. One of the take-home messages of the book is that once this transformation took place, finance and the market gained more importance than politics and the state. The idea of nominally communist China as the centre of global finance seems to validate that claim.

  As for that market-based economic system itself, when asked if capitalism itself is in crisis, Steinbrück gave an interesting answer:
  “I don’t think so. But the behavior of some elites is worth criticizing. We have to be careful not to allow enlightened capitalism to become tainted with questions of legitimacy, acceptance or credibility.”

• Liquor laws

  February 26, 2009 @ 8:15 am | by Bryan

  There is an interesting story on the BBC’s website. A year after Australia’s Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, apologised to Aborigines for ‘past injustices’, not much seems to have changed. In fact, some incredibly paternalistic practices introduced by former Prime Minister John Howard have been extended. Howard, in response to alarming statistics on child sexual abuse, banned the sale and consumption of alcohol in indigenous communities. Similar bans were extended to the sale of pornography. The idea was that a sober male population that wasn’t sexually charged on pornographic material would be less given to sexual assault. That’s probably a fair assumption.

  Like most people, I don’t think there are many things worse than the sexual abuse of children. It needs to be tackled aggressively. I also have no sympathy for people who break the law following substance. But I don’t like the idea of treating a people group like children. Incredibly, it seems as though the Rudd government is being accused of pursuing a line of thought that isn’t too far removed from the one which led to the abduction of Aboriginal children so that they could be raised ‘properly’.

  A friend and former colleague worked for years as a doctor in Alice Springs, a town in Australia’s Northern Territory. He was shocked by the degree of alcohol abuse he witnessed there, particularly within the Aboriginal community. We spent hours debating the degree to which the past, low expectations, and the other social factors contributed to that state of affairs.

  I am by no stretch of the imagination an expert on Australia. But coming from a continent that has suffered under the burden of low expectations, I can empathise with people who are angry about being subject to a different set of laws to the rest of the population.

• Chandrayaan-1

  October 22, 2008 @ 9:10 am | by Bryan

  

  India’s first unmanned moon mission blasts off. Photograph: Reuters

  I am more than a little disappointed that I can’t find the quotation, but many years ago, I read something that came to mind when I read about India’s moon mission. I think it was Kenneth Kaunda, in the preface to a someone’s book, who wrote that while the most developed nations were sending people into space, Africa was still trying to feed her children – or words to that effect.

  It looks like there is a space race in Asia. The Chinese are in the lead, the Indians are in second place, and I’m sure that sooner rather than later more countries will join in. But I can’t help wonder why on earth (excuse the pun) these countries would blow away so much money on what seems to me a frivolous exercise. What do they get from from successful missions to the moon, or Venus, Mars or anywhere else off the planet? Especially when there is still so much work still to be done, in India for example, on poverty eradication, health and education provision, and lately, sectarian violence.

  I am sure there are benefits to the economy in the long run, and a lot of R&D goes into this sort of thing, some of whose results will probably trickle down to the Indian market. But surely there are cheaper and more practical ways of investing in technology.

  All too often, I think developing nations get sucked into the world of the more developed ones for no good reason. I wonder if this is one such occasion?