What happens when a small island African country discovers oil in its territorial waters? (Via Der Spiegel) In a perfect world, it should be the way out of poverty and to development and higher living standards for all. But this is not a perfect world. And this is not a hypothetical situation. It is the story of what happened to Sao Tome and Principe (See the BBC country profile for Sao Tome and Principe for general background information on this country.).
And it is a textbook example of how power differentials and resource curse combine to create a situation where a few will benefit tremendously and the many will be left in the same abject poverty as they were before and where transnational corporations and richer and more powerful countries can throw their weight around with the help of corrupt officials. Read more
In light of the different posts on good and bad Democrats I thought I’d post on the principle of party invariance and why I think it should be considered for PB2.0. Read more
Jeremy Seabrook has a very pessimistic but, I think, powerful column in the Guardian in light of Barack Obama’s world tour. It centers on Obama but has wider implications for the way we consider political leadership in the global context. For those of us who regularly read Seabrook, it is a well know fact that he is vehemently opposed to corporate globalization (he writes for the New Internationalist as well) and is a subscriber to the Habermasian school of Crisis of Legitimacy in the political sphere. This column is no departure from this.
His starting point here is the focus on personality politics: Read more
Christian Chavagneux and Ronen Palan’s Les Paradis Fiscaux is a great (and mercifully short) introduction to tax heavens, banking secrecy and the offshore financial world. And it’s in French. For my non-French readers, not to worry, hopefully, my review will give enough substantial information… or, y’all could learn French! However, I have preserved what I think are the best quotes in the original language so as to preserve their value.
The book’s central thesis is that the development of offshore financial centers since the 1960s is an integral part of the dynamics of contemporary globalization, both in the financial and productive sectors. Tax heavens are now a pillar without which contemporary economic globalization could not function.
And surprisingly, they have not been studied to the extent that they should have been. For orthodox economic literature, tax heavens are a product of overtaxation in industrialized countries or a simple manifestation of informal economies. Both views are faulty according to Chavagneux and Palan. Read more
"Today’s rich had formed their own virtual country. They were in fact wealthier than most nations. By 2004, the richest 1 percent of Americans were earning about $1.35 trillion a year - greater than the total national incomes of France, Italy or Canada.
And with their huge numbers, they had built a self-contained world unto themselves, complete with thwie own health-care system (concierge doctors), travel networks (Net Jets, destination clubs), separate economy (double-digit income gains and double-digit inflation), and language ("who’s your household manager?"). They didn’t just hire gardening crews; they hired "personal arborists." The rich weren’t just getting richer; they were becoming financial foreigners, creating their own country within a country, their own society within a society, and their economy within an economy.
As promised, here are my initial reflections (or intellectual masturbation, as PLuk would say… works for me too!) on the conception of social justice that I think PB2.0 should promote and apply to whatever structure it ends up having.
A quick response to Paul on the intellectual masturbation:
"In ‘why I write’, George Orwell claimed that all writers were motivated by some mixture of four motives. The first was ‘sheer egoism’, which must to some be present if (as Orwell assumed) a ‘writer’ is not someone who is not content to write but wants to publish. The second was ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, which Orwell took to be some concern for the form of one’s work. The third was ‘historical impulse’, or, more broadly, ‘the desire to see things as they are.’ The last was ‘political purpose’ — using the word "political" in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter people’s idea of the kind of society they should strive after."
That’s a quote from Brian Barry’s book, Why Social Justice Matters, which inspired some (but not all) of the reflections below.
Again, my thanks to Lambert for offering me this opportunity.
I am one of the people who thinks that PB2.0 should be both about substance and structure. Both topics deserve posts of their own but in this post, I focus more on substance: a basic conceptualization of social justice.
Lambert has kindly invited me to write this week’s installment in our PB2.0 series and I am happy to do so, although I live in a Central Time area so, my post will probably be up around 6pm, Eastern.
My contribution will focus on what I think should be central to PB2.0: social justice (Lambert and I have a slight difference of view on this, so, I’m sure / I hope he’ll explain in the discussion). Read more
Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog (Lambert, where’s my “Department of Analytical Tools”??).
Watch this first amazing video. It is 16-minute long but worth every second (and see this BBC background page):
Those of us old enough to have lived through the 1980s remember Bhopal as a major industrial disaster in 1983. On December 3, 1984, a Union Carbide pesticide plant (UC was bought by Dow Chemical in 2001) released poisoned gas that killed an official estimate of approximately 3,800 people (actually doctors on site claim that 15,000 died within a month). Over 500,000 have been affected by inhaling the gas. Read more
Via Le Monde, everybody hates tax havens but they do not exist at the margins of the global financial system. If anything, they are an integral part of it and every year, billions of dollars land there. They are an integral part of the infrastructure of international finances.
What circulates through tax havens? Clean and dirty money (proceeds from illegal activities that end up there for purposes of money-laundering), tax-evasion money. Tax havens were allowed to prosper by all the economic powers, but now, they are worried because they have realized that these havens make funding terrorism easier and more discreet. In the past months, we also discovered that these place facilitate tax fraud on a grand scale, as the case of Liechtenstein where more than a thousand Western people deposited their funds. So, it is not really a surprise that this topic has come up at the G8 meeting. Read more
Via the Guardian, the surveillance society is going global:
"A comprehensive transatlantic pact clearing the way for the unprecedented supply of private data on European citizens to the American authorities is to be promoted by France in support of the US-driven campaign to combat terrorism and transnational crime.
The French government is expected to use its six-month presidency of the EU, starting tomorrow, to build on 18 months of confidential negotiations between Washington and Brussels aimed at clearing the complex legal obstacles to the exchange of personal information with the Americans.
The controversial proposed pact, a "framework agreement" on common data protection principles, is likely to enable the Americans to access the credit card histories, banking details and travel habits of Europeans, although senior officials in Brussels deny US reports that the Americans will also be able to snoop on the internet browsing records of Europeans." Read more
Have I ever mentioned how much I dislike President Sarkozy and his administration?
Via Context Crawler, comes this article from the Washington Post, by Shankar Vedantam on happiness surveys. We take it for granted, and it is supported by surveys, that people tend to be happier when their economic situation is more secure and overall better. That is fairly uncontroversial. And right now, the economy stinks, gas prices are through the roof, so, the mood is on the gloomy side. Straightforward as well. If the economy were better, people would be happier. What is the paradox then? Read more
In his presentation, Robinson contrasted his approach to globalization as qualitatively different phenomenon (transnationalism) as opposed to the school of thought he labeled "new imperialism." Robinson’s view of globalization involves specific features:
the rise of truly transnational capital with integration of all countries into that system;
the rise of the transnational state (TNS) where class power is exercised through networks and by the transnational capitalist class (TCC - especially its political / executive component);
the development of new relations of power and inequalities on a global scale
the increased power of the transnational corporation (TNC)
So, for the maths-oriented among us: Globalization = TNS + TNC + TCC = true transnationalism. Read more
I watched The Devil’s Miner (website) last night for the first time (it was originally from 2005) and what a film this is. The central question of the film is
How do we live in dignity?
Especially when you are 14 years old, living in Potosi, Bolivia, and you work at a mine inCerro Rico, "the mountain that eats men"? The mines there have been exploited for 450 years and are responsible for 8 million dead. Initially, exploited by the Spaniards, the mines were taken over by the Indios (indigenous peoples) and run as cooperatives but it is still as dangerous and it is still drudgery.
The film’s central character is Basilio He is 14 and has been working in the mines since he was ten. He lost his father when he was two, so, now, he is the father in the family, so much so that his little sister, Vanessa, calls him "papa". He works with his little brother Bernardino, who is twelve (also in the mines). The boys go to school for half a day and spend the rest of the time working in the mines. Read more
It is detrimental, says Thilo Thielke in Der Spiegel, because it creates unfairness and dependency in many different ways. First, using the case of Kenya, Thielke invokes a classical concept of formal organizational behavior: self-perpetuation.
"The roads are in horrid disrepair, and they’ll stay that way for a while. As a result, it would take days or even weeks to get the corn from the west to the northern parts of the country. But why would they need it there anyway? There’s a shortage in the north because the World Food Program is usually there to hand out food for free. The UN’s employees are paid to fight hunger, and that’s why they usually write reports in which they dramatically portray the situation in Africa and which they usually end with appeals demanding more donated food.
These developmental aid workers, whose reports largely shape our image of Africa, behave this way to a certain extent out of an instinct for self-preservation that they believe the Africans don’t have. Without help, they say, all the Africans will starve. And, indeed, without aid, all the helpers would also be out of a job."
A first problem then is that the persistent handing out of free food (largely surplus from Western countries) eliminates any incentives to be locally self-sufficient. And there is also the idea that the WFP needs people to be hungry in order to justify its existence and work (and some well-paying jobs for UN consultants). Even if some adventurous local entrepreneur tried to start local food production in an area with a numerous malnourished or under-nourished population, the results would likely be disastrous: Read more
The Global Studies Association conference is actually interesting because it still human-sized (unlike the ASA), so, there aren’t too many sessions, you can attend most of them, the attendance is not monstrous, so you get to talk to the speakers, and quite a few prestigious ones too.
This year’s conference, at Pace University in New York City, was titled The Nation in the Global Era. So, of course, the big question, which has been hotly debated ever since the academic recognition of globalization as a significant phenomenon (itself a hotly debated topic), was that of the relevance of the modern nation-state in the global era. In a more nuanced fashion, the sessions centered around the transformation, role and relevance of the nation-state in the global context. Read more
MoveOn recently allowed members to sign a virtual get well, be well card to be delivered to Senator Kennedy that contained the message that the entire liberal/progressive community was with him in his battle against the recently diagnosed cancer he will fighting.
Today he is in surgery doing just that.
The MoveOn card allowed members to add a personal word of their own, and I decided mine would be a simple one line quote - the last line of the speech the Senator had given to the deeply divided Democratic Convention in 1980. To make sure I remembered correctly, I consulted the speech.
Reading the speech again, one of many times I’ve turned back to it, it’s relevance to the divisive primary we are currently living through fairly shouted at me. Read more
Some campaigns aim to unseat board members. The CtW Investment Group, which is affiliated with a coalition of labor unions, wants board members at six financial firms, including Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, to explain what they did to manage subprime-loan risks. Says CtW’s Mike Garland: “Absent compelling explanations, we’ll recommend that shareholders vote against reelection.”
Department of about damn time. Notice that it is labor unions taking action, NOT institutional investors. Remember who your friends are, it is not the manager of your mutual fund.
The Republican party is an organized crime cartel that has been systematically stealing money from hard-working Americans and stuffing it all into the pockets of the very rich for 40 years. Read more
Surpise vacations, made possible by loving friends and family, in which both jacuzzis and learning are enjoyed, are the very Best. Thanks, People who Made it Possible.
So, what’s going on? It’s always fun to come back to the blogosphere after a few days off, to see what is bunching people’s panties today. Yawn, spare me the Hilbama wars for now, I didn’t miss that at all. Anything else on your brain?
Christian Chavagneux and Ronen Palan’s 
The book I want to start this conversation on social class is Robert Frank’s 
I watched