Showing posts with label corruption. Show all posts
Showing posts with label corruption. Show all posts
Monday, January 18, 2021
Alexei Navalny Arrested on Russian Return
Navalny reminded Russians who will take to the streets to protest his arrest on January 23, 2021, that they are demonstrating not just for him but for themselves. The strength of Navalny's anti-corruption movement derives from its nationalist identity rather than being a construct of the United States or another foreign intervention.
As soon as Alexei Navalny returned to Russia on January 17, 2021, after a 5-month recouperation in Germany from Moscow-ordered nerve agent poisoning, he was arrested for violating the terms of a suspended sentence for a questionable offense.
Russian President Putin is threatened by public support for Navalny's anti-corruption movement and the size of his YouTube audience. Just as the plane carrying Navalny from Germany was about to land in Moscow, it was diverted to another airport away from the group of supporters waiting to greet him. Back at Vnukovo airport in Moscow, police officers detained Novalny's supporters and associates.
Also see earlier posts: "Putin's Private Siberian Project Excludes Alexei Navalny" and "Alexei Navalny's Sudden Siberian Illness."
Saturday, April 18, 2020
China-Mongolia and the Deaths of Race Horses in California
Many aspects of global life illustrate how connected the world is. As preposterous as a connection between China, Mongolia, and last year's deaths of 23 horses at California's Santa Anita racetrack seems, it is a connection worthy of investigation.
On the books, China's Communist regime outlawed gambling when it took over in 1949. Efforts continue to purge online betting apps, and prison awaits those who challenge Chairman Xi's abhorrence of corruption. Nonetheless, local administrators of state-run lotteries manage to take their cuts, gamblers access online casino apps designed in Southeast Asia, illegal mah jong games hide from overhead drones in China's woods and mountains, and police even had to break up gambling at a cricket fighting tournament near Shanghai in August, 2019.
Off shore, casinos dominate Macao, a former Portuguese island and now a Chinese Special Administrative Region. In 2017, New Zealand created a Jockey Club to attract Chinese thoroughbred buyers and to cater to Chinese owners who want to train and race their horses in Australia and New Zealand. When Justify won the Kentucky Derby and the other two legs of the U.S. Triple Crown in 2018, owners from the China Horse Club just laughed after a reporter questioned how racing squared with China's ban on gambling.
If there is a connection between China and the 23 race horses that died at Santa Anita, it runs through China's landlocked northern neighbor, Mongolia. The historic domain of Genghis Khan's horses and riders also is the current home of dusty courses where hundreds of children as young as five ride bareback in races to win a Russian-made car. When racing was legal in China, owners used to send their horses north to strengthen their bones by grazing in the nutrient-rich pastures of Mongolia. Reporting on the fatal leg injury that caused the horse, Mongolian Groom, to be euthanized after the Breeders Cup Classic at Santa Anita in November, 2019, Billy Reed mentioned the need to reassess the calcium-building limestone content of the soil and water where many race horses graze in Kentucky.
As a cause of last year's race horse deaths, in recent months the coronavirus is receiving more attention that the dietary value of Kentucky's pastures, Scientists suspected COVID-19 could pass between animals and humans after researchers discovered pig farmers died of coronavirus in Malaysia. Observers watched bats land on a tree and poop into a vat of pig slop. Tests found the bats carried COVID-19 and transmitted the disease to farmers who had contact with the pig slop.
The coronavirus that affects humans and the equine enteric (gastrointestinal) coronavirus horses pass between each other are both among the large group of RNA messenger viruses. Since both forms of the virus in horses and humans lock onto cells using the same kind of spikes, transmission between these species is highly probable. Lack of evidence showing horses and humans exchange COVID-19 at this time may be a function of a lack of testing fecal samples of thoroughbred race horses and the failure to test personnel at Mongolian Stable, who may have shown little or no initial symptoms of the virus.
In August, 2019, the San Diego Tribune ran a photo showing Enebish Ganbat, a Mongolian who trains horses at Mongolian Stable, kissing Mongolian Groom's face. Such gestures, not unusual among those who love and care for horses, provide ample opportunity for humans and horses to transmit coronavirus to each other. Horses contract equine enteric coronavirus by contact with surfaces exposed to the manure of infected horses or by consuming some of their manure. Therefore, to prevent contracting coronavirus from a horse, people need to wash their hands whenever they touch anything, such as a shovel or pitchfork, that may have been in contact with an infected horse's manure. Unless humans who have or may not yet show symptoms of COVID-19 wear masks, they may spread coronavirus to horses.
Before racing resumes at Santa Anita this summer, last year's fate of Mongolian Groom is reason to test the nutrient value of Kentucky's pastures and to test for the presence of coronavirus in the horses that race there.
On the books, China's Communist regime outlawed gambling when it took over in 1949. Efforts continue to purge online betting apps, and prison awaits those who challenge Chairman Xi's abhorrence of corruption. Nonetheless, local administrators of state-run lotteries manage to take their cuts, gamblers access online casino apps designed in Southeast Asia, illegal mah jong games hide from overhead drones in China's woods and mountains, and police even had to break up gambling at a cricket fighting tournament near Shanghai in August, 2019.
Off shore, casinos dominate Macao, a former Portuguese island and now a Chinese Special Administrative Region. In 2017, New Zealand created a Jockey Club to attract Chinese thoroughbred buyers and to cater to Chinese owners who want to train and race their horses in Australia and New Zealand. When Justify won the Kentucky Derby and the other two legs of the U.S. Triple Crown in 2018, owners from the China Horse Club just laughed after a reporter questioned how racing squared with China's ban on gambling.
If there is a connection between China and the 23 race horses that died at Santa Anita, it runs through China's landlocked northern neighbor, Mongolia. The historic domain of Genghis Khan's horses and riders also is the current home of dusty courses where hundreds of children as young as five ride bareback in races to win a Russian-made car. When racing was legal in China, owners used to send their horses north to strengthen their bones by grazing in the nutrient-rich pastures of Mongolia. Reporting on the fatal leg injury that caused the horse, Mongolian Groom, to be euthanized after the Breeders Cup Classic at Santa Anita in November, 2019, Billy Reed mentioned the need to reassess the calcium-building limestone content of the soil and water where many race horses graze in Kentucky.
As a cause of last year's race horse deaths, in recent months the coronavirus is receiving more attention that the dietary value of Kentucky's pastures, Scientists suspected COVID-19 could pass between animals and humans after researchers discovered pig farmers died of coronavirus in Malaysia. Observers watched bats land on a tree and poop into a vat of pig slop. Tests found the bats carried COVID-19 and transmitted the disease to farmers who had contact with the pig slop.
The coronavirus that affects humans and the equine enteric (gastrointestinal) coronavirus horses pass between each other are both among the large group of RNA messenger viruses. Since both forms of the virus in horses and humans lock onto cells using the same kind of spikes, transmission between these species is highly probable. Lack of evidence showing horses and humans exchange COVID-19 at this time may be a function of a lack of testing fecal samples of thoroughbred race horses and the failure to test personnel at Mongolian Stable, who may have shown little or no initial symptoms of the virus.
In August, 2019, the San Diego Tribune ran a photo showing Enebish Ganbat, a Mongolian who trains horses at Mongolian Stable, kissing Mongolian Groom's face. Such gestures, not unusual among those who love and care for horses, provide ample opportunity for humans and horses to transmit coronavirus to each other. Horses contract equine enteric coronavirus by contact with surfaces exposed to the manure of infected horses or by consuming some of their manure. Therefore, to prevent contracting coronavirus from a horse, people need to wash their hands whenever they touch anything, such as a shovel or pitchfork, that may have been in contact with an infected horse's manure. Unless humans who have or may not yet show symptoms of COVID-19 wear masks, they may spread coronavirus to horses.
Before racing resumes at Santa Anita this summer, last year's fate of Mongolian Groom is reason to test the nutrient value of Kentucky's pastures and to test for the presence of coronavirus in the horses that race there.
Thursday, January 30, 2020
Can Democracy Be Exported?
Before accepting as an article of faith the glib notion that Russia, Iraq, and other countries with traditions of authoritarian regimes cannot change, consider the observations of Nabeel Khoury, a retired US foreign service officer with extensive experience in the Middle East. Interviewed by Thomas L. Friedman, on c-span's "Book TV" January 15, 2020, Dr. Khoury questioned this assumption. Basically, he said the freedoms in the First Amendment of the US Constitution have universal appeal.
During President Trump's impeachment trial, Congressional representatives often mentioned the wisdom of the small group who collaborated on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In essence, Dr. Khoury recommends a transition to democracy requires similar components: a small cadre of smart influencers and a plan. I was reminded of the intellectuals who gathered at Kavarna Slavia, Prague's Art Deco cafe, to plot Czechoslovakia's "Velvet Revolution."
That is not to say, democratic changes are free of bloody combat, When Hong Kong's democracy activists first protested China's attempt to void the 1997 Sino-British agreement designed to govern for fifty years after London handed its colony over to Chinese rule, many assumed Beijing quickly would crush resistance. That was eight months ago. In that time, clashes with police and injuries have occurred, but Hong Kong's determination seems to have helped strengthen the determination of nearby Taiwan, another island governed by China, to re-elect a pro-democracy government on January 11, 2020.
Just as violence can be expected to accompany a transition to democracy, factions within democratic movements also are likely. Authoritarian governments fail to satisfy not only the employment opportunities sought by educated young people in the Middle East and elsewhere, but in Russia, for example, they can fail to accommodate the needs of pensioners who resist increasing the age when they can draw benefits. Some seek freedom from corrupt officials who rob national economies, and others emphasize the desire for personal freedom to express their opinions and to live and work in humane conditions. The earlier marches Alexei Navalny led in Russia sought democratic reform, but he found protests against corruption had more appeal.
If teachers guided students through the process of writing a Classroom Constitution, their students would see for themselves how factions would emerge to complicate the process. Students would come to appreciate how difficult it is to define the powers and responsibilities Articles would assign to a teacher, students, and administrators, as well as to create mechanisms for resolving disputes.
Democracy brings with it a battle of ideas, once waged in pamphlets; now in social media. The highly-educated citizens China depends on for technological military and commercial advances value more leisure and call for shorter hours and fewer work days. They also value internet access free of censorship and figure out how to use Western sites both for technological tips and as a means to escape government oversight. On the other hand, new rural arrivals in China's metropolitan areas seek to fulfill basic needs for education, health care, and housing.
In order to fashion a democratic structure agreeable to all, masterful leaders need to study political theory and constitutional compromises. The US founders did not share the same objectives. Some owned slaves and others were abolitionists. Some preferred a strong central government; others clung to states' rights. When a rash of countries achieved independence from colonial powers after World War II, Dr. Lorna Hahn envisioned a way global experts could help satisfy the needs of newly independent countries. For 20 years, she sponsored forums and personal contacts that brought together a variety of scholars, such as attorneys experienced in writing constitutions, and leaders from developing countries at an Association on Third World Affairs.
For more echoes of Dr. Khoury's belief in the persistent universal quest for freedom that democratic systems of government provide, check out the earlier posts: "Why Do They Love Us?" and "Don't Give Up On Us."
During President Trump's impeachment trial, Congressional representatives often mentioned the wisdom of the small group who collaborated on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In essence, Dr. Khoury recommends a transition to democracy requires similar components: a small cadre of smart influencers and a plan. I was reminded of the intellectuals who gathered at Kavarna Slavia, Prague's Art Deco cafe, to plot Czechoslovakia's "Velvet Revolution."
That is not to say, democratic changes are free of bloody combat, When Hong Kong's democracy activists first protested China's attempt to void the 1997 Sino-British agreement designed to govern for fifty years after London handed its colony over to Chinese rule, many assumed Beijing quickly would crush resistance. That was eight months ago. In that time, clashes with police and injuries have occurred, but Hong Kong's determination seems to have helped strengthen the determination of nearby Taiwan, another island governed by China, to re-elect a pro-democracy government on January 11, 2020.
Just as violence can be expected to accompany a transition to democracy, factions within democratic movements also are likely. Authoritarian governments fail to satisfy not only the employment opportunities sought by educated young people in the Middle East and elsewhere, but in Russia, for example, they can fail to accommodate the needs of pensioners who resist increasing the age when they can draw benefits. Some seek freedom from corrupt officials who rob national economies, and others emphasize the desire for personal freedom to express their opinions and to live and work in humane conditions. The earlier marches Alexei Navalny led in Russia sought democratic reform, but he found protests against corruption had more appeal.
If teachers guided students through the process of writing a Classroom Constitution, their students would see for themselves how factions would emerge to complicate the process. Students would come to appreciate how difficult it is to define the powers and responsibilities Articles would assign to a teacher, students, and administrators, as well as to create mechanisms for resolving disputes.
Democracy brings with it a battle of ideas, once waged in pamphlets; now in social media. The highly-educated citizens China depends on for technological military and commercial advances value more leisure and call for shorter hours and fewer work days. They also value internet access free of censorship and figure out how to use Western sites both for technological tips and as a means to escape government oversight. On the other hand, new rural arrivals in China's metropolitan areas seek to fulfill basic needs for education, health care, and housing.
In order to fashion a democratic structure agreeable to all, masterful leaders need to study political theory and constitutional compromises. The US founders did not share the same objectives. Some owned slaves and others were abolitionists. Some preferred a strong central government; others clung to states' rights. When a rash of countries achieved independence from colonial powers after World War II, Dr. Lorna Hahn envisioned a way global experts could help satisfy the needs of newly independent countries. For 20 years, she sponsored forums and personal contacts that brought together a variety of scholars, such as attorneys experienced in writing constitutions, and leaders from developing countries at an Association on Third World Affairs.
For more echoes of Dr. Khoury's belief in the persistent universal quest for freedom that democratic systems of government provide, check out the earlier posts: "Why Do They Love Us?" and "Don't Give Up On Us."
Tuesday, November 26, 2019
Beware the New Normal
In the US, a wealthy, powerful and privileged plutocracy has defined a new normal that fails normal people, according to an article by Anand Giridharadas in TIME magazine (December 2-9, 2019), His observations apply equally to the elite hyperwealthy who govern in many countries throughout the world. Those who Giridharadas calls plutes know how to mask their influence by using the following tactics real normal people need to recognize and reject.
They:
They:
- Emphasize job creation, when they expect tax breaks where they locate a new business, contribute to climate change, or disregard environmental and worker safety laws.
- Benefit from ongoing corruption involved in constructing a sports arena that provides a day of entertainment for fans.
- Offset massive returns from investments of questionable social value, such as production of sugary soda drinks, by making some do-good investments and philanthropic contributions.
- Learn to describe their fear of losing wealth to taxes as harmful to those who benefit from their philanthropy and research to develop new products and drugs.
- Win elections by posing as the ones who are providing the food supplied by humanitarian organizations.
- Prefer paying fines, even major ones, to making actual reforms of harmful and unfair practices.
- Hire public relations' experts to brand harmful and unfair practices with deceptive labels and descriptions that sound like public services.
- Blame poverty on the victims of government policies or people who just don't like to work.
Whatever a person's religion or lack of religion, the Christmas season offers a reminder that it takes a god to be a savior. The world is too complicated for a wealthy individual to govern alone; it takes an administration. Fair elections enable lucky voters to choose between a one-person administration dedicated to maintaining a wealthy elite or an administration with a president, cabinet, congress, and courts devoted to the rule of law and institutions that serve the public interest.
Saturday, October 6, 2018
World Goes to the Polls in Brazil
At the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, a reporter went up into the hills to interview young boys flying kites. A translator conveyed the false notion that people living in the crowded makeshift homes above Rio preferred their friendly communities to the lonely confines of the modern homes in the city below. Those flying the kites told a different story. They saw the kites as a symbol of their dreams to escape.
By a margin of 55% to 45%, Jair Bolsonaro was elected Brazil's new President on October 28, 2018. His concern for money laundering, financing of terrorist groups, and other suspicious transactions in Brazil led to granting more power to the country's Financial Activities Control Council (COAF). Promoted as a way to speed investigations and integrate the functions of various government agencies, others view this bureaucratic reorganization as a threat to traditional guarantees of bank and financial secrecy.
Brazil's most popular politician was not running in the first round of voting for president on Sunday, October 7, 2018. An independent judiciary found Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil's president from 2003 to 2010, guilty of corruption and sentenced him to prison. Like others in Brazil's political elite, Lula, as he is known, was charged with taking bribes from construction companies looking for contracts from Brazil's state-controlled Petrobras oil company. Since the Odebrecht construction company was not satisfied only to bribe itself into Brazil's political process, the world has an opportunity to prosecute its corrupt tentacles in at least ten Latin American countries, the United States, and Switzerland. (See the latest news about Odebrecht's bribery case in Colombia in the post, "Cut Off the Head and the Colombia Snake Dies?") In the United States, Petrobras itself, which trades in the US market, was fined $853 million for corruption under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Fernando Haddad, the former Sao Paulo mayor with degrees in economics, law, and philosophy, represented Lula's Workers Party (PT) in the first round voting of the presidential election. The PT, which once brought prosperity to Brazil under Lula from 2003 ti 2011, gave way to the mismanaged economy, recession, and bribery of his successors: Dilma Rousseff, who was impeached for hiding the country's budget deficit, and Michel Temer, who fought a charge of corruption . Haddad is tainted with his association to PT's past sins and a suspected willingness to end an investigation into corruption.
The Brazilian rainforest, considered the world's lungs for its ability to absorb carbon dioxide and combat rising temperatures, drought, and fires, is endangered by Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain who belonged to nine different political parties during his 28-year congressional career. As expected, Bolsonaro and Haddad met again in the second round of voting. In the first round, Bolsonaro nearly won half the vote needed to avoid a runoff
Bolsonaro is the hero of Brazil's soybean farmers and cattle ranchers, because he would withdraw Brazil from the Paris Climate Accord and open the way to finance unlimited deforestation of the rainforest. With his running mate, General Hamilton Mourao, he shares an authoritarian approach to reversing the effects of Brazil's lingering 2014 recession: unemployment, reduced personal income, and a lack of education, health, and other government services. It also should be noted, Brazil's National Museum of historic treasures, housed in a once beautiful Portuguese palace, burned down on September 2, 2018, despite warnings about a lack of maintenance. Mourao claims the army has the ability to solve Brazil's problems, including drug-related violence, the way Brazil's military dictatorship did from 1964 to 1985.
Bolsonaro's supporters like his outspoken attacks on indigenous rainforest communities, women, blacks, and homosexuals. During the first round of voting, Bolsonaro was in the hospital while recovering from being stabbed in the stomach at a campaign event. He claims to be Brazil's President Trump, when one is more than enough for the world.
Brazil, once one of the promising emerging markets known collectively as the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), has fallen on hard times, but the country is too important for the world to ignore. There will be as many as 30 different political parties in Brazil's new congress. The Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB) that dominates congressional coalitions has to deal with members used to receiving pay-offs in jobs, funds for pet projects, and graft in return for passing necessary reforms.
The world's multinational corporations are in a position to exploit Brazil's political, economic, and social woes or to dream up win-win solutions for their stockholders and the country's kite flyers.
Local farmers complain that the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) that developed maize, soybeans, eucalyptus trees, and zebu cattle to thrive in the tropical heat and acidic soils on the savanna that covers 5% of Brazil's farmland no longer helps them. Biotechnology, now in the hands of Bayer, which just acquired Monsanto, and Syngenta, a Swiss pesticide producer, serves their agribusiness interests. Meanwhile, Munduruku tribe members, who formed the COOPAVAM cooperative, watch farms press toward the patch of forest where they harvest the wild Brazil nuts they press into oil for eco-friendly Natura cosmetics and school lunch food. At the very least, multinationals could abide by government regulations requiring only 20% of forest areas should be cleared for farming.
Boeing is in a position to honor or undercut the interests of Brazil's Embraer aircraft company employees and its metalworkers union. Young engineers are used to moving from projects on commercial aircraft to executive jets to defense projects. Since Boeing is only interested in acquiring the company's short-range, 70- to 130-seat commercial jet business in order to compete with Canada's Bombardier, Inc. and Airbus, excess employees rightly fear they would lose their jobs. Couldn't Boeing's worldwide operations offer them employment elsewhere?
All in all, Brazil's presidential election is a world, not just a national, event worth watching.
By a margin of 55% to 45%, Jair Bolsonaro was elected Brazil's new President on October 28, 2018. His concern for money laundering, financing of terrorist groups, and other suspicious transactions in Brazil led to granting more power to the country's Financial Activities Control Council (COAF). Promoted as a way to speed investigations and integrate the functions of various government agencies, others view this bureaucratic reorganization as a threat to traditional guarantees of bank and financial secrecy.
Fernando Haddad, the former Sao Paulo mayor with degrees in economics, law, and philosophy, represented Lula's Workers Party (PT) in the first round voting of the presidential election. The PT, which once brought prosperity to Brazil under Lula from 2003 ti 2011, gave way to the mismanaged economy, recession, and bribery of his successors: Dilma Rousseff, who was impeached for hiding the country's budget deficit, and Michel Temer, who fought a charge of corruption . Haddad is tainted with his association to PT's past sins and a suspected willingness to end an investigation into corruption.
The Brazilian rainforest, considered the world's lungs for its ability to absorb carbon dioxide and combat rising temperatures, drought, and fires, is endangered by Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain who belonged to nine different political parties during his 28-year congressional career. As expected, Bolsonaro and Haddad met again in the second round of voting. In the first round, Bolsonaro nearly won half the vote needed to avoid a runoff
Bolsonaro is the hero of Brazil's soybean farmers and cattle ranchers, because he would withdraw Brazil from the Paris Climate Accord and open the way to finance unlimited deforestation of the rainforest. With his running mate, General Hamilton Mourao, he shares an authoritarian approach to reversing the effects of Brazil's lingering 2014 recession: unemployment, reduced personal income, and a lack of education, health, and other government services. It also should be noted, Brazil's National Museum of historic treasures, housed in a once beautiful Portuguese palace, burned down on September 2, 2018, despite warnings about a lack of maintenance. Mourao claims the army has the ability to solve Brazil's problems, including drug-related violence, the way Brazil's military dictatorship did from 1964 to 1985.
Bolsonaro's supporters like his outspoken attacks on indigenous rainforest communities, women, blacks, and homosexuals. During the first round of voting, Bolsonaro was in the hospital while recovering from being stabbed in the stomach at a campaign event. He claims to be Brazil's President Trump, when one is more than enough for the world.
Brazil, once one of the promising emerging markets known collectively as the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), has fallen on hard times, but the country is too important for the world to ignore. There will be as many as 30 different political parties in Brazil's new congress. The Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB) that dominates congressional coalitions has to deal with members used to receiving pay-offs in jobs, funds for pet projects, and graft in return for passing necessary reforms.
The world's multinational corporations are in a position to exploit Brazil's political, economic, and social woes or to dream up win-win solutions for their stockholders and the country's kite flyers.
Local farmers complain that the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) that developed maize, soybeans, eucalyptus trees, and zebu cattle to thrive in the tropical heat and acidic soils on the savanna that covers 5% of Brazil's farmland no longer helps them. Biotechnology, now in the hands of Bayer, which just acquired Monsanto, and Syngenta, a Swiss pesticide producer, serves their agribusiness interests. Meanwhile, Munduruku tribe members, who formed the COOPAVAM cooperative, watch farms press toward the patch of forest where they harvest the wild Brazil nuts they press into oil for eco-friendly Natura cosmetics and school lunch food. At the very least, multinationals could abide by government regulations requiring only 20% of forest areas should be cleared for farming.
Boeing is in a position to honor or undercut the interests of Brazil's Embraer aircraft company employees and its metalworkers union. Young engineers are used to moving from projects on commercial aircraft to executive jets to defense projects. Since Boeing is only interested in acquiring the company's short-range, 70- to 130-seat commercial jet business in order to compete with Canada's Bombardier, Inc. and Airbus, excess employees rightly fear they would lose their jobs. Couldn't Boeing's worldwide operations offer them employment elsewhere?
All in all, Brazil's presidential election is a world, not just a national, event worth watching.
Sunday, September 23, 2018
In Praise of Print
Marc Benioff, co-founder of Salesforce.com, made his billions creating a software company in the cloud's digital age. Why did he and his wife, Lynne, just plunk down $190 million to purchase Time, a print magazine founded in 1923? They say they want to find solutions to some of the most complex problems in today's society.
Do complex problems in today's society lend themselves to hashtag solutions, slogans on posters in marches, presidential "debates," and election campaign ads on TV? Consider: racism, gun violence, immigration, cancer, gene editing, an income gap between the Benioffs and nearly everyone else in the world, corruption, censorship by the government in China and Facebook in the US, robots replacing human workers, marriage, privacy versus national security, climate change, lopsided trade balances.
TV headlines and 3-minute interviews, apps, and a limited number of Twitter characters have not solved today's problems, and they never will. The Federalist Papers argued before the U.S. Constitution was ratified. An extra Bill of Rights was needed. The print media backed further Amendments needed to clean up initial mistakes about the election of the President and Vice President, slavery, women's suffrage, and alcohol.
Print carries revolutionary ideas everywhere in the world. Why do authoritarian governments always shut down the press? Writing at Iowa's Storm Lake Times, with a circulation of only 3,000, Art Cullen won a Pulitzer Prize in journalism for showing transparency's importance as a guard against bribes affecting government decisions. He wondered who was enabling the local Board of Supervisors in Buena Vista County, population 10,000, to help fund a million dollar defense against the Des Moines Water Works. His editorial disclosed the corn and soybean agribusiness farms that were contaminating drinking water with nitrates from their fertilizer.
Open a discussion about tariffs at the dinner table or on social media. You'll see a difference of opinion on the purpose of tariffs, if they can accomplish these purposes, even if these purposes need to be achieved. Does anyone mention what they have read about what government representatives, experts on economics, seniors, Walmart shoppers, or farmers have said about tariffs?
Informed judgments require the extended, detailed information print provides. Read the"Letters to the Editor," too. I'm often inspired by the readers who take time to compose the thoughtful opinions published. A grandmother's letter told why she insisted her two teen-aged grandchildren, she called them "screen zombies," put down their "tiny rectangles" to take in the spectacular sight of crossing the four-and-a-half-mile bridge over Chesapeake Bay.
A digital marketer like Marc Benioff deserves gratitude for funding the printed link between society's complex problems and those who depend on the extensive body of information needed to solve them.
Do complex problems in today's society lend themselves to hashtag solutions, slogans on posters in marches, presidential "debates," and election campaign ads on TV? Consider: racism, gun violence, immigration, cancer, gene editing, an income gap between the Benioffs and nearly everyone else in the world, corruption, censorship by the government in China and Facebook in the US, robots replacing human workers, marriage, privacy versus national security, climate change, lopsided trade balances.
TV headlines and 3-minute interviews, apps, and a limited number of Twitter characters have not solved today's problems, and they never will. The Federalist Papers argued before the U.S. Constitution was ratified. An extra Bill of Rights was needed. The print media backed further Amendments needed to clean up initial mistakes about the election of the President and Vice President, slavery, women's suffrage, and alcohol.
Print carries revolutionary ideas everywhere in the world. Why do authoritarian governments always shut down the press? Writing at Iowa's Storm Lake Times, with a circulation of only 3,000, Art Cullen won a Pulitzer Prize in journalism for showing transparency's importance as a guard against bribes affecting government decisions. He wondered who was enabling the local Board of Supervisors in Buena Vista County, population 10,000, to help fund a million dollar defense against the Des Moines Water Works. His editorial disclosed the corn and soybean agribusiness farms that were contaminating drinking water with nitrates from their fertilizer.
Open a discussion about tariffs at the dinner table or on social media. You'll see a difference of opinion on the purpose of tariffs, if they can accomplish these purposes, even if these purposes need to be achieved. Does anyone mention what they have read about what government representatives, experts on economics, seniors, Walmart shoppers, or farmers have said about tariffs?
Informed judgments require the extended, detailed information print provides. Read the"Letters to the Editor," too. I'm often inspired by the readers who take time to compose the thoughtful opinions published. A grandmother's letter told why she insisted her two teen-aged grandchildren, she called them "screen zombies," put down their "tiny rectangles" to take in the spectacular sight of crossing the four-and-a-half-mile bridge over Chesapeake Bay.
A digital marketer like Marc Benioff deserves gratitude for funding the printed link between society's complex problems and those who depend on the extensive body of information needed to solve them.
Saturday, June 30, 2018
Introducing the Real Mexico
Mexico is more than revolutions, drug smugglers, and undocumented immigrants. The country's probable new president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, founded the political party, Movement for National Regeneration (Morena), that expects to bring him to power in tomorrow's election on July 1, 2018. Victory over the earlier ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRD) and the National Action Party (PAN) would be much different from the bloody revolutios that once brought, for example, a Victoriano Huerta to his provisional presidency.
Northern Mexico reaps prosperity from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Unskilled, cheap labor initially attracted US. factories south of the border, but these opportunities in Mexico helped create a new, educated cadre with up-to-date experience. Sister city mayors of Tijuana, Mexico, and San Diego, California, think in terms of a single urban region. A privately financed bridge enables travelers to walk back and forth between San Diego and the Tijuana Airport.
As a presidential candidate, Lopez Obrador tapped into the feelings of southern Mexicans watching norther Mexicans thrive. He promised to pave roads through the south's mountainous Oaxaca state and to add oil refineries in the southern states of Tabasco and Campeche. In an effort to eliminate food imports, he proposes price guarantees for crops grown by southern farmers. Rising oil prices also expect to help Mexico recover from export revenue losses when prices collapsed in 2014. Yet, to gain electoral support, Mr. Lopez Obrador made a variety of expensive proposals, including a pension for the elderly and disabled, scholarships, and water system improvements. In one instance, Mr. Lopez Obrador is known for an extreme measure. Residents in Tabasco, at his suggestion, did not pay their electric bills for two decades, thereby costing the company money and causing power to be disconnected periodically.
From China, the new president is likely to accept an offer of loans to build a railway north of Guatemala to connect the states of Quintana Roo and Chiapas and to builld another road/rail connection through Tehuantepec to the Oaxaca and Veracruz states west of Mexico's southern isthmus. By working with China, Mexico would demonstrate how different international relationships are from 1823, when the Monroe Doctrine told Europe the United States considered any attempt to extend its influence in the Western Hemisphere a threat to its "peace and safety."
Mexico's new leadership will have only one term to deal with two traditional problems. Drug gangs and the associated increase in murders and violence provide President Trump with justification to build a border wall. Yet, the US demand for cocaine and other illegal substances perpetuates the drug trade. Related turf wars among dealers cause violence and murders in the US and foreign countries, and the arrests of drug dealing criminals fill US prisons. In 2018, Mexico is on track to break the record for murders it set in 2017. With 22 homicides per 100,000 people, Mexico has one of the world's highest rates. The Tijuana arts council building on the site of a concrete-encased structure reminds those on the roof viewing California and those escaping across the border that the art gallery below them is in a tunnel that once carried drugs into the United States.
Besides inheriting a traditional drug transit destination, Mr. Lopez Obrador also would inherit Mexico's reputation for corruption. Implementation of a National Anticorruption System (NAS) has been on hold pending the results of the presidential election. NAS requires:
Northern Mexico reaps prosperity from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Unskilled, cheap labor initially attracted US. factories south of the border, but these opportunities in Mexico helped create a new, educated cadre with up-to-date experience. Sister city mayors of Tijuana, Mexico, and San Diego, California, think in terms of a single urban region. A privately financed bridge enables travelers to walk back and forth between San Diego and the Tijuana Airport.
As a presidential candidate, Lopez Obrador tapped into the feelings of southern Mexicans watching norther Mexicans thrive. He promised to pave roads through the south's mountainous Oaxaca state and to add oil refineries in the southern states of Tabasco and Campeche. In an effort to eliminate food imports, he proposes price guarantees for crops grown by southern farmers. Rising oil prices also expect to help Mexico recover from export revenue losses when prices collapsed in 2014. Yet, to gain electoral support, Mr. Lopez Obrador made a variety of expensive proposals, including a pension for the elderly and disabled, scholarships, and water system improvements. In one instance, Mr. Lopez Obrador is known for an extreme measure. Residents in Tabasco, at his suggestion, did not pay their electric bills for two decades, thereby costing the company money and causing power to be disconnected periodically.
From China, the new president is likely to accept an offer of loans to build a railway north of Guatemala to connect the states of Quintana Roo and Chiapas and to builld another road/rail connection through Tehuantepec to the Oaxaca and Veracruz states west of Mexico's southern isthmus. By working with China, Mexico would demonstrate how different international relationships are from 1823, when the Monroe Doctrine told Europe the United States considered any attempt to extend its influence in the Western Hemisphere a threat to its "peace and safety."
Mexico's new leadership will have only one term to deal with two traditional problems. Drug gangs and the associated increase in murders and violence provide President Trump with justification to build a border wall. Yet, the US demand for cocaine and other illegal substances perpetuates the drug trade. Related turf wars among dealers cause violence and murders in the US and foreign countries, and the arrests of drug dealing criminals fill US prisons. In 2018, Mexico is on track to break the record for murders it set in 2017. With 22 homicides per 100,000 people, Mexico has one of the world's highest rates. The Tijuana arts council building on the site of a concrete-encased structure reminds those on the roof viewing California and those escaping across the border that the art gallery below them is in a tunnel that once carried drugs into the United States.
Besides inheriting a traditional drug transit destination, Mr. Lopez Obrador also would inherit Mexico's reputation for corruption. Implementation of a National Anticorruption System (NAS) has been on hold pending the results of the presidential election. NAS requires:
- An independent national anticorruption prosecutor devoted to investigating and trying criminal cases,
- An autonomous Federal Administrative Court specializing in serious cases of bribery, vanishing public funds, benefits from campaign contributions, and other acts of corruption by administrative officials,
- Adoption of local anticorruption systems in each Mexican state, and
- A national computerized data platform capable of supporting NAS's objectives.
Monday, May 21, 2018
China Beyond the Headlines
Much is made of the contrast between the corruption overlooked in Russia and the crackdown on corruption in China. But other Chinese behaviors and practices deserve examination.
Stealing is rampant in China; the country's prohibition on tax evasion and gambling is evaded; and a form of discrimination is legal. Foreign companies expect their intellectual property rights to be ignored. Chinese companies contracted to manufacture products for foreign firms readily produce knock-offs of those same products. Even exchange students find they have to keep a sharp eye on their belongings or they will disappear. An engineering student from a U.S. Ivy League college, who planned to stay in China for a couple of months, left after a week when her caliper was stolen.
China is not exempt from tax dodgers. There is the revenue a company makes, the amount it reports for tax purposes, and the difference deposited in overseas banks or in Khorgos, an out-of-the-way Central Asian Chinese town on the Kazakhstan border. Along with film studios, media outlets, financial services, and over 14,000 other companies, Chinese movie star, Fan Bingbing, who earned $43 million in 2017, registered her company in Khorgos. Ever since China began a probe into tax evasion on June 3, 2018, Miss Bingbing has not been seen in public, and she has been fined $129 million. Her 62 million followers on social media correctly speculated she was caught in the Communist Party's anti-corruption, tax evasion campaign. She also might be a victim of President Xi Jinping's new morality crackdown on culture and behavior not in line with socialist values.
Gambling is illegal on the Chinese mainland. Beijing stopped approving new gaming apps created by China's Tencent tech leader and pressured Apple to remove gambling apps in its Chinese App Store. But casinos attract Chinese gamblers to Macau, a Special Administrative Region of China, and Chinese travelers freely gamble on overseas trips. "Justify," the winner of the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont Stakes is owned by the China Horse Club, as is "Audible," the horse that came in third in the Kentucky Derby. No doubt Chinese handicappers won plenty of cash, when "Justify" won all three legs of the Triple Crown.
Finally, the U.S. State Department's annual report on religious freedom called attention to the million Uighur Muslims China holds in secret re-education camps. In another example of discrimination in China, members of China's poor underclass, unskilled rural transplants earning little in city jobs, find they are victims of the hukou system. They are shut out of health care, housing, and quality educations in state-run schools. They also have been shut out of watching some short-form videos on Douyin, the app Chinese authorities find shallow and addictive and monitor for illegal or morally questionable content contrary to socialist values. Young Chinese viewers say they enjoy watching good-looking amateurs tell jokes, sing, and perform imaginative stunts on Douyin; it's fun and relaxing.
Stealing is rampant in China; the country's prohibition on tax evasion and gambling is evaded; and a form of discrimination is legal. Foreign companies expect their intellectual property rights to be ignored. Chinese companies contracted to manufacture products for foreign firms readily produce knock-offs of those same products. Even exchange students find they have to keep a sharp eye on their belongings or they will disappear. An engineering student from a U.S. Ivy League college, who planned to stay in China for a couple of months, left after a week when her caliper was stolen.
China is not exempt from tax dodgers. There is the revenue a company makes, the amount it reports for tax purposes, and the difference deposited in overseas banks or in Khorgos, an out-of-the-way Central Asian Chinese town on the Kazakhstan border. Along with film studios, media outlets, financial services, and over 14,000 other companies, Chinese movie star, Fan Bingbing, who earned $43 million in 2017, registered her company in Khorgos. Ever since China began a probe into tax evasion on June 3, 2018, Miss Bingbing has not been seen in public, and she has been fined $129 million. Her 62 million followers on social media correctly speculated she was caught in the Communist Party's anti-corruption, tax evasion campaign. She also might be a victim of President Xi Jinping's new morality crackdown on culture and behavior not in line with socialist values.
Gambling is illegal on the Chinese mainland. Beijing stopped approving new gaming apps created by China's Tencent tech leader and pressured Apple to remove gambling apps in its Chinese App Store. But casinos attract Chinese gamblers to Macau, a Special Administrative Region of China, and Chinese travelers freely gamble on overseas trips. "Justify," the winner of the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont Stakes is owned by the China Horse Club, as is "Audible," the horse that came in third in the Kentucky Derby. No doubt Chinese handicappers won plenty of cash, when "Justify" won all three legs of the Triple Crown.
Finally, the U.S. State Department's annual report on religious freedom called attention to the million Uighur Muslims China holds in secret re-education camps. In another example of discrimination in China, members of China's poor underclass, unskilled rural transplants earning little in city jobs, find they are victims of the hukou system. They are shut out of health care, housing, and quality educations in state-run schools. They also have been shut out of watching some short-form videos on Douyin, the app Chinese authorities find shallow and addictive and monitor for illegal or morally questionable content contrary to socialist values. Young Chinese viewers say they enjoy watching good-looking amateurs tell jokes, sing, and perform imaginative stunts on Douyin; it's fun and relaxing.
(Also see the earlier posts,"China's Plan for World Domination" and "China Stretches a Napoleon-Style Belt.")
Thursday, May 17, 2018
Corrupt Government Turnaround in Angola?
In Angola, President Joao Lourenco attempts to join Muhammadu Buhari in Nigeria, Adama Barrow in The Gambia, and Emmerson Mnanggagwa in Zimbabwe, the new leaders trying to break with a tradition that allowed African rulers to put their own interests ahead of their countries'.
After unseating Jose Eduardo dos Santos, Angola's president for 38 years, Lourenco began a crackdown on corruption rampant among the country's elite. Starting with the former president's rich daughter and son, he removed Isabel as head of the country's national oil and gas company, Sonangol, which exported $640 billion since the end of Angola's civil war in 2002 and charged Jose Filomeno with fraud for attempting to transfer $500 million from the country's $5 billion wealth fund through a London account.
Although the price of crude oil has rebounded from its 2014 low, as Africa's second-largest oil producer after Nigeria, Angola was still left with public debt, mainly to China, hovering between 65% and 80% of GDP, and missing billions, when Lourenco took office. To revive the economy, the new president no longer requires foreign investors to have local partners and asked the International Monetary Fund for advice. Suggested next steps include: an independent audit to discover where revenue from oil and diamond exports went, especially to overseas accounts. Locals share information about the corruption crackdown in Brazil, another former Portuguese country, that has sent former high-level officials to jail.
Additional needed reforms include: elimination of excessive licenses and regulations that provide bribery opportunities for those issuing or waiving them; improving living and health care conditions to reduce the country's high child and maternal mortality rates; stripping courts of political influence; freedom of the press and media, especially to report on corruption; and Angola's first local elections in 2020.
Meanwhile, in Portugal's other former African possession, Mozambique, the continuing 3-year attacks by a group of radical Muslim jihadists resulted in new beheadings in May, 2018.
While African leaders like Rwanda's President Paul Kagame, who led the Tutsi rebels who overthrew the Hulu regime responsible for genocide, and President Pierre Nkurunziza in neighboring Burundi intimidate their opposition and dictate constitutional reforms that enable them to extend their presidential terms to 2034, every indication of a gradual shift to responsible government by the rule of law on the African continent is welcome.
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After unseating Jose Eduardo dos Santos, Angola's president for 38 years, Lourenco began a crackdown on corruption rampant among the country's elite. Starting with the former president's rich daughter and son, he removed Isabel as head of the country's national oil and gas company, Sonangol, which exported $640 billion since the end of Angola's civil war in 2002 and charged Jose Filomeno with fraud for attempting to transfer $500 million from the country's $5 billion wealth fund through a London account.
Although the price of crude oil has rebounded from its 2014 low, as Africa's second-largest oil producer after Nigeria, Angola was still left with public debt, mainly to China, hovering between 65% and 80% of GDP, and missing billions, when Lourenco took office. To revive the economy, the new president no longer requires foreign investors to have local partners and asked the International Monetary Fund for advice. Suggested next steps include: an independent audit to discover where revenue from oil and diamond exports went, especially to overseas accounts. Locals share information about the corruption crackdown in Brazil, another former Portuguese country, that has sent former high-level officials to jail.
Additional needed reforms include: elimination of excessive licenses and regulations that provide bribery opportunities for those issuing or waiving them; improving living and health care conditions to reduce the country's high child and maternal mortality rates; stripping courts of political influence; freedom of the press and media, especially to report on corruption; and Angola's first local elections in 2020.
Meanwhile, in Portugal's other former African possession, Mozambique, the continuing 3-year attacks by a group of radical Muslim jihadists resulted in new beheadings in May, 2018.
While African leaders like Rwanda's President Paul Kagame, who led the Tutsi rebels who overthrew the Hulu regime responsible for genocide, and President Pierre Nkurunziza in neighboring Burundi intimidate their opposition and dictate constitutional reforms that enable them to extend their presidential terms to 2034, every indication of a gradual shift to responsible government by the rule of law on the African continent is welcome.
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Friday, April 27, 2018
Hazards of Hard to Break Cheating Habit
Students learn the perils of cheating by playing a game where they all are international traders. Each student receives an envelope containing a blue card worth $20 million in merchandise and a green one worth $10 million.Both dealmakers assume they can make a great profit by reselling whatever merchandise they receive in the trade. One or more sets of two students go out in the hall to negotiate a deal (or the whole class can discuss what kind of deal to make). They shake hands on the deal and turn their backs on each other while inserting the card or cards in the envelope they'll give to their customer. If, for example, they agree to trade both cards, but one student gives the customer only one card, what will happen, if these two try to make a deal in the future?
Opportunities to cheat tempt young people inside and outside their families and school. If something breaks, one sibling blames another. Students cheat on tests, copy reports from material on the internet, steal clothes from retailers, get "free" food from friends who work at fast food restaurants. Young people lie about staying over at a friend's house, when they plan to do something else. They drive too fast, fail to wear seat belts, and text while driving. They drink alcohol, experiment with drugs, and cheat on their boy/girl friends by dating others.
Ask students if they would be willing to loan $155 million to a company mired in corruption. This is currently a real life case that provides a cautionary tale to students who would carry their cheating habits over into their careers.
Related to a corruption enforcement decision, Odebrecht, an engineering company in Brazil, now owes a $2.7 billion fine to Brazil, Switzerland, and the United States for an extensive bribery scheme that stretched from South America to Central America to North America. On Wednesday, April 25, 2018, the company's construction unit needs loans to repay a $144 million bond within a 30-day grace period. By the end of the month, the company also owes an $11 million interest payment.
A default on these payments could lead banks holding other Odebrecht loans to demand earlier payment, because they see bankruptcy looming. Odebrecht finds buyers for assets it is trying to sell know the company is desperate to free up cash and offer to pay lower prices over extended periods. Not knowing what future assets the company will have for collateral does not reassure potential new lenders. As it is, banks asked for new loans offer less than needed, and Brazil's government development bank is reluctant to guarantee these private loans. In few countries will government officials want anything to do with accepting a bid and letting a contract for a new Odebrecht project that could hint of a kickback or any sort of bribery.
Corruption gives foreign investors an opportunity to gain control of key sectors in a country, when cash-strapped companies convicted of wrongdoing cannot find funds elsewhere. Corrupt Brazilian companies offer this kind of risk to their country. Already, the jointly owned China Three Gorges (CTG) and Portugal's largest company, the EDP utility, run hydroelectric power plants in Brazil. CTG holds a 23% share in EDP and aims for total control. Both companies have assets in other countries besides China and Portugal. EDP, for example, operates in 14 countries, including the United States, Spain, France, Italy, and Poland, where China is perceived as an intelligence and corporate espionage threat.
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News that former Brazilian president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has been jailed on corruption charges for allegedly accepting bribes from Odebrecht has been noted in Angola, one of Brazil's other former territories, as a cautionary tale.
For an excellent overview of international efforts to eliminate corruption, consult Corruption and Misuse of Public Office, published in the UK by Oxford University Press. Cheating of any sort is risky business. There is no guarantee that governments, teachers, parents, and girlfriends/boyfriends will not find out. Trust is a terrible thing to lose.
Opportunities to cheat tempt young people inside and outside their families and school. If something breaks, one sibling blames another. Students cheat on tests, copy reports from material on the internet, steal clothes from retailers, get "free" food from friends who work at fast food restaurants. Young people lie about staying over at a friend's house, when they plan to do something else. They drive too fast, fail to wear seat belts, and text while driving. They drink alcohol, experiment with drugs, and cheat on their boy/girl friends by dating others.
Ask students if they would be willing to loan $155 million to a company mired in corruption. This is currently a real life case that provides a cautionary tale to students who would carry their cheating habits over into their careers.
Related to a corruption enforcement decision, Odebrecht, an engineering company in Brazil, now owes a $2.7 billion fine to Brazil, Switzerland, and the United States for an extensive bribery scheme that stretched from South America to Central America to North America. On Wednesday, April 25, 2018, the company's construction unit needs loans to repay a $144 million bond within a 30-day grace period. By the end of the month, the company also owes an $11 million interest payment.
A default on these payments could lead banks holding other Odebrecht loans to demand earlier payment, because they see bankruptcy looming. Odebrecht finds buyers for assets it is trying to sell know the company is desperate to free up cash and offer to pay lower prices over extended periods. Not knowing what future assets the company will have for collateral does not reassure potential new lenders. As it is, banks asked for new loans offer less than needed, and Brazil's government development bank is reluctant to guarantee these private loans. In few countries will government officials want anything to do with accepting a bid and letting a contract for a new Odebrecht project that could hint of a kickback or any sort of bribery.
Corruption gives foreign investors an opportunity to gain control of key sectors in a country, when cash-strapped companies convicted of wrongdoing cannot find funds elsewhere. Corrupt Brazilian companies offer this kind of risk to their country. Already, the jointly owned China Three Gorges (CTG) and Portugal's largest company, the EDP utility, run hydroelectric power plants in Brazil. CTG holds a 23% share in EDP and aims for total control. Both companies have assets in other countries besides China and Portugal. EDP, for example, operates in 14 countries, including the United States, Spain, France, Italy, and Poland, where China is perceived as an intelligence and corporate espionage threat.
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News that former Brazilian president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has been jailed on corruption charges for allegedly accepting bribes from Odebrecht has been noted in Angola, one of Brazil's other former territories, as a cautionary tale.
For an excellent overview of international efforts to eliminate corruption, consult Corruption and Misuse of Public Office, published in the UK by Oxford University Press. Cheating of any sort is risky business. There is no guarantee that governments, teachers, parents, and girlfriends/boyfriends will not find out. Trust is a terrible thing to lose.
Sunday, October 29, 2017
Look East at South Korea, China, and Japan
North Korea is not the only country drawing attention eastward. On February 9, 2018, the Winter Olympics will begin in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
In October, 2017, the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China confirmed Xi Jinping as China's President for his second, and probably not final, 5-year term. His Chinese Socialism for a New Era is designed to replace Russia with China as the world's other superpower.
Unlike Russia, Xi cracks down on the corruption that makes President Putin vulnerable to opposition by those suffering economic deprivation. But Xi is not confident enough of his position to lessen censorship or to release from house arrest the widow of Liu Xiaobo, a leader of China's pro-democracy demonstration in 1989, or to free, permanently, critics, such as activists, Joshua Wong, Nathan Law, and Alex Chow, who organized a 2014 pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong.
China's neighbor in Japan continues to push for a constitutional amendment that would give the country the right to maintain a military force. Like Xi, Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe won a landslide election in October, 2017 that solidified his position and plans for economic growth. In 2020, the Summer Olympics will come to Tokyo.
In October, 2017, the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China confirmed Xi Jinping as China's President for his second, and probably not final, 5-year term. His Chinese Socialism for a New Era is designed to replace Russia with China as the world's other superpower.
Unlike Russia, Xi cracks down on the corruption that makes President Putin vulnerable to opposition by those suffering economic deprivation. But Xi is not confident enough of his position to lessen censorship or to release from house arrest the widow of Liu Xiaobo, a leader of China's pro-democracy demonstration in 1989, or to free, permanently, critics, such as activists, Joshua Wong, Nathan Law, and Alex Chow, who organized a 2014 pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong.
China's neighbor in Japan continues to push for a constitutional amendment that would give the country the right to maintain a military force. Like Xi, Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe won a landslide election in October, 2017 that solidified his position and plans for economic growth. In 2020, the Summer Olympics will come to Tokyo.
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Russia's Alternative to Putin
Does Russia have a viable alternative to Putin? The more than a thousand protesters, who were detained when they marched with Alexey Navalny in Moscow, and the nearly 100 other Russian cities on Sunday, March 26, 2017, think so.
Unlike the Chinese leaders who, realizing personal gain and other appearances of corruption undermine public support, adopted the Supervision Law that places everyone in the country's public sector under anti-corruption supervision (Under the guise of searching for corruption, Chinese authorities, of course, also position themselves to uncover other prosecutable violations), Putin and the oligarchs he enabled to accumulate their wealth continue to present their soft underbelly for Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation to document on his blog. Someone's $15 million worth of gold bars even fell out of a cargo plane leaving Yakutsk, Russia, according to TIME magazine (April 2, 2018). A Chinese spokesperson said China is willing to lend a hand to other countries that need help fighting corruption. Neighboring Russia is yet to take up the offer.
Moscow's cyberpropaganda concerns U.S. and European democracies, and Putin's adviser, Andrey Krutskikh, brags that Russia is "at the verge of having something in the information arena which will allow us to talk to the Americans as equals"(TIME magazine, May 29, 2017). But these so-called "triumphs" do nothing to prevent government corruption and a failing economy, based on falling oil prices, from motivating protests in Russian streets.
While Vladimir Putin basked in his March 18, 2018 sham election victory, ordinary Russian citizens continued to see their disposable income and standard of living deteriorate. By 2018. senior citizens protested Putin's plan to raise the age when they could retire and claim pensions. Although Putin promises to make Russia a great power again, he, like little North Korea's leader, stakes Russia's claim to world respect for its spheres of influence on new nuclear weapons (In December, 2018, he showed a new missile reaching Florida.) rather than the thriving economies and nuclear weapons that support the powerful positions of the United States and China. Where are Russia's wind farms, medical advances, and hybrid seeds to end world hunger?
Putin has problems: volatile oil revenues far below a once per barrel high near $150; failure to engineer relief from sanctions from the Trump administration; a younger generation getting its news from social media rather than official, state-owned radio and TV stations; corruption favoring oligarchs; a war dragging on in Syria; and a revolt by the Orthodox church in Ukraine. Just as China fears the competing influence of international religions and locks up Uighur Muslims in re-education camps and caused Buddhism's Dalai Lama to flee Tibet, Russia fears the independence of the Orthodox church in Ukraine, supported by Patriarch Bartholomen in Constantinople and Ukraine's president, Petro Poroshenko. Russia's President Putin, who considers the allegiance of the Russian Orthodox church, including in Ukraine, critical to his authority, threatened to punish those who worshiped in churches affiliated with Constantinople and raised concern that Russia would take over Orthodox cathedrals and monasteries not affiliated with Moscow. The West needs to be prepared to respond to any excuse Putin can use to further strengthen Russia's grip on Ukraine or former Soviet satellites.
The Kremlin has employed various strategies to silence Navalny and prevent him from running for President against Putin. After he was charged with stealing timber from a state-run forestry in 2013, he was sentenced to five years in prison, despite a lack of evidence. In protest, 10,000 took to Moscow's streets and failed to leave. The next morning Navalny was released. Following his release he ran for Mayor of Moscow and won 27% of the vote to come in second to Putin's candidate in a six-candidate field.
Later Alexey Navalny and his brother, Oleg, were charged with shipping company fraud. Again a conviction was rendered with no evidence. Oleg was sentenced to three and a half years in a penal colony, where he has been punished repeatedly for minor infractions and his requests for parole were refused twice. Alexey received a suspended three and a half year sentence and house arrest. Russia was using a traditional method of silencing one family member by imprisoning others. But Alexey cut the tracking bracelet off his ankle, announced what he had done on his blog, and started leaving his family's apartment at will. However, his fraud case is used to keep his name off the ballot in presidential elections, and, for staging protest rallies, he served 30 days in jail in 2018 and was re-arrested again two minutes after his release.
In the later blog, "29 Countries Influence 7 Billion People," see what the former leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, wrote about Vladimir Putin and democracy.
Unlike the Chinese leaders who, realizing personal gain and other appearances of corruption undermine public support, adopted the Supervision Law that places everyone in the country's public sector under anti-corruption supervision (Under the guise of searching for corruption, Chinese authorities, of course, also position themselves to uncover other prosecutable violations), Putin and the oligarchs he enabled to accumulate their wealth continue to present their soft underbelly for Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation to document on his blog. Someone's $15 million worth of gold bars even fell out of a cargo plane leaving Yakutsk, Russia, according to TIME magazine (April 2, 2018). A Chinese spokesperson said China is willing to lend a hand to other countries that need help fighting corruption. Neighboring Russia is yet to take up the offer.
Moscow's cyberpropaganda concerns U.S. and European democracies, and Putin's adviser, Andrey Krutskikh, brags that Russia is "at the verge of having something in the information arena which will allow us to talk to the Americans as equals"(TIME magazine, May 29, 2017). But these so-called "triumphs" do nothing to prevent government corruption and a failing economy, based on falling oil prices, from motivating protests in Russian streets.
While Vladimir Putin basked in his March 18, 2018 sham election victory, ordinary Russian citizens continued to see their disposable income and standard of living deteriorate. By 2018. senior citizens protested Putin's plan to raise the age when they could retire and claim pensions. Although Putin promises to make Russia a great power again, he, like little North Korea's leader, stakes Russia's claim to world respect for its spheres of influence on new nuclear weapons (In December, 2018, he showed a new missile reaching Florida.) rather than the thriving economies and nuclear weapons that support the powerful positions of the United States and China. Where are Russia's wind farms, medical advances, and hybrid seeds to end world hunger?
Putin has problems: volatile oil revenues far below a once per barrel high near $150; failure to engineer relief from sanctions from the Trump administration; a younger generation getting its news from social media rather than official, state-owned radio and TV stations; corruption favoring oligarchs; a war dragging on in Syria; and a revolt by the Orthodox church in Ukraine. Just as China fears the competing influence of international religions and locks up Uighur Muslims in re-education camps and caused Buddhism's Dalai Lama to flee Tibet, Russia fears the independence of the Orthodox church in Ukraine, supported by Patriarch Bartholomen in Constantinople and Ukraine's president, Petro Poroshenko. Russia's President Putin, who considers the allegiance of the Russian Orthodox church, including in Ukraine, critical to his authority, threatened to punish those who worshiped in churches affiliated with Constantinople and raised concern that Russia would take over Orthodox cathedrals and monasteries not affiliated with Moscow. The West needs to be prepared to respond to any excuse Putin can use to further strengthen Russia's grip on Ukraine or former Soviet satellites.
The Kremlin has employed various strategies to silence Navalny and prevent him from running for President against Putin. After he was charged with stealing timber from a state-run forestry in 2013, he was sentenced to five years in prison, despite a lack of evidence. In protest, 10,000 took to Moscow's streets and failed to leave. The next morning Navalny was released. Following his release he ran for Mayor of Moscow and won 27% of the vote to come in second to Putin's candidate in a six-candidate field.
Later Alexey Navalny and his brother, Oleg, were charged with shipping company fraud. Again a conviction was rendered with no evidence. Oleg was sentenced to three and a half years in a penal colony, where he has been punished repeatedly for minor infractions and his requests for parole were refused twice. Alexey received a suspended three and a half year sentence and house arrest. Russia was using a traditional method of silencing one family member by imprisoning others. But Alexey cut the tracking bracelet off his ankle, announced what he had done on his blog, and started leaving his family's apartment at will. However, his fraud case is used to keep his name off the ballot in presidential elections, and, for staging protest rallies, he served 30 days in jail in 2018 and was re-arrested again two minutes after his release.
In the later blog, "29 Countries Influence 7 Billion People," see what the former leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, wrote about Vladimir Putin and democracy.
Friday, August 26, 2016
Impact of Corruption on Terrorism
In some respects, you can't blame government leaders for adopting the self-serving, often corrupt, methods of the colonial administrators they followed after their countries became independent. Nonetheless, as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry pointed out in remarks in Sokoto, Nigeria (8/23/2016), bribery, fraud, inequality, humiliation, and poverty play into the hands of terrorist extremists.
In terms of government interference and corruption, when the World Bank's "Doing Business Index" and the "Corruption Perceptions Index" rank Nigeria as a worse offender than 89% and 82% of the other countries in the world, Nigeria gives a terrorist group like Boko Haram a recruiting argument and an excuse to engage in its own looting, killing, and kidnapping.
Citizens need to feel people in power work for them. Government funds need to be used to provide health care, educate their children, build roads, provide clean water and electricity, support agriculture, and attract investment and business, not head overseas to the secret bank accounts of crooked politicians.
(Also see the earlier posts, "Corruption Has Consequences," "Cheating is Easy, but...," and "Warning to Students: Don't Cheat.")
In terms of government interference and corruption, when the World Bank's "Doing Business Index" and the "Corruption Perceptions Index" rank Nigeria as a worse offender than 89% and 82% of the other countries in the world, Nigeria gives a terrorist group like Boko Haram a recruiting argument and an excuse to engage in its own looting, killing, and kidnapping.
Citizens need to feel people in power work for them. Government funds need to be used to provide health care, educate their children, build roads, provide clean water and electricity, support agriculture, and attract investment and business, not head overseas to the secret bank accounts of crooked politicians.
(Also see the earlier posts, "Corruption Has Consequences," "Cheating is Easy, but...," and "Warning to Students: Don't Cheat.")
Tuesday, August 2, 2016
Share the Olympic Experience
Teams coming from around the world to begin competing in the Olympic Games Friday will experience new people, products and sights in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. To help us share their experiences, I checked the innovations trendwatching.com now sees in Central and South America.
In Brazil, Olympians might pick up a new smartphone and learn Twizer provides help choosing apps, making the most of apps, and incorporating a new phone into daily lives. The Twizer service is free for everyone.
Other interesting things Olympians might hear about in Brazil include: the fact that for six hours on one day, Uber drivers picked up clothes, bedding, personal hygiene items, non-perishable food, and pet products for free to help Porto Alegre Prefecture's vulnerable people during the winter. Olympians might see the Ben & Jerry's inspired social media campaign, #amoreprogresso, disagree with love. Last spring Ben & Jerry's opened its store in Sao Paolo to let people discuss, over ice cream, contentious issues about corruption and politics.
Olympians coming from countries with a corruption problem also might look into Peruleaks, an independent, secure platform that enables citizens anonymously to provide encrypted information about crimes and corruption to journalists who check accuracy before publishing a whistleblower's observations. Peru's Peruleaks is part of the Associated Whistleblowing Press (AWP), a Belgium-based nonprofit, that combats corruption.
Venezuela is trying out a new crime fighting measure of interest to Olympians from almost any country. In the El Hatillo district of Venezuela, empty out-of-service police cars park in the city's most dangerous areas to serve as a security presence criminals are loath to ignore.
Olympians from countries writing a new constitution, such as Thailand, might ask competitors from Mexico to tell them about the system in Mexico City that invites citizens: 1) to submit proposals for a new constitution at Change.org and 2) to vote on proposed changes. Ideas that receive more than 10,000 signatures are submitted for consideration by a government panel.
Athletes determined to keep fit by eating healthy foods with no added hormones would be interested in the Chilean company called the NotCompany, which relies on the artificial intelligence (AI) expertise of the Giuseppe startup to make meats, cheeses, and milk out of nuts, peas, grains, and other plant-based crops.
Female Olympians thinking about life after competition could check out Peru's Laboratoria program for training women with little to no computer science knowledge and no college education. After graduating from a 5-month coding course, women receive job placement services in Peru, Chile, and Mexico.
And, finally, what can Olympians do with plastic bottles after they finish drinking their water? If they pass through Panama, they might see the Plastic Bottle Village being built by a Canadian entrepreneur. Once steel mesh frames are filled with up to 10,000 plastic bottles for insulation, concrete covers the frames to make walls.
In Brazil, Olympians might pick up a new smartphone and learn Twizer provides help choosing apps, making the most of apps, and incorporating a new phone into daily lives. The Twizer service is free for everyone.
Other interesting things Olympians might hear about in Brazil include: the fact that for six hours on one day, Uber drivers picked up clothes, bedding, personal hygiene items, non-perishable food, and pet products for free to help Porto Alegre Prefecture's vulnerable people during the winter. Olympians might see the Ben & Jerry's inspired social media campaign, #amoreprogresso, disagree with love. Last spring Ben & Jerry's opened its store in Sao Paolo to let people discuss, over ice cream, contentious issues about corruption and politics.
Olympians coming from countries with a corruption problem also might look into Peruleaks, an independent, secure platform that enables citizens anonymously to provide encrypted information about crimes and corruption to journalists who check accuracy before publishing a whistleblower's observations. Peru's Peruleaks is part of the Associated Whistleblowing Press (AWP), a Belgium-based nonprofit, that combats corruption.
Venezuela is trying out a new crime fighting measure of interest to Olympians from almost any country. In the El Hatillo district of Venezuela, empty out-of-service police cars park in the city's most dangerous areas to serve as a security presence criminals are loath to ignore.
Olympians from countries writing a new constitution, such as Thailand, might ask competitors from Mexico to tell them about the system in Mexico City that invites citizens: 1) to submit proposals for a new constitution at Change.org and 2) to vote on proposed changes. Ideas that receive more than 10,000 signatures are submitted for consideration by a government panel.
Athletes determined to keep fit by eating healthy foods with no added hormones would be interested in the Chilean company called the NotCompany, which relies on the artificial intelligence (AI) expertise of the Giuseppe startup to make meats, cheeses, and milk out of nuts, peas, grains, and other plant-based crops.
Female Olympians thinking about life after competition could check out Peru's Laboratoria program for training women with little to no computer science knowledge and no college education. After graduating from a 5-month coding course, women receive job placement services in Peru, Chile, and Mexico.
And, finally, what can Olympians do with plastic bottles after they finish drinking their water? If they pass through Panama, they might see the Plastic Bottle Village being built by a Canadian entrepreneur. Once steel mesh frames are filled with up to 10,000 plastic bottles for insulation, concrete covers the frames to make walls.
Tuesday, March 1, 2016
Corruption Has Consequences
Countries with a reputation for being free of corruption from abuse of power, bribes and kickbacks, and secret deals are attractive tourist destinations and prospects for business investment. Unfortunately, based on a study of 168 countries by the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), no country is totally free of corruption.
In 2015, using a scale of 0-100, the OECD's corruption index showed 68% of the ranked countries scored below 50, indicating a serious corruption problem that took protesters to the streets in some countries. Even Denmark, which scored 91, has room for a bit of improvement. The United States and Austria, with scores of 76, did not make the top ten list of least corrupt countries, which included: Finland, Sweden, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Singapore, Canada, and Germany. Corruption caused Kim Jong-un's North Korea and Somalia to tie for last place in both 2014 and 2015.
Brazil, now embroiled in a corruption scandal (See the earlier post, "Warning to Students: Don't Cheat."), dropped 5 points since 2014, and was in 76th place in 2015. Not a good prospect for countries sending teams to this summer's Olympics in Rio.
The OEDC cautions that its corruption index is based on surveys of conditions institutions make within a country's borders. Countries might have a higher or lower score, if their corruption activities in foreign countries were measured. Indeed, half of OECD countries have been found to violate agreements to stop companies from paying bribes when they do business in countries outside their borders.
The earlier post, "Cheating is Easy, but...," provides some anti-corruption strategies for doing business around the world.
In 2015, using a scale of 0-100, the OECD's corruption index showed 68% of the ranked countries scored below 50, indicating a serious corruption problem that took protesters to the streets in some countries. Even Denmark, which scored 91, has room for a bit of improvement. The United States and Austria, with scores of 76, did not make the top ten list of least corrupt countries, which included: Finland, Sweden, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Singapore, Canada, and Germany. Corruption caused Kim Jong-un's North Korea and Somalia to tie for last place in both 2014 and 2015.
Brazil, now embroiled in a corruption scandal (See the earlier post, "Warning to Students: Don't Cheat."), dropped 5 points since 2014, and was in 76th place in 2015. Not a good prospect for countries sending teams to this summer's Olympics in Rio.
The OEDC cautions that its corruption index is based on surveys of conditions institutions make within a country's borders. Countries might have a higher or lower score, if their corruption activities in foreign countries were measured. Indeed, half of OECD countries have been found to violate agreements to stop companies from paying bribes when they do business in countries outside their borders.
The earlier post, "Cheating is Easy, but...," provides some anti-corruption strategies for doing business around the world.
Monday, November 2, 2015
A Catholic and Communist Work to Overcome Two Countries' Major Difficulties
Vietnam and Brazil are not just accepting the status quo. With different approaches, two individuals are tackling problems and working to improve the lot of their citizens.
Using initial capital provided by an organization based in the Netherlands, Sister Mary Nguyen Thi Phuc, a member of Vietnam's religious order, the Secular Institute of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, designed a credit and savings program for women infected with HIV/AIDS. Using a $223 loan, a woman can start a small business, e.g. by buying a motorbike to transport paying customers or by opening a stand to sell soft drinks, coffee, or fruit, that can generate enough money to provide for herself and pay student fees for her children.
Borrowers are given 10 months to repay their loans with interest to a banking account. Interest is used to assist others who have accidents, illnesses, or lack funds to pay for a funeral. The microloan program has the added benefit of inspiring other women to overcome their difficulties.
In Brazil, the State of Maranhao on the Atlantic Ocean in the northeastern part of the country has both dense Amazonian forests and a vast desert-like expanse of white sand dunes. Its newly elected governor, Flavio Dino, although a member of the Communist Party, is a pro-free market proponent who recognizes the private sector generates wealth. He united members of opposition parties and governs with a vice governor from a pro-business party. His first order of business was to cut palace expenses by eliminating or reducing the budget for champagne, caviar, lobsters, and the security staff.
Although Brazil is in the midst of its worst recession since the 1930s, Maranhao, the country's second poorest state, is determined to rise above Brazil's corruption (See the earlier post, "Warning to Students: Don't Cheat."), declining commodity exports (See the earlier post, "Falling Commodity Prices Spur Diversification in Emerging Markets."), and political turmoil. This toxic combination is threatening to cause Brazil's overall economy to decline 3% this year.
Using initial capital provided by an organization based in the Netherlands, Sister Mary Nguyen Thi Phuc, a member of Vietnam's religious order, the Secular Institute of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, designed a credit and savings program for women infected with HIV/AIDS. Using a $223 loan, a woman can start a small business, e.g. by buying a motorbike to transport paying customers or by opening a stand to sell soft drinks, coffee, or fruit, that can generate enough money to provide for herself and pay student fees for her children.
Borrowers are given 10 months to repay their loans with interest to a banking account. Interest is used to assist others who have accidents, illnesses, or lack funds to pay for a funeral. The microloan program has the added benefit of inspiring other women to overcome their difficulties.
In Brazil, the State of Maranhao on the Atlantic Ocean in the northeastern part of the country has both dense Amazonian forests and a vast desert-like expanse of white sand dunes. Its newly elected governor, Flavio Dino, although a member of the Communist Party, is a pro-free market proponent who recognizes the private sector generates wealth. He united members of opposition parties and governs with a vice governor from a pro-business party. His first order of business was to cut palace expenses by eliminating or reducing the budget for champagne, caviar, lobsters, and the security staff.
Although Brazil is in the midst of its worst recession since the 1930s, Maranhao, the country's second poorest state, is determined to rise above Brazil's corruption (See the earlier post, "Warning to Students: Don't Cheat."), declining commodity exports (See the earlier post, "Falling Commodity Prices Spur Diversification in Emerging Markets."), and political turmoil. This toxic combination is threatening to cause Brazil's overall economy to decline 3% this year.
Monday, August 24, 2015
Warning to Students: Don't Cheat
Children who are motivated to cheat by copying another student's work, paying someone to write their papers, or hiring another student to take a standardized test for them could learn a few lessons from those who have avoided corruption or engaged in it around the world.
Even if the current business culture in a country sanctions corruption, the honesty espoused by Bulent Celebi's AirTies firm in Turkey offers a promising example. When Celebi established his WiFi company, which does not rely on phone lines or fiber optic cables to transmit data, he had six founding values. Besides customer satisfaction and engaged employees, he stated AirTies would be ethical. Therefore, he did not rely on bribes but, according to Elmira Bayrasli's book, From the Other Side of the World, he launched his business by working through the laborious process of dealing with Turkey's bureaucracy and paperwork. Shortcuts, he felt, would start AirTies off in the wrong direction.
While on a visit to Nairobi, Kenya, in November, 2015, Pope Francis told a cheering crowd that corruption was easy and sweet but in the end it makes politics, even in the Vatican, and a country sick. He urged the crowd to keep corruption out of its lives, because corruption takes away joy and robs people of peace in their lives.
Major European auto and truck maker, VW, will pay at least $15 billion for developing a cheating way to pass emissions tests.
As a result of bribing doctors and hospitals by giving them kickbacks, the Japanese-based manufacturer, Olympus, paid a $646 million fine.
By pretending subprime mortgages were sound, Goldman Sachs, one of the US firms that helped bring on the 2008 recession, is expected to pay about $5 billion to resolve state and federal investigations.
In Brazil, President Dilma Rousseff and House Speaker Eduardo Cunha have been implicated in a corruption scandal involving construction firms that paid bribes to Petrobras, the state energy firm. Marcelo Odebrecht, former head of Brazil's giant construction company, designed the scheme that paid kickbacks to win contracts from senior Petrobras officials and that funded political campaigns. In March, 2016, Odebrecht was sentenced to 19 years in prison. Although Rousseff thus far has been found blameless in the Petrobras scandal, the charge of her involvement has led to a call for her impeachment and hurt the country's economy by stopping building and energy projects. Petrobras has had to stop paying dividends, and the company has cut $32 billion from its 5-year $130 billion investment plan. Now that the Federal Accounts Court has ruled that Rousseff's administration used illegal accounting practices, the prospect of impeachment is even greater. Eventually, Rousseff was out, but in June, 2017, new President Michel Temer was charged with taking $11.5 million in bribes for helping a meatpacker who had tax and loan problems.
Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, Iceland's Prime Minister, was the first victim of a leak of papers from the Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca. In April, 2016, he stepped down, when it was disclosed that he and his wife owned an undeclared off shore account where he concealed millions of dollars from taxes. The papers reveal Mossack Fonseca also has formed off shore shell companies to help other clients launder money, dodge sanctions, and evade taxes.
Nigerian authorities fined the South African-based MTN multinational mobile telecommunications company $5.2 billion, later reduced to $3.4 billion. Of MTN's 62 million subscribers, the company failed to disconnect 5.1 million unregistered, and therefore unidentified, Sim card accounts. Kidnappers had used an unregistered Sim card from MTN to demand a ransom for Nigeria's former finance minister, Chief Olu Falae.
A November, 2015 report from the World Anti Doping Agency alleging State-sponsored doping of Russia's Olympic athletes could result in banning the country from competing in 2016's Summer Olympics. And the head of the agency that selects the countries that hold World Cup soccer matches had to resign, when winning host countries were found to have bribed their way into the honor.
In Indonesia, the government's failure to keep an up-to-date land registry results in an inability to assign blame for the devastating forest fires on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo that also have spread a thick haze of smoke to Malaysia, Singapore, and southern Thailand. All together, the smoke has caused an estimated 500,000 respiratory tract infections, and 100,000 premature deaths are a possibility. Fires are set by cheap slash and burn methods used to clear for new planting by both small scale farmers and corporate palm oil, timber (used for paper), and other agricultural corporations. Standards for the hiring and working conditions of migrant labor in the palm oil industry have failed to remedy abuses. When an investigation by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil found the Malaysian palm oil company, IOI, failed to correct deforestation violations in its concessions, Unilever and 9 other major companies cancelled their contracts with IOI.
You can read about charges of corruption Russia faces in the earlier blog post, "Hearing Voices." And Communist Party officials throughout China have been severely punished as reported in the earlier blog post, "China's Corruption Crackdown, New Bank Backing, and Release of PR Activists."
Even if the current business culture in a country sanctions corruption, the honesty espoused by Bulent Celebi's AirTies firm in Turkey offers a promising example. When Celebi established his WiFi company, which does not rely on phone lines or fiber optic cables to transmit data, he had six founding values. Besides customer satisfaction and engaged employees, he stated AirTies would be ethical. Therefore, he did not rely on bribes but, according to Elmira Bayrasli's book, From the Other Side of the World, he launched his business by working through the laborious process of dealing with Turkey's bureaucracy and paperwork. Shortcuts, he felt, would start AirTies off in the wrong direction.
While on a visit to Nairobi, Kenya, in November, 2015, Pope Francis told a cheering crowd that corruption was easy and sweet but in the end it makes politics, even in the Vatican, and a country sick. He urged the crowd to keep corruption out of its lives, because corruption takes away joy and robs people of peace in their lives.
Major European auto and truck maker, VW, will pay at least $15 billion for developing a cheating way to pass emissions tests.
As a result of bribing doctors and hospitals by giving them kickbacks, the Japanese-based manufacturer, Olympus, paid a $646 million fine.
By pretending subprime mortgages were sound, Goldman Sachs, one of the US firms that helped bring on the 2008 recession, is expected to pay about $5 billion to resolve state and federal investigations.
In Brazil, President Dilma Rousseff and House Speaker Eduardo Cunha have been implicated in a corruption scandal involving construction firms that paid bribes to Petrobras, the state energy firm. Marcelo Odebrecht, former head of Brazil's giant construction company, designed the scheme that paid kickbacks to win contracts from senior Petrobras officials and that funded political campaigns. In March, 2016, Odebrecht was sentenced to 19 years in prison. Although Rousseff thus far has been found blameless in the Petrobras scandal, the charge of her involvement has led to a call for her impeachment and hurt the country's economy by stopping building and energy projects. Petrobras has had to stop paying dividends, and the company has cut $32 billion from its 5-year $130 billion investment plan. Now that the Federal Accounts Court has ruled that Rousseff's administration used illegal accounting practices, the prospect of impeachment is even greater. Eventually, Rousseff was out, but in June, 2017, new President Michel Temer was charged with taking $11.5 million in bribes for helping a meatpacker who had tax and loan problems.
Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, Iceland's Prime Minister, was the first victim of a leak of papers from the Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca. In April, 2016, he stepped down, when it was disclosed that he and his wife owned an undeclared off shore account where he concealed millions of dollars from taxes. The papers reveal Mossack Fonseca also has formed off shore shell companies to help other clients launder money, dodge sanctions, and evade taxes.
Nigerian authorities fined the South African-based MTN multinational mobile telecommunications company $5.2 billion, later reduced to $3.4 billion. Of MTN's 62 million subscribers, the company failed to disconnect 5.1 million unregistered, and therefore unidentified, Sim card accounts. Kidnappers had used an unregistered Sim card from MTN to demand a ransom for Nigeria's former finance minister, Chief Olu Falae.
A November, 2015 report from the World Anti Doping Agency alleging State-sponsored doping of Russia's Olympic athletes could result in banning the country from competing in 2016's Summer Olympics. And the head of the agency that selects the countries that hold World Cup soccer matches had to resign, when winning host countries were found to have bribed their way into the honor.
In Indonesia, the government's failure to keep an up-to-date land registry results in an inability to assign blame for the devastating forest fires on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo that also have spread a thick haze of smoke to Malaysia, Singapore, and southern Thailand. All together, the smoke has caused an estimated 500,000 respiratory tract infections, and 100,000 premature deaths are a possibility. Fires are set by cheap slash and burn methods used to clear for new planting by both small scale farmers and corporate palm oil, timber (used for paper), and other agricultural corporations. Standards for the hiring and working conditions of migrant labor in the palm oil industry have failed to remedy abuses. When an investigation by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil found the Malaysian palm oil company, IOI, failed to correct deforestation violations in its concessions, Unilever and 9 other major companies cancelled their contracts with IOI.
You can read about charges of corruption Russia faces in the earlier blog post, "Hearing Voices." And Communist Party officials throughout China have been severely punished as reported in the earlier blog post, "China's Corruption Crackdown, New Bank Backing, and Release of PR Activists."
Friday, April 3, 2015
China's Corruption Crackdown, New Bank Backing, and Release of PR Activists
In case there was any doubt about China's determination to stamp out corruption, the April 2015 arrest of Zhou Yongkang, former head of the domestic secret police and the most senior member of the Chinese Communist Party to face corruption charges, should dispel that notion. Assets from Zhou's family members and associates totaling $14.5 billion were seized, and 300 of his relatives and allies have been taken into custody or questioned. Zhou, and earlier Bo Xilai, were believed to have been investigated by the special investigation team composed of cross-agency law enforcement officials that can only be authorized by Beijing's senior leadership to investigate high ranking Communist Party members.In the book, The Little Red Guard, mentioned in the earlier blog post, "See the World," model workers of older Chinese generations felt betrayed by a new corrupt system that rewarded friends and relatives of Communist Party officials with promotions and raises. Although President Xi Jinping was said to be worried that the extent of corruption revealed at a trial of Zhou would undermine public faith in China's Communist Party and alienate other high level party members who fear their own corruption charges, Zhou was sentenced to life in prison in June, 2015. China also has added Wang Tianpu, president of Sinopec, China's state-owned Petroleum & Chemical Corporation, to its list of corruption suspects. In October, 2015, Sam Pa, who heads the Queensway group in Hong Kong and who has ties to China's intelligence service, was detained in Beijing. Queensway is an active deal maker in Africa and North Korea. In March, 2016, HSBC froze $87 million of Sam Pa's assets.
Following the explosion of the Rui Hai International Logistics's chemical warehouse that killed over 100 and damaged 17,000 homes in Tianjin, ten Chinese officials were detained on suspicion of safety violations. Two Rui Hai executives admitted using political connections to get waivers that allowed the warehouse to be build closer to a residential area than allowed by law, and the warehouse had been cited for safety violations in the past.
China's corruption crackdown already has put politician and powerful Chongqing party boss, Bo Xilai, in prison for life and given his wife, Gu Kailai, a suspended death sentence for poisoning British businessman, Neil Heywood, who may have been murdered for wanting too big a cut for helping get the family funds of Bo and Gu out of China. On July 28, 2015, when Man Mingan, the Chinese prosecutor in Gu's murder trial, was found hanged in his Anhui province apartment, police launched an investigation into the circumstances. In another strange development, China uncovered a fake anti-corruption unit that had its own interrogation room.
The anti-corruption campaign has caused China's big rollers to flee Macau's casinos for Cambodia, where, as described in the earlier post, "Let's Visit China," they hope to do their gambling under the radar of investigators. Consequently, Macau's investors, who have seen their revenue drop, have decided to follow the Las Vegas model and give the island a more family-friendly image by adding a $2.3 billion theme park to a new casino.
Meanwhile, a new Chinese-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which has won the approval of the World Bank, has been founded. The bank's president, Jin Liqun, was among the world's 100 Most Influential People selected by TIME magazine in 2016. AIIB attracted 57 prospective founding members, including Singapore, India, Thailand, and even the UK (but not Japan, Australia, South Korea and the US, the more developed countries that control the rival Asian Development Bank.) Hoping the UK can cash in on billions of trade deals with China, British Prime Minister Cameron gave Chinese President Xi the royal treatment, including a ride in a horse-driven carriage, when he visited the UK in October, 2015. Although President Obama cautioned the UK about developing close ties with China and initially opposed Britain's participation in the AIIB, he eventually suggested the bank may have a positive impact on emerging markets. By 2017, the AIIB had 80 member nations including Britain ad Australia. The Asian Development Bank now works with AIIB to fund energy, transport, and infrastructure projects.
The July, 2015 purchase of the former Milan headquarters of Italian bank, UniCredit, by the Chinese Fosun group headed by Guo Guangchang was just the latest in a series of recent Chinese investments in Italy, including Italian banks and companies, such as tire maker Pirelli and luxury goods manufacturer, Caruso.
After being held for a month, China released five women's rights advocates who have a flair for gaining public attention. They were arrested in March when they prepared to distribute posters and stickers protesting domestic violence. Earlier, they had gained attention for the same cause by parading through the streets in bloody wedding gowns. The women who were charged with creating a disturbance could still be sentenced up to three years in prison, if they fail to report their movements to police and to make themselves available for questioning at any time.
Friday, September 19, 2014
Let's Visit China
While the world is focused on Scotland's vote to remain in the United Kingdom, the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, and ways to contain the ISIS menace, a number of Chinese developments merit attention.
China's e-commerce platform, Alibaba, raised $25 billion when its shares went on sale September 19, 2014. As with other e-commerce firms, there are charges pending about the lack of sales tax paid on Alibaba purchases, and there is concern about e-commerce sales of counterfeit items. Also, there has been no news about how well China's shipping and delivery network is handling online purchases, a problem that has adversely affected India's e-commerce boom (See the later blog post,"Problems Present Career Opportunities.").
Alibaba was not the only company to enjoy a strong response to its initial stock offering. China's CGN nuclear power group received a similar response when its shares went on sale for the first time in Hong Kong. Yet, in January, 2015, the Chinese residential real estate developer, Kaisa Group Holdings, defaulted on a $128 million payment to foreign investors holding $500 million in bonds promising a 10.25% yield.
Urbanization and higher incomes in China are raising demand for locally produced goods, baby formula, disposable diapers, Western foods (such as cheese and Starbuck's and Costa coffee) and movies. Aiming to expand into the film business, Dalian Wanda, China's fourth richest man, who operates China's largest cinema chain and luxury hotels, is expected to open a major office in Hollywood, where he has shown interest in buying shares in and film collaboration with Hollywood's Lionsgate studio. Jack Ma, executive chairman of Alibaba, also has had discussions with Lionsgate. In 2017, movie box office revenue in China will be $8.6 billion. By then, film studios and movie stars will begin to stash revenue in the Khorgos tax haven on China's far northwestern border with Kazakhstan.
Local governments continue to prop up failing heavy industrial plants, and China's manufacturing sector does not turn down opportunities to produce religious items. Though an atheist country, a Chinese factory has published over 125 million Bibles. Unfettered industrialization continues to cause China problems with pollution. Recent studies show China's population produces more carbon dioxide (CO2) per head than the European Union and U.S. Therefore, it was great news November 12, 2014 to learn that China and the U.S. have signed a pact, however symbolic, to limit carbon emissions. At a dinner and meeting in Beijing's Great Hall of the People during the November 11-12, 2014 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, both President Obama and President/General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, stressed peace, prosperity, stability, and a partnership that fosters security in a Pacific Ocean "broad enough to accommodate the development of both China and the United States."
At the end of the APEC summit, after Japan's Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, and China's President met on November 10, 2014, Abe said he hoped the two countries would talk again and again (a hotline to prevent their vessels from conflict in the East China Sea has been proposed) and that they would work toward a mutually beneficial relationship. Earlier, a Chinese diplomat in Iceland was arrested as a spy for Japan.
Hong Kong tycoons are spending freely. The Chan brothers have donated $350 million to Harvard and expect to make another sizable donation to the University of Southern California. Stephen Hung ordered $20 million worth of Rolls Royces to transport gamblers at his Louis XIII resort in Macao. Nonetheless, Chinese gamblers, who have been staying away from Macao's casinos for fear of being targeted in China's crack down on corruption, have put a big dent in the island's revenue as they try to stay clear of China's anti-graft investigations into the origin of their wealth. Casinos in Cambodia have benefited from this exodus of Chinese gamblers trying to stay under the radar. Macau's investors, on the other hand, are trying to regain visitors by following the Las Vegas model and giving the island a more family-friendly image by adding a $2.3 billion theme park to a new casino.
Despite the use of tear gas and the arrest of a leader of the pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, which has an almost country-to-country border crossing procedure with mainland China, protests continue to oppose Beijing's attempt to dictate which candidates can run for election in 2017. (See the later blog post, "Hong Kong Update.") Though not secure from authorities, Hong Kong protesters are using the smartphone mobile app, FireChat, to communicate with each other without relying on Internet connections. President Xi believes foreign countries are involved in the protests.
The number of Chinese students, who once made up 33% of international grad students in the U.S., is decreasing. French speaking Chinese students are on their way to former French African countries to work for Chinese companies there. In English-speaking Africa, China is building a $12 billion, 1,400 km railway in Nigeria.
(For more about China, see the earlier blog post, "See the World.")
China's e-commerce platform, Alibaba, raised $25 billion when its shares went on sale September 19, 2014. As with other e-commerce firms, there are charges pending about the lack of sales tax paid on Alibaba purchases, and there is concern about e-commerce sales of counterfeit items. Also, there has been no news about how well China's shipping and delivery network is handling online purchases, a problem that has adversely affected India's e-commerce boom (See the later blog post,"Problems Present Career Opportunities.").
Alibaba was not the only company to enjoy a strong response to its initial stock offering. China's CGN nuclear power group received a similar response when its shares went on sale for the first time in Hong Kong. Yet, in January, 2015, the Chinese residential real estate developer, Kaisa Group Holdings, defaulted on a $128 million payment to foreign investors holding $500 million in bonds promising a 10.25% yield.
Urbanization and higher incomes in China are raising demand for locally produced goods, baby formula, disposable diapers, Western foods (such as cheese and Starbuck's and Costa coffee) and movies. Aiming to expand into the film business, Dalian Wanda, China's fourth richest man, who operates China's largest cinema chain and luxury hotels, is expected to open a major office in Hollywood, where he has shown interest in buying shares in and film collaboration with Hollywood's Lionsgate studio. Jack Ma, executive chairman of Alibaba, also has had discussions with Lionsgate. In 2017, movie box office revenue in China will be $8.6 billion. By then, film studios and movie stars will begin to stash revenue in the Khorgos tax haven on China's far northwestern border with Kazakhstan.
Local governments continue to prop up failing heavy industrial plants, and China's manufacturing sector does not turn down opportunities to produce religious items. Though an atheist country, a Chinese factory has published over 125 million Bibles. Unfettered industrialization continues to cause China problems with pollution. Recent studies show China's population produces more carbon dioxide (CO2) per head than the European Union and U.S. Therefore, it was great news November 12, 2014 to learn that China and the U.S. have signed a pact, however symbolic, to limit carbon emissions. At a dinner and meeting in Beijing's Great Hall of the People during the November 11-12, 2014 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, both President Obama and President/General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, stressed peace, prosperity, stability, and a partnership that fosters security in a Pacific Ocean "broad enough to accommodate the development of both China and the United States."
At the end of the APEC summit, after Japan's Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, and China's President met on November 10, 2014, Abe said he hoped the two countries would talk again and again (a hotline to prevent their vessels from conflict in the East China Sea has been proposed) and that they would work toward a mutually beneficial relationship. Earlier, a Chinese diplomat in Iceland was arrested as a spy for Japan.
Hong Kong tycoons are spending freely. The Chan brothers have donated $350 million to Harvard and expect to make another sizable donation to the University of Southern California. Stephen Hung ordered $20 million worth of Rolls Royces to transport gamblers at his Louis XIII resort in Macao. Nonetheless, Chinese gamblers, who have been staying away from Macao's casinos for fear of being targeted in China's crack down on corruption, have put a big dent in the island's revenue as they try to stay clear of China's anti-graft investigations into the origin of their wealth. Casinos in Cambodia have benefited from this exodus of Chinese gamblers trying to stay under the radar. Macau's investors, on the other hand, are trying to regain visitors by following the Las Vegas model and giving the island a more family-friendly image by adding a $2.3 billion theme park to a new casino.
Despite the use of tear gas and the arrest of a leader of the pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, which has an almost country-to-country border crossing procedure with mainland China, protests continue to oppose Beijing's attempt to dictate which candidates can run for election in 2017. (See the later blog post, "Hong Kong Update.") Though not secure from authorities, Hong Kong protesters are using the smartphone mobile app, FireChat, to communicate with each other without relying on Internet connections. President Xi believes foreign countries are involved in the protests.
The number of Chinese students, who once made up 33% of international grad students in the U.S., is decreasing. French speaking Chinese students are on their way to former French African countries to work for Chinese companies there. In English-speaking Africa, China is building a $12 billion, 1,400 km railway in Nigeria.
(For more about China, see the earlier blog post, "See the World.")
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