Archive for January, 2010
01 31st, 2010
I am reading Dambisa Moyo’s book, Dead Aid, in which she writes: “In a perfect world, what poor countries at the lowest rungs of economic development need is not a multi-party democracy, but in fact a decisive benevolent dictator to push through the reforms required to get the economy moving.”
She may be right. But how to make it work?
01 30th, 2010
The average income in Britain is around £20,000 which is not enough for a family to live on. Employers knows this, but the lower the wages the higher their bonuses. Therefore, both parents have to work full time. Because parents are too exhausted to raise their children society has become ‘broken.’ This was the conclusion around the dinner table last night to the question of how can anyone live on the average salary. What a dangerous economic balance for a society to get itself into!
01 24th, 2010
The concept of having to hold elections to give government’s credibility unravelled a fraction with Afghanistan’s decision to postpone its parliamentary elections for four months. It shows up the paradoxical ideology advocated by Western democracies who pushed for the postponement — after the chaos of the presidential elections in August. Elections are all very well, but they must be held in an environment where they work.
01 23rd, 2010
I’m finding increasing pressure for the advocates of ‘instant democracy’ to get off their butts and argue their case. This is a very interesting site from the US. http://principalitiesandpowers.blogspot.com/
It is a disgrace, given all that political theorists have to teach, that there has been such enthusiasm for “democracy” and multi-party elections, in isolation of the other pre-requisites for liberty……With the rise of dictators (Chavez), kleptocrats (Putin), and Islamocrats by the ballot box, democracy has been earning a justifiably bad reputation. David C. Innes, Asst. Professor, The King’s College in New York City.
01 20th, 2010
Al-Qaeda is trying to destabilise the whole of South Asia hoping to provoke war between India and Pakistan, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates says. “It’s important to recognise the magnitude of the threat,” Mr Gates said, after meeting his Indian counterpart AK Antony in Delhi.
The scenario is laid out in:-
01 20th, 2010
Unusual for London, an elegant and spacious BYO restaurant with superb Thai and Malaysian food that does not charge corkage. It’s only just opened and deserves big support. A multi-dish dinner for two, squid, chicken, tofu, beef — all freshly cooked — costs less than £30 and would be double that if you had to pay for drinks. They helpfully direct guests to a small wine shop around the corner from where I chose a £9.99 bottle of New Zealand Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc.
It’s called The Number One Cafe Restuarant, 1 Dalgarno Gardens, London, W10 5LL 44 (0) 20 968 0558.
01 16th, 2010
The Economist has published one of the most carefully argued pieces I have seen on the democracy debate.
Here is an extract, but I urge you read the whole article:- Click here: Crying for Freedom – Democracy’s Decline
For freedom-watchers in the West, the worrying thing is that the cause of liberal democracy is not merely suffering political reverses, it is also in intellectual retreat. Semi-free countries, uncertain which direction to take, seem less convinced that the liberal path is the way of the future. And in the West, opinion-makers are quicker to acknowledge democracy’s drawbacks—and the apparent fact that contested elections do more harm than good when other preconditions for a well-functioning system are absent. It is a sign of the times that a British reporter, Humphrey Hawksley, has written a book with the title: “Democracy Kills: What’s So Good About the Vote?”.
01 13th, 2010
Review of Democracy Kills in The Morning Star:-
Humphrey Hawksley is not another Friedrich Engels. Yet the BBC correspondent’s latest book certainly has the potential to be something comparable to The Condition Of The Working Class in England in 1844, albeit different in the scope and scale of its subject matter. Democracy Kills: What’s So Good About Having The Vote? offers an impressive collection of evidence, including interviews with people at the bottom of the capitalist pile across five continents, to show that the last 20 years of imposed liberal democratic values – usually narrowly defined as the opportunity to periodically participate in elections – has led to the deaths of millions and the impoverishment of many more.
To read the whole review Click here: Democracy Kills — Morning Star
01 11th, 2010
So far this year, almost 300 have died in the war between Mexico’s drug cartels. Sixty nine had been killed in the past 24 hours and a third of the killings have been in Cuidad Juarez on the US border with El Paso. When covering drug trafficking over the US-Canada border last year, the US Border Patrol were adamant that drug cartels would not hesitate in exporting terror if the money was right. So which is the biggest danger Mexico or Afghanistan?
01 10th, 2010
Some sixty countries, mostly from the developing world, are planning to use nuclear power in the near future. Many believe that their fuel supplies could be blocked by Western sanctions totally unrelated to their nuclear ambitions, creating the nightmare scenario that they will begin enriching their own uranium. One solution is to create stockpiles of uranium, controlled by the United Nations, that these governments could draw upon. They would be known as international nuclear fuel banks. Two have already been earmarked – one in Russia and one in Kazakhstan – from where Humphrey Hawksley was given unprecedented access.
We were in a wilderness that used to be home to a string of Stalin’s Gulags. Emerging from a swirl of driving snow, the skyline of a brand new city appeared — mirage-like — in the distance. It rose from the frozen white Central Asian Steppe, a city of trophies, of boulevards and monuments, a pyramid, a circular tower, a grand arch and, at the outskirts, a mosque with its four minarets flanked protectively, but respectfully, by commercial sky-scrapers.
The scene reminded me of something, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
Was this like a creation of Shelley’s Ozymandias King of Kings with his ‘vast and trunkless legs of stone’ standing as symbols of misused power in the desert? Or was it another architectural glimpse of the Asian century whose confidence is stretching from Beijing to Delhi and beyond.
The city was Astana, the new capital of Kazakhstan, built on the site of a once-isolated railway town in the middle of no-where. Kazakhstan is an oil and gas frontier land and, despite its questionable democracy, a darling of the West.
It used to be a Soviet republic, famous for nuclear testing and its arsenal of weapons – which is why in the coming months it could also become a pivotal global player.
I arrived in Astana from Ust Kamenogorsk, a remote city in the east, once closed to the outside world, whose factories used to enrich uranium to make nuclear weapons. During the Cold War, Kazakhstan stockpiled enough for 55,000 Hiroshima-sized atom bombs.
My destination had been the Ulba Metallurgical Plant to look at an idea that had been suggested back in 1953 by President Eisenhower. It was too idealistic at the time and never got off the ground. But now, prompted by the Iran nuclear crisis, it could be right on the button. Eisenhower wanted to create international stockpiles of nuclear fuel available to any country for — as he put it — the peaceful pursuits of mankind.
Wrapped up against the sub-zero cold, we walked under a line of snow-covered pipes to a building where a guard pulled back a huge metal door. In front of us were green freight cars on a railway line; then, to our right a cavernous expanse of warehouse. Down the end was a wired off area inside which were rows of metallic cylinders containing uranium hexafluoride gas – a key stage of the nuclear fuel cycle.
The idea, if it comes off, would be to turn this area into diplomatic territory under United Nations jurisdiction. The International Atomic Energy Agency would control the nuclear fuel stored here and ready for use by any government that needed it for peaceful purposes – regardless of its politics or human rights record.
It would be known as an International Nuclear Fuel bank.
There are some sixty governments planning to use nuclear power in the future. Some, like Syria or Burma, are viewed as hostile to the West. The nightmare scenario is that many start enriching their own uranium, edging them closer to making nuclear weapons. The solution is that they won’t need to because their supplies will be guaranteed through a mechanism like this.
“Kazakhstan, with its experience in handling nuclear materials, is an ideal place to host a fuel bank,” explained the Kazakh foreign minister Kanat Saudabaev. “And this can be a key lever in stopping proliferation, not just for Iran, but also for many other countries.”
We were sitting with his interpreter in the gleaming ministry building in Astana. Like the whole city, it smelt of newness, with tapestries on the walls and minimalist furniture.
“So how come,” I asked, “that you made a decision to give up your nuclear arsenal, when Iran and other countries seem to be chaffing at the bit to get one?”
“It wasn’t easy,” he replied. “At that time, plane after plane arrived with government leaders offering us jumbo jets filled with dollars if we kept our nuclear weapons.”
“Who?” I asked.
His brow crinkled, but he didn’t answer. I eyed the interpreter. “The Muslim countries,” he whispered.
“What, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria….”
The interpreter answered with a barely perceptible nod, and it was then that I remembered what exactly the futuristic skyline of Astana had reminded me of.
It was Iraq. When building his convention centre in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein had commissioned a mural of a similar scene of mosque’s and skyscrapers in his vision of Iraq as forward-looking state of the Islamic world. But he had failed, largely because he opted for confrontation over his weapons of mass destruction.
“By renouncing nuclear weapons,” the foreign minister was saying, “we gained the world’s trust and a huge amount of foreign investment has come in.” He paused, thinking for a moment. “We can only imagine what might have happened if we had kept them. By now we would have become a pariah state.”
