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Latest Developments, January 23

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Mission creep
Le Monde reports being told by several military sources that the number of French troops on the ground in Mali is likely to be “considerably more than 3,000”:

“The mission’s anticipated duration remains unclear; officials will only say it will last ‘as long as necessary.’ There were 2,150 French troops deployed in Mali on Monday, with an additional 1,000 providing support.
…
In the second phase of the offensive, French forces will advance into the North. Rather than heavy bombardment, large numbers of helicopters will allow French forces to hold the ground. ‘Now is when the difficulties will begin,’ said a military official.” [Translated from the French.]

Hunger Inc.
The Independent reports that more than 100 civil society groups have launched a new campaign blaming a grain oligopoly for the hunger of hundreds of millions of people around the world:

“The new campaign challenges [this year’s G8 chair] David Cameron to take the lead in championing measures to stop tax-dodging by companies, prevent farmers from being forced off their land and ensure western nations live up to their promises on aid.
…
It says five multinationals – ADM, Bunge, Cargill, Glencore and Louis Dreyfus – control all but ten per cent of the world’s grain supplies.
The campaign’s chair, Max Lawson, Oxfam’s head of policy, said: ‘The stranglehold of a small number of companies on food supply is squeezing African farmers’ ability to feed themselves and their communities.’ ”

Buying access
The Globe and Mail reports that a Calgary-based energy company has agreed to pay the biggest foreign corruption fine in Canadian history over bribes paid to obtain oil and gas contracts in Chad:

“The plea by Griffiths Energy International Inc., a small privately held oil and gas company based in Calgary, stands to settle charges it faces under Canada’s Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act after a company investigation unearthed payments made in an attempt to secure lucrative energy properties in Africa.
…
It is illegal for Canadian companies to bribe foreign officials – transactions that were once viewed as routine business deals, particularly for resource outfits. The Griffiths case will mark the second conviction for the RCMP since it established teams dedicated to investigating foreign corruption.”

Dutch haven
Bloomberg reports that the Dutch parliament is looking into the Netherlands’ role as “a $13 trillion relay station on the global tax-avoiding network”:

“Last month, the European Commission, the European Union’s executive body, declared a war on tax avoidance and evasion, which it said costs the EU 1 trillion euros a year. The commission advised member states — including the Netherlands — to create tax-haven blacklists and adopt anti-abuse rules. It also recommended reforms that could undermine the lure of the Netherlands, and hurt a spinoff industry that has mushroomed in and around Amsterdam to abet tax avoidance.
Attracted by the Netherlands’ lenient policies and extensive network of tax treaties, companies such as Yahoo, Google Inc., Merck & Co. and Dell Inc. have moved profits through the country. Using techniques with nicknames such as the ‘Dutch Sandwich,’ multinational companies routed 10.2 trillion euros in 2010 through 14,300 Dutch ‘special financial units,’ according to the Dutch Central Bank. Such units often only exist on paper, as is allowed by law.”

Second fiddle
Radio France Internationale reports that, despite the personnel demands of the Mali intervention, the French military is maintaining a presence in another former colony, namely the Central African Republic:

“The military crisis has passed and soldiers, whether they be Central African or foreign, are less visible. The French army has been called to another theatre of operations, Mali, and in the streets of Bangui, French uniforms are now much more rare. ‘During last month’s crisis, we got up to 604 troops. The 240 that will stay here beyond the end of the week will carry out their original mission, providing logistical and technical support for the Central African Multinational Force. And of course, if the situation deteriorates again, they will ensure the protection of our citizens and our interests,’ said Lieutenant-Colonel Benoît Fine, commander of the French mission in the Central African Republic.” [Translated from the French.]

Questionable advice
Inter Press Service reports that Malawi’s new president’s apparent enthusiasm for the economic prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund is causing a popular backlash:

“According to John Kapito, head of the watchdog known as the Consumers Association of Malawi, [President Joyce] Banda has ‘transferred power’ to the IMF and the World Bank.
‘Like many leaders of poor countries, the problem with Joyce Banda is that she doesn’t think on her own. She is listening to everything that the IMF and the World Bank are telling her. She (agreed) to devalue the kwacha, agreed to remove subsidies on fuel without considering the impact of these decisions on the poor,’ said Kapito, who helped organise the latest demonstrations.”

Libyan arms
The Telegraph’s Richard Spencer writes about the large quantities of weapons that went missing from Libya after NATO military action helped topple the country’s long-time ruler, weapons that may have precipitated the latest foreign intervention, this time in Mali:

“Gaddafi, [Human Rights Watch’s Peter Bouckaert] said, had built up a vast arsenal of kit, with dumps in every city. Much of it has gone missing – far more than, say, disappeared after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. He himself photographed men with 18-wheel trailers towing away the landmines from my field – he reckoned there were 120,000 anti-personnel mines and 30,000 anti-tank mines. He says they were sold to an international arms dealer and are still in circulation.
‘The weapons that went missing in Libya are perhaps the greatest proliferation of weapons of war from any modern conflict,’ he said.”

Speaking out
Reuters reports that a Yemeni cabinet minister has broken ranks by criticizing US drone strikes in her country and calling for “more effective strategies”:

“[Human rights minister Hooria] Mashhour also said she wanted to see a fair trial for anyone suspected of involvement ‘in terrorist activities’.
‘This is our idea, to do this through the judiciary. But the United States said that it’s in an open war with them and they declared the US as an enemy. The (US) declared (militants) as enemies who could be targeted wherever they are found.
‘All we are calling for is justice and reliance on international regulations with regard to human rights and to be true to our commitment to our citizens in that they all deserve a fair trial,’ Mashhour added.

Latest Developments, July 24

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Bad news on inequality
The Tax Justice Network has released a pair of reports on the extent and the impacts of the global offshore banking system, which together argue that the “at least $21 trillion hidden in secret tax havens” mean economic inequality is actually much worse than generally thought:

“At its simplest, our argument is that if an asset is hidden in an offshore bank account, or an offshore trust or company, and the ultimate owner or beneficiary of the income or capital cannot be identified, then this asset and the income it produces will not be counted in the inequality statistics. Almost all these hidden assets are owned by the world’s wealthiest individuals. So it follows that the inequality statistics, particularly at the top end of the scale, underestimate the scale of the problem.”

AND

“For our focus subgroup of 139 mostly low-middle income countries, traditional data shows aggregate external debts of $4.1tn at the end of 2010. But take their foreign reserves and unrecorded offshore private wealth into account, and the picture reverses: they had aggregate net debts of minus US$10.1-13.1tn. In other words, these countries are big net creditors, not debtors. Unfortunately, their assets are held by a few wealthy individuals, while their debts are shouldered by their ordinary people through their governments.”

Strings attached
The International Monetary Fund has announced it has approved a $156 million loan for Malawi, as a result of new president Joyce Banda’s policies, even though they may be exacerbating the country’s growing food crisis:

“Following the Board’s discussion of Malawi, Naoyuki Shinohara, Deputy Managing Director and Acting Chair, issued the following statement:
‘Malawi’s new administration moved swiftly to devalue the kwacha, adopt a flexible exchange rate regime and liberalize current account transactions to address the country’s chronic balance of payment problems and improve the outlook for poverty reduction and growth.’
…
‘Tight control over non-priority spending will be needed to ensure that expenditures are aligned with the government’s priorities, including scaled up spending on social protection programs to mitigate the impact of adjustment measures on the poor.’ ”

Regulatory capture
The New York Times discusses a new book by Neil Barofsky, “the man whose job it was to police the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program”:

“ ‘There has to be wide-scale acknowledgment that regulatory capture exists, dominates our system and needs to be eradicated,’ Mr. Barofsky said in the interview.
…
‘We need to re-educate our regulators that it’s O.K. to be adversarial, that it’s not going to hurt your career advancement to be more skeptical and more challenging,’ he said. ‘It’s implicit in so much of the regulatory structure that if you don’t make too many waves there will be a job for you elsewhere. So we have to limit those job opportunities and develop a more professional path for regulators as a career. That way, they won’t always have that siren call of Wall Street.’
Mr. Barofsky’s assessment of his former regulatory brethren is crucial for taxpayers to understand, because Congress’s financial reform act — the Dodd-Frank legislation — left so much of the heavy lifting to the weak-kneed.”

Expanding footprint
MENAFN reports that Barrick Gold subsidiary African Barrick Gold is growing its operations beyond Tanzania, where controversies involving the company’s mines have included alleged toxic spills and fatal shootings, into Kenya with newly acquired exploration assets:

“Aviva’s Kenyan assets are located in the southwest corner of Kenya, about 300 kilometers northwest of Nairobi, near the border of Uganda and on the shores of Lake Victoria, it said.
‘This acquisition represents the first step in expanding our footprint outside of Tanzania and building our future growth pipeline,’ said Chief Executive Greg Hawkins. ‘The acquisition is an attractive entry into an under explored and highly prospective land package in a country bordering our existing operations.’ ”

Democratic calculus
Responding to a Human Rights Watch report condemning the current state of human rights in Venezuela, the Overseas Development Institute’s Jonathan Glennie counters that in some instances, freedom of the press “can actually mitigate against progress for the majority poor”:

“Take the Murdoch empire, multiply it by about a thousand and you are somewhere close to how powerful the rightwing media is in Latin America. In [the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s Mark] Weisbrot’s words the ‘unelected owners [of major media outlets] and their allies use their control of information to advance the interests of the wealth and power that used to rule the country’.
It is proven beyond doubt that the rightwing media was an active and key player in the 2002 coup that briefly removed [Venezuelan President Hugo] Chávez from power (see the brilliant documentary The revolution will not be televised). In such a context, reducing the rightwing media’s room for manoeuvre may be a crucial element in any plan to radically transform a country. (In the run-up to elections in October, Chavez has accused Venezuela’s privately owned media companies of bias towards the opposition and of ignoring his government’s achievements.) Where single-issue civil rights organisations see media crackdowns, what may be happening is an elected and popular government trying to implement the will of the people in the face of powerful business interests prepared to undermine democracy if need be.”

Fatal laws
Reuters reports that Mexican President Felipe Calderon has called America’s gun laws “mistaken” and is urging the US government to change them: 

“In comments posted on his Twitter account on Saturday, Calderon offered his condolences to the United States after a gunman went on the rampage with an assault rifle at a midnight premier of the new Batman film in Aurora, Colorado.
But Mexico’s president, who has repeatedly called on Washington to tighten gun controls to stop weapons flowing from the United States into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, said U.S. weapons policy needed a rethink after the killings.”

Fostering homophobia
The Guardian reports that US-based thinktank Political Research Associates is accusing American evangelical groups of attempting a “cultural colonisation” of Africa by opening offices across the continent to promote attacks on abortion and homosexuality.

“Entitled Colonising African Values: How the US Christian Right is Transforming Sexual Politics in Africa, the study analysed data from seven African countries and employed researchers for several months in Kenya, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
It identified three organisations it believes are aggressively targeting the continent: [televangelist Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice], the Catholic group Human Life International and Family Watch International, led by the Mormon activist Sharon Slater.
Each of these ‘frame their agendas as authentically African, in an effort to brand human rights advocacy as a new colonialism bent on destroying cultural traditions and values’, the report says.”

Latest Developments, July 17

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Mau Mau trial
The Standard’s Kenfrey Kiberenge writes that a lawsuit brought by elderly Kenyans against the British government highlights “the West’s double standards” in matters of human rights:

“Britain is a strong backer of an ICC case in which four Kenyans face charges of crimes against humanity related to the 2008 poll violence which left more than 1,000 people dead. Questions to any British official about these cases attract a uniform answer: let justice run its course.
Why then is the same administration seeking to have the Mau Mau case struck out on a technicality?”

Bad advice
The World Food Programme is predicting that 1.6 million Malawians will need food assistance over the next few months, in part because of the currency devaluation demanded by the IMF:

“The recent devaluation of the national currency by 49 percent, coupled with soaring inflation at 17.3 percent, has produced sharp increases in the prices of basic goods and services, pushing the cost of living to unsustainable levels for many Malawians. Food prices have been particularly affected by high transport costs due to increases in the price of fuel. Retail maize prices have already increased by 50 percent compared to the same time last year, and are expected to increase in the lean season.”

AU first
The Mail & Guardian reports that South Africa’s Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma has become the first female head of the African Union Commission:

“At a news conference earlier in the day before the vote, Dlamini-Zuma sought to dispel fears that South Africa might seek to use the AU post to try to dominate the continent.
Some smaller countries had argued that her candidacy broke an unwritten rule that Africa’s dominant states should not contest the AU leadership.
‘South Africa is not going to come to Addis Ababa to run the AU. It is Dlamini-Zuma who is going to come to make a contribution,’ she told reporters.”

Classified euphemism
The Council on Foreign Relations’ Micah Zenko quotes Newsweek’s Daniel Klaidman to illustrate the extent of the Obama administration’s drone-policy opacity, particularly when it comes to the CIA’s practice of killing “individuals who are deemed guilty not based on evidence, but rather on their demography”:

“Signature strike has gotten to be sort of a pejorative term. They sometimes call it crowd killing. And it makes a lot of people uncomfortable. If you don’t have positive ID on the people you’re targeting with these drone strikes. So the CIA actually changed the name of signature strikes to something called TADS. I had the acronym but I didn’t know what it stood for. I had a couple of words. I kind of figured it out. Terrorist, T for terrorist, S for strike and I was trying to find out what does the A-D stand for. Eventually I figured it out. It was Terrorist attack disruption strike. And I was going to put it in Newsweek. And actually it was the excerpt from my book. And various agencies from the government were very unhappy about that. I sort of could not understand why. They said, well, it’s a classified term. And I said, well, why would it be classified? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s just a term to describe a particular kind of activity that we know takes place. They asked me not to print it. You know, I printed it anyway.”

Top of the charts
The Financial Times reports on a new survey that found the UK oil and gas sector has faced more bribery prosecutions than any other industry in the last four years:

“The study by Ernst & Young found that of 26 completed cases since 2008, oil and gas made up nearly one-fifth of prosecutions. The industry saw five completed cases, compared to three each in the medical goods, insurance, and engineering and construction sectors.
Most of them involved payments made abroad, or kickbacks to foreign government officials.”

Controversial philanthropy
The Independent suggests that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s decision to devote millions to the development of genetically modified crops “could be the most significant PR endorsement for the controversial technology”:

“The Microsoft founder and his wife have established themselves as major players in global health and development over the past 16 years, having donated £26bn. Only last week Melinda Gates was in London to pledge $560m (£360m) to improve family-planning services across the developing world. But the Foundation’s support for GM crops has attracted criticism, as has its investment in Monsanto – one the world’s largest GM seed producers.”

Bank Recidivism
Reuters reports that HSBC’s claims to have left its money-laundering days behind may be premature:

“Former employees in [HSBC’s New Castle, Delaware, anti-money laundering office] describe a febrile boiler-room environment overseen by managers uninterested in investigating transactions with possible links to drug trafficking, terrorist financing, Iran and other countries under U.S. sanctions, and other illegal activities. Instead, they say, the single-minded focus was on clearing out the paperwork as fast as possible. ”

Too much help
Inter Press Service reports that not everyone thinks the billions in aid pledged to Afghanistan last month will be entirely helpful::

“The plan ‘Toward Self-Reliance’ promoted by the international community and endorsed by the Afghan government is grounded in a similar oxymoron: the call for the Afghan state to get back its sovereignty and ownership is made by those who are preventing it from happening.
The presence of foreign armies and of the international community ‘is one of the major elements that prevents the State, the political system, the ruling elite, from gaining full legitimacy,’ [the London School of Economics’] Antonio Giustozzi tells IPS. ‘Not necessarily because the foreigners pre-empt that, but because any government that relies on external support to stay in power does not have legitimacy.’ ”

Latest Developments, May 18

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G8(ish) summit
Deutshce Welle reports on the issues and questions facing the G8 as it convenes this weekend in Camp David, where the presidents of Ethiopia, Tanzania, Ghana and Benin will be in attendance, but Russia’s will not.
“The list of topics is long for a summit that doesn’t even last 24 hours. It spans from food security for Africa to the nuclear debate with Iran, troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, further course of action in Syria and North Korea all the way to climate protection.
…
So time and again the question arises what the point of the G8 summits even is. After all: the eight countries represent 15 percent of the world’s population and two-thirds of the international economic performance. It is a loose union of states, without any solid organization, financing or rules. It was created as a forum in the middle of the oil crisis in the 1970s to coordinate economic and trade issues. But political and economic questions are now regularly on the agenda – even when the G20 is considered the more powerful economic forum and the UN Security Council regulates sanction mechanisms.”

US army to Africa
Al Jazeera reports that a combat brigade will be assigned next year to the US military’s Africa Command “to do training and participate in military exercises” around the continent.
“General Ray Odierno, the army’s chief of staff, says the plan is part of a new effort to provide US commanders around the globe with troops on a rotational basis to meet the military needs of their regions.
This pilot programme sends troops to an area that has become a greater priority for the Obama administration since it includes several nations from where it perceives an increasing threat to the US and the region.”

Let them eat tobacco
Inter Press Service reports that Malawi’s IMF-prescribed currency devaluation earlier this month has made life more difficult for the country’s poor by causing a huge hike in food prices but should help the tobacco industry.
“Tobacco is the country’s main revenue earner, accounting for up to 60 percent – or 950 million dollars – of foreign exchange. According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, Malawi’s tobacco accounts for five percent of the world’s total exports.
…
‘On the export front, the devaluation will lead to increased demand for Malawi’s exports in the short run. In the long run, this is expected to stimulate production and thus lead to increased production of exportable goods … thereby generating foreign currency,’ said [the Malawi Economic Justice Network’s Dalitso] Kubalasa.
He added that because the prices of imports had automatically risen and become unaffordable for some, the situation would motivate locals to substitute these goods with commodities that can be produced locally. It would provide an incentive to local industry, he said.
But he admitted that the devaluation would affect the country’s middle class and poor.”

Matter of conscience
The Harvard School of Public Health’s Winston Hide explains that his conscience compelled his resignation from the editorial board of the Elsevier-published Genomics journal.
“No longer can I work for a system that provides solid profits for the publisher while effectively denying colleagues in developing countries access to research findings.”
…
The vast majority of biomedical scientists in Africa attempt to perform globally competitive research without up-to-date access to the wealth of biomedical literature taken for granted at western institutions. In Africa, your university may have subscriptions to only a handful of scientific journals.
…
So I’d prefer to devote the limited time I have available to an open access journal that provides its work at no cost to researchers who urgently require its contents to improve their environment.”

Growing debt
The Guardian reports that a few short years after a series of debt cancellations, total external debt owed by “developing countries” increased by $437 billion in 2010 to reach $4 trillion.
“A major chunk of the debt owed by 32 countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, was eliminated by the heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC) initiative of the World Bank and IMF, which was reinforced by the G8’s 2005 multilateral debt relief initiative (MDRI).
But many poor countries in Asia and Latin America (for example, Jamaica and El Salvador) did not have debts written off because their income per capita was too high to meet the IMF and World Bank criteria. Others, such as Bangladesh, did not qualify for cancellation because their debts were seen as sustainable.
…
But even in countries that did qualify for debt write-offs, there is evidence that external debts, which fell significantly after 1995, are on the rise again.
‘These loans are building up again,’ said [the Jubilee Debt Campaign’ Tim] Jones. ‘It can go unnoticed if economies are growing and exports are on the rise – but as soon as there’s a crisis like a drought or flood it becomes a huge problem.’ ”

Techno fixations
In a review of two new books on transformative technology, Sona Partners’ Timothy Ogden slams “techno-utopianism.”
“In the few places where [Abundance authors Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler] begin to acknowledge that the problems that keep much of the world disenfranchised, impoverished, and unhealthy are not technological in origin, they quickly explain that we already ‘know’ how to deal with those issues. For instance, we ‘know’ that ‘community support is the most critical component for any water solution’ and ‘maintenance workers need to be incentivized.’ Now that we know these facts, a technology breakthrough is all that’s needed to fix global water problems. I wonder what technology will fix global justice problems now that we know all people are created equal.”

Too hot for TED
The Atlantic reproduces venture capitalist Nick Hanauer’s speech on inequality that TED University deemed “too politically controversial to post on their web site,” in which he questions the conventional wisdom that rich people and businesses create jobs.
“Anyone who’s ever run a business knows that hiring more people is a capitalist’s course of last resort, something we do only when increasing customer demand requires it. In this sense, calling ourselves job creators isn’t just inaccurate, it’s disingenuous.
That’s why our current policies are so upside down. When you have a tax system in which most of the exemptions and the lowest rates benefit the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer.
Since 1980, the share of income for the richest Americans has more than tripled while effective tax rates have declined by close to 50%.”