Each misfortune you encounter will carry in it the seed of tomorrow’s good luck.
~Anonymous
Hope so!
My laptop died. My Dell D400’s hard drive started making clicking noises and now won’t start up. After several hours on the phone with Dell GOLD technical support (for which my former company paid a bunch of extra money for), I am told that I will be getting a hard drive in the mail, but all of my data is lost. Truly sad. I don’t have a very recent backup, so I lost several documents I was working on, and even a blog post! Also dear are my pictures, most of which I still have but my edits are probably gone.
“War is never economically beneficial except for those in position to profit from war expenditures.”
“Setting a good example is a far better way to spread ideals than through force of arms.”
both from Ron Paul, who is running for the Republican nomination for president in 2008.
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man was a great, light read. It is described as an insider’s account of exploitation or neo-colonialization of Third World countries by a cabal of corporations, banks, and the United States government. It was on the New York Times bestseller lists for over a year.
According to his book, Perkins’ function was to convince the political and financial leadership of underdeveloped countries to accept enormous development loans from institutions like the World Bank and USAID. Saddled with huge debts they could not hope to pay, these countries were forced to acquiesce to political pressure from the United States on a variety of issues. Perkins argues in his book that developing nations were effectively neutralised politically, had their wealth gaps driven wider and economies crippled in the long run. In this capacity Perkins recounts his meetings with some prominent individuals, including Graham Greene and Omar Torrijos. Perkins describes the role of an EHM as follows:
Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools included fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization.
Definitely interesting. I don’t have time to write a new review, so I’ll copy what I wrote to a friend who I’ve been dueling with over the benefits of market capitalism (my friend Sushil, who is pretty radical, actually recommended this book to me, and here’s what I wrote back to him) .
It was entertaining in a spy-thrillerish way, though I think Perkins sacrificed some truths for entertainment value, and the book is worse off for it. The basic thesis appeals to me quite a bit - the corporatocracy is bad. Corporatocracy as Perkins describes it is the teaming of the feds and select private sector firms to advance political hegemony and economic rent. Corporatocracy is terrible. However, extrapolating this to “globalization and capitalism is bad” is QUITE a stretch.
In fact what is bad is the creation of wealth that depends on coercion in the hands of the government. THAT IS NOT MARKET CAPITALISM! Halliburton and Bechtel, among others are funded indirectly by the US govt and our dollars to force people off their lands in South America. That is obviously terrible, and isn’t how market capitalism works, so this book doesn’t provide a cogent argument against libertarianism at all. Halliburton and Bechtel are violating our rights as taxpayers by funding the politically connected firms. The South American Govt’s are violating the rights of the people and cultures displaced when they remove them from their indigenous land.
He uses the real examples of Halliburton, Chas T. Main (engineering companies acting in hand with the US government to cheat 3rd world countries - though I think he exaggerates this and makes some leaps in logic), and then pretends that Wal-Mart and McDonalds going into the 3rd world are doing the same things. They aren’t toppling economies and they aren’t with I don’t find fault with Nike opening a factory in Malaysia, allowing workers who live in the area to voluntarily sell their labor for wages that would exceed their next-best opportunity for work. Noone dies, no cultures are killed off, and (hopefully) no subsides are given by the governments, so taxpayers aren’t footing the bill. Again, I don’t know the answers here… I’m open to discussing this and open to being swayed one way or another by someone. Shoot me an email or drop a comment if you have anything interesting to add.
Oh, in this vein, here’s an article against microfinance that I find to be pretty interesting. It echoes some thoughts I’ve had for a while.
Microfinance misses the mark
However, I still think there is a huge need for microfinance, and also that the industry has a long way to go. I think where the author is right is that Microfinance isn’t a silver bullet for poverty and that we need to support industry. However, there are many non-economic benefits of microfinance that can’t be overlooked. Additionally, one thing that I think the article is good about addressing is that microfinance is more than microcredit - finance includes the ability to borrow, but also much more than that, particularly savings and insurance. A lot of the problems are around governmental regulation, for example in India Non-Banking Financial Companies (NBFC’s) can’t accept savings, yet that is what most of the MFI’s in India are registered as or moving towards. Anyway, no time to write more, but its certainly an interesting discussion to have.
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Here are some Billboards from Bombay that I meant to post a long time ago but forgot… More than 10 years after deregulation, there are “Airline wars” going on in India, which are mostly good for the consumer. The Indian aviation market is pretty hot, and a bunch of low-cost carriers have come in the marketplace in the past few years. Here’s a great example of advertising one-upmanship:
First, Jet airways puts up a billboard saying “We’ve changed”. Kingfisher responded within 36 hours by putting up another billboard on top of it, saying, “We made them change”. A few days later, GoAir put one up on top, saying, “We’ve not changed. We’re still the smartest way to fly.” Pretty clever advertising.
