People in the City are muttering about being invaded by a horde of Swampies this weekend, for the Put People First march. There’s sure to be a lot of angry rhetoric – and rightly so – about the failure of free market capitalism.
But what exactly is the protest demanding?
What do you get when you mash up images from Google Earth, stats from the electric grid and power grid behaviour modelling and simulation? A real-time status of the national electric grid that federal state and local agencies can use to coordinate and respond to major problems such as wide-area power outages, natural disasters and other catastrophic events.
Just before the Washington G20 summit in November last year, David and I co-wrote a paper entitled A Bretton Woods 2 Worth of the Name. As the title implied, we were politely sceptical of some of the political rhetoric then flying around, comparing the G20’s discussions about bank capitalisation with the rather more far-reaching discussions held at the Mount Washington Hotel in 1944.
Now, though, things are getting more interesting. Two days ago, Zhou Xiaochuan – the governor of China’s central bank – quietly published a paper on the People’s Bank of China website, entitled Reform the International Monetary System. It opened like this:
The outbreak of the current crisis and its spillover in the world have confronted us with a long-existing but still unanswered question, i.e., what kind of international reserve currency do we need to secure global financial stability and facilitate world economic growth, which was one of the purposes for establishing the IMF?
Later, Zhou continues that:
The desirable goal of reforming the international monetary system, therefore, is to create an international reserve currency that is disconnected from individual nations and is able to remain stable in the long run, thus removing the inherent deficiencies caused by using credit-based national currencies.
Now this line of thinking really does take us straight back to Bretton Woods – and in particular to Keynes’s proposal for a new global currency called the bancor, and a new global institution called the International Clearing Union (ICU). (more…)
Exactly how hard can you wring your hands? This question arises from a pained debate afoot within the International Studies Association. Once a year, ISA brings together all the IR academics you’ve ever heard of (plus a lot you’ll go to your grave never having heard of) for a mega-conference in a large U.S. city. Recently, we’ve had Chicago (four days of unmitigated sleet), San Francisco (missed that one, foolishly) and NYC (thousands of foreign policy geeks packed into Times Square like some mad mockery of New Year). The venue for 2010 looks promising: New Orleans.
So, most ISA members are looking forward to four days of theoretical discussion coupled with 24 hour drinking in America’s sin-iest city. I for one am dreaming up some utterly fallacious paper on EU-UN cooperation to justify my presence. But there is a problem. Louisiana has a bigoted gay marriage law refusing recognition to gay marriages transacted outside the state. Some ISA members feel that the Association cannot countenance this – and should, to coin a phrase, call the whole thing off.
Today, an e-mail was circulated with the innocuous title “Information about New Orleans Convention Site”. I assumed this would be about parking. Not so. Here are the highlights of a very long message from ISA:
There has been some controversy and discussion surrounding the site. Yet, in thinking about options, it is important to remember that New Orleans has been through a great deal in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and holding major events there, such as the annual meeting, is one way to help the city recover.
While ISA cannot abrogate the contract at this stage without severe financial loss, possibly leading even to the bankruptcy of the organization, there are a number of ways in which we, as members of the organization, can address the situation. We can work with program chairs and sections to promote panels and roundtables that address Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgendered/Queer (L/G/B/T/Q) issues.
One option raised at an ISA-New York section meeting was to have T-shirts with a “message” on them. Yet other members have proposed that ISA members actively involve themselves with New Orleans community organizations and support some type of project during the conference that would benefit those most in need. And these are just a few ideas that we are aware of that have been raised to date.
It is incumbent upon us, as members of ISA, to arrive at positive ways in which we can draw attention to the issue without punishing or harming the people of New Orleans who have already suffered, and without jeopardizing the nonprofit status of ISA itself.
Now, I’m in favor of (i) gay marriage and (ii) helping New Orleans in every way conceivable. But I can imagine nothing better calculated to make the citizens feel their suffering anew than hordes of academics in L/G/B/T/Q-themed T-shirts charging about trying to find a community organization to interface with for four whole days. “Hello, I’ve just finished giving my fallacious paper on EU-UN relations and I just thought I’d pop by to share my rage. Erm… Sean Penn was great in Milk!”
I don’t recall a bunch of ISA members offering to break Chicago’s drug culture or clean up Wall Street as a little quid pro quo for their visit. Stop this silliness, and indulge in a form of activism that will help New Orleans: eat, drink, and pour dollars into its coffers.
Back in November last year, I blogged on the land lease deal agreed between Daewoo, the South Korean company, and the government of Madagascar, under which the former would lease fully one half of Madagascar’s arable land for a hundred years. Soon afterwards, the news emerged that Madagascar would receive no payment at all for the lease – the only upside would instead be the prospect of some job creation.
Since then, of course, Madagascar’s government has fallen in a coup d’etat. But what I hadn’t spotted until a US Department of Agriculture official mentioned it to me last week is the fact that the land deal was front and centre in what made the coup happen. Here’s Tom Burgis in the FT on Saturday:
“Everything was a monopoly with [President] Ravalomanana,” says Naina, a 41-year-old wood chopper in one of the capital’s poorest neighbourhoods. “The country could not develop.”
The bombshell that turned the discontent into outright anger and so brought an end to Mr Ravalomanana’s rule was news of a deal between the government and Daewoo Logistics. This envisioned leasing vast tracts of Madagascar’s arable land to the South Korean conglomerate to grow crops that would be exported from a country where aid agencies were battling rural starvation. “It was the news that said Daewoo expected to pay nothing for the land that accelerated the trouble,” says one well-connected Malagasy banker who asks not to be named.
At a stroke, alienated members of the Malagasy elite found the banner to which they could rally an urban poor already struggling to cope with rice prices driven higher by the global commodity boom. They also found a figurehead in Andry Rajoelina, a 34-year-old former DJ who had married into Malagasy aristocracy and built the capital’s foremost billboard advertising operation …
Thousands took to the streets, whipped up by the Daewoo deal as the symbol of all that was ill. Protests turned to looting. Scores died as buildings burned. Then, in early February, Mr Rajoelina lead a boiling crowd from the main square to the gates of the state palace. Amid the confusion, the presidential guard opened fire.
By now we’re all well used to the idea that oil, diamonds, coltan, poppies and other high-value commodities can lead to a ‘resource curse’ in fragile states – for instance when the resource endowment ‘crowds out’ other sectors of the economy (e.g. through exchange rate rises), or props up poor governance. Hitherto, though, only a few food crops – like coffee and cocoa – have been on the list of potential resource curse drivers.
I found myself wondering a couple of weeks ago whether the prospect of long term food price inflation and proliferating security of supply concerns in places like China, South Korea and a raft of Gulf countries, might lead to growth in the pool of potential resource curse drivers. Having seen the first government fall as the result of a landgrab deal, I think we now know the answer…