by Claire Melamed | Mar 29, 2011 | Middle East and North Africa
Queueing in the 'women's section' of a Macdonalds
A country where a woman who has no man to speak for her literally doesn’t exist as far as the authorities are concerned – and can’t claim benefits, can’t get medical treatment, feels intimidated to even leave the house. A country where women’s career choices are limited to teaching or, oddly, presenting radio phone-ins – and where they have to ask permission from their husband, father, or even their son, to go to work at all. Where even if they are allowed to work, they have to find a man to drive them there and back since there’s no public transport and women aren’t allowed to drive. Where fashion options are limited to chosing between black, navy or brown for the colour of the stifling, all-covering garment that all women have to wear or face arrest or beating.
The BBC’s Newsnight last night aired an absolutely brilliant film from Sue Lloyd-Roberts about women in Saudi Arabia – the country where all these things are just facts of daily life. It reminded me most of all of Margaret Atwood’s novel ‘A Handmaid’s Tale’, set in a future USA where women’s rights have been eroded to the point that they are reduced to the possessions of wealthy men. But it’s happening now, in a developed country with shopping malls (that women aren’t allowed to work in), radio phone-in shows (where teenagers seeking romance are advised ‘don’t bother’), and a chapter of the Hell’s Angels (whose members see nothing wrong with the country’s treatment of women).
And where, depressingly, some women defend the status quo. Sue Lloyd-Roberts asks one wealthy woman (the founder of an organisation called ‘My Guardian Knows What’s Best for Me’, believe it or not) if she agrees that it’s not fair that women can’t drive since it means that women who can’t afford chauffeurs can’t go to work. The reply? “A woman who is so financially constrained that she has to work, will never be able to buy a car”. Never mind that some of her less priviledged sisters are sitting in their homes, enduring illness, poverty and a total loss of dignity just because they are women.
There are some inspiring examples of women trying to make a change – like the social worker in the film and, inevitably, some Saudi bloggers. But it seems not many, not yet.
I know you know this. I knew it too. But seeing it, seeing the little humiliations and deprivations that make up the reality of life for women in that country is a different thing. It was truly horrifying. I hope that one day soon we will look back at films like this and be amazed, as we are now at the treatment of black South Africans under apartheid, that these things were able to exist in our world.
by Alex Evans | Mar 28, 2011 | Influence and networks, UK
The Daily Mail is so cheerfully and consistently hypocritical that most of the time it just feels like too much bother to pick them up on it. But every now and then, a gem comes along that’s so delightful that you can’t help yourself.
The Mail’s coverage of Saturday’s TUC march is such a gem. Here’s the opening from a piece by James Chapman this morning:
Ed Miliband was under fire last night for addressing Saturday’s march and comparing the protesters’ cause to that of the suffragettes, and the anti-apartheid and U.S. civil rights movements.
The article continues in the same vein for another few hundred words, with various folk quoted expressing their outrage that Ed Miliband would dare to compare himself or his rag-tag band of scummy demonstrators in any way with the suffragettes and other noble battlers for human dignity.
What the Daily Mail omits to mention is that the term ‘suffragettes’ was coined by… the Daily Mail. What could explain such a strange moment of shyness on the paper’s part? Perhaps the fact that the Mail devised the term as a term of abuse (until members of the movement defiantly appropriated it)?
And if you think that’s ironic, then try this: the Mail invented the term to pour scorn on members of the Women’s Social and Political Union specifically because of their use of direct action – coining the term ‘suffragettes’ to distinguish them from the broader movement of ‘suffragists’.
So for the Mail now to pour scorn on Ed Miliband for sullying the memory of the suffragettes: well, that probably represents some kind of all time best for the Mail. Ladies and gentlemen – the Daily Mail. Providing progressives with endless entertainment since 1896.
by Mark Weston | Mar 28, 2011 | Economics and development
A depressing piece in yesterday’s El País reports that Raymond McDaniel, CEO of the disgraced ratings agency Moody’s, who presided over the company’s devastating involvement in the financial crisis, took home $9.2 million in 2010, a 69% rise on the previous year. The justification for this? Apparently Mr McDaniel has “helped restore confidence in Moody’s ratings by improving knowledge of the role and function of ratings.”
The restoration of confidence was undeniably needed. After all, Mr McDaniels’s company it was that gave triple-A ratings to thousands of the sub-prime mortgage loans whose deterioration triggered the global recession. Triple-A, it should be noted, means a bond has less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of defaulting – in Moody’s’ estimation, as Michael Lewis points out in The Big Short, the sub-prime loans were as safe as US Treasury bonds (83 per cent of the triple-A ratings his firm gave to mortgage bonds in 2006 were subsequently degraded). McDaniels’s company, too, was still awarding triple-A ratings to Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG shortly before – in part because they believed the ratings and invested heavily in sub-prime bonds – they all went bust and almost brought the whole financial system down with them. Mr McDaniels, as Lewis reports, told an investor in 2007: ‘I truly believe our ratings will be accurate.’
A restoration of confidence is also needed in light of the congressional Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s damning verdict on the ratings industry, published in January. The rating agencies, the Commission concluded, ‘abysmally failed in their central mission to provide quality ratings on securities for the benefit of investors…The rating agencies placed market share and profit considerations above the quality and integrity of their ratings.’ The Commission selected Moody’s as its case study for bad practice in the industry.
The sheer ineptness of the companies is documented in embarrassing detail in The Big Short. In one of many examples of their incompetence, Lewis shows how they rated floating-rate mortgages, whereby borrowers would spend two years on a low, “teaser” rate before the rate rose sharply for the rest of the term, more highly than steadier fixed-rate loans. The ratings remained the same even when the interest payable on the loans soared: ‘The rating agencies simply assumed that the borrower would be just as likely to make his payments when the interest rate on the loan was 12 per cent as when it was 8 per cent.’
That floating-rate loans received higher ratings meant that more people were able to take them out – the proportion of US sub-prime mortgages with floating rates rose from 40 to 80 per cent in the five years to 2007. Buoyed by the lively trade in mortgage securities, lenders persuaded tens of thousands of people who could not afford it to saddle themselves with these loans. As Lewis notes, ‘sub-prime borrowers tended to be one broken refrigerator away from default – few, if any, should be running the risk of their interest rate spiking up,’ but Moody’s couldn’t get the loan ratings out of the door quickly enough: the agency went from spending six weeks assessing the credit-rating of a single security to issuing thirty new triple-A ratings on mortgage bonds every day (the Commission called the company a “Triple-A factory”).
But it was not just stupidity that threatened the system; it was also a complete – and sometimes suspicious – lack of transparency. Another passage from The Big Short relates what happened when two investors, Danny and Vinny, went to meet a woman from Moody’s to ask how she went about rating sub-prime bonds:
The woman from Moody’s was surprisingly frank. She told [the investors] that even though she was responsible for evaluating subprime mortgage bonds, she wasn’t allowed by her bosses simply to downgrade the ones she thought deserved to be downgraded. She submitted a list of the bonds she wished to downgrade to her superiors and received back a list of what she was permitted to downgrade. “She said she’d submit a list of a hundred bonds and get back a list with twenty-five bonds on it, with no explanation of why,” said Danny.
…
“Here’s what I don’t understand,” said Vinny, hand on chin. “You have two bonds that seem identical. How is one of them Triple-A and the other one not?”
“I’m not the one who makes those decisions,” said the woman from Moody’s, but she was clearly uneasy.
“Here’s another thing I don’t understand,” said Vinny. “How could you rate any portion of a bond made up exclusively of subprime mortgages Triple-A?”
“That’s a very good question.”
It’s a question the ratings agencies prefer to duck. Ray McDaniel, of course, is not alone in benefiting from the mess he helped cause – most of the heads of the investment banks that conned or bullied the agencies into upgrading sub-prime ratings (Moody’s complied not just because it didn’t understand the complex bond packages but because of the threat that the banks would go to its rival, S&P, if the rating wasn’t high enough to sell the securities on to pension funds and insurance firms), or that bet on the dodgy bonds themselves, are still in their jobs, and still raking in obscene bonuses.
Those banks are again making profits, thanks to being bailed out by the US taxpayers they had already shafted once. Moody’s net annual profit, on the other hand – despite the alleged restoration of confidence in the company – was 10% lower in 2010 than it was in 2005 when McDaniels took the helm. During that time, according to El País, the salaries of top staff have doubled. Why there hasn’t been a revolt against these people (not least from the shareholders who are so obviously being taken for a ride) is a mystery, but as with the Middle Eastern dictators they resemble, who are finally being punished after years of pillaging their countries, the day of judgement is surely only deferred.
by Alex Evans | Mar 28, 2011 | Economics and development, Global Dashboard, Influence and networks
Continuing our recent international development futures theme on Global Dashboard (see Andy’s post on international NGOs last week, and also the podcast I did on global development challenges with Owen Barder and Malini Mehra on Development Drums) – here’s a new report (pdf, 42 pages) that I did for ActionAid on critical uncertainties for development between now and 2020.
ActionAid commissioned the report as an input to their new International Strategy for 2012 to 2016. They asked me to review a large range of futures studies, outlook reports, scenario planning exercises and so on, and from them distill a sense of what are the key questions for the development outlook over the decade ahead – and also to extract some key recommendations for what this changing context would mean for them as a global campaigning organisation. Putting it together was a lot of fun.
There’s a brief summary below of the eight uncertainties and ten recommendations for ActionAid, lifted from the executive summary; click here to download the full report.
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