LILA RAJIVA: The Mind-Body Politic
Individuals Not Ideologies
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Archive for July, 2008
Their Man in Africa: Chinese Checkered in Zimbabwe
And what’s the real deal behind the unrelenting bad press for Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe? (Not that we are Mugabe fans here, but anyone who gets trashed regularly in the mainline…sorry…stream media invites lively curiosity, if not outright solicitousness from us). Well, here’s what:
“In April 2007 the chairman of China’s top political advisory body, Jia Qinglin, head of the National Committee of the Chinese Peoples’ Political Consultative Conference, flew to Harare to meet with Mugabe. It was a follow-up to the 2006 Beijing China-Africa Cooperation Summit where the Chinese government invited the heads of more than 40 African states to discuss relations. Africa has become a diplomatic and economic priority for China and its economy.
At that time, Beijing got an open invitation to help develop dormant mines in the country. The deputy speaker of Zimbabwe’s parliament called for more Chinese investment in the country’s mining sector, according to China’s Xinhua news agency. Zimbabwe’s mining laws were changed to allow the government to reallocate mining claims that were not being exploited.
Mining generates half of Zimbabwe’s export revenue. It is the only sector in the country that still has foreign investors after the collapse of the main agricultural sector. Western companies with mining claims in Zimbabwe were not exploiting them. “We would appeal to the Chinese government to come in full force to exploit these minerals,” Zimbabwean Deputy Parliamentary Speaker, Kumbirai Kangai said to the official Xinhua.
Kangai assured potential Chinese investors that they would not expose themselves to legal action if they took over claims held by Western companies.
A few months after, in December 2007, Chinese company, Sinosteel Corporation, acquired 67 percent stake in Zimbabwe’s leading ferrochrome producer and exporter Zimasco Holdings.Zimasco Holdings is the fifth largest high carbonated ferrochrome producer in the world. It used to produce 210,000 tons of high-carbon ferrochrome per year, nearly all of it along the mineral-rich Great Dyke, accounting for 4 percent of global ferrochrome production.
Zimasco has also the world’s second largest reserves of chrome, after South Africa. It was formerly owned by Union Carbide Corporation, now part of Dow Chemicals Corp.
Oh, oh! Alarm bells went ringing in London and in Washington at that news….”
More by the straight-talking Bill Engdahl.
Media-Trix: Rehearsing Our Rulers
“The most interesting of the seminars was presented by Dr. Vincent Covello, a crisis communication expert who told us an amazing story. His group had rehearsed former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his officers in how to respond to situations that included planes hitting the World Trade Center. Statements had been prepared and rehearsed way in advance of September 11, 2001. Suddenly, the poise and leadership that Giuliani was admired for seemed hollow.
Every eventuality, said the crisis expert, should be prepared for and rehearsed so that those in charge look cool and confident when it happens. In fact, said the expert, nothing should be left to chance. Former Gulf War Commander Norman Schwarzkopf had rehearsed the famous tear he shed during a Barbara Walters interview when she asked about the casualties of the first Gulf go ’round.
More in an interesting post at The Congress Blog.
PC Professoriat and Non-PC Stars
“A major new study of the political correctness of faculty members may challenge assumptions all around. For those who deny that there is an identifiable group of PC professors, the study says that there is in fact a group with consistently common perspectives, largely based on their views of discrimination (that it exists and matters).
But for those who say that these tenured radicals have all the power in academe, the study finds that politically correct professors’ views on the role of politics in hiring decisions aren’t very different from the views of other professors. Further, the study finds that a critical mass of politically incorrect professors is doing quite well in securing jobs at the most prestigious universities in the United States, despite claims that such scholars are an endangered species there……”
More at Inside Higher Education News.
“Simmons analyzes disciplines, and finds sharp differences — largely consistent with previous studies about disciplines and political leanings. Humanities and social science fields tend to have higher politically correct rankings, while professional and science disciplines do not. The table that follows is in order of political correctness. Psychology is the only field where a majority of professors are politically correct. Four fields — finance, management information, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering — had no one who was politically correct….”
Comment
Ron Paul Revolution: The Crisis Is Upon Us…
“Real fear of economic collapse could prompt central planners to act to such a degree that the New Deal of the 30’s might look like Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. The more the government is allowed to do in taking over and running the economy, the deeper the depression gets and the longer it lasts….”
Read more by Dr. Ron Paul here.
Global Games: The Ugly Face of Inflation
“Ugly math
On her way to the market, Lingani explained the ugly math: A year ago, she could feed her entire family a nutritious meal of meat and vegetables and peanut sauce for about 75 cents. But now the family gets much lower-quality food for twice the price.She said the cost of six pounds of cornmeal has risen from 75 cents to $1.50. A kilogram — 2.2 pounds — of rice cost 60 cents last year and costs a little more than $1 now. Other basics such as salt and cooking oil have also doubled in price.
Fuel costs have more than doubled for trucks that haul food to landlocked Burkina Faso, helping keep food prices high.
Beef or goat meat is now so expensive — about $1.20 for a tiny portion — that the family has given up meat completely, eating cheap dried fish instead. Rather than seasoning their sauces with vegetables and peanuts, they now use the tough leaves of baobab trees, the gnarly giants that flourish here in the dry lands south of the Sahara.
To soften the sour taste of the leaves, Lingani mixes in potash, a paste made by boiling down water strained through ashes from wood fires.
“In the past, our money would last the whole month. We might even have some left over,” Lingani said. “But now as soon as it arrives, we spend it.”
Dinner happens only if there is a bit of food left over from lunch. Even then, she said, there is rarely enough left for women.
“When the children ask for food, we have to give it to them,” she said. “We’re mothers.”
Thus the Washington Post on some of the weakest victims of food price inflation, poor mothers in Burkina Faso in Africa, where energy prices have doubled recently.
Comment:
Meanwhile, over in Zimbabwe, suffering from 2.2 million percent inflation, the 100 million…oops, billion... dollar note has just been injected into the national blood stream, for a little extra sugar high. That’s following on the heels of the 10 million dollar note this January and then in swift succession, the 100 million, 250 million, 5 billion, 25 billion and 50 billion notes, according to this report from AFP. Even then, economists say the inflation rate is grossly underreported.
And back here in the USA, GHQ, Globalization, the picture isn’t pretty either.
There are of course the poor. They may be always with us, as the Good Book says, but rarely in such numbers…..and rarer yet for such reasons - adjustable rate mortgages.
But the middle-class too is scrambling, raiding their IRA’s to pay the bills. That is, if they’ve managed to get them. And organic farmers who used to have to fight off insects and birds now have a new plague to deal with - diesel thieves who work round the clock to siphon of gas they can sell for half price to local truckers.
Too bad, trying to solve the energy problem seems only to have added..er…fuel to the crisis. A confidential World Bank Report tells us that about 75 percent of the 140 percent price rise between 2002 and 2008 was driven by the diversion of agriculture to biofuels….
If you got rich in the ethanol scam, try sleeping soundly on that number.
Financial Follies: The Great American Tsunami
“As with the Tsunami which devastated Asia in wave after terrifying wave in December 2004, the financial Tsunami we are witnessing is a low-amplitude, long-wave phenomenon of trillions of dollars of financial securities being unwound, defaulted on, dumped on the market. But the scale of the latest wave to hit, the collapse of confidence in the two Government-Sponsored Entities, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, is a harbinger of worse to come in what will be the most devastating financial and economic catastrophe in United States history. The impact will be felt globally.”
Justin Raimondo On Iran’s Weapons of Mass Distortion
“Are we really supposed to take the alleged Iranian “threat” – which Barack Obama deems “the greatest strategic challenge to the United States in the region in a generation” – seriously? Not unless Photoshop is reclassified as a “weapon of mass destruction.”
Nice piece by Antiwar’s fiery Justin Raimondo on Iran’s recent threat…
Double-Trouble - An Oil Bubble….
“As much as 60% of today’s crude oil price is pure speculation driven by large trader banks and hedge funds. It has nothing to do with the convenient myths of Peak Oil. It has to do with control of oil and its price. . . . Since the advent of oil futures trading and the two major London and New York oil futures contracts, control of oil prices has left OPEC and gone to Wall Street. It is a classic case of the tail that wags the dog.”[6]
U.S. Representative Bart T. Stupak, Democrat – Michigan, chairman of the subcommittee investigating commodity market speculation, attributes even a higher percentage of the oil price hike to market manipulation: “Speculations now account for about 70% of all benchmark crude trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, up from 37% in 200.”
Wall Street financial giants that created the Third World debt crisis in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the tech bubble in the 1990s, and the housing bubble in the 2000s are now hard at work creating the oil bubble. By purchasing large numbers of futures contracts, and thereby pushing up futures prices to even higher levels than current prices, speculators have provided a financial incentive for giant futures traders to buy even more oil and place it in storage….”
More at Counterpunch.
Comment:
Ah. Funny how intelligent people can think that the laws of supply and demand can explain the rate oil prices have shot up in the last two months. What a gas, eh?
Makes the environmentalists happy, the luddites chirpy, the nuclear industry and the Pentagon ecstatic and the big government lobby (the entire population) gets to vote in another big-government pol.
Financial Follies: Between the Buck and the Bubble
“If the Fed raises rates to prevent a sell off in dollars, they’ll crush the highly indebted and already struggling populace and, in so doing, unleash a serious economic crisis. But if the Fed keeps rates where they are, or even lowers them, they’ll trigger a dollar sell-off and unleash a serious economic crisis.
Either way, the story ends the same: a serious economic crisis.
At this point, our bet remains that the Feds will go to default mode which means cranking up the printing presses into the red zone, letting the dollar move ever closer to its intrinsic value: zero. That they’ll follow this route is suggested by two inputs. First, a depreciating dollar means a reduction in the trillions of dollars in obligations now owed by the U.S. government. And, secondly, foreign holders don’t vote.
So, we are calibrating our investments toward a serious economic slowdown, but with high inflation. Some people would call that Stagflation. But given the severity of both sides of that formula, the situation may be better described in terms of Scorched Earth. Or, because people seem to find concepts ending in “flation” handy, Stag-flagration.
Businesses and personal net worth will be devastated at the same time that costs run out of control.
How to Play It?
Our strongest recommendation is to position your portfolio in anticipation of higher inflation and, in time, a turnaround in interest rates. The latter is because interest rates, which are still near a 50-year low, can only go up as the inflation rises to the point of banner headlines (at which point, the government is hoping, the economic downturn will have moderated).
In fact, we think the move towards higher interest rates is a trend that will surprise many, but, once it gets going in earnest (and corporate bond yields are already on the rise) last for at least the next several years.
In terms of other investments, it’s worth noting that in the last major bull market for tangibles, back in the 1970s, oil was the best performing investment, followed by gold, U.S. coins, silver and stamps….”
That’s David Galland, from Casey Research.
Comment:
The buck is doing its old see-sawing on the edge of apocalypse, but having fallen off the cliff over the last year, we still feel inclined to temper our despair with numbers. Here’s an interesting piece that differs from Galland on the dollar:
“The point is that the dollar has been in a negative trend for almost exactly 7 years with the closing peak registered on July 5th of 2001. In the mean time the CRB Index has risen by more than 2 1/2 times. To get to a bottom for the dollar we needed to see some sort of peak in ocean freight rates and a bottom for stocks such as AMGN. The charts on this page make a somewhat tentative case that a trend back towards a sustainably stronger dollar has already begun although quite clearly the DXY will have to rise well above its moving average lines to mark the turn. There are encouraging signs for the dollar which suggest downward pressure on the commodity the theme but it is still much too early to mark this one as paid…”
Kevin Klombies at Inter-Market Relationship.
John Templeton: A Few of His Least Favorite Things
* Being too optimistic about business ventures
* Relying on any one idea or concept in your investments
*Relying on borrowed money you use for your ventures and assuming that you won’t have to pay it back
John Templeton, who passed away today in the Bahamas, was one of the world’s most successful investors and the three dangers he listed ought to have been nailed on the door of the Federal Reserve. Think about it. His trifecta of over optimism, single-concept thinking, and eternal borrowing just about sums up the mess the US economy is in: how better could you sum up the following:
1. The ‘new economy’ paradigm
2. The wholesale adoption of derivatives
3. The credit-and-leverage bubble.
Sir John had broader interests than finance, of course, which was what made him such a great financial thinker.
As this article in the Wall Street Journal points out, he “forged a union between his progressive investment philosophy and his equally open-minded religious thought.”
He was tolerant.
“I am still an enthusiastic Christian,” Sir John once said. “But why shouldn’t I try to learn more? Why shouldn’t I go to Hindu services? Why shouldn’t I go to Muslim services? If you are not egotistical, you will welcome the opportunity to learn more.”
In 1972, he established the Templeton Prize, the largest annual award given to an individual. Mother Teresa received the first award in 1973. The prize, which in 2009 will be valued at 1 million pounds, or about $2 million, recognizes achievement in work that relates to science, philosophy and spirituality. Its monetary value is always more than the Nobel Prizes — Sir John’s way of demonstrating that spiritual work should not be discounted.
Sir John was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1987 for his philanthropic achievements. That same year he created the foundation, which today has an endowment of about $1.5 billion and awards around $70 million in annual grants. The foundation supports research into fields of science and theology, in keeping with Sir John’s religious values and beliefs.”
Mind-Body: Krishnamurti on health and sickness
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” –Jiddu Krishnamurti
The Ugly Indian: Indians Ranked At Bottom Among Global Tourists
“Remember the tightwad tourist whose baggy shorts, frequent complaining and shouted questions about why none of the locals spoke any English made the ugly American the world’s Visitor From Hell? Well, it’s time for Archie Bunker to move over and make way for Petulant Pierre. According to a recent international survey, the French are now considered the most obnoxious tourists from European nations, and behind only Indians and the last-place Chinese as the worst among all countries worldwide. And it’s not only the rest of the world that have a gripe with the Gallic attitude: the French also finished second to last among nations ranking the popularity of their own tourists who vacation at home…..”
More at Time.
Comment:
It’s nice to know that some Indians (and their bhai-bhais up north) are beating the world to the bottom-rung of the globe-trotter hierarchy. Avid globalizers have always known that anything those Westerners can do, Asians can do better.
Torture Files: Testimony of Richard Wurmbrand About Communist Torture
“……I have been for years in prison with thieves and murderers. Even before having been put in prison I have been chaplain of a prison. A thief after he has stolen is a gentleman. He gives to the waiters the greatest tips and he invites girls and he invites you and he orders the best wines. He has not worked for his money. And such thieves are the communists. They have stolen half of Europe, they have stolen Russia, too. They have stolen a great part of Asia. And now they have what they have stolen and they are gentlemen and they expect the next occasion to steal again.
In this sense there is a relaxation with us, but it is not an essential one. We continue to have the avowed dictatorship of an atheistic party. We have one party. There can be no religious freedom where there is one party. We have elections. Now a joke is made with us that when God created Adam, He created only one woman, Eve, and He said to Adam, “You are free to choose for wife whomsoever you wish.” But there was only Eve. And so are the elections with us. (my emphasis)
Our Government doesn’t mind old women coming to church, but our childhood, our youth is poisoned with atheism. We are not allowed to counteract, and what bitter fruits will come out of this seed nobody can know.
Now you have asked another question, do we have open churches in Rumania? If somebody comes to Rumania - it is another situation in Russia - if somebody comes to Rumania, he is really impressed.
The Orthodox liturgy is something very beautiful. It is grand. And if you come in Rumania you see thousands of churches open, liturgies, sermons, many people in the church. And I have spoken with Americans who have been there and have told me, “I was very impressed.” And now there is really a certain religious liberty. In Rumania you are allowed to say as much as you like that God is good. You are not allowed to say that the Devil is bad. St. John the Baptist could have saved his life if he had said: “Repent because the kingdom of heaven is near.” Nobody would have touched him. He was touched when he said, “You, Herod, are bad.”
If Christ would have delivered a thousand “Sermons on the Mount” they would not have crucified Him. They crucified Him when He said, “You vipers,” then He was crucified.….”
Comment
One of the heroes of modern evangelical Christianity, Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, on the state’s use of religion as propaganda, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1966.
Wurmbrand, a Lutheran pastor of Jewish origin who died in 2001, isn’t easily dismissed: he spoke 14 languages, was a professor of the Old Testament and suffered over a dozen years of torture in Romanian prisons, several in solitary confinement underground.
He’s worth reading again today for anyone inclined to romanticize communism in the last century. And for anyone concerned about the direction in which the west is heading today.
More on what Wurmbrand suffered (his wife, Sabina, lost her entire family and herself worked as a slave laborer):
“His captors dumped him at Calea Rahova, a spanking new prison for dissidents, enemies of the people and criminals of various stripes. The warders there gave him a new identity (Vasile Georgescu), and set about erasing his old one. The 39-year-old Wurmbrand was 6 feet, 3 inches tall, with a medium build, and enjoyed relatively hale health before his abduction. But after being subjected to physical and psychological depredations and humiliations during his first year in the gulag, he nearly expired, kept just this side of living by the facility’s doctors. Dead, of course, he would be incapable of divulging information.
In clear, straightforward, occasionally stomach-churning prose, Wurmbrand recounts his horrific tortures: sleep deprivation; starvation diet; made to race around his four-steps-by-two-steps cell for hours until he collapsed; beatings with truncheons and boots; water funneled down his throat until it filled his stomach, which was then violently kicked; the bastinado, a relic of the Spanish Inquisition in which the bare soles of the feet are flogged; guards urinating and spitting into his open mouth; drugged into delirium; terrorized by dogs kept inches from his throat; solitary confinement–speaking to no one except inquisitors–for nearly three years in a three-paces-by-three-paces cell, this one located 30 feet underground; tossed into the “carcer,” a constricting, closet-sized enclosure with metal-spiked walls. In short, he experienced his own personal Passion.
“It was an image of hell,” Wurmbrand reported, “in which the torment is eternal and you cannot die.” He confessed to any false charges concerning himself–adultery, homosexuality–but steadfastly refused to implicate other believers, irrespective of denomination.
Transforming solitary confinement into his crucible, Wurmbrand affirmed his faith and tried to keep sane by mentally composing approximately 350 sermons and 300 devotional poems, which he later claimed to have memorized by employing condensed rhyme schemes and mnemonic devices. (He published 22 of the former in 1969’s Sermons in Solitary Confinement.) Additionally, he “talked” with and “preached” to inmates in adjacent cells by tapping on the walls using Morse code, which the prisoners learned from each other; devised chess matches with himself, substituting bread crumbs for pieces; and held imaginary conversations with his wife Sabina and young son Mihai.
More than three years into his ordeal, Wurmbrand was hauled before a faceless quartet of judges for a 10-minute trial, found guilty of subversive activities and sentenced to 20 years’ hard labor. Wracked by tuberculosis, he spent four years rotting in a prison TB ward in the Carpathian foothills. With no medicine, many died. While there he learned that his wife had been arrested in 1950 and pressed into slave labor digging and carting dirt for the Danube-Black Sea canal, a project eventually abandoned as infeasible. Held for three years, she ate grass when necessary.
A member of the secret police whom Wurmbrand had earlier converted to Christianity helped secure his release in June 1956, and he rejoined Sabina and Mihai in Bucharest, where he resumed preaching. “I knew, of course,” he wrote, “that sooner or later I would be rearrested.” In January 1959 he was re-imprisoned during a renewed crackdown on the clergy, his old sentence–plus five years–reimposed. Plunged back into the black hole of the gulag, he endured extensive brainwashing designed to eradicate religious beliefs. Five and a half years later he walked away, his faith intact…..”
More in an obituary in 2001 in the New York Press
On the other hand, the Independent in its obituary took a more reserved view of Wurmbrand’s experiences and testimony.
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