Don't tell anyone, but a dirty little secret within the foreign aid world is that aid often doesn't work very well.

Now that truth has been aired (and sometimes exaggerated) in a provocative new book by William Easterly, "The White Man's Burden." Mr. Easterly, a former World Bank official who is now an economics professor at New York University, has tossed a hand grenade at the world's bleeding hearts — and, worst of all, he makes some valid points.

Let me say right off that stingy Republicans should not read this book. It might inflame their worst suspicions.

But the rest of us should read it, because there is a growing constituency for fighting global poverty, and we need to figure out how to make that money more effective.

I disagree with many of Professor Easterly's arguments, but he's right about one central reality: helping people can be much harder than it looks. When people are chronically hungry, for example, shipping in food can actually make things worse, because the imported food lowers prices and thus discourages farmers from planting in the next season. (That's why the United Nations, when spending aid money, tries to buy food in the region rather than import it.)

On one of my last trips to Darfur, I had dinner at a restaurant in Nyala called K2. Out back were 18 big white S.U.V.'s belonging to the U.N. and aid groups; that amounted to nearly $1 million worth of vehicles, in a country where people are starving.

The aid workers are struggling heroically in a dangerous and difficult place, and I don't begrudge them reliable vehicles. But something seems wrong when international agencies are more successful at maintaining S.U.V.'s than clinics. (One reason is that budgeting is often done annually, and one of the ways to spend a grant in a single year is to buy a vehicle.)

It's well-known that the countries that have succeeded best in lifting people out of poverty (China, Singapore, Malaysia) have received minimal aid, while many that have been flooded with aid (Niger, Togo, Zambia) have ended up poorer. Thus many economists accept that aid doesn't generally help poor countries grow, but argue that it does stimulate growth in poor countries with good governance. That was the conclusion of a study in 2000 by Craig Burnside and David Dollar.

Professor Easterly repeated that study, using a larger pool of data, and — alas — found no improvement even in countries with good governance.

Saddest of all, Raghuram Rajan and Arvind Subramanian of the International Monetary Fund have found that "aid inflows have systematic adverse effects on a country's competitiveness." One problem is that aid pushes up the local exchange rate, discouraging local manufacturing. Mr. Subramanian also argues that aid income can create the same kinds of problems as oil income — that famous "oil curse" — by breeding dependency and undermining local institutions.

All these findings can ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Foreign Aid Has Flaws. So What? - New York Times

I remember fielding telephone calls on Election Day 2004 from friends and colleagues anxious to talk about the exit polls, which seemed to show that John Kerry was beating George W. Bush and would be the next president.

As the afternoon faded into evening, reports started coming in that the Bush camp was dispirited, maybe even despondent, and that the Kerry crowd was set to celebrate. (In an article in the current issue of Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. writes, "In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair went to bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect Kerry.")

I was skeptical.

The election was bound to be close, and I knew that Kerry couldn't win Florida. I had been monitoring the efforts to suppress Democratic votes there and had reported on the thuggish practice (by the Jeb Bush administration) of sending armed state police officers into the homes of elderly black voters in Orlando to "investigate" allegations of voter fraud.

As far as I was concerned, Florida was safe for the G.O.P. That left Ohio.

Republicans, and even a surprising number of Democrats, have been anxious to leave the 2004 Ohio election debacle behind. But Mr. Kennedy, in his long, heavily footnoted article ("Was the 2004 Election Stolen?"), leaves no doubt that the democratic process was trampled and left for dead in the Buckeye State. Mr. Kerry almost certainly would have won Ohio if all of his votes had been counted, and if all of the eligible voters who tried to vote for him had been allowed to cast their ballots.

Mr. Kennedy's article echoed and expanded upon an article in Harper's ("None Dare Call It Stolen," by Mark Crispin Miller) that ran last summer. Both articles documented ugly, aggressive and frequently unconscionable efforts by G.O.P. stalwarts to disenfranchise Democrats in Ohio, especially those in urban and heavily black areas.

The point man for these efforts was the Ohio secretary of state, J. Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican who was both the chief election official in the state and co-chairman of the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio — just as Katherine Harris was the chief election official and co-chairwoman of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Florida in 2000.

No one has been able to prove that the election in Ohio was hijacked. But whenever it is closely scrutinized, the range of problems and dirty tricks that come to light is shocking. What's not shocking, of course, is that every glitch and every foul-up in Ohio, every arbitrary new rule and regulation, somehow favored Mr. Bush.

For example, the shortages of voting machines and the long lines with waits of seven hours or more occurred mostly in urban areas and discouraged untold numbers of mostly Kerry voters.

Walter Mebane Jr., a professor of government at Cornell University, did a statistical analysis of the vote in Franklin County, which includes the city of Columbus. He told Mr. Kennedy, "The allocation of voting ma... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Those Pesky Voters - New York Times

Jello wrote:

In defense against the charge that he himself helped initiate the Bush Administration's revolutionary attitude to spreading democracy, Fukuyama stresses in his latest book that The End of History described a democratic capitalist version of an anti-Leninist Marxian approach--stressing slow cultural, social and economic change, not sudden revolution. He maintains that he is a Gramscian, emphasizing the intellectual and cultural hegemony of capitalist democracy, not claiming that it would inevitably work well everywhere or solve all problems. By contrast, he describes the Bush Administration as having become "Leninist" in its belief that history can be subjected to violent pushes.

Fukuyama Tukutama Fukyama Honeymama

nice
i do like the idea that the Bush admin is "Leninist"
question though is being a Leninist automatically wrong?
u live in a country born out of revolution (the first successful one against the British Empire)
1917 was a disaster
1789 went wrong in 1792
the English Civil War and Cromwell's Protectorate led to the velvet revolution of 1688, the beginning of constitutional/parliamentary government and produced John Locke
does history sometimes needs to be pushed?
certainly the american revolution was a great leap forward for liberalism
i think the division between Leninism bad and incrementalism good is rigid and dogmatic
"history" like evolution lurches "forward" sometimes through sudden sifts. There are sudden changes in the fossil record: sudden explosions of diversity: all is not a steady incremental march forward: sometimes there are siasmic sifts which are not down to disaster but rather innovation genetically (or memetically in the case of "history")
feminism is both a revolutionary break with the past and an intellectual tradition with a long history so the changes wrought in the 60s may be regarded as evolutionary. Or even if it was a revolution it might be argued that it was the overturning of a moribound hegemony (and so we're back with Gramsci).

RE: The Two Fukuyamas | The National Interest

For two millennia it was a "little hill" - the meaning of kleitoris, its root word in Greek.

But an Australian urologist, Dr Helen O'Connell, has revealed that the clitoris is shaped more like a mountain than a hill.

BBC NEWS | Health | Time for rethink on the clitoris

I do NOT plan to get in the habit of regularly reposting Stratfor's emails, but this one is extremely relevant to conversations we've been having on this site for a long time. (BTW, I'm not really sure if thats the first time that idea appeared here or if I'm really responsible for originating it. Its just the earliest link that I have. I think I was thinking that a long time before I said it. I said it when it became so obvious it seemed like review.)

Once again, let me start with one of the last sentances: Finally, the ability of grassroots cells to network across international boundaries, and even across oceans, presents the possibility that al Qaeda 4.0 cells could, now or in the future, pose a significant threat even without a central leadership structure -- meaning, a structure that can be identified, monitored and attacked

Stratfor: Terrorism Intelligence Report - June 7, 2006

Al Qaeda: The Next Phase of Evolution?

By Fred Burton

Canadian authorities recently arrested 17 men, accusing them of
planning terrorist attacks, after some members of the group bought
what they believed to be some 3 tons of ammonium nitrate
fertilizer, which can be used to make explosives. The men allegedly
were planning attacks against symbolic targets in Toronto and
Ottawa in a plot that reportedly included bombings, armed assaults
and beheadings.

One of the things that make this case interesting is that the group
-- now dubbed by the media as the "Canada 17" -- reportedly had
connections to alleged jihadists in other countries, whose earlier
arrests were widely reported. Those connections included two men
from the United States -- Ehsanul Islam Sadequee and Syed Haris
Ahmed -- who reportedly traveled from Georgia in March 2005 to meet
with Islamist extremists in Toronto. Authorities have said they
conspired to attend a militant training camp in Pakistan and
discussed potential terrorist targets in the United States. There
also is said to be a connection to a prominent computer hacker in
Britain, who was arrested in October and charged with conspiring to
commit murder and cause an explosion.

The June 2 arrests certainly underscore the possibility that
Canada , which has a long history of liberal immigration and asylum
policies, has been used by jihadists as a sanctuary for raising
funds and planning attacks. But the most intriguing aspect of the
Canada case is that it seems to encapsulate a trend that has been
slowly evolving for some time. If the allegations in the Canada 17
case are at least mostly true, it might represent the emergence of
a new operational model for jihadists -- an "al Qaeda 4.0," if you
will.

In other words, the world might be witnessing the emergence of a
grassroots jihadist network that both exists in and h... [ Read More (2.4k in body) ]

Stratfor agrees that Al'Q is a scene. Calls it Al'Q 4.0.

n Lome, Togo's capital, one of the first things you notice is that football is everywhere.

On back streets flooded by the wet season's downpours, young boys chase a ball. On waste ground, teenagers splash around in the rainwater. On the long expanse of sand beside the Atlantic Ocean, clubs hold their training sessions.
...
Togo are outsiders, a small West African state which many global World Cup viewers will have difficulty placing on a map.

Otto Pfister is aware of the challenges ahead, but he also knows that a football-mad country is watching, full of hope and expectation.

"It is like a religion," he told me after training. "Everybody is behind the team, from grandfather to baby. When Togo plays a game, no-one is in the street."

the real spirit of the World Cup

BBC NEWS | World | Africa | World Cup putting Togo on the map

A tiny bone has kept a nation in suspense for more than five weeks now. The digit in question, the fractured fourth metatarsal of England striker Wayne Rooney's right foot, has been the country's leading cause of angst and speculation this spring, and during the team's first World Cup training session in Germany on Tuesday morning, reporting on the injury still was irresistible for the massive British media throng.

cool Rooney has made even the Washington Post
and they are right the country is officially closed during England world cup games and semi-detached during the tournament in general
i shall be enjoying the football (i'm english so to me this is football not soccer) and various male friends of mine will hide from the entire event (hello simon, keith and andy)
the rest of us, both men and women, will enjoy the beautiful game in the biggest and greatest sporting competition in the world
please note if you are doing business or phoning friends abroad check the world cup tournament fixture list first unless you know for certain they aren't football fans

Rooney's Injured Foot Pains All of England

A Well of Smiths and Xias

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Muhammad Waqar, Avi Wolfman-Arent, Yiran Xia, Victoria Sandoval, Jacqueline Orellana-Flores, Elizabeth Packer, Ramona Singh, Anuja Shah, Mayra Ramos, Emily-Kate Hannapel, Natasha Perez, Samir Paul, Ekta Taneja, Linden Vongsathorn, Michael Tsai, Nardos Teklebrahan, Matiwos Wondwosen ...

I went to a high school graduation Monday and a United Nations meeting broke out.

The commencement was my daughter Natalie's, the high school was Montgomery Blair in Silver Spring, Md. There were some 700 kids receiving their diplomas, and as I sat there for two hours listening to each one's name pronounced, I became both fascinated and touched by the stunning diversity — race, religion, ethnicity — of the graduating class. I knew my daughter's school was diverse, but I had no idea it was this diverse.

The names above, which I just pulled from the graduation book, were typical of her entire class, which included exactly five people named "Smith." In my high school in Minnesota it seemed like there were only five people not named "Smith."

My daughter told me that the names in her class can be so difficult to pronounce that for graduation the school had all the students write their names phonetically on a card so the announcer would not mangle them in front of family and friends.

There is a lot to be worried about in America today: a war in Iraq that is getting worse not better, an administration whose fiscal irresponsibility we will be paying for for a long time, an education system that is not producing enough young Americans skilled in math and science, and inner cities where way too many black males are failing. We must work harder and get smarter if we want to maintain our standard of living.

But if there is one reason to still be optimistic about America it is represented by the stunning diversity of the Montgomery Blair class of 2006. America is still the world's greatest human magnet. We are not the only country that embraces diversity, but there is something about our free society and free market that still attracts people like no other. Our greatest asset is our ability to still cream off not only the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world but the low-skilled-high-aspiring ones as well, and that is the main reason that I am not yet ready to cede the 21st century to China. Our Chinese will still beat their Chinese.

This influx of brainy and brawny immigrants is our oil well — one that never runs dry. It is an endless source of renewable human energy and creativity. Congress ought to stop debating gay marriage and finally give us a framework to maintain a free flow of legal immigration.

What is so striking about Blair is that it is just a neighborhood public high school. It was not designed to be diverse. Yes, it has some magnet programs, but for the most part it just reflects its surroundings — about one-thi... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Diversity in America - New York Times Article

IBM said Tuesday that it would triple its investment in India to $6 billion over the next three years as the South Asian country becomes a cornerstone in the global network of the largest computer services company in the world.

Sam Palmisano, the chairman and chief executive of IBM, said the investment would be used to build service delivery centers in Bangalore, India's technology hub, and create a telecommunications research and innovation center for IBM clients around the world.

Palmisano also said IBM would increase the number of its employees in Bangalore, but did not elaborate.

the developing world becomes the development world

IBM to triple investment in India - IBM, india - Business - International Herald Tribune

The Decider's decision to whip up a phony crisis over same-sex marriage -- Values under attack! Run for your lives! -- is such a transparent ploy that even conservatives are scratching their heads, wondering if this is the best Karl Rove could come up with. Bush might as well open his next presidential address by giving himself a new title: The Distracter

Distracter in Chief