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South African President Jacob Zuma, currently on a three-day state visit to Britain, has come in for a rough time in the British press, which has castigated him for his polygamous habits. Stephen Robinson, writing in The Daily Mail, calls him a “sex-obsessed bigot with four wives and 35 children” and wonders why Britain is “fawning over this “vile buffoon.” [click to continue…]
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In yesterday’s New York Times Janet Yellen, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, is quoted as predicting a slow drop in the U.S. unemployment rate, now 9.7 percent, to 9.25 percent by the end of this year and 8.0 percent by the end of 2011. This is pretty anemic in view of her forecast of 3.5% GDP growth this year and 4.5% next year, a robust performance for a mature economy, though she attributes much of this growth to reduction in inventories rather than growth in sales. Ms. Yellen doesn’t foresee a return to peak economic performance and a corresponding drop in unemployment until 2013. The cause, she says, is clear: an increase in business efficiency and labor productivity, which she says, “is here to stay.” [click to continue…]
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Not quite two weeks ago I visited Daru, a town of some 20,000 people on an island of the same name situated near the mouth of the Fly River in the southwestern part of Papua New Guinea. Daru is the current administrative capital of Western Province, a vast area about the size of Maine and New Hampshire combined, with some 150,000 inhabitants and a mere 50 miles of road. The Fly River itself, together with its tributaries, is the main thoroughfare of the province down which barges full of copper ore from the Ok Tedi mine and rafts of logs have been floated down to the sea to be taken to Japan and China and other destinations. The Fly is also the superhighway along which, twice a year, the inhabitants of the North and Middle Fly districts travel hundreds of miles in dugout canoes and aluminum dinghies with Yamaha outboard motors down to Daru to collect their “compensation” payments. [click to continue…]
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I arrived Saturday afternoon in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, after a week on the West Bank and a 36-hour voyage that started in Ramallah, the West Bank city that serves as the administrative capital of the Palestinian National Authority, and involved eight time zones, five airports, four flights, three airlines, and two bags, which missed my connection in Sydney but arrived two days later on the Monday Air New Guinea flight. The only bright spot was when Emirates Airlines upgraded me to first class on the nine-hour Bangkok to Sydney segment, which entitled me to a private suite nearly as big as my first apartment in New York, plus as much 2000 Dom Perignon as I cared to drink.
I was in Palestine to help the Palestinian Investment Promotion Agency (PIPA) develop a new strategy and corresponding organizational structure. I am not going to talk about “the Palestinian Question” here, I promise. It’s been making people crazy for at least 3,000 years (the Arabic word for Palestine is “Philistine”), and if people as smart as Tony Blair and George Mitchell can’t come up with anything intelligent to say about it I am not even going to try. It reminds me of the old question, beloved of preadolescent Catholic schoolboys: “Sister, Sister, if God is all-powerful can he make a rock so heavy he can’t lift it?” We have our answer. With respect to Israel and Palestine, He has already done so. [click to continue…]
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Even before Tuesday’s earthquake Haiti had experienced 200 years of some of the worst luck that can befall a nation. Once France’s richest colony, it was a slave economy built on sugar, coffee, and the misery of African slaves, who finally revolted, saw off an invasion of 30,000 of Napoleon’s troops, and declared independence in 1804. France conceded defeat, but only at the price of 150 million francs in gold in “reparations” for its lost property, a sum it took the Haitians until 1947 to pay off, sometimes at a cost of 80% of the country’s annual budget. It has suffered 18 years of occupation by the U.S. Marines, AIDS, the brutal Duvalier regime, rampant deforestation, years of political turbulence and violence, U.S. economic sanctions that all but destroyed its small industrial base, and Ethiopian levels of poverty, disease and hunger.
Even amidst all of these tribulations, Haiti and its people retained the capacity to inspire and delight with their music, art, and their sense of humor and fun and joy.
And now this. Estimates of the death toll have already surpassed 100,000, but with tens of thousands of people still missing, it is sure to rise further, potentially rivaling the December 2004 tsunami, which claimed over 200,000 lives. But that was spread out over a dozen countries with an aggregate population of over 1.5 billion, while Haiti has only 9 million people.
I visited Haiti in early April of last year and it was a hopeful time. The security situation had improved and some semblance of political stability had returned. Under generous market access preferences granted Haiti by the U.S. government garment exports were booming and investors – especially from East Asia – were clamoring for land to build new garment factories. The major donor countries held a conference later that month, hosted by the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington with strong backing from former President Bill Clinton and his foundation, from which emerged a unified and substantial commitment to assist Haiti in ways that seemed to make sense.
All that is gone now, and efforts over the next months and probably years will be focused on trying to restore Haiti to what it was at the beginning of this week, never mind transforming it into something better. So far I have heard from some people I know, who mercifully are safe, but there remain others, some of them good friends, of whom I have no news.
Many of us are tempted to get on a plane, get down there, and pitch in, but the truth is we’d only get in the way of the professionals who know what they are doing. The Red Cross tell us that they are not accepting volunteers to go to Haiti, and unless you have specialist medical or technical skills all you can do is give money. Please do. My two preferences are Mercy Corps and the Red Cross. In the U.S., you can make an instant $10 donation to the Red Cross Haiti effort by texting “Haiti” to 90999, or you can give more by clicking here. Or give to another charity or relief organization of your choosing.
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