If you would like a definition of incoherent and rambling, check out Fidel Castro's latest column. It is a hazy mix of World Cup and how the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein was a good friend to Cuba, with some references to Iran sprinkled in. Oh, and we're going to have nuclear war. Signed, Fidel.
Read more...I read Michael Lewis' The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (by the way, what kind of terrible subtitle is that?) and highly recommend it as a perversely entertaining and straightforward narrative of how subprime mortgages were bundled into bonds few people understood, given too-high ratings, and then traded for enormous sums of money on the assumption that the booming housing market would go on forever. The book focuses on the handful of people who realized it was all bogus and absolutely could not last. As I read it, I kept thinking about Kurt Eichenwald's Conspiracy of Fools, another good book that tells the story of the bizarre and complex pyramid schemes dreamed up by Enron executives. Everyone thinks they can make money by creating nothing, and indeed even having companies sell their own bad investments to themselves.
And the bonds that had been most ineptly rated were the bonds that Wall Street firms had tricked the ratings agencies into rating most ineptly. "I cannot fucking believe this is allowed," said Eisman. "I must have said that one thousand times" (p. 101).
By assuming that one pile of subprime mortgage loans wasn't exposed to the same forces as another--that a subprime mortgage bond with loans heavily concentrated in Florida wasn't very much like a subprime mortgage bond more concentrated in California--the engineers created the illusion of security (p. 74).
I mentioned last week the possibility that the phone tapping allegations against Colombia were intended to halt the slowly improving relations between Colombia and Ecuador. It appears that both Rafael Correa and Alvaro Uribe agree. That agreement is hopefully a good sign, as the two countries need to move closer if they have any hope of attacking the FARC along their shared border. Really, no good can come out of an indefinite break of diplomatic relations. It will certainly make Colombia less secure.
Read more...Mick Andersen, who is editor of Security and Defense Review (the journal of the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies) has issued a call for papers for a special issue on "Women in Defense and Security."
Among the issues we hope to address in the Fall/Winter edition are the following:
President Obama has again made a speech calling for immigration reform. This is now problematic, because the political calculations behind these speeches are so transparent that they no longer have any impact--does anyone believe Obama will push hard for reform this year? In fact, they may well have the opposite effect--the Latino voters he wants to reach are being told over and over that the Democratic Party wants their vote, yet it becomes more and more clear that speeches alone are supposed to hold those votes indefinitely.
Obama is hoping to minimize the damage that afflicts the president's party in Congress in midterm elections. Fair enough. But we're moving gradually toward a crying wolf situation in which people--including Republicans he claims to want to court--simply stop believing he will really take action.
Reading Amnesty International's press release about intimidation of journalists raises two interesting questions.
First, this alone isn't news, and is worded as if the state "has created" a climate of fear somehow in recent years, as opposed to having constructed one since 1959.
Second, the fact that independent journalists exist in Cuba is newsworthy, even if it is to highlight how they are persecuted. But it points to the need for an analysis (and maybe one already exists) of independent journalism in Cuba. Who is their audience? To what degree does the average Cuban have access to their work, or even know that they exist? Are they entirely online?
I have to give a quick shout out to Arturo Pérez-Reverte, even though his books focus on Spain and not Latin America. To like these books, you must enjoy good writing, with a rich social class texture of Madrid under the reign of Philip IV (they take place in the 1620s) but also a male-oriented swashbuckling theme with sometimes thin plots (fyi, he does also write contemporary mysteries that take place in Spain). I just read Captain Alatriste, which is actually the third I've read, but perhaps the best of the three.
Aside from just fun reading, what I always enjoy about the books is their richly detailed examination of the severe decline of the Spanish Empire, political, economically, and culturally, with a view from the bottom run of society. Pérez-Reverte is absolutely unsparing:
Aragonese and Catalans were shielded by their laws; Portugal was patched together; commerce was in the hands of foreigners; finances were the purview of Genoese bankers; and no one worked except the wretched, exploited by the tax collectors of the aristocracy and the king. And in the midst of this all that corruption and madness, moving against the course of history, like a beautiful, terrifying animal that still slashed and clawed yet at the heart was eaten by a malignant tumor, our poor Spain was worm-eaten inside, condemned to an inexorable decadence that did not escape the clear eyes of don Francisco de Quevedo (p. 60).
There are no concrete sources, but an "unidentified Colombian intelligence officer" says that Colombia has been tapping the phone of Rafael Correa and others in Ecuador. Given everything that the DAS does, it is entirely plausible. It all started after the Colombian attack on the FARC over the border in Ecuador, presumably in the belief that Correa knew about and perhaps even was complicit with the FARC.
I would take this also to mean, though, that if they've tapping phones for two years and have said nothing, they have found no such link.
It is also plausible that someone in Colombia wants to help scuttle the slowly thawing relationship between Ecuador and Colombia by angering Correa. Even if not, what accounts for the timing of the revelation?
A few days ago, eight Republican senators sent a letter to President Obama in the face of rumors that he would issue an executive order stopping (at least temporarily) the deportation of undocumented immigrants with no criminal convictions. I found the following particularly absurd:
`We understand that there's a push for your administration to develop a plan to unilaterally extend either deferred action or parole to millions of illegal aliens in the United States,'' the letter reads. ``While deferred action and parole are Executive Branch authorities, they should not be used to circumvent Congress' constitutional authority to legislate immigration policy, particularly as it relates to the illegal population in the United States.''
The novelist Larry McMurtry has a take on Arizona in the New York Review of Books that is worth a look.
But the sadness I feel at the border is not because of the violence: it’s the eternal struggle of poverty with plenty, a struggle that humiliates and degrades both parties. The only winners are the franchises of McDonald’s and Taco Bell in Douglas or Nogales, Arizona. If we capture those poor people—as we do by the thousands—it’s mandated that we have to feed them, before we send them back across the border.
I don’t see this changing. The ridiculous fences won’t change it. As former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano crisply remarked: “Show me a forty-nine-foot fence and I’ll show you a fifty-foot ladder.” True. The Arizona legislature is basically spinning its wheels. Observe the increasingly Hispanic midwest, where more and more middle-class Latinos are now bringing in their poor cousins to care for their gardens and milk their dairy cows. And the Anglos can’t stop it with laws. For every Mexican deported two or three more will make it through. The numerical edge is with the “brown ones” from the south.
Tucson has always felt like an easygoing Sonoran city, which is one reason I like it. Phoenix has become a portal for just about anything bad. Senate Bill 1070 fails to deal with problems that have been there since the 1850s, when John Russell Bartlett, the New Englander who was responsible for establishing a border between the US and Mexico, drew a line in the desert where, for numberless centuries no line had been. Confusing to the native people, it has led us, inexorably, to the tragic place where we are now.Read more...
I can't help but comment on Arizona Governor Jan Brewer's following statement:
I believe today, under the circumstances that we're facing, that the majority of the illegal trespassers that are coming into the state of Arizona are under the direction and control of organized drug cartels and they are bringing drugs in," Brewer said.
I want to assure you that I am looking to develop a solution, not a standoff with you and the federal government.
Former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo has some remarks about Barack Obama's Latin America policy, which really left me scratching my head. He notes the huge problem of discontent with the status quo as being a major issue the U.S. must acknowledge: "one can hear the sound of 200 million poor and excluded women and men who were unable to taste the economic fruits of prosperity prior to the global financial meltdown."
Pot, meet kettle. David Scott Palmer, who has done research on Peru for years, writes the following:
Amidst violence and property damage, promises were made and not kept, decisions reached and reversed, and new programs announced but not funded. The president's disorganization, his libertine personal life, his assertive if talented Belgian wife, and the controversial personal advisors and family members who surrounded him all contributed to growing popular disillusionment with his administration. Toledo's popularity declined to single digits for much of his five-year mandate, even in the context of renewed and sustained economic growth, and rumors were rife of an early resignation.*
If you want a sense of how difficult the "drug war" is, take a look at the UN's World Drug Report 2010. It makes a game effort at optimism, but the numbers are a vivid reminder of how high demand is and how high potential profits are. For example:
Since the 1960s, and in a context of rapid and deep socioeconomic changes throughout the world, the international drug control system has succeeded in containing the spread of annual illicit drug use to around 200 million people, or 5% of the world population aged 15-64.
According to the scientific studies conducted by the DEA, in the last decade, there has been an increase in the efficiency of the clandestine laboratories employed in the three Andean countries, which has resulted in different conversion factors from leaves to cocaine. These changes are mainly due to the higher percentage of traffickers using more efficient methods to extract the cocaine.
A new poll from CERC has Sebastián Piñera's approval at 54%. CERC's director, the political scientist Carlos Huneeus, emphasized to the press that this was the lowest initial approval for any postauthoritarian president. He also argued that the low approval was largely due to the fact that RN and UDI don't have the same mobilization capacity as the parties of the Concertación. That set off a brief firestorm of comments from members of different parties interpreting it in a way favorable to them. Patricio Navia argues that each president has started with lower numbers than his/her predecessor, simply reflecting a population becoming more critical about their presidents.
In the short term, though, I would argue that starting numbers mean little and so should not be over-analyzed. Michelle Bachelet started fairly high, then plummeted (and then recovered). There is still a lot of room for movement in either direction.
Now this is wading into new waters--the Mexican government has filed a challenge to Arizona's immigration law, saying it is unconstitutional:
Citing "grave concerns," Mexico said its interest in having predictable, consistent relations with the United States shouldn't be frustrated by one U.S. state.
Mexico also said it has a legitimate interest in defending its citizens' rights and that the law would lead to racial profiling, hinder trade and tourism, and strain the countries' work on combatting drug trafficking and related violence.
"Mexican citizens will be afraid to visit Arizona for work or pleasure out of concern that they will be subject to unlawful police scrutiny and detention," the brief said.
It will be to a U.S. District Court judge to decide whether to accept the brief along with similar ones submitted by various U.S. organizations.
A Washington Post editorial keeps up the long-standing argument that Latin American governments are either friends or enemies. The overall argument is to pass an FTA with Colombia as a way to show Juan Manuel Santos that we like him and to counter Hugo Chávez, even using the word "friends," "ememy," "scorn," and "disdain" to paint a black and white picture of U.S.-Colombian relations. It also suggests that we could show our friendship by increasing military aid.
There are many valid arguments about ratifying the free trade agreement, though editorials tend not to explore them. An FTA with Colombia will have little or no effect on Venezuela or other countries in the region, and so should be evaluated by other criteria.
There is an article in the NYT about the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which refers to the idea that incompetent people are too incompetent to know they're incompetent.
Dunning and Kruger argued in their paper, “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.”
Juan Manuel Santos says he feels close to Alan García and Sebastián Piñera. Does this mean he feels unpopular and rich?
Read more...A mere twenty years and over a thousand victims later, the last land mine in Nicaragua has reportedly been removed. The Contra war was a gift that just keeps on giving.
Here is a good, brief video on the topic.
R. Dwayne Betts' A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison (2009) is a compelling and often poetic (he is in fact a published poet) memoir of a very young African American man who was put in prison for carjacking in Virginia in the mid-1990s. He was 16 at the time and served nine years.
It is a scattered book, and it moves back and forth chronologically. He plead guilty, was guilty, but dances around it:
The old head wanted to blame it on rap music, and often we wanted to blame it on racism, on the society that birthed us or on the streets that gave us the language of violence. The blame didn't work (p. 60).
"Talking to him gave me the chance to realize that there are people willing to judge me by who I have become, and not by a moment of insanity" (p. 236).
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