Let me be the 10th person to link to The aspiring dictator’s guide from the Mail & Guardian Online. Here’s an extract.
Rule 3. Make America or China happy. Make Israel and Saudi Arabia very happy. Become a Muslim, like Idi Amin. Visit Moammar Gadaffi often. He likes African leaders. We do not know why. Pray with George Bush and let him see your soul. Make your country’s leading supermodel the ambassador to France and Italy. Ask her to wear a mini when presenting her papers to Nicholas Sarkozy.
From Ethan Zuckerman, FP
On his first day in office in 2001, President George W. Bush reinstated the so-called Mexico City Policy — known to critics as the global gag rule. It prevents the US government from giving money to organizations that provide counseling and referral for abortion, lobby to make abortion legal or more available in their country, or perform abortions except in cases of a threat to the woman’s life, rape or incest (even if those activities are funded by somebody else).
On Development Drums this week, we heard about the impact of the global gag rule on women in Africa, in an interview with Dana Hovig from Marie Stopes International. (Full disclosure: my partner works for MSI.) My expert guests were sceptical that Barack Obama would give priority to reversing the global gag rule any time soon.
But this weekend, we have heard that Obama is preparing to reverse some key decisions that President Bush took using executive authority, including on stem cell research, oil and gas drilling and – according to the Washington Post, the New York Times and Bloomberg – the global gag rule:
President-elect Barack Obama will reverse U.S. family-planning and AIDS-prevention strategies that have long linked global funding to anti-abortion and abstinence education, a public-health adviser said. Obama “is committed to looking at all this and changing the policies so that family-planning services — both in the U.S. and the developing world — reflect what works, what helps prevent unintended pregnancy, reduce maternal and infant mortality, prevent the spread of disease,” Wood said.
These seems like a good time to raise the profile of this important issue, to make sure that reversing the global gag rule is on the list of decisions for President Obama to take in his first day in office. The Center for Reproductive Rights has written to Barack Obama calling for the repeal of the global gag rule. Now is the time to make as much noise as possible about this to generate political support for an early decision to reverse this policy.
For more information about the global gag rule, listen to the interview with Dana Hovig in Episode 6 of Development Drums (about 30 minutes in to the podcast).
As a West Wing junkie, I’m thrilled that Rahm Emmanuel may become President Obama’s Chief of Staff.
Emmanuel is apparently the model for the character of Josh Lyman (played by Bradley Whitford – pictured right) from his days in the Clinton White House.
Lyman has always been my hero in West Wing (except for that are-they-aren’t-they thing with Donna, his assistant).
Of course the West Wing scriptwriters foresaw that Emmanuel would become Chief of Staff: in Series 7, Lyman becomes Chief of Staff to Matt Santos, the first non-white President of the United States (played by Jimmy Smits).
To the managers of the banks
Every time I have suggested things you might do differently, I have been told that this is impossible as you are under an obligation to pursue the interests of your shareholders.
Now that I am – unexpectedly – one of your shareholders, I expect you’d like to know what I would like you to do. Here are seven new instructions to be getting on with.
1. Short-term profits are not important: what is important is long-term value. I would like you to stop chasing short term arbitrage opportunities and overnight trading and focus on identifying and investing in the best-run, most productive and valuable enterprises. There will be no trading in derivatives or other purely financial products.
2. Cut executive pay immediately. From now on, nobody in the bank will get paid more than four times the salary of the lowest-paid employee. If you want to award yourself a pay rise, you’ll have to increase the salaries at the bottom.
3. All our branches and subsidiaries overseas will pay local taxes, in full. There will be no clever arrangements to transfer profits to tax havens to avoid tax.
4. No more junk mail trying to persuade people to take out new credit.
5. It is no longer our objective to inflate house prices. An increase in house prices is not an increase in net wealth: it is a transfer from those who do not own houses to those that do. We will try to dampen the housing market, not reinvigorate it.
6. Every bank that is “too big to fail” will be split up into smaller banks. We are going to reverse the cycle of mergers and takeovers that has created these monolithic institutions that have held us all to ransom.
7. There will be no lending for businesses or individuals involved in industries that are harmful to our society and planet. That means no lending to any of the following: the arms trade, advertising and marketing, tobacco, extracting or burning fossil fuels, or the motor industry. Instead, please invest more in clean technologies, technologies appropriate for developing countries, non-profit organisations and community groups.
I know that you have many new shareholders, and it will take time for you to get to know us all. My views won’t necessarily be shared by all your new bosses, but you can be pretty sure that lots of your new bosses think more along these lines than the old lot.
I was a bit hesitant about becoming a bank-owner, but now that it has happened, I think I’m going to enjoy it.
Work hard – but not too hard.
Yours,
Owen
I’ve never liked the name of the FT’s lifestyle section, “How To Spend It“. But with financial markets as they are now, it seems particularly ludicrous. How to spend what, exactly?
Sitting in the airport lounge in Washington DC today, I was a bit surprised to find a “bonus issue” of How To Spend It in today’s paper.
I expect that there are lots of investors whose main concerns today include “whether the perfect sound system exists”, “the demure allure of autumn’s flattering longer skirts” (the Cavalli skirt is a snip at £3000), and “whether corporate gifts can ever truly be objects of desire”.
I know this is all very immature, but I thought this was a funny idea (via):
when you make a donation to Planned Parenthood in her name, they’ll send her a card telling her that the donation has been made in her honor. Here’s the link to the Planned Parenthood website:https://secure.ga0.org/02/pp10000_inhonor
You’ll need to fill in the address to let PP know where to send the “in Sarah Palin’s honor” card. I suggest you use the address for the McCain campaign headquarters, which is:
McCain for President
1235 S. Clark Street
1st Floor
Arlington , VA 22202PS make sure you use that link above or choose the pulldown of Donate–Honorary or Memorial Donations, not the regular “Donate Online”
I know that it isn’t nice to laugh at the misfortune of others, but you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at this.
First the religious right were asked to pray for rain during the Denver Democratic National Convention:
Stuart Shepard of Focus on the Family, one of America’s leading evangelical groups, was shown in a video filmed at Denver’s Invesco Field, where 75,000 are expected to cheer Mr Obama on Aug 28, asking Christians to pray for “torrential” rain.
“I’m talking ‘umbrella-ain’t-going-to-help-you rain,” the former pastor and television meteorologist said. He explained on the video: “I’m still pro life, and I’m still in favour of marriage as being between one man and one woman. And I would like the next president who will select justices for the next Supreme Court to agree.”
Did it rain on Mr Obama’s parade? Did it heck.
But what’s this? Hurricane Gustav has prompted a rethink over the Republican convention. John McCain said:
“But you know it just wouldn’t be appropriate to have a festive occasion while a near-tragedy or a terrible challenge is presented in the form of a natural disaster. So we’re monitoring it from day to day and I’m saying a few prayers too.”
If the Big Guy is sending rain according to which side he’s on, then He seems to be a Democrat.
Al Gore (reported in the NY times)
“We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that has to change.”
The Cabinet Office has now published guidance for civil servants for blogging and participation in online sites.
How the Civil Service Code applies to online participation
The Civil Service Code applies to your participation online as a civil servant or when discussing government business. You should participate in the same way as you would with other media or public forums such as speaking at conferences.
Disclose your position as a representative of your department or agency unless there are exceptional circumstances, such as a potential threat to personal security. Never give out personal details like home address and phone numbers.
Always remember that participation online results in your comments being permanently available and open to being republished in other media. Stay within the legal framework and be aware that libel, defamation, copyright and data protection laws apply. This means that you should not disclose information, make commitments or engage in activities on behalf of Government unless you are authorised to do so. This authority may already be delegated or may be explicitly granted depending on your organisation.
Also be aware that this may attract media interest in you as an individual, so proceed with care whether you are participating in an official or a personal capacity. If you have any doubts, take advice from your line manager.
Good luck to civil servants as they try to implement this. I had rather a torrid time when the Mail on Sunday chose to attack me for my previous blog.
Simon Dickson has more.
One of Tony Blair’s blind spots – as I think he would be among the first to admit – is that he has tended to underestimate the importance and value of effective and lasting institutions. As he contemplates his legacy he seems now to be coming round to understanding this.
Looking back at the successes of previous governments, we remember mainly the institutions they built as their lasting legacies. Lloyd George gave us national insurance; Clem Attlee gave us the National Health Service. We don’t remember Andrew Bonar Law much, because he built nothing. Harold Wilson famously cited the creation of the Open University as his greatest achievement.
This Government’s most notable institutional changes have been devolution, the independence of the Bank of England and the partial reform of the House of Lords: planned in opposition and implemented soon after the 1997 election. In Government, the PM has taken the view that the priority is to put in place the right people to take the right decisions. I think this is a manifestation of New Labour’s philosophy that they would go with “what works”. They would govern with pragmatism, not ideology; and that meant appointing the right people and getting on with it rather than constructing effective and long-lasting institutions that might limit their discretion.
In that context, the Prime Minister’s speech on 27 January in Davos made interesting reading, because it is all about the need for more effective international institutions:
This is my major reflection on 10 years of trying to meet these challenges, 10 years in which, as a deliberate policy, Britain has been at the forefront, for better or worse, of each of these major global issues. Interdependence is an accepted fact. It is giving rise to a great yearning for a sense of global purpose, underpinned by global values, to overcome challenges, global in nature.
But we are woefully short of the instruments to make multilateral action effective. We acknowledge the interdependent reality. We can sketch the purpose and describe the values. What we lack is capacity, capability, the concerted means to act. We need a multilateralism that is muscular. Instead, too often, it is disjointed, imbued with the right ideas but the wrong or inadequate methods of achieving them.
None of this should make us underestimate what has been done. But there is too often a yawning gap between our description of an issue’s importance and the matching capability to determine it. … Global purpose, underpinned by global values requires global instruments of effective multilateral action.
This emphasis on the need for more effective multilateral institutions is both right and important. As the world become more interdependent, there are more and more choices that we need to make collectively. These include the provision of global public goods, collective security, and mechanisms to ensure that the benefits of globalisation are fairly shared so that progress can be sustained. As I think the Prime Minister is now saying, if we do not have legitimate and effective institutions to take these decisions, we will find that we have no way to meet these needs and aspirations, nor to resolve the world’s tensions.
Britain has quite a specific long-term interest in this too. We are witnessing the rise of new world powers such as China, India and Brazil. I personally welcome this, though there is a lot of angst around about what it means for us. One thing it almost certainly means is that in 20 years time, Britain will no longer be a major world power with the same amount strategic influence at the most important forums such as the G8 and the Security Council. If and when that happens, we will depend on the existence of effective multilateral institutions to protect our interests, and those of other middle-ranking powers. It seems to me that we should be using the power that we have today, while we still have it, to put in place those institutions and build them up so that they are effective and legitimate in the future. That is a legacy for which future generations in Britain may well thank us.
G and I both ran the London Marathon yesterday, on a beautiful warm day. G had a good run – starting at a sensible pace, running even splits, and finishing in 3:28:01. I ran like an idiot – going off way too fast at the start, and (inevitably) hobbling home after my wheels came off at about 18 miles, for a total time of 3:04:09.
I learned some lessons again that I should have learned before:
- You can’t run a marathon well without training for it. G and I both relied on our background fitness. But really we needed a tailored combination of long runs, speedwork, aerobic fitness, and strength. Getting the right mixture is much more important than running in the park every day.
- If you go off too fast at the start, you will pay for it later. It is much better to go off slowly and then speed up. It is claimed that every 10 seconds a mile you run too fast in the first half will cost you a minute a mile in the second half. And it is much more fun to be overtaking people in the last ten miles than to be overtaken.
- You can’t run as fast when it is hot.
- You’ll go through some rough patches in any marathon. Don’t quit: they will pass. I had a stitch twice, and several segments when I had to walk, and I still ran fast enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon.
Andrew (“Lord”) Turnbull giving evidence to the Public Administration Select Committee (pdf here) (December 15, 2005):
I am going to start like the Vicar of St Anthony’s: my text is the Civil Service Code verses 9 and 13: “Civil servants should conduct themselves in such a way as to deserve and retain the confidence of ministers” and “Civil servants should continue to observe their duties of confidentiality after they have left Crown employment.” You should keep those two sentences in mind all the way through.
The very same Lord Turnbull gives an interview to the FT (March 20, 2007):
In an interview with the Financial Times, Lord Turnbull, permanent secretary to the Treasury for four years under Mr Brown before becoming cabinet secretary in 2002, accused the prime minister-in-waiting of a “very cynical view of mankind and his colleagues”.
“He cannot allow them any serious discussion about priorities. His view is that it is just not worth it and ‘they will get what I decide’. And that is a very insulting process,” Lord Turnbull said.
Comment: I’m with the 2005 version of Andrew Turnbull. Civil servants have no business revealing their views of Ministers and their behaviour – even after they cease to be civil servants. That is part of the job. Turnbull should not have spoken as he did.
Here is what Turnbull said should be the consequences for those who break those confidences:
the strongest safeguard is a sense of professional pride, and Radcliffe was right that the real sanction is that those who flout the guidelines will suffer reputational damage. Your calling witnesses is helpful in signalling that breaking confidences is not without cost.
I wonder if that loss of reputation means that Turnbull will be shunned for the Quangos, Inquiries and non-Executive Directorships that make up the life of a former Cabinet Secretary?
The British High Court has ruled that Zambia has to make substantial payments on its debt now held by Donegal International, based in the British Virgin Islands. Donegal International is a so-called vulture fund – that is, a financial organization that buys at a discount bonds that are very unlikely to be repaid, and then tries to sue the issuer for the full amount.
Ordinarily, I would be in favour of allowing markets to trade securities, and for companies to be able to enforce contracts against governments. Well-functioning and liquid secondary markets help to reduce the cost of capital when it is originally borrowed, and the subsequent trading at below par enables debt and risk to be priced.
But there is an obvious market failure here: it is the collective action problem of dealing with defaults. We have a solution for companies: when a company can no longer meets its debts, it goes bankrupt. This is an orderly procedure to ensure that the creditors receive their share of the debtor’s assets. In particular, bankruptcy prevents free riders from holding out for full repayment of their debts once other creditors have settled. But as Walter Wriston famously remarked, countries don’t go bust. Once a country’s debts become unsustainable, it is in everyone’s interests to restructure those debts. If there is no collective mechanism for restructuring, then creditors will scramble to be repaid at the first sign of trouble, which is in nobody’s interest. And if free-riders hold out for full repayment, then there will be less money for the other creditors and less prospect of an equitable and sustainable settlement. That is why we have the London Club (for private creditors) and Paris Club (for public creditors). But the Vulture Funds hope to free-ride on these collective mechanisms, and seek the repayment of debts in full once the other creditors have bailed out the country and restructured its debts.
There is a possible solution to this, which is related to the idea put forward by Michael Kremer and Seema Jayachandran. First, laws in creditor countries such as the UK and US could be changed to disallow seizure of a country’s assets for non-repayment of so called ‘odious debt’. In other words, we could change the law so that odious debt contracts are legally unenforceable. Second, foreign aid to successor regimes could be made contingent on non-repayment of odious debt. This would encourage successor governments to repudiate odious loans, which will encourage banks to refrain from originating them.
Who would determine what debts are odious? Kremer and Jayachandran suggest that we give a mandate to an international institution such as the UN or the IMF to declare a regime odious. For example, Mr Mugabe’s government in Zimbabwe would be declared odious. Any organization considering lending money to that government would know that the debts would be legally unenforcable. In addition, I suggest that we agree that any outstanding sovereign debts of a country that receives HIPC debt relief would also be automatically declared to be odious. This would mean that lenders today would be wary of making any sovereign loans to a country that might in the future run into a debt crisis.
An automatic mechanism to make debts unenforcable if they were lent to a government that was corrupt or incompetent, or if they contributed to a debt crisis, would impose a much stricter market discipline on lenders to make them think twice before making such loans; and it would also close down the free-riding activities of vulture funds.
Romania lent $30m to Zambia in 1999, when Frederick Chiluba was President of Zambia. Chiluba is under multiple charges of corruption and bribery. If those charges are made to stick, then the country’s debts which were incurred under his regime should, in my view, be declared odious and unenforcable in international courts. And that would mean that the vulture funds would not get paid.
Over at The Guardian, David Hencke draws attention to a consultation about possible proposals which would restrict the use that can be made of the Freedom of Information Act:
what ministers want to do is to restrict any individual or organisation from asking more than four detailed questions a year – severely limiting the opportunity for the most socially active to get stuff from their local council or government department. The second, more subtle restriction aims to load extra costs against a £600 notional fee (£450 for local councils) – used as a cut-off point by bureaucrats to say it is too expensive to get the information. Basically, the new charges cover time spent reading the information to see if it can be released and time spent by ministers consulting with each other and lawyers on whether to release the information. As you can see, the more contentious the information requested, the less likely it is that it will now be released. And major advances in the release of information – such as the disclosures of the huge agricultural subsidies received by Tate and Lyle and the royals – would never have been released under these regulations. Nor would all the new details of MPs' expenses either.
Hencke urges his readers to respond to the consultation to express their views about this change.
The comments are pretty interesting. A couple of civil servants there (under the names BackOfTheNet and RobertPeel01) say that the Freedom of Information Act is a huge waste of time for civil servants. I just wanted to say that, as a civil servant myself, I don't agree with them: I am in favour of as much freedom of information as possible. The government and public servants should be accountable to the citizens (as voters as well as taxpayers) and the public is entitled to know what is being done in their name and with their money. Transparency also leads to better policy-making. The additional burden on civil servants is a small price to pay.
I said in June that the national identity register should be a federation of connected computer systems, not a single database.
Very sensibly, that is what the Home Office has now announced in the Strategic Action Plan for the National Identity Register.
So far so good. There is one protection, however, that the government has not yet been persuaded to implement. Each citizen should be able to log in, see their own information, and see the names and job titles of every government official who has accessed that data.
Very interesting debate in this month's Prospect between Hilary Benn (Britain's Cabinet Minister with responsibility for International Development) and Bill Easterly, a critic of government aid.
For me, the money quote from Hilary Benn is this:
All functioning governments have essential features in common: a capacity to do things, good financial and information management, clear lines of accountability and freedom from corruption, to name just a few. We owe it to the world’s poor to help their governments to develop these capacities. Strong economic growth and fair trade are simply the fastest and most effective ways to get people out of poverty, and both of these require governments to work properly.
Here in Manila, I have had BBC World on the TV in the background. They have just had a story about the apparent breakdown in relations between Paul McCartney and Heather Mills.
I cannot see any conceivable public interest in this story. There is no reason for anybody apart from the people themselves to know the details of their marriage. Of course, the public may be pruriently interested, but that is a different thing altogether.
As a public service broadcaster, the BBC has no business broadcasting this rubbish.
Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank have been awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.
This is a powerful statement by the committee (which is appointed by the Norwegian parliament) of the role of poverty reduction in promoting peace.
As the Grameen Bank has shown, access to financial services such as credit can make a huge contribution to improving the lives of the poor.
Microfinance has become a very popular cause in international development, especially among the large private foundations of North America. Supporting microfinance appeals to the notion that we should give the poor a hand up, not a hand out. It appeals to our sense that we should find ways to unleash the entrepreneurial spirits of those who are unfortunate enough to have been born in poor countries.
But there remain important questions about microfinance. There remains very little systematic empirical evidence of the impact of microfinance on the incomes and well-being of the poor. Grameen's main measure of its success – its repayment rate – is impressive but tells us little about what impact microfinance has actually had.
In my view, it is impossible to argue with the view that the poor benefit, probably substantially, from access to affordable financial services, including credit, savings, insurance and remittances. But as I argued here in November last year, it does not follow at all that it is a good idea for donors and foundations to subsidize microfinance. After all, the Grameen Bank was developed without donor assistance.
So many congratulations to Muhammad Yunus for his well deserved award, and to the Nobel Peace Prize committee for recognizing the power of economic growth in poor countries to promote peace. But let's think carefully before we all climb on to the microfinance bandwagon. It is not clear that subsidizing microfinance is a high priority for helping the developing world to grow its way to prosperity.
More at Pienso, Marginal Revolution and NextBillion. Update: Also Mark Thoma, Audemus
G and I are back from two weeks in Morocco.
We went into the desert on camels and slept in tents, and hiked for days in the glorious Atlas mountains.
The weather was hot, despite which every adult we met was observing Ramadan.
I start work at DFID next week, with a trip to Tokyo to discuss how we can work better with the Japanese government to improve international aid, and a meeting in Manila on aid effectiveness.
G and I are going trekking in North Africa for a couple of weeks. (Note to American readers: In Europe we have these arrangements called "holidays" during which we stop work for a few weeks and enjoy ourselves instead. You should try it.)
We will be offline so there will be no blogging or emails. This will be our longest period away from email and the internet since our cycling holiday in Ethiopia.
See you all in a few weeks.
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