Blog of Q\’s

In Forbes magazine, the official publication of the corporate wing of the GOP, columnist Steven Landsburg says: “I hold this truth to be self evident: It is just plain ugly to care more about total strangers in Detroit than about total strangers in Juarez… Even if Kerry-style (or Nader-style or Buchanan-style) protectionism could improve America’s well being at the expense of foreigners, it would still be wrong.” He goes on to equate protectionism with the politics of virulent racists like David Duke. This is absurd. Exporting America’s manufacturing base and technical capacity to Communist China has more in common with the culture of death (ours) than simple minded allusions to the magically operative virtues of free trade.

Libertarians hooked on nostalgia for the glory days when free enterprisers and anti-marxists marched against domestic socialist planners and global communists don’t see this threat to our country. In the glory days, they would have called Landsburg a traitor. Loyalty to one’s family, community, and nation used to be the essence of citizenship. He will sacrifice his fellow citizens on the altar of an ideology that will supposedly benefit the entire world. Echoes of communist rhetoric. Not all the beneficiaries of Landsburg’s compassion are foreign, to be sure. Some Americans, like Landsburg, will profit by managing their nation’s decline. Call them the free-trade aparatchiks.

Conservatives have forgotten that “free trade” and “free enterprise” are slogans that were coined in an intellectually substantive effort to limit the expansion of the federal government into the ambits of the states and their citizens. Conservatives agree on the continued relevance of these terms understood in this sense. Some have forgotten, however, that America’s rise to global prominence during the 19th and early 20th Centuries took place behind a wall of tariffs designed to shelter domestic industries from competition with the more advanced nations of Europe, a process that China now pursues to its great advantage in the 21at Century. It’s good policy to encourage domestic competition. But conservatives should be aghast at American workers having to compete with Chinese, Indians, et al. While the corporate wing of the GOP might champion such an ideology, voters are unlikely to go along … unless the free-trade aparatchiks find a way to have third world residents vote in American elections.

–James L. Murphy, Esq., Contributer

The following
article (always click on titles for links to originals) appeared
shortly before the election of the pope. Thanks to James Murphy for
sending it to us.

By John L. Allen, Jr., National Catholic Reporter

… In his memoirs, “Milestones,” Ratzinger reflected on the German
church’s struggle to hold onto its schools under the Nazis. “It dawned
on me that, with their insistence on preserving institutions, [the
bishops] in part misread the reality. Merely to guarantee institutions
is useless if there are no people to support those institutions from
inner conviction.”   In the case of at least some colleges,
Ratzinger’s instinct would thus be to drop the pretense that these are
still Catholic institutions. He spelled this out in a book-length
interview called Salt of the Earth: “Once the church has acquired some
good or position, she inclines to defend it. The capacity for
self-moderation and self-pruning is not adequately developed …. it’s
precisely the fact that the church clings to the institutional
structure when nothing really stands behind it any longer that brings
the church into disrepute.”  The point applies also to hospitals,
social service centers, and other institutions…
 
Because Ratzinger is the prime theoretician of papal authority, it is
often assumed that under him the Vatican would take on even more
massive proportions. In fact, like most conservatives, Ratzinger feels
an instinctive aversion to big government. …  “The power typical
of political rule or technical management cannot be and must not be the
style of the church’s power,” Ratzinger wrote in 1988’s “A New Song for
the Lord.” “In the past two decades an excessive amount of
institutionalization has come about in the church, which is alarming. …
Future reforms should therefore aim not at the creation of yet more
institutions, but at their reduction.”   While Ratzinger
would not hesitate to make decisions in Rome that others believe should
be the province of the local church – revoking imprimaturs, replacing
translations, dismissing theologians – he would not erect a large new
Vatican apparatus for this purpose. Ratzinger would encourage bishops’
conferences and dioceses to shed layers of bureaucracy where possible…

From the Financial Times, April 22, 2005. Thanks to Michael Allen for alerting us.

Factory managers in China are becoming increasingly sophisticated at
falsifying worker time cards and payroll documents to disguise
irregularities including underpayment, excessive hours and inadequate
health and safety provision. Auditors estimate that more than half of
factories they see in China are forging some of their records …The
widespread forging of records threatens to undermine the aims of the
corporate social responsibility movement, a response by multinationals
to the concerns of customers, non-governmental organisations and trades
unions about issues including human rights and the environment.
…
The factory manager said he had assigned a team of six employees to
create a paper trail of fake documents for foreign buyers. Some of
these workers punched fake time cards to give the impression that the
stipulations of buyers were being met. One was charged with creating
matching payroll records on the computer.
…
One Hong Kong-owned toy factory even assigned workers to rubbing
falsified time cards in dirt to make them look genuine … Some
factories coach their employees ahead of auditors’ visits on how to
answer their questions. One sign posted in a footwear factory in
Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, and obtained by an
auditor reminds managers of the various weekly working hours required
by different buyers. “Please educate the workers well to avoid telling
the client the truth,” it says.

A document used in October 2003 to coach workers at a factory in
Huizhou, another city in Guangdong, warned staff that the factory had
received notice that Liz Claiborne representatives would be coming for
an audit the following Tuesday. “All departments and all work places
should organise a training for workers to prepare for this,” it said,
warning that “workers should not be allowed to let the buyers know that
we have given prior training to workers based on the specifics of the
workers’ interview”.
…
While persuading most auditors that his records were genuine was not
hard, said the Guangdong factory manager observed by the FT, workers
were harder to control. “I just stand outside the door and pray to God”
during worker interviews, the manager added.

(from the table of contents of the March Newsletter of the Kenan Institute)

• Tiffany & Co. To Continue Moratorium on Purchase of Gemstones Mined in Burma
• Tiffany’s Says No to Burma’s Blood Gems
• Tiffany Resumes Buying Gems Mined in Myanmar

I should hope so. They have to make up for losing those blood gems from Burma.

PRI Weekly Briefing, 11 March 2005
By Joseph A. D’Agostino
 
The month after he urged Hong Kong couples to have more children, Sir
Donald Tsang became acting chief executive of Hong Kong following the
retirement of Tung Chee-hwa.  …
Tsang, a Catholic with two sons, could easily be its choice.
 
In a major departure from the Communist Chinese government line, which
enforces a one-child policy on mainland Chinese, Tsang urged Hong Kong
couples to have three children apiece in order to counteract falling
birthrates and an aging population.  He said on a Radio Television
Hong Kong program last month, “Hong Kong has one of the lowest total
fertility rates in the world and we need to think about how to resolve
the problems discouraging people from having children. . . . I think
each couple needs to give birth to at least two children to reach the
population replacement level.  Three will be the best.”
 
… Perhaps even China’s anti-family Communist leadership recognizes
that Hong Kong is in dire straits.  In the meantime, the nearby
sovereign city-state of Singapore has implemented a host of financial
incentives to persuade its low-fertility population to have more
children.
 
Hong Kong, with a population of 7 million, has a fertility rate of .94
children per woman, far below the 2.1 children per woman required to
maintain an even population level.  Hong Kong’s rate is even below
those of Italy and Spain, whose people are fast committing national
suicide with fertility rates slightly above 1.
…

 Click on “Editorials”, to the right, for excerpts from this interesting article–which is brief in itself.

The following are excerpts from an interesting article.

Opini�n Sur
By Ram�n Daubon, Vice President for Programs at the Inter American Foundation

… we shouldn’t expect those who’ve devoted their lives to the wrong way of doing foreign aid to come out and admit they’ve been wrong all along. … Hence I propose a primer for new practitioners, based on fourteen basic thoughts and a checklist.

1. Traditional “development assistance” has not worked
…
2. Institutions matter
…
3. But institutions need to be legitimized
… This self-reinforcing cycle—performance depending on trust depending on performance─happens with institutions at all levels of public life, from the national to the neighborhood. The challenge for development assistance is to find the right level at which to jump-start that virtuous circle.
…
4. Community-driven development is where the rubber hits the road
… People live at the local level; their most pressing issues are typically local. Principal donors are thus beginning to focus their efforts on creating spaces at the local level in which such acting can take place, places for people in local public life.
…
5. Whether to be top-down or bottom-up: that is the question
…
6. The issue of scaling up and scaling out
… It is on the power of coordinated self-help practices, the “art of associating” that impressed Tocqueville in the 1830s, on which countries like America were built. … In effect, the process of development becomes one of re-defining relationships within and between such groups. Those reformed relationships call for and support reformed public institutions to mediate them. …
7. We need a different way to think about power

Ultimately, the core problem of underdevelopment is the unequal distribution of power. When power is evenly distributed politics and markets work more fairly and income and wealth assume fairer distributions. Yet, inversely, redistributing income will not by itself re-distribute power. North Korea probably has a flatter distribution of income than most developing nations. And we define power not only as the capacity to coerce or force, but as the capacity to make things happen. The crowds in the streets of Kiev in December 2004 showed power, yet they had no guns or tanks. Power is also the capacity to affect one’s own life.

8. Such empowerment requires owning the context, the whole set of circumstances
…
9. A “community” is not a place; it is the relationships that define it
… A community is an aggregate of relationships, surrounded by constantly changing circumstances. … Traditional development assistance is destined to fail first of all because it is designed to serve a reality which will have changed by the time the assistance reaches its destination. But more significantly, it fails because it is directed at the circumstances and not at the relationships that generate the circumstances. …

10. A democratic community can adapt to circumstances
…
11. A democratic community is a deliberative community
…
12. The greatest generator of information is openness.
…
13. But this is just a theory…

There is always a theory. What we call development “practice” is based on the theory of six decades ago. … Sixty years of practice under that theory has little to show for its effort. … Because poverty is not the lack of things; it is the lack of power to change the circumstances that generate the lack of things. And those circumstances remain─in essence─unchanged. But the required power cannot be simply given to the poor; it has to be encouraged and resourced.
…
14. So, here’s a checklist for donors and activists for a citizens’ political process

a. Who IS and who is NOT in the conversation? The more diverse the conversation, the more complicated it will be. The more complicated, the richer the options. The richer the options, the more the choices. The more the choices, the better the decision. A diverse, complicated conversation will therefore be much harder and conflictual, but it will generate more knowledge and will produce a more solid commitment to the agreements that are made, no matter how unimportant they may initially appear. Those small, committed agreements, few at first and later by the thousands and millions, will form the bedrock of sustainable governance.

b. Look for themes and patterns rather than causes and problems. Look for the simple underlying pattern and the clear organizing principle beneath the surface complexity. Focus on relationships─economic, social and political─and their components: identities, expressions of authority and power, interests, perceptions and stereotypes, and patterns of interaction of the groups involved.

c. Trust the power of the organizing principle and let it loose: combine some expectation of acceptable behavior with the freedom available to individuals to assert themselves in unplanned ways.

d. Give it time. Simple-minded ideas are designed quickly, even when they are complicated. Lasting ones, even if simple, must emerge at their own pace.

Plan the global, but let the local free. Everywhere in nature, order is maintained in the midst of change because autonomy exists at local levels. A system can manage the global demands for change when it has built into it internal freedom of motion at the local level. The local level shouldn’t be waiting for instructions, but rather constantly innovating, guided by a shared organizing principle of self-reference—not knowing where its next step is.

“Caminante no hay camino—se hace camino al andar” (“Traveler, there is no path; the path is made by walking” –Antonio Machado)

Washington Examiner: Opinion: “Examiner Editorial - AFTA NAFTA HAFTA CAFTA”

… He certainly deserves an enormous amount of credit for [the end of
communism in Eastern Europe], but not in the way it’s being expressed,
particularly in the American mass media. He is only too often in my
view presented as somehow or other having colluded with the U.S., even
with the CIA, to overthrow communism. It didn’t work that way… We …
and then later Reagan promoted human rights very directly politically.
The pope did something very different, which was not political but it
had a political effect. He stripped communism of its myth of
invincibility. He demonstrated that the appearance of unanimity in
communism was a sham, that people were universally against it, and that
is what had that effect.
…
The communist writers in the city of Krakow - the communist writers –
were having a party cell meeting, and a secret police colonel was
giving an oration on subversion. And he really referred to Karol
Wojtyla …as being the source of this subversion… Before he was
pope. He wasn’t pope yet. When all of a sudden, the lady who presides
over the buffet … bursts into the courtroom and screams loudly
“Wojtyla has just been elected pope.” The colonel comes to a dead stop.
… The first party secretary was so stunned that he forgot that the
microphone was on. He turns to the second party secretary where the
colonel is silent and says to him loudly, “My God, my God, from now on
we’ll have to kiss his ass;” whereupon, the second secretary turns to
him and equally loudly says, but in a whimper, “Only… only if he lets
us.” That tells you how the communist regime felt and immediately
recognized that they were now dealing with a formidable force.
…
We just shouldn’t instrumentalize him as a politician. He was not in
the same sort of league as FDR or Churchill or Gorbachev or Reagan,
which some people have been saying. He was apart, in my judgment, above
that because he tried to deal with the totality of the human condition
and he really saw as his mission the creation of a direct bond between
humanity and divinity I think in a unique way, transdenominational. He
achieved that in a significant degree on a global scale.
…
[H]e had two gifts, one kind of fundamental and one instrumental.
Fundamental was a faith and a charisma that was really infectious. It
was very hard to understand it, but there was something about him that
was serenely confident and yet strong. Secondly, he was a very good
communicator. He was an actor at one point in his life, and he knew how
to reach out. He had an enormous impact, particularly on young people,
which I think tells you something about his magnetism. I think the
combination of the two made him a man of the time but probably a pope
for the ages.

Massachusetts Avenue Development Seminar (MADS)

With Edward Miguel, Dept. of Economics, University of California at Berkeley
And Discussant Frederick Brown, Southeast Asia Studies Program, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies

1776 Massachusetts Ave. NW , Third Floor, Washington , D.C.
Thursday, April 7, 2005, 12:00 noon–1:30 p.m. (Lunch will be served)