Month: November 2009

By Riaz K. Tayob

While the rapid spread of information and communication technologies (ICTs) around the world, especially mobile phones, is beating the expectations of most experts, there is a widening gap between the developed and developing worlds in the availability of broadband Internet access, and greater efforts are needed to narrow the divide, according to the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
A person in a developed country is eight times more likely to be a broadband user than someone in a developing country, UNCTAD said in its “Information Economy Report 2009” released Thursday.

In a preface to the report, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said: “There is still a long way to go before we can claim to have significantly narrowed the digital divide’ to achieve an information society for all. Wide gaps in ICT infrastructure remain, not least in the case of broadband networks.”

While the digital inequality is shrinking, the gap varies by type of information and communication technology. Comparing the diffusion of the different ICTs with the distribution of income in the world shows that mobile telephony (cellular phones) has become the most equitably distributed ICT. At the end of 2008, there were about 4 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide.

(According to data released recently by the International Telecommunications Union, the number of mobile subscriptions is estimated to rise to 4.6 billion subscriptions globally by the end of 2009.)

On average, there are 60 subscriptions per 100 inhabitants, the UNCTAD report states. Developing countries account for two-thirds of all subscriptions, corresponding to a mobile penetration rate of about 50.

Third World Network for more

David Jenkins introduces Gore Vidal’s extraordinary scrapbook, with snapshots of life with Jagger, Warhol and the Newmans.

By David Jenkins

Writing in his new book, Snapshots in History’s Glare, Gore Vidal begins one paragraph with the words: ‘Despite never having been very social…’. He then proceeds to talk of asking Andy Warhol, Mick and Bianca Jagger and ‘baby Jade’ to visit him and his long time companion, Howard Austen, at their ravishing villa outside Ravello.

‘Our old friends the Newmans [Paul and Joanne, that is]’ used to drop by, the next sentence tells us. So did Lauren Hutton, Susan Sarandon, Rudolf Nureyev, Hillary Clinton, Sting, James Taylor, Leonard Bernstein, Johnny Carson, Bruce Springsteen and many others, as this pictorial memoir bears witness. How exhausting it would all have been if Vidal had actually liked company.

But then Vidal likes to tease, just as he enjoys tearing Truman Capote’s reputation to shreds. One of Capote’s crimes was claiming to have flown, and landed, a plane at the age of 10, which was what Vidal actually had done (Vidal’s father was director of Aeronautics at the Department of Commerce). There are, to prove it, pictures of a golden-haired, white-shorted Gore at the controls.

And there are photographs, too, of the young Vidal setting off to war and later frolicking with Tennessee Williams; and of a middle-aged Vidal running for Congress and shooting the breeze with JFK – Vidal shared a stepfather with Jackie Kennedy. Williams told Vidal that JFK had ‘a nice ass’; Vidal told Kennedy who said: ‘Why, that’s very exciting.’

But alongside the high-class gossip and feline settling of scores there’s an elegiac note, typified by a tender description of the last time Vidal saw Norman Mailer, a man with whom he was often portrayed as being at war. And a matter-of-fact note about his own mortality, evidenced by a caption to photographs of his Los Angeles home, ‘where I am now, as I write this in the last of my houses, a Twenties box in the Hollywood Hills. End of the road’.

Telegraph for more

Via 3Quarks

Call to Government of India by Concerned Citizens and Organisations

As we write this to the Government of India, different country governments are busy with intense climate negotiations at the ongoing UNFCCC sessions in Bangkok. As people all over the world have realised, the face of climate negotiations has been dramatically altered with the call given by a large number of developing country governments in their official submissions to the UNFCCC, demanding that the climate debt of the developed countries must be repaid, and this payment must begin with the outcomes to be agreed in Copenhagen.

For example, the Bolivian country government submission clearly states:
Developed countries climate debt—the sum of their emissions debt and adaptation debt—are part of a broader ecological debt reflecting their heavy environ-mental footprint, excessive consumption of resources, materials and energy and contri-bution to declining biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Within the same climate justice under-standing, many poor states and communities—all victims of the reckless over-consumption of the Northern countries and the overconsuming elite of the South, leading to a historical injustice in the form of the accumulation of wealth by the overconsumers and deprivation for the forced underconsumers—are also demanding drastic cuts in the emissions by these overconsumers. We call upon the Indian Government to fully support these demands.

This view is gaining ground amongst many developing countries. Seven of them have already signed the official call for reparations and 49 countries have inserted the phrases ‘climate/ ecological debt’ and ‘historical responsibility’ in their official submissions to the UNFCCC. While India has very recently used ’historical responsi-bility’ in its official submission, we feel it is not enough. India needs to strongly support the call for reparations against climate and ecological debt in the ongoing negotiations and stand solidly with the other developing countries.

We appreciate that the Government of India has taken a stand for using public finance for climate funds as against the World Bank, GEF and other IFI funds. This stand needs to be reiterated and we strongly call upon the government to stand firm on its stand against climate funds being sourced from IFIs and GEF.
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We urge the Government of India to endorse the Bolivian Government demand: The developed North should be ready to pay reparations against their climate and ecological debt.* Any effort to bring in the private sector into climate funding needs to be strongly resisted by the developing countries. We also urge the developing countries, including India, to ensure that the principle of common but differentiated responsibility is taken beyond the currently employed narrow interpre-tation only at international levels and should be taken right up to the community and household levels. Similarly, mechanisms need to be put in place to ensure that the real ecological solutions are decided in a democratic way and that such steps directly benefit the poor rather than bring additional costs to them.

Mainstream for more

By Cyril Mychalejko

Latin America may soon become the next front in Washington’s so-called “War on Terror.”

Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) , Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, held a hearing on Oct. 27 to investigate his “serious concerns about expanded Iranian influence in the region.” Engel believes Iran’s diplomatic and commercial relations with a number of Latin American countries is a threat to the region’s, and more importantly the U.S.´s security and stability.

Testimony heard at the hearing repeatedly singled out Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and to a lesser extent Brazil.

Despite Iran not having any military presence in the region, Norman A. Bailey, former head of intelligence for Cuba and Venezuela under the Bush Administration, told members of Congress that, “It is becoming increasingly clear that one of the principal motivations of all this activity [by Iran] is to be able to retaliate against the United States if it is attacked.”

Eric Farnsworth, Vice President of the Council of Americas, said he believes that Iran may be looking for uranium, possibly in Venezuela. But Time Magazine reported in an Oct. 8 article that “experts say it’s hardly certain Venezuela even has much, if any, uranium to provide Iran or anyone else.” Farnsworth also claimed Iran’s improved diplomatic relations with countries in Latin America is a boon for its intelligence capabilities.

Upside Down World for more

Buddhist Ethnic Cleansing in Sri Lanka

A. Sivanandan of Race and Class Institute (London) talks to New Left Review

Could you tell us about your origins and background?
I was born in Colombo in 1923, but my father’s family were tenant farmers from the village of Sandilipay in Jaffna Province. The north of the island is flat and arid—there are no trees, no rivers, no mountains. My grandfather had so little land, and such poor land, that the only thing he grew was children: he had thirteen in all, but seven died in childbirth or very young. He was so fertile that he was known locally as the farmer with a green penis. My father was the second-youngest of thirteen. He was very bright, did very well at the local school, and won a scholarship to a Catholic school in Colombo. Education was the only route to jobs and social advancement for Tamils. Under British colonial rule, many Tamils were sent to fill bureaucratic posts in one or another malarial station in the interior, to open up the country, as it were. My father, who was educated at primary school in Tamil and English, joined the postal service at the age of sixteen, to support his family. By the time I was born, he was a sub-postmaster in Kandy, but throughout my childhood he was often transferred from one place to another. So when I was ten or eleven, I was sent to Colombo, to attend St Joseph’s College. It was a big Catholic school in the middle of the city, but surrounded by narrow streets and slums, through which rich people travelled to attend classes.

New Left Review for more

By Tammy Law (Photoessay)

Males are often given more freedom when compared to females. Girls are expected to assume a role of servitude, while young men are free to do as they please. Photograph © Tammy

One of the oldest countries in the world, Ethiopia is often referred to as “the cradle of civilization” – a country with a tumultuous past, present and future, and yet at the same time, a place of unparalleled beauty. In the Northeastern region of Ethiopia earlier this month, a team of scientists recently unveiled their latest findings, Ardi, a revolutionizing fossil that pre-dates the infamous 3.2 million-year-old skeleton of Lucy.

A landlocked country situated in the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia is bound by its bordering neighbors Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, Sudan and Eritrea. For outsiders, famine, war, poverty and drought are the things most synonymous with the Ethiopia. Even now, it’s still one of the least developed countries in the world, so those preconceptions wouldn’t be entirely baseless.

…

The Afar have a deeply paternalistic attitude, which is obvious from birth to burial. At the birth of a baby boy, two celebratory gunshots are fired into the air while female births go unacknowledged. Seven-year-old girls are expected to assume a role of servitude within the household and conduct daily tasks alongside the women, while males are free to do as they please. At the end of their lives, male graves are more distinguishably marked and revered. The Afar have a traditional saying that seems to embody much of what I saw: “One should give an ear to a woman but not take seriously what is said.”

Women’s International Perspective for more

By Peter Beaumont

At the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin this week, one of the defining figures of last century’s history celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in which he played a key role.

Lech Walesa and Hillary Clinton, invited to listen to Daniel Barenboim conduct the Staatskapelle Berlin, were in the audience.

But the star guest was undoubtedly Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet premier under whose leadership the Cold War in eastern and central Europe was brought to an end.

If a sense of his importance to the events of 1989 is required, it was supplied by British historian Timothy Garton Ash, who described Gorbachev’s “breathtaking renunciation of the use of force” while Soviet leader as “a luminous example of the importance of the individual in history”.

Garton Ash’s reminder feels long overdue. For there is a conundrum concerning Gorbachev: it is why a living figure of such historic moment appears to have receded so far in our memory in comparison with contemporaries such as Nelson Mandela or Ronald Reagan.

Is it, perhaps, because his momentous experiment ended so inauspiciously with a failed coup, the implosion of the Soviet Union on a wave of nationalist sentiment in the republics and Russia itself, and a resignation that effectively finished his political career?

These events preceded the rise of a voraciously destructive klepto-politics in Russia, so venal that people would come to yearn for the certainties even of Stalin’s rule.

Or is it because the world has judged that he has diminished himself with the album of traditional ballads, the adverts for Pizza Hut and Louis Vuitton, the speaking tours and celebrity galas, the cameo film role in a Wim Wenders film playing – inevitably – himself? Stage antics of an old gunslinger trading on fading memory.

The truth is that Gorbachev meant, and means, more than that.

New Zealand Herald for more

Our friend Bassam Tariq from 30 Mosques in 30 Days just posted a fascinating story over at Times.com about a Bangladeshi candidate that ran for local office in NYC. (hat tip, Sharaf!)

Watch video

It’s the classic story, with a modern twist. Bangladeshi immigrant Mujib Rahman wants to be elected to New York’s City Council. It’s the story of an immigrant, running for office on the Republican ticket, wanting to make a difference for his community. The clip shows how he tries to campaign in the local Bangladeshi community to gain votes – to get one of their own Bangladeshis in office. But the campaign he’s running on is based on a divisive message – letting voters know his opponent is gay.

I was conflicted as I watched this. On one hand you want this hard working Bangladeshi uncle to achieve the bootstrap American dream. He’s getting himself and his community involved in civic engagement. But on the other hand, his closed minded smear campaign just reflects all the reasons I stopped talking politics with my father’s generation of uncles. Were any of our readers involved in Mujib’s campaign? Did any of you have the chance to vote (or not vote) for Mujib?

Sepia Mutiny

(Submitted by reader)

Unemployment and Debt Rise as a Made in the USA Crisis Goes Global

By Danny Schechter

Johannesburg: There was lots of skepticism when I came to South Africa two years ago to show my film IN DEBT WE TRUST. While my critique of consumer debt resonated, the film’s forecast of a financial crisis didn’t. Their economy seemed to be doing well and it was hard to tell a society that tends to look inward that they would be affected by a financial crisis in America, l0,000 miles away.

Most believed it would pass them by.

It hasn’t. A year ago, the International Monetary Fund warned that 200,000 people would be affected. People living on $2 a day might end up surviving on $1 or not surviving at all. These victims around the world are mostly not part of the US debate or our media coverage. The faces and stories of these victims are as conspicuous by their absence as have been stories of the one million families that had their homes foreclosed upon in the last quarter.

As if South Africa doesn’t have enough problems — the AIDS pandemic, massive poverty, and simmering unrest, the Finance Minister yesterday discussed the impact that the global economic crisis is having. There’s been a loss of 500,000 jobs and a fall off of taxes and an increase in expenditures.

The projected deficit will soar with a shortfall doubling to 7.6% of GDP. The government has to cut costs; that will mean a further cutback in social services at the very time of growing protests against service failures and neglect of the poor. South Africa will now be forced to go deeper into debt, to borrow more money

Thank you Wall Street — although most of the media I saw here did not blame forces/financial criminals in the USA for causing this financial cancer. Perhaps they are too far away for most polilticans and pundits here to see the connection. I did read about a big South African bank that got stuck with sleazy subprime losses sold by US firms but that is not being raised in connection with this emerging economic catastrophe.

They even have their own Ponzi schemers here. The government has issued arrest warrants for two scammers pushing phony investments in AIDS drugs. Several big companies are being prosecuted for pice fixing on commodities like bread and paraffin or healting oil.

Common Dreams for more

Thousands of people were left landless because of greed among the political elite in the Kenyatta administration in the 1960s. Politician Jackson Angaine, who was the Lands minister in 1965, presided over dishing out of prime land, some of which was allocated to Mr Daniel Moi, who later became president. Photo/FILE

By John Kamaup

The take-over by the rich of farms meant to settle the poor in the high-potential areas infuriated the British Government and confused government officials who did not want to take action or stop continued allocation of the 100-acre plots (Z-plots) to the rich.

Only one man — Mr James Maina Wanjigi, the Director of Settlements — dared to issue a directive to stop the allocation. But he was quickly overruled by Land and Settlement permanent secretary Peter Shiyukah.

Mr Wanjigi was asked by Mr Shiyukah to compile a list of the VIPs, or “big shots” as he later described them — who had received such land.
“You said that you would want to send this (list) for the President’s retention,” wrote Wanjigi in the covering letter dated January 22, 1966.
These details show why the settlements went wrong from the beginning and why the land equation in the country was tilted in favour of those close to power.

But angry that government officials had started to allocate themselves development funds, and plots in schemes they had funded to settle the landless, the British Ministry of Overseas Development asked the High Commission in Nairobi to seek more details.

Original correspondence from the period highlights the misuse of power.
On June 18, 1965, a year after funds from the World Bank and CDC had been used on the Z-plots without their knowledge, the British High Commission in Nairobi wrote to Mr Shiyukah asking whether the proposal to set aside “some of the best farm houses….with a certain amount of surrounding land had been implemented”.

By the time Mr Neil Brockett of the High Commission was writing this, he knew already that some key politicians, including President Kenyatta had acquired land in the schemes.

The Nation for more