links for 2008-05-25

• In defence of central bank independence - Vox EU
• Redesigning the EU trade strategy towards China - Vox EU
• Who Owns Transaction Information? - Discourse.net
• Real Archaeologists Don't Wear Fedoras - washingtonpost.com
• Could Someone Explain Stolper-Samuelson to James Surowiecki? - pgl
• Brazil Rainforest Analysis Sets Off Political Debate - NYTimes.com
• Global Dreams for a Wireless Web - NYTimes.com
• Tibet, quake and the Chinese media - Project Syndicate

Comments

[hari]

EU - China Trade Relations (Vox EU)

The principle bottleneck is emerging (EU/US) tactics of utilizing NTBs including anti-dumping rules under WTO. China is not likely to negotiate as long as anti-dumping rules are upfront in any bilateral negotiations with EU.

The rest of the article is of no serious value because bilateral relations are already advanced...and trade negotiations with China (and India) are central to EU future as a trading block.

It's important to recognize neither China nor India are likely to remove their domestic tariff protection of infant industries. Over time, trade and structural adjustment process will ultimately level the playing field with Asian emerging markets - as it did when EU/US experienced similar bottlenecks in their bilateral trade, as OECD countries, on a vairiety of products/sectors.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/world/americas/25dominican.html?hp&pagewanted=print

May 25, 2008

Dominican Crackdown Leaves Children of Haitian Immigrants in Legal Limbo
By MARC LACEY

SAN PEDRO DE MACORIS, Dominican Republic — Two obsessions define this country: baseball and Haiti. Ángel Luis Joseph, a teenage outfielder with a hot bat, is caught between Dominicans' devotion to the one and disdain for the other.

So many major leaguers have emerged from this sugar town that agents keep an eye on even pint-size players with potential. Ángel, 17, was only a lanky grade school boy when his coach noticed he showed all the signs of becoming a standout. Before long, the San Francisco Giants came calling with a $350,000 offer, he said.

But then politics interfered with his dream. To obtain a visa to the United States, Ángel went to a local government office to get a copy of his birth certificate. Little did he know that the Dominican government had recently begun a crackdown on the children of Haitian immigrants, even those like him who have lived their whole lives in the Dominican Republic.

"If your last name is weird, they won't give you your documents," he said. "Same thing if your skin is dark like mine."

Ángel's request for his birth record was denied, prompting the Giants to withdraw the offer.

His parents, like hundreds of thousands of others, moved from Haiti to the Dominican Republic in the 1970s to work in the sugar cane fields. Their children were born in the Dominican Republic, grew up here and became, in their eyes at least, full-fledged Dominicans. They speak Spanish, dance merengue and play "pelota," the popular name for the Dominican pastime baseball.

"They don't play baseball in Haiti," said Melanie Teff, who has studied the issue for Refugee International, an advocacy group in Washington. "That shows how Dominican this guy and many people like him are."

The government does not necessarily agree, and Ángel awaits a ruling on his appeal for access to his Dominican birth record.

The issue arose with a fury several years ago when advocates took the government to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, whose jurisdiction the Dominican Republic acknowledges, to protest the denial of birth certificates to two ethnic Haitian children.

While the case was in process, the government changed its migration law in 2004 to specifically exclude the offspring of Haitian migrants from citizenship. The Dominican Constitution grants citizenship to those born on Dominican soil, except the children of diplomats and those "in transit." That has long meant that the children of immigrants, no matter their legal status, gained Dominican citizenship.

After the international court ruled against the Dominican government in 2005, ordering that damages be paid to the two children, the Dominican Supreme Court said that Haitian workers were considered "in transit" and that their children were therefore Haitian, not Dominican.

Last spring, the government agency in charge of identity documents, the Joint Electoral Council, issued a memorandum telling its employees to watch for the offspring of foreigners trying to identify themselves as Dominican. It now hangs at every clerk's office and is shown to people thought to have Haitian blood.

"The issue of Haiti has become very combustible in the Dominican context," said Daniel Erikson, director of Caribbean programs at the Inter-American Dialogue, a research group in Washington. "You have a deep resentment of Haiti, and that's driving these responses that don't reflect favorably on the country."

Government officials point out the strain that poor illegal immigrants from Haiti put on the Dominican Republic. The two countries share the island of Hispaniola but have vastly different levels of development.

Of course, Haitians contribute, too. They have long worked in the jobs Dominicans did not want to do, mostly cutting cane on plantations that supply sugar to the United States. The government has not just known of their presence for decades but has in some cases encouraged their arrival.

The Dominican government says the new crackdown is a security matter, aimed at wiping out fraud. And in some cases over the years, young Haitians who had crossed the border illegally claimed to have been born on the Dominican side.

But opponents accuse the government of applying its 2004 law retroactively, which they call an illegal practice that has longstanding societal animosity against Haitians at its heart.

"The racist beliefs of some are being used to twist our laws," said Cristóbal Rodríguez Gómez, a Dominican constitutional law professor at Ibero-American University, who is acting as counsel for another descendant of Haitians who lacks documents....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/world/americas/25amazon.html?hp&pagewanted=print

May 25, 2008

Brazil Rainforest Analysis Sets Off Political Debate
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

SÃO JOSÉ DOS CAMPOS, Brazil — Gilberto Câmara, a scientist who leads Brazil's national space agency, is more at ease poring over satellite data of the Amazon than being thrust into the spotlight.

But since January, Dr. Câmara has been at the center of a political tug-of-war between scientists and Brazil's powerful business interests. It started when he and his fellow engineers released a report showing that deforestation of Brazil's portion of the rainforest appeared to have shot up again after two years of decline.

Since then, Dr. Câmara, who leads the National Institute for Space Research here, has found himself having to defend his agency's findings against one of Brazil's richest and most powerful men: Blairo Maggi, who is governor of the country's largest agricultural state, Mato Grosso, and a business owner known as the "Soybean King."

Governor Maggi was exercised enough by the report — which led to harsh measures stifling business in his state — that he asked for, and got, a meeting with the president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The stakes could not be higher for Mr. da Silva. Stewardship of the Amazon has always been a touchy subject, with many Brazilians fearful that world powers would try to impose their standards on the rainforest. But in recent years, the debate over the Amazon has intensified, with many outside the country seeing an intact rainforest as a key to controlling global warming. At the same time, Brazil's economy has taken off — largely because of businesses that are claiming more of the Amazon's land for crops and livestock, and more of its trees for logging.

Mr. da Silva has spent the last several years walking a careful line, trying to maintain his image as Brazil's first "green" president, which has gained him international cachet, without threatening Brazil's agriculture industry at a time of soaring grain and meat prices.

Dr. Câmara's findings made the president's balancing act harder and turned up the heat on what had been a long-simmering battle between businesses and environmentalists across the world into a low-grade war. It did not help that the scientists' report, released in January, relied heavily on a relatively new measure of deforestation called progressive deforestation, which is widely accepted in the environmental community but which Governor Maggi contends is tantamount to lying. The space agency argues that this slower-paced deforestation, where parts of the forest are thinned out little by little rather than at once, can be just as devastating.

The criticism worried scientists in and out of Brazil, including Dr. Câmara. "Science," he said, "should not bow to authority."

The president's answer was more nuanced; he told Governor Maggi that the space agency would recheck its work. But the scientist said that the agency was not pressed into changing its stance.

"This is not the first time in the larger world where people dispute the numbers because they don't like them," said Thomas E. Lovejoy, president of The Heinz Center in Washington, an environmental research group. "But this is the first time this has happened in Brazil. The pressures from agricultural economic interests are really making a difference in Brasília," the country's capital.

The space agency, known as INPE, reported in January that deforestation had hit an estimated 4,300 square miles between August and December of last year. That is on pace to exceed the approximately 6,900 square miles recorded from August 2006 to August 2007....

[Denis Drew]

IS THERE AN ECONOMIC MODEL IN A TEXTBOOK SOMEWHERE FOR AN ENTIRE NATION'S LABOR BEING AS DUMB AND GETTING AS FULLY TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF AS RENT-A-CENTER CUSTOMERS?:

Wealthy Americans reap the benefits of globalization for the same reason wealthy Americans reap an outsize proportion of the benefits of the economy as a whole: American labor's complete complacency about its need to bargain powerfully in the free marketplace.

I don't know if there is any equation or model in the text books to fit -- for a close parallel -- uninformed customers being taken to the cleaners in a Rent-A-Center store. Rent-A-Center suckers are a tiny bit of our economy -- taken-to-the-cleaners (as in completely deunionized) labor is the going standard.

Again, I don't believe there is a text book model that spells out the cause and effect of what is truly America's "great wage depression". Imagine if we predicted to Americans of 1968 that by 2008 25% of our workforce would be earning less than LBJs $10/hr minimum wage.

If American workers were getting their share across the board, then globalization of manufactured goods might merely be the equivalent of automation to them.

[anne]

http://www.juancole.com/2008/05/memorial-day-2008.html

May 25, 2008

Memorial Day, 2008
Edited by Juan Cole

We aren't told the scale of the sacrifice by our corporate media or Washington officials. Michael Munk has done a fine job of focusing in like a laser on the real numbers of casualties for the Iraq War. Here is the last dispatch I have from him, dated May 6, 2008:

"US military occupation forces in Iraq suffered at least 108 combat casualties in the week ending May 6, as the official casualty total reached at least 65,500. The total includes 33,325 dead and wounded by what the Pentagon classifies as 'hostile' causes and 32,175 (since over a month ago on March 1) dead and injured from 'non-hostile' causes.

"The actual total is over 85,000 because the Pentagon chooses not to count as 'Iraq casualties' the approximately 20,000 casualties discovered only after they returned from Iraq - mainly brain trauma from explosions.

"In addition, a rare report * showed that 1,123 'US civilian contractors' has been killed since the invasion, including a record 353 in 2007. No numbers are available on the wounded and injured, nor about casualties among the 'contractors' who are not US citizens."

* Houston Post, February 9, 2008

[anne]

http://www.juancole.com/2008/05/sistani-forbids-feeding-americans-warns.html

May 25, 2008

Sistani Forbids Feeding Americans; Warns Against Security Agreement
By Juan Cole

Fars News reproduces in Persian on May 24, 2008, another anti-American fatwa by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani of Najaf. It says that its correspondent in Najaf reports that an Iraqi Shiite submitted the following to Sistani:

"I sell foodstuffs. Sometimes the Occupying Powers or their associates come to my establishment. May I sell them foodstuffs?"

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani replied:

"Selling foodstuffs to the Occupying Powers is not permitted."

Last I knew, the US military in Iraq does not buy its food from Iraqis but rather imports it, for fear that Iraqi nationalists might poison it. So the fatwa has no immediate effect. But if Sistani is laying the grounds for a Gandhi-style non-cooperation movement, he certainly could put a crimp in the American military's style in Iraq. I can't imagine US troops could function in the Shiite south or much of Baghdad without Shiite cooperation. Sistani still has a great deal of moral authority, and would be backed by less cautious clerics such as Muqtada al-Sadr and Ayatollah Jawad al-Khalisi.

This fatwa is significant in light of the reports that Sistani has been orally permitting attacks on US troops by Shiite militiamen loyal to the Shiite religious authorities in Najaf.

Then an Iranian news service reported yesterday that Sistani is also coming out against the proposed mutual security agreement * between the United States and Iraq that is intended to serve as a Status of Forces Agreement after the United Nations Security Council authorization for US troops to be in Iraq expires in December.

The report says:

"The Grand Ayatollah has reiterated that he would not allow Iraq to sign such a deal with 'the US occupiers' as long as he was alive, a source close to Ayatollah Sistani said. The source added the Grand Ayatollah had voiced his strong objection to the deal during a meeting with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in the holy city of Najaf on Thursday."

Sistani may have been forced to take a stand on this issue because his clerical peers and rivals are coming out vocally on it.

The man some consider the "fifth Grand Ayatollah of Iraq," Sayyid Kadhim al-Ha'iri (who resides in Qom, Iran because he cannot abide the Occupation regime in Iraq) has denounced the proposed security agreement in no uncertain terms.

* http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=57198&sectionid=351020201

[Trade]

"...the very people who suffer most from free trade are often, paradoxically, among its biggest beneficiaries. The reason for this is simple: free trade with poorer countries has a huge positive impact on the buying power of middle- and lower-income consumers..."

That's a lie. Monetary expansion prevents the CPI from falling due to trade mediated efficiency. It is those first in line to receive newly created money who mostly gain. Laid off steelworkers do not get an increase in wages due to trade, borrowers get lower interest rates.

[hari]

@ Anne -

The Sistani *fatwa* - if it is true - is really end of US military occupation in Iraq. It not only displays the intrinsic cultural divide between US - Iraq but also perhaps the indignity of foreign military occupation of an Arab land.

Recall, (Saudi/Yemen) Bin-laden declared his fatwa by moving against US troops on Saudi soil, to begin with. Earlier, he was the *king pin* of CIA militia against SovietUnion in Afghanistan.

[Distribution]

"...free trade affects relative prices, not the price level (the latter being the province of macro and monetary factors)."

If sufficient new money is created to accommodate the extra consumer goods extant because of trade induced efficiency, the recipients of the newly created money will wind up with all of the extra consumer goods. The method used to distribute newly created money is therefore crucial to evenly spread around the gains from trade. If all of the newly created money is distributed to 10% of the population, 10% of the population winds up with all of the gains from trade.

This phenomenon is rarely addressed.

[anne]

Hari:

"The Sistani *fatwa* - if it is true - is really the end of US military occupation in Iraq. It not only displays the intrinsic cultural divide between US - Iraq but also perhaps the indignity of foreign military occupation of an Arab land."

Juan Cole thinks we are growing closer; me too. There is no dignity in colonialism.

[anne]

http://www.juancole.com/2008/05/sistani-forbids-feeding-americans-warns.html

May 25, 2008

Sistani Warns Against Security Agreement

The agreement will specify how many bases the US may have in Iraq, where, and for how long. It will probably also grant US troops extraterritoriality, that is, a guarantee that they will not be tried in an Iraqi court for any crime committed on Iraqi soil.

The extraterritoriality of foreign troops was a common legal feature of colonial arrangements in the region. It was one of the things the nationalist movements campaigned about, and typically they abrogated it as soon as they came to power. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini made the legal immunity of US troops in Iran in the 1960s and 1970s a plank in his platform of revolution against the Shah.

Both the US and the Iraqi government appear to recognize that US bases in Arab Iraq are likely to be contentious, and apparently the thinking is now increasingly to site most of them in Kurdistan, where the population is more welcoming. That scenario, however, seems to me to have severe drawbacks. Iraqi Kurdistan is harboring guerrillas of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), who have frequently hit Turkey and provoked strong Turkish reprisals. You want to put US troops in the middle of that? The bases would have to be provisioned via Incirlik Air Force Base in Turkey, so the Turks could always blackmail the US military into supporting them against their Kurdish hosts! Kurdistan is landlocked and surrounded by potentially hostile powers-- Iran, Syria, and and the arab provinces of Iraq. Is that the sort of place it is wise to site thousands of US troops?

-- Juan Cole

[anne]

http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2008/05/when-i-look-at-scenes-of-lebanese.html

May 25, 2008

When I look at scenes of the Lebanese parliament, I remember my childhood. My brothers and I used to play in that hall as kids, and we used to sit on the balcony and watch parliamentary sessions (my father was an employee in the parliament). I remember I was once passing by the accountant of the parliament (he later became a member of parliament in 1972 on the list of Kamil Al-As`ad) as a child: and he invited me in and opened the safe: and stuffed my pockets with coins. From the treasury itself!!! I left learning about Lebanese state accounting what I knew not before.

-- As'ad AbuKhalil