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The #UN, with special mention to @UN_HRC #HumanRights Council, has outdone itself this year. Thanks @UNWatch

noreply@blogger.com (The MasterBlog) — Tue, 26 Dec 2017 05:02:00 +0100

From electing #Mugabe as Goodwill Ambassador @WHO and #Erdogan to the @UNESCO Board, to naming #SaudiArabia to its #Women's Rights Commission ...

The #UN, with special mention to the @UN_HRC #HumanRights Council, has outdone itself this year...

The Top 10 Most Evil U.N. Actions of 2017 @UNWatch

UN Briefing

UN Watch Briefing
Latest from the United Nations

December 25, 2017

The Top 10 Most Evil U.N. Actions of 2017

10. Denied Venezuelan Hunger: In the first-ever U.N. visit to Venezuela, Alfred de Zayas, the U.N. Human Rights Council's Cuban-backed "Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order," posted propaganda photos to deny mass hunger caused by the regime's failed policies.

After UN Watch exposed the sick lie—in truth, Venezuelan hospitals are filled with starving children—the U.N. official was pressured into deleting his blog post and tweet.

9. Foxes to Guard the Chickens: The U.N. elected Qatar (slave labor), Pakistan (death row for Christian 'blasphemers'), Democratic Republic of Congo (mass rape as weapon of war), Afghanistan (abuse of women) and Angola (corrupt & oppressive regime) to the 47-nation Human Rights Council, for 3-year terms beginning in January 2018. Existing members already include Saudi Arabia, China, Cuba and Venezuela.

UN Watch led the protest with a major report and social media campaign, cited in AP, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Deutsche Welle & Spain's EFE.

8. Mugabe as Goodwill Ambassador: In October, the U.N.'s World Health Organization named Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe a "goodwill ambassador."

UN Watch's protest sparked world outrage—generating a blitz of media reports in CNN, Washington Post, Newsweek and 140 other news agencies. Eventually, donor states including the U.S., Britain and Canada protested, and the dictator was dropped. A month later, Mugabe was overthrown—no thanks to the United Nations, which had only sought to legitimize him.

7. Making Putin the Victim: U.N. expert Idriss Jazairy (above), a former Algerian diplomat, published a report astoundingly concluding that Russia was a victim of human rights violations—due, he said, to U.S. and EU "unilateral coercive measures."

UN Watch's Hillel Neuer took the floor in the Human Rights Council to question the ethics of Jazairy's office recently accepting $50,000 from Russia. Jazairy lashed out at UN Watch, and denied any influence. The story was reported worldwide by AP, The Independent, and Radio Free Europe.

6. U.N. Punished Whistleblower for Trying to Stop Outing of Chinese Dissidents: The U.N. human rights office retaliated against employee Emma Reilly after she tried to stop the dangerous hand-over to China of names of dissidents slated to attend a Human Rights Council session. An independent watchdog also called for Prince Zeid al-Hussein (above), the U.N. rights chief, to be suspended and placed under investigation for his alleged mistreatment of whistleblowers such as Anders Kompass, who tried to stop peacekeepers raping children in Central African Republic, and Miranda Brown, who exposed the U.N. transfer of unlicensed shipments of U.S. computers and firewalls to North Korea.

5. Rewarding Genocidal Syria: The U.N. elected Syria's genocidal regime to a senior post on a decolonization committee charged with opposing the "subjugation, domination and exploitation" of people. The propaganda victory was quickly trumpeted by the Assad regime.

4. Honoring Qaddafi Agent: In March, the U.N. Human Rights Council opening session gave a position of honor to its Advisory Committee member Jean Ziegler, co-founder and 2002 recipient of the "Muammar Qaddafi Human Rights Prize." Two weeks later, Eric Tistounet, a top official of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, joined a panel showering praise upon Ziegler as a great "intellectual."

UN Watch protested in a detailed letter that documented's Ziegler's despicable record of siding with murderous regimes.

Executive Director Hillel Neuer took the floor in the Council to challenge Ziegler to his face: "I have a question for the panel member who in 1989 co-founded the Mummar Qaddafi Human Rights Prize, and who went to Tripoli, Libya, on Sept. 29, 2002, to himself win that prize."

"Given that this Council eventually reversed its policy on the Qaddafi regime, and suspended Libya in 2011 for its gross and systematic abuses, do you regret your actions? The Swiss media reported that the prize was worth 100,000 Swiss Francs. Would you consider returning these funds to the Libyan people?"

3. Purges Teachers, Now on UNESCO Board: In November, the U.N. agency for education, science & culture elected Turkey to its executive board—barely one year after President Erodgan summarily fired 100,000 teachers, university deans, academics, judges, and other officials. Erodogan persecuted heroic journalists like Can Dundar and Yavuz Baydar, yet will now be a U.N. judge of press freedom. Turkish propaganda celebrated the win, as reported by UN Watch.

2. Mother of All Rogues' Galleries: In September, the U.N. Human Rights Council assembled the most despicable single panel of presenters in its 70-year history, legitimized by the presence and speech of a former top official of Human Rights Watch. The subject was "unilateral coercive measures," i.e., why Western sanctions against oppressive regimes like Russia, Sudan, or Venezuela, are supposedly illegal.

Left to right: Jean Ziegler, a UNHRC advisor who founded and won the Qaddafi Prize, used his slot to openly defend the Maduro regime and to attack Veenzuela's political prisoners; Idriss Jazairy, a U.N. expert who as Algerian diplomat was the greatest enemy of legitimate U.N. human rights experts; Peggy Hicks, representative of High Commissioner Zeid al-Hussein and former U.N. rep of Ken Roth's Human Rights Watch, was silent as Ziegler praised Venezuela; Jorge Valero, ambassador of the oppressive Maduro regime, the official moderator of the panel; Alena Douhan, a Belarus academic with a soft spot for Russia, whose doctorate was on the principle of "non-interference" in countries' "internal affairs"; and Alfred de Zayas, expert of the UNHRC whose World War II revisionist history has made him a hero to Holocaust deniers.

UN Watch was the only voice at the United Nations to take the floor, in the Council and outside, to challenge this perversion of human rights.

1. Saudi Arabia Elected to U.N. Women's Rights Commission: In April, the 54-nation Economic and Social Council elected Saudi Arabia to the U.N.'s women's rights commission, despite its horrific subjugation of women. UN Watch's report went completely viral, quoted in CNN, Newsweek, the leading papers of France, Britain, Germany, Spain, Italy—and even in Teen Vogue.

When UN Watch also revealed that at least five European Union states voted for the Saudis, a major scandal erupted in Belgium—the prime minister was forced to admit their immoral vote and he apologized—and controversies erupted in the parliaments and media of Ireland, Norway and Sweden. Click for video.

THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO
DONATED TO UN WATCH IN 2017

To support the vital work of UN Watch, please contribute here.
UN Watch is an independent human rights group founded in 1993 in Geneva, Switzerland,receiving no financial support from any organization or government. We rely on the
generosity of charitable donations. Thank you for your support.

tel: (41-22) 734-1472 • fax: (41-22) 734-1613
www.unwatch.org

The Chutzpah!! #Iran foreign min goes all-out against #SaudiArabia as fomenter of extremism

noreply@blogger.com (The MasterBlog) — Wed, 14 Sep 2016 18:45:00 +0200

Mohammad Javad Zarif: Let Us Rid the World of Wahhabism - NYTimes.com

In today's NYTimes:

Mohammad Javad Zarif: Let Us Rid the World of Wahhabism

Tehran — Public relations firms with no qualms about taking tainted petrodollars are experiencing a bonanza. Their latest project has been to persuade us that the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, is no more. As a Nusra spokesman told CNN, the rebranded rebel group, supposedly separated from its parent terrorist organization, has become "moderate."

Thus is fanaticism from the Dark Ages sold as a bright vision for the 21st century. The problem for the P.R. firms' wealthy, often Saudi, clients, who have lavishly funded Nusra, is that the evidence of their ruinous policies can't be photoshopped out of existence. If anyone had any doubt, the recent video images of other "moderates" beheading a 12-year-old boy were a horrifying reality check.

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, militant Wahhabism has undergone a series of face-lifts, but underneath, the ideology remains the same — whether it's the Taliban, the various incarnations of Al Qaeda or the so-called Islamic State, which is neither Islamic nor a state. But the millions of people faced with the Nusra Front's tyranny are not buying the fiction of this disaffiliation. Past experience of such attempts at whitewashing points to the real aim: to enable the covert flow of petrodollars to extremist groups in Syria to become overt, and even to lure Western governments into supporting these "moderates." The fact that Nusra still dominates the rebel alliance in Aleppo flouts the public relations message.

Saudi Arabia's effort to persuade its Western patrons to back its shortsighted tactics is based on the false premise that plunging the Arab world into further chaos will somehow damage Iran. The fanciful notions that regional instability will help to "contain" Iran, and that supposed rivalries between Sunni and Shiite Muslims are fueling conflicts, are contradicted by the reality that the worst bloodshed in the region is caused by Wahhabists fighting fellow Arabs and murdering fellow Sunnis.

While these extremists, with the backing of their wealthy sponsors, have targeted Christians, Jews, Yazidis, Shiites and other "heretics," it is their fellow Sunni Arabs who have been most beleaguered by this exported doctrine of hate. Indeed, it is not the supposed ancient sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shiites but the contest between Wahhabism and mainstream Islam that will have the most profound consequences for the region and beyond.

While the 2003 American-led invasion of Iraq set in motion the fighting we see today, the key driver of violence has been this extremist ideology promoted by Saudi Arabia — even if it was invisible to Western eyes until the tragedy of 9/11.

The princes in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, have been desperate to revive the regional status quo of the days of Saddam Hussein's rule in Iraq, when a surrogate repressive despot, eliciting wealth and material support from fellow Arabs and a gullible West, countered the so-called Iranian threat. There is only one problem: Mr. Hussein is long dead, and the clock cannot be turned back.

The sooner Saudi Arabia's rulers come to terms with this, the better for all. The new realities in our region can accommodate even Riyadh, should the Saudis choose to change their ways.

What would change mean? Over the past three decades, Riyadh has spent tens of billions of dollars exporting Wahhabism through thousands of mosques and madrasas across the world. From Asia to Africa, from Europe to the Americas, this theological perversion has wrought havoc. As one former extremist in Kosovo told The Times, "The Saudis completely changed Islam here with their money."

Though it has attracted only a minute proportion of Muslims, Wahhabism has been devastating in its impact. Virtually every terrorist group abusing the name of Islam — from Al Qaeda and its offshoots in Syria to Boko Haram in Nigeria — has been inspired by this death cult.

So far, the Saudis have succeeded in inducing their allies to go along with their folly, whether in Syria or Yemen, by playing the "Iran card." That will surely change, as the realization grows that Riyadh's persistent sponsorship of extremism repudiates its claim to be a force for stability.

The world cannot afford to sit by and witness Wahhabists targeting not only Christians, Jews and Shiites but also Sunnis. With a large section of the Middle East in turmoil, there is a grave danger that the few remaining pockets of stability will be undermined by this clash of Wahhabism and mainstream Sunni Islam.

Interactive Feature | Sign Up for the Opinion Today Newsletter Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, the Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.

There needs to be coordinated action at the United Nations to cut off the funding for ideologies of hate and extremism, and a willingness from the international community to investigate the channels that supply the cash and the arms. In 2013, Iran's president, Hassan Rouhani, proposed an initiative called World Against Violent Extremism, or WAVE. The United Nations should build on that framework to foster greater dialogue between religions and sects to counter this dangerous medieval fanaticism.

The attacks in Nice, Paris and Brussels should convince the West that the toxic threat of Wahhabism cannot be ignored. After a year of almost weekly tragic news, the international community needs to do more than express outrage, sorrow and condolences; concrete action against extremism is needed.

Though much of the violence committed in the name of Islam can be traced to Wahhabism, I by no means suggest that Saudi Arabia cannot be part of the solution. Quite the reverse: We invite Saudi rulers to put aside the rhetoric of blame and fear, and join hands with the rest of the community of nations to eliminate the scourge of terrorism and violence that threatens us all.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/14/opinion/mohammad-javad-zarif-let-us-rid-the-world-of-wahhabism.html

Mohammad Javad Zarif: Let Us Rid the World of Wahhabism

31 INCREDIBLE FACTS ABOUT #GOLD

noreply@blogger.com (The MasterBlog) — Wed, 3 Aug 2016 11:23:00 +0200

No metal can claim a legacy comparable to gold.

From VisualCapitalist.com:

Gold has been used to show affectionate love, but it has also represented power, status, and riches for the greatest kings of antiquity. Gold’s history is truly legendary, ripe with colorful tales and anecdotes from people ranging from William Shakespeare to Christopher Columbus.

But gold doesn’t just “talk the talk”.

Gold also walks the walk, because its grandeur is backed up by impressive chemical properties and uses. As we documented in our extensive Gold Series, it’s been used as a monetary metal for thousands of years by ancient civilizations such as the Lydians, Greeks, Chinese, and Romans. It’s the most malleable and ductile metal, and it doesn’t tarnish or corrode. Over time, these properties have helped people to associate gold with concepts such as immortality or royalty.

Even today, people are still finding new uses for gold that are impressive in their own right. For example, scientists recently discovered a gold alloy that is four times tougher than titanium.

Without further ado, here are 31 incredible facts about gold.

31 INCREDIBLE FACTS ABOUT GOLD

The following infographic puts the rich history of gold into perspective.

See the post online at Visual Capitalist here: http://www.visualcapitalist.com/31-incredible-facts-about-gold/

#Israel Proves the #Desalination Era Is Here #WaterDiplomacy

noreply@blogger.com (The MasterBlog) — Mon, 1 Aug 2016 16:38:00 +0200

Israel Proves the Desalination Era Is Here - Scientific American

Israel now gets 55% of its domestic water from desalination, and that has helped to turn one of the world's driest countries into the unlikeliest of water giants.

From Scientific American:

Israel Proves the Desalination Era Is Here

From Ensia (find the original story here); reprinted with permission.
July 19, 2016 — Ten miles south of Tel Aviv, I stand on a catwalk over two concrete reservoirs the size of football fields and watch water pour into them from a massive pipe emerging from the sand. The pipe is so large I could walk through it standing upright, were it not full of Mediterranean seawater pumped from an intake a mile offshore.
"Now, that's a pump!" Edo Bar-Zeev shouts to me over the din of the motors, grinning with undisguised awe at the scene before us. The reservoirs beneath us contain several feet of sand through which the seawater filters before making its way to a vast metal hangar, where it is transformed into enough drinking water to supply 1.5 million people.
We are standing above the new Sorek desalination plant, the largest reverse-osmosis desal facility in the world, and we are staring at Israel's salvation. Just a few years ago, in the depths of its worst drought in at least 900 years, Israel was running out of water. Now it has a surplus. That remarkable turnaround was accomplished through national campaigns to conserve and reuse Israel's meager water resources, but the biggest impact came from a new wave of desalination plants.
Bar-Zeev, who recently joined Israel's Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research after completing his postdoc work at Yale University, is an expert on biofouling, which has always been an Achilles' heel of desalination and one of the reasons it has been considered a last resort. Desal works by pushing saltwater into membranes containing microscopic pores. The water gets through, while the larger salt molecules are left behind. But microorganisms in seawater quickly colonize the membranes and block the pores, and controlling them requires periodic costly and chemical-intensive cleaning. But Bar-Zeev and colleagues developed a chemical-free system using porous lava stone to capture the microorganisms before they reach the membranes. It's just one of many breakthroughs in membrane technology that have made desalination much more efficient. Israel now gets 55 percent of its domestic water from desalination, and that has helped to turn one of the world's driest countries into the unlikeliest of water giants.
Driven by necessity, Israel is learning to squeeze more out of a drop of water than any country on Earth, and much of that learning is happening at the Zuckerberg Institute, where researchers have pioneered new techniques in drip irrigation, water treatment and desalination. They have developed resilient well systems for African villages and biological digesters than can halve the water usage of most homes.
Bar-Zeev believes that Israel's solutions can help its parched neighbors, too — and in the process, bring together old enemies in common cause.The institute's original mission was to improve life in Israel's bone-dry Negev Desert, but the lessons look increasingly applicable to the entire Fertile Crescent. "The Middle East is drying up," says Osnat Gillor, a professor at the Zuckerberg Institute who studies the use of recycled wastewater on crops. "The only country that isn't suffering acute water stress is Israel."
That water stress has been a major factor in the turmoil tearing apart the Middle East, but Bar-Zeev believes that Israel's solutions can help its parched neighbors, too — and in the process, bring together old enemies in common cause.
Bar-Zeev acknowledges that water will likely be a source of conflict in the Middle East in the future. "But I believe water can be a bridge, through joint ventures," he says. "And one of those ventures is desalination."

Driven to Desperation

In 2008, Israel teetered on the edge of catastrophe. A decade-long drought had scorched the Fertile Crescent, and Israel's largest source of freshwater, the Sea of Galilee, had dropped to within inches of the "black line" at which irreversible salt infiltration would flood the lake and ruin it forever. Water restrictions were imposed, and many farmers lost a year's crops.
Their counterparts in Syria fared much worse. As the drought intensified and the water table plunged, Syria's farmers chased it, drilling wells 100, 200, then 500 meters (300, 700, then 1,600 feet) down in a literal race to the bottom. Eventually, the wells ran dry and Syria's farmland collapsed in an epic dust storm. More than a million farmers joined massive shantytowns on the outskirts of Aleppo, Homs, Damascus and other cities in a futile attempt to find work and purpose.
Water is driving the entire region to desperate acts.And that, according to the authors of "Climate Change in the Fertile Crescent and Implications of the Recent Syrian Drought," a 2015 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was the tinder that burned Syria to the ground. "The rapidly growing urban peripheries of Syria," they wrote, "marked by illegal settlements, overcrowding, poor infrastructure, unemployment, and crime, were neglected by the Assad government and became the heart of the developing unrest."
Similar stories are playing out across the Middle East, where drought and agricultural collapse have produced a lost generation with no prospects and simmering resentments. Iran, Iraq and Jordan all face water catastrophes. Water is driving the entire region to desperate acts.

More Water Than Needs

Except Israel. Amazingly, Israel has more water than it needs. The turnaround started in 2007, when low-flow toilets and showerheads were installed nationwide and the national water authority built innovative water treatment systems that recapture 86 percent of the water that goes down the drain and use it for irrigation — vastly more than the second-most-efficient country in the world, Spain, which recycles 19 percent.
But even with those measures, Israel still needed about 1.9 billion cubic meters (2.5 billion cubic yards) of freshwater per year and was getting just 1.4 billion cubic meters (1.8 billion cubic yards) from natural sources. That 500-million-cubic-meter (650-million-cubic-yard) shortfall was why the Sea of Galilee was draining like an unplugged tub and why the country was about to lose its farms.
The country faces a previously unfathomable question: What to do with its extra water?Enter desalination. The Ashkelon plant, in 2005, provided 127 million cubic meters (166 million cubic yards) of water. Hadera, in 2009, put out another 140 million cubic meters (183 million cubic yards). And now Sorek, 150 million cubic meters (196 million cubic yards). All told, desal plants can provide some 600 million cubic meters (785 million cubic yards) of water a year, and more are on the way.
The Sea of Galilee is fuller. Israel's farms are thriving. And the country faces a previously unfathomable question: What to do with its extra water?

Water Diplomacy

Inside Sorek, 50,000 membranes enclosed in vertical white cylinders, each 4 feet high and 16 inches wide, are whirring like jet engines. The whole thing feels like a throbbing spaceship about to blast off. The cylinders contain sheets of plastic membranes wrapped around a central pipe, and the membranes are stippled with pores less than a hundredth the diameter of a human hair. Water shoots into the cylinders at a pressure of 70 atmospheres and is pushed through the membranes, while the remaining brine is returned to the sea.
Desalination used to be an expensive energy hog, but the kind of advanced technologies being employed at Sorek have been a game changer. Water produced by desalination costs just a third of what it did in the 1990s. Sorek can produce a thousand liters of drinking water for 58 cents. Israeli households pay about US$30 a month for their water — similar to households in most U.S. cities, and far less than Las Vegas (US$47) or Los Angeles (US$58).
The International Desalination Association claims that 300 million people get water from desalination, and that number is quickly rising. IDE, the Israeli company that built Ashkelon, Hadera and Sorek, recently finished the Carlsbad desalination plant in Southern California, a close cousin of its Israel plants, and it has many more in the works. Worldwide, the equivalent of six additional Sorek plants are coming online every year. The desalination era is here.
What excites Bar-Zeev the most is the opportunity for water diplomacy.What excites Bar-Zeev the most is the opportunity for water diplomacy. Israel supplies the West Bank with water, as required by the 1995 Oslo II Accords, but the Palestinians still receive far less than they need. Water has been entangled with other negotiations in the ill-fated peace process, but now that more is at hand, many observers see the opportunity to depoliticize it. Bar-Zeev has ambitious plans for a Water Knows No Boundaries conference in 2018, which will bring together water scientists from Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza for a meeting of the minds.
Even more ambitious is the US$900 million Red Sea–Dead Sea Canal, a joint venture between Israel and Jordan to build a large desalination plant on the Red Sea, where they share a border, and divide the water among Israelis, Jordanians and the Palestinians. The brine discharge from the plant will be piped 100 miles north through Jordan to replenish the Dead Sea, which has been dropping a meter per year since the two countries began diverting the only river that feeds it in the 1960s. By 2020, these old foes will be drinking from the same tap.
On the far end of the Sorek plant, Bar-Zeev and I get to share a tap as well. Branching off from the main line where the Sorek water enters the Israeli grid is a simple spigot, a paper cup dispenser beside it. I open the tap and drink cup after cup of what was the Mediterranean Sea 40 minutes ago. It tastes cold, clear and miraculous.
The contrasts couldn't be starker. A few miles from here, water disappeared and civilization crumbled. Here, a galvanized civilization created water from nothingness. As Bar-Zeev and I drink deep, and the climate sizzles, I wonder which of these stories will be the exception, and which the rule.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the-desalination-era-is-here/#

"1.2 billion opportunities" #Africa

noreply@blogger.com (The MasterBlog) — Thu, 21 Apr 2016 17:44:00 +0200

But slow growth, ballooning deficits and #debt that has increased 18x in 7 years, will make the path to prosperity fraught with pitfalls.

1.2 billion opportunities

THE ECONOMIST
Apr 21

FOR A LOOK at the African boom at its peak, do as a multitude of foreign investors have done and fly into Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast. Visitors arrive in an air-conditioned hall where a French-style café sells beers, snacks and magazines. There is advertising everywhere, for mobile-phone companies, first-class airline tickets and a new Burger King. The taxi into the city smoothly crosses over a six-lane toll bridge. On the way to the Plateau, the city's commercial core, cranes, new buildings and billboards jostle for space on the skyline. In the lagoon, red earth piles up where yet another new bridge is under construction.

Just five years ago, Ivory Coast seemed like a lost cause. Having been defeated in an election at the end of 2010, the then president, Laurent Gbagbo, refused to leave office. The victorious opposition leader and now president, Alassane Ouattara, mounted a military offensive to force Mr Gbagbo out. French troops seized the airport to evacuate their citizens (the country used to be a French colony). Protesters were gunned down by troops, foreign businesses were looted and human-rights activists gave warning about mass graves being dug.

Ivory Coast still has problems, as shown by a terrorist attack in March that killed 22 people. But its economy is the second-fastest-growing in Africa (after Ethiopia, which is much poorer), expanding by almost 9% per year. Foreign investment is pouring in. As well as the Burger King, Abidjan now has a Carrefour supermarket, a new Heineken brewery, a Paul bakery and plenty of new infrastructure. Sharp-suited, French-educated ministers explain in perfect English what they are doing to "open up", "improve the ease of doing business" and "sustainably grow the middle class". Expensive hotels, such as the reopened $300-a-night Ivoire, are booked up; their bars are full of affluent people striking deals. The country's three port terminals, the biggest of which is being expanded by Bolloré, a French industrial firm, are working at full capacity, importing cars and electronics and exporting cocoa, coffee and cashew nuts.

This is the Africa of business magazines and bank ads: a continent that is rising at a prodigious pace and creating profitable new markets for multinational firms. But Abidjan also has plenty of reminders that it has been here before. For all of the new buildings springing up, its impressive skyline is still dominated by crumbling 1960s and 1970s concrete modernism. The roads may be new, but the orange taxis that ply them are still ancient fume-spewing Toyota Corollas, remnants of an earlier boom. For the two decades after independence from France in 1960, Ivory Coast enjoyed an economic miracle. Then, quite suddenly, the price of cocoa and coffee plunged and the boom faded as quickly as it had begun.

Reasons to worry

The deepest fear of today's investors in Africa is that it may be happening again. In Ivory Coast's neighbour, Ghana, thousands of government workers have been marching in the streets in the past few months to protest against their rising cost of living. Ghana relies on oil and gold, both of which have fallen in price, as well as cocoa. That, plus prodigious government borrowing, has caused a crisis. One US dollar now buys 4 cedi, the local currency; in 2012, it bought not quite two. Growth has halved since 2014, and Ghana is running a budget deficit of 9% of GDP and a current-account deficit of 13%.

According to the World Bank, in the year to April last year the terms of trade deteriorated in 36 out of 48 sub-Saharan African countries as the price of their commodity exports fell relative to the cost of their imports, mostly manufactured goods. Those 36 countries account for 80% of the continent's population and 70% of its GDP. Eight countries, including two giants, Angola and Nigeria, derive more than 90% of their export revenues from oil, which has recently plummeted far below the price needed to draw in new investors. Growth across sub-Saharan Africa dropped to 3.7% in 2015, far below East Asia's 6.4% and nowhere near enough to create enough jobs for the continent with the world's youngest and fastest-growing population. The World Bank expects it to tick up again, but only to 4.8% in 2017.

Countries that happily borrowed from international investors over the past few years have now found themselves shut out of the markets. The stock of outstanding sovereign bonds in the region had risen from less than $1 billion in 2009 to over $18 billion in 2014. If growth continues at a decent clip, that should be manageable. But if it stops, interest rates of 10% or more on dollar-denominated bonds will make refinancing difficult.

The continent's two biggest economies, Nigeria and South Africa, are already in deep distress. The reasons are different, but both have suffered from commodity-price falls as well as from atrocious economic management. The IMF, although loathed in much of Africa, is back, providing a $ 1billion loan to Ghana and preparing another for Zambia. Some fear a return to 2000, when this newspaper described Africa as the "hopeless continent".

Yet despite that, Nairobi's thriving malls and Abidjan's humming ports show that there are plenty of reasons to stay optimistic. The economic conditions have got worse, but this is a very different continent from two decades ago, when troops from eight African countries were fighting in Congo alone. Wars still rage in South Sudan, Somalia, Mali and northern Nigeria, and violence bubbles in places like eastern Congo, the Central African Republic and Burundi. But broadly speaking, most of sub-Saharan Africa is now peaceful. Elections seem increasingly less likely to result in strife, even if they still generally return incumbents, and more and more often for unconstitutional third terms. The governments that come to power are still often corrupt and inefficient, but far less brazenly so than those of cold war despots such as Mobutu Sese Seko of Congo or Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic.

Africa's 1.2 billion people also hold plenty of promise. They are young: south of the Sahara, their median age is below 25 everywhere except in South Africa. They are better educated than ever before: literacy rates among the young now exceed 70% everywhere other than in a band of desert countries across the Sahara. They are richer: in sub-Saharan Africa, the proportion of people living on less than $1.90 a day fell from 56% in 1990 to 35% in 2015, according to the World Bank. And diseases that have ravaged life expectancy and productivity are being defeated—gradually for HIV and AIDS, but spectacularly for malaria. Some of the gains may seem modest, but given that living standards across Africa declined during the 30 years after independence they are sufficiently established to prove lasting.

And for all that oil and metals have come to dominate economies such as Nigeria's and Congo's, the boom broadened beyond natural resources. Mobile telephones have transformed commerce across Africa, and now smartphones and feature phones (which are halfway between dumb and smart) are taking hold. In 2014, the latest year for which figures are available, 27% of Nigerians owned a smartphone. In many African countries 4G mobile-phone infrastructure is the only thing that works well, but it works at least as well as in much richer countries, and a lot can be built on it. What began with mobile-money systems such as Kenya's M-Pesa is now branching into bank accounts, savings accounts, loans and insurance. That in turn is helping people rise out of poverty and invest in their future.

This special report will argue that despite some deep and entrenched problems, African businesses offer hope too. It is clearly risky to make sweeping judgments about an entire continent with 54 countries and 2,000 languages. This report draws on visits to various countries in sub-Saharan Africa, but four in particular: South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya and Ivory Coast, all coastal, urbanised and relatively rich. They certainly do not represent the whole of Africa, but your correspondent picked them because they each illustrate a different aspect of business across Africa as a whole. The businesses covered have not yet transformed the continent, but they show that African firms are capable of extraordinary innovation—if only they can be set free.

See the article on The Economist here:

1.2 billion opportunities

Economist – Apr 14, 09:00

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#Mexico has world's 11th-highest GDP based on PPP. As Europe weakens, it will be in the top 10 @johnfmauldin

noreply@blogger.com (The MasterBlog) — Thu, 14 Apr 2016 11:44:00 +0200

Mexico as a Major Power

By George Friedman

March 14, 2016

This from Mauldin Economics

Mexico has the 11^th-highest GDP in the world based
on purchasing power parity, according to the International Monetary
Fund. As Europe weakens, it will be in the top 10 in the not-too-distant
future. Yet, this country is regarded by many Americans as a Third
World nation, dominated by drug cartels and impoverished people
desperate to get into the United States.

While it is true that organized crime exists in Mexico and
that many Mexicans want to immigrate to the US, a roughly equal number
are leaving the US and returning to Mexico… drawn by economic
opportunities in their home country. The largest auto plant in the
Western Hemisphere is in Mexico, and Bombardier builds major components
for aircraft there. Mexico has many problems, of course, but so does the
U.K. (the 10^th-largest economy) and Italy (12^th).

No one would be surprised by the U.K. or Italy rankings, but many
people would be stunned to find that Mexico is ranked right up with
them. Obviously, Mexico is not as developed as Britain is. Like most
nations transitioning from underdevelopment to greater development,
Mexico suffers from substantial class and regional inequality, and the
emergence of a dominant middle class is still unfolding.

At the same time, Italy also has substantial regional inequality.
Mexico can't aspire to British standards, but Italy is a reasonable
model. Inequality diminishes the significance of being 11th in some
ways, but it doesn't change the basic reality of Mexico’s relative
strength.

Mexico is commonly perceived, far too simplistically, as a Third
World country with a general breakdown of law and a population seeking
to flee north. That perception is also common among many Mexicans, who
seem to have internalized the contempt in which they are held.

Mexicans know that their country’s economy grew 2.5 percent last year
and is forecast to grow between 2 percent and 3 percent in 2016—roughly
equal to the growth projection for the US economy. But, oddly, they
tend to discount the significance of Mexico’s competitive growth numbers
in a sluggish global economy.

Here, therefore, we have an interesting phenomenon. Mexico is, in
fact, one of the leading economies of the world, yet most people don’t
recognize it as such and tend to dismiss its importance.

Read the rest of the article here: Mexico as a Major Power

Mark Zuckerberg chose some pretty interesting books for the first year of Facebook's Book Club

noreply@blogger.com (The MasterBlog) — Wed, 17 Feb 2016 12:04:00 +0100

Zuckerberg's reading list is pretty good! Although the birth of his daughter kept him from hitting his goal of a book every two weeks, he ended the year with 23 selections.

Here is the article from Business Insider: 23 books Mark Zuckerberg thinks everyone should read

A Missed Opportunity of Ultra-Cheap Money - #ZIRP @NYTimes

noreply@blogger.com (The MasterBlog) — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 17:39:00 +0100

From 2009 through September of this year, United States companies issuing such bonds spent a mere 2 percent of the proceeds of those bonds on capital expenditures, or "capex"

Public investment spending as a share of overall economic activity has fallen to lows not seen since the 1940s

A Missed Opportunity of Ultra-Cheap Money

The Portal Bridge over the Hackensack River in New Jersey, built in 1910, is overdue for replacement. Fred R. Conrad for The New York Times

Years of ultralow interest rates engineered by the Federal Reserve may have breathed life back into the economy and buoyed Wall Street. But they have not managed to solve problems like the aging Portal Bridge.

The 105-year-old railway bridge in northern New Jersey has for decades caused delays for commuters in and out of New York. "We have long desired the bridge's replacement," said Stephen Gardner, an executive vice president for Amtrak, whose trains use the bridge. "It's time for it to retire."

A replacement bridge would cost an estimated $1 billion, the sort of sum that financial markets can raise for a private corporation in the blink of an eye. Yet even though the federal government and the state of New Jersey can borrow at rock-bottom rates, the overhaul remains unfunded.

There are many such infrastructure projects needed around the country, providing a stark reminder of the deeper problems in the economy that the Fed's easy-money policies have not been able to fix.

"We are not where we should be when it comes to investment, public or private," said William A. Galston, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Graphic

Why the Fed Raised Interest Rates

Officials said the economy was strong enough to keep growing with a little less help from the central bank. They said rates would rise slowly, but borrowing costs already have started to climb.

OPEN Graphic

Mr. Galston in particular lamented the failure to set up a government-backed infrastructure bank in recent years. "This will go down as one of the great missed opportunities," he said.

Public investment spending as a share of overall economic activity has fallen to lows not seen since the 1940s, according to an analysis by James W. Paulsen of Wells Capital Management.

Political impasses have, of course, restricted the flow of money into government projects aimed at improving aging roads, bridges and mass transit. But even in the private sector, many of the hoped-for benefits of low-cost borrowing have not occurred.

Corporations have tapped the markets for trillions of dollars in recent years, yet they plowed relatively little of the money into new operations. Such investments might have bolstered hiring and made American business more efficient and globally competitive.

In some ways, these are the wasted opportunities of the cheap-money years — and they may well remain squandered now that the cost of borrowing appears to be heading higher, even if the initial increases after the Fed's decision Wednesday to move its benchmark up from close to zero will remain modest.

The Fed's stimulus policies worked in many ways. They prompted banks and investors to lend, lifted stock prices and bolstered the confidence of consumers and chief executives. The economy eventually regained strength, causing unemployment to fall, auto sales to take off and house prices to rise somewhat.

But important indicators suggest that the money did not flow where some economists and analysts say it is needed to improve the long-term potential of the economy.

Corporations may not have made the most of the Fed's largess. In theory, low interest rates should spur companies to borrow money that they then invest in new machines and technology that will make their operations more efficient. These investments can improve profitability and make firms more competitive in global markets.

But business investment as a percentage of gross domestic product has remained below historical levels since the Great Recession. A surprising lack of investment also shows up in the recent borrowing habits of companies that issue junk bonds, a market that ballooned after the Fed cut interest rates.

From 2009 through September of this year, United States companies issuing such bonds spent a mere 2 percent of the proceeds of those bonds on capital expenditures, or "capex," according to an analysis of data provided by Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The capital expenditures figures may not capture all investment, the bank's analysts noted. Even so, the data shows that the lion's share of bond proceeds went to pay off other debt owed by the companies and to finance acquisitions and leveraged buyouts.

"Very little of it has been used for capex," said Michael Contopoulos, head of United States high-yield and leveraged loan strategy at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. "We think that's a big problem."

The lack of corporate investment may hold back the United States' growth rate in the future. Higher capital expenditures might have bolstered productivity, a crucial economic yardstick that measures how much an economy produces with resources like labor and capital. Growth in productivity has slowed in recent years, disturbing economists.

A History of Fed Leaders and Interest Rates

The chairwoman of the Federal Reserve is about to begin the process of raising interest rates, a move that her predecessors have taken in recent decades as they put their own distinctive stamp on the economy.

Paradoxically, it is possible that the low interest rates have held back forces that would have made companies more efficient. In an influential speech in 2014, Lawrence H. Summers, a former Treasury Secretary and now a professor at Harvard, cited the experience of Japan, where interest rates have been low for a long time.

"In a period of zero interest rates or very low interest rates, it is very easy to roll over loans," he said. "And therefore there is very little pressure to restructure inefficient or even zombie enterprises."

The Fed's higher interest rates may now usher in a period of upheaval in corporate America. Recent turmoil in the junk bond market suggests that investors expect bankruptcies, particularly in the energy sector. And the pain today may create the sort of longer-term changes that would make the economy stronger. Conversely, if banks and bond investors cut back too much on lending, the economy could suffer.

But even as interest rates appear to be heading higher, some economists say there is an optimistic, alternative possibility.

Under this theory, productivity was weak in the years after the crisis because high unemployment kept labor costs depressed, giving companies an easy way to maintain margins. "Employers can be pretty sloppy in terms of efficiency," said Jared Bernstein, a former member of President Obama's economic team and now a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "It's not hard to squeeze the heck out of labor costs."

Now, as unemployment has fallen, companies may compete more for workers, potentially pushing up wages. Confronted with higher labor costs, companies will have no choice but to invest to become more efficient, the theory goes. "You want an economy and labor market where firms can't afford to be inefficient," Mr. Bernstein said.

Question marks, however, will most likely continue to hang over the country's roads and railways as interest rates rise.

If the economy continues to grow and fiscal pressures ease, the federal government, state and cities may find more to spend on infrastructure even if they face higher borrowing costs.

But the substantial investment that some Democrats are hoping for seems improbable. Many Republicans assert that the infrastructure needs are overstated and that the private sector, rather than the taxpayer, needs to play a much greater role.

Congress overcame ideological differences this month to pass a roughly $300 billion transportation bill that provides funding for roads and bridges.

The bill happens to contain measures that could make it easier to secure funding for replacing the Portal Bridge, as well as building new tunnels under the Hudson. The existing tunnels, damaged by Hurricane Sandy, were the cause of long delays in July that caused an outcry among commuters.

Any rebuilding will take longer and cost much more than earlier plans. But advocates for public works, while saying the transportation bill falls short of the overall needs, nonetheless see reason to be encouraged.

"I'm optimistic; there's been big strides made," Mr. Gardner, the Amtrak official, said. "Infrastructure is starting to creep back into people's minds as an issue."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/business/dealbook/a-missed-opportunity-of-ultra-cheap-money.html?emc=dlbkpm&emc=edit_dlbkpm_20151217&nl=%3Fnl%3Ddlbk&nlid=10378144&_r=0

#LatinAmerica: after a decade of budgets and politics buoyed by high commodity prices, the raw realities of geopolitics are back with a vengeance.

noreply@blogger.com (The MasterBlog) — Tue, 3 Nov 2015 10:04:00 +0100

An excellent analysis from Stratfor on the future political landscape shape in Latin America.

The New Latin America

By Reggie Thompson

Several years into a Chinese economic slowdown, the Latin American economies that relied on China to buy up their key exports are feeling the pain. With less hard currency coming in, governments across the region are rapidly readjusting their spending plans and preparing to govern in an environment in which they will have fewer resources to secure their key constituents' political loyalties.

The Role of Geography

Ever since commodity prices began dropping several years ago, much has been written about how slow economic growth and potential political instability will plague Latin America in coming years. But what will Latin America as a whole look like in a decade as a result of the Chinese economic downturn? What ideologies will dominate in a continent that over the past decade veered toward leftist populism? And what issues will define its relationship with the United States, the hemisphere's undisputed hegemon?

The region's geopolitics hold the beginning of an answer. The first step is to view Latin America's geographic regions and countries as a series of divided islands rather than a united entity. Unlike Western Europe, where the relative absence of natural obstacles eventually gave rise to interconnected political entities, South America is bisected by the dense Amazon rainforest and divided lengthwise by the nearly insurmountable Andean mountain range. Latin American colonies were divided even before the collapse of the Spanish Empire in the Americas more than two centuries ago. After independence, this disconnected geographic landscape created dozens of economies of wildly varying sizes often more linked by trade with partners outside the region than with each other. With few unbroken expanses of arable land and high transport costs across the forests and mountains, Latin America was simply not in a position to create capital on the scale of the United States or Western Europe. Consequently, even major Latin American states such as Brazil or Mexico remain highly reliant on inflows of cash from abroad to keep their economies afloat and rely on exports to China or the United States for a significant part of their foreign trade.

Unsurprisingly, the goal of forming institutions that can provide lasting political and economic unity has eluded Latin American statesmen. Numerous attempts have been made to unite the fractious region: Simon Bolivar's ill-fated 19th-century bid to unite South America, a similar attempt at uniting the Central American states into a federation and the more recent creation of separate economic blocs in Latin America. Yet the isolation created by geographic barriers has foiled leaders' attempts to unite the region's countries into a real economic or political union on the scale of the European Union or even the North American Free Trade Agreement. In recent history, the closest that Latin American states came to some sort of unity — besides regional trading blocs such as the Common Market of the South and the Pacific Alliance — was the wave of leftist populist governments that swept the continent beginning in the early 2000s. But after a decade of budgets and politics buoyed by high commodity prices, the raw realities of geopolitics are back with a vengeance.

The Shape of Governments to Come

We cannot define the exact nature of the national governments that will emerge during the next decade; short-term actions are less predictable than long-term trends, and attempting to forecast which people or parties will lead countries such as Brazil after its 2018 elections or Venezuela after its presidential election in 2019 is very risky. However, we have a rough idea of the shape these governments will take. With less revenue available to pacify restive populations, the new governments will likely be more economically pragmatic than their predecessors. This is not to say that populism as a means of governance in Latin America will subside; rather, rulers are likely to take more care in how they relate to their voters and the outside world.

Because the region is so dependent on foreign capital for continued economic growth, and because states' export revenues are so depleted (in Bolivia, for example, export revenue is down by nearly a third compared with last year), leaders are more likely to refrain from mass nationalizations or hostility to foreign companies. During the past decade, leftist governments seized numerous private assets in disputes with private firms. Except for extreme cases such as Venezuela — which, because of its default risk, economic problems and past expropriations, is already de facto cut off from most foreign lending and many investments — most states will likely now try to encourage investments rather than scare them off. Consequently, Latin America is likely entering an era in which the grand populist gestures of the past decade will no longer yield the same results as before and can, in fact, be counterproductive for leaders trying to restart their faltering economies.

The weakening of the Latin American left is another factor that will shape the coming decade. In the next 10 years, the governments that came to power during the boom times will reach the end of their tenures. The list of states that will evolve from leftist administrations into some other type of government is lengthy. Venezuela will reach the painful point of reckoning in which its ruling United Socialist Party will split apart. And as the party splits, Venezuela will undergo a painful economic restructuring and a political shift away from extreme populism. In Ecuador, leftist President Rafael Correa may not secure even another four-year term. In Bolivia, low export prices for natural gas will put President Evo Morales' ability to secure another decade in office to the test.

Perhaps the only exception will be Colombia, where a possible peace deal with rebel groups could bring the left into the national fold, which could lead other parties to co-opt more leftist ideas. But even Cuba, long the bastion of Latin America's left and its ideological center, will eventually move into the United States' political orbit, likely in exchange for the lifting of the five-decade trade embargo.

The left's decline will give the United States an exceptionally benign climate for managing its relationships and priorities to the south. To be sure, longstanding concerns — such as trade, drug trafficking and illegal migration — guiding the United States' actions in much of Latin America will remain. But the bumper crop of leftist states that were often minor hindrances to U.S. political moves in the region will become less of a factor in the next decade. Washington's new priorities in the region, such as cushioning Venezuela's economic collapse and bringing Cuba into some sort of improved trade relationship, will occupy the United States' time.

Of the states currently undergoing deep economic downturns, several seem poised to make a resurgence. Mexico is an outlier, given than it is so linked to the United States through trade. But those links will ensure that despite problematic public finances, Mexico will remain a major force in Latin American economic growth. For Peru and Colombia, international trade will drop over the next several years, but their stable public finances will likely ensure some degree of social stability. And even Brazil, in the midst of a massive corruption scandal at Petrobras, will ride out the crisis due to its strong (albeit currently strained) domestic manufacturing base and sheer economic size.

Re-Emerging Differences

The rampant populism of the past 15 years — bolstered by rapidly increasing exports to hungry markets abroad — imposed a false appearance of unity among the Latin American leftist states. Superficially, Nestor Kirchner's Argentina appeared to have much in common with Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, even though both countries' individual geographic and political characteristics ultimately dictated the governments' decisions. With the rise of another leftist bloc unlikely in the next decade, the divided nature of Latin America will again become evident.

And the continent's divided nature means that the shortcomings of international bodies there, such as the Common Market of the South (Mercosur) and the Union of South American Nations (Unasur), will become even more self-evident. For example, Brasilia will use Mercosur to do what is in its own immediate benefit: increase trade links with Latin American states outside its immediate neighborhood, such as Mexico. But truly lucrative deals, such as a Mercosur-European Union trade agreement, will remain just out of reach because they require full approval of all the group's members. Mercosur's other key member, Argentina, opposes any such deals lest they harm its domestic industry. Consequently, Brazil will continue looking for small bilateral deals, but it will continue to be hamstrung by Mercosur. Unasur, on the other hand, which was originally conceived of as a sort of South American United Nations, is highly unlikely to progress beyond a regional body that meets a couple of times a year. It is not that there is no political will in Latin America to push toward greater unity, but unlike the European Union, such bodies cannot be superimposed onto a region whose trade ties and key political relationships are focused toward other continents rather than each other.

The next decade will bring with it some political and economic continuity. The region will maintain its fundamental relationship with the rest of the globe, in which its foreign trade is overwhelmingly skewed toward the export of raw materials and its economies are heavily reliant on foreign capital markets. But deeper internal changes are already in motion, and the states of the region will change accordingly. The parties at the helm of these states will be different, and the way these parties relate with the outside world on a political and economic level will be undeniably different. Over the next 10 years, the shortcomings of extreme reliance on the Chinese economy will spur cost-cutting and domestic economic diversification. The trappings of the Cold War will fade in Latin America as leaders are replaced and political institutions evolve, but the new Latin America will continue to be more defined by its divisions than by any idea of unity.

"<a href="https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/new-latin-america">The New Latin America</a> is republished with permission of Stratfor."

The New Latin America | Stratfor