Archive for March, 2006

The White Man’s Burden

Tuesday, March 28th, 2006

William Easterly, author of The White Man’s Burden: Why The West’s Efforts To Aid The Rest Have Done So Much Ill And So Little Good,
has added his voice to the growing demand for independent evaluation of
foreign aid. … Easterly said … that development
assistance lacks CIAO: Customer feedback, Incentives, Accountability,
and, therefore, good Outcomes. The solution, he said, is independent
evaluation.

“We need independent evaluation of foreign aid. It’s amazing
that we’ve gone a half century without this,” he said. Truly
independent evaluation of aid would “give feedback to see which
interventions are working and give incentives to aid staff to find
things that work,” he said. As a result, aid agencies would “start
specializing much more in individual, monitorable tasks for which they
can be held accountable.”

… Easterly contrasted two approaches. First, an ineffective
planners’ approach that he said lacks the knowledge and motivation to
achieve overambitious, arbitrary targets. Second, what he regards as a
more constructive searchers’ approach: individuals always on the
lookout for piecemeal improvements to poor peoples’ well-being, with a
system to get more aid resources to those who find things that work.

Posted in International Development | Comments Closed

Global Fund Gets Facelift

Thursday, March 23rd, 2006

Please see the new globalfund.org, where some of us work. The opinions we express on the blog you’re reading are not necessarily those of the Global Fund.

Besides a completely new design, the
site of the Global Work-Ethic Fund has new content, and some new names: we are
down-playing Work-Ethic. We had
our reasons for this name, and it got some folks’ attention, but … it doesn’t
translate well. So we now highlight:

Posted in International Development | Comments Closed

Americans view Mexicans well; reverse not true

Tuesday, March 21st, 2006

By Stephen Dinan, THE WASHINGTON TIMES, March 21, 2006

    Mexicans
see Americans as racist, dishonest and exploitative, while Americans
see Mexicans as hardworking and think they are more tolerant than
Americans.

    A new survey of attitudes the two countries hold toward each
other showed the border is more than a geographic divide, but also a
fissure in public opinions of the two nations and what their citizens
think of each other.

    The poll, taken by New York-based Zogby International and the
Centro de Investigacion para el Desarrollo AC in Mexico City, found
that 62 percent of Mexicans surveyed said the United States is more
wealthy than Mexico because “it exploits others’ wealth.” Only 22
percent said it was because the United States is “a free country where
people have plenty of opportunity to work.”

    Among Americans, 78 percent saw Mexicans as hardworking, and
44 percent saw them as tolerant. Among Mexicans, just 26 percent saw
Americans as hardworking, 16 percent saw them as honest and 73 percent
said Americans are racist….

Posted in Immigration | Comments Closed

Bush: Corporations Shun Faith-Based Groups

Wednesday, March 15th, 2006

From Pres. Bush’s address to the Second White House National Conference on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, March 9, 2006

… a recent survey of our Office of
Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, … of 20 large
corporate foundations, found that only about 6 percent of their grants went
to faith-based groups. …

I would urge our corporate foundations to reach beyond the
norm, to look for those social entrepreneurs who haven’t been
recognized heretofore, to continue to find people that are running programs
that are making a significant difference in people’s lives.

When we studied 50 large foundations, we found that one in five prohibited
faith organizations from receiving funding for social service programs. In
other words, there’s a prohibition against funding faith programs from
certain foundations in the country. I would hope they would revisit their
charters. I would hope they’d take a look at achieving social objectives
— make the priority the achievement of certain social objectives before
they would make the decision to exclude some who are achieving incredible
progress on behalf of our country….

Posted in Multinational Corporate Responsibility | 1 Comment »

The Fruits of NAFTA

Tuesday, March 14th, 2006

by Patrick J. Buchanan, March 10, 2006

…U.S.-Mexico
trade calls to mind the trade relationship between Betsy Ross’ America
and the England of the Industrial Revolution, with Mexico in the role
of England. Our exports to Mexico read like a ship’s manifest from
Bangladesh.

The
American people were had. NAFTA was never a trade deal. NAFTA was
always an enabling act – to enable U.S. corporations to dump their
American workers and move their factories to Mexico…

When one considers who finances the Republican Party, funds its candidates,
and hires its former congressmen, senators and Cabinet officers at six-
and seven-figure retainers to lobby, it is understandable that the GOP
went into the tank. But
why did the liberals, who paid the price of mandating all those
benefits for American workers and imposing all those regulations on
U.S. corporations, go along? That’s the mystery. About NAFTA there is
no mystery. There never really was.

Posted in Globalization | Comments Closed

The Fruits of NAFTA

Tuesday, March 14th, 2006

by Patrick J. Buchanan, March 10, 2006

… U.S.-Mexico
trade calls to mind the trade relationship between Betsy Ross’ America
and the England of the Industrial Revolution, with Mexico in the role
of England. Our exports to Mexico read like a ship’s manifest from
Bangladesh.

The
American people were had. NAFTA was never a trade deal. NAFTA was
always an enabling act – to enable U.S. corporations to dump their
American workers and move their factories to Mexico…

When
one considers who finances the Republican Party, funds its candidates,
and hires its former congressmen, senators and Cabinet officers at six-
and seven-figure retainers to lobby, it is understandable that the GOP
went into the tank. But
why did the liberals, who paid the price of mandating all those
benefits for American workers and imposing all those regulations on
U.S. corporations, go along? That’s the mystery. About NAFTA there is
no mystery. There never really was.

Posted in Globalization | Comments Closed

Data on Job Growth

Sunday, March 12th, 2006

By Paul Craig Roberts

On February 20 Forbes.com

told its readers with a straight face that “the
American job-generation machine rolls on. The economy
will create 19 million new payroll jobs in the decade to
2014.” Forbes took its information from the 10-year
jobs projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, US
Department of Labor, released last December.

If the job growth of the past
half-decade is a guide, the forecast of 19 million new
jobs is optimistic, to say the least. According to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics payroll jobs data, from
January 2001-January 2006 the US economy created
1,054,000 net new private sector jobs and 1,039,000 net
new government jobs for a total five-year figure of
2,093,000. How does the US Department of Labor get from
2 million jobs in five years to 19 million in ten years? …

Oracle,  … which has been
handing out thousands of pink slips, has recently
announced two thousand more jobs being moved to India.
How is Oracle’s move of US jobs to India creating jobs
in the US for waitresses and bartenders, hospital
orderlies, state and local government and credit
agencies, the only areas of job growth? …

Posted in Globalization | Comments Closed

Facing the Facts of Europe’s Suicide

Saturday, March 4th, 2006

PRI Weekly Briefing, 3 March 2006, By Joseph A. D’Agostino

Will the Muslims inherit Western Europe?  “If [Western people] don’t do something, probably,” replies Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, Senior Fellow in Economics at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty.
“That’s a very probable outcome.  The West doesn’t believe in itself.”

After decades of overpopulation hysteria, the realization has firmly dawned on almost everyone paying attention that global birthrates have fallen fast and far, and that Western European nations’ are suicidally lower than replacement level—though their increasingly radical Muslim immigrants’ fertility is high.  It hasn’t dawned on quite everyone, or perhaps British diplomats don’t pay attention to such matters, since the UK’s ambassador to the Holy See dismissed demographic concerns at a recent conference on the family and Centesimus Annus sponsored in Rome by the Acton Institute.  Possibly heralding a new emphasis on the issue, Alfonso Cardinal Lopez Trujillo, President of the Pontifical Council on the Family and keynote speaker at the conference, admonished Amb. Francis Campbell about collapsed European birthrates when the latter said that birthrates are cyclical, and that therefore there is nothing to worry about.

Cardinal Trujillo has spoken about Europe’s fertility decline before, but it is rare for a Vatican cardinal to intervene so firmly at a public event like Acton’s “The Family in the New Economy: Reflections on the Margins on Centesimus Annus,” held January 21 at the North American College.
Trujillo is thought to be especially close to Pope Benedict XVI, who intends to make the meta-problem of modern Europe’s rootlessness and self-destruction a central theme of his papacy…

Posted in Culture | 1 Comment »

Iranian Solidarity?

Thursday, March 2nd, 2006

By ROYA HAKAKIAN, March 2, 2006; Page A14, Wall Street Journal
The bomb that Tehran’s mullahs are allegedly building
has already done its damage. … “The bomb” is an ingenious
design by which to divert any global interest in the country’s domestic
matters, giving the ruling clerics free rein to devastate opposition
with all the brutality they can muster. Among the ruins is an event
unprecedented in 27 years: A major strike by the workers of Sherkat-e
Vahed, the Union of Workers of the United Bus Company of Tehran….

The executive committee’s first meeting came under
fire. Baton-wielding thugs shouting “The bus syndicate, the monarchs’
hideout!” charged in, set their office on fire, beat everyone in
attendance, and promised to cut off the tongue of Mr. Ossanloo if he
continued his activities. As a sign of their seriousness, they ran a
blade over his tongue, shaving a layer off. He has spoken with a lisp
ever since.

In every flier and in every interview, the workers
emphasized that they were apolitical and did not wish to topple the
government, asking only to have some very basic demands met. … “In the name of He who created justice,” write the
organizers, “we hope for the people of the world to hear our plea:
Death or Syndicate!” …

Posted in International Development | Comments Closed