They put Ron Paul in charge of the subcommittee overseeing the Federal Reserve. Really? The man who wrote End the Fed?
Paul, in an interview last week, said he plans a slate of hearings on U.S. monetary policy and will restart his push for a full audit of the Fed’s functions. (via Bloomberg)
Ah, let the overreaching begin.
Not that anyone is paying attention, but Ghana’s next door neighbor Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast to my less cultured peeps) had an election last Sunday. Which was blatantly stolen by the current president on Friday, when it became clear that he was going to lose (again). History is repeating itself, but nobody seems to notice or care.
The seeds of the civil war in Cote d’Ivoire were planted by Henri Bedie, who took power in 1993 largely by fiat (he declared himself president when the only president the country had known since independence, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, died). There was a brief power struggle between Bedie and Alassane Ouattara, then the prime minister. Why is that name interesting? Because he was the opposition candidate in last week’s election. Bedie was obviously concerned about running against Ouattara, and in 1995 managed to exclude Ouattara from candidacy for the presidency by changing electoral rules, effectively changing the citizenship rules of Cote d’Ivoire by arguing that Ouattara’s parents were from Burkina Faso, and therefore Ouattara could not be an Ivorian citizen. Of course, the fact that Ouattara had served as prime minister before was pushed to one side in this decision . . . In any case, this more or less effective change in citizenship rules (both parents have to be from Cote d’Ivoire for a person to be a citizen) became law in a hasty referendum right before the 2000 election, once again blocking Ouattara and basically disenfranchising many living in the northern part of the country, where movement across borders to Burkina, Mali, Northern Ghana and Guinea is quite common. Combine this with the fact that the north of the country is heavily Muslim, with a dominantly Christian and Animist south (a common situation across West Africa), and you have a perfect storm – religion, ethnicity and citizenship all aligning, with one group getting nothing and one group gaining everything. Bedie was deposed in a coup in 1999, at least in part over ethnic tensions that played out into the military, but this did not seem to teach anyone anything. In 2000, Laurent Gbagbo won election as president by continuing this exclusionary process. Two years later, civil war broke out.
So, after three years of power-sharing under a unity government, and an election meant to reunify the country, what did Gbagbo’s people do this time? Oh, the Constitutional Council (run by Gbagbo’s friends) just annulled ALL OF THE RESULTS from the seven regions in the north of the country, which was obviously going to vote heavily for Ouattara. Gbagbo’s friends didn’t challenge a few ballots, or a few polling places, or demand a recount of the votes. Nope. They just voided the ENTIRE NORTH OF THE COUNTRY due to “irregularities” (read: voting for Ouattara). You know what’s really funny, though? Even after voiding Ouattara’s strongest supporters, Gbagbo’s people could only claim that their man won with 51% of the vote! Holy crap, he is barely loved in his own electoral stronghold!
Humorous and pathetic though this result might be, this probably just cost Cote d’Ivoire three years of slow progress toward reconciliation, and could be the trigger for more conflict. Looks like the French military is going to have to get back to work in there . . . ugh.
But there is an important lesson here – this is a conflict that has an ethnic component, but it is not an ancient ethnic conflict that is unresolvable. Ethnicity was, by and large, a nonissue in Cote d’Ivoire from independence to 1993. The same might be said of religion. It was not until political leaders decided that these differences were useful political tools that they were mobilized into drivers of conflict. There are clear villains in this story, and clear pathways to reconciliation and resolution – this conflict is only 17 years old, and it comes after three decades of coexistence without major issues. This is not a quagmire – it is a place where these issues can be resolved, and where guilty parties can be identified and brought to justice. There is plenty of hope for Cote d’Ivoire – just look at how the country could come together around its Soccer National Team (Les Éléphants – how I love that nickname), and how much power players like Didier Drogba have in the country. That team was a major factor in the formation of a unity government in 2007, and even today people will listen to Drogba, a man who wants the conflict to end. Someone please get him the tools he needs to make it end before it all turns bad again . . .
Sorry folks, I am swamped. I am going through the page proofs of the book, finishing an article with some students of mine just before its deadline, worrying about how I have done absolutely nothing to prepare for my upcoming talk at UNC-Chapel Hill and trying to prepare a briefing on the climate change initiative in my bureau for my new Assistant Administrator. Oh, and I do have a day job with its attendant duties. And a family that likes to see me sometimes. All of that needs to come together in a pretty quick stretch, with deadlines cascading out starting Thursday morning and ending on Monday the 15th. I’m sure I will post in there, but lord knows how . . .
Remember that little rant I went on about funding the humanities a few posts back? Well, the NY Times is really following this one up with a whole series of people discussing the issue. And they are all more thoughtful than I am . . . worth the read.
The BBC professes to be shocked (yes, shocked!) by the find of archaeological evidence suggesting Chinese contact in East Africa in the early 1400s. In a previous life I was an archaeologist (still sort of am, actually), and I worked in Africa . . . and it has long been well-known that there was Chinese contact, and certainly extensive global trade, that brought Chinese goods to Africa well before European exploration and colonization began.
Given that, one wonders what the Chinese are doing here, and why people profess to be so interested and excited about it. This strikes me as a pretty routine dig that is fleshing out some details of what we already knew, not a really big deal. However, archaeology is rife with examples of using the past to justify issues in the present, the best example being the case of Great Zimbabwe and the Rhodesian (Rhodesia is modern Zimbabwe) government – the Rhodesians more or less refused to acknowledge that a native African population could have constructed the buildings at these sites, as this construction severely stressed the idea of black inferiority. Here, it seems to me that there is an interesting effort to emphasize a shared Chinese-African past just as the Chinese are extending their interests into Africa.
The past is rarely innocent. Same goes for archaeology.
Mickie Glantz has an interesting post up on his FragileEcologies Blog in which he muses about whether or not politicians can be bought. I gained some insight into this question during my orientation for my current fellowship, as we were addressed by a number of former officeholders. One of them argued that politicians aren’t generally bought by campaign donations or bribes, though this sort of thing happens. Instead, the process is much more mundane. Donations buy access to the politician. The politician then sees you around, says hi to you, starts to recognize your face, and after enough of these sorts of events, might even feel like s/he knows you. At which point you have the ability to talk to them about your pet issue, and argue for it . . . and if the politician doesn’t have a strong stand one way or the other, s/he just might think that you are a good person, and you care a lot about the issue, so why not go with your point of view? This, so the argument went, is how donations really come to affect lawmaking, votes, etc.
Now, finding an issue that the politician has no feelings about is hard – people follow voting records, etc.. And politicians generally have their survival in mind when they vote. So there are limits to this means of influencing politicians. But if this is how it is done, it is much more subtle and complex than the simple story of bribery, etc. that we seem to fall into when we discuss such things. Thus, how policy is made is also much more complex than a simple story of big money shaping votes directly. In the end, the story does run out in the same manner, because the people who can afford to attend a bunch of fundraisers in which they can shake their congressman’s/senator’s hand are by and large wealthy, and so that wealth is buying access and possibly influence. At the same time, it suggests that working on campaigns for elected officials might provide similar access without the need for so much money – so perhaps activists might consider that route?
I am, at least part of the time, an associate professor of Geography at the University of South Carolina. I am in DC right now because the university has been kind enough to grant me a few years of leave to take up this fellowship (and who are we kidding, I’m saving them my salary and benefits in a time of budget crisis – everyone’s a winner!). So the subject of education and its purpose still lurks in the back of my mind, even when I am away from campus.
I was struck by an opinion piece in the NY Times today about literary criticism – the piece itself is fine, if a bit esoteric unless you’ve spent a long time working in some of the areas of theory the author references. I was, however, struck by one passage:
“research model” pressures described are beginning to have another poorly thought out influence. It is quite natural (to some, anyway) to assume that eventually not just the model of the sciences, but the sciences themselves will provide the actual theory of meaning that researchers in such fields will need. One already sees the “application” of “results” from the neurosciences and evolutionary biology to questions about why characters in novels act as they do or what might be responsible for the moods characteristic of certain poets. People seem to be unusually interested in what area of the brain is active when Rilke is read to a subject. The great problem here is not so much a new sort of culture clash (or the victory of one of C.P. Snow’s “two cultures”) but that such applications are spectacular examples of bad literary criticism, not good examples of some revolutionary approach.
This jarred me into thinking about the relationship between the sciences and the humanities – I have a sort of unique background, having held an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship while in grad school – I have straddled these worlds. This makes me sensitive to their relative positioning in the academy. On most large research-oriented campuses, the sciences dominate – in large part because the sciences are avenues to large grants which the university can collect huge (40-50%+ depending on the school) overhead charges that contribute to the bottom line. Even internal funding opportunities at these universities tend to be science oriented, as the hope is that the small internal grant will spur research that eventually brings in huge research (and overhead) dollars in a sort of academic multiplier effect. In an era of rapidly shrinking budgets (South Carolina has been completely decimated by cuts over the past four to five years, despite the astonishingly disingenuous claims about our funding by Governor Appalachian Trail)*, these research dollars are crucial to the survival of all kinds of campus programs and jobs. But at the same time, this creates a hierarchy that is rarely openly voiced, but always felt, on these campuses – research dollars are what matters, and everyone else needs to facilitate those who bring them in or get out of the way.
This worries me greatly – an inadvertent side effect of all the budget cutting these days is the collapse of the liberal arts education on our campuses. This has implications for how students write, think, etc. In short, it damages our ability to produce the sorts of citizens that a functioning democracy requires for its survival. I’ve often said that I would rather talk to an intelligent person who disagrees with me than someone who agrees with me without understanding why – this idea, it seems to me, is the central premise of how our society should function. But without training in the arts, in literature, in history, in other languages, we lose tools central to our critical faculties . . . the ability to tell right from wrong, to understand when we are being lied to, to imagine new ways to express ourselves and be heard, to be inspired by those who have gone before us. In short, as we focus in some sort of myopic all-out charge toward science and math, we are not building a stronger America. We’re creating a country full of little worker bees with no ability to think beyond their tiny little jobs. Nothing could weaken this country more.
And as for the idea that the humanities should look to the sciences for models and theories . . . read Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman to see what the humanities can do for theoretical physics. My father gave me that book years ago, and it is still one of the greatest things I’ve ever read.
Fund the humanities, dammit.
*Note: in the linked article, the reporter has his numbers wrong several times, which is distressing. USC now takes closer to 10% of its operating budget from the state – the state is now the FIFTH most important source of funding on our campus, after THE BOOKSTORE.
Remember the Flash Crash – the May 6 “unexplained” stock market dive? Well, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission now say they have found the cause, and nobody did anything wrong to cause it. According to the NY Times, these commissions
“found no evidence of market manipulation. Instead, the temporary crash resulted from a confluence of forces after a single fund company tried to hedge its stock market investment position legitimately, albeit in an aggressive and abrupt manner” via NYTimes
This . . . is . . . insane. I mean, read the rest of the report, and this conclusion seems like an almost willful departure from reality. According to authorities, here is what happened:
In plain English, they decided to dump at all costs, without regard for losses or market impact. The firm claims it was dumping the contracts because it was concerned about the European financial crisis spreading to the US – they found themselves long on a lot of trades in the contracts in question, and decided to get out while they could in the face of what they expected would be a reversal in the contract values. OK, so maybe they got a bit jumpy . . . but the logic here comes apart when you look at the sale mechanism – they basically started dumping these contracts onto the market, creating an oversupply which would drive the contract price down . . . and they would keep pumping contracts into the market even as they exacerbated this problem. In other words, they tried to offload these contracts to avoid losses when their value dropped, but the way in which they offloaded the contracts ensured their value would drop. This is where the whole thing turns really nuts – they set up their sale algorithm to sell everything in 20 minutes. They dumped $4.1 BILLION DOLLARS OF CONTRACT ONTO THE MARKET IN 20 MINUTES! What the hell did they think would happen? Hell, the only rationalization I can come up with here is that they hoped to dump it all so fast that they would actually beat the market collapse they were likely to trigger.
You cannot tell me that the folks running this fund did not understand what this sale, executed in this manner, could do to markets. The justification of the sale structure is itself illogical on its face. And the fact that these guys still have jobs, and have not been beaten to death (metaphorically speaking) by other funds for what they did (like many of those who shorted the 2008 financial crisis) makes me really wonder what the hell went on here.
But the SEC and the CFTC have turned into Officer Barbrady from South Park: “Move along, nothing to see here”
Which reminds me of a classic South Park exchange (South Park, season 2, episode 2):
Mayor: Officer Barbrady, let’s pretend for one second that we had a competent law enforcer in this town. What would he do?
Officer Barbrady: Hmmm. That’s a good question, Mayor. Let me get right on that, with thinking.
Hello, my small but dedicated fanbase . . . I’ve recently had a few readers request permission to pass along either the blog or a particular post to other folks. My answer:
I admit to writing this mostly for myself, but a nice side effect seems to be that some people find it interesting. In any case, I think a few folks are worried that I will get in trouble for the blog back at my current place of employment – don’t worry, I won’t. You’ll note that I never blog about work – blogging about work would cross into writing about my job, which immediately causes legal problems with regard to publication – basically, I’d probably have to get each blog post cleared by the legal team at work, and they have much better things to be doing with their time. So, I am only writing about things that I am not addressing directly at work (I suppose that means you could try to figure out what I was not blogging about, and by subtraction work out what sorts of things I am dealing with at work, but I don’t post often enough to make that viable), and mostly things that are addressed in my soon-to-be-released book. It’s all fair game, folks, so share away!
Thanks to everyone who is already reading and commenting, here and on Facebook – it makes me miss lecturing just a little bit less . . .
Hello all:
Just FYI, I have installed a new spamfilter for the comments on this site. I have to authorize all comments from new users, and I probably have to wipe out about 12-15 spam comments each day. To keep this work to a minimum, I have installed a new filter that may ask you to verify a code to submit your comment – basically, this heads off the spambots. I apologize for making comment submission a little bit harder (hopefully only a few extra seconds), but this will make life on the blog a bit easier for me.