Reading Matters, Even If It's Only One Book

A lovely photo of a boy reading a hefty tome in a bookstore in Afghanistan grabbed my attention recently on social media, and without thinking I typed my comment: "He is reading the Koran." Someone promptly responded saying that my remark was hateful, and that it did not matter what the book was as long as the boy was reading. I can see why someone could consider the comment mean, but it was not meant to be. The picture of the Aghan boy reminded me of a visit to the Darul Quran Madrasa Azmatia in Kolkata, India, more than 15 years ago.

About 150 boys were attending classes at the madrasa attached to Kolkata's largest mosque. When I saw the students during the break they seemed reticent and looked at me as I imagine they would look at a Martian. But within minutes their natural curiosity and friendliness won over, and some of them were even ready to make silly poses for the camera.  

The imam told me through an interpreter that poor families from all over India sent their boys to the madrasa. Their tuition, board and lodging was paid by the charity. The school was more than 100 years old and the number of students was growing.

"Two reasons," Imam Qari Fazlur said, "one is the population growth and the other: people are bending toward religion. People like to see that their children learn the Koran and the Koranic teachings and the practices followed by the Prophet Mohammed."

But there were other reasons, I learned. India's constitution guarantees children's education in their mother tongue, but speakers of minority languages, such as Urdu and Bengali, often complain that the official language Hindi, spoken by the Hindu majority, is enforced in schools throughout the country. So when possible, speakers of other languages send their children to private schools.  But the vast majority of Muslims in India are poor and instead of sending their children to any school, they are sending them to work. Some families who cannot feed their offspring feel lucky if at least one child is accepted at a madrasa where it will get a clean bed, food, clothes and education free of charge. 

The education at a madrasa consists largely of learning to read and recite the Koran.  By the time they finish school, most boys know the holy book by heart.  There is nothing wrong with that.  The problem is that they learn little else and once out of the madrasa, these young men are not prepared for gainful employment, and the cycle of poverty continues.  

More than 120 million people aged 15 to 24 in the world cannot read or write. Close to a half of them live in only nine countries: India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Egypt and Burkina Faso. Poor education is linked to poverty in these countries, regardless of religion.

So, as my angry commenter remarked, it is important to read, or to be precise: to be able to read. With a literacy rate of 28 percent, Afghanistan is the second most illiterate country in the world after South Sudan. Therefore, the picture of the barefoot Afghan boy in a library, engrossed in a book, is heartening. What is disheartening is learning - as I have at a Library of Congress event - that bookstores are disappearing from the neighboring Pakistan. The only "reading" available to ordinary citizens are tape-recorded sermons by local imams, sold outside the mosques. One can only hope that Afghanistan has many bookstores like the one in the charming photo with a young reader.

On Faith, Brexit and Designer Babies

Last week was awful in terms of the news: conflict, conflict everywhere and not a drop of light at the end of the tunnel.  As if mass shootings, terror attacks and wars were not enough, politicians are clashing on every single issue and the general public picks up the cue. The Brits are still fighting over whether they should stay in the EU or not, the young now claiming their long life ahead was determined by geezers with one leg in the grave. Amid all the mayhem reports, a refreshing headline grabbed my attention the other day: "Baby-making could jump from the bedroom to the lab." Wow!

I've heard of genetic modification and tampering with embryos to create a baby with desired traits. But this is not about harvesting eggs and working on them, it is about creating a baby from any cell in the body; a skin cell for example. In the near future, according to the report, cells will be turned into eggs and sperm in a lab to produce hundreds of embryos. Those will be tested to see what genetic traits they carry, and parents will be able to choose which one they want hatched into a baby. People who otherwise could not have their own children will be able to have them made from non-reproductive cells. From the multitude of embryos they will also be able to pick the ones that do not carry a hereditary disease. And if they have a lot of money to spend they can have the embryo further engineered to produce a baby with the desired eye and hair color, the size of the nose, the height, etc.

These days, children who get stuck with silly names chosen by their parents, like North West or Apple and Pear, can change them when they grow up. Altering one's physical and character traits may be a little harder. Still, in the future, we may have more Caitlyn Jenners. Gone are the days when the family awaited the arrival of a baby with baited breath to see if it is a girl or a boy. There will be no surprises - pleasant or otherwise - any more.

Whoa!  I got carried away.  For a moment I forgot my own video packages on drought and famine in sub-Saharan Africa. More than 40 million people in the region face hunger and even a larger number in India. A family moving from the parched Somaliland into the scorched parts of Ethiopia in search of food and water will be happy if the child is delivered alive, forget the hair color.

Then there is faith. A person who believes that a reward for killing in the name of God secures a place in heaven, with charming maidens serving refreshments  (as allegedly the Orlando shooter believed), is hardly likely to believe in creative baby making. Such a person is killing and ready to be killed to return things to what he imagines they may have been in some other time and place.

I am reading a book about Dracula - the real one, not the Hollywood creation. A fascinating and repulsive character at the same time: overly fond of impaling even for his own era, he also seems to have engaged in cutting off noses, ears, heads, women's breasts and genitals. It was said that Vlad III, nicknamed the Impaler, sometimes had children boiled in hot oil and made parents eat them, and did other stuff too gruesome to mention. But as we know, similar things happened during the war in the Balkans just a couple of decades ago, and are still happening at the hands of Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria.

We live in a world in which technology and innovation are literally skyrocketing, but too many people still face  hunger.  There is poverty in the United States, "the richest country in the world." More than 45 million people worldwide live in "modern" slavery. Globalization was supposed to even out some of the differences and bring people closer together, but appears to have created an even wider abyss between fellow human beings - a chasm not different from the one separating the medieval Wallachian prince and his brother Radu the Handsome, a favorite of Sultan Mehmed II.  The brothers fought each other, one with atrocities, the other with Turkish support.

Those caught in the middle of the tensions are confused and angry.  Sometimes they feel helpless, like the young Brits who say that the elderly imposed an unwanted future on them. Other times they arm themselves with assaults weapons, like some Americans.  Readers' comments to media articles on any topic reek of racism, misogyny and hatred. Culture is no exception. Just check YouTube video clips from operas. If you happen to like a singer or performance someone else dislikes, you better keep your opinion to yourself unless you have high tolerance for insults.

So commentators, professional or amateurish, who hasten to praise the Brexit as a "momentous event" akin to the fall of the Berlin Wall, those who predict that other EU countries will follow suit, and those who hope that the U.S. under Donald Trump will close its borders, are missing the point. Britain was split almost in half on the remain-leave referendum and it seems that some members of the "winning" camp got cold feet the very morning after the victory.  More than a million are now demanding a second referendum. Whichever way the vote might have gone, it would not have reduced the tensions in Britain. Neither will the country fall to pieces because it stepped out of the bloc. "Nigdar ni bilo da ni nekak bilo"...as an old Croatian wisdom goes.

In the 1960s, the slogan "Make Love, Not War" began its tour around the world, and the Hippy era saw the Westerners enthralled with oriental culture and spirituality. The commercialization of yoga and meditation in the West is a lasting reminder of that time. The world "love" has disappeared from the intercultural discourse. Today, we are talking of "tolerance" and we are protesting "against hatred" at best. Some of the most religious of us believe that a faith can be "defended" by war and isolation, and that love has nothing to do with it. I am no proponent of a return to any "glorious" era of the past, but I do hope that a future generation of the "Brave New World," the one that will create babies in the lab, comes up with a new make-love movement, one less steeped in drugs and more in sharing.

International Money Laundering Perpetuates Global Poverty

Britain's HSBC is facing charges of fraud and money laundering from authorities in Belgium, who accuse the Swiss arm of Britain’s biggest bank of having helped wealthy customers evade tax. The Belgian authorities said Monday that “The Swiss bank is suspected of having knowingly eased and promoted fiscal fraud by making offshore companies available to certain privileged clients. ”

Earlier this year U.S. authorities said they had broken a crime ring that laundered tens of millions of dollars from drug cartels through businesses in Los Angeles, California. Authorities suspect that drug cartels were funneling their profits through the companies in an international laundering scheme.  Those might have included ransom payment made to release a U.S. citizen tortured by a drug cartel in Mexico.

Also this year, U.S. officials accused the British bank Standard Chartered of illegally laundering $250 billion in financial transactions with Iran during the past decade, allegedly filtering money through its New York branch in about 60,000 transactions with Iranian financial institutions. 

Illegal money transactions have come to plague the free market system because western laws passed since the 1960s have created a financial structure that facilitates the circulation of illegal money, wrote former businessman Raymond Baker, in his book Capitalism’s Achilles Heel.  

Raymond Baker

"This structure consists of tax havens, off-shore secrecy jurisdictions, disguised corporations where no one knows who owns the business; flee clauses that enable the trustee who is the nominal head of the disguised corporation to shift that disguised corporation to a different secrecy jurisdiction if anyone comes knocking on the door trying to find out who owns it; shell banks, anonymous trust - fake foundations where you can donate money to the foundation and then benefit yourself out of the foundation; false documentation, mispricing and a whole host of loopholes that facilitate the movement of money out of the dirty money structure into western coffers, ” Baker told an audience in Washington D.C.

Kannan Srinivasan, a researcher at Melbourne's Monash Asia Institute, said the easiest way to conceal unlawful funds is to move them across international borders. The absence of coordinated international legal and law enforcement efforts makes this possible.

“When money comes out of any country, one does not go very deeply into the origin of that money. Therefore, it takes on this new character of being a variety of international money and can sometimes come back into the very country from which it has exited because it is presumed to be a sort of international investment.” 

Srinivasan said many banks, including those in the United States and Switzerland, accept large deposits of money from overseas, typically without checking their origin. "For example," he said, "a person making money by running a prostitution ring in the United States could not by law deposit that money in an American bank. But if dirty money is earned outside the United States, it can be deposited in U.S. banks."

Drug dealers, racketeers, terrorists and other criminals have to conceal the sources of the money they earn through their illegal activities. So they usually have other legitimate businesses, such as shops, garages and restaurants, through which they channel their illicit incomes.  But money laundering takes various forms and is not confined to criminal and terrorist circles.

“Dirty money comes in three forms: corrupt, criminal and commercial," said Baker.  "The corrupt component is the proceeds of bribery and theft by foreign government officials. The criminal component is the drug and the racketeering and the terrorist money that sloshes around the globe in the billions of dollars. The commercial component has the characteristic of being almost always tax evading,” he said.

But many people are not aware of the devastating effect illegal money transactions have had on them and the rest of the world.

Baker estimated that some $ 11 trillion of dirty money were hidden away in tax havens around the world.  In addition, about $1 trillion in illicit funds crossed international borders every year, half of it originating in poor countries who receive aid. According to Baker, this makes eradicating global poverty a near impossible task.

“Consider the impact of this money. First, it eviscerates foreign aid.  Foreign aid has been running at about $50 billion a year, and higher in recent years. Match that against the $500 billion of dirty money that comes illicitly out of developing and transitional economies.”

Corrupt leaders in developing countries often use huge portions of aid money to enrich themselves and bribe those who help them in the endeavor.  Terrorism also is financed by dirty money and as we can see in the case of ISIS, there is no shortage of it.

Baker said that al-Qaeda had accumulated an estimated $300 million through the dirty money structure in the decade prior to September 11 attacks. "It’s the way that Saddam Hussein re-armed after the Persian Gulf War, buying munitions that were later killing Americans in Iraq. It’s the way that Abdul Quadeer Khan in Pakistan operated his nuclear network, buying and selling nuclear materials around the world," he said. 

Branko Milanovic, a senior scholar at the City University of New York, said international monetary laws should be tougher and more coordinated.

Branko Milanovic

“When you have people who are mutually benefiting from a relationship that is somewhere in a gray area, and which may be illegal in one country and quasi-legal or legal in another country, it is very difficult to actually go after them,” said Milanovic. "And having laws in place is not enough," he warned, "because even those already on the books are not properly enforced." 

Milanovic said the main reason is that most of the victims of money laundering are poor and powerless people in developing countries.

“It’s almost impossible for poor people to organize themselves and to fight back. They have no political power, they have no economic power and they have no access to the media.”

Perhaps more importantly, noted Milanovic,"the poor in developing countries often are unaware they have been harmed by money laundering."  
  
Huge amounts of international aid attract the vultures who siphon off large portions of it and often send it back to where it came from, using illegal channels.  Meanwhile, millions of destitute people die every year from preventable poverty-related causes.  

The corruption of international capitalism has prevented the spread of global prosperity, with those most hurt by it unable to prevent it.  Experts agree that new laws will hardly change a thing.  But governments can and should do more to educate the public and establish mechanisms to enforce the existing laws.  No amount of aid will erase poverty until the illegal flow of money out of poor countries is stopped.

*****
And on a lighter note:

http://www.tickld.com/x/capitalism-explained-this-is-so-accurate-it-hurts

Natural Disasters and Poverty

More than 450 people were killed in Pakistan and India in recent floods and landslides caused by monsoon rains. Anger is rising against governments in both countries for failing to prepare for the disasters. When natural calamities such as droughts, floods or earthquakes strike, the poor populations usually suffer the most.  Sometimes it is because they live closest to the unsafe areas, but tolls are often higher than they need to be because no measures are in place to keep people safe. 

Villager in India Rescued by Soldiers

According to the World Bank, during the 1990’s about 80-thousand people died each year in natural calamities. On average, 51 people died per natural disaster in developed countries, compared to 589 deaths per natural disaster in the developing world.

“It’s certainly true that it’s not only the poor countries that are most hardly hit by natural disasters, but it’s the poor people within the countries that bear the brunt of the impact,” said Mark Pelling, professor of geography at King’s College of the University of London and author of the book The Vulnerability of Cities: Natural Disasters and Social Resilience. He said the poor are especially vulnerable to natural hazards because of their inadequate housing, fragile health and lack of back-up resources in case of emergencies.  Pelling said this was evident, for example, during the heavy rains in Venezuela in 1999.

“There was a huge land slide along the coast, and Caracas was badly hit by this following rain fall. And those people who lost their lives and lost their home were the informal dwellers in the city who were living on the hill slopes," said Pelling. "There were also some middle and high-income groups living on hill slopes, but their properties were properly designed to a higher standard at least and that meant there was less of an impact.”
 
Developed countries also are better prepared for natural disasters than poor countries. The attractive West Coast of the United States is prone to earthquakes, tsunamis, forest fires and even volcano eruptions. But that does not keep wealthy people from living there.
“Earthquakes are monitored generally by federal agencies like the US Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and that information is centralized and processed and provided to agencies like mine,” said Jim Goltz, a planner at the earthquake and tsunami program of the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services in Pasadena.  His office helps smaller local governments prepare people for disasters.

California has well established warning systems, and Goltz said they are not all that costly. But natural disasters are not always predictable, and it is important to know how to respond when they happen.

“More important than warning systems is having a population that’s aware of the risk of tsunamis, understands that when you feel an earthquake in a coastal area, it could be followed by a tsunami and that people should turn on radios and television and be aware of warnings that might be issued in connection with this,” said Goltz.
 
In addition, California has strict building laws.  "Overall," said Goltz, "it is cheaper to prepare for disasters than recover from them and wealthy countries could help the poor develop such programs."

But analysts note that international aid agencies are often more willing to send large aid after disasters strike than much smaller aid to help prevent huge losses.  Pelling said there are many reasons for that, some very prosaic.

“It makes very good press and very high visibility for governments to invest or spend money in humanitarian relief. It’s much less visible and you get much less political kudos for spending money over the long term in a very low-visibility way; in perhaps strengthening livelihoods, or improving governance, or improving the physical structures in planning of a city.” 

The problem with humanitarian aid is that it helps in emergencies. It removes people from the immediate hazard, saves lives and provides food and shelters. But it does not improve the quality of life in the long run and can make populations even more vulnerable once the emergency is over.

“There’s certainly no lack of practical knowledge on the ground," said Pelling. "There is thirty years of academic argument that suggests that poverty alleviation and disaster-risk reduction will pay out in the end, and it’s political will that’s lacking at the moment.”

Ian Vasquez, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity in Washington, said economic growth is the best protection from natural disasters.

“It’s only through the sustained economic growth that poor people can be pulled out of the precarious living conditions that they experience and that can mean a matter of life and death even over the short term of ten years.”

But as poverty worsens the impact of natural disasters or disease outbreaks so do these disasters worsen poverty. Countries that have been hit by the Ebola virus this year, for example, will suffer economic losses because of the extra health care costs as well as a loss of work power.  Drought and flood in poor countries may result in famine.

Experts say that disaster risk management should be a key component of poverty reduction efforts. Development goals must include dealing with natural disasters, which are among major causes of poverty.