From RIA Novosti:

The EU austerity plan for Greece will not rescue the country from default, Paul Krugman, Princeton University professor and winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics, said in his blog in The New York Times on Tuesday.

Eurozone officials agreed early on Tuesday a second 130 billion euro ($172 billion) bailout aid package for Greece and called for private investors to waive 53.5 percent of their principal in a bond swap to cut Greece’s debt by 107 billion euros.

As a mandatory condition to provide the bailout, the eurozone officials forced Greece into fresh austerity measures to cut the debt to 120.5 percent of GDP by 2020 from some 160 percent last year.

“The problem with all previous rounds has been that austerity policies depress the economy to such an extent that it wipes out most of the topline fiscal gains: revenue falls, so does GDP, so the projected debt/GDP ratio gets, if anything, worse,” Krugman wrote in his blog.

“Now we have another round of austerity — which is assumed not to do too much damage to growth. The triumph of hope over experience.”

The European leaders are not prepared to take the plunge into either sustained aid to Greece instead of loans or a Greek departure from the euro, leading eventually to higher competitiveness and faster growth.

“Both options would be politically catastrophic, which means that they can’t be taken until there is literally no alternative.”

ATHENS, February 21 (RIA Novosti)

rian.ru

Caribbean Blog International

By David Mullings:

MY column last week focused on Jamaica not being an island in the economic, political or cultural sense. I said that the country was not insular and had a major impact on the world; it was a brand, a destination and more.

Jamaica is a global brand that has influenced many things, notably music. This month is supposed to be Reggae Month in Jamaica, but it often seems to me that Jamaica has somehow lost its place as the home of reggae music.

The Grammy Awards nominate reggae albums that are not big sellers in Jamaica, local radio is far more preoccupied with dancehall, the biggest reggae festivals are in Europe, foreign reggae acts are capitalising even better on our sounds, and an entire generation of Jamaicans is possibly missing out on our reggae heritage because of all this.

Jamaica is synonymous with Marley (and now Bolt) and reggae music, yet we have barely scratched the surface of what that could be leveraged for. Our tourism has yet to really tap into reggae lovers worldwide and present them with numerous attractions to feed their desires to see where the music comes from and where the biggest stars were born or lived.

On the local side, the Bob Marley Museum in Kingston gets far more visitors from overseas than locals, despite the local rate offered. How many schools visit the Bob Marley Museum each year to expose our children to our heritage and the sound that our country gave to the world?

Most countries show off their local music or instruments and fiercely defend their heritage. We, however, have merely reduced our support for reggae music and the musicians that produce something that help put Jamaica on the world map.

It is my sincere hope that reggae music regains its rightful place in Jamaica as the leading musical export, because at this rate some other country will become the home of modern-day reggae. An entire generation now has very little appreciation for reggae music, where it came from and the impact it has had on the world.

We must ensure that we teach Jamaicans what they are supposed to be proud of and what we have contributed to the world so that they will have a better appreciation. I recently listened to a BBC Radio story on the violence in Syria and the reporter was riding in a taxi cab. Not so surprisingly, a Bob Marley song was playing in the background. This rebel music, our music, has consistently appeared in areas of strife, war and oppression. From the fall of the Berlin Wall to South Africa during Apartheid. From Tiananmen Square in China to Zimbabwe freedom fighters, reggae has been involved in all those critical junctures in history. Do we as Jamaicans really appreciate this music that we created and shared with the world? Do we really want to continue to be the land of reggae?

Jamaica is not an island, it is a global brand, and reggae is part of that brand. We must embrace that wholeheartedly or risk no longer being the land of reggae.

David Mullings was the first Future Leaders representative for the USA on the Jamaican Diaspora Advisory Board. He can be found on Twitter at twitter.com/davidmullings and Facebook at facebook.com/InteractiveDialogue

By Dennis Morrison, Jamaica Gleaner - Contributor:

The spectre of military confrontation over Iran's nuclear development pro-gramme, and that country's threat to cut the flow of oil to six European nations, has reignited memories of the 1973 and 1979 oil price shocks that destabilised the world economy.

In 1973, it was the Arab-Israeli war and the resulting oil embargo that led to the spike in prices that triggered a recession. The era of cheap oil that had powered the post-World War II economic boom came to an end.

The 1979 political revolution in Iran, then OPEC's oil-producing member, brought another round of dislocation and skyrocketing prices. As the mullahs took power in Tehran under the Islamic government and Ayatollah Kho-meini made pronouncements, oil and financial markets shook. High oil prices fuelled inflation and the world eventually entered deep recession that lasted into the early 1980s.

In Jamaica, our economy was shaken to its very foundations, with our import substitution-based manufacturing sector and bauxite industry having been established on the basis of cheap oil. As the wrangling over Iran's nuclear programme heats up with the risk of conflict increasing, the obvious concern is whether we are likely to be hit by another massive escalation in oil prices. By some reckoning, a confrontation leading to disruption to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic waterway for Middle East oil, could push the fuel to US$150 per barrel.

Catastrophic

With high oil prices already exerting such great pressure on the Jamaican economy, another oil-price shock would be catastrophic. While Iran's threat to cut the flow of oil has added to jitters in the market and pushed up prices by US$5-US$10 per barrel, changes in the political configuration since the 1970s have reduced the chances of a price shock of the scale of the earlier periods. A major change is the emergence of the Russian oil industry as the world's largest producer and a giant exporter.

The break-up of the Soviet Union and the dissipation of the East-West ideological conflict have opened up trade and economic relations, with Russia now supplying oil and gas across Europe to China, Japan, South Korea, and even to the western part of the United States (US). In fact, the grade of Russia's main export oil is similar to that supplied by Iran to the six European countries that it is now threatening with embargo. The limiting factors, however, would be the extent to which Russia could suddenly increase its oil exports, and the duration of a conflict with Iran.

Government overthrow

The tensions between the West and Iran go back into the history of Anglo-American domination of its oil reserves and in-terference in its politics. The British and the Americans punished Iran for collaboration with the Nazis in the early 1940s, and orchestrated the overthrow of the nationalist Mossadeq government of the early 1950s that sought to take control of the oil industry. The Shah was then installed as head of a pro-Western regime that lasted till the Revolution in 1979.

Under his despotic rule, Western oil multinationals ['The Seven Sisters'] regained control of Iran's oil supplies with powerful US backing. The Opposition to the Shah grew as repression intensified, and was eventually manifested in a radical Islamic fundamentalism that was virulently anti-American. As the Shah was overthrown, hostility deepened, leading to the hostage crisis and 30 years of ongoing conflict between Iran and the West, particularly the US.

First, there was the hostage crisis to which the US retaliated by imposing economic sanctions. Then US support for Iraq in its invasion of Iran, and the war deepened the tensions. In recent years, Iran has actively supported radical Islamist groups across the Middle East and is seen as a threat to pro-Western regimes in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.

The conflict has now turned to Iran's nuclear programme, the heightened fear of it developing nuclear capabilities and opposition to its political system. While Iran continues to deny that it intends to militarise the programme, United Nations inspectors insist otherwise. With tough, new economic sanctions being imposed by the UN, and Israel's aggressive stance, the risk of a showdown has escalated.

It is the Israeli threat of pre-emptive military action against Iran's nuclear facilities, however, that carries the greatest risk of causing dislocation. Ironically, there is a strong view that the impact of the tightened economic sanctions may be so severe that Iran is more likely than before to seek a negotiated settlement of the issue.

Dennis Morrison is an economist. Email feedback to: columns@gleanerjm.com.

February 19, 2012

jamaica-gleaner

Caribbean Blog International

By Jonathan Bellot:

One afternoon in June of 1860, upon hearing Charles Darwin’s suggestion that humans may have descended from apes, the wife of the Bishop of Worcester is famously supposed to have exclaimed, “My dear, descended from the apes! Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known.”

Darwin had published his famous work on the mechanism of evolution, On the Origin of Species, the year before, and debates and arguments had begun almost the moment the book appeared. It is likely Darwin realized his book would be controversial. After all, contrary to what most people suppose, he didn’t actually do more than hint at the possibility that humans were part of this evolutionary process in On the Origin of Species. 

It wasn’t until 1871, when he published another deeply controversial text, The Descent of Man, that his views on human evolution became explicit. Nonetheless, many a debate had happened in the years between, and Victorian England, like much of Europe and America on hearing about Darwin’s theory, found itself divided into two camps: those who found evolution plausible and those who either did not find it plausible or -- more likely -- did not think evolution could fit in with their religious views.

After all, the latter group asked, if humans evolved over millions of years and shared a common ancestor with the great apes, how could a god have created Adam and Eve? Was that not a flagrant violation of the book of Genesis? Did God simply “stop” evolution -- if it had indeed occurred -- at some point and imbue a primate with a soul? Or was the Adam and Eve story just that -- a story that, for the first time, could be demonstrably proven impossible? 

These questions came at a time when more and more dinosaur bones and entire skeletons were being discovered, and similar debates were raging on about what had happened to those mysterious giants. One of the most extraordinary proposals came from a man called Philip Henry Gosse, who suggested in a book called Omphalos that God had put the bones in the dirt to trick those who were too curious. There were also many debates going on about the universe. How big was it? How old was it? Was there life on other planets, just like on Earth?

All of these arguments coincided, at some point, with Darwin’s theory.

The mere fact that these debates existed at all was testament to how well Darwin thought out and provided evidence for his theory. And it is often forgotten that Darwin did not come up with this theory in a vacuum. Not only were there theories resembling evolution in circulation over a century before Darwin (such as those of Lamarck), but there was also another man, Alfred Russell Wallace, who came up with a theory strikingly similar to Darwin’s at almost the same time. 

Wallace corresponded with Darwin, and he sent Darwin his own theory of natural selection in 1858; to Darwin’s shock, Wallace’s theory was virtually the same as his own. It was, in fact, fear that Wallace would take credit for the idea that led Darwin to publish his work first, since he had put it away indefinitely before learning of Wallace.

But it is worth being aware that, had Darwin not published one of the world’s most famous and controversial texts, someone else would have. The theory of evolution, being a scientific theory, has nothing to do with Darwin except for his having first published a relatively comprehensive account of it. And, because we have learnt a lot since 1859 -- much of which Darwin himself would never know -- it is now clear to over 99% of biologists today, as well as many an intellectuals in many a field, that evolution is the best theory we have to explain how life moved from very simple organisms to very complex ones, over great periods of time. 

While a lot of what is in Darwin’s books was correct, a number of his ideas have been revised as we have learnt more. We have much more fossil evidence than Darwin did (or can examine the fossils with more advanced technology), including such spectacular creatures as the Archaeopteryx (a creature that is a dinosaur with clear birdlike characteristics) and the fossils of the Burgess Shale; we have evidence of creatures who have gradually almost lost features they once had, like the vestigial tail in humans you can see in our skeletons, and the legs you can see in the skeletons of both whales and snakes; we have the fact that viruses evolve (and often make the news for it), forcing us to continually develop new vaccines; and, above all, we have learnt that all organisms are genetically connected. Put human genes into a fruit fly, and the fly will use those genes as if they were a fly’s. Compare our genes to a chimpanzee’s, and they are almost the same. We are more different from each other, really, than we are from a chimpanzee, genetically speaking.

So why is there such a big argument nowadays over evolution?

Technically, there isn’t really an argument in the Caribbean -- in large part because the majority of Caribbean people are creationists and have either never learnt about evolution or have simply rejected it out of dislike or disinterest. February 12 is Darwin Day -- the day Darwin was born, and a day many a scientist and secularist celebrate. Let’s say on that day, you go up and ask the average person on the street about Darwin’s theory. They might know it was evolution, but beyond that, who knows what you’ll hear.

This needs to change.

One step towards becoming a more advanced society -- and no one but the naïve or the medieval-minded would argue that we have steps to take -- is that people become aware of the world around them. This does not only mean watching or reading the news. This means knowing about important historical events. It means having a smart, cultured answer to some of our most enduring and important questions: Who are we? How did we get here? Where is here, anyway? Why am I here? And that answer is not one you memorize; it is one you continually revise and redevelop as you learn more, explore more, contact more people from more backgrounds.

There are many facets of such questions. Evolution is but one of them -- though it may be one of the most important. It is worth understanding that the Earth has been shown to be 4.6 billion years old and that the universe itself is currently estimated at 13.72 billion years old. 

It is worth knowing that our solar system -- the sun and the planets surrounding it -- is but one of thousands within the Milky Way Galaxy, and that our home galaxy is one of billions of similar galaxies, each likely containing planets and suns just like our own. 

It is worth knowing that space is so vast, and our planet so tiny, that we will likely never travel outside of our solar system in a spaceship -- much less to anywhere else out there. 

It is worth knowing that the universe is expanding -- making us even tinier than before.

It is worth knowing that 99% of life that has ever been known to exist on Earth is extinct today -- and that the life forms we can only see under a microscope were the first to be here and will still be here long after we have gone, since it is the microbes which truly rule the world, when you stop to think about it. Pick up a handful of dirt, and you may be holding more little organisms than human beings alive today.

It is worth knowing, too, how the religions we hold so dear were given to us, how some of us may never have even heard of a Jesus or a Mohammed if we had remained all our lives in Africa. It is unlikely, of course, since colonialism has left many parts of Africa intensely religious -- and yet there are still peoples there, as there are tribes across the world, who know nothing of our religions. Give that a thought. Are those peoples worse off? Or are their own belief systems just as valid as our own, since none of us knows the absolute answers to life’s questions, at the end of the day? Why are so many of us so arrogant as to believe that religions given to us by missionaries centuries ago are correct?

Whether or not you are religious, it is a step in the right direction to accept that evolution is the best theory science has for how life went from simple to complex. It is not a theory of how life began from non-life. (That would be an entirely separate idea known as abiogenesis, an idea not currently supported by nearly as much evidence as evolution -- though that does not make it wrong, of course.) 

And once we accept that we are indeed animals, intimately related to the other animals around us, doesn’t that make you stop and think about so much else? What does it mean to be a primate who has evolved so far beyond other organisms? Do we mean less than we do if we ignore that we are animals?

Do we mean more?

Does it matter, if it is true?

And that’s the final point: the truth. Even if the truth may not always be pretty, I would rather accept what is most likely true than hide behind something that comforts me with false hope or a false sense of superiority. I love imagining things -- I am a writer of fiction, after all -- but I am well-aware of the difference between what I dream up and what is most likely the truth. And once we accept that there is much we do not know, once we let go of what we only believe in, and once we step forward and examine what we do know -- well, I’m willing to believe we will ultimately be the better for it. At the very least, we will be more honest with ourselves. 

Of course, those who do not really think much about things like evolution now will not necessarily benefit from learning or not learning about it. But those of us who want to know things, and those of us struggling with the questions of who we are and what it all means, would do well to begin -- or get to soon -- the strange, wonderful, and redefining theory a brave man put into words over a century and a half ago.

We are an evolving set of islands, the Caribbean. If we take the step to educate ourselves and others on the big issues and ideas so often ignored or underemphasized in the region, we will be taking a step in a direction that can do us nothing but good. Let us take that step, and let us remember, along the way, the brave steps Darwin himself took, steps that would have profound effects on the world. Let us become the best people we can be.

Jonathan Bellot is pursuing his MFA in Fiction at Florida State University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Transnational Literature, BIM: Arts for the 21st Century, Belletrist Coterie, Black Lantern Publishing, and The New Humanism. He was born in 1987 in Cincinnati, Ohio to Dominican parents, and has lived since nine in the Commonwealth of Dominica.

February 15, 2012

caribbeannewsnow

Caribbean Blog International

tribune242 editorial:

HOPEFULLY, it has by now been established that Haitian President Martelly's brief stop-over in Nassau last week on his way to Mexico was neither at the invitation of the FNM government, nor was it an official visit.

Opposition Leader Perry Christie and Mr Fred Mitchell can now stop "looking to the Prime Minister for a clarification" of what Mr Martelly said to his people when he met with them on his arrival.

"The PLP is looking to the Prime Minister for a clarification," said a PLP statement. "The Bahamas government must explain what was meant because it was under their invitation that he came and made his address."

In fact, Mr Christie should have been in a better position to get an explanation because he met with Mr Martelly in a social setting in the privacy of his own home later that day. In fact, when Mr Ingraham met formally with Mr Martelly in his office that morning, he said he did not know what the President had advised his people about voting the night before. However, Mr Christie should have known when he hosted him later that day. What is curious is that if Mr Christie were indeed concerned, why didn't he take that opportunity to get an explanation from the President himself rather than waiting for several days to use inaccurate information as a political football to throw into Mr Ingraham's court?

Another baseless rumour making the rounds is that Prime Minister Ingraham did not inform the Opposition of the President's intended stopover - the suggestion being that it was a secret conspiracy between the country's two leaders. We hope that by now that falsehood has also been put to rest. We have been told that in the House of Assembly's Smoker's Room, Mr Ingraham was overheard telling Mr Christie that Foreign Affairs had been contacted about a stop-over visit being planned for Mr Martelly. However, neither the day nor time had been finalised. He told Mr Christie that when he had more information he would let him know. If a member of Mr Christie's party was not informed, then it is to Mr Christie that he should look, not Mr Ingraham.

In a press conference, Mr Martelly said he had not urged Haitians living here to protest. Instead, he had urged them to use this country's democratic system to work in their favour.

"I could not ask my people to riot for their right; this is not what I want," he said. He made it clear that he wanted to work with the Bahamas government to stop illegal immigrants from his country coming here and taking jobs from Bahamians.

This is a quantum leap from 1992 when the FNM won the government and the relationship between Haiti and the Bahamas was such that the Bahamas had to lock up illegal Haitians in Fox Hill prison. Haiti refused to take their own people back. Since then, protocols have been established, and Haiti has only to be notified of the arrival of the aircraft from Nassau to receive their returning nationals.

Another question being asked is why did Mr Martelly have to go through all the formalities of Foreign Affairs to pass through Nassau on his way to Mexico.

We are not suggesting that this is a question being asked by Mr Christie or his colleagues, but Mr Christie would be the best person to give the answer.

Mr Christie will recall an uncomfortable experience he had when in June 2004 he attempted, as a head of state, to make an unofficial trip to the United States. Treated as Mr John Q. Public he had to take off his shoes at the airport.

There are protocols to be followed when heads of state travel -- either officially or unofficially -- from one country to another.

In Mr Christie's case, his office was late in notifying Foreign Affairs of his travel plans. As a consequence, through no fault of its own, Foreign Affairs was late in notifying the Bahamas Embassy in Washington, and, as a consequence the Bahamas Embassy was late in co-cordinating special cover for him with the US Secret Service. What made matters worse was that all US internal security -- with the 9/11 jitters of the destruction of New York's Twin Towers still uppermost in their minds -- was trying to coordinate the arrival of heads of state from around the world for the funeral of the late President Ronald Reagan. Their resources were stretched.

Despite this, it is understood that the US would have tried to have accommodated Mr Christie, but Mr Christie declined to use the Secret Service because his visit was private.

As a result, he was treated as an ordinary Joe Blow. Consequently, he could have no cause for complaint.

And so there are reasons for these protocols. Mr Martelly followed them by notifying Foreign Affairs so that he would have security protection and that doors would be opened for him while he was here.

This is just part of the system. Only the uninitiated would suggest otherwise.

February 14, 2012

tribune242

Caribbean Blog International