does anyone know where i can find the answer to numbers 40, 22, 19, and 23 ?


Please and thank you :]

help with INternational Trade Approach

what does this mean........also international trade alternative

Posting bank here too

Unit VI Test Bank


1. The difference in per capita GDP between the more developed and less developed regions is

A. widening.

B. remaining constant.

C. decreasing.

D. zero.

E. negative

2. The gross value of the product minus the costs of raw materials and energy

A. level of development.

B. gross domestic product.

C. productivity.

D. value added.

E. development

3. Per capita means?

A. for each person

B. the number of countries below the poverty level

C. the distribution of wealth within a country

D. the spatial distribution of global wealth

E. the level of industry within a country

4. An example of a primary sector activity is

A. education.

B. manufacturing.

C. mining.

D. retailing.

E. shipping

5. The tertiary sector includes all but which of the following?

A. transportation

B. producer services

C. government

D. construction

E. education

6. The large percentage of population involved in agriculture in China indicates that

A. the country imports most of its food.

B. few people are unemployed.

C. most people consume an inadequate amount of calories.

D. the country exports most of its food

E. most people must produce food for their own survival.

7. The value of a product compared to the amount of labor required to make it

A. gross domestic product.

B. value added.

C. tertiary sector.

D. gross national product

E. productivity.

8. Which of the following is not an indicator of a country's level of development?

A. infant mortality rate

B. crude death rate

C. age structure

D. natural increase rate

E. both B and D

9. Petroleum reserves in the Middle East are

A. clustered primarily in the Persian Gulf states.

B. dispersed throughout the region.

C. concentrated primarily along the Mediterranean Sea.

D. primarily in Saudi Arabia.

E. clustered primarily along the Red Sea

10. According to Rostow's development model, the process towards economic maturity happens when

A. a high percentage of national wealth is allocated to nonproductive activities.

B. an elite group initiates innovative activities.

C. take-off industries achieve technical advances.

D. workers become skilled and specialized and technology diffuses to many industries.

E. per capita GDP exceeds $5,000

11. According to the international trade approach to development, a country should identify which of its following assets?

A. abundant agricultural products

B. high quality manufactured goods

C. imports to be limited

D. low cost distribution networks

E. none of the above

12. The biggest problem in promoting development through the international trade alternative is

A. overdevelopment of LDCs

B. increased price of petroleum.

C. regional cooperation.

D. unequal distribution of resources.

E. increased demand for many goods.

13. In contrast to the international trade approach, the self-sufficiency approach to development

A. begins when an elite group initiates innovative activities.

B. This system tries to ensure that rural areas are roughly equal to urban areas in terms of developing

C. India is an example of this kind of country which spreads investment equally among economic sectors.

D. focuses on one industry to begin development

E. Both B and C

14. The principal benefit of the self-sufficiency approach is to promote

A. balanced growth of all economic sectors.

B. global competitiveness for local industries.

C. the maintenance of a large bureaucracy.

D. unequal distribution of resources.

E. the dependency theory

15. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the distribution of industry was

A. clustered.

B. concentrated.

C. dispersed.

D. randomly distributed.

E. all of the above

16. Eastern North America is the continent's manufacturing center in part because it has access to the continent's

A . largest markets

B. most extensive sources of essential raw materials.

C. best-maintained transportation systems.

D. all of the above

E. both A and C

17. Situation costs are critical to a firm that wishes to

A. avoid labor unions.

B. minimize production costs inside the plant.

C. minimize transport costs.

D. identify unique characteristics of a particular location.

E. increase bulk-reducing industries

18. The location of a maquiladora plant is a good example of the importance of

A. product size determining a location

B. labor costs and government restrictions determining a location

C. Post-Fordist production.

D. break-of-bulk points.

E. both a and b

19. A company which uses more than one mode of transport will often locate near

A. break-of-bulk points.

B. consumers.

C. raw materials.

D. suburbs.

E. markets

20. Copper mining is an example of

A. perishable industry.

B. specialized industry.

C. bulk-gaining industry.

D. communications-oriented industry.

E. bulk-reducing industry

21. A manufacturer of women's and children's underwear is more likely than Google to

A. relocate in a developing country B. go out of business C. need more capital.

D. all of the above E. both A and C

22. Demand for many industrial goods in more developed countries has been stagnant in recent years, in part because of

A. low prices for many goods.

B. market saturation.

C. rapid population growth.

D. substantial salary increases.

E. lack of labor

23. By subsidizing industries such as steel and textile, governments contribute to the global problem of

A. higher prices.

B. stagnation

C. lower consumer demand.

D. oversupply.

E. job loss.

24. Transnational corporations have transferred some work to less developed countries because of access to

A. government subsidies.

B. labor.

C. markets.

D. raw materials.

E. capital

25. In contrast to fordist production, Post-Fordist production is more likely to

A. be repetitive

B. place more importance on site factors.

C. assign each worker one task.

D. dominate transnational corporations.

E. introduce more flexible work rules.

26. Maquiladoras are possible because of the change in what type of function of our border?

A. operational B locational C situational D linguistic E Girastic

27. What two features best characterize the changes affected by the Industrial Revolution?

A. service industries and information processing

B. technological innovation and specialization

C. improved farm implements and the development of hybrid seeds

D. higher literacy rates and decreased population doubling time

E. well-equipped professional armies and the deployment of nuclear weapons

28. Which of these statements about core-periphery relationships is correct in characterizing the global economic system?

A. It works to the advantage of periphery countries

B. It works to the disadvantage of core countries

C. It works to the advantage of both core and periphery countries

D. It works to the disadvantage of periphery countries

E. It is irrelevant in a complex worldwide economic system

29. An industry is said to be footloose if

A. transport costs have little bearing on location

B. transport costs determine location

C. power costs determine location

D. borders of a country do make a difference in its location

E. labor costs determine location

30. Which of the following is not typically defined as one of the four key determinants of development?

A. Per capita GDP B. Literacy rate

C. physical environment D. Life expectancy

E. Amount of education

31. Purchasing power parity refers to

A. the goal of reforming trade to make it more equitable

B. a monetary measurement that takes into account what money actually buys

C. subsidies used to strengthen home industries

D. Making corporations pay equally for all items they use

E. Making all items equal in price


32. People are more productive in more developed countries because they

A. are better workers than anyone in LDCs

B. have access to more technology.

C. have a higher value added per person than could ever be possible in an LDC.

D. are better educated than all LDC people.

E. live longer

33. The lifespan of women and their survival rate from birth would be relevant to which

A. The Gender-Related Development Index

B. The Human Development Index

C. The Gender Empowerment Measure

D. Rostow’s development model

E. The international trade approach

34. Assumptions in Rostow’s development model include all of the following except

A. the world is the same as when MDCs moved through the model

B. every country will move from step 1 through step 5

C. LDCs do not face additional barriers due to a crowded field

D. development somewhere requires underdevelopment somewhere else

E. both B and D

35. A transnational corporation

A. operates in countries other than the one in which its headquarters are established

B. has the potential to be more economically powerful than a sovereign state

C. takes advantage of global production networks

D. allows corporations to take advantage of the full range of geographical variations in costs

E. all of the above

36. A copper concentration mill tends to locate near a copper mine because it is a

A. bulk-reducing industry. B. perishable industry.

C. site factor. D. specialized manufacturer.

E. capital issue

37. Since 1980, new U.S. automobile assembly plants have been built in the

A. Midwest, to minimize national distribution costs.

B. Northeast, to minimize access to the largest market.

C. Sunbelt, to minimize labor costs.

D. West, to minimize access to Japan.

E. Southeast, where labor is cheap

38. Industrial areas outside North America and Europe have become increasingly important in recent years primarily because of

A. access to markets. B. access to raw materials.

C. break-of-bulk points. D. site factors.

E. situation factors

39. All of the following are examples of perishable products except

A. daily newspaper B. milk

C. steel D. all of the above are perishable products

E. both A and B

40. Of the three steps of textile production, which is more dependant on situation factors?

A. Spinning B. Weaving C. Sewing D. all equally dependant E. none are dependant

41. Which of the following explains why the most basic industrial problem on a global scale is a gap between the world demand for products and the world capacity to supply them?

A. Stagnant demand B. Increased capacity worldwide

C. Expanding markets D. Lack of surplus

E. both A and B

42. The most significant benefit of EPZs for LDCs is

A. the influx of foreign-owned businesses

B. improved jobs skills for workers

C. creation of employment opportunities

D. money made from tariffs

E. high wages

43. Which of the following are negative aspects of EPZs?

A. Components are not locally purchased

B. LDC must provide infrastructure

C. Concessions often outweigh benefits

D. Low wage jobs

E. All of the above

Some hints at the ways I will make these multiple choice questions.

-what factors cause agglomeration
---think about the types of jobs (sector) and how they can create other jobs
---think about infrasturcture for one factory and how that can encourage other factories to
come
-how can agglomeration be both a negative and a positive factor
---how can the creation of a bunch of factories be positive
---what about second sector jobs is negative (think about environmental impacts)
-What factor creates the largest difference in culture between countries
-which job sectors have the largest impact on the environment
-what is deindustrialization and where is it occurring and why
---you should know where this occuring and how it relates to the core periphery and
information we talked about with job sectors
-what are the main areas where industrialization occurred and how did it diffuse from there
---you need to read this section in your texts
-what job sector do countries need to get into in order to start developing
---I could even rephrase this to ask why 2nd sector does this and first not (think
multiplier effect, agglomeration, and disposable income)
-what was the main difference between Ghana and South Korea between 1950
---think about the job sectors, stability, nation state and stability
-what are the McDonald factors that allow a country to develop and get factories
---have a list in mind of all of the things a McD's needs and how that relate to
factories
-be able to define location theory, variable costs, least cost theory, agglomeration, deglomeration
---I am going to put up a series of questions with these and use part of the definition in
the question and you are going to need to know which one it goes with
-How do distance decay and friction of distance relate to the location of Industries
---think about transportation costs, the size of the object and where those
factories tend to be. car factories in Mexico; toy facotires in China
---where do they want to be closest to
---what do they wish to take advantage of
---in other words where is their market and what costs are they trying to minimize
-what is an an intensive labor industry and why are they the most likely to relocate
---this one is answered in the class notes posted on the blog on Friday
-what are the new industrial areas
---think about that core-periphery model and that new term semi-peripheral
-know what the core-periphery model is, when it started and which countries this applies to at a regional scale
-know what a semi-peripheral country is and which countries that applies to best
-know what uneven development is and apply it to terms like technology gap, and longevity gap
-know what the level of development indicators are and when to use them
-know what fordism and post-fordism is and why this has changed in modern times
-be able to define just-in-time delivery, global division of labor, break of bulk point
-know what NAFTA, WTO, and EU are
-know what a technopole is as well as a high tech corridor and where you can find some

#10?

Does anyone know the answer to # 10 from the Unit Vi Test bank?!?

Pleasee and thank you =]

Questions

You do not have to use all of the vocab. Just make sure to use a good number of the ideas and concepts in your answers. Some roles are more suited to certain ideas than others.

Question

I do not understand what we are supposed to do with the list at the end of the assignment (the list of things after the in class question) what does it mean/what do we do with this? Also, we only have to use ten terms in our answers, right?

Questions

If you have questions, do not bury it in a comment on a post. Make a new post or e-mail me.

Also, look below for details on the assignment

Some Auto Worker stuff

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9404E6DC1230F93AA25754C0A96E958260&scp=8&sq=union+auto+worker&st=nyt

and a list of links from NYTimes
http://query.nytimes.com/search/alternate/query?query=union+auto+worker&st=fromcse

Roles Assignment - Important

1. I strongly urge you not to use a jailcard for this as discussion is required. You can do that but you will get a zero for all discussion points no matter what.

2. You must show you researched your roll. If not, the assignment is an automatic zero. I will post some research for each role now.

3. You must use vocab and concepts and use them correctly. 40 percent of your grade will be based on this.

4. Be aware all second semester assignments are being graded much harsher. I will be going over the in-class assignments on Monday and any that lack details from the handouts will get a zero. I want to see specifics and see them used correctly from here on out. That will make up 40 to 100 percent of your grade on assignments from here on out. I will also expect to see answers that could do well on the AP exam.

I provided much research for each role. If I missed yours, let me know.

Wal-Mart

Against
http://walmartwatch.com/
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/walmart/
http://www.sprawl-busters.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wal-Mart

Defense-For
http://walmartstores.com/FactsNews/
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/nov2005/nf2005117_0199_db016.htm

Copy and paste

You will have to copy and paste those last links

More Research

Liberia
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/weekinreview/12seng.html?scp=2&sq=liberia+child+labor&st=nyt


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/world/africa/29ghana.html?scp=1&sq=Africa%27s+World+of+Forced+Labor%2C+in+a+6-Year-Old%27s+Eyes&st=nyt

More Research

Maquiladoras
http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch?query=maquiladoras&srchst=cse

French Farmers
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/27/business/worldbusiness/27trade.html?scp=4&sq=French%20Farmer%20globalization&st=cse


French College Students
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/weekinreview/06smith.html?scp=1&sq=French%20college%20craig%20smith&st=cse

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/apr2006/fstd-a04.shtml

More Research

Nike Factories in Asia Article from Time: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,988059,00.html?promoid=googlep

Another Article
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12967

National Geo Article on Bethelehem http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/12/bethlehem/finkel-text


India Call Center

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C02E0D6123CF935A15751C0A9629C8B63&scp=3&sq=bangalore%20call%20center%20friedman&st=cse

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/08/opinion/08friedman.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=bangalore%20friedman&st=cse

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F00E5DE1E3FF934A35750C0A9629C8B63&scp=2&sq=bangalore%20friedman&st=cse

Getting sworn at while working at call center
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56474-2005Feb26.html

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1671982,00.html

Roles Assignment - Important

1. I strongly urge you not to use a jailcard for this as discussion is required. You can do that but you will get a zero for all discussion points no matter what.

2. You must show you researched your roll. If not, the assignment is an automatic zero. I will post some research for each role now.

3. You must use vocab and concepts and use them correctly. 40 percent of your grade will be based on this.

4. Be aware all second semester assignments are being graded much harsher. I will be going over the in-class assignments on Monday and any that lack details from the handouts will get a zero. I want to see specifics and see them used correctly from here on out. That will make up 40 to 100 percent of your grade on assignments from here on out. I will also expect to see answers that could do well on the AP exam.

I provided much research for each role. If I missed yours, let me know.

Malawi Farmer

Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts
By CELIA W. DUGGER

Correction Appended

LILONGWE, Malawi — Malawi hovered for years at the brink of famine. After a disastrous corn harvest in 2005, almost five million of its 13 million people needed emergency food aid.

But this year, a nation that has perennially extended a begging bowl to the world is instead feeding its hungry neighbors. It is selling more corn to the World Food Program of the United Nations than any other country in southern Africa and is exporting hundreds of thousands of tons of corn to Zimbabwe.

In Malawi itself, the prevalence of acute child hunger has fallen sharply. In October, the United Nations Children’s Fund sent three tons of powdered milk, stockpiled here to treat severely malnourished children, to Uganda instead. “We will not be able to use it!” Juan Ortiz-Iruri, Unicef’s deputy representative in Malawi, said jubilantly.

Farmers explain Malawi’s extraordinary turnaround — one with broad implications for hunger-fighting methods across Africa — with one word: fertilizer.

Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.

Stung by the humiliation of pleading for charity, he led the way to reinstating and deepening fertilizer subsidies despite a skeptical reception from the United States and Britain. Malawi’s soil, like that across sub-Saharan Africa, is gravely depleted, and many, if not most, of its farmers are too poor to afford fertilizer at market prices.

“As long as I’m president, I don’t want to be going to other capitals begging for food,” Mr. Mutharika declared. Patrick Kabambe, the senior civil servant in the Agriculture Ministry, said the president told his advisers, “Our people are poor because they lack the resources to use the soil and the water we have.”

The country’s successful use of subsidies is contributing to a broader reappraisal of the crucial role of agriculture in alleviating poverty in Africa and the pivotal importance of public investments in the basics of a farm economy: fertilizer, improved seed, farmer education, credit and agricultural research.

Malawi, an overwhelmingly rural nation about the size of Pennsylvania, is an extreme example of what happens when those things are missing. As its population has grown and inherited landholdings have shrunk, impoverished farmers have planted every inch of ground. Desperate to feed their families, they could not afford to let their land lie fallow or to fertilize it. Over time, their depleted plots yielded less food and the farmers fell deeper into poverty.

Malawi’s leaders have long favored fertilizer subsidies, but they reluctantly acceded to donor prescriptions, often shaped by foreign-aid fashions in Washington, that featured a faith in private markets and an antipathy to government intervention.

In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, the World Bank pushed Malawi to eliminate fertilizer subsidies entirely. Its theory both times was that Malawi’s farmers should shift to growing cash crops for export and use the foreign exchange earnings to import food, according to Jane Harrigan, an economist at the University of London.

In a withering evaluation of the World Bank’s record on African agriculture, the bank’s own internal watchdog concluded in October not only that the removal of subsidies had led to exorbitant fertilizer prices in African countries, but that the bank itself had often failed to recognize that improving Africa’s declining soil quality was essential to lifting food production.

“The donors took away the role of the government and the disasters mounted,” said Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist who lobbied Britain and the World Bank on behalf of Malawi’s fertilizer program and who has championed the idea that wealthy countries should invest in fertilizer and seed for Africa’s farmers.

Here in Malawi, deep fertilizer subsidies and lesser ones for seed, abetted by good rains, helped farmers produce record-breaking corn harvests in 2006 and 2007, according to government crop estimates. Corn production leapt to 2.7 million metric tons in 2006 and 3.4 million in 2007 from 1.2 million in 2005, the government reported.

“The rest of the world is fed because of the use of good seed and inorganic fertilizer, full stop,” said Stephen Carr, who has lived in Malawi since 1989, when he retired as the World Bank’s principal agriculturalist in sub-Saharan Africa. “This technology has not been used in most of Africa. The only way you can help farmers gain access to it is to give it away free or subsidize it heavily.”

“The government has taken the bull by the horns and done what farmers wanted,” he said. Some economists have questioned whether Malawi’s 2007 bumper harvest should be credited to good rains or subsidies, but an independent evaluation, financed by the United States and Britain, found that the subsidy program accounted for a large share of this year’s increase in corn production.

The harvest also helped the poor by lowering food prices and increasing wages for farm workers. Researchers at Imperial College London and Michigan State University concluded in their preliminary report that a well-run subsidy program in a sensibly managed economy “has the potential to drive growth forward out of the poverty trap in which many Malawians and the Malawian economy are currently caught.”

Farmers interviewed recently in Malawi’s southern and central regions said fertilizer had greatly improved their ability to fill their bellies with nsima, the thick, cornmeal porridge that is Malawi’s staff of life.

In the hamlet of Mthungu, Enelesi Chakhaza, an elderly widow whose husband died of hunger five years ago, boasted that she got two ox-cart-loads of corn this year from her small plot instead of half a cart.

Last year, roughly half the country’s farming families received coupons that entitled them to buy two 110-pound bags of fertilizer, enough to nourish an acre of land, for around $15 — about a third the market price. The government also gave them coupons for enough seed to plant less than half an acre.

Malawians are still haunted by the hungry season of 2001-02. That season, an already shrunken program to give poor farmers enough fertilizer and seed to plant a meager quarter acre of land had been reduced again. Regional flooding further lowered the harvest. Corn prices surged. And under the government then in power, the country’s entire grain reserve was sold as a result of mismanagement and corruption.

Mrs. Chakhaza watched her husband starve to death that season. His strength ebbed away as they tried to subsist on pumpkin leaves. He was one of many who succumbed that year, said K. B. Kakunga, the local Agriculture Ministry official. He recalled mothers and children begging for food at his door.

“I had a little something, but I could not afford to help each and every one,” he said. “It was very pathetic, very pathetic indeed.”

But Mr. Kakunga brightened as he talked about the impact of the subsidies, which he said had more than doubled corn production in his jurisdiction since 2005.

“It’s quite marvelous!” he exclaimed.

Malawi’s determination to heavily subsidize fertilizer and the payoff in increased production are beginning to change the attitudes of donors, say economists who have studied Malawi’s experience.

The Department for International Development in Britain contributed $8 million to the subsidy program last year. Bernabé Sánchez, an economist with the agency in Malawi, estimated the extra corn produced because of the $74 million subsidy was worth $120 million to $140 million.

“It was really a good economic investment,” he said.

The United States, which has shipped $147 million worth of American food to Malawi as emergency relief since 2002, but only $53 million to help Malawi grow its own food, has not provided any financial support for the subsidy program, except for helping pay for the evaluation of it. Over the years, the United States Agency for International Development has focused on promoting the role of the private sector in delivering fertilizer and seed, and saw subsidies as undermining that effort.

But Alan Eastham, the American ambassador to Malawi, said in a recent interview that the subsidy program had worked “pretty well,” though it displaced some commercial fertilizer sales.

“The plain fact is that Malawi got lucky last year,” he said. “They got fertilizer out while it was needed. The lucky part was that they got the rains.”

And the World Bank now sometimes supports the temporary use of subsidies aimed at the poor and carried out in a way that fosters private markets.

Here in Malawi, bank officials say they generally support Malawi’s policy, though they criticize the government for not having a strategy to eventually end the subsidies, question whether its 2007 corn production estimates are inflated and say there is still a lot of room for improvement in how the subsidy is carried out.

“The issue is, let’s do a better job of it,” said David Rohrbach, a senior agricultural economist at the bank.

Though the donors are sometimes ambivalent, Malawi’s farmers have embraced the subsidies. And the government moved this year to give its people a more direct hand in their distribution.

Villagers in Chembe gathered one recent morning under the spreading arms of a kachere tree to decide who most needed fertilizer coupons as the planting season loomed. They had only enough for 19 of the village’s 53 families.

“Ladies and gentlemen, should we start with the elderly or the orphans?” asked Samuel Dama, a representative of the Chembe clan.

Men led the assembly, but women sitting on the ground at their feet called out almost all the names of the neediest, gesturing to families rearing children orphaned by AIDS or caring for toothless elders.

There were more poor families than there were coupons, so grumbling began among those who knew they would have to watch over the coming year as their neighbors’ fertilized corn fields turned deep green.

Sensing the rising resentment, the village chief, Zaudeni Mapila, rose. Barefoot and dressed in dusty jeans and a royal blue jacket, he acted out a silly pantomime of husbands stuffing their pants with corn to sell on the sly for money to get drunk at the beer hall. The women howled with laughter. The tension fled.

He closed with a reminder he hoped would dampen any jealousy.

“I don’t want anyone to complain,” he said. “It’s not me who chose. It’s you.”

The women sang back to him in a chorus of acknowledgment, then dispersed to their homes and fields.

Correction: December 7, 2007

A chart on Sunday about improvements in Malawi’s agricultural production, using erroneous information from a study by researchers at Imperial College London and Michigan State University, misstated the size of recent corn harvests. (Because of an editing error, the article also included the wrong figures.) The increase in production was in millions of metric tons, not billions. (Estimates show that corn production rose to 2.7 million metric tons in 2006 and 3.4 million in 2007 from 1.2 million in 2005.)

Man o nthe street Bethlehem

Just look at the National Geo Article we wrote about.

Notice Americans had to train Saudi's at first

In 1973, forty years after American oil explorers first went ashore on Saudi Arabia's eastern coastline, the Saudi government began an incremental buy-out of the concession-holding Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco). The richest prize in oil industry history, the generator of billions of dollars for the four American oil companies that owned Aramco, was being relinquished -- without rancor or recriminations. In 1933, Saudi Arabia lacked indigenous skilled workers, had few schools and virtually no civil infrastructure. Within the lifetime of the 67-year-old Ali Naimi, who joined Aramco as a boy and is now the Kingdom's oil minister, the world's largest integrated oil company was totally in Saudi hands -- from the rig floor to top management. This is an account of human resource development, an evolving concession agreement, the character of the relationship between the Saudi Arab government and Aramco, and the on-going Saudi-American energy industry partnerships.


Saudi Arabs, Americans and Oil
By Robert L. Norberg

Human Resources

In 1949, when Harry Snyder was hired to head up the training of Saudi Arabs for Aramco, James Terry Duce, a company executive in New York, told him what was expected:
Your task at Aramco is to train Saudis as quickly and as soundly as possible to operate the Saudi oil industry. Inevitably, the Saudi Arab Government will eventually nationalize the industry. When that occurs, we want the young Saudis to have attained the proficiency that will enable them to operate the oil industry efficiently and with goodwill toward Aramco. Thus they will be serving their country's best interests and will be protecting the interests of our parent companies.1

This vision of the training mission and its ultimate result might have appeared reasonably attainable if recruits were available from local schools, knew a bit of English, and had some exposure to industrial practices. But those conditions did not exist when the concession agreement was signed in 1933, nor in 1949 as the postwar development of Saudi Arabia's petroleum resources gathered momentum. Tom Barger, a geologist who arrived in Arabia in 1937 and rose to board chairman before retiring in 1969, recalled many years later:
[One] aspect that impressed me was the enormous, inordinate poverty of the inhabitants. As I found out later, nearly everybody was hungry most of the time. . . . There's no education, obviously. The few people who could read and write largely had taught themselves. And there were some very learned men, as a matter of fact, among this population, although most of it was illiterate. They had practically no mechanical skills. We had new employees who couldn't get out of a room because they didn't know how to use a doorknob."2

B. C. Nelson, who served Aramco in employee relations for many years, recalled in 1965 what it had been like for Saudis recruited to Aramco in the early years of the enterprise:
Word spread to the desert and townspeople that in exchange for some physical effort the blue-eyed foreigners would give a man a handful of silver! And so they flocked to Aramco's budding oil centers . . . Imagine the effect on a recruit to be plunged into the mechanical age -- none of which fit in with his prior orientation or culture -- with little or nothing in his experience to help him adjust. The most amazing thing about these times in terms of one small facet of an Industrial Relations problem -- absenteeism-was not that, when they were handed their bag of money, they returned to their tribe with their glad tidings, but rather that they ever came back to work. Industrial discipline was practically unknown, so the amazing thing was that there was only a 75 percent turnover in the first few years.3

On-the-job training began on an informal basis in the 1930s and was soon complemented by rudimentary industrial training in classrooms. But without English, Arabic literacy, and basic arithmetic, there was a limit to the progress Saudis could make in job performance and advancement. In 1944, with operations revived after a wartime suspension, the Jabal (meaning "mountain" or "hill") School was opened in Dhahran.
Surely in 1944 no one expected history to remember the humble Jabal School. Yet the little company school endures as a symbol for development -- not for the development of an oil company, but for the development of a generation of very special young men. Many Saudis were introduced to the mystery of letters and numbers at the Jabal School. Among them were future scholars, successful businessmen and powerful executives.4

The Jabal School was the beginning of an ever-evolving, structured program of job-related training and general education that replicated under corporate auspices what an American might have experienced in public institutions, with grade school-junior high (company classrooms in-Kingdom), high school (assignments abroad, often Lebanon), and college (primarily in U.S. institutions).

One Jabal School pupil learned to type at 100 wpm and expressed an early aspiration to become Aramco's "first Saudi secretary." A Bedouin boy, he had been attracted to Aramco in the first place because of the opportunity for schooling, joining in 1947 at the age of 12. Not long after he returned from the U.S. in 1963 with two degrees, including a Stanford M.S. in geology, his name appeared in a lengthy Wall Street Journal article about Aramco. At the time only one Saudi had risen as high as department manager. Asked this time about his aspirations, the 30-year-old Ali Naimi replied, tongue-in-cheek, "Becoming the first Saudi president of Aramco." That was to transpire in 1984, and in 1995 he was named Saudi Arabia's Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources.

Naimi's Jabal School classmates, and many who followed later on increasingly sophisticated training and education tracks in modern facilities, began filling jobs at all levels of the company, gradually populating all of the supervisory and upper management positions in addition to drilling the wells, loading the ships, and manning the refinery and other plants, as they had been doing for many years. Throughout the process it was a matter of qualifying for positions, often an arduous, step-by-step progression, in a system of meritocracy.

In 1983 alone, a record half billion dollars was budgeted for training. In that year, 85 percent of all Saudi employees attended training classes, and the company was sponsoring 1,300 Saudis for university studies.

An Evolving Concession

Two provisions of the original 1933 concession agreement were never questioned or changed. One required the concessionaire to employ Saudi Arabs exclusively if they were qualified and available. The other said the company was not to interfere with administrative, political and religious affairs within Saudi Arabia.

But the terms of the original concession agreement between the Kingdom and Standard Oil Company of California were modified and amended for other reasons, mostly involving money and concession area, at the initiation of one or the other. The first alteration was a supplementary agreement signed in 1939 -- commercial quantities of oil had been discovered the preceding year -- that agreed to various additional payments to the government and extended the concession area to its maximum historic size, about 673,000 square miles, and lengthened the concession period from 60 to 66 years.

But by far the most important of the changes was the so-called 50-50 agreement, under which the company agreed to pay income taxes (the original agreement exempted the company from all taxes):
By this agreement [signed in 1950] the Saudi government's income from Aramco's operations came to be linked primarily not to the number of barrels produced and sold, as before, but rather to how much profit the company made. After 1950, therefore, the government showed increasing interest in the prices charged for oil, the cost of running the business, and the accounting methods used in determining these things . . . At the same time, as the government was increasingly successful in developing a group of technically trained oil experts in its Ministry of Petroleum, it also became more and more interested and involved with the actual operations of the company-such things as exploration programs [and] drilling practices . . . 5

By this time, the California Arabian Standard Oil Company (CASOC), the subsidiary to which the concession was assigned by SOCAL, had brought in three other American majors to what had been renamed in 1944 as the Arabian American Oil Company. The Texas Company (later Texaco) was the first, in 1937, with Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (later Exxon) and Socony-Vacuum (later Mobil) joining in 1948.

The keen interest that the Saudi government now had in how Aramco ran its business on a 50-50 basis was expressed in several ways. The company, at the government's request, moved its headquarters from New York to Dhahran in 1952. The government began auditing Aramco's books on a regular basis. And, in 1959, two Saudis were appointed to Aramco's board of directors.

The first sign that the concession was not going to live for its full 66-year period came in 1968, when Oil Minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani first raised the issue of Saudi "participation" in Aramco, whereby the Kingdom would buy into the company in increments, purchasing for itself rights to certain quantities of oil it would market on its own as well as becoming active in management decisions. The first 25 percent interest was acquired by Saudi Arabia in 1973.

At no time did the drive for Saudi ownership imply that something was broken and needed fixing, although increased pressure was now applied on Aramco to accelerate Saudi hiring and training, and for replacement of Americans with Saudis in top management positions.

Full 100 percent ownership of Aramco was reached in 1980, with beneficial financial effect from 1976. In part to reassure the work force that no drastic change was in store, the government did not displace Aramco with its own national oil company immediately -- waiting a full eight years. As symbolic reinforcement that past and present were being merged seamlessly, the government announced that the new entity created in 1988 was to retain the old acronym and be known as "Saudi Aramco." Now the Saudi company was to invite Americans to join its board of directors as the American company had done with Saudi appointments 30 years earlier. The Americans included Harold Haynes and James Kinnear, the retired heads of Chevron and Texaco respectively.

While during the course of the concession there were on occasion sharply divergent positions on the Aramco and Saudi government sides, few left permanent scars, and only once was it necessary to resort to outside arbitration (when Aramco resisted, successfully, the government's interference with the company's prerogative of determining whose tankers would carry oil exports: the Aristotle Onassis dispute). As former Oil Minister Yamani summed up the relationship: "In a closed room we sit down and quarrel, but finally we reach an agreement."6

Character of the Saudi-American Relationship

The fact that Aramco brought on its own redundancy by training and educating Saudis to eventually displace Americans and other nationals was the most important factor in a concession relationship that was generally amiable. Another factor was the nature of the communication between the two parties. Most routine contacts with the government's municipal, provincial and ministry offices were channeled through the company's Government Relations organization. This insured a uniform approach to presenting and resolving problems. Mutual confidence grew out of the Americans making "courtesy calls," when no pressing business issues were tabled, and by the fact that individual American "relations reps" and individual Saudi counterparts would deal with each other over a period of many years, sometimes rising in their respective hierarchies together.

In addition, Aramco found itself fulfilling the role of a quasi-governmental body in its areas of operations because Saudi Arabia, at least until the late 1950s, lacked the money, expertise and structure to implement and manage public works. By this time there was a dual tension at work. Aramco knew the immense magnitude of the oil reserves embraced by the concession and wanted to preserve its exclusive access to them. Saudi Arabia recognized that Aramco had the expertise and personnel on the ground to deliver infrastructure and services beyond what had been envisioned by either side in the concession agreement. Both sides played on advantage and need.

Pressured by the government and prodded by its Saudi employees, the company embarked on an expensive program to build -- and pay the operating costs for -- public schools in the Eastern Province in a number that would accommodate on an ongoing basis a pupil population equal to the number of children of the company's Saudi employees.

There were other of these "community citizenship" programs undertaken by Aramco in the early years, most of them undoubtedly in its self-interest, such as medical care for employees (and, later, their families); health education in surrounding towns and villages; malaria control; trachoma research; farming operations; loans and technical assistance to local contractors and industry; and support for public utility development.

The early Saudi workforce was made up to a large extent of Bedouins drawn off the desert by wages and opportunity, and in the early days they lived without their families in bachelor housing, which contributed to high turnover. To address this problem, the company introduced a home ownership program that, in addition to subsidized loans and free lots, involved creating housing developments complete with utility lines and streets.

Bonds between Americans and Saudis in general also grew over time, in large part because Aramco was a company in its own right, not a consortium made up of staff seconded from member companies for short terms of one to three years. For Americans hired up until the late 1970s, remaining on the payroll was virtually assured -- poor performance cases and cyclical cutbacks excepted -- and careers of 20 to 30 years in the Kingdom were common. Business decisions were no doubt influenced by this "home town" bias, since Aramco management in Dhahran would be more inclined than the shareholder companies in the U.S. to see the value of deploying capital into non-oil activities such as public school construction. Local management could lobby successfully for "good citizenship" expenditures by arguing that such investments prolonged a lucrative investment. On a personal level, friendships and family associations formed in this environment have lasted into retirement for Saudis, Americans and other nationalities, and there are Saudis and Americans in the company today whose parents and grandparents worked together in Aramco.

The Continuing Saudi-American Energy Industry Partnership

The Saudi-owned and run company is a far more complex and far-flung enterprise than the American-owned Aramco. Aramco explored for oil, drilled wells, processed oil and gas, then filled the oil and product tankers that arrived at its loading ports. Saudi Aramco retains all of those functions, while assuming responsibility for all crude oil, gas and product marketing internationally and domestically. Saudi Aramco bought or built 21 tankers through its Vela International Marine subsidiary and entered into joint venture refining-marketing operations in the U.S., Philippines, South Korea, and Greece.

Saudi Aramco maintains business relationships with all of the former "Aramco Four." Its first joint venture abroad (through its U.S. subsidiary Saudi Refining, Inc.) was in 1988 with Texaco in what was named Star Enterprise, which included refineries and a network of Texaco gasoline stations. (Later, Star gave way to Motiva, a partnership with Shell Oil Company, and Texaco was bought out as a consequence of federal regulations relating to the Texaco-Chevron merger.) Continuing associations with former Aramco shareholders include a joint venture refinery in Yanbu (originally with Mobil, now ExxonMobil), joint ventures for in-Kingdom lubricating oil production and distribution (originally Mobil, now ExxonMobil), and an on-shore concession agreement in the Saudi Arabia-Kuwait Neutral Zone (originally Texaco -- which had bought out Getty -- now ChevronTexaco).

In 1998, Crown Prince Abdullah invited bids on projects to develop the Kingdom's natural gas resources in what amounted to competition with state-owned Aramco, fracturing the long-held assumption in the industry that inviting international oil companies to return to upstream involvement was taboo. ExxonMobil has the lead role in a proposal for developing the South Ghawar Area, potentially a multi-billion dollar project if negotiations move forward successfully.

Conclusion

Much has been written about the sheer size of Saudi Arabia's oil industry, its 100-plus years of oil reserves, and the excess (and costly) oil production capacity that it can deploy to moderate price shocks, as demonstrated during the 1991 Gulf War. Yet the more compelling story is how these assets have come to be managed in such a brief span of time by a previously unindustrialized people.

The definitive study of human resource development across Saudi Arabia up until the mid-1980s was written by Joy Winkie Viola, who was Dean of the Office of International Affairs at Northeastern University when her book was published in 1986.7 In it, she quotes Oil Minister Yamani in his foreward to Aramco's 1982 Annual Report: "Relations between the government of Saudi Arabia and Aramco, like all complex associations, were not without their ups and downs, but wisdom and rationality have always dominated." The Minister went on to recount "the creation [by Aramco] of a Saudi staff who are pioneers in the understanding of the mysteries of the petroleum industry."

Viola went on to observe:
These are not the words of an embittered government, nor are they the angry charges of a government that sought to nationalize its natural resources without compensation to the company that developed them -- as has been the case in more than one developing nation. . . . . As many scholars have attested, the Aramco experience remains the one single collaborative effort and force that cemented the economic foundation of a new nation in the 1930s and vastly contributed to the "special relationship" that still exists between Saudi Arabia and the United States today.

Endnotes:
1. James Terry Duce speaking to Harry Snyder as recounted in Saudi Aramco and Its People: A History of Training, Aramco Services Company, 1998, p. 42.
2. The Mulligan Papers, Special Collections, Georgetown University Library, "Presentation on International Oil," speech by T.C. Barger, Shreveport, LA, April 1977.
3. Notes provided by B.C. Nelson to R. L. Norberg.
4. Saudi Aramco and Its People: A History of Training, p. 19.
5. Aramco and Its World, Arabian American Oil Company, Washington, D.C., 1980, p. 235.
6. Ibid.
7. Human Resource Development in Saudi Arabia: Multinationals and Saudization, International Human Resources Development Corporation, 137 Newbury Street, Boston, MA 02116. Also see Saudi Aramco and Its People: A History of Training, Aramco Services Company, Houston, Texas, 1998.


Chronology of American-Saudi Oil Industry Relationships

1933: Saudi government signs concession agreement with Standard Oil of California (later Chevron), which operates concession through new subsidiary, California-Arabian Standard Oil Company (CASOC).

1937: The Texas Company (later Texaco) joins CASOC as 50 per cent shareholder.

1944: Name changed to Arabian American Oil Company.

1948: Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (later Exxon) and Socony-Vacuum (later Mobil) join as shareholders. Each holds a one-third interest, except for Socony-Vacuum with 10 percent.

1973: Saudi government buys into the Aramco enterprise with first increment of 25 percent.

1980: Saudi government makes final payment for 100 percent of Aramco, with financial effect from 1976.

1988: Saudi National Oil Company created by Saudi government to succeed Aramco; new company to retain old acronym and go by "Saudi Aramco."

1988: Joint venture of Saudi Aramco (via U.S. subsidiary) and Texaco established as Star Enterprise.

1984: Texaco acquires Saudi concession (formerly held by Getty) in Saudi-Kuwait Partitioned Zone.

2001: American and European oil companies invited by Saudi Arabia to conceptualize and bid on an estimated $25-billion in natural gas development projects in the Kingdom. Exxon and Mobil (now one company, ExxonMobil) currently negotiating for project in South Ghawar.

The Top Five
Annual Oil Production
(millions of barrels daily)
1. Saudi Arabia 8,7681
2. United States 7,717
3. Russia 7,056
4. Iran 3,688
5. Mexico 3,560
Note 1. 11.8% of total world production

Proven Crude Oil Reserves
(billions of barrels)
1. Saudi Arabia 261.81
2. Iraq 112.5
3. United Arab Emirates 97.8
4. Kuwait 96.5
5. Iran 89.7
Note 1. One-quarter of total world proven reserves

*Source: BP Statistical Review of Energy, June 2002

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert L. Norberg was employed by Aramco (later Saudi Aramco) from 1964-1995. His assignments in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, were in Public Affairs (1964-72) and Government Affairs (1972-85). He was transferred to Aramco's Washington, D.C. office in 1985, and retired as Director of that office in 1995.


© St. Petersburg Times
published July 21, 2002

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- A silvery shaft of glass and steel as tall as the Eiffel Tower, the new Kingdom Center soars high into the desert sky.

On the lower floors are offices and apartments, a Four Seasons hotel and a mall anchored by Saks Fifth Avenue. The upper half forks into two slim columns capped by an observation deck with nothing but open air in the middle.

Saudis have a dark joke about the place: The hole is there so a plane can fly through.

The Saudi government was quick to condemn the events of Sept. 11, when 19 hijackers crashed jets into another high-rise landmark, New York's World Trade Center, as well as the Pentagon and a remote Pennsylvania field.

It took far longer, though, for Saudis to admit that 15 of the hijackers were their own countrymen, recruited by a scion -- Osama bin Laden -- of one of Saudi Arabia's most prominent families. Now that they have accepted that, many Saudis see the hijackings as not just an attack against America but also against their country and its hugely profitable, if often problematic, relationship with the United States.

Saudi Arabia is America's biggest source of imported crude oil, supplying 10 percent of U.S. energy needs. And since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the kingdom has been host to thousands of U.S. troops stationed near Riyadh.

"The true victim of Sept. 11 in terms of politics is the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United States," said Dr. Fahad Almubarak of the Shura Council, advisory body to Saudi's ruling family.

"There are extremists in Saudi Arabia who would like to see all U.S. bases out of here because they fear U.S. influence is going to jeopardize our independence. And there are organizations and countries that do not like Saudi positions. In this day, one could easily have many enemies."

Like many council members, Almubarak went to school in the United States (he has a doctorate from the University of Houston) and professes great fondness for Americans. Yet even Western-educated Saudis say U.S. support for Israel and its hard line toward the Palestinians has fomented extremism here and throughout the Arab world. At the same time, they accuse the U.S. media of fostering a one-dimensional view of Saudi Arabia, portraying it as little more than a breeding ground of Islamic fanatics.

In reality, Saudis insist, the attacks were the work of a few brainwashed young men whose actions in no way reflect mainstream Saudi thought or the tenets of Islam.

"The fact the hijackers had Saudi nationalities doesn't mean all Saudis are bad," said Prince Abdullah Bin Faisal, head of the country's investment authority. "It's like saying all Americans are bad because somebody goes out and kills school kids."

Still, Sept. 11 and the Saudi connections underscore the tensions in Saudi society -- tensions inevitable and disturbing in a key U.S. ally that is clearly struggling to reconcile Western-style progress with traditional Islamic values.

In many respects, Saudi Arabia has made remarkable strides since oil was discovered in 1938. Billions of dollars have been spent transforming mud-walled villages into modern cities with hospitals, universities, striking office towers and eight-lane highways. Walk through a food court -- McDonald's, KFC, Starbucks are big here -- and you might think you were in a U.S. mall.

But the clash between cultures can produce jarring inconsistencies. Store mannequins display sexy lingerie, yet the mutaween, or religious police, might lash a woman on the wrist for letting a strand of hair escape from under her veil. Satellite dishes bring in risque fare from all over the globe, yet Saudi Internet providers block the Web site of England's Middlesex Cricket Club because it has "sex" in the name.

Even some Saudis concede that efforts to shield society from Western "decadence," as many fundamentalists call it, is like trying to hold back the ocean with a sponge.

"We can't provide too much government protection -- it is up to me to teach my children what to watch and to create firewalls in their minds," said the Shura Council's Almubarak, who has five children age 9 to 18.

"It's not to the point where Saudi society is losing its values but it is a tough battle."

The tensions are exacerbated by a sobering reality: Saudi Arabia's boom days are behind it.

As oil revenues have dropped, Saudis have seen their per capita income plunge from $19,000 -- among the highest in the world -- to less than $8,000 in just 20 years. Saudis who once might have lived in big villas and driven gas-guzzling Lincolns are moving into apartments and buying fuel-efficient Nissans.

In scenes unthinkable two decades ago, dirty Saudi boys hawk bottled water at intersections in Jeddah, the second-largest city, and root through garbage bins in search of food. Yet just a few miles away, the Red Sea waterfront is lined with the enormous palaces of Crown Prince Abdullah, the acting Saudi ruler, and other members of the 30,000-strong Saudi royal family.

While the economic slump has widened the gap between rich and poor, fueling resentment of the royals, it has done little to reduce the high Saudi birth rate. More than 70 percent of Saudis are younger than 19 and millions of young Saudi men are entering the job market as the economy continues to weaken.

The competition for jobs is increasingly joined by Saudi women. They are graduating from college in record numbers, only to run up against the constraints of a conservative Islamic society that keeps men and women from working together anywhere but hospitals.

But in a country that tolerates only limited dissent, what complaints there are tend to focus on government policies rather than on religion. For better or worse, Saudis agree, Islam is what defines their country.

"Without Islam in Saudi Arabia you would not have Saudi Arabia," said Prince Sultan Bin Salman, head of the country's tourism commission. "Islam is the glue that holds Saudi Arabia together."
Eating behind a curtain

Saudi Arabia was the birthplace of the Prophet Mohammed and is home to the two holiest sites in Islam: Mecca and Medina. The modern kingdom was founded in 1932 by Abdul Aziz al-Saud, whose descendants wield absolute power today within the confines of Islamic law.

Geographically and culturally isolated for much of their history, Saudis cling to an interpretation of Islam -- Wahhabism -- that seems rigid and anachronistic to Westerners yet is tolerated to a surprising degree by even moderate Saudis.

That's why Saudi journalist Nada Al Fayez says she doesn't mind wearing an abaya, a long black robe, even though she often criticizes the country's treatment of women. The abaya meets the Islamic decree that women dress modestly in public.

"I must wear it. This is my religion and my roots," says Al Fayez, a 26-year-old who plays the stock market and writes an investment column. "For another Arab woman it might be easy to take off the abaya but I am a Saudi. It's like I'm carrying history in my heart."

To Saudis, few concepts are more alien than America's separation of church and state. Here, Islam permeates every facet of life:

The big Al-Azizia supermarkets throughout Riyadh are as well-stocked as their U.S. counterparts, with one notable exception. Because of the Muslim ban on pork, the meat counter has "turkey ham" and "beef ham."

Shoppers at Al-Azizia and other stores in the kingdom are careful to watch the clock. When prayer time comes -- as it does five times a day -- the lights are dimmed, the doors locked and the checkout counters closed. Anyone in line must wait 15 minutes before business resumes.

At the recent kickoff of the Jeddah summer tourism festival, an imam began the night's entertainment by reading passages from the Koran, the Muslim holy book.

That was followed by a laser show. Among the special effects: A huge laser version of the Koran, pages flipping open in time to a thumping beat.

And on Saudi Arabian Airlines, which boasts a modern fleet of Airbuses and Boeing 777s, a recorded voice repeats Allahu Akbar -- God is great -- as the plane taxis for takeoff.

The big TV screen in front of each cabin shows a compass pointing to Mecca so Muslim passengers will know which way to face at prayer time. At the back of the 777 is a space where up to nine people can spread their prayer rugs.

"And they can hold on to this bar if it gets turbulent," points out Faisal Al Sabyani, a veteran flight attendant. Saudi women cannot hold such jobs because it would require them to work with Saudi men; all the airline's female flight attendants are from Morocco or other Arab countries.

Indeed, the Saudi interpretation of Islam has produced what often seem to be parallel universes, one occupied by men, the other by women.

The Saudi American Bank, like most other banks in the kingdom, has separate ladies' branches. They are reached by separate entrances and staffed by women.

At Herfy's, a Saudi-owned chain of fast-food restaurants, the booths in the "family section" are curtained. That way women can eat without being seen by male customers.

When parents in Riyadh want to take their kids out for an evening of fun, the men might head to the kingdom's only ice skating rink. No women are allowed. But men can't go to the popular Women's Park, where mothers spread blankets on the grass and chat as the kids ride roller coasters and tilt-a-whirls.

Even marriage ceremonies, typically held in rented wedding halls, are segregated. The groom enjoys dinner with his male friends and relatives in one room, while the bride and her female guests dine and dance in another. The only time bride and groom get together is to pose for wedding pictures with the immediate family.

Saudi women have far fewer rights than men. They can't drive or travel abroad without a husband's permission. Daughters can inherit only half as much as sons, and a woman's testimony is given only half the weight of a man's in court.

Al Fayez, the journalist, is among the Saudi women who are starting to speak out. The Koran, she says, guarantees women equal rights and contains no ban on women working.

"The Prophet Mohammed was working for a woman in her business before he married her -- she was a businesswoman," Al Fayez said. "What we have here are policies and processes that must be changed -- there is nothing in Islam" that keeps women out of the workplace.

Al Fayez has publicly criticized the Ministry of Planning for hiring women only as clerks and translators and not having women in positions to help draft the country's five-year plan.

"We are an Islamic society in which men and women are segregated. How can men plan for women when they don't know what's happening in the women's sector?

"We must open positions and create jobs for women. The woman power in the kingdom is very high but we are not using it."
Saudi newspapers 'are more interesting'

In a culture like Saudi Arabia's, change comes slowly. But there are signs it is coming.

For the first time, women are allowed to have photo ID cards although they must get permission from a male family member.

Women who uncover their hair or faces in public are less likely these days to receive a disciplinary lash from the mutaween, the religious police. And men and women who aren't related have become a bit more relaxed about meeting for coffee, especially outside the "Bible Belt," as Saudis jokingly call their ultraconservative capital, Riyadh.

Saudi women also are moving into more occupations, including some that bring them into direct contact with men. Almubarak of the Shura Council said he was surprised, but not upset, when the female nutritionist he sought for advice shut the door to her office once he was inside.

"I thought maybe she would not want to do that," he said, because they weren't related. Almubarak, a financial consultant, said he also has "Saudi women calling me and trying to sell me investment products."

The 120-member Shura Council remains all male and no one expects that to change anytime soon. Yet it tries to get input from women in drafting legislation. When a Shura committee considered a retirement program for female workers, women were invited to give testimony, albeit from another room via closed circuit TV.

"Some say women are in our hearts and minds -- any time we think of an issue we always think of women," said Almubarak, whose wife is a professor at a women's university. "I think that's not enough. . . . I personally would like to see more participation of women at all levels of government. More participation will bring better balance, and the more they participate the more they will create opportunities for other women."

The experience in Saudi hospitals has shown that men and women can work comfortably together. Khulud Kadi, a 30-year-old woman who runs the Internet department at the King Fahad National Guard Hospital in Riyadh, has eight employees, half of them men.

Working relationships with the men are excellent, she says. "I have never been in a situation where I had a problem dealing with them even though some come from conservative families. I think people are getting used to the concept."

The gradual opening in society is reflected in a freer press. While Saudis in private often joke or grumble about members of the royal family, direct public criticism of Islam or the regime remains taboo. But Saudi papers are becoming bolder in attacking government policies on education, employment, health care and other matters.

"Suddenly Arabs are telling me they are reading Saudi newspapers because they're more interesting," said Reem Mohammed Al Faisal, a photographer and granddaughter of the late King Faisal.

When a fire in a girls' school in Mecca killed 15 students last March, Saudi papers blasted the religious establishment after witnesses claimed the mutaween had kept the girls from fleeing because they were not properly covered. And the disastrous World Cup performance of the Saudi soccer team -- it was shut out in all three matches -- prompted a wave of stories slamming the Youth Welfare Federation, headed by King Fahd's son, for not adequately preparing the team.

Among the most aggressive papers has been the English-language Arab News, which circulates throughout the kingdom. It has exposed a camp in which foreign workers were housed in 110-degree heat with no air conditioning, and revealed that a government hospital in Jeddah was so deeply in debt employees would get only 10 percent of their salaries.

Because it is based in Jeddah, the Arab News routinely reports on the declining quality of life in the city, a once-pleasant place now plagued by drugs, squalor and prostitution. A recent column bemoaned the city's "lost beauty and charm" and said government officials "must publicly admit their failure to do the job."

If criticism is based on accurate reporting, it is generally tolerated by authorities, said Khaled Al-Maeena, the paper's editor-in-chief. But there are limits. Al-Maeena's counterpart at another Saudi newspaper was canned after printing a poem that accused Islamic judges of being corrupt and obeying "tyrants."

Moderate Saudis see even the minor increase in press freedom as evidence society is maturing enough that Saudis can engage in constructive self-criticism. While the papers remain full of anti-Israel venom, there is even the occasional call for Arabs to examine their views and rhetoric.

In a recent column, for example, Reem Al Faisal castigated Muslims who rue that Hitler "didn't finish the job." Islam, she reminded readers, is a religion with a long history of peaceful co-existence with Jews.

The big question is whether Saudi society can continue on its moderating course, however glacial that might be.

"We are at a crossroads," says Al Faisal's brother, Amr, a Jeddah architect. "We either make the right decisions or we have a serious problem. This is why Sept. 11 was so bad -- it came at a crossroads. We are a society that relies on evolution and our evolution has been jarred and shocked by Sept. 11."

-- Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com.

American Woman Jailed in Saudi Arabia for Sitting With Men at Starbucks

Sharia Alert. A "venti" Sharia Alert, with an extra shot of tyranny, and hold the joy, freedom of movement, and free association. From Fox News:

A 37-year-old American businesswoman and married mother of three is seeking justice after she was thrown in jail by Saudi Arabia's religious police for sitting with a male colleague at a Starbucks coffee shop in Riyadh, according to a report in The Times of London on Thursday.

Yara, who does not want her last name published for fear of retribution, was bruised and crying when she was freed from a day in prison after she was strip-searched, threatened and forced to sign false confessions by the Kingdom's “Mutaween” police, The Times reported.

“Some men came up to us with very long beards and white dresses. They asked ‘Why are you here together?'. I explained about the power being out in our office. They got very angry and told me what I was doing was a great sin,” recalled Yara, who wears an abaya and headscarf, like most Saudi women.

The men were from Saudi Arabia's Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, a police force of several thousand men charged with enforcing dress codes, sex segregation and the observance of prayers.

Yara says she was interrogated, strip-searched and forced to sign and fingerprint a series of confessions pleading guilty to her “crime,” the Times reported.

Yara was visited yesterday by officials from the American Embassy, who promised they would file a report.

Posted by Marisol at February 7, 2008 10:51 AM

Think about issues like culture shock and oil as a primary resource and how that relates to why Americans are there.

Lots of research for each role

This is something that Mr. Lewis posted earlier about Google

Google employees are pampered. They are 3rd sector post industrial employees with college educations so it is harder to find employees with this level of skill in other countries. You cannot really outsource these jobs and because it is hard to find someone this good anywhere ion the world, it is hard to get someone to replace them. These are the people who can demand to get pampered because they are competitive even on a global scale and the time-space compression that has happened does not affect these jobs. These workers can demand more because they are the very best on a global scale. They do not even need to unionize because their skill level is so high that it would be difficult for the company to replace them.
Let me know what other help you want

If you have this, try and find out all of the ways their pampered and relate this to what I mentioned above.


Just incase you missed the other Google Sites Here they are again.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/googlife

http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/static.py?page=benefits.html


Google worker

If you need help on finding information on google you can go to google's official site on youtube and they have many videos with employees speaking. from the massage therapist to the chef or even the tech engineer. they have many helpful videos. GOOD LUCK


If you Have Google Worker, Youtube Working At Google









Sector Roles Assignment

You must find and use specific details about your role in class. In other words, research your role and know some very good details that you can apply to the relevant aphg ideas. If not, you are not getting a grade higher than a D on this project.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigeria#Crime

Take a look at Nigeria's overall economy, population growth, employment issues and see why this might be a problem in this country. You could also look at the interesting article/section on happiness in Nigeria. This is an interesting sidenote.



Nigeria

Identity Crisis
By STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT

Counting the Cost of a ‘Chargeback’

Steven Peisner stabbed excitedly at his computer keyboard, trolling through a chat room where identity fraudsters buy and sell names, addresses, Social Security numbers and PINs. Some of the hustlers are American, but others are from Russia, India, the Philippines, Nigeria, Vietnam, Iran — any place, really, where young men and computers cohabit.

How does this market work? If someone has just hacked a hospital database and come away with 10,000 “fulls” (a full set of personal information, down to your mother’s maiden name), he’ll post his asking price (typically $10 to $30 per full, depending on the freshness), along with a sampling of the data to prove its legitimacy. Fraudsters also post specific queries. “Here’s one,” Peisner said, reading from his screen: “ ‘Need female WU confirmer. Your share: 40 percent.’ That means they need someone to go to the Western Union office in some coffee shop in Romania to pick up the cash — because Vlad can do a lot of things, but he can’t be Amy Weiss from Manhattan Beach, Calif.”

There are as many varieties of identity theft today as there are varieties of, say, mushrooms. And there are nearly as many misconceptions — about the scope of the problem, the incentives to stop it and how its costs are borne. For starters, there are indications that identity theft has peaked. A recent study by Javelin Strategy and Research claimed that 8.4 million U.S. adults suffered some form of identity fraud in 2006, down from 10.1 million in 2002. Bear in mind that the Javelin study was paid for in part by three financial-services institutions, which certainly have an incentive to alleviate customer fears. But the Federal Trade Commission also reports a leveling off, as does the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which runs one of the most aggressive identity-theft task forces in the country.

Still, for those so inclined, identity theft remains an extraordinarily appealing crime. In his new book, “Stealing Your Life,” the reformed fraudster Frank Abagnale calls identity theft an “elementary” crime with “enormous” upside and a “minuscule” chance of being caught. Most police departments don’t have the staffing or know-how to even pursue the perpetrators; the F.B.I., meanwhile, usually won’t get involved unless the fraud reaches $100,000.

Which raises an obvious question: If law enforcement doesn’t care about identity theft, who does?

The answer would also seem obvious: You, the potential victim. But according to the Javelin data, people probably worry way too much about identity theft. Seventy-three percent of victims incur no out-of-pocket expenses whatsoever; the unlucky minority loses, on average, $2,000 — hardly chump change but far less than the scare stories would have us believe. And in more than half the cases of identity theft, the thief is not a stranger at all but rather a relative, friend or co-worker.

So while you were being frightened into never again using a credit card, and perhaps shredding your child’s report card, most of the cost of identity theft was actually being paid by someone else.

Surely, then, it is the banks and credit-card companies that are desperate to stop the problem? Sgt. Robert Berardi, who runs the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department’s ID Theft Task Force, has found otherwise. “The banks are in conflict between security and making a profit,” he says. In an industry that is reluctant to add even an ounce of friction to a customer’s purchase, Berardi says identity theft is seen as simply the cost of doing business. Indeed, a recent report by TowerGroup, a research firm owned by MasterCard Worldwide, noted that “banks are not yet ready to dedicate resources to solving any ID theft problem.”

So if the banks, the consumer and the police aren’t sufficiently incentivized to stop identity theft, who is?

The merchant. That is what Peisner, a 44-year-old veteran of the credit-card business, has discovered. “Let’s say one of these hackers takes the information they find in a chat room,” he says. “He goes to the Sony Web site, buys a laptop computer for $1,000, and a month later the actual cardholder gets the billing statement. He calls up his bank and says, ‘I didn’t order a computer from Sony.’ At that point, the credit-card issuer, let’s say Citibank, sends a ‘chargeback’ through the interchange system to the acquiring bank, and that $1,000 is taken right out of Sony’s bank account, and they also get hit with a $25 chargeback fee.” So the merchant has lost the money from the sale (as well as the laptop) while paying the chargeback fee, other bank fees and processing and shipping costs. “If you’re a merchant,” Peisner says, “you have all the liability.”

And, therefore, all the incentive to stop the crime. That is why Peisner recently started a company, Sell It Safe, which aims to help merchants and banks screen their customers in online and telephone transactions. His main weapon is a massive live database of stolen personal information, which a merchant can instantaneously check to learn whether Amy Weiss is really Amy Weiss or if perhaps she is really Vlad. In an era when information flows like water, Peisner is hoping to add a filter onto a few million faucets.

Along the way, he has become a good Samaritan. When he comes upon stolen data in a hacker chat room, Social Security numbers and passwords strewn about like underwear after a burglary, he often personally calls the victims. He reads off enough information to convince them of their misfortune and advises them to notify the police and the bank. Usually, they assume at first that he is a hustler himself, or at least a nut. But ultimately they are grateful. Peisner is helping them out, after all, and he doesn’t gloat.

This may be because Peisner himself recently responded to a phony e-mail message, commonly known as a phish, that supposedly came from eBay. He was in the throes of bidding on a Jack Nicklaus personal credit card — Peisner collects credit-card memorabilia with a passion bordering on mania — when he received the eBay phish telling him that his account would be suspended if he didn’t update his personal information. “I thought, It expires in 10 minutes — I better go in and turn my account back on,” he recalls.

If it could happen to Peisner, it could happen to anyone. In a recent academic paper called “Why Phishing Works,” three computer scientists (one from Harvard and two from Berkeley) ran a study and found that “the best phishing site was able to fool more than 90 percent of participants.”

Fortunately, most phishing sites are not designed by top-tier computer scientists with good English skills. One day recently, Peisner discovered a fake Bank of America Web site that asked for a customer’s account number, online ID, PIN, Social Security number and address. Only at the end of the form was the site’s illegitimacy — and the creator’s foreign origin — revealed, when it asked for information that should have baffled any American customer: “Father Maiden Name.”

Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt are the authors of “Freakonomics.” More information on the research behind this column is at www.freakonomics.com


Nigerian Letter or "419" Fraud

Nigerian letter frauds combine the threat of impersonation fraud with a variation of an advance fee scheme in which a letter, mailed from Nigeria, offers the recipient the "opportunity" to share in a percentage of millions of dollars that the author, a self-proclaimed government official, is trying to transfer illegally out of Nigeria. The recipient is encouraged to send information to the author, such as blank letterhead stationery, bank name and account numbers and other identifying information using a facsimile number provided in the letter. Some of these letters have also been received via E-mail through the Internet. The scheme relies on convincing a willing victim, who has demonstrated a "propensity for larceny" by responding to the invitation, to send money to the author of the letter in Nigeria in several installments of increasing amounts for a variety of reasons.

Payment of taxes, bribes to government officials, and legal fees are often described in great detail with the promise that all expenses will be reimbursed as soon as the funds are spirited out of Nigeria. In actuality, the millions of dollars do not exist and the victim eventually ends up with nothing but loss. Once the victim stops sending money, the perpetrators have been known to use the personal information and checks that they received to impersonate the victim, draining bank accounts and credit card balances until the victim's assets are taken in their entirety. While such an invitation impresses most law-abiding citizens as a laughable hoax, millions of dollars in losses are caused by these schemes annually. Some victims have been lured to Nigeria, where they have been imprisoned against their will, in addition to losing large sums of money. The Nigerian government is not sympathetic to victims of these schemes, since the victim actually conspires to remove funds from Nigeria in a manner that is contrary to Nigerian law. The schemes themselves violate section 419 of the Nigerian criminal code, hence the label "419 fraud."

Some Tips to Avoid Nigerian Letter or "419" Fraud:

*
If you receive a letter from Nigeria asking you to send personal or banking information, do not reply in any manner. Send the letter to the U.S. Secret Service, your local FBI office, or the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. You can also register a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission’s Consumer Sentinel.
*
If you know someone who is corresponding in one of these schemes, encourage that person to contact the FBI or the U.S. Secret Service as soon as possible.
*
Be skeptical of individuals representing themselves as Nigerian or foreign government officials asking for your help in placing large sums of money in overseas bank accounts.
*
Do not believe the promise of large sums of money for your cooperation.
*
Guard your account information carefully
*




Google Employee sites

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/googlife

http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/static.py?page=benefits.html


More Bolivia

La Paz: Memoirs of a Dancing Devil
By KATE WHEELER

In La Paz, the sun shines from April to October, nightfall the only significant interruption. Two and a quarter miles above sea level, the light of Bolivia's capital is so clear it begins to seem a form of cognizance. It showers like pure gold from the flawless paint-blue sky, filling perception with an ethereal, incorporeal splendor that challenges even the solidity of the carved granite that composes large parts of the city streets and buildings. This is no less than Inti, I decided, the mystical sun worshiped by the great Andean empires, Tiahuanaco and Inca.

I lived in La Paz half of last year, finishing a novel, while my fiance, David, an anthropologist, did fieldwork. We made our headquarters at the Residencial Rosario on Calle Illampu. Lined with crumbling Colonial buildings, Illampu was once the heart of the indigenous district. Now it lies at its northern, downhill edge.

Each morning when we parted the sun-warmed curtains of our bedroom, we had a vision of the glorious white, three-peaked Illimani massif, some 21,000 feet at its highest, southern pinnacle. Illimani is the city's apu, or tutelary deity, according to the Aymara religion; its name means ''perpetual.'' Whether the mountain is a deity or the deity resides atop the mountain is difficult even for local people to determine; one friend gently told us that perhaps it was a silly distinction. The apu Illimani speaks three languages and can respond to requests made in Spanish. It's visible from most points in La Paz, so beautiful that veneration is spontaneous. At dusk it is bathed in the color of oranges and strawberries; under a full moon it glows an unearthly whitish-blue, like neon.

As we left the hotel, the brujas would be just arriving at the corner of Illampu and Santa Cruz, peeling off the sheets of blue plastic that (not counting spells, presumably) are all that protect their stalls of medicinal herbs, Brazilian love charms, dried llama fetuses and bottled talismans through the chilly hours of darkness.

Most La Paz street vendors are women, dressed in full skirts, shawls and derbies. Derived from aristocratic fashions of 16th-century Spain, this garb now defines an urban indigenous woman of La Paz, known as a chola, or, more respectfully, a senora de pollera, a ''woman of the skirt.'' The newspaper woman, the dye sellers, the coca merchants under their green awnings, as well as sundry transient vendors lining the four corners and eight sidewalks, were nearly all dressed in this expensive fashion. (The Tambo Quirquincho museum, on the Plaza Alonzo de Mendoza, devotes a room to chola dress.) Between them, the pavement was a male realm where buses, taxis and minivans whizzed and swerved.

Darting between hurtling vehicles, David and I traversed Santa Cruz and climbed the wooden stairs of El Lobo Cafe to breakfast on omelets and cappuccino at bargain prices, and to read the newspapers. I was addicted to Bolivian tabloids, with their gasping headlines (''Infidel Suicide Saved by Man of God''), their meat-and-potatoes shots of naked women and of hapless corpses at the morgue. Such reports were easier to bear than those of Bolivia's serious press, daily chronicling the deplorable antics of the ruling elite, censored only by a lack of apparent effect. In a country where the median income recently rose to about $1,000 a year, I read of the disappearance of donated ambulances, the police chief's embezzling from the pension fund, the bribe-rich Customs Bureau staffed by more than a dozen members of one family.

''Got to go,'' David would eventually say. ''What is my love's plan today?'' Suddenly, I'd be seized by a conviction that, for my novel's sake, I'd go out into the city, absorb impressions.

Plaza San Francisco was, for me, the city's most essential site. It was on the way to most things, so I went there nearly every day. Its church, begun in 1549, the year after La Paz was founded, is the city's greatest building and one of the New World's foremost religious monuments (ignore the lumpish tower, a late addition). The vast plaza in front of it is constantly alive with mountebanks, zealots, beggars, fake-fossil sellers and rows of older people relaxing to gossip. It was easy, there, to let my imagination reel out across the centuries.

Soundlessly, under the streets, runs the Choqueyapu River. The V of its bed makes sense out of the city. It makes getting lost almost impossible: walk downhill from anywhere and you'll end up on the main boulevard. It also protects from wind and freezing temperatures, the reason why the Spanish moved La Paz here three days after founding it up on the altiplano. ''Choqueyapu'' means ''gold farm,'' and chroniclers never omit gold from the location's virtues. In 1777, a 42-pound nugget was found in a tributary stream.

Now even tin mining has collapsed, and the Choqueyapu is paved over. But San Francisco Church remains, a temple to the Spanish boom. In the years of its construction, Bolivia was synonymous with wealth. Its extraordinary mineral resources founded cities, built churches, fueled the economy of Europe. La Paz was a of seat of Spanish power, and San Francisco was its main church, from which armies of Christianizing priests set forth, leaving anonymous converts to carve a facade. The result is an indigenous Baroque masterpiece, resembling a wedding cake iced with granite vines, monkey faces, flowers and naked women. The sculptors were lucky: according to one estimate, eight million people died after being forced into slave labor in the silver mines.

The church's interior darkness was shocking, so cavernous, cold and stony that I always felt alone. Far, far off at the end of the nave, the grandiose carved and gilded altar inspired a sense of awe, while cryptlike vaults pressed down upon my soul, generating a desperate need for prayer. I wasn't sure I liked the atmosphere of religious gloom, but if my writing went poorly, I'd visit St. Anthony of Padua, with his purple neon halo, and ask him to find the next sentence for me. On the day I shipped my final draft to Boston, I came here to give thanks.

From Plaza San Francisco, the boulevard's irresistibly gentle slope draws footsteps gently downward, past monuments and flower gardens, fancy hotels and movie palaces. On down, past the university, begins an unmistakable increase in prosperity. Amid glassy condo towers, [cholas] grow scarcer on the sidewalks, reappearing hatless, as nannies and inexpert walkers of upper-class dogs.

In La Paz, the accustomed snobbery pertaining to altitude is reversed, with the rich living low and the poor pushed ever higher. The poor have the best views, especially if they live up around the airport, in El Alto. There, 1,500 feet higher than La Paz itself, the entire snowy cordillera is visible, peaks as magnificent as their names: Illampu, Chacaltaya, Huayna /Potos$(4$)i/, Mururata -- all [apus]. The rich have trickled off in the opposite direction, down the river valley into southern suburbs. In Zona Sur, 20-foot walls and hedges, sheltering enormous houses, arise from an arid, reddish landscape reminiscent of the Southwest in the United States.

I preferred, however, to roam the old heart (/Paceonos/ call it the ''old hoof'') of the city, where I assigned myself sweetly educational hours watching free videos at the folklore museum, admiring the National Theater or wandering into pebbled courtyards to discover an alabaster fountain or an intimate show of paintings. On Calle /Ja$(4$)en/, the secretive, subterranean Museum of Precious Metals was a garish black-and-gold surprise; and the wee Museum of the Bolivian Littoral, stubbornly wistful, a memorial to glories that do not exist, since Bolivia lost its coast to Chile after the War of the Pacifici (1879-83). I revisited the miniatures at the House of Murillo and the tiny clay dioramas in the Museo Costumbrista, which express the playfulness of Bolivian folk culture.

At noon, all doors slam shut, for three hours. Time stops. At midday, in the Plaza Murillo, eternity becomes palpable. Here it was good to bask in the warmth and light reflected from the golden buildings, as in a pool of melted margarine. The Plaza Murillo feels like the center of the republic, surrounded by graciously imposing buildings: the Presidential Palace, Congress, the Cathedral, the National Museum of Fine Arts and the recently refurbished Gran Hotel Paris (where David and I often ate dinner, serenaded by tango musicians so ancient they could barely step down from the tiny stage). Amid lovers, statuary and cooing pigeons, it was easier to doze off than believe that hundreds of people had been hanged, burned to death and murdered right here. In 1810, Pedro Domingo Murillo and eight cohorts were hanged, martyrs of the independence movement. In 1861, 70 politicians were executed in the Congress building. In 1875, revolutionaries set fire to the Presidential Palace, killing 130; at least 30 more died in the subsequent street battle. In 1939 President /Germ$(4$)an/ Busch committed suicide (or was assassinated) inside the rebuilt palace. In 1946, a mob dragged President Gualberto Villaroel out of it and strung him from a lamppost.

Today La Paz lives up to its peaceful name; I walked alone at night, though I kept an arm clamped over purse and camera. But its streets have too often run with blood and rung with bullets. Notorious even among Bolivia's dreadful dictators was Luis /Garc$(4$)ia/ Meza, who ruled in 1980-81 with help from the Nazi butcher Klaus Barbie. (Both men were subsequently imprisoned.)

And there are frequent street dramas, amazing for a visitor. The city is often paralyzed by protest marches. I saw a peasant crone bullwhipping an effigy of the president, and students enacting crucifixions on lampposts all up and down the Prado. ''Another strike,'' cabdrivers groaned, but then it was the turn of the [transportistas].

How, you may ask, could I be ecstatic in a country where the social compact is so disastrously eroded? Perhaps it should have been instructive to notice that, in La Paz's glaring luminosity, every wrought-iron balcony, market stall and human body drags along a slicing, cold, and absolute shadow. Objects are etched with unbearable sharpness. Still, though, I felt whole there.

Many factors influenced my relationship with La Paz, including the fact that I speak Spanish. Besides being drunk on light, I was moved by the persistent integrity of Andean Aymara culture, with its stubbornness, its playfulness, its adaptability and dignity.

Wandering in the streets above Illampu, the European influences that have filtered through Bolivia since the Conquest weaken. A new order becomes subtly palpable as you wander through the apparent chaos of the markets on Calle /Rodr$(4$)iguez/, Avenidas Tumusla or Buenos Aires, or the wildly congested streets of Pedrode la Gasca, Vicente Ochoa and Max Paredes. Gazing upon everything that is for sale, stacks of coffinlike men's shoes, mattresses, stolen goods, fresh livers; amid honking and shouting, intermittently catching sight of Illimani, you will discern the shape of another world. You may notice the grave respect with which women treat their babies, the formal clothing worn by laborers, how intimately connected are the city and the countryside. And you may also feel the intimations of an alternate calendar, a secret, sacred, playful meaning underlying the hurly-burly of commercial survival.

[Cholas] are the most visible sign of the strength of Aymara culture; festivals are another. Each Bolivian city and village, and nearly every urban neighborhood, has at least one, usually dedicated to a patron saint. Most take place during the sunny winter months, between May and September.

Hiking high up, to Calle Los Andes, or taking a cab or minivan to Avenida Collasuyo alongside the Cementerio, you enter the festival world. Bits of costume are sold at every corner shop, scraps of brass-band music lilt from unknown sources. Glass vitrines display the latest gorgeously grotesque masks and sequined disguises for festival dancers. There are slaves and overseers, Incas, untamed ''savages'' from the low rain forest and devils, or [diablos], representing miners, permitted sunlight just for one day, the festival. Thus the historic suffering of Bolivia's people is transformed, made fun of. These vast street parties connect people to spiritual forces, human communities, music, dancing, eating, drinking, play.

Bolivian festivals are relics of the ritual dances of the Inca and Aymara empires, filtered through Spanish tradition and then imbued with shifting, modern identity. La Paz's great festival is the Gran Poder (''Great Power''), which takes place in late May or June, on the the Saturday preceding the Feast of the Holy Trinity eight weeks after Easter. It is dedicated to a miraculous painting of Christ, now housed in an unobtrusive church on Calle Gallardo, near the corner of Eloy /Salm$(4$)on/. This Christ once had three faces, representing Father, Son and Holy Ghost. All but the central one were painted over in the 1930's, in accordance with an iconographic decree of the Church. As the story goes, the painting then began producing miracles. Some people say they can still see all three faces.

In honor of the Gran Poder, 30,000 dancers and 300,000 spectators pour through the streets, starting at the Cementerio, curving past the church, across Illampu and down onto the Prado. Dancing is a holy act, a vow of devotion. Dancers pray for forgiveness, salvation, health, good fortune in return for their exertions. Dawn to dusk, a river of splendor churns the narrow cobbled streets. Sun flashes on sequins, the mouths of tubas, satin flags. Waving plumes and glittering helmets seem excrescences of the light. The brass bands are deafening, playing waltzes and modified tarantellas, haunted by an underlying Andean pentatonic scale. [Cholas] twirl their most sumptuous skirts in unison; their husbands stagger under the weight of gigantic tin heads.

Preparations last most of the year. In the weeks just before Gran Poder, night practices are often held in the neighborhoods above Calle Illampu. David and I began following the sound of music to find them. We'd chat, ask questions; David would take notes. Soon someone would ask us, teasingly, if we were interested in dancing. I would say yes, and was often invited to join up on the spot. I'd been fascinated by Bolivian devil masks ever since I saw one as a child, so David helped me pick out a friendly [diablada], or devil group, the Diablada Internacional Juventud /Rel$(4$)ampago/.

The [diablada] is Bolivia's best-known dance. Devils may be male or female; all wear variations on the same costume, horned masks and horsehair wigs, a heavy skirt and breastplate like a Roman soldier's. We leap and kick, bossed around by an angel. Supposedly this depicts the victory of good over evil, but as a devil, I didn't feel too defeated as I roared, guffawed and pretended to scare the little kids.

Many of the more than 100 members of my [diablada] were sons and daughters of devils, and had been loyal to the [diablada] all their lives. Yet they welcomed me and other newcomers with open hearts. The angel, our dance leader, taught me a devil's explosive leaps, triangular hops and jerky arm movements. We practiced in a half-size cement soccer field, tucked behind the meat stalls of a market.

On the morning of the Gran Poder, my knees trembled with excitement. In the back rooms of a cheap boardinghouse, my devil friends helped me pin my scarves and pad my mask with bits of foam. Together we walked to the starting point. The band struck up the devils' melody. I pulled the mask over my face, and became unrecognizable. At the first shrill blast from the angel's whistle, I leaped, and ran and spun. By the end, nearly six hours later, I couldn't lift my feet above a shuffle. While I danced, I was happy.

After the parade, I walked back up to the hotel in La Paz's chilly, crystalline darkness. My mask dragged at my arm, almost too heavy to carry. The crowds had given way to street sweepers, noses and mouths shrouded in surgical masks. But the pumpkin-colored city lights had come on, like a trapped or fallen galaxy, blanketing the hills and revealing their forms. Meanwhile the actual galaxies still spilled across the clabbered heavens, just as thick and bright as city lights, though nowhere as near.

An Inside View

TIPS: La Paz's altitude can be grueling at first. Plan to take things easy for the first few days: choose short excursions, eat lightly, drink lots of water but no alcohol.

When taking photographs, be discreet. Except during a festival, most local people -- cholas in particular -- loathe being photographed. The same woman who smiles as she sells you picnic supplies may curse and hurl tomatoes at you if you point your camera at her.

Fresh-squeezed orange juice is safe to drink from street vendors, if you select a vendor who uses disposable plastic cups. But don't eat hot dogs, hamburgers or meat pasties from street carts. Meat in most restaurants is fine, but the newspapers have run exposes of the ingredients used in street hamburgers, which are hilarious -- but only if you have never eaten one.

LODGINGS: La Paz has several hotels of international style, standard and price. The Radisson Plaza, 2177 Avenida Arce (telephone: 591-2-44-11-11), has double rooms for about $180 a night. The centrally located Hotel Presidente, at 920 Calle Potosi and Sanjines (591-2-367-103; fax: 591-2-354-013), charges $155 and offers a pool, sauna and Jacuzzi. The Ritz Aparthotel, on leafy Plaza Isabel la C1/3tolica (591-2-43-31-31), has rooms with kitchenettes for a similar rate.

For those who prefer an old-style grand hotel, the Gran Hotel Paris, Plaza Murillo and Bolivar (591-2-31-91-70), remodeled in 1995, is the place. It offers double rooms for $100 a night, with bath and cable television. For longer stays, the modestly priced Hotel Residencial Rosario is at 704 Calle Illampu (591-2-31-61-56).

DINING: Many restaurants are closed Sunday nights. Exceptions are hotel restaurants, and the informal El Lobo Cafe (corner of Santa Cruz and Illampu) and Cafe Ciudad (Plaza del Estudiante). When in doubt, call ahead. A meal for two at La Paz's finest restaurants costs between $15 and $40, including a bottle of wine or several liters of the excellent local beer. What follows are some personal favorites.

Cafe Paris, Plaza Murillo (591-2-31-91-70). Old World atmosphere, bread served with tongs, but no need to dress up. Good food (try the roast pork special), gas fire, live tango nightly.

El Vagon, 382 Calle Pedro Salazar, just below Plaza Avaroa in Sopocachi (591-2-43-24-77). Intimate, old-family atmosphere. Open weekdays from noon to 3 and from 7 to 11, and weekends from noon to 3. Try a long lunch on Sunday afternoon, when President Hugo Banzer sometimes goes there. Can close early if business is slow, so phone ahead.

Villa Pompei. Edificio Madrid, on Calle Ecuador, just west of Plaza Espana in Sopocachi (591-2-41-24-19). Each order of pasta is cooked in an individual pressure cooker to combat the effects of altitude.

SHOPPING: You can find endless gift ideas in the witches' market and antiques shops of Calle Sag1/3rnaga and Linares. Some of the world's finest alpaca sweaters are available from Millma on Calle Sag1/3rnaga and in the Radisson Plaza Hotel. Brightly painted tin signs and silkscreened banners can be commissioned from an artist named Magic, at 950 Calle Leon de la Barra, just below the Avenida Buenos Aires bridge. All music shops, but particularly the big ones on Avenida Buenos Aires (turn to the right if you're hiking up along Santa Cruz), are troves of obscure Andean sounds. Makers of festival gear on Calle los Andes and Avenida Collasuyo are often willing to sell their wares to foreigners; try Amanda Yana's devil store at 1013 Calle los Andes (591-2-32-86-27). For the adventurous, the automotive section of the vast Sunday-Thursday flea market in El Alto, on the plateau above La Paz, is fascinating in itself, as well as a great place to buy weird stickers and chromed hood ornaments shaped like horses, swans and women. Kate Wheeler

Kate Wheeler is the author of ''When Mountains Walked'' (Houghton Mifflin).

Che's Second Coming?
By DAVID RIEFF

The Bolivian Congress is an ornate building in the Spanish Colonial style. It is also a study in cognitive dissonance. Located on the Plaza Murillo, one of the central squares of Bolivia's main city, La Paz, it is flanked by the Presidential Palace, the Cathedral and the mausoleum of Bolivia's second president, Andrés Santa Cruz, who fought alongside Simón Bolívar. Around these decorous buildings, soldiers in red pseudo-19th-century uniforms stand at attention or march ceremoniously from point to point. Were it not for the fact that most of these young recruits have the broad Indian faces of the Andean altiplano, or high plains, and that those gawking at them in the square are also themselves mostly indigenous, it would be easy to become confused and believe you were in some remote corner of Europe, albeit the Europe of a century ago.

Inside the Congress, this effect is, if anything, even stronger: marble floors, waiters wearing white shirts and black bow ties, photos on the walls in the office wing of the building, many now yellowing with age, that show previous generations of congressmen among whom there is barely an Indian face to be seen. The burden of this faux-Europeanness seems overwhelming, until, that is, you walk down one of the main corridors and, at its end, find yourself confronted with an enormous, colorized, Madonna-like image of Ernesto (Che) Guevara, Fidel Castro's comrade in arms, the archrevolutionary who died 38 years ago in the foothills of the Bolivian Andes trying to bring a Marxist revolution to Bolivia, then as now the poorest and most racially polarized country in South America.

"This is a sanctuary to El Che," says Gustavo Torrico, an influential congressman from the radical MAS party, gesturing around his office. (Though mas literally means "more," the Spanish acronym stands for "Movement Toward Socialism.") There are not just a few pictures of Che; there are literally dozens of them, big, small and in between: Che with Castro, Che in the field, Che with his daughter in his arms, smiling, smoking, exhorting. The effect is overwhelming.

And yet, in Bolivia these days, Che's image is hardly restricted to the office of a few leftist politicians. To the contrary, it is everywhere. It stares down at you from offices and murals on city walls of La Paz and of Bolivia's second-largest city, Cochabamba, in working-class districts and slum communities and university precincts. In Bolivia, Che's image is not a fashion statement, as it is in Western Europe. When you see people wearing Che T-shirts, or sporting buttons with the martyred revolutionary's face, they are in deadly earnest. In Bolivia, only images of the Virgin Mary are more ubiquitous, and even then it's a close-run thing.

"Why do I like Che?" Evo Morales, MAS's leader and presidential candidate, said in response to my question, looking as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Morales is the first full-blooded Aymara, Bolivia's dominant ethnic group, to make a serious run for the presidency, which is in itself testimony to the extraordinary marginalization that Bolivian citizens of pure Indian descent, who make up more than half of the population, have endured since 1825, when an independent Bolivia was established. "I like Che because he fought for equality, for justice," Morales told me. "He did not just care for ordinary people; he made their struggle his own." We were sitting in his office in Cochabamba, a building in a condition somewhere between Spartan and derelict that Morales uses as a headquarters when he is in the city but that normally serves as the headquarters of the cocaleros, the coca-leaf growers from the country's remote, lush Chapare region. Morales started in politics as the leader of these cocaleros, and he has pledged that if he wins the presidential election scheduled for Dec. 18, one of his first acts will be to eliminate all penalties for the cultivation of coca, the raw ingredient in cocaine.

Unlike Che, who was a kind of revolutionary soldier of fortune, Morales does not have to adopt the revolutionary cause of Bolivia. He was born into it 46 years ago, in a tin-mining town in the district of Oruro, high in the Bolivian altiplano. Morales's family history is similar to that of many mining families who lost their jobs in the 1970's and 1980's, when the mines closed, and migrated to the Bolivian lowlands to become farmers, above all of coca leaf. (Limited cultivation of coca in certain indigenous regions is legal in Bolivia, and the cocaleros insist that the coca they grow is used only for "cultural purposes," but the Bolivian government and American drug-enforcement officials say that as much as 90 percent of the coca in Morales's home region, Chapare, makes its way into the international cocaine trade.) As an adolescent and a young man, Morales was a coca farmer, but his political work on behalf of the cocaleros soon propelled him into the leadership of a coalition of radical social movements that constitute the base of the MAS party.


How seriously to take Morales's tough talk about drug "depenalization" and nationalization of natural resources - oil, gas and the mines - is the great question in Bolivian politics today. Many Bolivian observers say they believe that MAS is nowhere near as radical as its rhetoric makes it appear. They note that conservative opponents of Brazil's current leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, also predicted disaster were he to be elected, but that in office Lula has proved to be a moderate social democrat. And MAS's program is certainly much more moderate than many of its supporters would like. Washington, however, is not reassured. Administration officials are reluctant to speak on the record about Morales (the State Department and Pentagon press offices did not reply to repeated requests for an interview), but in private they link him both to narco-trafficking and to the two most militant Latin American leaders: Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's leftist populist military strongman, and Fidel Castro.

Rogelio (Roger) Pardo-Maurer IV, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Western Hemisphere affairs and a senior adviser to Donald Rumsfeld on Latin America, said in a talk last summer at the Hudson Institute in Washington, "You have a revolution going on in Bolivia, a revolution that potentially could have consequences as far-reaching as the Cuban revolution of 1959." What is going on in Bolivia today, he told his audience, "could have repercussions in Latin America and elsewhere that you could be dealing with for the rest of your lives." And, he added, in Bolivia, "Che Guevara sought to ignite a war based on igniting a peasant revolution.. . .This project is back." This time, Pardo-Maurer concluded, "urban rage and ethnic resentments have combined into a force that is seeking to change Bolivia."

Morales has become almost as much of a bugbear to the Bush administration and many members of Congress on both sides of the aisle as Chávez or Castro. And for his part, Morales seems to revel in the role. At the summit meeting of the Organization of American States held in Mar del Plata, Argentina, earlier this month, he appeared with Chávez at a huge anti-American and anti-globalization rally just before the meetings began. The two men spoke in front of a huge image of Che Guevara. This is symbolic politics, but it is more than that too. The left is undergoing an extraordinary rebirth throughout the continent; Castro's survival, Chávez's rise, the prospect that the next president of Mexico will be Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the leftist mayor of Mexico City, and the stunning trajectory of Morales himself all testify to that fact. Pardo-Maurer is right that Morales's success reflects both Bolivia's current dire economic conditions and the perception of the indigenous majority that it is finally their time to come to power. But it is also a product of the wider popular mood in Bolivia and, for that matter, in much of contemporary Latin America.

For most Bolivians, globalization, or what they commonly refer to as neoliberalism, has failed so utterly to deliver the promised prosperity that some Bolivian commentators I met insisted that what is astonishing is not the radicalization of the population but rather the fact that this radicalization took as long as it did. Bolivia often seems now like a country on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Every day, peasants or housewives or the unemployed erect hundreds of makeshift roadblocks to protest shortages of fuel (a particularly galling affront in a country with vast hydrocarbon resources) or to demand increased subsidies for education or to air any of the dozens of issues that have aroused popular anger. The language of these protests is insistently, defiantly leftist, with ritual denunciations of multinational corporations, of the United States and of the old Bolivian elite, who are white, mostly descendants of Spanish and German settlers. Two presidents were chased out of office in the last two years by popular protests made up largely of MAS supporters: first Gonazalo Sánchez de Losada, then Carlos Mesa. (Since Mesa's government fell in June, the country has been run by a caretaker government overseen by a former chief justice of the supreme court.)

What distinguishes the situation in Bolivia from that of some of its neighbors is the way that ethnic politics and leftist politics have fused. It is this hybrid movement that Morales has led with such popular success. The hopes of many indigenous Bolivians are now incarnated in Morales's candidacy, and even many members of the old elite, including former President Sánchez de Losada, seem to believe that if he wins, Morales must be given the opportunity to rule.


When you meet him in person or read transcripts of his speeches, Morales seems like an unlikely vessel for these hopes. Whatever his gifts as an activist, and despite his obvious commitment to his cause, to an outsider, at least, he seems too young, too naïve, too provincial to serve as president of Bolivia. And when he talks of depenalizing coca production, as he often does, and insists that there will be nonnarcotic markets for coca leaf in China and Europe, it is hard to know whether he is simply being loyal to the cocalero constituency that first propelled him to prominence or whether he sincerely believes what he is saying. Certainly, such statements have played into the hands of his political enemies within Bolivia and abroad, who routinely accuse him of being in the pay of narco-traffickers - a charge Morales angrily denies and for which no concrete proof has ever been offered.

One of Morales's supporters told me, "Evo is a desconfiado, a man who tends to mistrust people until they show him a reason to think otherwise." That, along with the naiveté, is certainly the impression he gives. And yet surrounded by his supporters, visibly basking in their affection - an affection that often seems to border on devotion - Morales, or Evo, as almost everyone in Bolivia calls him, is a man transformed, a natural orator with extraordinary charisma. It is worrisome to think what the reaction in poor urban neighborhoods and in the altiplano will be if Morales does not become Bolivia's president.

Certainly, the candidate is starting to behave as if the office will soon be his. A telltale sign of this is the way Morales and MAS, while not repudiating previous statements about the changes they want to make in the Bolivian economy, seem to be leaving the door open to a more moderate approach. Increasingly in speeches and interviews, Morales has taken to emphasizing that when, for example, he speaks of nationalization, he is mainly speaking of Bolivia's reassertion of sovereignty over its natural resources and of partnership with multinational corporations, not, à la Fidel Castro, of the systematic expropriation of the multinationals' interests in Bolivia. Morales commented to me that "Brazil is an interesting model" for cooperation between the state and the private sector, and, he added, "so is China."

Only on the depenalization of coca production does he remain absolutely adamant and defiant, and in this, it must be said, he enjoys considerable popular support among not just the coca growers but also many Bolivians who believe that the cocaine problem should be addressed principally on the demand side, in the United States and Europe. A popular T-shirt in the markets of La Paz reads, "Coca leaf is not a drug."

Assuming there is no attempt to cancel the elections outright, Morales's most difficult political problem may be that MAS's platform is actually quite a bit more moderate than many of its rank-and-file supporters would like - or, indeed, than they understand it to be. As Roberto Fernandez Terán, a development economist at the University of San Simón in Cochabamba and an expert on Bolivia's external debt, told me, "I have no great hope that MAS will make profound changes." Senior MAS officials insist, however, that their nationalization program alone would engender profound improvements in the Bolivian economy. By proposing that the Bolivian government renegotiate its contracts with the multinational oil companies, "we are literally proposing changing the rules of the game," said Carlos Villegas, a researcher at the University of San Andrés in La Paz and MAS's principal economic spokesman. "The current contracts say that the multinationals own the resources when they're in the ground and are free to set prices of natural gas and oil once it has been extracted." In March, the Bolivian Congress, under pressure from demonstrators, passed a law reasserting national ownership of resources, but, Villegas said, "it is not being enforced." MAS would not only enforce the law; it would also extend its powers.

Bolivia has considerable oil reserves and, far more crucially, has the second-largest proved reserves of natural gas in South America after Venezuela - some 54 trillion cubic feet. Talk to ordinary Bolivians, and it often seems as if their profound rage and despair over what is taking place in their country is at least partly due to the gap between Bolivia's natural riches and the poverty of its people. "We shouldn't be poor" is the way Morales put it to me. This perception is hardly limited to die-hard MAS supporters. In the campaign ads being run by Morales's two main rivals for the presidency - Samuel Doria Medina, a wealthy businessman, and Jorge Quiroga, a former president - each candidate makes populist appeals. Doria Medina, in his ads, says he will "stand up" for Bolivia. And lest there be any doubt about what he is referring to, at the end of his ad he looks straight into the camera and says that if elected he will tell the multinationals, "Gentlemen, the party is over!"

If Petrobras, the oil company that is partly owned by the Brazilian state, can prosper, MAS supporters argue, why can't Bolivia adopt a similar strategy and flourish as a result? In any case, they point out, a large part of the population derives what little hope it has from Bolivia's hydrocarbon reserves. "The population," Carlos Villegas told me, "is demanding to know why these resources haven't lifted the country out of poverty. And they blame the privatization imposed by international lenders." At least according to Villegas's argument, taking back control over oil and natural gas would allow Bolivia to get a fair price and to pay for its industrialization, in the process creating employment and thus alleviating poverty, and escaping the problems that afflict so many resource-rich countries from Gabon to Indonesia. "Look, this is not a fantasy," he said at the end of our interview. "It's a perfectly feasible, practical program."

At least some well-informed outsiders agree. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate who was formerly the chief economist of the World Bank and is now a professor of economics at Columbia University and a stern critic of many international lending institutions, put it to me this way: "They could do it." If Bolivia abrogated its existing contracts, he said, some of the non-Western oil giants would gladly negotiate new deals on better terms. "Petronas" - the Malaysian state oil company - "would come in, China would come in, India would come in." If Morales did nationalize the country's oil and gas, the multinational oil companies that currently hold the Bolivian concessions, including Repsol, a Spanish company, and British Gas, would probably sue Bolivia in an international court and try to organize an international boycott. But Stiglitz dismisses that threat: "If you had three, four, five first-rate companies around the world willing to compete for Bolivia's resources, no boycott would work."

Of course, there are strong countervailing views not only to MAS's nationalization program but also to any sweeping criticism of the policies of the principal international lending institutions: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank. "People criticize our recommendations," said Peter Bate, a spokesman for the IADB. "But before the international financial institutions intervened, Bolivia's inflation was running at 25,000 percent per year. What should we have done, let that continue?"

For Jeffrey Sachs, Joseph Stiglitz's colleague at Columbia and a former economic adviser to the Bolivian government, the problem was less the international lending institutions' recommendations than the lack of follow-up on the part of Washington. Gonzalo Sánchez de Losada, the first of the two presidents ousted in Bolivia's recent wave of protests, has said that when he went to see President Bush at the White House in 2002, the president talked of little except Afghanistan. As Sachs put it later in an op-ed piece in The Financial Times, the Bush administration "proved to be incapable of even the simplest responses to a profound crisis engulfing the region." In an e-mail message to me, he said he had "never seen such incompetence" as the Bush administration's approach to Latin America, which he characterized as comprising "neglect, insensitivity, disregard, tone-deafness." Sachs cited one damning example in Bolivia: as his government teetered on the verge of collapse in 2003, Sánchez de Losada asked the U.S. government for $50 million in emergency aid. Washington made $10 million available. As Sachs put it bitterly, the decision in effect invited MAS and the social activist movements - peasants, coca growers, laborers and the unemployed - "to finish off the job of bringing down the government."

In this, Joseph Stiglitz agrees. "One of the main stories" from Latin America's period of austerity measures imposed at the urging of international institutions, he told me, "is the gap between what was sold and what was delivered." In countries like Bolivia, he added, "people went through a lot of pain, and 20 years later now they don't see any of the benefits. Leaders in the anti-inflation fight gave the countries that followed their recommendations A-pluses. But few of the results in terms of incomes of the average person and poverty reduction had been yielded."


Many Bolivians, and certainly almost all MAS supporters, are more than prepared to blame the Americans for much of what went wrong during what Roberto Fernandez Téran, the economist from the University of San Símon, described to me as "the lost decade of the 1980's and the disappointments of the 1990's." A joke you hear often in Bolivia these days sarcastically describes the country's political system as a coalition between the government, the international financial institutions, multinational corporations and la embajada - the U.S. Embassy. But while it would be unwise to underestimate the force of knee-jerk anti-Americanism in Latin America, the ubiquitousness of leftist sentiments in Bolivia today has more to do, as Joseph Stiglitz points out, with the complete failure of neoliberalism to improve people's lives in any practical sense. It is almost a syllogism: many Bolivians believe (and the economic statistics bear them out) that the demands by international lending institutions that governments cut budgets to the bone and privatize state-owned assets made people's lives worse, not better; the Bolivians believe, also not wrongly, that the U.S. wields extraordinary influence on international financial institutions; and from these conclusions, the appeal of an anti-American, anti-globalization politics becomes almost irresistible to large numbers of people.

If Bolivians who support Morales and MAS seem drawn to thinking in conspiratorial terms about U.S. actions in the region, the mirror image of this attitude is to be found in Washington. There is a powerful consensus in U.S. government circles that holds that Morales is being bankrolled by Chávez - a charge that the Bolivian leader flatly denies. Roger Noriega, the former assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, repeatedly made the point during his tenure, echoing background briefings by Pentagon officials. "It's no secret that Morales reports to Caracas and Havana," Noriega said last July, just before leaving office. "That's where his best allies are."

Publicly, Thomas A. Shannon, Noriega's successor, has taken a more low-key approach. But the Bush administration's view of Morales does not appear to have changed significantly. Michael Shifter, a senior fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue, a policy group in Washington, and one of the shrewdest and most experienced American observers of Latin America, told me that he has been struck by the depth of conviction in Washington that Morales is dangerous. "People talk about him as if he were the Osama bin Laden of Latin America," Shifter told me, adding that, after a recent lecture Shifter gave at a military institution, two American officers came up to him and said that Morales "was a terrorist, a murderer, the worst thing ever." Shifter replied that he had seen no evidence of this. "They told me: 'You should. We have classified information: this guy is the worst thing to happen in Latin America in a long time."' In Shifter's view, there is now a tremendous sense of hysteria about Morales within the administration and especially at the Pentagon.

It has happened before. During the 2002 Bolivian elections, when Morales was a first-time candidate little known outside of the country, the U.S. ambassador at the time, Manuel Rocha, stated publicly that if Morales was elected, the U.S. would have to reconsider all future aid. Most observers, and Morales, too, who speaks of the episode with a combination of amusement and satisfaction, say that it got him and MAS at least 20 percent more votes. The current U.S. ambassador, David Greenlee, has been far more circumspect. But if anything, Washington's view of Morales has only hardened. And the reason for that, unsurprisingly, is Hugo Chávez's increasing role. As Michael Shifter puts it, "There is this tremendous fear that Chávez is living out the Fidel Castro dream of exporting revolution throughout Latin America and destabilizing the region - something that wasn't done during the cold war and is now being financed by Venezuelan oil."

For his part, Morales is unapologetic and, when pressed, grows more rather than less defiant. At his rallies, Cuban flags are ubiquitous, as are Che Guevara T-shirts and lapel pins. But he is at some pains to make the point that neither Venezuela nor Cuba is a model for the kind of society he wants Bolivia to become. Castro and Chávez, he told me, are his friends, but so are Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations, President Jacques Chirac of France and Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of Spain. Morales also makes a point of emphasizing that the era of "state socialism" is past. Even when he is talking about the nationalization of Bolivia's natural resources, which with the depenalization of coca cultivation is the central plank of his campaign, Morales is at pains to point out that the model he has in mind is closer to Brazil's state-owned oil giant, Petrobras, than to anything Castro would endorse.

When you spend time with Morales, it is hard not to conclude that he wants to have it both ways where his links with Chávez and Castro are concerned. For while he denies any particular affinity with either regime, there is no doubt that these two "radical" leaders are the ones to whom he has turned time and again for advice. Certainly, Hugo Chávez has made no secret of the sympathy he feels for Morales's campaign, while the state-run Cuban press has lavished a great deal of attention on Morales. MAS seems unsure of how to present these links. In Morales's campaign biography, there are angry sentences denying a connection to Chávez. But on the same page where these lines appear, there is a photograph in which Morales and the Venezuelan strongman are posed together.


On the campaign trail, "populist" doesn't even begin to describe the Morales style. He seems genuinely indifferent to creature comforts. He also seems committed to a kind of political campaigning that more closely resembles the labor activism that catapulted him to fame than to political campaigning in the classic sense. Morales has drawn a number of important Bolivian economists like Carlos Villegas to his side, but he seems most at ease among his rank-and-file supporters. The overwhelming majority of MAS activists appear to be volunteers, and while they seem to view Morales's candidacy almost as a sacred cause, it quickly becomes obvious that most have little experience in electoral politics. Morales's two bodyguards didn't seem to have the first clue about how to protect their charge. He travels without any serious security, almost always moving from place to place in a single S.U.V., accompanied by only a driver, an aide and whomever he is meeting with at that particular moment. MAS campaign offices are almost all utterly unadorned except for the usual campaign paraphernalia and posters and images of the candidate, his running mate and, inevitably, Che.

Even without apparent resources, MAS is surging, and the most recent polls put Morales ahead of his two principal rivals. Yet many Bolivians, including some who are sympathetic to MAS, say privately that Morales remains something of an unknown quantity. Shifter suggested to me that Morales is "still a work in progress," and a number of well-informed Bolivians I met agreed. The problem, of course, is that given the severity of the Bolivian crisis, the militancy of so much of the population and the impossibly high level of expectations that a MAS government would engender among Bolivia's poor and its long-marginalized indigenous populations, there is very little time. It is quite accurate to speak of the rebirth of the left in Latin America, but the sad truth is that the movement's return is more a sign of despair than of hope. Almost 40 years ago, one self-proclaimed revolutionary, Che Guevara, died alone and abandoned in the Bolivian foothills. Today, another self-proclaimed revolutionary, Evo Morales, could become the country's first indigenous and first authentically leftist president. But as was true of Che himself, it is by no means clear that Morales has any hope of fulfilling the expectations of his followers.

On a stage in a soccer stadium in Mar del Plata, before a rapturous crowd and with Hugo Chávez beside him, or on the campaign trail back home, surrounded by people who look as if they would give their lives for him, Morales exudes confidence. And the more Washington makes plain its opposition to him, the greater the fervor he inspires in his supporters. But if the history of the left in Latin America teaches anything, it is that charisma is never enough. The fate of Che Guevara, who failed to foment a Latin American revolution and left no coherent societal model behind for his followers, should have taught us that already.

David Rieff, a contributing writer, is the author, most recently, of "At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention."

Correction: Dec. 4, 2005, Sunday:

An article on Nov. 20 about Bolivia referred incorrectly to the city Cochabamba. It is the country's third-largest, behind Santa Cruz de la Sierra and La Paz, not the second-largest.




Alpaca Sweaters Woven in La Paz
By PETER J. MCFARREN; PETER J. MCFARREN IS A JOURNALIST WHO LIVES IN LA PAZ, BOLIVIA.

LEAD: In a courtyard near El Prado, the main thoroughfare of La Paz, Bolivia, Isabel Mamani kneels on the floor as she grinds cochineal on a stone mortar, the kind of mortar used in most Bolivian homes to grind hot pepper, garlic and spices. Cochineal, an insect that feeds on cactus, is also the name of a dye produced from female cochineal; a spectrum of reds, from scarlet to rust, is the result, and the colors are used to dye a line of scarves, sweaters and shawls produced by Artesanias Millma.

In a courtyard near El Prado, the main thoroughfare of La Paz, Bolivia, Isabel Mamani kneels on the floor as she grinds cochineal on a stone mortar, the kind of mortar used in most Bolivian homes to grind hot pepper, garlic and spices. Cochineal, an insect that feeds on cactus, is also the name of a dye produced from female cochineal; a spectrum of reds, from scarlet to rust, is the result, and the colors are used to dye a line of scarves, sweaters and shawls produced by Artesanias Millma.

The Millma workshop, at Calle 20 de Octubre 1824, is owned and run by Arthur Tracht and Laurie Adelson, husband and wife, and a new breed of artisans that is producing elegant alpaca woolens in Bolivia.

La Paz, a city of one million, is surrounded by snow-covered peaks, jagged rock and dirt formations and flatlands that harbor alpacas, llamas and vicunas. Most of the 200,000 alpacas in existence are raised in the Peruvian and Bolivian flatlands and hills that surround Lake Titicaca.

Alpaca wool has a long and very fine fiber with a natural crimp that, when spun and woven, produces a soft, warm product. Baby alpaca wool is considered almost as soft and silky as cashmere - and it is nearly as expensive.

Miss Adelson and Mr. Tracht are producing garments with designs that incorporate traditional Aymara and Quechua Indian motifs and techniques as well as modern styles and colors. One sweater, designed by Mr. Tracht, is based on pre-Columbian Tiwanacu textile designs that could pass as the work of a modern-day designer. And one of their most popular items is a full-length knitted dress of alpaca, with green zigzags against a background of regal purple, and a soft cowl neck. Another beautiful item is a shawl with a combination of naturally dyed pink, gray, blue and red wools.

Millma sweaters are characterized by bold colors in traditional textile patterns including Andean, pre-Columbian, Italian needlepoint, Indonesian ikats and Native American designs. Abstract patterns are also featured. Colors range from bright reds, pinks, turquoise, blues and black in the women's models to more subdued colors in the men's designs. The sweaters have as many as 12 colors in a model. Some sweaters show subtle color and hue changes; others demonstrate bold contrasting colors. This fall, Millma has a women's line of loose-fitting tops with color-coordinated mini skirts or long, tube skirts.

Laurie Adelson, a native of Chicago, arrived in Bolivia in 1976 to do research on highland Bolivian weaving traditions for the Los Angeles Craft and Folk Museum. Later she was co-author of ''The Weaving Traditions of Highland Bolivia''; in 1978 she started collecting and exporting weavings from Bolivia to United States galleries, private collectors and museums.

Arthur Tracht, a cartography and Latin American studies major from Temple University, went to Bolivia in 1977 to collect and export Bolivian weavings. He has lived in Bolivia since then.

Their paths crossed, and they began traveling by truck or bus throughout the Bolivian Andes, learning from Aymara and Quechua Indians the ancient arts of spinning, dyeing and weaving. Their research took the form of a book (''Aymara Weavings: Ceremonial Textiles of Colonial 19th-Century Bolivia'') that was published in 1985 in conjunction with a Smithsonian exhibit they organized. In 1983 they bought a shop in the basement of the Hotel Plaza in downtown La Paz.

The shelves of this shop are lined with displays of the latest alpaca wear, Quechua and Aymara Indian weavings and wall hangings with abstract pre-Columbian designs. Their new line includes men's round-necked sweaters, $50 each, with coca brown or blue and black patterns. Also for sale are naturally dyed men's scarves and alpaca ties. A woman's alpaca sweater with abstract flower, bird and geometric designs colored with natural indigo and cochineal on a white background sells for $60. Another sweater is called the Milky Way and has a constellation of points and circles in shades of gray and white.

Full-length dresses, $80 each, show bright colors ranging from reds, pinks, turquoise, blues and blacks, either with simple stripes or intricate geometric forms patterned on Andean pre-Columbian textiles. Also available are loomed belts made and used by Bolivian highland Indians and sets of alpaca children's sweaters, scarves and mittens that sell for $35.

To stock the store in the Hotel Plaza and another one they opened at Calle Sagarnaga 225 in La Paz, Miss Adelson and Mr. Tracht had to produce their own line of woolens. ''We started working with women who handknit at home,'' said Miss Adelson. ''The problem was that we had no control over quality, so we soon decided to set up our own looms.'' They also started getting wholesale orders from the United States but could not meet demand without their own production. They began the factory in 1984 with five women employees who had no previous weaving training.

''We realized that because of the high cost of alpaca wool we needed a product for the upper-scale market, and to produce such a product, a top designer,'' said Mr. Tracht.

They made a contract with Jane Everett, an independent New York-based designer who has worked for top designers. She flies in twice a year to produce an alpaca and pima cotton line, and she advises them on the color and design trends for the coming year.

Mr. Tracht and Miss Adelson started in 1984 with an annual production of 500 sweaters. Starting a business in Bolivia in 1984 when inflation was running at 10,000 percent was not easy. Salaries and prices for wool and other supplies had to be readjusted weekly. Numerous transport strikes often forced workers to walk an hour or two to work from their homes in the outskirts of the city. By 1985, inflation had reached 20,000 percent, shortages were widespread and a regular supply of wool virtually impossible. With Bolivia unable to produce enough wool to satisfy demand, Mr. Tracht must go to Peru to purchase wool.

Today, despite a production of 7,000 hand-knit and hand-loomed sweaters and an equal number of woven goods, they can't keep up with demand. Last year, they introduced a line of hand-loomed pima cotton sweaters for the North American spring and summer markets. Their workshop, which occupies an entire floor of an adobe house, has already become too small for the 55 employees who produce cotton and alpaca sweaters on knitting machines; shawls, scarfs and loomed textiles are made on wooden looms imported from the United States.

Millma is one of several alpaca shops that have opened their doors in La Paz recently to provide designer-quality knitwear. The shift has been away from sweaters, dresses and shawls with llama designs made from wool in shades of brown, gray and white to brighter, colorful pieces designed with fashion-conscious clients in mind. WHERE TO FIND WOOLLY SWEATERS La Paz

There are many stores in La Paz that sell alpaca garments. Sweaters in adult sizes generally cost $40 and up (prices are about half as much as in the United States). Garments in the following shops are designer quality.

Artesanias Millma (workshop at Calle 20 de Octubre 1824; telephone 35-02-55 or 32-20-57) has stores in the Hotel Plaza (Avenida El Prado; 32-18-31) and at Calle Sagarnaga 225 (35-89-25). Prices in the workshop and stores are the same.

La Lana in the Hotel Sheraton (Avenida Arce; workshop telephone 31-18-13 or 31-26-28) is owned by an American, William Siegal (560 Harrison Avenue, Boston, Mass. 02118; 617-482-3693), who is also a wholesale merchant in the United States.

Urdimbre (Edificio Petrolero, Avenida El Prado; no telephone) also carries a line of cotton-knit sweaters.

Adam (Avenida 6 de Agosto 2135; 32-05-15) is a cooperative (supported by the Agency for International Development) of people who make alpaca garments at home. Elsewhere

Peruvian Connection (Canaan Farm, Tonganoxie, Kan. 66086; 913... or 800-...) is a mail-order company that carries Millma sweaters in the United States, where they cost $150 to $190.

Pavo Real (89 South Street, Pier 17; New York, N.Y. 10038; 212...) carries a variety of Millma's sweaters, skirts and full-length dresses in its shops in Boston, Chicago and Washington as well as in New York. Skirts run about $50 to $100, full-length dresses about $150 to $200. - P. McF.
Bolivia Epitomizes Fight for Natural Resources
By JUAN FORERO

Correction Appended

LA PAZ, Bolivia, May 22 - The struggle over globalization and who controls natural resources is being waged across Latin America, but the battle lines are no sharper anywhere than here in Bolivia, where a potent confederation of protesters plans a march on Monday to demand more state control of energy resources.

Political analysts say the march - combined with a work stoppage and an Indian-style town hall meeting in a La Paz plaza - could further weaken the already debilitated government of President Carlos Mesa. It was just such a protest over energy policy that forced President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada from office in October 2003.

Now, with Mr. Mesa politically incapacitated and Congress thoroughly discredited because it is seen as corrupt, protesters have become emboldened, with some calling for the outright expropriation of private gas installations operated by such energy giants as British Gas, Repsol-YPF of Spain and Petrobras of Brazil.

Such demands have been gathering force, and they underscore the increasingly deep divisions in this Andean country, which despite its isolation has been at the forefront of a powerful backlash against market overhaul in Latin America.

"I think it's the most polarized the country has been in a long time," said Jim Shultz, director of the Democracy Center in Cochabamba, which studies the effects of globalization on Bolivia. "In October 2003, the issue was more volatile, but it was more volatile because it was basically everybody against the government. This isn't everybody against the government. This is a situation where Bolivia is split three or four different ways."

On one side, there are Bolivians like Carlos Alberto López, a former vice minister of energy who was educated at Harvard and the London School of Economics.

Mr. López, now a consultant for energy companies, contends that nationalizing the oil industry would be a disaster for the country. He said Bolivia should instead be taking advantage of the fact that it has Latin America's second largest gas reserves by attracting foreign investors with favorable terms and then selling the gas to energy-hungry giants like Brazil or the United States.

"This was our last best hope for Bolivia's economy to grow," Mr. López, 45, said in an interview.

Across this capital, in a small office decorated with posters of the revolutionary icon Che Guevara, another protagonist expresses a sharply opposed viewpoint.

"The people have a right to nationalize and expropriate," said Jaime Solares, 53, who started working at age 13, has a 10th grade education and heads the Bolivian Workers Central, the country's largest labor confederation. "The people no longer believe in neo-liberalism."

The movement against market reforms appears to be gaining ground.

Last week, Bolivia's Congress, under pressure from protesters, signed into law a new tax-and-royalty scheme so tough that energy experts say oil and gas multinationals will curtail investments.

But groups like Mr. Solares's, with hundreds of thousands of members, say the law is too soft and want more restrictions. At the same time, a conservative, pro-globalization movement in the relatively prosperous eastern part of Bolivia is calling for a referendum on whether the region should have more autonomy, including control of its gas fields.

Political analysts say the divisive crisis could lead to violence or, in time, the disintegration of a country whose state has little presence or control over its far-flung provinces.

The discovery of large gas deposits in the late 1990's was supposed to have brought Bolivia more stability and wealth as the country's leaders tried to position Bolivia as a regional energy power.

But the masses of poor indigenous people have never forgotten how the Spanish and a series of corrupt governments plundered the country's silver, tin and gold, leaving them more poverty-stricken than before. Flexing their political muscle, they have carried out protests that resulted in the departure of two foreign water companies and wreaked havoc with the government's energy plans.

"Those companies always come in with big promises, but all they do is rob," said Rafael Condori, 18, an Aymara Indian who plans to take part in the protest on Monday.

Such words could not be more troubling to Juan Carlos Iturri, an economist who said that many protesters are driven by slogans and do not take into account Bolivia's economic realities.

"Nationalization is not real and it cannot be sustained in time," he said. "They want a horse and a battle and nothing sounds better than saying, 'Die, transnationals.' "

But Bolivia's history seems to signal that the protests are not likely to fade away. A major revolution in 1952 led to nationalization of the largest tin mines, and charismatic leaders have revived the movement in recent years.

Eduardo Gamarra, the Bolivian-born director of Latin American studies at Florida International University in Miami, referred to that history, saying in an interview, "Bolivia is one of the few places in the world where you have a firm belief that nationalizing key industries is the way to go."

Correction: June 2, 2005, Thursday:

An article on May 23 about a struggle between the Bolivian government and protesters opposed to privatization of the country's energy resources incompletely described an economist who was quoted criticizing the protesters. The economist, Juan Carlos Iturri, was until recently the coordinator of a Bolivian government trade negotiation team.





Help with Bolivia working class in La Paz






Articles on Turkey

Turkey’s Parliament Lifts Scarf Ban
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

ISTANBUL — Parliament took a major step on Saturday toward lifting a ban against women’s head scarves at universities, setting the stage for a final showdown with Turkey’s secular elite over where Islam fits in the building of an open society.

Lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in favor of a measure supported by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to change the Constitution in a way they say will guarantee all citizens the right to go to college regardless of how they dress.

The authorities imposed the ban in the late 1990s, arguing that the growing number of covered women in colleges threatened secularism, one of the founding principles of modern Turkey.

Secular opposition lawmakers voted against the change, with about a fifth of all ballots cast. Crowds of secular Turks backed them on the streets of the capital, Ankara, chanting that secularism — and women’s right to resist being forced to wear head scarves by an increasingly conservative society — was under threat.

“This decision will bring further pressure on women,” said Nesrin Baytok, a member of Parliament from the opposition secular party, during the debate in Parliament. “It will ultimately bring us Hezbollah terror, Al Qaeda terror and fundamentalism.”

Another member from that party, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, said the group would take the amendments to the Constitutional Court, a pro-secular institution that is likely to rule against Mr. Erdogan. That process must wait until the changes are approved by the president and published in the official state newspaper.

The head scarf ban, and the push to repeal it by Mr. Erdogan’s governing party, has become one of the most emotional issues in Turkey. It pits a rising, increasingly wealthy middle class of observant Turks, on one side, against a secular elite, backed by the military and the judiciary, on the other.

“It’s all about power,” said Jenny B. White, an anthropologist at Boston University who has been studying Turkey since the 1970s. “It’s about who gets to decide what Turkey’s image and emblematic lifestyle will be. Islam is the lightning rod for all the fears and concerns.”

Many secular Turks are concerned that the Justice and Development Party led by Mr. Erdogan has such significant power, controlling Parliament, the presidency and the prime ministry, that it will impose its own conservative values on Turkey.

“It’s been presented as a liberty to cover the head, but in practice, it is going to evolve into a ban on uncovered hair,” said Hikmet Sami Turk, a former justice minister, speaking on NTV television.

Turkey’s current tensions are rooted in its recent past, when migrants from the country’s more observant heartland moved to cities, starting in the 1950s, in a process that changed Turkey into an urban society.

But it remained divided by class, and when many covered women began entering universities and taking public sector jobs, the secular elite banned head scarves.

Now, Mr. Erdogan is trying to lift the ban, and the debate, which began in Parliament on Wednesday, has been emotional.

“I will entrust liver to a cat, but won’t entrust secularism to you,” Deniz Baykal, the head of the secular opposition party, said Wednesday, according to Today’s Zaman, an English-language daily newspaper.

Cemil Cicek, a conservative member of Mr. Erdogan’s party, countered, “We are not trying to bring a ban; we are trying to lift a ban.”

“Why aren’t you willing to reach consensus, but spread radioactive fear and horror across the country like the Chernobyl power station?” he asked in Wednesday’s debate. “What is this?”

Turkey is groping toward a new understanding of itself. Observant Turks, the underclass for years, are now firmly part of the elite, and hard questions have emerged about how to share public space, like college campuses and public buildings.

Those who argue for retaining the ban say they do not oppose the head scarf worn in times past by grandmothers, tied babushka-style under the chin.

Nilufer Gole, a Turkish sociologist who wrote “The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling,” argues that the past generation was mostly working class, and therefore not threatening, while today’s wealthier covered women are.

“We liked our grandmothers because they were just knitting,” she said by telephone from Paris. “They were never trying to go to university.”

Turkey’s booming economy is a great equalizer. On the streets of Istanbul, young women in jeans, stylish T-shirts and Keds wear head scarves of all colors. Young observant women are more integrated than ever.

“For me it’s a good sign,“ Ms. Gole said. “It means they are participating.”

Still, Turkey is entering uncharted waters in its attempts to balance liberal democracy, Islam and secularism, and Western models do not show the way.

“It’s not like a Sikh policeman wearing a turban under his helmet in England,” said Murat Belge, a professor at Bilgi University in Istanbul. In Britain, Sikhs are a tiny minority. In Turkey, he said, those asking to have their way are a majority.

That majority, many secularists believe, is using the veil as a first step toward a repressive Islamic state.

But Ms. White, writing in a Turkish newspaper on Friday, said the veil’s political meaning is in the eye of the beholder. “Meaning,” she wrote, “is in our heads, not on our heads.”

Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting.


Turkish City Counters Fear of Islam’s Reach
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

KONYA, Turkey, May 12 — In the not too distant past here in Turkey’s religious heartland, women would not appear in public unless they were modestly dressed, a single woman was not able to rent an apartment on her own, and the mayor proposed segregating city buses by sex.

Fears of such restrictions, inflamed by secularist politicians, have led thousands of Turks to march in major cities in the past month. A political party with a past in Islamic politics led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has tried to capture the country’s highest secular post.

Once it succeeds, the secularists’ argument goes, Turkey will be dragged back to an earlier era when Islam ran the state. [Another march drew a million people in Izmir on Sunday.]

But here in Konya, a leafy city on the plains of central Turkey, Mr. Erdogan’s party has done no such thing. In the paradox of modern Turkey, the party here has had a moderating influence, helping to open a guarded society and make it more flexible.

Konya is still deeply attached to its faith. Mosques are spread thickly throughout the city; there are as many as in Istanbul, which has five times the population. But in a part of the world where religion and politics have been a poisonous mix and cultural norms are conservative regardless of religion, it is an oasis: women here wear relatively revealing clothing, couples hold hands and bus segregation is a distant memory.

“We’ve been wearing the same dress for 80 years, and it doesn’t fit anymore,” said Yoruk Kurtaran, who travels extensively in Turkey. “Things used to be black and white.”

Now, he said, “there are a lot of grays.”

The shift shows the evolution of Turkey’s Islamic movement, which has matured under Mr. Erdogan, abandoning the restrictive practices of its predecessors and demonstrating to its observant constituents the benefits of belonging to the European Union.

It also follows a pattern occurring throughout Turkey, where the secularists who founded the state out of the Ottoman Empire’s remains are now lagging behind religious Turks in efforts to modernize it.But secular Turks, like those who took part in the recent protests, do not believe that Mr. Erdogan and his allies have changed.

The mayor who proposed segregation, for example, is now part of Mr. Erdogan’s party. The protesters argue that the party may say it wants more religious freedom for its constituents, for example allowing observant women to wear their head scarves in universities, but it has never laid out its vision for how to protect secular lifestyles.

Mr. Erdogan’s party has been the most flexible and open of all parties that consider Islam an important part of Turkish society. Its politics have so far been respectful of secular freedom in most cases. But there are harder-line members who would like to see a more religious society, and secular Turks fear that highly personal questions like their children’s education and rights for unmarried women could be threatened.

In the country as a whole, religious Turks have felt like second-class citizens for generations, in part a legacy of Ataturk’s radical, secular revolution in the early 20th century. Now, elevated by a decade of economic growth, they are pressing for a bigger share of power.

In Konya some of the change started from the top. In 2003, around the time Mr. Erdogan’s party came to power, an irreverent ophthalmologist and a veterinarian with long hair were appointed to run Selcuk University in Konya. They immediately began challenging the sensibilities of this conservative city, organizing concerts and encouraging student clubs.

Kursat Turgut, the veterinarian, who became vice rector, said he had been confronted by a group of students who went to his office and demanded that he cancel a concert because they did not like the singer. He refused.

“Change is the most difficult thing,” Mr. Turgut said, sitting in the rector’s office, where paintings lined the walls. “It takes time to change a mentality.”

The students were from a nationalist group with an Islamic tinge that for years had used scare tactics to enforce a strict moral code on campus. When Umit, who did not want to give his last name, started at the university’s veterinary school five years ago he was chastised by students from the group for cuddling with his girlfriend and, on another occasion, for wearing shorts.

“They thought they were protecting honor and morals,” said Aliye Cetinkaya, a journalist who moved here 12 years ago for college. “If we crossed the line there was a fight.”

Mr. Turgut and the rector, Suleyman Okudan, shut down the group’s activities. Now, four years later, there are more than 80 student clubs, students like Umit behave and dress any way they choose, and Mr. Turgut’s concerts, open to the public, draw large crowds.

“It is like a different century,” Ms. Cetinkaya said.

She still faces limitations. When she covered a demonstration in Konya early last year against the Muhammad cartoons published in Denmark, stones and shoes were thrown at her because she was not wearing a scarf. But such incidents are rare, and far outweighed by improvements. For example, there were only about 50 women in the two-year degree program she attended a decade ago. Now the number is above 1,000, she said.

The deep-rooted religiosity in Konya found public expression in politics in the late 1980s, when the city became one of the first in the country to elect a pro-Islamic party — the Welfare Party of Necmettin Erbakan, the grandfather of the Turkish Islamic movement — to run the city. Mr. Erbakan himself was elected to Parliament from Konya.

The administration was restrictive: it was a Welfare Party mayor, Halil Urun, who proposed, unsuccessfully, segregating the buses in 1989. But the city kept electing the party until the late 1990s, when it was shut down by the state establishment for straying from secularism.

Then, in 2000, a young member of the banned party, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, began the Justice and Development Party. Mr. Erdogan had made a concerted effort to take Islam out of politics altogether — aware that continuing to push religion would lead to the same end — and it was unclear whether Konya voters would accept it.

They did. Of the 32 members of the City Council, all but two are now members of Mr. Erdogan’s party.

It was economics that convinced Ahmet Agirbasli, 57, a businessman who sells car parts and pasta. When he was younger he did not shake hands with women. For years he voted for Mr. Erbakan’s party. He did not believe that Turkey’s future was with Europe, but he changed his mind after Mr. Erdogan’s party began reforms with the intention of joining the European Union, and his business began to grow.

“Erbakan didn’t have an open mind,” Mr. Agirbasli said, eating a club sandwich in a hotel restaurant. “He didn’t believe the country needed links with the rest of the world.”

Now he sells macaroni to 50 countries. Five years ago he sold to only 10.

Akif Emre, a columnist at Yeni Safak, a conservative newspaper in Istanbul, argues that Mr. Erdogan has helped to bridge the gap between Turkey’s religious heartland and urban, secular Turks.

“They really accept secularism,” he said of Mr. Erdogan and his allies. “They are changing the mentality. Conservative people changed their lifestyle toward a more secular way.”

Religious Turks, for their part, still harbor an unspoken wariness of the state. New civil organizations are more focused on building mosques than engaging in public debate, and people scrupulously avoid talking about politics.

Religious extremists have been found on the fringes. In January the authorities arrested a man they said was the leader of Al Qaeda in Turkey, and in 2000 a pile of bodies that showed signs of torture was found buried under a villa rented by a homegrown Islamist group called Hezbollah.

“Konya is one of the main hubs of traditional and conservative, anti-Ankara countryside,” said Ersin Kalaycioglu, a professor of political science at Isik University in Istanbul. “It has a structure that takes religion very seriously and formulates social life around it.”

Rahmi Bastoklu, the leader in Konya of the secularist Republican People’s Party and the only one of the Konya district’s 16 members of Parliament who is not from Mr. Erdogan’s party, put it bluntly: “People have to leave Konya to enjoy themselves.”

But an unspoken understanding between Konya’s religious Turks and the secular state is in place, in which the mosques are left alone, but religious Turks do not press too many demands on the state. The balance is often held steady by Mr. Erdogan’s party.

Still, pushing too hard against the secular establishment might mean the loss of recent gains. “It’s not a useful thing to talk about,” said Ilhan Cumrali, 36, sitting in his clothing store among racks of floor-length skirts. “We are trying to find the right path. If we do it too aggressively there will be a negative reaction.”

Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Istanbul.

In Turkey, Fear About Religious Lifestyle
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

ISTANBUL, April 29 — When hundreds of thousands of protesters filled the streets of Istanbul on Sunday, it may have looked like a protest of government policy.

It was not.

Behind the slogans and signs of marchers in Istanbul on Sunday and in Ankara two weeks ago was something much more basic: a fear of the lifestyles of their more religious compatriots.

Some concerns were snobbish: religious Turks were uneducated and poor, their pesky prayer rugs got underfoot in hospital halls.

Others were less elitist and had more personal worries: how much tolerance for our secular lifestyles will an emerging class of religious Turks have?

“These people are from poor areas; they just don’t know what the government stands for,” said Aysel Tuikman, 39, a civil servant wearing a skirt, a sweater, beige pumps and pearls. “They’re only being manipulated. We are here for their good also.”

“People here are the real Turkey,” she said, waving a flag high above her head.

It is an emotional reaction to a relatively new layering of society that began 20 years ago but has accelerated recently. A massive migration from rural areas to Turkey’s cities and a large-scale economic boom have drawn an entirely new class of religious Turks from the country’s heartland into the life of its secular cities.

The class is represented by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is challenging the secular elite, forcing a presidential candidate upon them whom they find completely distasteful.

On Friday, the military gave him a warning. It has ousted four elected governments since 1960, and seemed to be considering whether to make Mr. Erdogan’s the fifth. On Sunday, Mr. Erdogan gave a warning of his own: He will continue to push his candidate, an action that will probably lead to early national elections.

Secular Turks fear that Mr. Erdogan has a secret agenda to impose Islamic law on Turkey and that his party’s move to secure the presidency, the highest seat of secularism in Turkey, is one of the final steps needed to start that process.

Mr. Erdogan, for his part, came from Turkey’s political Islamic movements of the 1990s, but he broke with them and formed his own, which swept national elections in 2002. He has said that he would keep religion out of policy decisions, and for the most part, he has.

But for the protesters on Sunday, that was not enough.

“They say they’ve changed, but look at their wives,” said Yalcin Turkdogan, 61, an architect who had not been to a protest since 1977. Mr. Erdogan’s wife wears a head scarf.

For Sevim Erzen, a retired civil servant at a protest in Ankara earlier this month, the number of women in head scarves moving into her wealthy Istanbul neighborhood was disturbing. “They have started to look down on us,” she said. “They are trying to be part of the ruling class.”

The message of secularist protesters, said Metin Heper, a professor at Bilkent University in Ankara, was this: “We are uncomfortable with the lifestyles of these people.”

“They fear these people, but these fears are groundless,” he said. “Gradually, they will see that these people are no different from themselves.”

Prejudices among secular Turks have their roots in Turkey’s education system, Mr. Heper said. “Education here teaches that if you are a practicing Muslim, you are an ignorant person who will bring the country back to the Middle Ages,” he said.

M. Hakan Yavuz, the author of “Islamic Political Identity in Turkey,” describes being shocked at the rigidity in the political science department at Ankara University, where he got his undergraduate degree, compared with the village where he grew up, where interpretations of the teachings of a thinker of Sufism, a mystic branch of Sunni Islam, were welcomed everywhere.

“It was not a dialogue, but rather a carefully structured program of indoctrination,” Mr. Yavuz writes in the preface of his book, published by Oxford University Press in 2003, referring to his education at Ankara.

One of the problems for the secularists is that the elite never fully redefined the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the visionary who founded the Turkish state in 1923. It did not change with the times. The main secular political party, the Republican People’s Party, lacks agile leaders who can articulate a unifying vision for the diverse secular groups.

They never had to. The most recent attempt by a pro-Islamic party to run the country, in 1997, ended in the military pushing it out of power.

Gokay Gedik, a 20-year-old student at Marmara University here who had come to the protest on Sunday with his friends, all members of the same rock band, said the Republican People’s Party was all talk and no action.

“Blah, blah, blah,” added his friend, who had a pierced eyebrow and dreadlocks.

Secular Turks worry that the new class of religious migrants could potentially be a force for radicalism. Large groups of new migrants to cities propelled revolutions in Iran and in Russia.

But in Turkey, the class owns businesses and has become better off in the recent economic boom. It values stability in society.

The new mingling in secular urban areas has had a quieter effect, raising emotional questions like whether to separate the sexes in public swimming pools or change the curriculum in schools to include more religious instruction.

Questions about how tolerant the new class of society will be of secular lifestyles is of vital importance to secular Turks, but they go unaddressed by Mr. Erdogan’s party. In part, that is because the party is under fire by the secular establishment, which seizes on any opportunity to find evidence of Mr. Erdogan’s Islamic influence.

“Even if Erdogan walked on water, the secularists wouldn’t believe him,” said Morton Abramowitz, a former American ambassador to Turkey who is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a nonpartisan research group.

Mr. Erdogan dodges direct discussion of religion, preferring instead to cite his party’s glowing economic achievements, which his secular critics often dismiss. “Some have eyes but cannot see,” he said in a speech this month. “Some have tongues but cannot speak the truth. They have ears but can’t hear. That’s where the problem is.”

Then, in an earnest cry of incomprehension: “What makes you so uncomfortable?”

But his silence has fed the worries of secular Turks, who fear that their freedoms will be curtailed by the rank and file of Mr. Erdogan’s party, who have grown up in conservative communities largely separated by sex.

“There is a feeling of my rights being taken away,” said Guldal Okutucu, the leader of the women’s branch of the Republican People’s Party, “of pressure that tries to push me into a secondary role.”

Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting.


posted by mrlewishistoricalsociety @ 7:20 PM 0 comments
Microloans in Bangladesh

Debate Stirs Over Tiny Loans for World's Poorest

April 29, 2004
By CELIA W. DUGGER





GORMA, Bangladesh - Nearly every woman in this village
seems to have gotten tiny loans to invest in a miniature
business.

None has made better use of the cash than Firoza Akhter, a
shrewd, flinty young mother who put her profits from four
loans into cows, goats, land, a sturdy house and private
tutors for her daughter. "I can make money out of
anything," she boasted in her wheezy voice, a gold,
flower-shaped stud glinting in her nose. Hers is a shining
success story for microcredit.

But while she came from humble origins, she was not among
the poorest of the poor. Like many of the 50 million people
who take part in microcredit programs, she hovered at the
upper fringe of poverty.

Today there is a growing push for the nonprofit groups and
banks that run such programs to reach deeper into the ranks
of the poor, though there is little rigorous evidence
juding whether the very poor benefit from microcredit,
economists say.

Since 1988, the United States Congress has appropriated $2
billion for such programs. In new rules to take effect next
year, it has put teeth into a requirement that half of
American aid for these loans - defined as $1,000 or less in
Europe and Eurasia, $400 or less in Latin America and $300
or less in the rest of the world - go to the very poor
living on less than $1 a day.

The new rules have stirred strong opposition from other
donors and a range of microfinance institutions, which
contend that the industry may grow faster and ultimately
help more very poor people by aiming at a wider pool that
ranges from people who are struggling but not poor to those
much further down the economic ladder.

"This limbo dance to serve the poorest is a distraction
from a much broader issue of trying to reach a billion
people who have no access to credit or a safe place to save
their money," said Elizabeth Littlefield, a former managing
director at J. P. Morgan who now heads the Consultative
Group to Assist the Poor, an association of donors.

Researchers for this country's largest microlender, the
Bangladesh Rural Action Committee, or BRAC, have found that
people near the poverty line are the main users of
microfinance and are more likely to get more and bigger
loans and build successful microenterprises.

By contrast, BRAC has found that the very poor are more
likely to drop out of microcredit programs.

But the group's leaders say the microcredit industry needs
to try new approaches to help the poorest people. They have
coupled small loans with skills training and grants of
food. And they are experimenting When the dynamic Ms.
Akhter got her first loan, for $50, she said she already
had $250 saved from working as a cook and raising chickens,
the family trade. "I thought I could increase my capital by
taking the loan," she said. She invested it in a calf she
later sold for $100. Her next $80 - borrowed at 27 percent
interest - she loaned out at more than triple that rate.

Today her skillful investments have helped her become
relatively prosperous, despite having left her husband in
disgust after he took a fourth wife. "She was always
enterprising," said her father, who gave her chicks to tend
when she was just a girl.

Since the 1980's, wealthy nations and international
organizations have provided billions of dollars for
microcredit programs. The idea that small loans enable
millions of poor people to pull themselves up by their
bootstraps has captivated liberals and conservatives alike.


But there are still no stringent evaluations of microcredit
programs generally viewed as credible by experts.
"Energetic, entrepreneurial people do well with
microcredit," said Jonathan Morduch, an associate professor
of public policy and economics at New York University. "But
others who are less skilled and trained, how do they do?
Can very poor households get decent returns or not? That's
the big question policy-wise."

At a time when the United Nations is pursuing the
eradication of extreme poverty as the world's top
development goal, advocates of the new congressional rules
fear that the poorest people are too often neglected.

They have mobilized elected officials from the United
States to Britain and Japan to petition the World Bank, the
largest provider of microfinance funds, as well as the
African, Asian and Inter-American development banks, to
adhere to the same emphasis on the very poor that was
adopted by the United States Congress.

"It's a myth that you can't reach the very poor," said Sam
Daley-Harris, a musician-turned-advocate who founded the
Results Educational Fund, which lobbied Congress for the
new rules. He points to Share Microfin, an Indian lender,
as evidence that the very poor can be helped with
microcredit.

In the village of Gorma, the experience of Bina and Kanu
Sarkar, a gaunt couple with anxious eyes, illustrates the
complexities of escaping poverty, even where microcredit is
available.

Here, the paddy fields are alive with barefoot men
delicately planting tender rice seedlings and oxen lazing
in the sun. The landscape is a gentle, quilted patchwork of
scratchy brown burlap and soft green silk, but the life it
supports is hard.

Before microlenders arrived, the poor had little choice but
to become deeply indebted to moneylenders who charged
exorbitant interest rates of 120 percent or more a year.
Microfinance institutions in Bangladesh generally charge
from 20 to 50 percent.

Mrs. Sarkar last year became one of BRAC's 3.5 million
borrowers. She used the $50 to buy her husband a rickshaw,
which will save him 35 cents on the daily rickshaw rental
fee once the loan is paid off. But even with the extra
earnings, the Sarkars, both illiterate, will be desperately
poor.

They and their sons, Badal, 12, and Akash, 6, struggle to
get by on the $1 a day that Mr. Sarkar earns pedaling his
rickshaw. Now even that meager livelihood is threatened by
an ulcer that doubles him over in agony.

"The choice is whether to see a doctor or buy food," he
said, laying out the pitiless arithmetic of poverty. "The
government doctors don't check us properly because we don't
pay them money. Even if they prescribe medicines, we can't
afford them."

If his strength continues to seep away, the rickshaw will
be no use to him, he explained. The evening before, after
miles of hard pedaling, he was forced to forfeit a fare
when his stomach pain grew unbearable. He had to ask his
passengers to get down.

As he related the story, Akash clambered into the rickshaw
and pedaled out of the dirt courtyard. His father leapt up
to chase the boy in a panic, fearing a crash would destroy
the one asset he needed to feed his family.

"If I can't work for even a day, my wife and children go
unfed," he said, clutching his belly.

Some lenders here in Bangladesh, the heartland of the
microcredit movement, are experimenting with new ways to
reach the poorest of the poor. For years, BRAC has offered
some poor women free wheat and training along with micro
loans.

But now it has entirely dropped the use of loans in one
pilot program for "ultrapoor" women. BRAC gives them goats
or cows to raise, coupled with training and health care,
rather than burdening them with debts they cannot repay.

None of the poverty-stricken women who sat under a palm
tree in Mochahata village on a recent morning had ever
dared to apply for a microloan. One woman's pierced nose
hole was empty because she had already been forced to sell
her gold stud for money. Another's 9-year-old son pedaled a
rickshaw for 50 cents a day to keep the family fed.

But they eagerly joined BRAC's new program - and were
pleased to see their fast-breeding goats multiply. They
were still so poor that their bodies seemed little more
than collections of bones beneath worn saris, but their new
assets offered hope.

"I had nothing, nobody," said Mina, who worked as a maid
for payment in rice after her husband abandoned her. "I was
scared to become a member of BRAC. I was too poor to repay
a loan. But now that I'm getting goats free, I'm
interested."

posted by mrlewishistoricalsociety @ 7:18 PM 0 comments
Articles on France

Four Ways to Fire a Frenchman
By CRAIG S. SMITH

Paris

The French government wants to make it easy to fire young workers. Easier firing, easier hiring, the logic goes. Who wants to add people to the permanent payroll if it's painful and costly to undo a mistake?

The laws on "licensement," as firing in France is called, are complex enough to fill a book, but in the end there are essentially four ways for an employer to deliver a pink slip. All involve time or money or both, because employees who don't want to go quietly can file a complaint with the Conseil des Prud'hommes, the court that rules on terminations. CRAIG S. SMITH

1. PROVE YOU CAN'T AFFORD THE JOB

Dismissing a person for economic reasons is legal but complicated. A company must be able to prove in court that eliminating the position is necessary either because of economic woes or because it is essential to remain competitive.

Companies must also show that they can't transfer the employee to another job. If employers have more than one person in the same position, they must explain why they are firing Pierre instead of Jean-Paul. And an employer must show that the decision was made using purely objective criteria.

If the company has more than 50 employees and wants to fire more than 10, it must create a "social plan" that includes efforts to minimize dismissals and provide for job training or other support for employees who are cut.

"That is huge work," said Joël Grangé, a lawyer for the Paris firm Gide Loyrette Nouel who represents employers. If the judge doesn't consider the social plan adequate, he can demand that the employer reinstate the jobs.

In any case, employers must first summon the workers to a preliminary meeting to warn them that they may lose their jobs. Then they must send a registered letter telling a worker he is fired, listing the reasons and explaining the efforts that were made to find him another position in the company and detailing the support he will receive later on — usually a training program.

It's worth getting it right, because if the procedure is not followed and the employee has worked at the company for two years or more, he may be entitled to damages. "Clearly the litigation on this is more and more," Mr. Grangé said.

2. PROVE HE DID A BAD, BAD THING

"You can't just fire someone just because you don't like them," Mr. Grangé said. But you can fire him for doing a job badly. Again the company has to be able to prove in court that the grounds are real and serious, which can be difficult.

"For a salesman, for example, you have to demonstrate that his performance is not due to a bad product or market," Mr. Grangé said.

The employee will most likely counter that the reason isn't serious, and the courts are inclined to favor employees, he added.

"Judges ask for evidence that is very difficult to gather," he said, "They say, 'When you say he's a poor performer, are you sure it isn't due to a lack of organization in your company?' That's a very difficult thing to show."

3. PAY HIM TO SCRAM

Most cases brought by fired workers are settled out of court, but they include a hefty payment to avoid a trial, which can take years. Still, because settlements are exempt from taxes, it is usually in both the employer's and the employee's financial interest to go through that legal process rather than opt for the faster solution of paying the employee directly to resign. Settlements are usually calculated to include payment for a notice period, or the time between notification and actual termination, during which employees continue to draw a salary. For blue-collar workers, that is usually two or three months, but it can be as long as six months for white-collar workers. Settlements can also include several months' salary to pay for job training and include a severance payment that is determined by how long the employee has worked for the company and which industry he is in. Bank employees, for example, get at least one month's salary for every year they've worked.

Finally, there are damages, which can be just a few months' salary for a young person who has worked at a company less than two years but can be several years' salary for someone closer to retirement with many years at the company.

4. PUT HIM IN A CUPBOARD AND THROW AWAY THE KEY

Some managers with problem employees simply "put them in the cupboard," as the French saying goes, which usually means moving them out of the way and leaving them alone in hopes that they eventually quit.

"But putting them in a cupboard is a very expensive way to do it," Mr. Grangé said, because the employees continue to draw a salary as long as they show up and don't give the company cause to fire them. Mr. Grangé added that such a strategy also carries risks. If Sophie has been set aside with nothing to do, she can ask the court to declare that she has been effectively fired without due process and then can claim damages.

Can Thierry Breton Get France Working Again?
By ROGER COHEN
International Herald Tribune

The French government is onto something: It's no good having a country where people make more money by not working than by taking a job. That realization may just mean that France will stir from its lethargy.

Certainly, Thierry Breton, 50, the boyish French finance minister with a fine command of English and a taste for things American ("I love your country," he purred), is convinced that "France is about to move."

Over breakfast at the French Consulate here, Breton suggested that no less than "a second French Revolution" was under way, one that the government of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin would like to complete "under the radar screen."

That, in fact, is how most change is accomplished in France, where a left-leaning rhetoric of equality and solidarity has been de rigueur for decades, even as the country has moved steadily toward the European norm of an open market economy. Now, Breton wants to accelerate the market-oriented change by trashing, at last, the myth that a highly-regulated labor market preserves jobs.

Is he nuts to try this in strike-plagued France? "No," Breton said, "I am not a politician, so I do not have anything to lose." An executive and sometime best-selling writer of science fiction, whose restless career has taken him from the public to the private sector and from Europe to the United States, Breton imagines a France unbound.

With that in mind, he's ready to break taboos. "We had a strange situation," he said. "For some people the subsidies they could get, unemployment benefits and so on, were higher than if they came to work." During an hourlong conversation, he returned to this theme again and again, insisting that the principle must be re-established that "work pays, which has not been the case."

For a long time now, it has been clear that the problem of chronically high unemployment in France and Germany has been tied to the fact that a combination of long-term state handouts and tax-free work in the black economy was more attractive to many people than taking a job. But finding a politician ready to say that has been hard.

Breton said it not once but five times. He also outlined measures the government is taking to render work more attractive and accessible. These include one-time payments of 1,000, or $1,207, to workers taking first-time jobs in sectors including construction, tax relief for people moving more than 200 kilometers, or 124 miles, to take a job, and allowing companies of under 20 employees to hire and fire with ease.

"In France the rigidity has been so great that people hesitate to hire because they have to keep people they no longer need," Breton said. "So now, in a small company, you can hire and, if it does not work out, let them go overnight with no penalty, so long as this happens within the first two years."

This last measure, he added, had already led to 30,000 new work contracts in the past three months. Unemployment has fallen slightly in the same period, to 9.8 percent from over 10 percent.

That is still high, but with the presidential election looming in 20 months and Villepin an undeclared candidate, this government is in a hurry to produce results. Otherwise the prime minister would stand little chance in what would be his first bid to get elected to political office.

"We think there are 500,000 jobs on offer in France that we have been unable to fill," Breton said. "With the new flexibility and incentives, that should change."

Of course, the political season is only just beginning again in France after the summer break and when labor unions catch on to what is going on "under the radar screen," the reaction could be harsh.

But already the broad lines of the government's approach to economic reform seem clear. Pander to national sentiment and notions of French exceptionality with talk of "economic patriotism" and assurances that globalization is not part of France's destiny, while pushing through fiercely pragmatic market reforms under that smoke screen.

Among the reforms Breton is pushing is a revision of the tax code that will cap the top income tax rate at 40 percent (down from 48 percent), reduce the number of tax brackets, and neutralize France's wealth tax ("It has done a lot of damage to our economy") by declaring that nobody pay more than 60 percent of his or her revenue in taxes. Abolishing the wealth tax was too politically sensitive, but this measure should curb its worst excesses.

Doing all this while keeping the French budget deficit under control, and beginning to tackle the long-term problem of spiraling debt, will not be easy, Breton acknowledged.

The tax cuts, which still require parliamentary approval, will not kick in until 2007, allowing resources to be focused on unemployment next year. Meanwhile, nonstrategic assets like the highways are up for sale, and Breton said 30 billion would be raised from privatizations this year.

Will the French go along with this ambitious reform program that declines to speak its name? Breton, an engineer by training, believes he has "all the vectors" lined up for success. The French, he thinks, have grasped that they cannot go on living beyond their means. They have understood that they must "work more to pay for our social protection system."

I think Breton might be onto something. France is never quite what it appears. It blew off a lot of national steam by voting "No" to the European constitution, a supposed blow to "neoliberal" economics that was in fact just the opposite.

Now, having got through that thrilling little catharsis, the country may be ready to get down to the business of running a successful global economy with more flexibility and lower unemployment. If he can restrain his penchant for irrational exuberance, Villepin's attempt at a quiet revolution may get him closer to the Élysée Palace.

E-mail: rcohen@iht.com

Tomorrow: Alan Riding examines the evolution of celebrity life.

E-mail: rcohen@iht.com

France Races to Oust Illegal Immigrants

By ELAINE GANLEY

Associated Press Writer

6:11 AM CDT, September 22, 2007

PARIS

A Russian boy suffers head injuries after falling from a window while trying to elude police. A North African man slips from a window ledge and fractures his leg while fleeing officers. A Chinese woman lies in a coma after plunging from a window during a police check.

As France races to deport 25,000 illegal immigrants by the end of the year -- a quota set by President Nicolas Sarkozy -- tensions are mounting and the crackdown is taking a toll.

Critics say the hunt threatens values in a nation that prides itself on being a cradle of human rights and a land of asylum. Protesters have gathered by the dozens in Paris to protect illegal aliens as police move in.

But with three months left in the year, police have caught at least 11,800 immigrants, less than half the target, so Sarkozy has ordered officials to pick up the pace.

"I want numbers," Sarkozy reportedly told Brice Hortefeux, head of the Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-Development, which Sarkozy set up after taking office in May. "This is a campaign commitment. The French expect (action) on this."

There are no solid estimates of the number of illegal aliens in France. The Immigration Ministry puts it at 200,000 to 400,000, many from former colonies in Africa. France has a population of some 63 million.

The president, who cultivated a tough-on-crime image while serving as Interior Minister, says France needs a new kind of immigrant -- one who is "selected, not endured."

His government is fast-tracking tighter immigration legislation. Parliament's lower house on Thursday approved a bill that would allow consular officers to request DNA samples from immigrants trying to join relatives in France. Even some Cabinet ministers dislike the measure, which critics say betrays France's humanitarian values.

The DNA tests would be voluntary and proponents say such testing, which would get a trial run until 2010, would speed visa processing and give immigrants a way to bolster their applications.

Immigration legislation under consideration also aims to ensure that immigrants joining family members here speak French and grasp French values -- to be proven with tests.

In a nationally televized interview Thursday, Sarkozy went further, saying he wants France to adopt immigration quotas by regions of the world and by occupation.

"I want us to be able to establish each year, after a debate in parliament, a quota with a ceiling for the number of foreigners we accept on our territory," he said.

European countries to the south, like Italy or Spain, face a greater challenge from illegal immigration than France -- but neither has set themselves targets for throwing aliens out.

In the Netherlands, the first act of the new parliament elected in November 2006 was to halt deportations set in motion by the previous government.

Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende's new government declared an amnesty for up to 30,000 people. New asylum seekers and illegal immigrants still face a tough regime, kept in camps while their cases are handled. Even legal immigrants must pass language tests before coming and take citizenship classes in order to remain.

Meanwhile, resistance to France's crackdown has built among human rights groups, politicians of the opposition left, and even police. Injuries of foreigners during the past two months have also mobilized critics.

The 12-year-old Russian boy, who was fleeing with his illegal alien father in the northern town of Amiens, has been hospitalized with serious head injuries since early August. The North African man in the southern town of Roussillon suffered double fractures to his leg. The Chinese woman fell from an apartment in Paris on Thursday when police investigating a theft complaint turned up to carry out a check.

"Neighborhood groups are forming," said Pierre Willem of the UNSA police union. "Reactions are becoming more and more violent."

Some police officers worry they will get caught in the numbers hunt -- accused of racism for making arrests on the basis of skin color or other illegal criteria.

Even unions representing Air France employees are protesting, saying the flagship carrier's image is suffering because the government uses it to return illegal aliens, sometimes bound hand and foot, on flights occasionally marked by violent incidents.

"It's not our mission to be police auxiliaries," said Leon Cremieux, a national secretary of Sud Aerien, a small union representing employees of the aviation industry. Conditions during some expulsions are "contrary to human rights."

Socialist lawmaker Michele Delaunay, of Bordeaux, recently became a symbolic sponsor of a Kurd of Turkish nationality who had been ordered to leave France, stalling the expulsion process.

"It's a way to show the public that these problems of expulsion are, above all, human problems and not numbers," Delaunay said, adding that the young man speaks French, worked and paid taxes, making his case "particularly legitimate."

She nevertheless received an official warning that citizens who help illegal aliens stay in France risk a five-year prison term.

Copyright © 2007, The Associated Press

posted by mrlewishistoricalsociety @ 7:15 PM 0 comments
helpful for malawi farmer

Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts
By CELIA W. DUGGER

LILONGWE, Malawi — Malawi hovered for years at the brink of famine. After a disastrous corn harvest in 2005, almost five million of its 13 million people needed emergency food aid.

But this year, a nation that has perennially extended a begging bowl to the world is instead feeding its hungry neighbors. It is selling more corn to the World Food Program of the United Nations than any other country in southern Africa and is exporting hundreds of thousands of tons of corn to Zimbabwe.

In Malawi itself, the prevalence of acute child hunger has fallen sharply. In October, the United Nations Children’s Fund sent three tons of powdered milk, stockpiled here to treat severely malnourished children, to Uganda instead. “We will not be able to use it!” Juan Ortiz-Iruri, Unicef’s deputy representative in Malawi, said jubilantly.

Farmers explain Malawi’s extraordinary turnaround — one with broad implications for hunger-fighting methods across Africa — with one word: fertilizer.

Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.

Stung by the humiliation of pleading for charity, he led the way to reinstating and deepening fertilizer subsidies despite a skeptical reception from the United States and Britain. Malawi’s soil, like that across sub-Saharan Africa, is gravely depleted, and many, if not most, of its farmers are too poor to afford fertilizer at market prices.

“As long as I’m president, I don’t want to be going to other capitals begging for food,” Mr. Mutharika declared. Patrick Kabambe, the senior civil servant in the Agriculture Ministry, said the president told his advisers, “Our people are poor because they lack the resources to use the soil and the water we have.”

The country’s successful use of subsidies is contributing to a broader reappraisal of the crucial role of agriculture in alleviating poverty in Africa and the pivotal importance of public investments in the basics of a farm economy: fertilizer, improved seed, farmer education, credit and agricultural research.

Malawi, an overwhelmingly rural nation about the size of Pennsylvania, is an extreme example of what happens when those things are missing. As its population has grown and inherited landholdings have shrunk, impoverished farmers have planted every inch of ground. Desperate to feed their families, they could not afford to let their land lie fallow or to fertilize it. Over time, their depleted plots yielded less food and the farmers fell deeper into poverty.

Malawi’s leaders have long favored fertilizer subsidies, but they reluctantly acceded to donor prescriptions, often shaped by foreign-aid fashions in Washington, that featured a faith in private markets and an antipathy to government intervention.

In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, the World Bank pushed Malawi to eliminate fertilizer subsidies entirely. Its theory both times was that Malawi’s farmers should shift to growing cash crops for export and use the foreign exchange earnings to import food, according to Jane Harrigan, an economist at the University of London.

In a withering evaluation of the World Bank’s record on African agriculture, the bank’s own internal watchdog concluded in October not only that the removal of subsidies had led to exorbitant fertilizer prices in African countries, but that the bank itself had often failed to recognize that improving Africa’s declining soil quality was essential to lifting food production.

“The donors took away the role of the government and the disasters mounted,” said Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist who lobbied Britain and the World Bank on behalf of Malawi’s fertilizer program and who has championed the idea that wealthy countries should invest in fertilizer and seed for Africa’s farmers.

Here in Malawi, deep fertilizer subsidies and lesser ones for seed, abetted by good rains, helped farmers produce record-breaking corn harvests in 2006 and 2007, according to government crop estimates. Corn production leapt to 2.7 million metric tons in 2006 and 3.4 million in 2007 from 1.2 million in 2005, the government reported.

“The rest of the world is fed because of the use of good seed and inorganic fertilizer, full stop,” said Stephen Carr, who has lived in Malawi since 1989, when he retired as the World Bank’s principal agriculturalist in sub-Saharan Africa. “This technology has not been used in most of Africa. The only way you can help farmers gain access to it is to give it away free or subsidize it heavily.”

“The government has taken the bull by the horns and done what farmers wanted,” he said. Some economists have questioned whether Malawi’s 2007 bumper harvest should be credited to good rains or subsidies, but an independent evaluation, financed by the United States and Britain, found that the subsidy program accounted for a large share of this year’s increase in corn production.

The harvest also helped the poor by lowering food prices and increasing wages for farm workers. Researchers at Imperial College London and Michigan State University concluded in their preliminary report that a well-run subsidy program in a sensibly managed economy “has the potential to drive growth forward out of the poverty trap in which many Malawians and the Malawian economy are currently caught.”

Farmers interviewed recently in Malawi’s southern and central regions said fertilizer had greatly improved their ability to fill their bellies with nsima, the thick, cornmeal porridge that is Malawi’s staff of life.

In the hamlet of Mthungu, Enelesi Chakhaza, an elderly widow whose husband died of hunger five years ago, boasted that she got two ox-cart-loads of corn this year from her small plot instead of half a cart.

Last year, roughly half the country’s farming families received coupons that entitled them to buy two 110-pound bags of fertilizer, enough to nourish an acre of land, for around $15 — about a third the market price. The government also gave them coupons for enough seed to plant less than half an acre.

Malawians are still haunted by the hungry season of 2001-02. That season, an already shrunken program to give poor farmers enough fertilizer and seed to plant a meager quarter acre of land had been reduced again. Regional flooding further lowered the harvest. Corn prices surged. And under the government then in power, the country’s entire grain reserve was sold as a result of mismanagement and corruption.

Mrs. Chakhaza watched her husband starve to death that season. His strength ebbed away as they tried to subsist on pumpkin leaves. He was one of many who succumbed that year, said K. B. Kakunga, the local Agriculture Ministry official. He recalled mothers and children begging for food at his door.

“I had a little something, but I could not afford to help each and every one,” he said. “It was very pathetic, very pathetic indeed.”

But Mr. Kakunga brightened as he talked about the impact of the subsidies, which he said had more than doubled corn production in his jurisdiction since 2005.

“It’s quite marvelous!” he exclaimed.

Malawi’s determination to heavily subsidize fertilizer and the payoff in increased production are beginning to change the attitudes of donors, say economists who have studied Malawi’s experience.

The Department for International Development in Britain contributed $8 million to the subsidy program last year. Bernabé Sánchez, an economist with the agency in Malawi, estimated the extra corn produced because of the $74 million subsidy was worth $120 million to $140 million.

“It was really a good economic investment,” he said.

The United States, which has shipped $147 million worth of American food to Malawi as emergency relief since 2002, but only $53 million to help Malawi grow its own food, has not provided any financial support for the subsidy program, except for helping pay for the evaluation of it. Over the years, the United States Agency for International Development has focused on promoting the role of the private sector in delivering fertilizer and seed, and saw subsidies as undermining that effort.

But Alan Eastham, the American ambassador to Malawi, said in a recent interview that the subsidy program had worked “pretty well,” though it displaced some commercial fertilizer sales.

“The plain fact is that Malawi got lucky last year,” he said. “They got fertilizer out while it was needed. The lucky part was that they got the rains.”

And the World Bank now sometimes supports the temporary use of subsidies aimed at the poor and carried out in a way that fosters private markets.

Here in Malawi, bank officials say they generally support Malawi’s policy, though they criticize the government for not having a strategy to eventually end the subsidies, question whether its 2007 corn production estimates are inflated and say there is still a lot of room for improvement in how the subsidy is carried out.

“The issue is, let’s do a better job of it,” said David Rohrbach, a senior agricultural economist at the bank.

Though the donors are sometimes ambivalent, Malawi’s farmers have embraced the subsidies. And the government moved this year to give its people a more direct hand in their distribution.

Villagers in Chembe gathered one recent morning under the spreading arms of a kachere tree to decide who most needed fertilizer coupons as the planting season loomed. They had only enough for 19 of the village’s 53 families.

“Ladies and gentlemen, should we start with the elderly or the orphans?” asked Samuel Dama, a representative of the Chembe clan.

Men led the assembly, but women sitting on the ground at their feet called out almost all the names of the neediest, gesturing to families rearing children orphaned by AIDS or caring for toothless elders.

There were more poor families than there were coupons, so grumbling began among those who knew they would have to watch over the coming year as their neighbors’ fertilized corn fields turned deep green.

Sensing the rising resentment, the village chief, Zaudeni Mapila, rose. Barefoot and dressed in dusty jeans and a royal blue jacket, he acted out a silly pantomime of husbands stuffing their pants with corn to sell on the sly for money to get drunk at the beer hall. The women howled with laughter. The tension fled.

He closed with a reminder he hoped would dampen any jealousy.

“I don’t want anyone to complain,” he said. “It’s not me who chose. It’s you.”

The women sang back to him in a chorus of acknowledgment, then dispersed to their homes and fields.