We start this week with President Obama, who met Brazil’s president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva amid the G-20 meetings in Washington. Obama is siding with the developing world against Europe, which has become very stimulus-shy. Paul Krugman points out why:
Europe’s economic and monetary integration has run too far ahead of its political institutions. The economies of Europe’s many nations are almost as tightly linked as the economies of America’s many states — and most of Europe shares a common currency. But unlike America, Europe doesn’t have the kind of continentwide institutions needed to deal with a continentwide crisis.This is a major reason for the lack of fiscal action: there’s no government in a position to take responsibility for the European economy as a whole. What Europe has, instead, are national governments, each of which is reluctant to run up large debts to finance a stimulus that will convey many if not most of its benefits to voters in other countries.
In many ways, Obama is the first American president who ‘gets’ globalization. In a press conference today, he spoke of the need for global action to recover from global recession. Click here to see the video.
But speaking of global governance, yesterday’s edition of the New York Times featured an op-ed from Evo Morales, President of Bolivia:
In 1961, the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs placed the coca leaf in the same category with cocaine — thus promoting the false notion that the coca leaf is a narcotic — and ordered that “coca leaf chewing must be abolished within 25 years from the coming into force of this convention.”…So for the past eight years, the millions of us who maintain the traditional practice of chewing coca have been, according to the convention, criminals who violate international law.[...]
The custom of chewing coca leaves has existed in the Andean region of South America since at least 3000 B.C… Today, millions of people chew coca in Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and northern Argentina and Chile. The coca leaf continues to have ritual, religious and cultural significance that transcends indigenous cultures and encompasses the mestizo population.
Morales explains that coca leaves contain alkaloids chemically similar to caffeine and nicotine. The alkaloids aren’t narcotic until they’ve been concentrated and processed. This points to one very important problem with international lawmaking: the ruling bodies are distant and disconnected from the societies their laws affect.
Last, we have this bizarre video from China. The alpaca-like animal is a “grass-mud horse,” which is a Chinese-language pun on “fuck your mother.” This silly video has spread like wildfire among the Chinese. The NYT explains:
Conceived as an impish protest against censorship, the foul-named little horse has not merely made government censors look ridiculous, although it has surely done that.It has also raised real questions about China’s ability to stanch the flow of information over the Internet — a project on which the Chinese government already has expended untold riches, and written countless software algorithms to weed deviant thought from the world’s largest cyber-community.
Government computers scan Chinese cyberspace constantly, hunting for words and phrases that censors have dubbed inflammatory or seditious. When they find one, the offending blog or chat can be blocked within minutes.
Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, who oversees a project that monitors Chinese Web sites, said in an e-mail message that the grass-mud horse “has become an icon of resistance to censorship.”
h/t to Disgrasian for that one.
