Moisés Naím / El País
ExxonMobil -- with revenues of about $450 billion (yes, $450 billion) – displaced WalMart as the world’s largest company. Most countries do not have annual incomes of that magnitude. Steve Coll, an elegant writer and dogged investigative reporter just published a book on which he had been working for years: Private Empire. The book shows how in the 1990s, ExxonMobil – which already was a huge company – laid the foundations that enabled it to becoming the dominant giant that it now is.
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Moisés Naím / El País
Two of today’s main trends are the dizzying growth of people’s access to the internet, and the deepening of economic inequalities. These two trends are converging. There will be one internet for the haves, and another for the have-nots. This does not mean there will be two different webs, or that internet for less affluent users will cease to offer the great opportunities it has brought to all, regardless of age, income level or nationality. Indeed, the popularization of internet has, in many positive ways, served to counteract the concentration of wealth, income and power.
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Moisés Naím / El País
Argentina has more psychologists per capita than any other country in the world. This fact came to mind when president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner announced the nationalization of Repsol YPF, the country’s main oil company. Argentina has a long and calamitous history of forced nationalizations and wasteful public sector management. And here it was, repeating the same mistakes, oblivious to history and experience.
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Moisés Naím / El País
I have just interviewed Álvaro Uribe, the controversial ex-president of Colombia. My first question was: “President, the authorities have arrested your agriculture minister, the secretary of the president’s office, and the director of your intelligence services. There are also proceedings against your interior minister and your press secretary. This can only mean one of two things: either you have poor judgment in selecting your senior staff, or a process of judicial hounding is going on against you and your team.” Uribe answered that one can’t generalize, and that each of these cases had to be discussed separately, which he proceeded to do. He is convinced that his colleagues are worthy public servants, innocent of the charges against them (corruption, illegal telephone wiretaps, etc.). The implication is obvious: if so many of his close associates are facing prosecution, and the ex-president thinks they are innocent, then he must think that something strange and ominous is going on.
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Moisés Naím / Foreign Affairs
The global economic crisis has been a boon for transnational criminals. Thanks to the weak economy, cash-rich criminal organizations can acquire financially distressed but potentially valuable companies at bargain prices. Fiscal austerity is forcing governments everywhere to cut the budgets of law enforcement agencies and court systems. Millions of people have been laid off and are thus more easily tempted to break the law. Large numbers of unemployed experts in finance, accounting, information technology, law, and logistics have boosted the supply of world-class talent available to criminal cartels. Meanwhile, philanthropists all over the world have curtailed their giving, creating funding shortfalls in the arts, education, health care, and other areas, which criminals are all too happy to fill in exchange for political access, social legitimacy, and popular support. International criminals could hardly ask for a more favorable business environment. Their activities are typically high margin and cash-based, which means they often enjoy a high degree of liquidity -- not a bad position to be in during a global credit crunch.
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Moisés Naím / Financial Times
Repsol “pursued a policy of pillage, not of production, not of exploration”, the Argentine president thundered on Monday. “They practically made the country unviable with their business policies, not resource policies.” Such was Cristina Fernández’s sulphurous stance as she announced her government was renationalising YPF, the country’s largest oil group.
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Moisés Naím / Financial Times
The White House should propose a bilateral economic treaty that Brazil’s leader cannot refuse. Such a deal would, of course, be a huge political gamble for a US president facing plenty of difficulties elsewhere. But the benefits for the two countries and the rest of the region would be considerable …”
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Moisés Naím / El País
What is it that we are never short of? What is it that always seems to be available in abundance — even in the poorest, remotest parts of the world?
Arms.
When was the last time that we heard of a war, an insurgency or a guerrilla movement that ceased or abated because one of the sides in the conflict ran short of bullets?
Never.
Where there is war money always appears, and where there is money, arms always appear. And they don’t just appear where there is war and money. Arms abound even in the most miserable parts of the planet. In ghettos where there is a shortage of everything — where babies don’t have milk, students don’t have books, and hunger is a daily experience — arms are never in short supply. Pistols, revolvers, rifles, submachine guns, grenade launchers and other small arms are tragically common in the slums of the world.
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Moisés Naím and Uri Dadush / The Huffington Post
Economic growth or income redistribution? To alleviate poverty, which of the two should be given priority? Should governments invest in expanding the electricity grid to power new, job-producing private companies or use the money to subsidize health and education for the poor? It is an old, sterile, and ideologically charged debate -- one too often immune to evidence.
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Moisés Naím / El País
Forbes magazine recently published its annual list of the world’s richest people. This coincided with another event, the meeting of China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) which is formally one of the supreme organs of the Chinese state, representing the legislative branch. Surprisingly, there is a connection between the two events. The list of the delegates to the NPC includes many of the country’s richest people. Some of them also appear on the Forbes list.
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Moisés Naím and Uri Dadush / The Washington Post
The scandal over the repellent way the World Bank president is appointed has obscured an equally scandalous situation: the appointment process of the rest of the senior managers at the bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). They too are selected through opaque, quota-driven negotiations that are a far cry from the meritocracy these two institutions claim to value and preach to others.
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Moisés Naím / El País
Will Israel bomb Iran’s nuclear plants? If Greece goes under, will Europe slip into economic chaos and destabilize the global economy ? Will China go off the rails? The list of grim prophecies is long, and easy to draw up. It is surprising, then, that good news doesn’t get more attention. And lately, the world has got some good news. World poverty in 2010 was half of what it was in 1990, and the number of people living in poverty has fallen throughout the globe.
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Moisés Naím / El País
War and new technologies that boost the power of armies have been with us since the dawn of history. Firearms relegated the sword to museums, in World War I tanks replaced cavalry and in 1945 the atomic bomb inaugurated the age of mass destruction. In this new century another artifact has appeared which has forced generals to rethink their tactics. Nothing very sophisticated: an old bomb buried on a dusty road or placed in a bag of rubbish on the roadside, set off remotely with a cellphone or a garage-opener when enemy troops are passing. The improvised explosive devices (IEDs) popularized by the insurgents in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are as cheap as they are lethal.
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Moisés Naím / Financial Times
As it begins the search for a new president of the World Bank, the Obama White House risks repeating the very same mistakes that all too often in the past have led to the wrong person being appointed.
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Moisés Naím / El País
What do Nicolas Sarkozy, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Vladimir Putin have in common? Well, all of them will soon be facing difficult electoral contests. The same goes for Barack Obama and Hugo Chávez. And many other presidents. This year there will be presidential elections or changes of heads of government in countries that together account for over half of the world economy. But this is not all. Even more significant is the fact that many leaders who must seek the people’s votes in upcoming months bear the responsibility of making decisions which, for better or for worse, directly influence the many, grave and simultaneous crises which are now shaking the world. And the demands of national politics are often at odds with those that emanate from international politics and economics.
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Moisés Naím / El País
This must the question that the Syrian tyrant asks himself every day. While the world’s democracies have discussed long and hard the options for bringing a stop to the slaughter, far less time has been spent identifying the options that remain for Assad himself. I imagine him contemplating his possibilities while he looks at two photographs taken last year. One of his lovely wife Asma in a flattering report that appeared in Vogue magazine, and the other of the dead body of Muammar Gaddafi. The first reminds him of a life and alternatives that he no longer has, while the second brutally illustrates his possible future. The hope, symbolized by Vogue's flattering article, that Assad might be able to reform the murderous dictatorship he inherited from his father, is now gone forever. The thousands of innocent people he has killed put an end to that. In which case, what possibilities remain? I see three:
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Moisés Naím / El País
You may not have heard of Lt. Colonel Davis of the US army, who now works at the Pentagon, after several tours of duty in Iraq and more recently, Afghanistan. Davis just returned and wrote a report that begins thus: “Senior ranking military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the US Congress and American people in regard to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable. This deception has damaged America’s credibility both among our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan. It has likely cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars Congress might not otherwise have appropriated had it known the truth, and our senior leaders’ behavior has almost certainly prolonged this war. The single greatest penalty our nation has suffered, however, has been that we have lost the blood, limbs and lives of tens of thousands of American Service Members with little to no gain to our country as a consequence of this deception.” And this is just the public version of his report. He also produced a confidential version, for a few congressmen and senators with security clearances.
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Moisés Naím / El País
Daddy (Papá) is Hipólito Mejía, who wants to be president of the Dominican Republic. Llegó Papá! (Here is Daddy!) is his campaign slogan. His promise to the voters is that Daddy will give them what they don’t have and have never had. The elections are in May, and Mejía, who already was president between 2000 and 2004, may be re-elected despite the fact that during his tenure the country suffered a disastrous economic crash .
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Moisés Naím / Financial Times
The ancient Greeks thought that “those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.” For them, the surest way to destroy a person is to fill him or her with success, power, prosperity and fame. Excessive success induces inordinate self-confidence, which inevitably leads them to make disastrous mistakes and to failure. Hubris, they called it.
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Moisés Naím / Financial Times
Inequality will be the central theme of 2012. It has always existed and is not going away, but this year it will top the global agenda of voters, protesters and politicians running for office in the many important elections scheduled.
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