I missed four and one of them really, really pissed me off when I realized the correct answer. I swung and missed horribly at at knuckleball.
But the other three I just did not know the answer. So I learned something early this morning and that is always a good thing.
I was scored as missing 5, but one of them was a kneejerk deal & I realized my error just after I clicked “next”. So I’m counting it as 4, and like you, 1 was a knuckleball (assassinations), and I just didn’t know the other three.
I notice that Newfoundlanders & Labradorans did better than citizens of any U.S. State. It might help that only their smartest two kids took the test, though.
I got seven wrong. Could have been only five mistakes if I had gone with my second choice on a couple of questions. Not bad for a citizen of Soviet Canuckistan who has no particular interest in U.S. politics. Eh?
Come to think of it I do know enough about U.S. politics to correctly guess the number of assassinations. I just added a couple to those I was aware of for good measure. . .
good job, r.e. I’ll look you up when I’m ‘oat’ your way.
The Democratic Republic Congo is on fire because of what the west formed against that country
Why has Africa had so much civil war? In all other regions of the world the incidence of civil war has been on a broadly declining trend over the past thirty years: but in Africa the long term trend has been upwards. Of course, every civil war has its ‘story’ – the personalities, the social cleavages, the triggering events, the inflammatory discourse, the atrocities. But is there anything more? Are there structural conditions – social, political or economic – which make a country prone to civil war? Might it be that the same inflammatory politician, playing on the same social cleavages, and with the same triggering events, might ‘cause’ war under one set of conditions and merely be an ugly irritant in another.
Surprisingly, the dominant factors are economic. Three factors matter a lot for the risk of civil war: the level of income, its rate of growth, and its structure. If a country is poor, in economic decline, and is dependent upon natural resource exports, then it faces a substantial risk that sooner or later it will experience a civil war. Typically, such a country runs a risk of around one-in-seven every five years. Like Russian roulette, things might go well for a while, but then some conjunction of circumstances – the personalities, the triggering events – ignite violent conflict. Of course, when this happens, the media focus on the personalities and the triggering events. These are indeed the proximate ‘cause’ of the conflict. But the big brute fact is that civil war is heavily concentrated in countries with low income, in economic decline, and dependent upon natural resources.
Let’s start with the political economy. The most obvious route is that natural resource rents are a ‘honey pot’. Politics comes to be about the contest for control of these revenues. This produces a politics of corruption – aided and abetted by foreign corporate behavior – and sometimes directly a politics of violence. The stakes are highest in low-income countries because the control of the state implies massive revenues relative to other income-earning opportunities. Further, this politics of rent-seeking diverts the public arena from its normal function of achieving the collective action that is necessary to supply public goods – the social and economic infrastructure that all societies need. The society thus loses out twice over: in the struggle for resource rents other resources are dissipated, and the supply of public goods declines. Nigeria provides a striking example of such a politics of contest for oil rents.
The second route by which natural resource rents increase the risk of war is through the detachment of government. Because resource-rich governments do not need significant other tax revenues they become detached from their electorates. In most societies, because electors have to pay high taxes, they scrutinize the government to see how it uses their money. This was indeed how democracy developed in the West. The campaigning slogan ‘no taxation without representation’ can be inverted to the depressing reality of ‘no representation without taxation’. In many resource-rich societies the resource rents are not seen as belonging to ordinary people in the same way as income taken from them in taxes – hence the detachment. The government is able to ignore the concerns of the population. Mobuto’s Zaire was a classic example of such detachment.
That is not surprising. The West is less interested in human rights in Africa than in justifying and setting the stage for a new Cold War. The BBC reported on 13th July it “has found the first evidence that China is currently helping Sudan’s government militarily in Darfur”.
Yet, China’s real crime is its dominating investments in Africa which now exceeds British, USA, European Union, World Bank and IMF aid budgets, combined.
A recent World Bank confirmed that China is financing infrastructure projects in more than 35 African countries with Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Mosambique, Nigeria, the Sudan, Zambia and Zimbabwe among the biggest recipients. In the DRC, China has agreed to build thousands of kilometers of roads, several hospitals and three universities. Unlike the West, China gives Africa quality projects on time and much more cheaply.
In their most direct statements yet recorded, African leaders made their views about the West clear during the Chinese Africa summit, held in Beijing in November 2006. Speaking to Lindsey Hilsum of British Channel Four television, former president Festus Mogae of Botswana said “”I find that the Chinese treat us as equals. The West treats us as former subjects (read slaves). Which is a reality. I prefer the attitude of the Chinese to that of the West.”
For his part, President Museveni who is seen as a darling of the West said, “The Western ruling groups are conceited, full of themselves, ignorant of our conditions, and they make other people’s business their business. Whereas the Chinese just deal with you, you represent your country, they represent their own interests, and you do business.”
I think that the magic ingredient that makes the difference is scrutiny of government by the country’s citizens. Unfortunately, scrutiny is a ‘public good’ – that is, if it is provided, the whole society benefits. The incentives for individual action are thus all wrong – basically, the smart thing to do is to sit back and hope that someone else goes to the trouble of providing public goods such as scrutiny. Societies need ‘collective action’ to overcome the public goods problem and because Africa’s societies are so highly diverse –more ethnically diverse than anywhere else in the world – they find it unusually difficult to supply public goods at the national level.
Of course, people and groups lobby the government, but overwhelmingly this lobbying is not for the national interest but for individual or group advantage. But there are ways around this problem. In an ethnically diverse society it is probably much easier to organize scrutiny at the local or regional level than at the national level – at the local level ethnicity is likely to unite people in collective action, just as at the national level it is likely to divide them and frustrate collective action. If the rents from natural resources could be transparently and fairly distributed to sub-national levels of government there is some hope that such governments would come to face serious citizen scrutiny. The challenge is to get to this stage where rents accruing at the national level are seen to be fairly distributed to the regions.
This, to my mind, is the agenda for corporate social responsibility in DRC: transparency in bidding for resource concessions; transparency in revenue payments to governments; and cooperation by banks in tracking misappropriation of rents. Sadly, it is far from the currently dominant agenda. International resource extraction companies live in terror of two powerful forces – Western consumers who may boycott their products; and the local people living around their installations, who may kidnap employees and damage equipment. They have responded to Western consumer pressure – itself based on a lazy, teenage misdiagnosis of Africa’s ills – by trying to look like good employers and good environmentalists. They have responded to local extortion rackets by providing health and education facilities in the neighborhood of their installations. Frankly, both of these are at best irrelevant. High wages mess up the labour market and so cost jobs; it is governments, not companies, that should be supplying basic social services. What has got lost is the legitimate, indeed essential role that companies can play in helping African societies to scrutinize their governments. Corporate social responsibility in Democratic Republic of Congo must be radically redefined.
I think it time for Congolese poeple to wakeup and stand for their country not UN or European Union will be able to stop the conflict.
May God Be with DRC
Rev. Freddie Nsapo, MPA
“good job, r.e. I’ll look you up when I’m ‘oat’ your way.”
And when might that be smijer?
Feel free to drop me a line at -
robinedgar59@yahoo.ca
if you ever are oot and aboot in the Montreal area.
What?
Me worry about Nigerian Scam SPAM?
Nah.
Honestly, I don’t get around much… I just wanted to be silly.. If I *do* get an opportunity to QB, I’ll certainly look you up.
You might like 419 Eaters – a group that counter-scams the Nigerian scammers.