Juanson World

MISSOULA, MT - Finally got a shower tonight after two nights of camping. In lieu of reports, I'll post some pictures:

MADISON, WI - It is fitting that I write this from the "Fair Trade Coffee House" here on picturesque State St. in downtown Madison. The industrial 1950s style campus buildings provide the perfect backdrop for strolling down the main drag, where bohemian clothing stores compete with memorabilia-heavy industrial size sports bars. Such is the liberal haven of the Midwest, where the long winter doesn't appear quite so forboding as students prepare for the fall bachanalia known as Badger football season.

Madison came on the heels of another Big 10 powerhouse, Columbus, home of THE Ohio State University. Hosted by a friend of a friend, the locals were not afraid to stay out until the wee hours of morning to show us the "authentic" Columbus experience. East Coasters as we are, it was a snapshot of "real" America - friendly folks born and raised in Ohio with no intention to leave Columbus. Having grown up in the Washington, DC area and attended school in NJ, I never experienced the "leaving my hometown for the big city" experience that seems to define the yuppie concept in America. My friends and I decided to forgo the sweltering South to explore a part of the country we may never see again. The Twin Cities are next, followed by the Badlands of South Dakota. Hopefully I can get some pictures up soon.

MARTINSVILLE, NJ - After having been to nine different Latin American countries this year, it's high time I saw some of my own country. Tomorrow morning I leave from New York on a cross-country road trip to San Francisco. I'll try to blog from the road as I can. Stay tuned...

Great post by Dan Savage in Andrew Sullivan's blog (I'll just reprint it here in its entirety):

GET OUT NOW: Okay, I have a half an hour until my stint here as guest-blogger ends and I turn back into pumpkin. I wish I had more time to flesh this out, but I have to leave for the airport in a half an hour so I’m just going to have to blast through this. Forgive the stream of consciousness, the misspellings, and the rambling nature of this post.

Look, I was for this thing. I went out on limb and backed it. I wanted it to succeed. I still do.

But it’s time to declare victory and get the fuck out. Thanks to the incompetence of this administration, we can no longer avoid the “Q” word. It’s a quagmire. Period. Listening to Marketplace while I made dinner tonight, I learned that attacks on military convoys have gone up—doubled or tripled, I didn’t have a pen—in the last 12 months. How’d that happen? How many billions spent and how many Americans and Iraqis dead and yet things just keep going from bad to worse.

It seems that the more corners we’re told we’ve turned, the more walls we run into. And it just keeps coming back to manpower—“just enough troops to lose,” as Andrew says. There were never enough troops on the ground, and since this President never met a fuck-up that he wouldn’t pin a Medal of Freedom on, the same fuck-ups who mismanaged this thing from the start are still grinning at us on TV.

Does anyone in the White House know what the fuck they’re doing? One day it’s the war on terror, the next day it’s got a new name, then it’s back to the war on terror. We’re going to set a date to start reducing troop levels—no, wait, we’re not. Killing Saddam’s sons will change things for the better, no wait. Capturing Saddam will take the wind out of the sails of the insurgency. Now that everyone in Iraq has a purple finger, the insurgents are going to slink away. We clear a town of insurgents, but we don’t have the manpower to hold it, so we pull the troops out and—surprise—the insurgents take the town back. “Dead enders,” “last throes,” “losing stream.”

On and on it goes, and the news doesn’t change, or get any better. If it needs a new name perhaps we should call it the Groundhog’s Day War. Does anyone believe that the Iraqi Constitution—coming on Monday—is going to change a damn thing?

George Bush is good at one thing and one thing only: winning elections and coasting along. Forget the maybe/maybe not criminal outing of a CIA agent—the prosecution of this war is this administration's signature crime. My friends who admonish me for not seeing this coming the run-up to the war are right, it pains me to admit. I have no longer have any faith—none whatever—in Bush, Rummy, Condi, Dick, or the rest of the jackasses running this show. And like all liberals who supported this thing, I'm angier about George Bush's handling of this war than any liberal who opposed it. Liberal hawks wanted to win this more desperately than anyone else. But it’s time to bring down the curtain—why? Not because war I hate Bush so much that I want to see my country lose this war—I love my country—and not because I don’t care about the Iraqi people. I’m one of those liberals who backed the war for humanitarian reasons.

No, we should get out because, with the Bushies running the show for the next three years, we’re simply not going to win. It’s just go to drag on and on. This war, as I see it now, is either going to be nasty, brutal and short or nasty, brutal and long. I prefer nastry, brutal and short, if only because it will mean fewer Americans will die. And fewer Iraqis too, I suspect.

To paraphrase a war hero: How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for an incompetent?

Andres Oppenheimer has a crucially important op-ed in yesterday's Miami Herald, which notes the starking contrast in the number of engineers and scientists being produced by the Americas versus Asia:

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) says that, in sheer volume, China is the world's leading producer of engineers: It graduates around 220,000 a year. By comparison, the United States graduates about 60,000 a year, South Korea 57,000, Mexico 24,000, Brazil 18,000, Colombia 11,000, Chile 4,000 and Argentina 3,000.

A separate report by the Engineering Trends consulting firm shows that, measured on a per-capita basis, South Korea produces the most engineers annually, followed by Taiwan and Japan. By comparison, Colombia ranks 19th, Chile 23rd, Mexico 24th, the United States 25th, China 30th, Brazil 35th and Argentina 37th.

As Tom Friedman has driven home in his op-eds and catch-phrase creating books, this has critical implications for development:

'Falling behind is dangerous, because it affects countries' manufacturing capabilities,'' says Engineering Trends founder Richard Heckel. ``Manufacturing is an ever-changing scene. If you don't innovate, you don't compete.''

Development experts say that, if a country wants to be a manufacturing powerhouse, it needs people who can produce existing goods in more efficient ways, and people who can constantly come up with new products. This means they need engineers on both sides of the production cycle.

I mentioned brain drain in my previous post, but this goes beyond brain drain: call it brain abortion. I'm guilty as charged: I majored in political "science" after having enjoyed and excelled in science and math in high school. At the college level, I, like many of my classmates, was turned off to pursuing these subjects mainly due to the poor structure of the introductory courses. These large and cumbersome classes tend to weed out the truly committed in part through poor teaching by TAs whose command of English was shaky at best. Moreover, like journalism and academica, science and engineering careers do not seem to be perceived as lucrative professions in US, in contrast to MBAs, MDs, and JDs, which all of my friends seem to be pursuing these days.

What are some of the other factors that account for the science and engineering gap? Ostensibly, culture has a hand: the fact that Argentina's University of Buenos Aires produces 10 lawyers for every engineer fits neatly into the paradigm of the porteño psyche. Conversely, Asia reflects "a culture that venerates scientists and engineers nearly as much as rock stars."

What can be done to buck the trend? Oppenheimer notes that Daniel Filmus, Argentina's Minister of Education (a reliable source tells me that he's doing good things over there), shocked that the country was producing three (!) textile engineers a year, established 30 new scholarships for engineering through a public/private sector partnership. This is a good start, as the region's governments must invest in human capital. As Asia's rise as a global power demonstrates, science and engineering represent one of the most valuable types of these sort of investments.

I'll defer to Oppenheimer for the final word, as he uses the hemisphere's lineup of presidential occupations to speak for themselves:

The United States has a president who got a B.A. degree in history, and a master's in business administration. In Latin America, most presidents are lawyers (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala), economists (Honduras, Peru, Panama), business administrators (Mexico), clinical physicians (Costa Rica, Ecuador), psychiatrists (Costa Rica), sports commentators (El Salvador) or army officers (Venezuela).

Perhaps it's time to elect engineers as presidents.

The Washington Post has an interesting article on the DC area delegation that is currently in El Salvador. One of the purposes of the trip is to encourage investment from Salvadorans in the US back into El Salvador. The rationale behind this is to generate some productivity from all of the money pouring into the country ($2.5 billion last year) in the form of remittances. Instead of simply sending money to consume, the logic goes, capital can be used as a long term investment. Sounds great, right? Well, the article features a range of viewpoints on this idea:

"They want us to buy land and hotels on the beach," said Faustino Merino Jr., a Salvadoran immigrant who lives in Lorton, Va. "They want us to open better restaurants with the same food that we have here. Then they think that the tourists will come. But what does it serve us to open when they don't provide the security that we need?"

When Merino left El Salvador 24 years ago, a civil war was raging. During the 1980s, he could not safely travel back to El Salvador, and he says the government made no attempt to stay connected to its emigrants in the chaos. When the conflict ended in 1992, Merino and his family had established roots in Northern Virginia. Now he is an owner or investor in five Central American restaurants there.

Merino said he has been invited to several meetings with the Salvadoran consulate. Last year, a representative of El Salvador's economic ministry met with him and others to promote investment opportunities.

"Now they see that we can invest," Merino said. "They see that we are big people now, and we put the money in [the United States]. Now they are jealous. They see we are strong here. They want us to put our money [in El Salvador]. They have to make sure it is secure."

I find it unfortunate that immigrants that have succeeded in the US are reluctant to return to their native countries and contribute to development. In many ways, this particular stance from Salvadorans that left the counry in the 80s that is cautious to invest reminds me of a less rabid version of the anti-Castro South Floridians that left Cuba 45 years ago.

When I was in San Salvador in June, every Salvadoran I spoke to told me that they had family in the States. I sat next to a man in his 30s on a bus coming back from a lake outside the city, who started up a conversation in nearly flawless English. He had grown up in the marginal area surrounding the lake, but had been in the Bay Area for almost 10 years now. He started out as a janitor and now worked for the San Francisco city government in urban planning. He owned a home in Oakland and his children were doing well in school. He was back visiting his mother, and told me that he had been sending remittances the entire time.

This example illustrates one of the challenges facing Latin America as a whole: brain drain. It is the most ambitious and driven that end up in the North. Whether it is Colombians starting businesses in Costa Rica who left for security reasons or Bolivians heading to Spain who cannot survive on local wages, Latin America cannot progress without those abroad making an investment in their country's futures. A great example of a solution to this is an NGO in Argentina called HelpArgentina. The premise behind the organization is to mobilize Argentines abroad by channelling contributions to local organizations. The founder of the organization, Lloyd Nimetz, studied in Argentina following the economic crisis in late 2001, and witnessed the fleeing of Argentines to greener pastures. Last year HelpArgentina channelled over $200,000 to various local organizations and is growing by leaps and bounds.

It is disheartening when a candidate like Tuto Quiroga in Bolivia gets slammed by the left for being "white IBM executive from Texas" when he is forgoing the lucrative US private sector to try to make a contribution to Bolivia. Furthermore, it does not bode well for democracy when leaders like Lula and Chavez, sweeping to victory on populist campaigns aimed at the poor, find themselves unable to fulfill their promises as they sell out their base through corruption and other shenanigans. It is an Sisyphean battle that the United States cannot afford to continue ignoring.

Excuse the comparison, but I've been wondering for awhile if Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva would stay above the fray throughout Brazil's PT corruption scandal, a la Reagan during Iran Contra. I had my doubts, and now a former ally has come out and said that Lula indeed was aware of the misdeeds:

"Lula was in the next room. He knew we were negotiating numbers," former Liberal Party head Valdemar Costa Neto told Epoca magazine in an interview. The Liberal Party is an ally of the Workers' Party.

He said Lula was aware he negotiated 6.5 million reais in off-balance-sheet campaign funding with former Cabinet Chief Jose Dirceu and ex-ruling party Treasurer Delubio Soares.

"Lula, Jose Dirceu and Delubio are part of the same family. You can't just crucify one of them," said Costa Neto, who resigned from Congress on August 1 after admitted to having taken the irregular funding.

Wow. This is a brutal revelation, especially in light of Lula's recent comments:

"Among 180 million Brazilians, there is no one, neither man nor woman, with the authority to lecture me about ethics, morals or honesty," [Lula] said in a speech here last week. "In this country, the person who can debate ethics with me has yet to be born."

Thiw would be a huge blow to the President, who in recent polls was predicted to lose the 2006 election in a run-off.

Lula addressed the nation this morning, apologizing for the scandal and providing a bit of stability to the real, which had devalued by 3 percent in the midst of investor cautiousness because of the scandal. It appears that Lula will not be able to simply grin and bear it while his underlings take the heat.

Excellent Krugman this morning:

I used to live next door to a Russian émigré. One day he asked me to explain something that puzzled him about his new country. "This place seems very rich," he said, "but I never see anyone making anything. How does the country earn its money?"

The answer, these days, is that we make a living by selling each other houses. Since December 2000 employment in U.S. manufacturing has fallen 17 percent, but membership in the National Association of Realtors has risen 58 percent.

The housing boom has created jobs in two ways. Many jobs have been created, directly and indirectly, by a surge in housing construction. And rising home values have fueled a simultaneous surge in consumer spending.

Krugman goes on to point out that the current economic expansion has been driven in part by increased military spending and the Bush tax cuts, but that the housing bubble is mostly responsible for this. This bubble becomes more fragile when you consider the number of US treasury bonds that are being held by China:

Now, any economics textbook will tell you that it's fine to borrow from abroad if the money is used to expand the economy's productive capacity. When 19th-century America borrowed from Europe to build railroads, it was also enhancing its ability to repay its debts later. But we aren't borrowing to build productive capacity. As a share of G.D.P., investment other than housing construction is below its average between 1980 and 2000, and way below its level at the end of the 1990's.

In other words, a fuller answer to my former neighbor would be that these days, Americans make a living selling each other houses, paid for with money borrowed from the Chinese. Somehow, that doesn't seem like a sustainable lifestyle.

Those that have purchased real estate as a profit-making venture, having taken out huge mortgages, are in for a inevitable meltdown when the bubble slowly deflates. They will have Bush to thank for his massive levels of deficit spending.

One has to be at least somewhat impressed by the "Ocean's 11"-style planning that was behind one of the largest bank robberies ever last weekend in northeastern Brazil. The culprits, who most likely were led by infamous criminal Moises Teixeira da Silva, alias Tatuzao, (Giant Armadillo) "spent three months digging an 80-meter-long (262-foot-long), 70-centimeter-high (28-inch-high) tunnel from a house they had rented near the bank in the city of Fortaleza, 2,500 kilometers (1,550 miles) northeast of Sao Paulo."

As if Brazil didn't have enough to worry about, it would appear that Brazilian taxpayers will have to foot the bill for the $68 million stolen, as the money was not insured while in the vault. In a country with the some of the worst corruption and inequality in the world, this incident demonstrates the influence that gangs and drug dealers continue to exert in the streets that the state does not control.

Unfortunately, the stabbings of six teenagers in two incidents at a Montgomery County high school and mall on Friday demonstrate that gang violence continues to infiltrate the youth of the DC area. Members of the gang Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13, were responsible for the attacks. MS-13 was originally composed of Salvadoran immigrants to Los Angeles in the 1980s, but now has broad membership throughout the country with ties to gangs in Central America.

El Salvador is one of the countries most afflicted by gang violence, and not surprisingly, the DC area has one of the largest Salvadoran populations in the United States. Official census numbers indicate approximately 100,000 Salvadoran immigrants in the area, but undocumented immigrants would account for at least double or triple that amount. Thus, it is an encouraging sign that Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan is to embark on a three-day trade mission to El Salvador, where he plans to bring up the gang issue in meetings with government officials and business executives.

Duncan's trip will be the first official visit by a county official to El Salvador, and it could not have come at a more appropriate time. Cooperation between governments is crucial in tackling the complex issues of youth gangs, and it starts with law enforcement agencies at the county level. In addition, Duncan will be sure to benefit from witnessing the reality of El Salvador firsthand: he is scheduled to visit some of the more impoverished parts of the country. I hope that his experience will heighten his awareness to the challenges that immigrants face in leaving their homelands.

Marcela Sanchez's online column today illustrates why I wish the Post was able to publish her more often in print. She deftly analyzes recent transitions at the State Department in high level Western Hemisphere positions.

First of all, Sanchez lauds the creation of the new "Cuba transition coordinator," as it will "absorb the pressures that Cuban-American constituents place on the administration." Indeed, US foreign policy in the region has been almost exclusively focused on Cuba from an electoral politics perspective. Bush's initial appointments reflect this obsession with pandering to the anti-Castro South Floridians:

Some may remember Otto J. Reich, Bush's first nominee for assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs. The Cuban exile is a one-issue man and, like Bolton, received a temporary recess appointment after fierce congressional opposition to his confirmation in 2002.

...Bush then nominated Roger F. Noriega, a less controversial figure, certainly, but a hard-liner nonetheless. The Senate, where Noriega worked as senior staff in the 1990s, confirmed him in July 2003.

As a Senate staffer, Noriega often complained about the lack of a comprehensive strategy toward the region. Unfortunately his words and actions during his two years as assistant secretary of state revealed a strategy whose only logic was its anti-Castro obsession.

Noreiga's resignation opens the door for likely successor Thomas Shannon, who brings diplomatic experience in the Andean region to the table. Sanchez opines that Shannon will do a better job than his predecessor in dealing with Chavez. Noreiga was quick to engage the Venezuelan leader, often falling right into his hands, and providing him with more of a soapbox.

Finally, Sanchez concludes with an excellent point:

It is important to acknowledge that neither Shannon nor McCarry is Latino. In that way their choice means that the administration has been thinking about qualifications over mere tokenism to attract Hispanic voters. And while more Latinos in government are welcome, of course, the Latinos on this administration's roster have proven to be less beneficial for Latin America as a whole.

With continuing immigration from Latin America, I believe that firsthand experience in the region will become a necessity in US-Latin American relations. Hopefully Latinos in the US will make gains in their educational performace, which up until now has prevented them from climbing the ladder into the echelons of power.

While I didn't get my wish to see the two cowboys on horseback, they appeared to enjoy each other's company in the heat. However, as stated by the Miami Herald, Uribe did not achieve his main aim: to win approval for the Justice and Peace Law. For now, it would appear that lobbying from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty has achieved some trepidation. Nevertheless, I would argue that reservations within Congress probably have more to do with Bush's reluctance to fully embrace the plan, due to its limits on extradition for drug traffickers.

Tommorow, Colombian president Alvaro Uribe will be paying George W. a visit at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. This is a big deal, as noted by El Tiempo, because only eleven previous world leaders have been extended said invitation, and among these, only one from Latin America: Mexico's Vicente Fox. Moreover, Fox received the nod in the pre-9/11 days, when Bush seemed committed to putting emphasis on Latin America. Thus this visit is symbolic of the closeness between the two allies. The US views Colombia as a significant counterweight to Chavez in the Andean region, while Colombia remains dependent on US funding for security forces in their internal conflict.

Uribe should feel right at home in cowboy country: he is an avid rider of horses and has his own ranch in Cordoba. But Bush and Uribe share more in common than just horseback riding. Both leaders' defining policy agendas have been driven in part by personal vendettas: Uribe against the FARC guerillas who murdered his father on their family ranch in 1983; Bush against Saddam Hussein, who allegedly led a failed assassination attempt in Kuwait against Bush Sr. in 1993.

Uribe and Bush, who will be joined by several Colombian ministers as well as Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice and National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, are set to discuss negotiations for a bilateral free trade agreement, the Justice and Peace Law, and Plan Colombia's progress. Yesterday, the State Department (questionably) approved Colombia for its biannual human rights certification, thus freeing up $70 million in military aid. Tommorow, Uribe will also be asking for a pledge of $40 million (of an estimated $160 million needed) to fund paramilitary demobilizations under the new law. With all of these requests, being chummy with W. is of great benefit to Uribe. I personally can't wait to see the cowboy photo-op on horseback.

It must be the 8 year old Little Leaguer inside of me, but the fact that Rafael Palmeiro got busted for steriods is really saddening. I always considered Raffy one of the most underrated players in the game, and loved his sweet swing. His career now has a black cloud over it, just like Canseco, McGwire, Pudge, and Sosa. I knew that Canseco was telling the truth because at the highest levels of competition, it is too tempting to get an edge however possible. It took a buffoon to get the truth out there, and the truth hurts.

There's a lot of Colombia news today, in advance of president Alvaro Uribe's visit to sweltering Crawford on Thursday. In the wake of Luis Alberto Moreno's assuming the presidency of the IDB, Uribe has offered the US ambassadorship to former president Andres Pastrana, who happens to be one of Uribe's most vehement critics. According to El Tiempo, Pastrana has all but accepted the appointment, pending a final consultation with his family.

This represents a bold political move by Uribe, who has chosen as his representative in Washington a figure who had been mobilizing his political alies against Uribe since leaving the presidency in 2002. Uribe's campaign in 2002 was based upon a reversal of Pastrana's failed negotiations with guerilla groups, replacing this strategy with a more hard-line approach. Furthermore, Pastrana has criticized Uribe's handling of the ongoing demobilization of paramilitaries and has also opposed Uribe's bid to change the constitution in order to run for reelection.

In effect, Uribe's decision has splintered the Pastranistas, who stand divided between those who support the appointment and those who view it as a move to neutralize the opposition. Critics contend that those who fail to support Uribe are characterized as being anti-patriotic, a phenomenon that underscores the fragility of Colombia's democracy. While it will be interesting to see how Pastrana handles the role of supporting policies that he once criticized, I believe that mobilizing a leader of the opposition to cooperate with Colombia's most important ally can only serve to bolster the peace process. John Kerry would have similarly benefited had John McCain agreed to be his running mate.

In addition, this morning's Washington Post offers a qualified backing of the Justice and Peace Law, affirming that the plan does offer punishments in contrast to peace processes in Chile and South Africa:

U.S. critics contend Mr. Uribe's government can force the paramilitaries to accept tougher terms. In reality what they are calling for is a return to war between the government and the insurgents -- a war that Mr. Uribe has waged more vigorously and effectively than previous Colombian presidents but that remains unwinnable. If the demobilization plan fails, Colombia will have no choice but to return to fighting -- and paramilitary leaders who continue to traffic drugs will once again face extradition to the United States. In the meantime, the United States ought to do what it can to give this crucial initiative by a democratic ally every chance to succeed.

Juxtaposed against this endorsement is the release of a Human Rights Watch report today that lambasts the law, describing it as "smoke and mirrors:"

But Human Rights Watch asserts that the demobilization law provides the legal tools that will protect paramilitary fighters from what they fear most, extradition on drug trafficking charges to the United States. So while the government declares that peace is on the way, the report says, the fighters are focused on laundering drug money and building a Mafia-like organization rooted in corruption and cocaine trafficking.

Finally, Maurice Bishop, a reporter for The Economist, has apologized for describing Shakira as "Colombia's greatest legal export" in an article two weeks ago describing her plan to release a Spanish language album followed by an English release this fall. Bishop sheepishly called it "a reference to a joke that people make."