“Malia headshot Image”
”Terror Threat to U.S. Raised From Yellow to Orange; Hawaii Has Own Terror Threat that Shuts Down Honolulu International Airport’s Inter-island Terminal”
U.S. Attorney John Ashcroft this morning announced the Homeland Security Council increased the terrorism threat condition designation currently classified at “elevated risk” to “high-risk” –
“Malia headshot Image”
”Terror Threat to U.S. Raised From Yellow to Orange; Hawaii Has Own Terror Threat that Shuts Down Honolulu International Airport’s Inter-island Terminal”
U.S. Attorney John Ashcroft this morning announced the Homeland Security Council increased the terrorism threat condition designation currently classified at “elevated risk” to “high-risk” –
Universal Health Care in Hawaii – A Foolish Proposal
Alan Matsuda
I’m absolutely certain that Rep. Dennis Arakaki, D-Kalihi, is sincere and cares a great deal about Hawaii residents. But his proposal to create a new state authority to micro-manage our health-care industry is extremely foolish.
Why create another mess similar to our public school system?
Government in Hawaii has a sterling track record of executing very poorly. Yes, there are compelling reasons why government agencies can’t do a better job, but why expand the damage that government programs and government interference with free markets wreak on society?
Last November, Oregon voters voted over 70 percent against Prop. 23, which would socialize health care in Oregon.
If anything, Rep. Arakaki’s committee and other government entities should take steps to bring in to Hawaii more competition for HMSA and Kaiser, our duopoly medical insurers.
Competition is the crucible that brings about good products and good services. Government entities and government workers are sheltered from competition and their output is often woeful beyond measure.
I ask Rep. Arakaki, kindly cease your efforts on HB 1617 or anything similar to it.
”’Alan Matsuda is a Libertarian in Hawaii Kai. He can be reached via email at”’ mailto:matsuda77@worldnet.att.net
The Secretary of State has now briefed the United Nations Security Council on Iraq’s illegal weapons programs, its attempts to hide those weapons, and its links to terrorist groups. I want to thank Secretary Powell for his careful and powerful presentation of the facts.
The information in the Secretary’s briefing and other information in our possession was obtained through great skill, and often at personal risk. Uncovering secret information in a totalitarian society is one of the most difficult intelligence challenges. Those who accept that challenge, both in our intelligence services and in those of our friends and allies, perform a great service to all free nations. And I’m grateful for their good work.
The Iraqi regime’s violations of Security Council resolutions are evident, and they continue to this hour. The regime has never accounted for a vast arsenal of deadly biological and chemical weapons. To the contrary; the regime is pursuing an elaborate campaign to conceal its weapons materiels, and to hide or intimidate key experts and scientists, all in direct defiance of Security Council 1441.
This deception is directed from the highest levels of the Iraqi regime, including Saddam Hussein, his son, the Vice President, and the very official responsible for cooperating with inspectors. In intercepted conversations, we have heard orders to conceal materiels from the U.N. inspectors. And we have seen through satellite images concealment activity at close to 30 sites, including movement of equipment before inspectors arrive.
The Iraqi regime has actively and secretly attempted to obtain equipment needed to produce chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Firsthand witnesses have informed us that Iraq has at least seven mobile factories for the production of biological agents, equipment mounted on trucks and rails to evade discovery. Using these factories, Iraq could produce within just months hundreds of pounds of biological poisons.
The Iraqi regime has acquired and tested the means to deliver weapons of mass destruction. All the world has now seen the footage of an Iraqi Mirage aircraft with a fuel tank modified to spray biological agents over wide areas. Iraq has developed spray devices that could be used on unmanned aerial vehicles with ranges far beyond what is permitted by the Security Council. A UAV launched from a vessel off the American coast could reach hundreds of miles inland. Iraq has never accounted for thousands of bombs and shells capable of delivering chemical weapons. The regime is actively pursuing components for prohibited ballistic missiles. And we have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons — the very weapons the dictator tells the world he does not have.
One of the greatest dangers we face is that weapons of mass destruction might be passed to terrorists, who would not hesitate to use those weapons. Saddam Hussein has longstanding, direct and continuing ties to terrorist networks. Senior members of Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda have met at least eight times since the early 1990s. Iraq has sent bomb-making and document forgery experts to work with al Qaeda. Iraq has also provided al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training.
We also know that Iraq is harboring a terrorist network, headed by a senior al Qaeda terrorist planner. The network runs a poison and explosive training center in northeast Iraq, and many of its leaders are known to be in Baghdad. The head of this network traveled to Baghdad for medical treatment and stayed for months. Nearly two dozen associates joined him there and have been operating in Baghdad for more than eight months.
The same terrorist network operating out of Iraq is responsible for the murder, the recent murder, of an American citizen, an American diplomat, Laurence Foley. The same network has plotted terrorism against France, Spain, Italy, Germany, the Republic of Georgia, and Russia, and was caught producing poisons in London. The danger Saddam Hussein poses reaches across the world.
This is the situation as we find it. Twelve years after Saddam Hussein agreed to disarm, and 90 days after the Security Council passed Resolution 1441 by a unanimous vote, Saddam Hussein was required to make a full declaration of his weapons programs. He has not done so. Saddam Hussein was required to fully cooperate in the disarmament of his regime; he has not done so. Saddam Hussein was given a final chance; he is throwing that chance away.
The dictator of Iraq is making his choice. Now the nations of the Security Council must make their own. On November 8th, by demanding the immediate disarmament of Iraq, the United Nations Security Council spoke with clarity and authority. Now the Security Council will show whether its words have any meaning. Having made its demands, the Security Council must not back down, when those demands are defied and mocked by a dictator.
The United States would welcome and support a new resolution which makes clear that the Security Council stands behind its previous demands. Yet resolutions mean little without resolve. And the United States, along with a growing coalition of nations, is resolved to take whatever action is necessary to defend ourselves and disarm the Iraqi regime.
On September the 11th, 2001, the American people saw what terrorists could do, by turning four airplanes into weapons. We will not wait to see what terrorists or terrorist states could do with chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons. Saddam Hussein can now be expected to begin another round of empty concessions, transparently false denials. No doubt, he will play a last-minute game of deception. The game is over.
All the world can rise to this moment. The community of free nations can show that it is strong and confident and determined to keep the peace. The United Nations can renew its purpose and be a source of stability and security in the world. The Security Council can affirm that it is able and prepared to meet future challenges and other dangers. And we can give the Iraqi people their chance to live in freedom and choose their own government.
Saddam Hussein has made Iraq into a prison, a poison factory, and a torture chamber for patriots and dissidents. Saddam Hussein has the motive and the means and the recklessness and the hatred to threaten the American people. Saddam Hussein will be stopped. Thank you.
The stock market seems determined to contradict all those who have predicted an imminent rebound since it first began its decline. The questions have now gone from wondering when the market will rebound to how far will it fall. To understand the real roots of the problem one has to go back a tad more than three decades but this analysis will be restricted to the last decade.
After the supposed stock market crash of 1987, which was really just a minor correction, Federal Reserve Chairman Allan Greenspan very cautiously eased the money supply. For those who don’t know what this means a brief digression into some Keynesian Economics is required.
Keynesian Theory, the prevailing economic model of our times, asserts that economic growth is the result of individuals having ready cash to spend, and that by purchasing items with this ready cash, stimulate economic growth. The Federal Reserve makes this “ready cash” available through a number of means, too numerous to mention here, but each provides an avenue to make more money available to both businesses and consumers. This is known as “increasing liquidity.” This is a fancy name for cash, as opposed to homes, automobiles, gold or any other asset that cannot be readily converted to cash. It means what you can spend now. The government controls the level of growth of the economy by controlling this liquidity. This government control is the heart of Keynesian Theory.
Greenspan’s caution was meant to prevent a singular outcome which is feared beyond all else, the great demon inflation. So the Federal Reserve monitors a plethora of indexes, from the price of bread to the price of automobiles, averages these all out, and comes up with an inflation index. What the inflation index actually measures is the loss in value of paper money, but a certain amount is thought necessary to stimulate economic growth. So the Fed very carefully expands the money supply, so that there are enough dollars out there, enough liquidity, to keep the economy humming along. At least that is the theory.
In the 1990s the gradual increase of the money supply put money in the hands of individuals as intended, and the economy began to expand. Furthermore the lowering of interest rates prompted not only individuals but businesses to borrow, thereby purchasing more equipment and expanding their operations. They then hired more workers and as these workers spent their wages the economy expanded more and more demand appeared, justifying the borrowing, purchasing and expansions. Allan Greenspan and the Fed frantically looked this way and that but saw little signs of inflation rearing its ugly head. All seemed to be well.
Into this scenario came a new kid in town, the Internet and the computer revolution. The information age had arrived. The increased liquidity and borrowing power that the easing of the money supply had wrought made it easy for the new players to get started. Start a new company, hang out your shingle on the World Wide Web and viola! You’re in business! With little capital investment, little overhead and little if any business planning almost anyone could now compete with the big guys. Almost everyone dreamed of being the next Steven Jobs and taking the world by storm. It seemed almost too good to be true.
In order to service all these new companies, and the customers they would serve, other companies sprang up to install the infrastructure necessary to support them. These companies, such as Global Crossing, borrowed huge amounts of money to invest in endless miles of fiber optic cables to service the new economy. Internet providers sprung up like weeds and people began selling everything on the Internet from books to groceries to cars. A new day had dawned and the information age had arrived.
Not everyone was thrilled though. There were economic analysts who began to question what was happening. They pointed out that many of these companies, with huge capital investments, had yet to make any profit, with no prospects they ever would. Further, though most had gone public and issued stock, those stocks were trading at levels that had never been seen before. Even more traditional companies had risen to unheard of levels as well. The traditional barometer of stock value, the price-to-earnings ratio had not only risen to the warning zone, but far surpassed it to shoot into the economic stratosphere. When these more traditional economists warned that maybe something was wrong, they were laughingly told that the business cycle had been repealed. Well, laws of economics, unlike the laws of men, cannot be repealed. What had inflated were stock prices, and such inflation is called a bubble.
The standard rule of thumb in fundamental analysis of stocks is that a rational price-to-earnings ratio is around 15, that is to say that dividing the price of common stock by earnings per share in the previous 12 months results in a ratio of about 15:1, and when it rises above 20:1 or more it is cause for alarm, the price isn’t justified by the income. Some of the high tech stocks at the height of the boom in 1999 were in the area of 135:1 or more. Even traditional stocks, carried along by the burgeoning bubble were in the area of 60:1, which is anathema to fundamentalists. That Alan Greenspan recognized that this situation was hazardous was the source of his now infamous “irrational exuberance” comment in December 1996.
In fact, the irrational exuberance that Greenspan feared was already well underway. Documents recently released from 1997 show that Greenspan wanted to begin to slow the economy then but was dissuaded by the Board of Governors. Inflation, that old bugaboo, was still within acceptable limits and there seemed to be no real reason to slow the economy down. So the growth continued apace.
The problem with all this growth was that there was nothing there for it to support. It was analogous to building a road into the wilderness and then expecting people to come build houses. The “information age” was also built upon a fallacy — people cannot just trade information with one another, information only has value when it is used to create something, to create wealth — a fact that rarely occurred to anyone. Thousands of companies had gone into debt to provide services that ultimately were not going to be in demand.
A perfect example of this is in Seattle where hundreds of miles of fiber optic cable were installed under the streets, underpinning nearly the entire metropolitan area with state of the art high speed connnectability. Yet these cables lie dark and unused because no one can afford to install the individual converters and lines that would run them the last few yards to the buildings themselves, to wire those buildings, and purchase the connections. The demand began to falter just as the final cables were being laid. This scenario was repeated all around this country and the much of the globe.
Company upon company was built upon a phantom demand that would never materialize. Equipment was purchased, people were hired, buildings were constructed all with no other product other than an Internet connection. Even companies that were created to provide a service, such as Internet-ordered groceries which were then delivered in company trucks, failed to take into account the costs of such delivery or what a minuscule percentage of people would actually change their ways in favor of such a system. Things like coordinating delivery days and times for customer convenience eventually sank such ventures.
So the stock market was confronted with a huge amount of money invested in companies that ultimately had no viability. So these companies failed and their assets were sold, sometimes for pennies on the dollar. The fact is though, this was the real valuation of what these companies were worth. This phase of liquidation to actual value is what is currently happening in the stock market, and the economy in general, world wide. Over-investment, bad investments and over priced stocks are slowly being liquidated to their real actual worth.
Now one can assess the present value of the stock market. In Forbes.com Andrew T. Gillies noted February 1st of this year that the price-to-earnings ratio for the S&P 500 stood at 29, when it should be 15. This gives an indication of how much further the stock market will have to fall before it reaches sensible levels. It means that on average the stock market is still over priced by about double and a tremendous amount of overvalued assets needs to be liquidated to fair market values.
The Dow Jones Industrials are currently hovering around 8,000, so surmising that its value is about double, on par with the S&P 500, then it isn’t unreasonable to assume the Dow will eventually fall to around 4000 before it rebounds. From a technical analysis point of view this would still fall within the safe range of a 2/3rds correction, measured from the beginning of the current stock market run up in the late 1980s, and not an actual depression. So the stock market will continue to fall for the foreseeable future, no matter what the economists say. The bubble is still in the process of bursting.
”’Don Newman is a freelance writer living in Waikiki and can be reached via email at”’ mailto:newmand001@hawaii.rr.com
The stock market seems determined to contradict all those who have predicted an imminent rebound since it first began its decline. The questions have now gone from wondering when the market will rebound to how far will it fall. To understand the real roots of the problem one has to go back a tad more than three decades but this analysis will be restricted to the last decade.
After the supposed stock market crash of 1987, which was really just a minor correction, Federal Reserve Chairman Allan Greenspan very cautiously eased the money supply. For those who don’t know what this means a brief digression into some Keynesian Economics is required.
Keynesian Theory, the prevailing economic model of our times, asserts that economic growth is the result of individuals having ready cash to spend, and that by purchasing items with this ready cash, stimulate economic growth. The Federal Reserve makes this “ready cash” available through a number of means, too numerous to mention here, but each provides an avenue to make more money available to both businesses and consumers. This is known as “increasing liquidity.” This is a fancy name for cash, as opposed to homes, automobiles, gold or any other asset that cannot be readily converted to cash. It means what you can spend now. The government controls the level of growth of the economy by controlling this liquidity. This government control is the heart of Keynesian Theory.
Greenspan’s caution was meant to prevent a singular outcome which is feared beyond all else, the great demon inflation. So the Federal Reserve monitors a plethora of indexes, from the price of bread to the price of automobiles, averages these all out, and comes up with an inflation index. What the inflation index actually measures is the loss in value of paper money, but a certain amount is thought necessary to stimulate economic growth. So the Fed very carefully expands the money supply, so that there are enough dollars out there, enough liquidity, to keep the economy humming along. At least that is the theory.
In the 1990s the gradual increase of the money supply put money in the hands of individuals as intended, and the economy began to expand. Furthermore the lowering of interest rates prompted not only individuals but businesses to borrow, thereby purchasing more equipment and expanding their operations. They then hired more workers and as these workers spent their wages the economy expanded more and more demand appeared, justifying the borrowing, purchasing and expansions. Allan Greenspan and the Fed frantically looked this way and that but saw little signs of inflation rearing its ugly head. All seemed to be well.
Into this scenario came a new kid in town, the Internet and the computer revolution. The information age had arrived. The increased liquidity and borrowing power that the easing of the money supply had wrought made it easy for the new players to get started. Start a new company, hang out your shingle on the World Wide Web and viola! You’re in business! With little capital investment, little overhead and little if any business planning almost anyone could now compete with the big guys. Almost everyone dreamed of being the next Steven Jobs and taking the world by storm. It seemed almost too good to be true.
In order to service all these new companies, and the customers they would serve, other companies sprang up to install the infrastructure necessary to support them. These companies, such as Global Crossing, borrowed huge amounts of money to invest in endless miles of fiber optic cables to service the new economy. Internet providers sprung up like weeds and people began selling everything on the Internet from books to groceries to cars. A new day had dawned and the information age had arrived.
Not everyone was thrilled though. There were economic analysts who began to question what was happening. They pointed out that many of these companies, with huge capital investments, had yet to make any profit, with no prospects they ever would. Further, though most had gone public and issued stock, those stocks were trading at levels that had never been seen before. Even more traditional companies had risen to unheard of levels as well. The traditional barometer of stock value, the price-to-earnings ratio had not only risen to the warning zone, but far surpassed it to shoot into the economic stratosphere. When these more traditional economists warned that maybe something was wrong, they were laughingly told that the business cycle had been repealed. Well, laws of economics, unlike the laws of men, cannot be repealed. What had inflated were stock prices, and such inflation is called a bubble.
The standard rule of thumb in fundamental analysis of stocks is that a rational price-to-earnings ratio is around 15, that is to say that dividing the price of common stock by earnings per share in the previous 12 months results in a ratio of about 15:1, and when it rises above 20:1 or more it is cause for alarm, the price isn’t justified by the income. Some of the high tech stocks at the height of the boom in 1999 were in the area of 135:1 or more. Even traditional stocks, carried along by the burgeoning bubble were in the area of 60:1, which is anathema to fundamentalists. That Alan Greenspan recognized that this situation was hazardous was the source of his now infamous “irrational exuberance” comment in December 1996.
In fact, the irrational exuberance that Greenspan feared was already well underway. Documents recently released from 1997 show that Greenspan wanted to begin to slow the economy then but was dissuaded by the Board of Governors. Inflation, that old bugaboo, was still within acceptable limits and there seemed to be no real reason to slow the economy down. So the growth continued apace.
The problem with all this growth was that there was nothing there for it to support. It was analogous to building a road into the wilderness and then expecting people to come build houses. The “information age” was also built upon a fallacy — people cannot just trade information with one another, information only has value when it is used to create something, to create wealth — a fact that rarely occurred to anyone. Thousands of companies had gone into debt to provide services that ultimately were not going to be in demand.
A perfect example of this is in Seattle where hundreds of miles of fiber optic cable were installed under the streets, underpinning nearly the entire metropolitan area with state of the art high speed connnectability. Yet these cables lie dark and unused because no one can afford to install the individual converters and lines that would run them the last few yards to the buildings themselves, to wire those buildings, and purchase the connections. The demand began to falter just as the final cables were being laid. This scenario was repeated all around this country and the much of the globe.
Company upon company was built upon a phantom demand that would never materialize. Equipment was purchased, people were hired, buildings were constructed all with no other product other than an Internet connection. Even companies that were created to provide a service, such as Internet-ordered groceries which were then delivered in company trucks, failed to take into account the costs of such delivery or what a minuscule percentage of people would actually change their ways in favor of such a system. Things like coordinating delivery days and times for customer convenience eventually sank such ventures.
So the stock market was confronted with a huge amount of money invested in companies that ultimately had no viability. So these companies failed and their assets were sold, sometimes for pennies on the dollar. The fact is though, this was the real valuation of what these companies were worth. This phase of liquidation to actual value is what is currently happening in the stock market, and the economy in general, world wide. Over-investment, bad investments and over priced stocks are slowly being liquidated to their real actual worth.
Now one can assess the present value of the stock market. In Forbes.com Andrew T. Gillies noted February 1st of this year that the price-to-earnings ratio for the S&P 500 stood at 29, when it should be 15. This gives an indication of how much further the stock market will have to fall before it reaches sensible levels. It means that on average the stock market is still over priced by about double and a tremendous amount of overvalued assets needs to be liquidated to fair market values.
The Dow Jones Industrials are currently hovering around 8,000, so surmising that its value is about double, on par with the S&P 500, then it isn’t unreasonable to assume the Dow will eventually fall to around 4000 before it rebounds. From a technical analysis point of view this would still fall within the safe range of a 2/3rds correction, measured from the beginning of the current stock market run up in the late 1980s, and not an actual depression. So the stock market will continue to fall for the foreseeable future, no matter what the economists say. The bubble is still in the process of bursting.
”’Don Newman is a freelance writer living in Waikiki and can be reached via email at”’ mailto:newmand001@hawaii.rr.com
Should Africa focus on trade and investment or on HIV/AIDS handouts? In his State of Union address, President Bush of America announced that he would ask the Congress to commit $15 billion over the next five years to turn the tide against HIV/AIDS in the most afflicted nations in Africa and the Caribbean.
Kenya will finally receive $179.4 million from the UN Global Fund to fight AIDS and other diseases. The health ministry indicated that $129 million of this would go to the fight on HIV/AIDS, $33.6 to malaria and $11.2 to tuberculosis. However, to check the tide against AIDS Africans, really need economic empowerment through trade and productivity. Countries may receive all sorts of aid packages, but as long as they subject their populations to policies that sustain them in poverty, there is a danger diseases will be turned into a tool of global politics.
It may well be that the famine in southern African countries is largely attributable to the HIV/AIDS scourge. With over 7 million agricultural workers killed since 1985, crop output plummeted nearly 60 percent. The news from United States of America is certainly welcome. But will Africa put in place the infrastructure to absorb the aid?
Is Africa more sexually active than the rest of the world? Africa accounts for 70 percent of the global population of people with HIV/AIDS and 80 percent of global deaths from AIDS. Wealthy countries have fewer cases than the poor countries. The incidence of HIV/AIDS in the urban areas has been lower than that in the rural areas. In some countries such as South Africa, this disease has tended to annihilate more of the black Africans than the white Africans. What could really be the problem?
According to a June 2000 report on Incidence and Depth of Poverty in Kenya (by the Kenya Ministry of Finance and Planning), Nyanza province leads with 63 percent of its population living below poverty line. Coast Province follows with 61 percent, Western and Eastern 58 percent, and Central performs better with 31 percent. The report used consumption rather than income to measure living standards and defined the poor as those who are unable to afford minimum needs, such as food and non-food items. With a few exceptions, poorer districts have tended to have higher incidents of HIV/AIDS related deaths because their people have already been weakened by malnutrition, malaria, dysentery and other diseases.
Provinces like Nyanza, Western, Coast and parts of Eastern have been the hardest hit due to both poverty and culture. Taboos on sexuality and wife inheritance have contributed to high incidences of this disease in some areas; ignorance has also been a major contributor in low-income districts. With an estimated 500 Kenyans dying every day, one wonders why governments should be preaching about a population “explosion’. The figures peddled by HIV/AIDS agencies point to a possible population “implosion” that calls for emergency measures. While implementing measures to curb the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Kenya ought to review its family planning program, to ensure that its population stabilizes.
It is urgent that Kenya (and by extension Africa) addresses issues that make it difficult for her people to access health care. Our countries ought to review the regulatory and bureaucratic barriers, taxation, licensing of drugs, corruption, poverty and infrastructure that make it difficult for people to access medicines. Intellectual property rights rules have been cited as another possible barrier, although on-the-ground evidence indicates the opposite.
For instance, Kenya has recorded high incidences of malaria deaths, and anti-malarial drugs are not subject to patent restrictions. This year alone, 15 people have already lost their lives. This being a seasonal disease, it’s predictable that between May and July more people will perish. What measures are in place to reduce these deaths? The government has been unable to address this annual phenomenon. Why must it wait for aid to tackle malaria, typhoid and other diseases?
Giving medicine to the hungry that live in poor sanitary conditions, consume untreated water and are illiterate will not reverse the scourge. MERCK & Co together with other pharmaceutical companies under the umbrella of UNAIDS have reduced the prices of their ARVs by 80-90 percent to countries in the developing world where the AIDS pandemic is a threat to human populations. Niraj Doshi, a representative of MERCK in Eastern Africa estimates that since his company lowered prices in 2001 for Anti Retroviral Drugs, the number of beneficiaries increased ten times and the number could be higher if the link to economic empowerment is addressed. Despite the lowered price, it is still expensive for the average Kenyan hence the urgent need to facilitate wealth creation that will not only lead to more access but also grant economic independence to consumers.
One way to promote economic growth is to put in place policies that will make it easier for Kenyans to produce and market their commodities. In agriculture, farmers should be in a position to access credit, small business people should not be bogged down by excessive licensing procedures, and communities should be allowed to operate community tourist hotels that will cater to visitors who want to sample African lifestyles. Kenya must eliminate corruption and implement the rule of law, to ensure that contracts are enforceable. We must create a system that lets Kenyan and inter-African trade thrive.
No community or government can tackle disease when its people are barely surviving on $1 a day. Developing countries also face impossible odds because their exports are confined to only primary products, and processed commodities face high tariffs imposed by rich nations. Poor countries also lack the technical expertise to interpret legal documents and negotiate in world trade bodies. To develop this expertise, they rely on rich country machinery and NGOs that do not have Kenya’s or Africa’s best interests at heart.
Many products from the poor countries face quarantine rules, which are basically a trade barrier to agricultural products. Products from Africa are subjected to sanitary and environmental standards (on pesticides and biotechnology, for example) that simply block them out of the richer markets. In most cases, movement of people from poor to rich countries is also restricted through difficult visa requirements. One can hardly trade without surveying your potential market! Together with export subsidies and price-distorting domestic subsidies, this has severely harmed economic growth in poor countries.
Unless the people of Africa are allowed to be productive and prosperous, aid in the form of cheaper medicines alone will not alleviate its health problems. More efforts should be put in place to remove barriers to health care. The African people are not more sexually active than the rest of the world. They simply suffer from stress and generally ill health due to corruption, bad laws and harmful policies imposed by their own and rich foreign governments.
”’James S. Shikwati is the Director of Inter Region Economic Network [IREN Kenya]. He can be reached at P.O. Box 135 GPO Code 00100 NAIROBI KENYA, Phone/Fax 254-2-2723258, Cell 254-733-823062 or by email at”’ mailto:james@irenkenya.org ”’His Web site is found at”’ https://www.irenkenya.org
“Dick Rowland Image”
”Shoots (News, Views and Quotes)”
– Gun Registration and Resistance Head North
About 27 percent of Quebec gun owners have refused or neglected to
obtain a license for their firearm, as required under a law that went
into effect on January 1st — probably the highest non-compliance
rate of any province in Canada.
Why are so many Quebec gun owners indifferent to the case for
stricter gun laws? Is their non-compliance simply a knee-jerk
hostility to the theatrical tactics employed by Michael Moore in his
film “Bowling for Columbine”?
No. According to Independent Institute research fellow Pierre
Lemieux, non-compliance is based on the resistors’ understanding of
the legitimacy of private firearm ownership. In support of his claim,
Lemieux cites a group called the Canadian Unregistered Firearm Owners Association, which has launched a civil disobedience campaign against the law, called C-68.
“There are many reasons to resist C-68,” Lemieux wrote in his
occasional column for the NATIONAL POST. “It forces any individual
who even only wants to keep his hunting gun at home to apply for a
personal licence every five years, and tell the police about his
depressions and his love life. It forces 10% of the Canadian adult
population to notify the police when they change addresses. It grants
the police arbitrary powers to seize guns and to deny or revoke
licences. In certain circumstances, it allows searches (rechristened
“inspections”) without warrants. C-68 also forces the registration of
all individual guns, and prepares the sort of confiscation that the
British and the Australians have recently suffered (like, before
them, subjects of all totalitarian countries). It is one of the last
nails in the coffin of the right of individuals to defend their lives
if the police cannot (or will not) intervene. …
“George Orwell, the author of 1984, wrote: ‘That rifle hanging on the
wall of the working-class flat or labourer’s cottage is the symbol of
democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.'”
See “The Gun in the Labourer’s House,” by Pierre Lemieux (THE
NATIONAL POST, 12/31/02)
https://www.independent.org/tii/news/021231Lemieux.html
Above article is quoted from
Lighthouse@independent.org January 27, 2003
– Field of Reams
The Federal Communication Commission is set to go to war this week
(1/14/03) over how best to regulate local phone companies. The local
Bells insist they can’t deliver all the advanced goodies like broadband unless they are given a free hand to price their offerings as they want. And if that means locking out would-be competitors, so be it.
Net service providers and re-sellers say, Wait a minute, we’ve heard
that one before. The Bells always claim that something won’t be built — fiber to the home, new switches, whatever — unless the FCC eases up. Then the FCC eases up and nothing gets built.
Only one outcome is certain: Regulators and politicians will make sure that urban areas continue to subsidize rural ones in some form or fashion.
On the plus side, FCC chairman Michael Powell seems to understand that giving consumers more control over what they see and hear is good. Reflecting on his favorite Christmas present, Powell called TiVo “God’s machine.”
Powell’s affection for the digital video recorder is significant, as the big content mob would love for the FCC go along with plans to cripple digital video recorders in the name of copyright protection.
Above article is quoted from www.reason.com
Reason Express 1/14/03
– St. Petersburg Times
“On the Castle Coalition Website,
www.castlecoalition.org, you will find the ‘Eminent Domain Abuse
Survival Guide.’ It is a manual for owners potentially facing
condemnation, informing them of everything from effective
coalition-building and lobbying to how to ‘make noise.’ All in the hopes of getting owners a fair shake in a process that, for many years, has been looking more like a shakedown.” — Reported by Institute for Justice www.ij.org December 2002
”Roots (Food for Thought)”
Why Do We Regulate Insurance?
Markets, Not Government Regulators, Provide Consumers With Better
Services at Better Prices
By Wayne T. Brough, Ph.D.
As the economy has evolved, insurance markets have become more
diversified, more efficient, and more accurate in assessing risk. Today, consumers have a wide variety of options when shopping for insurance, which has become a major industry in the United States, with revenues of roughly $800 billion and net income of around $40 billion annually. Numerous brokers and agents supply a wide variety of products to meet the needs of consumers. At the same time, insurance instruments are available from a greater number of sources, including self-insurance and financial services providers. Where allowed, competition has generated the results that would be expected in any competitive market — lower prices, a wider variety of goods and services, and more fully informed producers and consumers who can make more knowledgeable decisions about
the insurance products they need. Nonetheless, insurance markets in most states remain heavily regulated, which raises costs for consumers.
The prospect of a more competitive insurance market offers the potential for significant consumer gains. As early as 1973 Professor Joskow at Massachusetts Institute for Technology demonstrated that markets for insurance had no characteristics suggesting a need for regulation. To varying degrees, states are evaluating the possibility of increasing the degree of competition in the insurance industry. Technological advances, financial services deregulation, and more effective risk management tools have compelled many states to reconsider the role of competition.
Insurance, as an industry, has long operated under the watchful eye of regulators. As the industry matured in the 19th century, concerns about financial solvency and consumer information led many states and localities to regulate the operations of insurance providers. A primary concern was the ability of insurers to cover the losses of their customers in the case of a widespread catastrophe. Fire, in particular, was a major issue in the in the 19th century. With lower building standards and dense construction in urban areas, fires spread quickly and heavy losses tallied just as swiftly. Fearing that some providers did not have the reserves required in the event of a disaster, regulations were put in place to govern reserve requirements for insurance providers. As in other industries, concerns arose over the potential for “ruinous competition” that would lower prices to the point where insurers would not be operating with sufficient reserves to fulfill their obligations to customers.
Despite the public interest language endorsing insurance regulation,
there were clearly selfish incentives at work promoting entry
restrictions and price regulation. As in other regulated industries,
fears of ruinous competition and bad actors could be used to establish a new regulatory regime that protected incumbents at the expense of consumers and potential new entrants. Indeed, the fact that government charters and regulation provided a secure revenue stream can be traced back to the creation of England’s first insurance businesses: “In 1720, reputedly succumbing to a bribe of
The low, dishonest — and expensive — Drug War advertising campaign being waged by the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) in all the major newspapers, television networks, and leading magazines is — let’s be as honest as they are not — full of crap. The most horrific lie the campaign peddles is the tortured claim that recreational drug users in America are supporting terrorism.
Sure, sure, some terrorist groups do in fact make money from protecting drug kingpins or even growing and refining drugs themselves. But there’s one vital precondition for their doing so — a precondition that’s completely ignored by Drug Czar John Walters and his crew of merry misleaders at ONDCP. And that is the futile Drug War itself. No war, no drug producers in need of protection by terrorists, guerrillas, thugs, gangbangers, or anybody else.
ONDCP pleads with parents to “help the kids you know make the connection between this risky drug [marijuana] and acts of violence committed against innocent people where you live and around the world.” Drugs and violence. They go together like a horse and carriage, right? But ONDCP doesn’t want you to ask the next question: why? Let’s consider a bit of history. Murder rates appear to rise and fall in the United States in very telling lockstep with drug and alcohol prohibitions over the course of the 20th century.
Hillsdale economist Kirby Cundiff, in a study for the Independent Institute, compared homicide rates and changes in substance control policy in the United States and concluded, “The best theory of the primary cause of violent crime in the United States is a violent black market caused by the War on Drugs today, and Prohibition in the 1920s.”
In 1900, between 2 percent and 5 percent of the entire adult population of the United States were addicted to drugs. The average drug user was a rural middle-aged white woman who used morphine-based patent medicines. The murder rate in 1900 was 1.2 per 100,000 people. But that all changed as America went through one of its periodic bouts of Puritanism.
In 1914, Congress passed the Harrison Narcotic Act that essentially banned the non-medical sale of opiates and cocaine derivatives. The murder rate the year after was 5.9 per 100,000. Then came the 18th Amendment in 1920, outlawing the sale of all alcoholic beverages. In 1921, the murder rate in America jumped to 8.1 per 100,000. Of course, the 1920s were the era of gangsters and bootleggers.
In 1933, America came back to its senses, or at least decided that the millions of unemployed during the Depression might need a good stiff drink now and then, and passed the 21st Amendment repealing Prohibition. The murder rate that year reached 9.7 per 100,000. After Prohibition, the murder rate began to drift downward, dropping to 4.5 per 100,000 in 1958. Meanwhile, organized crime, jumpstarted by black markets for booze, had expanded their businesses into other black markets like gambling and prostitution, and, of course, still-banned drugs like opiates, cocaine, and marijuana.
By 1970, when Congress passed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, the murder rate had risen back to 8.3 per 100,000. In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared that drugs were the “No. 1 Public Enemy” and announced the beginning of a new “War on Drugs.” In 1973, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was established. As the Drug War heated up, the murder rate reached an all-time high of 10.7 per 100,000 in 1980.
The war continued and President Ronald Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1986, which mandated harsher penalties for drug possession and drug trafficking. As tens of billions of dollars were poured into the War on Drugs by Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, the murder rate hovered between 8.5 and 10.5 for the next 15 years. The murder rate began dropping in the mid-1990s and is now at levels last seen in the mid-1960s. Is the Drug War finally working at cutting that violence that we are assured is commensurate with drug use?
Well, in a way, but not the way the feds’ drugs=violence equation implies. Most likely it is because the United States now has nearly 2 million people in jail or prison. It would have to be a pretty poor policing operation if, in the course of sweeping up some 1.5 million people annually for drug use, that those offenders most likely to act violently did not end up incarcerated.
Never mind that it is the idiocies surrounding the drug war that encourages some people to become violent in the first place. Even if putting hundreds of thousands of people behind bars does lower violent crime rates, legalization would get the same results
“Suzanne Gelb Image”
Dear Readers:
As an added resource, over the next few months I will supplement my answers with self-help materials. Supplemental reading for today’s answers can be found in my book “Welcome Home. A Book About Overcoming Addictions” (p. 62 for Answer 1; p. 63 for Answer 2). For more information visit my Web site at www.DrGelbSays.com.
”Parents – How Do I Appreciate Them?”
Dear Dr. Gelb:
I was an abused child and I have done a lot of personal growth work to get myself on track and make a good life. How can I not be bitter toward my parents for raising me the way they did?
Grateful to have Survived
A: Dr. Gelb says . . .
Dear Survivor:
Until a person can release themselves from the affliction of being an abused child, then they are likely to still, on some level, feel as if they are that abused child. I believe that in order to truly be free of this affliction, a person needs to reach that point where they can affirm and accept that, yes, I was abused, but I am grateful to have survived, and now I will forgive myself for the hate and agony I have felt, not only toward myself but toward my caregivers. In order for me to survive, there was probably a reason for my anger and hate. However, that no longer applies to me. I can be a self-loving adult because now I can accept and love the child within me, and we merge and begin to live a meaningful life.
”Mistakes — Why Can’t They be OK?”
Dear Dr. Gelb:
I’m 13 years old and I try to be a good kid and help around the house. But when I make a mistake, like I fold the laundry wrong because there is a new shirt and I don’t know how my Mom wants it folded, then she gets mad at me, and there is no way I can fix the mistake. Is it bad to make mistakes?
Trying To Get It Right
A: Dr. Gelb says . . .
Dear Trying:
I believe that more than likely your mother is as knowledgeable as she is because she has learned from mistakes that she has made. And yes, you, like the rest of us, will probably continue to make mistakes the rest of your life. Mistakes are not a sin. However, not learning from our mistakes tends to hold heavy consequences. We can learn either by trial or error, or we can learn by way of emulation.
If I were in your position, I would ask my mother to show you how she wants something folded and I would keep that item separate from the rest and practice folding it the same way. That goes for many tasks, such as folding clothes, hand towels, napkins or for the way one sets a table. These are habits that people form to be socially acceptable.
You appear to be a smart and intelligent 13-year-old. I hope you do not do what so many teenagers who experience disapproval have done — they resort to anger and stubbornness and indifference to punish their parents for their disapproval. Remember that we can teach ourselves and learn to master many challenges. Good luck to you in growing strong and healthy.
”’Suzanne J. Gelb, Ph.D., J.D. authors this daily column, Dr. Gelb Says, which answers questions about daily living and behavior issues. Dr. Gelb is a licensed psychologist in private practice in Honolulu. She holds a Ph.D. in Psychology and a Ph.D. in Human Services. Dr. Gelb is also a published author of a book on Overcoming Addictions and a book on Relationships.”’
”’This column is intended for entertainment use only and is not intended for the purpose of psychological diagnosis, treatment or personalized advice. For more about the column’s purpose, see”’ “An Online Intro to Dr. Gelb Says”
”’Email your questions to mailto:DrGelbSays@hawaiireporter.com More information on Dr. Gelb’s services and related resources available at”’ https://www.DrGelbSays.com
