“I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.” This was allegedly the ambition of a political adviser to Bill Clinton, overawed by the power of the bond market to influence government.
The individual who has come closest to fulfilling this dream is Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive and co-chief investment officer of Pimco, the bond investment manager.
Despite being the man ultimately in charge of $747bn (£529bn, €596bn) worth of assets, mostly bonds, Mr El-Erian is dismissive of claims Pimco is worryingly powerful in the bond market.
“We don’t think in those terms. We live in a world of constructive paranoia,” he says, adding this is focused on continuing to add value for clients. “We have over 8m clients in the US and millions more around the world. We manage money for teachers, policemen, firefighters, across a whole range. If people entrust you with their assets, you have to continuously work at what the world will look like.”
That view of the world is not sunny at the moment. “2009 will be as bad as 2008,” predicts Mr El-Erian. This crisis has now morphed into “something much more sinister” than a market downturn. Pimco’s house view is that the world has changed fundamentally, and the firm is trying to position itself for the “new normal”, without knowing precisely what that will be.
“There are three things that are unambiguous about the new world,” says Mr El-Erian. First he predicts a shift in the balance of power between private and public sectors as governments step in, first to bail out collapsing markets and industries, then to regulate them in the future. “This is very consequential,” he says, because it will affect “price formation, risks and capital structure”.
Then there will be “massive consolidation in the financial industry, which is going to play out in every segment of the industry”. Finally, underlying all this is a major change in the global growth dynamics, as multiple growth engines, largely from the developing world, replace the single engine of growth of the US-centric twentieth century.
While the ride there may be very bumpy, Mr El-Erian is confident Pimco has the necessary skills to deal with the new world order. As governments get more involved in financial markets and regulation becomes a more high profile element of the framework of capital markets, investors will need an extra skillset, that of dealing with public policy.
Mr El-Erian’s background, including 12 years as an economist with the International Monetary Fund, should help a bit, but Pimco is not relying on this. Instead, it has beefed up its public policy expertise with recent appointments such as Andrew Balls, a former Financial Times journalist and brother of the UK education secretary.
The IMF background, and the fact that Mr El-Erian started his Pimco career as an emerging markets bond manager, should also be helpful with that other aspect of the brave new world, the increased importance of economies such as India and China.
He is adamant this is not the reason Pimco called him back from Harvard Management Company after just two years in the top job there. “There isn’t causality, but there is coincidence. It just happens I have that experience.”
Emerging markets experience will not just be helpful when the world finally reaches some form of stability, he says. It is useful now, during the crisis.
“Industrialised countries find themselves in a very unfamiliar situation. This crisis is happening at the centre of the global system, not on the periphery, and the centre is not wired for crisis management. The skillset we have found very useful at Pimco is our emerging markets team.”
Speaking during a press day where Allianz Global Investors, Pimco’s parent, announced its results, Mr El-Erian was notably calm for someone predicting gloom and doom.
This may in part be due to being a bond investor – the bond markets have not seen the terrible plunges of equity markets in the past 12 months – but is also due to Pimco’s foresightfulness, he claims.
During the past 10 years, while other commentators noted the moderation of volatility and interest rates on world markets, Pimco identified a “stable disequilibrium”, a temporary state that would be followed by market turmoil. In order to meet this rocky future, now realised, it developed what Mr El-Erian calls a “forward looking bond index”.
The Global Advantage Bond Index covers both sovereign and corporate debt and employs a methodology Pimco hopes will be less pro-cyclical than traditional indices.
Building an index like this is not traditionally the job of an investment manager, but Pimco felt that “because of our standing in the market, we had an obligation to put something out there to be discussed”, says Mr El-Erian, in the first hint of acceptance that his company is a powerful player in the financial world.
With the expectation that the global economy will be less centred on the US comes a need for such a large company to think of itself as global. With nine offices around the world, including a recently opened base in Hong Kong, Pimco is making that transition. But it will take it slowly, says Mr El-Erian, ensuring the company remains true to its values.
Among these values is a self-definition as an “investment manager” as opposed to an asset manager. The difference, he explains, is the focus on investment returns for clients, rather than gathering assets.
Mr El-Erian himself is part of the investment returns search – as well as being chief executive and co-chief investment officer, he recently announced he would be lead portfolio manager on a new fund based on the Global Advantage Bond index.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
What is Culture?
defenition and knowdledge
The word culture has many different meanings. For some it refers to an appreciation of good literature, music, art, and food. For a biologist, it is likely to be a colony of bacteria or other microorganisms growing in a nutrient medium in a laboratory Petri dish. However, for anthropologists and other behavioral scientists, culture is the full range of learned human behavior patterns. The term was first used in this way by the pioneer English Anthropologist Edward B. Tylor in his book, Primitive Culture, published in 1871. Tylor said that culture is "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." Of course, it is not limited to men. Women possess and create it as well. Since Tylor's time, the concept of culture has become the central focus of anthropology.
Culture is a powerful human tool for survival, but it is a fragile phenomenon. It is constantly changing and easily lost because it exists only in our minds. Our written languages, governments, buildings, and other man-made things are merely the products of culture. They are not culture in themselves. For this reason, archaeologists can not dig up culture directly in their excavations. The broken pots and other artifacts of ancient people that they uncover are only material remains that reflect cultural patterns--they are things that were made and used through cultural knowledge and skills.
Layers of Culture
There are very likely three layers or levels of culture that are part of your learned behavior patterns and perceptions. Most obviously is the body of cultural traditions that distinguish your specific society. When people speak of Italian, Samoan, or Japanese culture, they are referring to the shared language, traditions, and beliefs that set each of these peoples apart from others. In most cases, those who share your culture do so because they acquired it as they were raised by parents and other family members who have it.
The second layer of culture that may be part of your identity is a subculture . In complex, diverse societies in which people have come from many different parts of the world, they often retain much of their original cultural traditions. As a result, they are likely to be part of an identifiable subculture in their new society. The shared cultural traits of subcultures set them apart from the rest of their society. Examples of easily identifiable subcultures in the United States include ethnic groups such as Vietnamese Americans, African Americans, and Mexican Americans. Members of each of these subcultures share a common identity, food tradition, dialect or language, and other cultural traits that come from their common ancestral background and experience. As the cultural differences between members of a subculture and the dominant national culture blur and eventually disappear, the subculture ceases to exist except as a group of people who claim a common ancestry. That is generally the case with German Americans and Irish Americans in the United States today. Most of them identify themselves as Americans first. They also see themselves as being part of the cultural mainstream of the nation.
These Cuban American
women in Miami, Florida
have a shared subculture
identity that is reinforced
through their language,
food, and other traditions
The third layer of culture consists of cultural universals. These are learned behavior patterns that are shared by all of humanity collectively. No matter where people live in the world, they share these universal traits. Examples of such "human cultural" traits include:
1.
communicating with a verbal language consisting of a limited set of sounds and grammatical rules for constructing sentences
2.using age and gender to classify people (e.g., teenager, senior citizen, woman, man)
3.classifying people based on marriage and descent relationships and having kinship terms to refer to
them (e.g., wife, mother, uncle, cousin)
4.raising children in some sort of family setting
5.having a sexual division of labor (e.g., men's work versus women's work)
6.having a concept of privacy
7.
having rules to regulate sexual behavior
8.distinguishing between good and bad behavior
9.having some sort of body ornamentation
10.
making jokes and playing games
11.having art
12.having some sort of leadership roles for the implementation of community decisions While all cultures have these and possibly many other universal traits, different cultures have developed their own specific ways of carrying out or expressing them. For instance, people in deaf subcultures frequently use their hands to communicate with sign language instead of verbal language. However, sign languages have grammatical rules just as verbal ones do.
Culture and Society
Culture and society are not the same thing. While cultures are complexes of learned behavior patterns and perceptions, societies are groups of interacting organisms. People are not the only animals that have societies. Schools of fish, flocks of birds, and hives of bees are societies. In the case of humans, however, societies are groups of people who directly or indirectly interact with each other. People in human societies also generally perceive that their society is distinct from other societies in terms of shared traditions and expectations.
While human societies and cultures are not the same thing, they are inextricably connected because culture is created and transmitted to others in a society. Cultures are not the product of lone individuals. They are the continuously evolving products of people interacting with each other. Cultural patterns such as language and politics make no sense except in terms of the interaction of people. If you were the only human on earth, there would be no need for language or government.
Is Culture Limited to Humans?
Non-human culture?
This orangutan mother is
using a specially prepared
stick to "fish out" food from
a crevice. She learned this
skill and is now teaching it
to her child who is hanging
on her shoulder and intently
watching.
There is a difference of opinion in the behavioral sciences about whether or not we are the only animal that creates and uses culture. The answer to this question depends on how narrow culture is defined. If it is used broadly to refer to a complex of learned behavior patterns, then it is clear that we are not alone in creating and using culture. Many other animal species teach their young what they themselves learned in order to survive. This is especially true of the chimpanzees and other relatively intelligent apes and monkeys. Wild chimpanzee mothers typically teach their children about several hundred food and medicinal plants. Their children also have to learn about the dominance hierarchy and the social rules within their communities. As males become teenagers, they acquire hunting skills from adults. Females have to learn how to nurse and care for their babies. Chimpanzees even have to learn such basic skills as how to perform sexual intercourse. This knowledge is not hardwired into their brains at birth. They are all learned patterns of behavior just as they are for humans.
The word culture has many different meanings. For some it refers to an appreciation of good literature, music, art, and food. For a biologist, it is likely to be a colony of bacteria or other microorganisms growing in a nutrient medium in a laboratory Petri dish. However, for anthropologists and other behavioral scientists, culture is the full range of learned human behavior patterns. The term was first used in this way by the pioneer English Anthropologist Edward B. Tylor in his book, Primitive Culture, published in 1871. Tylor said that culture is "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." Of course, it is not limited to men. Women possess and create it as well. Since Tylor's time, the concept of culture has become the central focus of anthropology.
Culture is a powerful human tool for survival, but it is a fragile phenomenon. It is constantly changing and easily lost because it exists only in our minds. Our written languages, governments, buildings, and other man-made things are merely the products of culture. They are not culture in themselves. For this reason, archaeologists can not dig up culture directly in their excavations. The broken pots and other artifacts of ancient people that they uncover are only material remains that reflect cultural patterns--they are things that were made and used through cultural knowledge and skills.
Layers of Culture
There are very likely three layers or levels of culture that are part of your learned behavior patterns and perceptions. Most obviously is the body of cultural traditions that distinguish your specific society. When people speak of Italian, Samoan, or Japanese culture, they are referring to the shared language, traditions, and beliefs that set each of these peoples apart from others. In most cases, those who share your culture do so because they acquired it as they were raised by parents and other family members who have it.
The second layer of culture that may be part of your identity is a subculture . In complex, diverse societies in which people have come from many different parts of the world, they often retain much of their original cultural traditions. As a result, they are likely to be part of an identifiable subculture in their new society. The shared cultural traits of subcultures set them apart from the rest of their society. Examples of easily identifiable subcultures in the United States include ethnic groups such as Vietnamese Americans, African Americans, and Mexican Americans. Members of each of these subcultures share a common identity, food tradition, dialect or language, and other cultural traits that come from their common ancestral background and experience. As the cultural differences between members of a subculture and the dominant national culture blur and eventually disappear, the subculture ceases to exist except as a group of people who claim a common ancestry. That is generally the case with German Americans and Irish Americans in the United States today. Most of them identify themselves as Americans first. They also see themselves as being part of the cultural mainstream of the nation.
These Cuban American
women in Miami, Florida
have a shared subculture
identity that is reinforced
through their language,
food, and other traditions
The third layer of culture consists of cultural universals. These are learned behavior patterns that are shared by all of humanity collectively. No matter where people live in the world, they share these universal traits. Examples of such "human cultural" traits include:
1.
communicating with a verbal language consisting of a limited set of sounds and grammatical rules for constructing sentences
2.using age and gender to classify people (e.g., teenager, senior citizen, woman, man)
3.classifying people based on marriage and descent relationships and having kinship terms to refer to
them (e.g., wife, mother, uncle, cousin)
4.raising children in some sort of family setting
5.having a sexual division of labor (e.g., men's work versus women's work)
6.having a concept of privacy
7.
having rules to regulate sexual behavior
8.distinguishing between good and bad behavior
9.having some sort of body ornamentation
10.
making jokes and playing games
11.having art
12.having some sort of leadership roles for the implementation of community decisions While all cultures have these and possibly many other universal traits, different cultures have developed their own specific ways of carrying out or expressing them. For instance, people in deaf subcultures frequently use their hands to communicate with sign language instead of verbal language. However, sign languages have grammatical rules just as verbal ones do.
Culture and Society
Culture and society are not the same thing. While cultures are complexes of learned behavior patterns and perceptions, societies are groups of interacting organisms. People are not the only animals that have societies. Schools of fish, flocks of birds, and hives of bees are societies. In the case of humans, however, societies are groups of people who directly or indirectly interact with each other. People in human societies also generally perceive that their society is distinct from other societies in terms of shared traditions and expectations.
While human societies and cultures are not the same thing, they are inextricably connected because culture is created and transmitted to others in a society. Cultures are not the product of lone individuals. They are the continuously evolving products of people interacting with each other. Cultural patterns such as language and politics make no sense except in terms of the interaction of people. If you were the only human on earth, there would be no need for language or government.
Is Culture Limited to Humans?
Non-human culture?
This orangutan mother is
using a specially prepared
stick to "fish out" food from
a crevice. She learned this
skill and is now teaching it
to her child who is hanging
on her shoulder and intently
watching.
There is a difference of opinion in the behavioral sciences about whether or not we are the only animal that creates and uses culture. The answer to this question depends on how narrow culture is defined. If it is used broadly to refer to a complex of learned behavior patterns, then it is clear that we are not alone in creating and using culture. Many other animal species teach their young what they themselves learned in order to survive. This is especially true of the chimpanzees and other relatively intelligent apes and monkeys. Wild chimpanzee mothers typically teach their children about several hundred food and medicinal plants. Their children also have to learn about the dominance hierarchy and the social rules within their communities. As males become teenagers, they acquire hunting skills from adults. Females have to learn how to nurse and care for their babies. Chimpanzees even have to learn such basic skills as how to perform sexual intercourse. This knowledge is not hardwired into their brains at birth. They are all learned patterns of behavior just as they are for humans.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Thailand's political transformation
THailAd Challenge
The weeks of popular protests by thousands of red-shirted demonstrators in the centre of Bangkok reached a critical stage on the late Saturday evening of 10 April 2010. At that point, Thailand’s state-security forces began a crackdown against those who had gathered under the banner of the United Front of Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD). A longstanding political crisis that has divided Thais into bitterly opposed camps has now become a national tragedy.
The immediate crisis had been escalating since mid-March 2010, when tens of thousands of members of the increasingly heterogeneous UDD began their takeover of the streets of Bangkok. The red-bedecked activists from all over Thailand carried their tents, sleeping-mats and food supplies into the area around the high-rent shopping-district of the Rajprasong intersection. The red-shirts’ political representatives held intermittent talks with the government of Thailand’s prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva; but these broke down in the first days of April, and the protestors then vowed to stay in place until the parliament was dissolved and new elections announced.
The crackdown was launched three days after Abhisit declared a state of emergency, which provided the government with broad powers of arrest, censorship, and suspension of civil liberties. Among the first measures taken was the blocking or closure of independent media, including thirty-six websites; the popular bilingual news-site Prachatai was one of those affected.
This prepared the ground for the more stringent actions on Bangkok’s bloody Saturday night: the use of water-cannons, tear-gas, and ultimately live ammunition to force the red-shirts off the streets. At the time of writing, twenty-one people arereported to have been killed (sixteen protestors, four soldiers, and a Japanesejournalist), and over 800 injured. Abhisit Vejjajiva insists that soldiers were permitted to use live bullets only to shoot into the air or in self-defence, though the nature of the deaths and wounds inflicted on many protestors casts some doubt on this statement.
Thus the uneasy peace that had prevailed amid the popular tumult on Bangkok’s streets has been broken. Thailand now peers into the abyss. But whatever the outcome of the clash between people and state, a profound and little-remarked political transformation continues to unfold.
The arc of crisis
A conventional reading of Thailand’s crisis traces its deeper roots to the mid-2000swith the rise, fall and subsequent exile of Thaksin Shinawatra, the populist leader elected in January 2001 and ousted in a military coup on 19 September 2006.
Thaksin’s Thai Rak Thai (TRT) government was seen by many in Thailand’s political elite and among the urban middle-class as a subversive challenge to its traditional political hegemony. In early 2006, Sondhi Limthongkul - like Thaksin, a millionaire businessman - began to mobilise his supporters in an extra-parliamentary campaign to unseat the elected prime minister.
The confrontation between the yellow-shirted activists of Sondhi’s Peoples’ Alliance for Democracy (PAD) and Thaksin Shinawatra’s government accentuated Thailand’s political divisions, amid the gradual retreat and loss of legitimacy of the country’s older political parties. But the military takeover of September 2006 did nothing to stem the crisis. The army-appointed quasi-civilian government under Surayud Chulanont sought to manage the transition to restored civilian rule by dissolving the TRT, but Thaksin’s party reinvented itself as the People Power Party (PPP) - and proceeded to win power in the first post-coup elections in December 2007.
Thaksin himself, facing legal charges over his financial dealings, had been in New York at the time of the coup, and remained outside the country; his proxy in the PPP, Samak Sundaravej, became Thailand’s new prime minister. The political carousel continued when Samak’s appearance on a TV cookery show forced his resignation, and replacement by his PPP colleague Somchai Wongsawat. The PAD’s yellow army then launched further street-protests and in November-December 2008 occupied Bangkok’s Suvarnibhumi international airport, paralysing travel in and out of Thailand and greatly damaging the country’s vital tourismindustry (see “Thailand: the misrule of law”, 1 December 2008).
The political momentum remained with the PAD when soon after the airport seizure, Thailand’s constitutional court ordered the dissolution of the PPP. A realignment within parliament in December 2008 then saw a Democrat Party-led coalition come to power, with Abhisit Vejjajiva at the helm. This might appear to have restored Thailand’s traditional political order - dominated by the military, monarchy, and Bangkok’s middle class - but there was no stabilisation. In April 2009, a red tide of protestors now organising as the United Front of Democracy Against Dictatorship demanded Abhisit’s resignation, and it took tanks on the streets to force the “Songkhran uprising” to retreat (see “Thailand’s democratic crisis”, 9 April 2009).
The reshaping of politics
This narrative is essential background to the tragedy of 10 April 2010. But it also misses an important dimension that is critical to understanding what is happening in Thailand: the changes in consciousness - the imagining of what is politically possible - which have animated the 2006-10 period.
In this perspective, the familiar rendering of Thailand’s political drama - put simply, as a confrontation between red-shirted pro-Thaksin republicans with a political base in the rural poor versus yellow-shirted royalist conservatives backed by the urban middle and upper-classes – fails to convey the political heterogeneity that has been emerging under these misleadingly unified banners. Such shorthand references do account for some of the members of each movement, but they also elide their evolving dynamics: in particular, the cross-class, cross-space, and contingent formation of the red-shirted alliance in the streets of Bangkok, as well as those writing, posting, and otherwise supporting them elsewhere in Thailand and abroad.
The point can be made by referring to the Thai word phrai, which has become an ubiquitous reference-point by red-shirt members of the UDD and in broader Thai political discourse (and in media discourse about the Thai events). Phrai can be rendered in English as “commoner”: it is a direct reference to the feudal era, which officially ended in 1932 with the transformation of Thailand from an absolute to constitutional monarchy.
Thomas Fuller, the New York Times’s Bangkok correspondent, criticised a popular red-shirt bumper-sticker which reads: “The blood of the phrai is worth nothing”. This may be “overblown rhetoric”, says Fuller. “There are many stories of upward mobility in Thailand and, despite the presence of tens of thousands of protesters, the anger has not translated into personal attacks on the wealthy. The main target of the protesters’ ire seems to be the system: the perception that bureaucrats and the military serve the elite at the expense of the poor” (see “Thai Protesters Shed Culture of Restraint”, New York Times, 31 March 2010).
But to see the red-shirt choice of the term phrai as a misperception of reality is flawed. The UDD side is seeking not merely to rearrange Thailand’s political rhetoric but to redefine its political reality. To do this they position the phrai in opposition to the amatya (bureaucratic elite) - and by implication to the jao (lords) which traditionally and by definition the phrai could neither become nor even challenge (see “The class divide fuels red-shirt anger against the established elite”, The Nation, 26 March 2010).
It’s true that the mediatised images of these weeks of drama - such as the ubiquitous red glow cast by the demonstrators and reflected in the windows of the Bangkok elite’s luxury outlets - can seem to confirm the picture of a popular insurgency by Thailand’s rural poor against its urban rich. But it is so much more interesting and complicated than that. For as the protests have continued, the links of the red protestors with Thaksin Shinawatra have become more and more irrelevant. Instead, what has emerged are new forms and actors of politics in Thailand.
The old and the new
The dimension of class is indeed a key component of these events. Nattawut Saikua, one of the UDD leaders, declared as the red-shirts streamed into Bangkok from every direction on 18 March 2010 that the protest was the beginning of a “class war”. This was echoed by Thanet Aphornsuvan of Thammasat University as the state’s violence was unleashed on the evening of 10 April: “The battle [is] between the army that supports the establishment, government and Bangkok’s urban elite against the people from the provinces … It is a real class war. Saturday’s crackdown confirms this.”
Yet the events in and beyond Bangkok’s streets extend the traditional meanings of “class war”, and indeed perhaps even of “revolution”. The red-shirt movement in Thailand is redefining the terrain of politics, in a way reminiscent of the autonomiststruggles in Italy in the late 1970s and the Zapatistas in Mexico in the late 1990s. For like these earlier movements,the UDD is seeking both to contest an ancien regime (and in Thai terms, the amatya and jao who populate it) and to change the terms of engagement through which politics is conducted.
The red-shirts are, after all, seeking far more than merely a seat at the decision-making table for the marginalised majority. In their refusals, demonstrations and demands to reshape politics, they are agents of a deeper transformation in Thailand.
The state’s use of violence to repress the red shirts has not succeeded; they remain in key locations throughout Bangkok, defying Abhisit Vejjajiva’s demand that they evacuate the city’s streets. The red shirts continue to call for the immediate resignation of the prime minister, the dissolution of parliament, and plans for new elections. Moreover, the official attempts to constrain independent media – which long predate the state of emergency - have themselves been widely reported through a host of new-media outlets; and scholars and activists raise their voices infavour of renewed efforts to broker peace.
During the Songkhran uprising in April 2009, I wrote an article for openDemocracyin which I quoted Antonio Gramsci’s famous line from The Prison Notebooks: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.” A year later, the counter-revolutionary violence of 10 April 2010 seeks to keep the new at bay, and carries the potential for even greater loss of life. Thailand’s crisis continues.
For compromise in Wis., 3 GOP senators are needed
MADISON, Wis. – To end a high-stakes stalemate over union rights that has captured the nation's attention, a handful of Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin might have to stand up to their new governor.
Gov. Scott Walker made clear Sunday he won't back off his proposal to effectively eliminate collective bargaining rights for most public employees. Senate Democrats who fled the state last week to delay the plan vowed not to come back to allow it to pass — even if they have to miss votes on other bills Tuesday. And union leaders said they would not let up on protests that have consumed Wisconsin's capital city for a week and made the state the center of a national debate over the role of public employees' unions.
That dynamic means it might take Republicans in the Legislature who believe Walker is going too far to try to break the impasse. One idea that has been floated by GOP Sen. Dale Schultz would temporarily take away bargaining rights to get through the state's next two-year budget, then immediately restore them.
While it's unclear whether that would be acceptable to his colleagues, Democratic Sen. Jon Erpenbach said in a phone interview from the hotel room in Chicago where he's hiding out that Schultz was brave for making the proposal. He said Schultz, of Richland Center, and five or six other Republican senators who have ties to organized labor are in the best position to get both sides to negotiate a deal.
Protesters who crowded inside the Capitol for a sixth day Sunday had a similar message. They hung a banner in the Capitol reading "Wisconsin needs 3 cou(R)ageous Senators," referring to the number of Republicans needed to join with Democrats to block the bill.
So far, there's little evidence of a move to compromise. "Won't happen, won't happen, won't happen," said Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald. The Juneau Republican said he spoke with every member of his caucus over the weekend and they remained "rock solid" in their support for Walker's plan, even if they had some internal disagreements earlier.
Fitzgerald said Republicans could not back down now because the governor's two-year budget blueprint, to be released in coming days, slashes spending for public schools and municipal services by $1 billion or more. Local government leaders will need to make cuts without bargaining with employees, he said.
Walker's plan would allow unions representing most public employees to negotiate only for wage increases, not benefits or working conditions. Any wage increase above the consumer price index would have to be approved in a referendum. Unions would face a vote of membership every year to stay formed, and workers could opt out of paying dues.
The plan would also require many public employees to cut their take home pay by about 8 percent by contributing more of their salaries toward their health insurance and retirement benefits. Union leaders said their members are willing to accept those concessions, but they will not give up their right to collectively bargain.
Mariah Clark, an emergency medical technician at the University of Wisconsin hospital and a volunteer firefighter, said she stands to lose $250 per month with the benefits concessions. Standing on a bench holding a sign reading "EMT. Firefighter. Not the public enemy," she said the pay cut would hurt, but that's not why she was protesting.
"I really believe this is about workers everywhere, not just public employees," said Clark, 29. "It's pathetic that in Wisconsin, one of the places where the labor movement started, that this would happen."
Wisconsin was the first state to enact a comprehensive collective bargaining law in 1959. It's also the birthplace of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the national union representing all non-federal public employees, which was founded in 1936 in Madison.
Walker said the concessions would help close a projected $3.6 billion budget deficit through June 30, 2013, and the changes to weaken unions would pave the way for local and state governments to operate more efficiently for years to come.
The Republican-controlled Assembly is expected to meet Tuesday to consider the plan. With Senate Democrats in Illinois, Fitzgerald said the Senate would meet without them to pass non-spending bills and confirm some of Walker's appointees. While Republicans are one vote short of the quorum needed to take up the budget-repair bill, they need only a simple majority of the Senate's 33 members to take up other measures.
Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller, speaking from "an undisclosed location in northern Illinois," said it's up to Republicans who privately have concerns with Walker's plan to force the governor to compromise.
"I think it's important those talks begin because there's a lot of Republicans that are uncomfortable with stripping away the rights of workers," the Monona Democrat said. "They recognize public workers are their constituents and neighbors and want them respected. We need to find a way for those Republicans to be able to be part of a solution."
South Africa: Social and Political Transformation
Explore the dynamic socioeconomic, political, and cultural processes of South Africa, an extraordinarily diverse country in transition.
Similar to other countries around the world, South Africa is striving to free itself of a legacy of racial discrimination, economic exploitation, and political authoritarianism to build a new democratic and equitable regime.
Through coursework and community engagement, students discover the significant role that Durban, the program's base, has played in South African history, particularly its role in apartheid. To provide students with learning opportunities in many different contexts, the program also includes field visits to Johannesburg, rural parts of both KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape, the Umfolozi and Hluhluwe Game Reserves, and the Drakensberg Mountain range.
Students interact with a range of organizations involved in the transformation process, during the course of the program, including:
- The Abahlali Shackdwellers Movement – which campaigns around housing issues and works to give voice to the views of the poor and homeless
- Phoenix Zululand – which works to apply the principles of restorative justice in 13 KwaZulu Natal prisons
- The Cato Manor Youth Empowerment Project – which operates a school feeding scheme and youth club in the Cato Manor area of Durban where students have their first and longest homestay. Students participate in both these activities on a weekly basis.
- The African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD) - an African-oriented conflict resolution center based in Durban
Durban street signs - photo: Emily Orlaska
While the program is located in the southeastern province of KwaZulu-Natal, the focus is national and internationally comparative. While investigating the complex issues of inequality, poverty, racial, ethnic, and gender-based discrimination in the context of South Africa, students are challenged to draw and reflect on the experiences of their home countries in dealing – or not dealing - with these same issues.
Through the program's thematic seminar, students investigate the following topics:
- Issues of Transformation: South Africa's political, socio-economic, and cultural landscapes including the process of transformation from apartheid to democracy, the apartheid legacy, and the current political economy. This includes a look at issues of unemployment and poverty alleviation; land reform and restitution; the state of schooling and issues of identity involving the building of a new and indigenous South African national identity.
- Development: an overview of theory and practice in the context of South Africa. Topics include the informal sector; rural and agricultural development; service delivery – housing, water, and electricity; ecotourism; issues of gender violence and HIV/AIDS.
- Reconciliation: opportunities and challenges. Topics include the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its legacy; the concept of ubuntu; issues of violence, ethnicity, and xenophobia; conflict resolution and peacekeeping.
| Program alumna wins peace prize to return to South Africa Spring 2009 student Maya Semans has been awarded the $10,000 Davis Peace Prize by Simmons College to run a three-week creative writing, art, and music camp in Durban during summer 2010. The program aims to enrich the lives of Durban’s street children. Maya is traveling back to South Africa with former SIT classmate Vanessa Shea of Smith College. They will work in conjunction with two Durban-based partner organizations, Umthombo, a center for street children in Durban, and The Network, a grassroots hip-hop initiative |
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Subscribe Now: bloglines
