Image via WikipediaAmerica and Europe have been going through for two years what Japan has been going through for two decades, and so far America and Europe have been trying the same remedies that have not worked to get Japan out of its flunk.
For one there are no domestic remedies. America alone can not do it. Europe alone can not do it. Japan alone can not do it. The three economic giants of the past half century - America, Europe and Japan - have to come together and launch a global "Marshall Plan" and that is the only way out of this flunk. They should put together a trillion dollars each and create a pot of three trillion dollars. The biggest chunk of this money should go to connect every human being on the planet to broadband. This is Barack Obama's option to go to the moon.
We lack the data for the biggest problems in the world today.
A three trillion dollar global "Marshall Plan" to last a decade.
Gordon Brown: Global New Deal: America’s path to growth through higher consumption is blocked by high personal borrowing and negative equity. Another well-trodden road out of recession—a private investment spurt—has failed to materialize as businesses hoard cash in the absence of a growing home market. ........ And now that the debt deal will forestall the other traditional path—a stimulus from public investment—just one route to sustained growth remains that can prevent a decade of high American unemployment. ....... Obama should now refocus his attention on securing a global growth pact that will free the world as a whole, and particularly the West, from years of anemic growth. ....... far bolder: “America’s plan for the world economy”—to achieve for global trade and growth now what Gen. George Marshall’s plan did for the faltering world of the 1940s. ........ a “global New Deal” ....... Today, 60 percent of China’s income comes from exports, while America’s export share is just 25 percent. ..... The need is urgent because as Asia’s middle classes double in the next decade, its consumer market will dwarf all others, accounting for 40 percent of all global consumer spending. Without a bigger footprint in Asia, America will be left behind. ....... if—as predicted—India, China, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, Turkey, South Korea, Indonesia, and Russia, which today buy just 15 percent of U.S. exports, account for 70 percent of future global growth, then no American company can afford to stay at home. ........ Europe’s only hope of salvation from a decade of high unemployment is to export its way to growth. ....... an up-skilling of America’s middle class and calls for U.S. public and private sectors to frontload investment in education technology and infrastructure. And a global growth pact will require America to agree to common global financial standards that can prevent future financial crises. ......... with each iPad sale, only $4 of profit go to its Asian manufacturers, while $80 go to its American (and British) designers ........ From now until Election Day, the president’s opponents will frame his position as “burdening our children with debt.” Indeed, so adept have those on the right been at playing the politics of fear, on all continents, that even in Australia—a country with virtually no debt—the incumbent Labour government lost its majority when it was faced with a conservative onslaught about deficits. ....... Two thirds of a century ago, after the greatest of depressions and the worst of wars, General Marshall rejected the politics of fear for the economics of hope, and the Marshall Plan pioneered a global program that framed the new world order. It repaid itself many times over, doubling global trade and putting America’s flagging postwar economy on course for its most successful era ever. Now, with the same vision and by accepting that a global new deal is the only way forward, an America reborn can lead again.
The Atlantic : North Korea’s Digital Underground: the very archetype of a “closed society.” It ranks dead last—196th out of 196 countries—in Freedom House’s Freedom of the Press index. Unlike the citizens of, say, Tunisia or Egypt, to name two countries whose populations recently tapped the power of social media to help upend the existing political order, few North Koreans have access to Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. In fact, except for a tiny elite, the DPRK’s 25 million inhabitants are not connected to the Internet. Televisions are set to receive only government stations. International radio signals are routinely jammed, and electricity is unreliable. Freestanding radios are illegal. But every North Korean household and business is outfitted with a government-controlled radio hardwired to a central station. The speaker comes with a volume control, but no off switch. ........ media insurgents have a two-pronged strategy, integrating Cold War methods (Voice of America–like shortwave broadcasts in; samizdat-like info out) and 21st-century hardware: SD chips, thumb drives, CDs, e-books, miniature recording devices, and cell phones. ....... these new media organizations are helping to create something remarkable: a corps of North Korean citizen-journalists practicing real journalism inside the country. ....... This past December, Open Radio North Korea, a broadcast-news organization, broke the story that a train headed for Pyongyang with gifts from China for Kim Jong Un, the heir apparent, was reportedly sabotaged and derailed, in one of several sporadic and mostly unreported acts of resistance that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. ....... in January 2010, a North Korean factory worker was publicly executed by firing squad for phoning news about the price of rice to someone in South Korea ...... Like most of the other independent news organizations, it receives funds from the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as other NGOs and private donors. ...... The footage Ahn brought out was shocking: filthy, barefoot children scavenging for food, picking kernels of corn from cow manure. Glassy-eyed, the children told the interviewer that their parents had died and they were homeless and alone. ...... Once these North Korean defectors made it across the Yalu or Tumen River, they were startled to discover that even the poorest Chinese had higher living standards than they did ....... (A 2009 survey found that 58 percent of North Koreans had regular access to a cassette recorder with radio, and 21 percent watched videos on video-compact-disc players.) The confluence of these developments created a remarkable journalistic opening: just as defectors in unprecedented numbers were bringing more information out of North Korea, the spread of markets and secondhand technology was creating a conduit for getting more information in. ....... Until the late 1990s, all international phone calls were routed through Beijing or Moscow. ..... Cell phones, both legal and illegal, have become a fact of life only during the past five years. ..... NK Reform Radio interviews defectors now living in South Korea. Some are unable to fit into South Korean society ...... The subject that most interests North Koreans is the country’s ruling dynasty: founder Kim Il Sung, his son Kim Jong Il, and his presumed heir, Kim Jong Un. Most of their subjects know little more than the idealized history of the Kims churned out by the state’s propaganda mill. They are shocked to learn that Kim Jong Il was born in Russia, and not on the mythic Mount Paektu; Koreans are quite socially conservative and are aghast that he has fathered several children with women other than his wives. ...... d a clear correlation between the “consumption of foreign media” and “more negative assessments of the regime and its intentions.” ....... One night he heard a South Korean program that contradicted a number of the myths surrounding the Kim family. After a little research, he discovered that the broadcasts were true. Was everything he’d been taught a lie, he wondered? It wasn’t long before he defected. ..... had several e-books, which I got from China. The national security force arrested me for possessing them,” he tells me. The books were pretty innocuous fare, mostly motivational titles like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.
The government in Sri Lanka is all set to announce its total military victory over the LTTE. There are those who will marvel at the military operation. And it perhaps will be a military victory. But at what price and to what end?
There can not be a military solution to a political problem. Sri Lanka can not continue to be a unitary state. Sri Lanka can not continue to be a country that treats its Tamil minority like second class citizens. That basic political problem if anything has only worsened.
I have never approved of LTTE violence. But for me that has not been an excuse to ignore the very real political issues of Sri Lanka's Tamil minority.
There is a very real danger that the ruling class in Sri Lanka will think of themselves as victors and find the military victory to be an excuse to further mistreat the Tamils. We already have the ugly stories from the internment camps.
Genocide/Ethnic Cleansing Of Sri Lanka Tamils More Than 1,000 Civilians Killed In Attacks On Sri Lanka Safe Zone Guardian more than 1,400 people were believed to have been killed in two days of air and artillery attacks. ..... said shells were continuing to fall on the area in which civilians were sheltering. "Still the shelling continues and the fighting is going on" ........ also been an attack by a Sri Lankan air force Kfir jet. ...... the UN said the bloodbath it had feared since the government launched its all-out campaign to destroy the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had now become a reality. ...... UN officials estimate that between 50,000 and 100,000 civilians could still be packed into a tiny three sq km pocket of land, but the Sri Lankan government has claimed that no more than 20,000 are left. ........... independent journalists are denied access to the area where the fighting is taking place. ......... The UN has been critical of the Sri Lankan use of artillery and air power in such a small area. ..... the UN security council was due to have another informal meeting on Sri Lanka in New York today, with the foreign ministers of Britain and France – who had a stormy visit to Sri Lanka at the end of April – both due to attend. ....... Both the US and Britain are pushing to secure a ceasefire, but Russia and China have opposed such a move. .......... many were believed to have died in an air strike yesterday morning. ....... the shelling began at 5pm and continued through until 9am. It appeared the shells were fired from government positions in Mullaitivu. ........ "The shells were landing about 300 metres from the hospital," he said. "All the time, we have casualties coming in. We don't have time to think." ........ the dead were being buried in large pits, with 30 or 40 bodies in each pit. ......... a report in which it was alleged that women were being subjected to sexual abuse in the internment camps set up to hold civilians fleeing the fighting.
Image via WikipediaAmerica and Europe have been going through for two years what Japan has been going through for two decades, and so far America and Europe have been trying the same remedies that have not worked to get Japan out of its flunk. 
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