Posted by: lettrist on: July 22, 2009
Going through some “draft” posts I have on the back-end of this blog, I found a lot of notes (old notes) I wrote to myself about SDS groups. Instead of writing up a fluid post on Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) or connecting these ideas, I’d rather just post my thoughts separately, divided by [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: June 26, 2009
This video is the simplified, dinner-table outreach version of the World Bank argument put forth by Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist famous for saying that capitalism is failing in Third World countries because of complicated legal systems. De Soto and the World Bank advocate widespread privatization of extra-legal and squatter [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: June 15, 2009
The prime directive for governments these days is to manage crises, to restore failures in every market.
The global economic crisis surfaced during a global food crisis. At the same time last year, energy crises were rampant across Central Asia, gas prices soared in Australia. Tajikistan, Latvia, and many other countries are defaulting on IMF loans [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: February 1, 2009
“I guess the buzz word around here is ’smart power’,” said a senator at the hearing for Hilary Clinton’s initiation as the US Secretary of State two weeks ago. It’s true, all everyone kept saying at this hearing was “smart power”.
Sometimes the phrases IR studies professors come up with are unnecessary. Smart power is supposed [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: November 24, 2008
This is a conventional view advanced by the World Bank: land rights are more secure and transferable through the titling process – that is, assigning titles to parceled bits of land so that urban and rural poor can then use the land.
Titling land provides a guarantee to the informal urban and rural markets that the [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: November 10, 2008
Since the mid-1990s, the International Non-Governmental Organizations bypassed Third World governments in order to work directly with regional and neighborhood NGOs. Some have called this “the NGO revolution”.
Revolution? Well, it is clear there are now tens of thousands of NGOs in Third World cities on housing specifically: the World Bank, the UNDP, Ford Foundation, German [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: May 18, 2007
Trial by media can be a very effective tool for uncovering information valuable to the public. Paul Wolfowitz, who has suffered a short media trial, insisted he was only following his directors’ sketchy advice, but now he’s resigning under pressure. The scandal has eclipsed all the Bank’s other efforts, and rendered Wolfowitz unable to lead [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: May 18, 2007
Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and now perhaps more of Latin America.
Perhaps this alliance has already been confirmed, but this week’s news from the World Bank seemed to confirm it even more. Chavez has been calling on other countries like Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua–all allies with the aforementioned–to join him in rejecting the World Bank [...]
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