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Friday, May 31, 2013

Edgardo Buscaglia

Pedro Pardo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The aftermath of a shootout in the Los Organos neighborhood of Acapulco.
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It is fashionable in the United States these days to assert that Mexico has arrived on the world stage economically and politically. Certainly, Mexico’s political, business and union elites have acquired great wealth — explained and unexplained — since the signing of the North American Free Trade Association with the United States and Canada in the 1990s.

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Yet the vast majority of Mexicans face a daily struggle to survive under a government that is often either absent or corrupt, high levels of common and organized crime, a chronic lack of formal employment opportunities, and the highest levels of insecurity since the Mexican Revolution.
Though it is now caught in a painful political transition, Mexico has the potential to become a world-class economic and political powerhouse. But it’s not there yet. Several necessary ingredients are missing.
All countries, of course, are afflicted to some degree with internal organized crime. Russia and China generate criminal groups even more powerful than those in Mexico; West European nations face the lawless cross-border activities of many well-financed criminal groups. But none of these countries experience such extreme forms of organized violence as do Mexico and some of its Central American neighbors, all of which face unprecedented rates of homicide, human trafficking, kidnapping and extortion.
Illegal drugs and the access to weapons do not in themselves cause such extremes. Studies show that organized crime syndicates usually try to avoid confrontation with strong central governments, preferring to operate in local and regional markets that augment the lucrative trade in illicit narcotics.
Mexico’s extreme violence is caused rather by the power vacuums and failures created by the country’s chronically corrupt governments. The corruption creates huge incentives for criminal groups to consolidate their markets through savage competition for voids in “authority.”
Under the previous conservative federal administration, states like Michoacan appeared to have been infiltrated by sophisticated criminal enterprises, such as La Familia Michoacana. In 2010, the half-brother of the Michoacan governor was forced out of his seat in Congress after he was accused of being a top-ranking member of La Familia, and he remains on the run. In 2009, three dozen mayors in the state were arrested and accused of working for organized crime, though later the charges were dropped.
Prosecution of political figures in Michoacan was made difficult because prosecutors were under the complete political control of the party running the federal government. Moreover, the rights of the accused, all of whom belonged to opposition parties, were often violated, making any indictments legally unsustainable.
More recently, the current federal administration arrested the leader of the national teachers’ union on charges of embezzling 2 billion pesos in union funds. Before her indictment, she had voiced objections to the education reforms of President Enrique Peña Nieto, which only strengthened the perception that criminal indictments are used for political purposes.
In the 12 years that the Institutional Revolutionary Party (P.R.I.) was out of power, until it retook the presidency in 2012, many but not all of the authoritarian institutions that developed during more than 70 years of P.R.I. rule were dismantled. Yet it has been far more difficult to fill the resulting power vacuums with legitimate and stable democratic institutions.
Every country should achieve its political transition in its own way. But the latest political agreement among the elites, called “Pacto por México” — in which party leaders from the left and the right aim at social, economic and political reforms — is opaque and fails to meet the test of democracy. The pact bypassed deliberation in Congress; was done without consulting civil society; and fails to specify measures for improving security.
For all practical purposes, Mexico’s judicial system has collapsed. State governors, some of them under the voluntary or involuntary control of criminal groups, have full power over the appointment of judges and prosecutors and the launching of police investigations, thus ensuring impunity for their political and business supporters.
Mexico’s unsuccessful attempts to enforce statutes on money laundering and asset forfeitures also demonstrate the weaknesses of the state. Political foot-dragging impedes international efforts to work with Mexican authorities on investigations into money laundering schemes that might link organized crime to Mexican and international political and business figures.
Moreover, the lack of government programs, in coordination with civil society networks, to help prevent criminal association is another area where state power falls far short. Not having such a social system says a lot about why Mexican and Central American youth are drawn in soaring numbers into urban gangs that morph into transnational criminal groups, such as MS-13, which originated in the United States and spread across Mexico and Central America.
The Mexican private sector today is submerged in the largest informal economy of all O.E.C.D. countries. Its potential entrepreneurs, visible for example among the hundreds of thousands of “changarros” (street vendors), are all seeking the chance to access legal credit, to invest and to secure formal jobs. Once a high-growth Mexican private-sector revolution takes off, the nation’s youth will see no need to supply their labor to organized crime or to migrate to the United States.
Transnational criminal organizations are present in all countries. Drastic U.S.-European reductions in drug consumption and arms sales or drives to decriminalize drug markets will not help Mexico to enhance its human security unless the country first completes its transition to democracy through the elimination of state power vacuums and the establishment of the rule of law.
Edgardo Buscaglia is senior scholar in Law and Economics at Columbia University, and president of the Instituto de Acción Ciudadana in Mexico.

Violeta Parra

From the Mouths of Babes


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Like many observers, I usually read reports about political goings-on with a sort of weary cynicism. Every once in a while, however, politicians do something so wrong, substantively and morally, that cynicism just won’t cut it; it’s time to get really angry instead. So it is with the ugly, destructive war against food stamps.
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The food stamp program — which these days actually uses debit cards, and is officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — tries to provide modest but crucial aid to families in need. And the evidence is crystal clear both that the overwhelming majority of food stamp recipients really need the help, and that the program is highly successful at reducing “food insecurity,” in which families go hungry at least some of the time.
Food stamps have played an especially useful — indeed, almost heroic — role in recent years. In fact, they have done triple duty.
First, as millions of workers lost their jobs through no fault of their own, many families turned to food stamps to help them get by — and while food aid is no substitute for a good job, it did significantly mitigate their misery. Food stamps were especially helpful to children who would otherwise be living in extreme poverty, defined as an income less than half the official poverty line.
But there’s more. Why is our economy depressed? Because many players in the economy slashed spending at the same time, while relatively few players were willing to spend more. And because the economy is not like an individual household — your spending is my income, my spending is your income — the result was a general fall in incomes and plunge in employment. We desperately needed (and still need) public policies to promote higher spending on a temporary basis — and the expansion of food stamps, which helps families living on the edge and let them spend more on other necessities, is just such a policy.
Indeed, estimates from the consulting firm Moody’s Analytics suggest that each dollar spent on food stamps in a depressed economy raises G.D.P. by about $1.70 — which means, by the way, that much of the money laid out to help families in need actually comes right back to the government in the form of higher revenue.
Wait, we’re not done yet. Food stamps greatly reduce food insecurity among low-income children, which, in turn, greatly enhances their chances of doing well in school and growing up to be successful, productive adults. So food stamps are in a very real sense an investment in the nation’s future — an investment that in the long run almost surely reduces the budget deficit, because tomorrow’s adults will also be tomorrow’s taxpayers.
So what do Republicans want to do with this paragon of programs? First, shrink it; then, effectively kill it.
The shrinking part comes from the latest farm bill released by the House Agriculture Committee (for historical reasons, the food stamp program is administered by the Agriculture Department). That bill would push about two million people off the program. You should bear in mind, by the way, that one effect of the sequester has been to pose a serious threat to a different but related program that provides nutritional aid to millions of pregnant mothers, infants, and children. Ensuring that the next generation grows up nutritionally deprived — now that’s what I call forward thinking.
And why must food stamps be cut? We can’t afford it, say politicians like Representative Stephen Fincher, a Republican of Tennessee, who backed his position with biblical quotations — and who also, it turns out, has personally received millions in farm subsidiesover the years.
These cuts are, however, just the beginning of the assault on food stamps. Remember, Representative Paul Ryan’s budget is still the official G.O.P. position on fiscal policy, andthat budget calls for converting food stamps into a block grant program with sharply reduced spending. If this proposal had been in effect when the Great Recession struck, the food stamp program could not have expanded the way it did, which would have meant vastly more hardship, including a lot of outright hunger, for millions of Americans, and for children in particular.
Look, I understand the supposed rationale: We’re becoming a nation of takers, and doing stuff like feeding poor children and giving them adequate health care are just creating a culture of dependency — and that culture of dependency, not runaway bankers, somehow caused our economic crisis.
But I wonder whether even Republicans really believe that story — or at least are confident enough in their diagnosis to justify policies that more or less literally take food from the mouths of hungry children. As I said, there are times when cynicism just doesn’t cut it; this is a time to get really, really angry.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

End of Term

Yesterday was Teacher's Day in Mexico. I got some good wishes through e-mails, from old students and colleagues. Today I finished one of the Astronomy sections I led at Waubonsee Community College, some students personally thank me for the class.

Neat.

Monday, May 13, 2013

p-adic number - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

p-adic number - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

"In mathematics the p-adic number system for any prime number p extends the ordinary arithmetic of the rational numbers in a way different from the extension of the rational number system to the real and complex number systems. The extension is achieved by an alternative interpretation of the concept of "closeness" or absolute value. In particular, p-adic numbers have the interesting property that they are said to be close when their difference is divisible by a high power of p – the higher the power the closer they are. This property enables p-adic numbers to encode congruence information in a way that turns out to have powerful applications in number theory including, for example, in the famous proof of Fermat's Last Theorem by Andrew Wiles.[1]"

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Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History: Eduardo Galeano: 9781568587479: Amazon.com: Books

Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History: Eduardo Galeano: 9781568587479: Amazon.com: Books:

 

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Subterranean Homesick Blues Lyrics

Johny's in the basement
Mixing up the medicine
I'm on the pavement
Thinking about the government
The man in the trench coat
Badge out, laid off
Says he's got a bad cough
Wants to get it paid off
Look out kid
It's somethin' you did
God knows when
But you're doin' it again
You better duck down the alley way
Lookin' for a new friend
The man in the coon-skip cap
In the big pen
Wants eleven dollar bills
You only got ten.

Maggie comes fleet foot
Face full of black soot
Talkin' that the heat put
Plants in the bed but
The phone's tapped anyway
Maggie says that many say
They must bust in early May
Orders from the DA
Look out kid
Don't matter what you did
Walk on your tip toes
Don't try, 'No Doz'
Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose
Keep a clean nose
Watch the plain clothes
You don't need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows.

Get sick, get well
Hang around an ink well
Ring bell, hard to tell
If anything is goin' to sell
Try hard, get barred
Get back, write Braille
Get jailed, jump bail Join the army, if you failed
Look out kid
You're gonna get hit
But users, cheaters
Six-time losers
Hang around the theaters
Girl by the whirlpool
Lookin' for a new fool
Don't follow leaders
Watch the parkin' meters. 

Ah get born, keep warm
Short pants, romance, learn to dance
Get dressed, get blessed
Try to be a success
Please her, please him, buy gifts
Don't steal, don't lift
Twenty years of schoolin'
And they put you on the day shift
Look out kid
They keep it all hid
Better jump down a manhole
Light yourself a candle
Don't wear sandals
Try to avoid the scandals
Don't wanna be a bum
You better chew gum
The pump don't work
'Cause the vandals took the handles.

Lyrics Freak

Wedding Picture


Renzo de Santis