On the ground in Manhattan at the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual meeting
From the “lost arrogance” of the financial crisis to the “blizzards of conflict” that lie ahead in the 21st century, ex-president Bill Clinton has firmly established his Clinton Global Initiative as the preeminent philanthropic organization in the world. Describing his annual general meeting as “show business for nerds,” the total tally for this year’s edition came in at 291 commitments worth $6 billion US, for a total of 1,950 commitments worth $63 billion US since the inception of the CGI in 2005.
At the closing plenary, Michelle Obama’s impassioned speech echoed remarks made earlier in the conference, by Laura Bush, that pleaded with businesses to hire military veterans, and for communities to embrace support networks that assist veterans in making the difficult transition back into civilian life. President Clinton stated that his worse fear was that people would loose their “confidence and mojo” due to the financial crisis. In a wide ranging discussion with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, both leaders expressed concern that the “rate of progress was under threat.” Gates, however, was buoyed by strong indicators that the poverty reduction targets as set out in the CGI’s “Millennium Development Goals” are being met. Gates also praised UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s “ring-fencing” of his government’s aid budget, despite expressing reservation about the magnitude of the cuts being implemented in Britain. He noted that the “push back” is going to be where the challenge lies — without doubt something to watch carefully in the months to come. (more…)
On the ground in Manhattan at the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual meeting
Clinton Global InitiativeFrom left: Katie Couric, CBS News; Queen Rania Al Abdullahl Hashemite of Jordan; Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of the Republic of Liberia; Muhtar Kent, chairman and CEO, The Coca-Cola CompanyOne billion people worldwide have bank accounts. Three billion people have mobile phones.
Two questions being asked at the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual meeting in the context of poverty alleviation:
“How much (loan) interest is too much interest?”
“If you were an NGO micro-finance loan officer, how would you respond to a poor woman’s plea of ‘Am I not poor, too?’ after you have just denied her a loan?”
An inescapable political theme doing the rounds at the CGI’s New York sessions is the awareness of what has been called the “wail of the top 1 percent” or “the angry rich.” A recent example of this phenomena came this past summer in the form of The Giving Pledge consortium. In the rush to grasp the magnitude of the current social, technological and economic disruptions afflicting the philanthropic world, it is the necessary to view matters through the prism ideological appeasement that seeks to fend off the more blunt dimensions of the impending expiry of the Bush tax cuts. Instead of cost-cutting mantras that paper over payroll attrition, Wall Street and corporate America are now actually beginning to talk again about job creation beyond the stimulus as a means of promoting growth. Whether this growth and jobs are created offshore or domestically however remains a very open and contentious question. (more…)
On the ground in Manhattan at the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual meeting
Clinton Global InitiativeBill Clinton attends the CGI 2010 Green Vehicle ShowcaseBill Clinton hit the streets Monday in New York City to promote electric cars, nifty collapsing bikes, and draw attention to energy-efficient modes of transportation ahead of his annual Clinton Global Initiative (CGI).
The first major event of the meeting was the “CGI Exchange” — a kind of smorgasbord of altruism, organized as a “trade show” for relief aid, development, and education. Lesson learned: the latest in high-impact messaging is definitely short, made-for-the-iPad video activism. For example, Haiti’s Ciné Institute showed a raw and emotional two-minute video zinger which far outclassed the pamphlet crowd. The atmosphere in the ballroom/showroom had an understated yet persuasive elegance and urgency, coupled with a plodding café del mar soundtrack. Where else can you find Jewish appeal groups smiling across the aisle at the Palestanian National Authority’s economic aspirations desk? And only in New York do you see a runner doing his early morning ab crunches on the sidewalk as rolly-polly-packin’ security guys grab their sidearms and shades from of a caravan of black-tinted Suburbans.
The CGI is one of those rarefied, gift-bag-friendly get-togethers where battle-weary symbolic interactionalists brush elbows with the bastard offspring of international situationalists over conversation, catastrophe, and canapés. In recent years, the CGI has become the all-star game of UN General Assembly week. If you are a brand name politician or CEO, step right up. No stodgy podiums in empty cavernous hangars here — this is primary colours staging, network cameras, 7th Avenue glitz and casual seating for a very well-heeled crowd. (more…)
Private moments after the public debut of Barney’s Version, the film version, in Venice
Noah RichlerOur water taxi was one of a small flotilla speeding the producers, cast, and crew from the Venice Film Festival opening of Barney’s Version, on the Lido, to some exclusive nightclub on the Grand Canal that no one had heard about until Robert Lantos, the film’s producer, began directing people to it. At the screening, there had been a standing ovation, and the buzz was on — but in the cabin of the speeding vessel, my wife’s sixteen-year-old daughter was quietly seeking the advice of the film’s Canadian director, Richard Lewis. She’d studied film at an arts camp during the summer, and spent part of her time in Venice asking the cast and guests to name their three favourite movies of all time.
Joy von Tiedemann“My Dad, the Movie, and Me” by Noah Richler: On the set of Barney’s Version, with Dustin Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, and the ghost of Mordecai Richler (October 2010)Lewis threw his hands up in the air. (It doesn’t take long, or too many spritz, before the visitor to Italy learns just how much can be said with the hands.) “That’s not fair!” he said. “If you’re going to ask me for a list then it has to be twenty.”
“Your three favorites right now,” she insisted.
And then, as had already been the case with actors Paul Giamatti and Scott Speedman, it was about five seconds before not just Lewis started chipping in with answers.
“Citizen Kane,” said the director, to the noisy approval of the three beautifully dressed women sitting on the open-air, cushioned bench at the stern of the wooden launch (fleet and polished, much like a Muskoka Lakes boat). “Jaws,” he said next, to some surprise, but eventually more unified nods of agreement, and then named Stardust Memories as his last — before trying to change it to Shine. (more…)
A letter from Venice, where the author is soon to attend the premiere of Barney’s Version
Noah RichlerNoah Richler is in Venice to attend the premiere of Barney’s Version, the film adaptation of his father’s famous novel — and the subject of Noah’s cover story for The Walrus’s November 2010 issue. In the coming days, he will report on the event itself; meanwhile, The Walrus Blog presents a charming anecdote from his time in the city.
On the Lido, by the pier at San Nicolò, I asked an elderly woman where the Jewish cemetery was and she said she had no idea. As it turned out, the cemetery was right behind her. Founded by decree in 1386, the resting place has endured much greater indignities over the more than six centuries of its existence than being overlooked by one who lives immediately next to it.
At its gates, a mere twenty feet away, I met Mr. Izzo, a kind and impeccably attired man in his seventies, a fellow Jew who agreed to show me around the old cemetery as well as the “new” one started in 1774. Mr. Izzo is lean and handsome, with deep lines furrowed into his forehead. He was wearing white linen trousers, a light-blue linen shirt, cobalt blue blazer — and a kippah, of course. I was not dressed shabbily either, but I was grateful that he was emanating such kindness, as I was not wearing one, and could feel that some part of him was trying to gauge to what point of forgetting my Judaism had descended — and whether or not my wife Sarah, with her good Hebraic name, was Jewish or another post along the road of his people’s vanishing.
We toured the cemetery for a good three hours, during which time Mr. Izzo recounted centuries of abuse of its graves, starting with the encouraged vandalism of those in the employ of the irritated Benedictine monks who lived, when the cemetery was founded, in the monastery beside it. This pattern of defilement continued at the hands of various armies, including Napoleon’s and Hitler’s, but also Italy’s (there is still the remnants of a shooting range next door); it was perpetuated as well by property owners and even the city, which built roads over some of the 12,000 graves in the area (according to Mr. Izzo’s estimate), if the cemetery is measured to its true, vague extent. Mr. Izzo, who is the graves’ custodian, pointed out the resting places of celebrated rabbis and poets; he clearly enjoyed the vagaries of an accumulated history impossible to ascertain in all its details, and with ambiguities often rooted in language. (Is “Guidecca” derived from “Jew” or “judged people”? Who really knows?) (more…)
Under a low bank of clouds, the Indian Ocean thundering before me, I stand looking at a Soccer City made of sand. Facsimiles of the major World Cup stadiums are dotted along Durban’s Marine Parade, and the rangy young architects expect coins in return for their work. Here’s Green Point, there’s Port Elizabeth*, and, behind a gory faux-naif piece entitled “Big Leopard Bites Poor Man,” Durban’s own Moses Mabhida Stadium. In the morning, of course, these works will be swept away with the tide; one doesn’t have to be Jimi Hendrix to locate the dread metaphor inherent in this small slice of beachfront: World Cup 2010 South Africa. Chimera.
The last time I visited Durban, I sat in a dusty, dying colonial-era gentleman’s club in the heart of downtown, interviewing one of South Africa’s ranking captains of industry. His mottled drunkard’s nose was testament to the fact that our mid-morning gin and tonics were a habit rather than an anomaly, and he told me the following: “This country’s major resource is its people and their energy. Soon, my kind will be dead. Then the blacks running the show will have a choice: use the energy, or squander it. This place can go to shit in a hurry. Or it can be the greatest nation on earth. But make no mistake, South Africa is a marketer’s dream — the easiest sell on earth.” This was 2007, and he undoubtedly had the World Cup on what remained of his mind.
I’d left the club, picking my way through a city that was crumbling in on itself, a great dystopian mess battered by a furious southwesterly. Durban: holiday town of my childhood. During apartheid, the city was a seaside playground; in 2007, it was on the verge of ruin. But flash-forward to present day, and I properly understand what the old fellow was talking about. Durban is temporarily reinvented: crime-free, clean, temperate, ebullient. The city’s nature — Zulu meets Indian meets Edwardian English — once subverted, is now fully expressed. It’s real, not the whitewashed sham of the apartheid years, nor the neglected post-transition orphan-apolis. The blacks running the show have done a fine job. The easiest sell on earth, indeed.
Now what? (more…)
Under a bruised sky and a gathering chill — as un-African a tableau as imaginable — a crowd gathers. Fourteen barely clad tribal dancers pronk around a stage in an artfully cobbled square, ringed by wine bars and meze bars and high-end food outlets. This is Melrose Arch, a luxury outdoor mall compound in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs. Built during the peak of the city’s post-apartheid violent crime wave, it has the simultaneous feel of a hyper-modern shopping emporium and a walled medieval city. Over the course of the World Cup, Melrose Arch has played host to one of Joburg’s most popular fan parks — or fan jols in FIFA-approved local parlance. Ghana’s Black Stars — recently defeated by Uruguay in a nasty quarter-final match that was stolen from them by the devil’s hand — are scheduled to drop by and say, “Thank you, South Africa, and adieu.”
The Black Stars have organized this encore appearance because locals, since the first-round elimination of Bafana Bafana, have embraced the team as their own. Indeed, it seems as if the whole continent has banded together, donning Ghana’s gold, red, and green, blasting those accursed vuvuzelas in an approximation of the Ghanaian national anthem. This pan-Africanism, having nothing to do with leaders the likes of Muammar Gaddafi or Ghana’s first post-independence president, Kwame Nkrumah, feels like the genuine deal. Such is the power of football; it has united a disparate continent, at least for a week or so.
Melrose Arch is the second of two scheduled stops on this impromptu whistle-stop tour, the first being Soweto’s Orlando West district. The drive the Black Stars are undertaking is weighted with symbolism. From Soweto to the northern suburbs: a half-hour trip through the South African divide. From the have-nots to the haves, and everything in between. (more…)
The Canadian Association of Journalists recently published an open letter calling on journalists to “better explain to readers and viewers just how little information Ottawa has provided for a story.” Ever since Stephen Harper took office in 2006, the letter notes,
“…the flow of information out of Ottawa has slowed to a trickle. Cabinet ministers and civil servants are muzzled. Access to Information requests are stalled and stymied by political interference. Genuine transparency is replaced by slick propaganda and spin designed to manipulate public opinion.”
This Kafkaesque MO is nicely illustrated by the Harper administration’s Americas Strategy, the policy I’ve been investigating over the past year.
Ottawa first went public with the decision to make Latin America the main target (Harperites might prefer “beneficiary”) of Canada’s foreign policy in 2007. “Democratic governance, prosperity, and security,” became our three stated priorities in dealing with our neighbors to the south. To that end, Harper appointed a new Minister of Foreign Affairs (Peter Kent) to focus on the region; the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) refined its “countries of focus” list to concentrate more heavily on Latin America; Panama received a shiny new security centre; Latin American embassies and CIDA headquarters alike increased staffs and boosted budgets.
All well and good. But last August, when I started researching a story for The Walrus about the expanding consequences of Mexico’s drug war, I had my first brush with the limits of government rhetoric. I wanted to know why, despite explicit guarantees during the NAFTA negotiations that we would never demand travel visas from our Mexican trading partners, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney had just instituted that very requirement. I called Citizenship and Immigration Canada to ask if there was anyone I could speak with about it. I was told to go to CIC’s website, where I would find all the answers I needed; no one in the whole department had time to speak to a national magazine. (more…)
New myths are sprouting in the Sacred Valley. A medicine man called Puma Singona told me one in the Plaza de San Blas one glorious May morning, the sun slowly baking the last night’s chill out of Cuzco’s ancient boulders as he spoke.
“There was an old lady begging in the streets of Taray,” Puma began, referring to a town half an hour’s drive from where we sat. “In Quechua culture,” he explained, “we don’t give money to beggars — there always has to be an exchange. But it is different with the elderly, because one day all of us will be old and helpless. Nevertheless, a young mother came out of her house and scolded the old lady. ‘You can’t beg here,’ she exclaimed, ‘what kind of example are you setting for our children? You have to leave our town.’ ‘Oh really?’ replied the beggar. ‘Very well. I’ll leave and we’ll see how well your town does without me.’
“The old woman walked away with the slow, stooped gait that you see all around here — life has been hard to many of our people. It’s written in their spines. That night at two in the morning, a rumble came down from high in the mountains. It was the huayco — the mudslide — that everyone knows about now. It rumbled down the creek that runs through Taray, turning the trickle into a furious black river that destroyed the whole village.”
The old woman? The goddess Pachamama of course, come to test the generosity of the people. Other versions focus more on the environmental sins that have accompanied Cuzco’s tenfold growth in the past two decades — the raw sewage, for instance, that more than 200,000 people pour into the Sacred Valley’s Rio Urubamba every day. All the myths agree, however, that the disaster was a manifestation of Pachamama’s wrath. (more…)
The clumsy, kleptomaniac corruption that blooms so frequently in warm climates is to politics what alliteration is to prose — childish, and all too often lucrative. Take Peru, where fresh scandals have made telenovelas of the news in recent weeks.
We begin with José E. Crousillat. The Conrad Black-ish former owner of a prominent television station made his first star turn ten years ago, when he was busted taking bribes from Vladimiro Montesinos (the diabolical power behind the throne during the Fujimori regime) in exchange for providing upbeat coverage of government policy. Crousillat received an eight-year sentence in 2005 and joined both Montesinos and Fujimori in jail. But last December, current president Alan García (who had fled Peru on corruption charges after his first term ended in 1990) pardoned Crousillat on humanitarian grounds: his doctors had claimed he was nearly dead from a heart condition, prompting an appeal to spend his last days with his family.
Public sympathy, never high to begin with, evaporated altogether when, a few weeks ago, Crousillat was spotted sipping cocktails on a beach. He disappeared before he could be reeled in for a fresh medical, and continues to elude the police. No one knows where he’s soothing his valves now.
The Crousillat uproar was quickly overwhelmed by a second case involving not only past and present presidents, but potential future leaders as well. This one revolves around a private firm, Business Track, which specializes in spying on just about everyone who matters in Peru. The story began two years ago, when a series of tapes known as the “petroaudios” exposed Big Oil executives bribing senior government ministers for oil contracts. Nothing much came of the petroaudios until a few weeks ago, when Business Track released a treasure trove of even juicier dialogues. (The firm is now being investigated for espionage even as the fruit of its labours is used as evidence.) These new conversations revealed further players in the Petrogate scandal, as well as several unrelated bribings in other industries and ministries.
The Justice Department received the recordings on a single USB drive, but before the police could finish their analysis, or even duplicate the files, this nuclear piece of evidence was erased by an unknown hand within the Justice Department itself. Patchy, scintillating details have been emerging ever since, leaked from the snippets police did manage to peruse. One of the biggest emerging culprits is Jorge Del Castillo, secretary general of the ruling Apra party and heir apparent to President García in the 2011 election; Castillo is reported to have put in a few words tying him to Petrogate in no uncertain terms. On the other end of the political spectrum, Ollanta Humala, the far-left runner-up in the last election and Castillo’s strongest competitor in the next, was taped accepting money from Hugo Chavez via the Venezuelan embassy in Lima. Humala interprets this as evidence that García paid Business Track to spy on him during the 2006 campaign, lending fresh momentum to his longstanding claim that the president won the poll through fraud. (more…)
The first time I meet S. he talks about the importance of killing: “Only by killing his enemies can an Awajun establish his leadership. That is why we train our youth how to fight.”
He says this because, in his view, Peru’s native communities will never achieve their demands through dialogue alone.
What are those demands? First, to be granted title over ancestral lands — a step the government has agreed to in principal, while in practice signing over just a third of the recognized territory — and second, to be consulted before any industrial activity takes place on those lands.
Last week, the International Labour Organization declared that Peru’s government was obliged to halt all resource exploitation until proper consultation with affected natives and campesinos could take place. This derives from Article 169 of the ILO, which the Peruvian government has signed. The ILO’s demand was quickly, predictably repeated by groups ranging from Survival International, an NGO representing indigenous rights worldwide, to Peru’s own National Coordinator for Human Rights. The government, just as predictably, declined to respond, leaving it to a representative of Peru’s business community to remind leftists that Article 169 isn’t legally binding.
S. and I are sitting in a small restaurant beside the humble Lima office of AIDESEP, the national association of Amazon Indians. He is working through a plate of lomo saltado for breakfast; dressed in jeans and a plain red t-shirt, he’s a slight man in his early forties who speaks quietly, with a small smile playing at the corners of his mouth. (more…)
You’d think I’d know better. After spending the better part of three years examining the course of American pop culture in the Muslim world, I’ve waded into another fraught cultural cage match, thus inviting a second volley of apparently endless, staggeringly well-argued commentary and hate mail. Woe is me, and all that. The reaction to “Cape Flats Calling,” my Walrus Blog post on the so-called Zef-rap outfit Die Antwoord, along with the general interweb frenzy regarding the band, is a reminder that 150 years after Manet outraged the Paris salon with his Olympia remix, art can still get folks hot under the collar. Millions of Die Antwoord–related bits and bytes have been uploaded, a fair bit of actual ink has been spilled; it thus appears that a quick revisit is called for.
Die Antwoord are a white South African rap group, lead by a gangly fellow named Ninja, who channel (or appropriate, or ape, depending on your view of these things) Cape Town Flats–coloured gang culture, creating a mash-up of grime, rave, and old-school hip hop. In early February, after a number of influential blogs picked up on their free-to-download album $0$, they became the first genuine internet phenomena of this brand new decade. Entirely complicit in all the promotional brouhaha, Die Antwoord have surfed the capricious wave of Web 3.0 on, some say, the backs of a marginalized community who will decidedly not be joining them on the stage at Coachella. The band is now negotiating with the home of the Black Eyed Peas, Lady Gaga, and M.I.A., Interscope Records. Them’s the big leagues.
If journalism is literature in a hurry, then web-journalism is literature at warp speed. In my first post, I made a number of errors — since corrected — that somehow escaped the sentinels at my normally impenetrable factual firewall. For those, I was rightly taken to task. Interestingly, a measure of the criticism directed my way comes from a piece on indie music Mecca Pitchfork, in which Ninja called my assessment of their music “quite fuckin’ brilliant.” I have thus been labeled a Die Antwoord booster, as if the brokest band in the known universe sent a Lear Jet round to schlep me off to gigs, softening me up with tik, coconut bongs, and luxury guided tours of Cape Town’s ghettos. There was also some suggestion that Die Antwoord’s popularity was driven mostly by the fervour of people just like me, white South African expatriates who spend their time in Australia, the UK, and Canada trawling the net for: (a) anything that confirms the fact that SA is now an unlivable disaster zone rife with violent crime, thus validating their decision to emigrate, and (b) anything that scratches their paradoxical itch for home. But Interscope does not consider signing bands based on the listening requirements of white ex-Johannesburgers; Die Antwoord must thus be considered a genuine global pop cultural phenomenon. It’s worth considering why that may be. (more…)
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