Africa: fighting corruption using the Web

It is easy for westerners to forget how endemic corruption is in less fortunate parts of the world such as the Middle East and Africa. Charities have to help direct resources to the poor and the hungry and to do this they need to know when money is being diverted into private pockets.

On p.23 of the summer issue of Christian Aid News Eric Gutierrez points out the complexity of the problem. Sometimes rulers have to allow armed gangs and rebel groups to  carry on an illicit trade or criminal activities in return for not causing too much disruption; and so many leaders are involved in bribery and fraud  that it is not uncommon for a politician to be re-elected despite previous convictions. In general, the priority is to deal with violent conflcit before corruption.

Some charities, like Christian Aid, try to tackle the problem at grass roots but to do so they need information and it turns out that the Internet is proving useful in getting it to where it’s needed.  Two examples:

KENYA

Media-Analysis and Research Services Group was set up in 2005 to publish online evidence such as budget documents, bidding rules and project profiles. This helps journalists reporting on corruption and aids prosecutors in pursuing cases.

ANGOLA

Rafael Marques, a journalist, diverted anti-corruption reports to makaangola.com from newspapers when the latter were bought off by companies fearing his reports. His website led to Daimler AG withdrawing from a joint venture with an Angolan general and also has led to the Cobalt oil company being investigated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

There are of course difficulties, both political and technical, in maintaining these sites but they are helping citizens set up campaigns such as the Partnership for Change, a non-violent initiative in Kenya to 'end the impunity of corrupt politicians'. More internet-based anti-corruption action has originated in Angola with various Christian Aid partners such as

• Omunga quintasdedebate.blogspot.com/
• SQS Habitat angolaresistente.net/
• Radio Ecclesia radioecclesia.org/
• O Apostolada apostalado-angola.org/
• Action for Southern Africa's Angola Monitor actsa.org/

There is a long way to go but it is good to see from the above and other evidence that corruption in parts of the developing world is being taken increasingly seriously by aid agencies, governments and the indigenous peoples. As with most misery in the world human frailty and evil are the root cause. 

Feedback welcome.

John

author, 2077 AD

cosmik.jo@gmail.com

The Internet: a citizen's view

The Internet was originally developed by the US Department of Defense during the Cold War. International packet switched networks were devised. These enabled messages to be transmitted between any two points on the network even if parts of it had been destroyed in a nuclear attack. Later, a CERN physicist called Tim Berners Lee wrote the World Wide Web software enabling the exchange of  text and images.

Once the web was fully operational it became the domain of idealists:  hippies and cyber-libertarians. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and other organisations emerged to oversee it; and in 1996 John Perry Barlow, a lyricist with the Grateful Dead,  wrote the Declaration of the independence of cyberspace.

Without this initial idealism and the freedom from government interference it is doubtful whether the following benefits would have happened so quickly:

• Wikipedia  – a truly unique knowledge resource.
• Augmentation of parliamentary democracy (e.g. in the UK the ‘38 degrees’ online petition service).
• Data exchange worldwide, allowing problems to be tackled more powerfully and quickly. (e.g. in biomolecular and climate change models).
• Business productivity improvements.
• Consumer choice and convenience.
• Citizens and professionals are able to cooperate in ways previously unimaginable (e.g. in climate, astronomical and wildlife monitoring using the processing power of thousands of home PCs).
• Medical treatments have been enormously improved and made widely known to patients.

Unfortunately, the web has over the last decade or so been subject to negative influences arising from the  shortcomings of human nature and the absence of adequate regulation by nation states or international bodies:

• Spam (e.g. 75% of the world’s emails are spam) and obtrusive advertising.
• Hacking for profit or malice or fun. Even the latter can waste enormous amounts of time, including that of the hacker who could be doing something useful (e.g. removing grafitti).
• Fragmentation of society as news, information, comment, analysis, art, literature, music and entertainment are increasingly tailored to the individual.
• Curtailment of some mental faculties, such as the building of an internalised body of knowledge, although others may be improved (e.g. reaction speeds, multitasking).
• Divorcement from reality by excessive concentration on fantasy games as well as games masquerading as realistic when in fact they rely on the author’s particular model of a subset of reality.
• Fraud and the undermining of the financial system.
• Propagation of evil values outside the law and widely accepted mores of most nation states or the UN etc, (e.g. paedophile rings, child prostitution, slander, certain kinds of theft).
• Mind control by totalitarian states (e.g. China, North Korea and most states in the Middle East) able to block or restrict foreign access.

The Internet itself and the devices connected to it are functioning less effectively as the quest for profit wins over the original ideals, while these very ideals are used as an excuse for Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and others to prevent nations and supranational bodies from interfering with their right to profit, even if this has a downside for users: intrusive advertising, loss of privacy, social inequalities of access, dysfunctionality arising from incompatible technologies (e.g. wars between browsers and operating systems) or over-concentration on immediate profits (e.g. deterioration of an existing system in the rush to start up a  new money spinner) and the prevention of innovation from newcomers.

Also, I’m not an expert in IT, but I get the impression that bandwidth is being unwisely allocated on a free market basis, with corporations buying bocks of channel capacity from the internet service providers. There is only a finite amount of channel capacity in the network while its 2 billion user-base is growing fast. TV programmes and movies hog a large amount of channel capacity, yet can be broadcast or sold on DVDs. Consequently, important Internet uses in education, business, science, medicine, public services and leisure get slowed down or made unreliable.

So in my view it is time for international and state interference, so that the full potential of the Internet miracle can be realised.

Feedback welcome.

John

Author, 2077 AD

cosmik.jo@googlemail.com

The US debt mountain

Much of the western world is in debt. Here I am concentrating on the USA because it is in more debt than most and because, as the largest economy and the most powerful nation on Earth militarily, its future affects everybody.

The total government debt in the USA is now about $14.3 trillion and the population is 313 million. Dividing one by the other gives $45,000 of government debt for every man, woman and child – about $180,000 per family. In the long term this money has to be paid back to the nations, banks and other institutions who have lent the money – and with interest. The longer it takes to pay back the larger the interest.

The government does not have enough money to pay its bills - e.g. salaries and pensions of state employees. Frequently, as on August 2 2011,  it has to ask Congress for permission to borrow the shortfall. 

How are US citizens going to payback all this public debt? Through taxes; but the citizens themselves are in debt (mortgages, car loans etc.) to the tune of $7,800 per capita, say $30,000 per family.

In addition to the government and personal debt the US is running a large trade deficit. In May 2011 $50 billion  exited the US financial system as payment for imports exceeded revenue from exports.

 If foreign creditors asked for their money back the value of the dollar would collapse: the US would be unable to afford imports, including energy, raw materials, foods and consumer goods, and the US banks would be unable to invest in US industry because they would have no money to lend. If the government tried to print the money in this situation there would be hyperinflation and astronomical interest rates.

So why do foreign nations continue to put money into the USA by buying government bonds and investing in US industry, or at least retain their existing dollar holdings?

Because if they did not their own dollar investments would suffer as the dollar collapsed. And I believe every country in the world has major dollar investments because the dollar has become the main currency by which oil, gas, precious metals, corn etc. are traded and by which goods are bought and sold internationally. This situation has arisen over the last century because the US economy and entrepreneurial spirit have grown to dwarf that of any other nation.

It is a precarious situation. It only takes one country to suddenly withdraw substantial dollar reserves and this would be perceived as a signal to panic by others, setting off a financial chain reaction and the downfall of most economies worldwide. This could happen if, say, Saudi Arabia was taken over by a hostile jihad group wanting to destroy western civilisation. Evidently such groups do not care if they themselves suffer (or rather the leaders do not suffer but their brainwashed subjects do).

The only way of preventing this would be to freeze assets, unless of course this caused other nations to stop investing in dollars for fear that their own assets would be frozen.

Overall President Obama is saddled with a problem which in the main he did not create and which it is in almost everyone’s interest to  have solved. 

John

Author, 2077 AD

cosmik.jo@gmail.com