Uruguay - the first country to create a legal market for drugs

Uruguay has taken a momentous step towards becoming the first country in the world to create a legal, national market for cannabis after the lower chamber of its Congress voted in favour of the groundbreaking plan.

The Bill would allow consumers to either grow up to six plants at home or buy up to 40g per month of the soft drug – produced by the government – from licensed chemists for recreational or medical use. Previously, although possession of small amounts for personal consumption was not criminalised in the small South American nation, growing and selling it was against the law.

The Bill passed by 50 votes to 46 shortly before midnight on Wednesday after a 14-hour debate as pro-legalisation activists crowded the balconies above the legislature floor. 

Uruguay’s Senate, where the ruling left-wing coalition has a larger majority, is now expected to approve the measure. President José Mujica, an octogenarian former armed rebel – who has previously overseen the passing of measures to allow abortion and gay marriage – backs the move.

Proponents of the Bill argue marijuana use is already prevalent in Uruguay and that by bringing consumers out of the shadows the government will be better able to regulate their behaviour, drive a wedge between them and peddlers of harder, more dangerous drugs, and tax cannabis sales.

They also believe that it closes the loophole that outlaws growing or buying cannabis while turning a legal blind eye to its consumption. Currently, judges in Uruguay have discretion to decide whether an undefined small quantity of the drug is for personal use or not.

Campaigners for an end to prohibition were quick to claim the vote as a landmark in the international push for drug policy reform. “Sometimes small countries do great things,” said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the New York-based Drug Policy Alliance, whose board includes entrepreneur Richard Branson, but also the late President Ronald Reagan’s former Secretary of State, George Shultz.

“Uruguay’s bold move does more than follow in the footsteps of Colorado and Washington,” added Mr Nadelmann, referring to the two Western US states that recently also permitted recreational cannabis use. “It provides a model for legally regulating marijuana that other countries, and US states, will want to consider.”

Hannah Hetzer, the Drug Policy Alliance’s Americas coordinator, who is based in Montevideo, added: “At the heart of the Uruguayan marijuana regulation Bill is a focus on improving public health and public safety. Instead of closing their eyes to the problem of drug abuse and drug trafficking, Uruguay is taking an important step towards responsible regulation of an existing reality.”

Nevertheless, the measure has divided Uruguay and in the run-up to the vote few dared predict its outcome, with the 99-member house almost split down the middle. All 49 opposition deputies had agreed to vote against the measure en bloc, while the 50 members of President Mujica’s ruling coalition were due to back it.

One of the government deputies, Darío Pérez, a doctor by training, had warned that cannabis is a gateway drug to harder substances and feared that fully legalising it would trigger a mushrooming of Uruguay’s already serious problems with crack and other cheaper, highly addictive cocaine derivatives.

In the most keenly awaited speech of the debate, Mr Pérez attacked the Bill but said he would vote in line with the coalition whip, although he could not have made his displeasure clearer. “Marijuana is manure,” he told the chamber. “With or without this law, it is the enemy of the student and of the worker.”

Mr Pérez was also unhappy with what he saw as a broken promise by Mr Mujica not to foist the law on a society that was not yet ready for it, citing a recent survey by pollsters Cifra that found 63 per cent of Uruguayans opposed cannabis legalisation while 23 per cent backed it.

Last December, the president had temporarily placed the measure on the back burner to give advocates a chance to rally public opinion. “The majority has to come in the streets,” he said then. “The people need to understand that with bullets and baton blows, putting people in jail, the only thing we are doing is gifting a market to the narco-traffickers.”

But those arguments failed to convince Gerardo Amarilla, a deputy for the conservative opposition National Party, who told the chamber: “We are playing with fire. Maybe we think that this is a way to change reality. Unfortunately, we are discovering a worse reality.”

Official studies from Uruguay’s National Drugs Board have found that of the country’s population of 3.4 million, around 184,000 people have smoked cannabis in the last year. Of that number, 18,400 are daily consumers. But independent researchers believe that may be a serious underestimate. The Association of Cannabis Studies has claimed there are 200,000 regular users in Uruguay.

One thing that no one disputes is that Uruguay has a serious and growing problem with harder drugs, principally cocaine and its highly addictive derivatives flooding into the Southern Cone and Brazil, mainly from Peru and Bolivia. That, in turn, has fuelled a crime wave as addicts seek to fund their cravings. Breaking the link between them and cannabis users is one of the government’s principal justifications for marijuana legalisation.

Under the measure, registered users will be able to buy cannabis from the nation’s chemists, cultivate plants at home and form cannabis clubs of 15 to 45 members to collectively grow up to 99 plants. Although the high would depend on the strength of the cannabis, which can vary significantly, the 40g per month limit would allow a user to potentially smoke several joints every day. To prevent cannabis tourism, such as that which has developed in Amsterdam, only Uruguayan nationals will be able to register as cannabis purchasers or growers.

Uruguay’s move comes as pressure grows across Latin America for a new approach to Washington’s “war on drugs”, which has ravaged the region, seeing hundreds of thousands die in drug-fuelled conflicts from Brazil’s favelas to Mexico’s troubled border cities.

Colombia President Juan Manuel Santos has called for a discussion of the alternatives while his Guatemalan counterpart Otto Pérez Molina has openly advocated legalisation. Meanwhile, Felipe Calderón, President of Mexico from 2006 to 2012, has also called for a look at “market” solutions to the drug trade.

Crucially, all three are conservatives with impeccable records as tough opponents of the drug trade. Mr Pérez Molina is a former army general with a no-nonsense reputation, while Mr Santos served as Defence Minister for his predecessor, the hard-right President Álvaro Uribe. Meanwhile, Mr Calderón was widely criticised during his time in power for the bloodbath unleashed by his full-frontal assault on the drug cartels, a conflict which cost an estimated 60,000 lives during his presidency.

Politicians who demand inquiries should be taken out and shot

From Stephen Lawrence to Bloody Sunday, an inquiry serves as the establishment's get out of jail free card

• 
• • Simon Jenkins
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 25 June 2013 20.30 BST

Neville Lawrence, Stephen Lawrence's father, at a press conference responding to the publication in 1999 of the report of the Macpherson inquiry into the Stephen Lawrence killing. 'The call for yet another inquiry into the Stephen ­Lawrence murder – by some counts the 17th – must make it the most interrogated death in history.' Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian

There should be a public inquiry. Indeed there should be a judicial inquiry, a veritable "judge-led" inquiry. Into what? That does not matter. An inquiry has become the cure-all for any political argument. Whether the subject is a dud police force, a dud hospital, a dud quango or a dud war, only a judicial inquiry will atone for wrongdoing and do penance for public sins.

An inquiry defers blame. It throws the ball into the long grass and kicks the can down the road. This week's call for yet another inquiry into the Stephen Lawrence murder – by some counts the 17th – must make it the most interrogated death in history. As withBloody Sunday and Hillsborough, a British scandal is measured not in deaths but in juridical longevity.

Politicians who demand inquiries should be taken out and shot. In almost every failure in a public service – run by or regulated by ministers – we know perfectly well what happened and who was in charge. Guilt should lie at the top, or at some recognised cut-off point. An inquiry merely replaces the straight, sure arrow of accountability with the crooked line of pseudo justice. It is the establishment's get out of jail free card.

For a minister to set up an inquiry – or his opponent to call for one – is like a bankrupt board of directors calling in consultants. The hope is that it may soften the line of blame, fog the argument, postpone the day of reckoning. A minister declares, "I have asked the distinguished Lord Justice So-and-So to leave no stone unturned." By the time he does, the minister prays he may have moved on. The furniture of blame will have rearranged itself.

Almost all public inquiries are nowadays political. In 1998 Tony Blair, eager to push forward his Ulster peace process, set up yet another inquiry into Bloody Sunday. The Saville inquiry became a scandal of judicial extravagance and delay (into which, of course, there was no inquiry). In 2009 Gordon Brown wished to take the heat out of the Iraq war before an election. He set up the Chilcot inquiry, now so dormant it can be of use only to scholars of latter-day Blairism. Two years later David Cameron, under attack for his links to News Corporation, sought a judge known to be eager for higher office and chose Lord Justice Leveson to investigate press ethics. From the resulting shambles Cameron escaped scot free.

In the Victoria Climbié inquiry of 2001, thunderbolts of damnation were hurled on to the heads of hapless social workers. Trials and inquiries cursed officials, police, councillors and local managers. Lord Laming's subsequent report came up with 108 recommendations, so many as to allow responsibility to disperse like seeds from a dandelion. When a minister says "we are all to blame", he means no one is.

The recent bevy of inquiries into the Staffordshire and Cumbrian hospital scandals has shone a mesmerising light on modern quangocracy. Highly paid officials with ill-defined jobs that are nothing to do with health argue over who said what, when and to whom. The row cannot save a single patient, while the resources diverted must jeopardise thousands. The salaries and fees roll on.

Government by retrospective inquiry is not government at all. It is a first rough stab at history. Its strangest feature is the deference shown to lawyers and legal process. All professions have their biases and the law is no exception. The sanctity of court process, important in trying a criminal case, is hardly relevant to the politicised context of a modern public inquiry. Judges, for good reason, do not speak the language of politics. As we can see from their hysteria over legal aid, they certainly have no comprehension of budgetary priorities.

Those attending the 2003 Hutton inquiry into the death of David Kelly found it an eerily legalised process. It led to a whitewash so unconvincing it had to be repeated, in effect, a year later by Lord Butler. The Leveson inquiry was likewise conducted as if it were a trial of the press for the mass murder of celebrity reputations. No attention was paid to the ethics of the electronic media, let alone to those of lawyers who were equally assiduous users of hacking services. The reality is that inquiries set up to get politicians off a hook usually do so by finding some other individual or group to hang on that same hook.

De Tocqueville remarked that the intrusion of lawyers into every corner of government meant that "scarcely any political question … is not resolved into a judicial question". A lawyer is to a modern politician what a priest was to a medieval one – someone on hand to help in a scrape, to dispense indulgence for wickedness.

If political accountability were truly a matter for judicial determination, parliament could pass laws and go home, leaving judges to decide on their efficacy. Everything could be rolled into one ongoing, everlasting public inquiry, to which every political upset could be referred for trial and execution. Parliament could be removed to the royal courts of justice with the lord chief justice as Mr Speaker.

We know what this would be like. We can see it today following the centralisation of town and country planning by Cameron's eccentric commissar, Eric Pickles. Local plans and decisions based on them have been superseded by Pickles's targets and instructions to his planning inspectors. This plays so fast and loose with local discretion that any planning application is worth taking to appeal. Planning is no longer a local function but determined ad hoc by Whitehall inspectors, followed by public inquiries and potential judicial review. It is not planning but financial combat.

As a result, planning is set to join immigration in the soaring total of judicial reviews. What was once a relatively smooth mechanism for deciding what sort of building should occur and where has become a judicial free-for-all (or rather costly-for-all). Expediting government through legal process is a contradiction in terms.

Democracy cannot work without a clear line between a decision and someone who can be held responsible. That means clear when the decision is taken, not clear to subsequent inquiry. Big centralised organisations such as the NHS stretch that line to breaking point. Public inquiries validate that breakage. They are a menace. Lawyers should stick to the law. Elected politicians who screw up should come clean and resign.

Why Germany is now 'Europe's biggest brothel'

Legalised prostitution, cut-price offers and a boom in sex tourism mean Germany's red light districts are thriving. But not everyone is happy with the country's liberal legislation

A Ukrainian prostitute in a brothel in Berlin: two-thirds of Germay's sex workers are thought to come from overseas. Photograph: Axel Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images

With skin-tight clothes and bum bags strapped around their waists, sex workers wait by the roadside close to Hackescher Markt, one of Berlin's busiest shopping and entertainment districts. This is a familiar sight just before dark in the capital of a country that has been dubbed "Europe's biggest brothel".

The sex trade in Germany has increased dramatically since prostitution was liberalised in 2002, with more than one million men paying for sex every day here, according to a documentary, Sex – Made in Germany, aired this week on Germany's public broadcaster, ARD.

Based on two years of research using hidden cameras, the film by Sonia Kennebeck and Tina Soliman exposes the "flat-rate" brothels where men pay €49 (£42) for as much sex as they want, as well as a rise in sex tourism, with men from Asia, the Middle East and North America coming to Germany for sex.

Germany's law governing the sex trade is considered one of the most liberal in the world. It was passed by the former coalition government, made up of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Greens, in a bid to strengthen the rights of sex workers and give them access to health insurance and benefits.

Since then, red light districts have become even more prominent in many major German cities including Berlin, Frankfurt and Hamburg, where the Reeperbahn is, notoriously, the focus for the sex trade. During the 2006 World Cup in Germany, brothels appeared close to football stadiums across the country to cater for fans before and after games.

But more than 10 years after the law was passed, critics are becoming increasingly vocal. They argue that although it may benefit those sex workers who choose to work in the trade, it also makes it easier for women from eastern Europe and countries outside the EU to be forced into prostitution by traffickers. Two-thirds of Germany's estimated 400,000 sex workers come from overseas.

"Migrant women who don't know the language are highly dependent on people to bring them here and to show them around," says Roshan Heiler, head of counselling at the Aachen branch of Solwodi, a women's rights organisation that helps women forced into prostitution.

She is not surprised at the number of men now paying for sex in Germany. "I think it's just a result of the legalisation," she says. "The men are not prosecuted and prices are low."

Meanwhile, Monika Lazar, spokeswoman on women's issues for the Alliance 90/Greens party, has defended the law, saying that making prostitution illegal again is not the way to improve working conditions. "Prostitution is still socially stigmatised, and that has not changed in the few years in which the law has been in effect," she says. "But the law is helping to strengthen the position of prostitutes and ensuring women, and men, are much better protected."

Why shouldn't three people get married?

As three Brazilians are legally joined as a 'thruple' it starts to look illiberal to insist that marriage must be between two people

• 
• • Jean Hannah Edelstein
  • guardian.co.uk, Thursday 30 August 2012 12.47 BST

'If three, or four, or 17 people want to marry each other simultaneously and equally, why should they not be granted the same status as two people who want to become a legal family?' Photograph: Stone/Getty Images

Three Brazilians in love have their nation up in arms over whether their relationship, now enshrined in a three-way marriage, is legal. The public notary who conducted their marriage says there's no reason the threesome – or "thruple", as the internet has charmingly labelled it – shouldn't enjoy the same kinds of rights imparted upon two people who get hitched. But traditionalists are not impressed: lawyer Regina Beatriz Tavares da Silva, of the Commission for the Rights of the Family, has it "absurd and totally illegal".

Speaking of absurd, shall we take a moment to consider traditional marriage? We do adore it: in the UK, just under half the population has chosen to pledge to love another person as long as they both shall live, or as long as they don't get divorced. And yet as we shoehorn ourselves into two-by-two formation, we're not that good at keeping our promises: as Helen Croydon has pointed out, breaking the boundaries of monogamy is far from unusual. Plenty of marriages have three people in them. They're just not legal ones.

A good old-fashioned monogamous marriage works beautifully for some. But even the most successful marriages are special and unique and incredibly weird. For much as we have a sweet collective imagining of what a happy union entails, the reality is that they all deviate from the fantasy norm, pretty much from the time that the certificate is signed, the chicken is noshed and the bouquet is chucked. The government can dictate that two people should be in a marriage, but it can't legislate what will make them feel happy or stable or emotionally complete together. And if we accept that, as we do every time we allow anyone the freedom to make a decision about who they'll marry, and furthermore allow them the freedom to call each other by execrable pet names in public, then does it not begin to seem strange, just a bit, that we do allow the government to dictate how many people are allowed to pledge to be together forever? Perhaps even as strange as it is for government to dictate who can do it based on their gender?

This is not about the advocacy of patriarchal polygamy that regards wives as unequal to, or property of, their husbands. But if three, or four, or 17 people want to marry each other simultaneously and equally, why should they not be granted the same status as two people who want to become a legal family? Without reverting to religious arguments, or logistical ones (does Ikea manufacture a big enough bed to accommodate this union?), it begins to feel a bit illiberal.

Is it possible that if we allowed more people to marry simultaneously that more marriages might be successful? Fewer breakups over infidelity might occur, for example, if those who found themselves in love with more than one person didn't have to choose or conceal their feelings. And relaxing the expectation that one partner should fulfil all of one's needs – good sex, complementary taste in television and shared preference for dogs over cats may just be too much to ask for – might mean that people who opt for a portfolio of other halves (or thirds) could outdo the rest of us in happiness.

Legalisation wouldn't send stampedes of people to the registry office in five-aside squads; for many of us, monogamy does feel the most comfortable option, whether it's because our brains aren't wired to love more than one person or because the prospect of making multiple people happy is too complex. But three's not a crowd for everyone. And as long as everyone is entering a marriage equally, as long as everyone is really going to make an effort to be open and honest to everyone else, it's probably not the government's job to tell them how many of them there should be.

Why did Ecuador risk slighting UK, US, Sweden, over Assange?

by Narayan Lakshman in The Hindu

A 3am-standoff between British police and officials at the Ecuador embassy in Knightsbridge, London notwithstanding, Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Patiño underscored his government’s firm view on the case of Julian Assange when he announced on Thursday, “The government of Ecuador, true to its tradition of protecting those who seek refuge in its territory or on the premises of diplomatic missions, has decided to grant diplomatic asylum to citizen Assange.”

The Minister’s remarks came in the face of an unprecedented – some would say brazen – raid by the police to allegedly arrest Mr. Assange from the embassy, where he sought refuge on June 19, and extradite him to Sweden was said to be planned. Mr. Assange is not only formally sought by authorities in Sweden in a pending case against him, but along with his organisation he is held responsible for publishing thousands of confidential cables of the U.S. State Department.

One unanswered question on most observers’ minds at this time was why Ecuador has decided to grant political asylum to Mr. Assange especially when doing so would risk jeopardising its ties with nations that it considers important allies and trading partners, including the U.S., the U.K.,Sweden and Australia.

A host of possible justifications for the Ecuadorian action have been suggested, including notions that the country’s President, Rafael Correa, may be seeking to show himself a champion of free speech, or to embarrass the US, or to thrust himself onto the global stage as a fearless leader.

However as Mark Weisbrot of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research has argued, Mr.Correa “didn’t want this mess and it has been a lose-lose situation for him from the beginning,” given the escalation in tensions that he has suffered the US, UK and Sweden since Mr. Assange sought asylum at the embassy on June 19.

Mr. Weisbrot and others have pointed out that the U.S. is Ecuador's largest trading partner and has several times threatened to cut off trade preferences that support thousands of Ecuadorian jobs.

However what Ecuador’s own explanatory note on the decision to grant Mr. Assange asylum suggests is that Mr. Correa’s government made the decision based on a careful consideration of the facts in the case, including shortcomings in the procedures followed by the

prosecution regarding sexual assault charges that he faces in Sweden, and the balance of ethical considerations.

Of particular salience to Ecuador’s support for Mr. Assange is the fact that Mr. Assange’s legal team have on several occasions offered to provide Swedish authorities with access to Mr.Assange on the premises of Ecuador’s London embassy, in order for them to interrogate him and take formal statements for the case.

“This measure is perfect and legally possible. Sweden did not accept,” Ecuador’s Foreign Ministry noted, adding that the U.S. had similarly refused to clarify its position on the Assange case, “saying it is a bilateral matter between Ecuador and the United Kingdom.

Thus the facts that ultimately tilted Ecuador toward granting asylum to Mr. Assange included the consideration that “there is strong evidence of retaliation by the country or countries that produced the information disclosed by Mr. Assange, retaliation that may endanger their safety,integrity, and even his life.”

The case for the legalisation of drugs

• By Alexander Wickham
• Opinion
• Thursday, 2 February 2012 at 4:15 pm

Sir Richard Branson is a fascinating figure. His politics are surprisingly convoluted for a billionaire businessman; at times he has resembled a Thatcherite neo-classical and at others he has been a Labour-supporting proponent of humanitarian issues and environmentalism. Last week the Virgin Group boss addressed the home affairs select committee on another issue he has championed down the years, calling on the government to implement a liberalisation of drugs policy. Interestingly, what he had to say made a lot of sense.

Branson began, naturally, with cannabis. He insisted that the decriminalisation, regulation and taxation of the drug libertarians have traditionally seen as a start-point for reform would reap widespread rewards for society as a whole. Responsibility for drugs policy should shift from the Home Office to the Department of Health, he argued, quite compellingly enquiring of his inquisitors whether, upon finding out that their own son or daughter had a drug problem, would they rather seek medical help or be having to deal with the police? Tellingly, they offered no answer. In Portugal, where even heroin addicts are hospitalised rather than arrested, drug use has fallen by 50% as a result of legalisation. Each year some 75,000 young Britons have their futures ruined by receiving criminal records for minor drugs offences. Treating drug users as patients rather than criminals would be an important first step to a more effective drugs policy.

Following decriminalisation, Branson admitted that regulation would inevitably be required. I have previously argued that carefully regulating the legal sale of drugs would do more than anything else to save lives. Last November two young men died after taking a fatally potent form of ecstasy (MDMA) at a London music venue. Due to the covert nature of acquiring drugs they had no way of knowing what they were buying; drug dealers are not thoughtful enough to label their products with an ingredients sticker. At present drug users are clueless about whether they are actually taking what they think they are, the extent to which it has been cut with other noxious substances, or even if they have been given a new and untested form of drug. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out why people are dying. Legalisation and regulation would require sellers – licensed by the state – to only offer a genuine product with clear guidelines for safe usage. It may have saved the lives of the two young men last November, and would save countless more in the future.

If the practical case for a more liberal drugs policy is fairly straightforward, the economic argument is somewhat more complex. Branson convincingly articulated the basics last week. Home Office figures show that £535 million of taxpayers’ money is spent each year on the enforcement of laws relating to the possession or supplying of drugs. Conversely, only 3% of total expenditure on drugs is through health service use, and just 1% on social care. A staggering 20% of all police time is devoted to arresting drug users and sellers. The balance between policing and treatment clearly seems skewed, but in this age of austerity these figures are especially unforgivable. At a time when the Coalition is controversially cutting welfare, why do we accept huge spending on a law and order policy that has failed to reduce the prevalence of drugs in society? As Branson succinctly puts it, the money saved through decriminalisation and taxation would surely be better spent elsewhere: ‘it’s win-win all round’.

Now on to the more technical side of things. While the supply-side economist Milton Friedman is of course celebrated for his writings on neo-liberalism, his less well-known contribution to the debate on drugs was also quite brilliant. Friedman argued that the danger of arrest has incentivised drug producers to grow more potent forms of their products. The creation of crack cocaine and stronger forms of cannabis (and evidently MDMA as shown above) is, he claims, the direct result of criminalisation encouraging producers to strive for a more attractive risk-reward ratio. Moreover, drug prohibition directly causes poverty and violent crime. Supply is suppressed by interdiction and prosecution therefore prices rise. Users are forced by their addictions to pay the going rate, then turn to crime to fund their habit as they are plunged into poverty. Finally, and perversely, the government effectively provides protection for major drug cartels. Producing and selling drugs is a risky and expensive business so only serious organised crime gangs can afford to stay in the game. All the money goes to the top. It is, as Friedman notes, ‘a monopolist’s dream’.

The deleterious and unforeseen economic consequences of criminalisation are, one you get your head round them, pretty persuasive. There is, however, one last point worth considering: the moral perspective. You may hate the idea of drugs, most people do. Yet what right does the state have to tell someone what they can and cannot do in the privacy of their own home? John Stuart Mill, the great liberal philosopher, famously declared that ‘the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant’. The act of taking drugs is an entirely personal choice that affects no one but the individual himself. Can the state therefore justify impinging upon his personal liberty? Mill would say no. This is a question that deserves serious thought.

Sir Richard Branson is a maverick. A week ago most people would have been against a liberalisation of drugs policy. After listening to what Branson had to say many will have changed their minds.

The short, sharp life of 'Chinese century'

By Nick Ottens

If there is to be an Asian century, it won't be China's alone. While it still has hundreds of millions of people living in poverty, the country is losing its cheap labor advantage to East Asian competitors while more industrialized nations in the region are far more receptive to international trade.

The Chinese economy is expected to overtake the United States as the world's largest in sheer size by the middle of this decade but the ruling Communist Party has ample reason to be worried about perpetuating China's impressive growth rates for another generation.

As China's middle class expands in the urban east, it is expecting more than just growth but in the western hinterland, a lack of development and, perhaps even more frustrating to the people there, a lack of political accountability fuels unrest and discontent. The party will be increasingly hard pressed to meet the aspirations of both these peoples. Economic and political openness, as desired in the coastal provinces, would weaken the state's grip on industrial development, which could exacerbate the existing imbalance between cities and countryside.

Chinese labor is already becoming too expensive for some manufacturers who are taking their business to countries as Indonesia and Vietnam while Malaysia, Thailand and Taiwan are more attractive for technology companies that require an educated workforce and a business climate that isn't too burdened by regulatory restrictions and corruption.

Labor laws and tax regimes in the rest of South and Southeast Asia are generally more flexible. These countries welcome international trade and investment whereas China seeks to protect its "infant industries" from free and fair competition on the global market. This policy enables the ruling class in Beijing to build high-speed railways across China but the cost, which is less clear, could be hugely detrimental to its economy in the future.

Foreign investors in China have to cope with laws and regulations that are inconsistently enforced - sometimes arbitrary. The Chinese legal system cannot guarantee the sanctity of contracts, which is vital to a market economy. Capital account transactions are tightly regulated.

This is a system that thrives on cronyism where businesses that are connected with local and state officials prosper and companies that aren't could see their investment go up in smoke when a magistrate determines that factory wages should increase by a third, overnight.

China does attract huge amounts of foreign direct investment. In fact, it takes in every month what India assumes in a year. Yet China grows at a rate just two percentage points faster than India. And even there, corruption is endemic.

At its most recent congress in March of this year, the Communist Party affirmed the need to improve "balanced growth", which should translate into increased welfare spending, including subsidies for farmers and the urban underclass. Western stereotypes notwithstanding, the Chinese state is not sitting on an infinite amount of cash however. It cannot simultaneously build a proper welfare state and allow the subsidizing of companies, especially in real estate, to continue unabated. If it wants to expand social programs and thus prevent civil unrest, it has to challenge vested interest with allies in the party.

With major changes in political leadership expected next year, it may not be until 2013 before a comprehensive social agenda is implemented. That could be two years wasted while necessary economic reforms to further open up China to world markets are delayed.

There is another, less immediate concern that could put a stop to this Chinese century before the world has a chance to recognize that it's living in one.

By the middle of the 21st century, 400 million Chinese will have retired. That's more than America's total projected population by that time. India, which is set to overtake China as the world's most populous nation by 2030, is expected to have nearly 400 million people more in 2050 than China.

How is China going to pay for all these old people? China doesn't have an expansive public pension system, which means that many Chinese in their prime, often without siblings because of their government's "one child" policy, will have to provide not only for their parents but, as life expectancy rises, their grandparents as well. Naturally, wages will have to rise to accommodate this unprecedented level of dependency which can only happen if Chinese labor becomes much more productive and skilled - fast.

The party has to manage this while not only dealing with internal pressure to democratize; it is also expected to finance American and European deficit spending when these continents blame China for its "colonialist" scramble for resources, including water, in Africa and Central Asia - resources it desperately needs to continue to grow; to invest in its future industrial base and to alleviate hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

If despite this all, China somehow ends as tomorrow's superpower, "owning" the 21st century, that will be quite a feat.

Nick Ottens is an historian from the Netherlands and editor of the transatlantic news and commentary website Atlantic Sentinel. He is also a contributing analyst with the geopolitical and strategic consultancy firm Wikistrat.

Hazare ke Khwaishen aisi ki har Khwaish ho-hum nikale// Bahut nikale unke demands phir bhi kam nikale

Corruption And Its Discontents

By Niranjan Ramakrishnan

26 August, 2011
Countercurrents.org

Hazare ke Khwaishen aisi ki har Khwaish ho-hum nikale
Bahut nikale unke demands phir bhi kam nikale

(with apologies to Mirza Ghalib)

Judging from the New York Times and the Washington Post, urban India is abuzz with the idea of banishing corruption. Photographs of peaceful marchers filling a giant overpass have made front-page news. Anna Hazare, whose arrest and fast have ignited the stir in cities all across India and amongst Indian groups abroad, is now a well-known figure. The fast, meetings, and protests are being billed as nothing less than a second Freedom Movement.

That last accreditation is in perfect pitch with an intelligentsia cut adrift from any sense of proportion, as befitting one that till only the other day was capable of considering Manmohan Singh a more significant reformer than Mahatma Gandhi.

Amid all the din it is easy to forget the lofty purpose of the Second Freedom Movement. It is for the appointment of an ombudsman and a subsidiary bureaucracy to oversee allegations of corruption amongst government officials. One may just as soon label a demand for Web access to one's income tax records as the second Declaration of Independence.

Owing perhaps to his experiences as a lawyer, Gandhi did not view some new law as the panacea to every social, economic or political problem. He pinned a lot more importance on the renewal of the human being. Gandhi believed that the quality of any country ultimately depends on the quality of its people. His abhorrence of legal cleverness as a means to fixing human problems is best illustrated by EF Schumacher in his classic, Small Is Beautiful,

" Gandhi used to talk disparagingly of 'dreaming of systems so perfect that no-one will need to be good'. "

That corruption is the scourge of daily existence in India as in few other countries may be entirely true. Ordinary people in everyday life have to pay bribes all the way from getting a driver's license to obtaining a housing permit. Certainly many of these are paid to government officials, big and small. The same government officials have to bribe others in their capacity as applicants. Corruption is many things to many people.

What Anna Hazare and his acolytes seem to forget is that corruption is not limited to the government. They also appear to believe that the appointment of eminent Indians to some overseeing council would somehow ensure moral chastity. If credentials alone, or even a personal reputation for incorruptibility, were such strong safeguards, the administration of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh should be a showcase for civics textbooks on model governance. Instead, it is considered the fount of malpractice and graft on a gargantuan scale, with many reckoning it presides over the most corrupt dispensation in independent India's history.

Neither the protesters nor the government want to address the issue of corruption in India in its deeper essence. Is it an obscenity only when a government official receives a bribe? What about corruption of the conscience? For instance, is it corruption when someone can build a 60 story skyscraper for a personal residence in a country where millions of children go to bed malnourished? Gandhi again,

"Every palace that one sees in India is a demonstration, not of her riches, but of the insolence of power that riches give to the few, who owe them to the miserably requited labours of the millions of the paupers of India."

Even though there seems to be a palpable correlation between the size and scope of scams in India and Manmohan Singh's neoliberal initiatives starting in the early 90s, Anna Hazare and his wise counselors don’t seem to want to see it. And amidst all his ineptitude in dealing with this latest crisis, practically the first words out of the Prime Minister’s mouth were to caution that it would be wrong to connect corruption with economic liberalization.

As veteran journalist Alexander Cockburn is fond of saying, "never believe anything until it is officially denied".

In 1991, Manmohan Singh, finance Minister in a minority government, kicked off a 'liberalization' program laying the foundation for a two decade neoliberal spree. It has turned some 250 million Indian citizens into celebrated ‘consumers’, but distorted any measure of what Professor Amartya Sen would call ‘social choice'. In this new order, what is good for consumerism and high living is alone good for India, whatever its cost by way of farmer suicides, uprooting of entire villages, pollution of the water table, or handing over of India's agricultural future to the GMO boys at Monsanto and elsewhere. The lone measure of success in this Eastern Wild-West is something called growth rate; the ethos it has spawned would both amaze and gratify Gordon "Greed Is Good" Gecko.

Gandhi's diagnosis and cure for India's corruption epidemic would probably involve a lot more pain and sacrifice than a few marches. He might point out that in a milieu where leaders openly promote moneymaking as the most important virtue, and an elite esteems itself by the extent of its ostentation, corruption would only find a conducive habitat. He would reject recourse to some bill, not for some technical shortcomings, but perhaps saying that reliance on such measures would "diminish the moral height" of Indians, just as his khadi movement urged Indians to boycott foreign cloth and adopt the rougher and costlier homespun, instead of a fast outside the Viceroy’s palace pleading for a ban on English mill imports.

The fervid and often uncivil jousting between "civil society" on the one side and the gentleman Prime Minister’s cabinet on the other, poring over fine points of an anticorruption bill while taking care never to mention the 800 pound gorilla parked in the middle of the room, reminded me of something I had read long ago.

“One of the greatest of the Bengali novelists of the 20th century, Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, has summed up the underlying principle of Hindu behavior in a neat, if cynical, epigram. He makes a woman who had a low-caste paramour boast that although she lived 20 years with him she had not for a single day allowed him to enter her kitchen.”

-- Nirad Chaudhuri, Autobiography of an Unknown Indian

Niranjan Ramakrishnan is a writer living in the United States. He can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com

UK TOURISTS BEWARE – Cambridge Hospital Staff Demand Instant Money from Sick and Ailing Indian Tourist

Cambridge Hospital Staff Demand Instant Money from Sick and Ailing Indian Tourist

The UK likes to portray itself as a friendly and inviting place for tourists. Its visa regime informs tourists who possess medical insurance that in case of an emergency they will receive adequate medical treatment without any need to pay the money upfront. But this is not true in reality as the following story illustrates.

VM, aged 73, is an Indian tourist visiting her family in Cambridge UK since June 2011. On Thursday 18 Aug she was admitted to Cambridge's famous Addenbrooke's hospital for an emergency illness and she received good medical care. Her medical insurers contacted the hospital on Friday 19 August in order to confirm her medical insurance cover and to guarantee payment. Yet on Tuesday 23 August and Wednesday 24 August VM received a rude shock in her hospital bed. Staff from the finance department beseiged her sick bed and demanded that she sign a carte blanche document agreeing to pay any/all charges the NHS may levy for her treatment. When it was pointed out that her insurance company was willing to offer a payment guarantee for her treatment they refused to listen and threatened to deport the tourist.

This issue becomes even more important as London prepares to invite tourists for the 2012 Olympic games. As the following article shows, NHS hospitals have made it a policy to use such high handed behaviour to extort cash from patients in their ailing beds.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-562980/Foreigners-asked-produce-cash-hospital-beds-crackdown-health-tourists.html

In short if this behaviour is allowed to continue, if a luckless tourist finds himself in an NHS hospital s/he will not only have to hope to get better soon in a foreign land, but also try to figure out how to arrange large amounts of cash to fob of the finance staff of these hospitals.

You have been warned, visit the UK only if you or your relatives have large amounts of instant cash. Else you and your relatives will be in peril should you have a medical emergency as NHS hospitals fail to honour the legal commitment made when you obtained your visa.

THE DAILY MAIL ARTICLE

Foreigners asked to produce cash in their hospital beds in crackdown on 'health tourists'

By OLINKA KOSTER
Last updated at 17:54 30 April 2008

A hospital is pioneering a "get tough" attitude on health tourists - by throwing them out of hospital before their treatment is complete unless they pay up.
It means that foreigners who travel to Britain to get free care on the NHS will now be asked to produce cash or a credit card at their hospital bed.
The new approach has already saved the West Middlesex University Hospital in Isleworth up to £700,000 a year. Its proximity to Heathrow Airport makes it a particular target for immigrants.
If all hospitals did the same, the NHS could recoup tens of millions of pounds a year from health tourists.
Scroll down for more...

Crackdown: West Middlessex University Hospital is getting tough on illegal 'health tourists'

Andy Finlay, the hospital manager in charge of collecting the money at the Middlesex trust, said patients had to pay up-front - or face being discharged within 48 hours.
"We will discharge a patient before they are well," he insisted.
"We will discharge a patient when they are stable, when we have provided what we have to provide - the minimum benchmark.
"Generally, within the first 48 hours after admission they will be given a price on how much, roughly, their treatment is going to cost.
"If I'm interviewing an inpatient I will be at that patient's bedside and I will ask them there and then for a visa, MasterCard, debit card, or cash. We don't take cheques."
Under the current system, anyone who needs emergency care, such as for a heart attack or accident and emergency treatment after an accident, does not have to pay.
But patients not eligible for free care who attempt to use the NHS for ongoing care or treatment that is not immediately necessary have to pay.
These so-called health tourists normally receive a bill on departure from hospital - but only an estimated 30 per cent of the money is recovered.
Under the pilot scheme, they will be asked to pay at their hospital bed for non-emergency care, or told to leave.
However, they would only be discharged after three consultants have agreed their condition is stable.
In the case of a heart attack victim, NHS patients would normally stay in hospital for 10 days. But anyone not eligible for free care could be asked to leave after 48 hours if they are judged stable.
Most patients told to leave did so willingly, Mr Finlay added - but not all of them.
"I've had two death threats, I've been held up against a wall, I've been grabbed round the throat, I've been manhandled by relatives - verbal abuse is almost day-to-day," he said.
"You have to have a very thick skin."
Last year, a secret Government report based on figures from 12 NHS trusts suggested that the bill for treating health tourists was at least £62million a year.
This did not include the cost of treating foreigners entitled to free healthcare, such as asylum seekers and students.
Health tourists not entitled to free treatment include pregnant women who arrive on holiday visas and give birth here.
Many foreign HIV sufferers also target UK hospitals for treatment, the study from 2005 revealed.
In the case of an HIV patient, a clinical decision would be made as to whether emergency care was needed.
At the time the figures were revealed, Conservative MP Ben Wallace said hospitals appeared to be pursuing a "don't ask, don't charge and don't chase policy".
Cash-strapped hospitals are being pushed further into debt because they are failing to claim the millions owed to them by those abusing the system.
As well as the West Middlesex University Hospital, the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and the Luton and Dunstable NHS Foundation Trust have been chosen to take part in the pilot scheme because their catchment areas contain both a "major point of entry to the UK" and a large proportion of asylum seekers.
Mr Finlay said his methods had received an enthusiastic response from across Whitehall - and saved the trust between £600,000 and £700,000-a-year.
"They think it is a fantastic idea, a solution to a relatively new problem," he said.
"It is up to the Department of Health to see how brave they will be to use innovative ways to tackle health tourism."
A spokesman for the Department of Health said: "It is important that those who are not entitled to NHS services pay for any they receive.
"The Government is currently reviewing access to primary and secondary care for all foreign nationals.
"In doing this we must take into account the implications of any such decisions on the key preventative and public health responsibilities of the NHS.
"We always treat people and do not charge them for emergency treatment, but the thinking behind the pilot schemes is that the NHS is there first and foremost for people who live here."