Article

2005-05-07 International-UN-NGOs

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Posted by Fred 2005-05-07 00:01|| || Front Page|| [4 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 ''The appointment of a new Middle East envoy comes at a time of renewed momentum for peace that must be sustained by the parties and strongly supported by the international community,'' UN spokesman Fred Eckhart said.

Lol! Candidate for Howler of the Day. Methinks he'll say anything for a paycheck, heh. I'm sure that a real-speak translation would have something to do with coughing up more money.

Posted by .com 2005-05-07 00:11|| 2005-05-07 00:11|| Front Page Top

#2 the UN has real momentum going

/sarcasmic vomit

Posted by Frank G">Frank G 2005-05-07 00:16|| 2005-05-07 00:16|| Front Page Top

#3 de Soto is a brilliant man. Check him out. He has radical ideas about solving global poverty: provide legal property rights to the poor for the hovels and land they occupy. This instantly makes them players in the economy, and they make very effective use of that.

Posted by Brian H">Brian H 2005-05-07 03:54|| 2005-05-07 03:54|| Front Page Top

#4 Brian, Are you thinking of Hernando De Soto?

Posted by Mrs. Davis 2005-05-07 06:18|| 2005-05-07 06:18|| Front Page Top

#5 Mrs D, your link is back to the RB mainpage.

Posted by phil_b 2005-05-07 07:01|| 2005-05-07 07:01|| Front Page Top

#6 Brian post some links and we will read them. All google tells me is that he was responsible for Cyprus and Burma. Hardly shining examples of the UN at its best.

Posted by phil_b 2005-05-07 07:13|| 2005-05-07 07:13|| Front Page Top

#7 Brian is confusing Alvaro with Hernando de Soto, author of
''The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else''
From a review of his book
It's become clear by now the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in most places around the globe hasn't ushered in an unequivocal flowering of capitalism in the developing and postcommunist world. Western thinkers have blamed this on everything from these countries' lack of sellable assets to their inherently non-entrepreneurial ''mindset.'' In this book, the renowned Peruvian economist and adviser to presidents and prime ministers Hernando de Soto proposes and argues another reason: it's not that poor, postcommunist countries don't have the assets to make capitalism flourish. As de Soto points out by way of example, in Egypt, the wealth the poor have accumulated is worth 55 times as much as the sum of all direct foreign investment ever recorded there, including that spent on building the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam.

No, the real problem is that such countries have yet to establish and normalize the invisible network of laws that turns assets from ''dead'' into ''liquid'' capital. In the West, standardized laws allow us to mortgage a house to raise money for a new venture, permit the worth of a company to be broken up into so many publicly tradable stocks, and make it possible to govern and appraise property with agreed-upon rules that hold across neighborhoods, towns, or regions. This invisible infrastructure of ''asset management''--so taken for granted in the West, even though it has only fully existed in the United States for the past 100 years--is the missing ingredient to success with capitalism, insists de Soto. But even though that link is primarily a legal one, he argues that the process of making it a normalized component of a society is more a political--or attitude-changing--challenge than anything else.

Posted by john 2005-05-07 08:22|| 2005-05-07 08:22|| Front Page Top

#8 But even though that link is primarily a legal one, he argues that the process of making it a normalized component of a society is more a political--or attitude-changing--challenge than anything else. If this is indeed his view then he is wrong. Collateralisation of property is a function of the banking system, assuming there are secure and transferable rights to property. A bank lends money and the borrower agrees to pay interest and the sum borrowed at a future date and the bank acquires a legally enforceable right to seize some real property should the borrower default.

Posted by phil_b 2005-05-07 08:44|| 2005-05-07 08:44|| Front Page Top

#9 It was a link to the Amazon Listing for ''The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else''.

I've double checked this one, so it should work or Fred's got a new bug for Mother's Day

Posted by Mrs. Davis 2005-05-07 08:46|| 2005-05-07 08:46|| Front Page Top

#10 Yup. Bug.

Posted by Mrs. Davis 2005-05-07 08:47|| 2005-05-07 08:47|| Front Page Top

#11 Let's see if "that" helped...

Posted by Fred">Fred 2005-05-07 09:07|| www.rantburg.com]">[www.rantburg.com] 2005-05-07 09:07|| Front Page Top

#12 Phil, your asumption of secure and transferrable title is not valid in the countries De Soto studied, primarily Peru, and is exactly the one De Soto hones in on. He goes through how excessive bureaucratization in zoning and title transfer has fed corruption and has led to most personal real estate in the developing world being "illegal" and off the records. But if you leave the high rise government offices and go into the neighborhoods, everybody knows and generally agrees on who owns what and how to transfer property within their neighborhood. Apparently this includes some substantial dwellings as well as the cardboard shanty towns that have grown up around all the metropolitan areas. Given that people do not have legal titles to the real estate they own and hold, banks will not lend with it as collateral. This is the source of the statement about the illiquid capital the poor have that must be liberated. His book also goes into the efforts necesary to get the real estate properly titled.

What is fascinating is that he goes into how the U. S. did it correctly with stories of the settlement of the U. S. The bottom line, as I recall and I read the book several years ago, is that when the U. S. was settled, the lawyers tried to bring over the land laws from Europe. They didn't work in the early U. S. just as they haven't worked in the third world. But in the U. S. one of the great unheralded legal and political developments of the 19th century was the evolution of land law to recognize and parallel common practice instead of denying the existance of common practice and trying to maintain the fiction of uneconomic and unuseable legal formalities. A triumph of localized republican democracy muddling through to find a practical, workable solution without any care for its theoretical consistency.

This is one of the hallmarks of les Anglo Saxons that the French fear so much. They and the Spanish must have theoretically consistent solutions that eminate from and reenforce the power of the omniscient and omnipotent center. This story is told in "The New World of the Gothic Fox: Culture and Economy in English and Spanish America" by Claudio Veliz. For the Spanish it comes from the need for central control to finally drive the Moors from Spain. So the bottom line is that the whole land tenure problem in Latin America is the fault of the Mooselimbs. Great way to get back to the GWOT.

Posted by Mrs. Davis 2005-05-07 09:24|| 2005-05-07 09:24|| Front Page Top

#13 De Soto's Book.

Posted by Mrs. Davis 2005-05-07 09:25|| 2005-05-07 09:25|| Front Page Top

#14 Yup. It works!

Thanks. Fred! And Happy Mother's Day to your mom.

Posted by Mrs. Davis 2005-05-07 09:26|| 2005-05-07 09:26|| Front Page Top

#15 Thanks, Nrs D. and the link now works.

Posted by phil_b 2005-05-07 15:53|| 2005-05-07 15:53|| Front Page Top

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