At this point, we'd like the show to be about the economic possibilities and problems with global remittances.

Possible guests/contacts:

Uche Nworah, an expert on remittances and the Nigerian migrant worker dispora
Dilip Ratha, senior economist at the World Bank and author of Understanding the Importance of Remittances
Joy Zarembka, at the Campaign for Migrant Domestic Worker's Rights
bloggers, bloggers, bloggers
Watson folks and adjuncts.

At this stage in the research, I'm not really seeing what the arc of the show is. Defining the issue, weighing the benefits of localized remittances vs. FDI (Foreign Direct Investment), citing the major pitfalls of national reliance on remittances, then the solutions that some countries are trying to answer those problems? Sounds pretty dry-- As Mary would say, there's not much there that's keeping me from switching the dial to the ballgame.

Here are the major issues as I see them:

Scale: the amount of money remitted anually to Africa ($17 billion) rivals the amount of FDI there ($15 billion), and comes close to aid/grants figures. The impact is huge, and not studied much.

Impact: In a survey of the Nigerian diaspora, Uche Nworah found that 96% of respondents said that they contribute to nation building, especially by sending money home. But since only 6% of remittances to Africa are invested, that money might boost disposable incomes and increase educational access by paying tuition bills, but it won't account for large scale change. Also, it won't have an appreciable effect on those families which are so poor that they can't afford to send workers abroad, which might only increase the inequality. Blogger Nebuer attributed inflation to remittances in his native Kerala.

It'll be important to tie into the imigration rights protests, but since our airdate won't be set until mid summer, we won't be able to depend upon the news peg to keep people listening.

More in a bit...

Cecilia Fire Thunder, Giago: Oglala Sioux president on state abortion law, Indianz.com, 3/21/06

Oglala Sioux girl at Pine Ridge [Stephen Thompson / Flickr]

The statement aroused quite a bit of interest among LiveJournalers after kathrynt proposed a fundraising campaign to support the proposed clinic. Blogger tezliana did some digging and emailed Planned Parenthood of South Dakota for a statement.

Things are unfolding quickly in South Dakota, so this information may change at any time, but we are not currently planning to establish a clinic on tribal land. While we appreciate Ms. Thunder's support, I believe she made the comment prior to speaking with us about a clinic on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Mark Fredrickson, Email from Planned Parenthood this morning, re: South Dakota, Liana's Little Jungle, 3/23/06

When Cecilia used the name Planned Parenthood, she used the name in reference to an abortion clinic in general. She fully intends to donate land so that a clinic can be built....You can't possibly expect a victim of violence to raise a 100% healthy child.

Vonnie Bush, personal assistant to President Fire Thunder, in a conversation with Open Source, 3/24/06

American Indian women are sexually assaulted at a 3.5 times higher rate than women in all other racial groups. Given these numbers and her background counselling rape victims as a nurse, Fire Thunder says she had to take a stand.

Rather than having our daughters and our women have to drive several states away, as if they were criminals, to protect their own health, we wanted to have a viable option closer to their homes, until this law is struck down. We intend to take the lead to make sure that we live up to our constitution and our own ideals, and respect our female citizens.

Cecilia Fire Thunder, in an email to Open Source, 3/24/06

Could plans for a clinic on tribal lands actually go through? Will this move test the limits of tribal sovereignty? South Dakota Attorney General Larry Long says the state might be able to enforce HB1215 in Indian County "but only against non-Indian women who receive abortions by non-Indian doctors." Could this bring down the law that would bring down Roe?

This is not a matter of an assertion of tribal sovereignty - we already have that. Nor is it a matter of confronting Governor Rounds or the State of South Dakota, it is a matter of upholding federal law, as it now exists. I believe that the South Dakota law banning abortion will be struck down as unconstitutional. We are making it clear that we support the constitutional right of women all over this country, and particularly here in South Dakota, to make their own decisions and their own choices regarding their own health.

Cecilia Fire Thunder, in an email to Open Source, 3/24/06

In his introduction, Sachs lays out some examples of countries as reference points along the ladder’s development continuum. Malawi doesn’t have a ladder, he says. The picture Sachs paints is a country of small farmers, a country ravaged by malaria and AIDS, a country without the funds to afford preventative medicines and without the infrastructure to deliver them. No ladder.

One rung above Malawi is Bangladesh, with a thriving economy of “apparel firms” (read: sweatshops). Raised as I was to be label-conscious of the manufacturer’s labor practices, it turns my stomach a bit to think that sweatshops can be one rung above anything. But I suppose that’s a function of my swanky American passport, too.

I lived with a group of Bushmen just outside Tsumkwe, Namibia for a little while a few years ago. Bigwig anthropologist John Marshall was staying in the same place, and after a few drinks we would get into some lively debates. It’s near impossible to legislate fair land use policies to help maintain “the hunter gatherer lifestyle.” Most of the Bushmen themselves would rather herd cattle and dig boreholes (wells) and go to school than to try to survive within the traditional means, especially when land has been roped and barbed-wired off so that they’re expected to live on a tiny fraction of the land they once traveled across. The lifestyle is unsustainable. Still, our romantic notions of The Gods Must Be Crazy’s “simpler way of life are hard to rid ourselves of.

The same could be said of Malawi and Bangladesh—it seems antithetical to my every hippie romantic notion that sweatshop work could be preferable to subsistence farming. My friends at Students against Sweatshops would loathe to hear him say it, but it’s hard to argue with Jeff Sachs when he says that to demand these “apparel firms” raise wages would be “a ticket back to rural misery.”

He also brings up remittances as an important step on the way to economic self sufficiency. Henry and I are thinking of putting a show together on this topic.

Counterpoint: This American Life did a piece a while back about the Cambodian government trying to institute their own fair labor practices in the garment industry as a country: search the TAL archives for “David and Goliath” and take a listen.

Unfortunately, none of the blog searches I know of allow you to restrict your search by location tag. Type in “Dubai blogger” into Technorati a few days after a major news peg like the ports deal, and you’re likely to get a bunch of Americans and Brits pontificating, and no man-on-the-ground perspective from Dubai.

Tricks I use to circumnavigate blogspace and find those regional bloggers:

- Global Voices is, of course, invaluable, but its regional editors can be somewhat inconsistent (some updating all the time, others not for months).

-If the city I’m looking for has a MetroBlogging community, that can be a great way to find a cluster of folks who want to talk about their town.

- If I can find one site that uses Google’s Blogger interface, the tags for location are linked to other blogs with the same location tag. Unfortunately though, if one person enters their location as “Dubai” and one as “UAE” and one as “United Arab Emirates,” they won’t help you find each other.

-In Technorati and Google BlogSearch and the other engines, I find the best way to find the locals is to enter specific search strings: “life in Karachi” rather than ”Pakistan,” etc.

But those are really all I’m working with thus far. (If you’ve got tips and tricks or search engines that can restrict for location, please do send them along).

For now, since the ROS guys have been making valiant efforts to synchronize their rolodexes, I’ve been trying to keep a record of my favorite regional bloggers who group their blogrolls by location.

Selections:

Iraqi and Afghan blogs:
Dave Shuler edits Carnival of the Liberated, a digest of Iraqi and Afghan blogs. He posted a “greatest hits 2005” back in September at his own blog, The Glittering Eye .

Israeli blogs:
Lisa Goldman (a great friend to Open Source, also the regional Global Voices editor), On the Face
EB, OneJerusalem.com
Imshin, Not a Fish

Palestinian blogs:
Haitham Sabbah, Sabbah’s blog
Laila El-Haddad, A Mother from Gaza

Much much more to come.

Dubai is the fastest growing city on the planet. It’s not vast oil reserves that allows Dubai to bust out all over. Compared to brother-emirate Abu Dhabi, the oil reserves are actually running pretty low. The source is tourism and investment money that used to come to us.

Not finding the U.S. or our economy particularly inviting since the war on terror, many Arab investors have turned to Dubai, and the proof is in the skyline. The riviera is a cluster of cranes and scaffolding, punctuated by skyscrapers that cut impossible streaks into the sky. An indoor ski slope. An underwater hotel. The tallest building in the world, shaped like a giant lighting rod. No more room on the beachfront? No problem. They simply manufacture more.

You might have heard about Palm Island, the man made archipelago of islands that reaches out from the coastline in the shape of (you guessed it) a palm tree, its "leaves" reaching out like grabby fingers. It looks laughable from above until you realize that Mama evolution has been churning out prototypes of the Palm Island blueprint for millennia-- whenever you need a major surface area bang for your volume buck, branching is the way to go. Leaves get more contact with the air to pull water up and out, bronchioles in lungs get more of a shot to leech out more poisons from the air you take in, Palm Island realtors get 78 MILES of brand new coastline within the swanky Dubai zipcode to develop.

The Guardian’s Adam Nicolson says Dubai is “Not the modern centre of the Arab world but, more than that, the Arab centre of the modern world.”

Is Dubai the next London, the next New York? Is this the face of the empire that will succeed us?

[Check out the resultant show here]

At one point in the discussion, we're talking narrative is the only way to write history well because it's analogue to our own experience of time, we're talking sociologists look at human behavior to try to track predictable, applicable events, historians look at events as unique, not extrapolations of rules we're asking is history an autonomous discipline?

As a kid who likes her historiographical theory wrapped around her history like prosciutto on sausage, I eat this stuff up.

Then at one point, Prof. Wood offers an opinion: The reason there's been so much outrage among Muslim populations over the Danish cartoons is that Muslim populations never experienced the Enlightenment.

Sounds like a huge value judgment, I know. Furtive glances over the seminar table said I wasn't the only one unsettled. But I bit my tongue and heard him out, under the banner of "productive discomfort."

The religious wars of the 17th century-- WWII lasted four years. The Thirty Years' War was thirty years of the most brutal combat any of them could imagine at that time. The Catholics and the Protestants slugging it out with every weapon they had, killing each other with the greatest ferocity they could muster. But they learned from it. There was a softening of the passions. Religion lost its bite. The West is full of secular humanists now.

I don't think these Muslims have gone through that. They didn't experience the brutal Enlightement.

My first objections: But clearly there are still religious battles being fought in "the West." Homophobia and abortion debates in the U.S. are always shadowed by religious doctrine.

GWood's response:

Well, the original U.S. colonists never went through the Enlightenment either. The Puritans escaped it, and when religious dissenters cropped up in the colonies they were just sent off to Rhode Island.

We went back and forth for a while, he says religious toleration came from the Enlightenment, i say that's what the protestors were demanding from the Euro newspapers, that's what it said on the signs they carried; he says: they just know what will strike a chord with Western audiences, I say Well, it worked.

Asad, Protest X-Rated

I hope you understand that I am not the type of person who accepts violence in order to get a message across, such as the burning buildings etc. This is why I joined the Auckland protests as they were peaceful.

Asad Khalid Naseem, from an email to Open Source on 2/7/06

Denmark, Norway, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, Jordan, the U.S., Iceland, Belgium, Portugal, Switzerland, Spain, Hungary, Poland.

Oh, and now New Zealand.

War-on-Terror hawks might say New Zealand dropped us as soon as things got rough (they officially opposed military action in Iraq); then again, New Zealanders might say they supported us when they thought our actions fair (i.e. in Afghanistan).

Regardless, it may seem out of character that three NZ newspapers, The Dominion Post, The Nelson Mail, and The Press printed the Danish cartoons as a free-speech protest. In separate statements, editors of all three newspapers defended New Zealand's right to know "what all the fuss was about," and defended their duty to "keep readers fully informed". Only the editor of The Dominion Post has claimed solidarity with the European newspapers that ran the cartoons last week.

Not all of New Zealand agreed.

The simple fact here is that, freedom of speech is not absolute in Europe, there is precedence where it is restricted. So in that sense, these European countries do not have the same values as New Zealand (as far as I know denying Holocaust or any other type of speech does not get you prison time in NZ). Publishing cartoons that insult members of a major religion does more harm to the precious freedom of speech than good.

Berkay Mollamustafaoglu, "Your say: Mohammed cartoons," The Dominion Post, February 7, 2006

As an expat Kiwi, I was proud of our small country's ideals and sensible culture that embraced diversity, and which was so highly thought of overseas. I question the wisdom of a NZ newspaper which follows the lead of a Europe that is often filled with racism, led by greater powers, and breeds division. Respect, and tolerance for one another's differences is the essence of peace. Publishing the cartoons was not a lesson in freedom of the press, but a tactic for selling more newspapers to the detriment of our wonderful country's reputation and the backlash it will most likely cause to our exports. My head hangs in shame.

Yvonne Xygalas, "Your say: Mohammed cartoons," The Dominion Post, February 7, 2006

Though local Islamic leaders are preaching peace, NZ student blogger Asad Khalid Naseem -- quoted above -- was one of at least 700 protestors in Auckland who marched on Sunday. Asad is a member of a small but growing population of Pakistani and Indian expats who have been settling in New Zealand since the 1970s. Recent numbers estimate the Muslim population in New Zealand at close to 6,000. One in eight marched in Auckland.