March 12, 2010
The Sham Recovery
Business cheerleaders naturally want to emphasize the positive. They assume the economy runs on optimism and that if average consumers think the economy is getting better, they'll empty their wallets more readily and -- presto! -- the economy will get better. The cheerleaders fail to understand that regardless of how people feel, they won't spend if they don't have the money.
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March 8, 2010
China Lassoes Its Neighbors
Touted as the world's biggest Free Trade Area, CAFTA will bring together 1.7 million consumers with a combined gross domestic product of $5.9 trillion and total trade of $1.3 trillion. Under the agreement, trade between China and Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore has become duty-free for more than seven thousand products. By 2015, the newer members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) — Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar — will join the zero-tariff arrangement.
The propaganda mills, especially in Beijing, have been trumpeting the FTA as bringing "mutual benefits" to China and ASEAN. In contrast, there has been an absence of triumphal rhetoric from ASEAN. In 2002, the year the agreement was signed, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo hailed the emergence of a "formidable regional grouping" that would rival the United States and the European Union. ASEAN's leaders, it seems, have probably begun to realize the consequences of what they agreed to: that in this FTA, most of the advantages will probably flow to China.
At first glance, it seems like the China-ASEAN relationship has been positive. After all, demand from a Chinese economy growing at a breakneck pace was a key factor in the Southeast Asian growth that began around 2003 after the low growth following the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and 1998. For Asia as a whole, in 2003 and the beginning of 2004, "China was a major engine of growth for most of the economies in the region," according to a UN report. "The country's imports accelerated even more than its exports, with a large proportion of them coming from the rest of Asia." During the current international recession ASEAN governments, much like the United States, are counting on China — which registered an annualized growth rate of 10.7 percent in the last quarter of 2010 — to pull them out of the doldrums.
A More Complex Picture
But is the Chinese locomotive really pulling the rest of East Asia along with it, on the fast track to economic nirvana? In fact, China's growth has in part taken place at Southeast Asia's expense. Low wages have encouraged local and foreign manufacturers to phase out their operations in relatively high-wage Southeast Asia and move them to China. China's devaluation of the yuan in 1994 had the effect of diverting some foreign direct investment away from Southeast Asia. The trend of ASEAN losing ground to China accelerated after the financial crisis of 1997. In 2000, foreign direct investment in ASEAN shrank to 10 percent of all foreign direct investment in developing Asia, down from 30 percent in the mid-nineties.
The decline continued in the rest of the decade, with the UN World Investment Report attributing the trend partly to "increased competition from China." Since the Japanese have been the most dynamic foreign investors in the region, much apprehension in the ASEAN capitals greeted a Japanese government survey that revealed that 57 percent of Japanese manufacturing transnational corporations found China to be more attractive than the ASEAN-4 (Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines).
Snags in a Trade Relationship
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Clearing the Rubble, Including the Old Plan for Haiti
Private charitable donations can only go so far. Where is the rest of the reconstruction coming from? What is the plan of these other actors? Generally speaking there are two sets of actors: the "public sector" and the "private sector." I put both in quotes because there is considerable slippage between governments and private, for-profit investors or companies, in the U.S. as in Haiti. Both sets of actors have a planning conference coming up, one in Miami and the other in New York.
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March 6, 2010
On Women’s Day, Damaging Gender Wealth Gap Exposed
Single black and Hispanic women are particularly hard hit, owning only a penny of wealth for every dollar owned by their male counterparts and a fraction of a penny for every dollar owned by single white women, according to the report released by the Insight Center for Community Economic Development at a Capitol Hill symposium on the economic security of women.
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What “Small Government” Looks Like in Real Life …
This is what smaller government looks like on the ground. You can't fund anything that people have come to expect with no tax revenue. The Tea Party movement doesn't seem to understand this basic fact.
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March 5, 2010
Organic Dairyman (VIDEO)

It's impossible to have a conversation with Jon Bansen without asking about his favorite cow Rosie. She's now 12 years old (she was 9 in the film), and for an active producing cow, well beyond the average productive years for a dairy cow. And yet, Bansen proudly shares, Rosie is producing 120% of capacity compared with the rest of his 165 jersey cow herd. By contrast, Bansen explains, the average conventional dairy cow will last about 4 years, and during their first two years, will not produce any milk at all. To Bansen, organic cows are healthier, and remain on average, productive longer, than their conventional counterparts because of the differences in how they are treated, and their access to open pasture for grazing.
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Sleep And Rhythm: How To Live In Accordance With Your Natural Cycles
Chronic sleep problems interfere with your body's natural rhythms and rob it of the time it needs to restore itself. The incidence of many diseases including diabetes, high blood pressure, heart attacks and depression increases with a lack of sleep. Recent research has even shown a connection between poor sleep and weight gain. We simply weren't built to just go, go, go. We were built to go, go, go and then rest, rest, rest. We evolved according to the natural rhythms of darkness and light; our bodily functions reflect this and undergo similar fluctuations. They perform best when we live in accordance, as much as possible, with these cycles.
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March 4, 2010
Love Yourself Blog — Breakups Are Tradeups!
Many of my friends and mentoring clients all went through a huge shift in 2009 that started with money challenges (because of the recession) and ended up affecting much of the rest of their lives. As money gets short and fears materialize relationships are tested.
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