For reasons yet unclear, BRIC companies and entrepreneurs now consume roughly half my professional time. The Brazilian, Russian, Indian, and Chinese (BRIC) managers I meet are as sharp, credentialed, energetic, and hungry as their Silicon Valley or Rte. 128 counterparts. Sometimes their English is even better. They desperately want to be world-class innovators.
These people aren't interested in launching imitations. They're not looking to be even lower-cost suppliers or sub-contractors to a WalMart or HP or JPMorganChase. They want to be valued as much for their ingenuity as for their prices.
Consequently, they appear particularly open to ideas and experimentation. They know they lag so they'll grasp any reasonable innovation edge they can. Measured by brainpower and grit, there's no reason why BRIC enterprises shouldn't consistently out-innovate their richer rivals. Money isn't the vital variable holding them back. So what's the issue?
This is an audio presentation by David Harvey accompanied by an animation that shows an interesting series of recent historical and geographical connections in the global financial system. The speaker admits to not having any solutions, but only providing the overview of what has happened.
Link to article (ship of junkfood to feed poor, helping them become more susceptible to illness?) Photo Credit: Marie Hippenmeyer, Nestle
AlterNet / ByMichele Simon
Nestle Stoops to New Low, Launches Barge to Peddle Junk Food on the Amazon River to Brazil's Poor
Has Big Food already run out of customers in cities and other locales that are more readily accessible by land?
July 8, 2010 |
Last month Nestlé announced that it, the world's largest food company, would soon start delivering its products to the far reaches of Brazil. But not in the usual way, through a distributor, which in turn delivers products for sale in actual stores. Rather, the plan is to sell to customers directly from its own ship. Full article here
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Comment: Although more related to malnutrition and not general eating habits of the poor, Project Peanut Butter's Ready to Use Therapeutic Foods (RUTFs) are of worthy mention. They work with USAID, Doctors Without Borders, The Clinton Foundation, UNICEF, Save the Children, and Concern Worldwide (all listed here). However, it is surprising how much of a somewhat low profile they have when they are associated with such a major global need. In 2009, the Earth Intelligence Network identified the connection-need between Project Peanut Butter and the Malnutrition Surveillance Project (plus the Moringa Tree leaves to be used in food aid) and contacted UNICEF and those associated with the Malnutrition Surveillance Project team but did not receive any clear feedback about these ideas. Another inquiry was sent to UNICEF today.
This important essay by Ray McGovern makes a compelling case for the recommendation he makes last two paragraphs which are repeated in italics below:
“As a former CIA analyst, I hope that Obama would have the presence of mind to order a fast-track special National Intelligence Estimate on the implications of the Iran-Brazil-Turkey agreement for U.S. national interests and those of the countries of the Middle East.
Obama needs an unvarnished assessment of the agreement’s possible benefits (and its potential negatives) as counterweight to the pro-Israel lobbying that will inevitably descend on the White House and State Department.”
The times may be a-changin’ — at least a bit — with the United States and Israel no longer able to dictate to the rest of the world how crises in the Middle East must be handled, though the new reality has been slow to dawn on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her neocon friends in Congress and the U.S. media.
They may think they are still in control, still the smart ones looking down at upstarts like the leaders of Turkey and Brazil who had the audacity to ignore U.S. warnings and press ahead with diplomacy to head off a possible new war, this one over Iran.
On Monday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva announced success in persuading Iran to send roughly 50 percent of its low-enriched uranium to Turkey in exchange for higher-enriched uranium that would be put to peaceful medical uses.
“I believe Logics, Linguistics, Semiotics, Philosophy and Information Science are disciplines that play key roles in Intelligence. As an Intelligence student and researcher, I am interested in investigating the foundations of Intelligence, focused on Intelligence Analysis, according to an inter and transdisciplinary approach, inspired by Biology and guided by Critical Thinking”.
Muscling Latin America: The Pentagon has a new Monroe Doctrine (The Nation)
In September Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, delivered on an electoral promise and refused to renew Washington's decade-old, rent-free lease on an air base outside the Pacific coast town of Manta, which for the past ten years has served as the Pentagon's main South American outpost. The eviction was a serious effort to fulfill the call of Ecuador's new Constitution to promote “universal disarmament” and oppose the “imposition” of military bases of “some states in the territory of others.” It was also one of the most important victories for the global demilitarization movement, loosely organized around the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases, since protests forced the US Navy to withdraw from Vieques, Puerto Rico, in 2003. Correa, though, couldn't resist an easy joke. “We'll renew the lease,” he quipped, “if the US lets us set up a base in Miami.”
Funny. Then Washington answered with a show of force: take away one, we'll grab seven. In late October the United States and Colombia signed an agreement granting the Pentagon use of seven military bases, along with an unlimited number of as yet unspecified “facilities and locations.”
Connect these dots: In Nigeria this week, Muslim youths set fire to a church, killing more than two dozen Christian worshippers. In Egypt, Coptic Christians have been suffering increased persecution including, this month, a drive-by shooting outside a church in which seven people were murdered. In Pakistan, Christian churches were bombed over Christmas. In Turkey, authorities have been closing Christian churches, monasteries and schools. Recently, churches in Malaysia have been attacked, too, provoked by this grievance: Christians inside the churches were referring to God as “Allah.” How dare infidels use the same name for the Almighty as do Muslims!
Haitians piled bodies along the devastated streets of their capital Wednesday after the strongest earthquake hit the poor Caribbean nation in more than 200 years crushed thousands of structures, from humble shacks to the National Palace and the U.N. peacekeeping headquarters. Untold numbers were still trapped.
Destroyed communications made it impossible to tell the extent of destruction from Tuesday afternoon's 7.0-magnitude tremor, or to estimate how many were dead among the collapsed buildings in Haiti's capital of about 2 million people.
France's foreign minister said the head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission was apparently among the dead.
