Latest blog posts by BobHiggins

Global Unemployment

09 02 2012 18:50:45 +0000

It will offer small consolation to the long term unemployed in the US to know that much of the rest of the world is suffering from the same problem. The International Labor Organization (ILO) reported late last month that more than 1.1 billion people were either unemployed or underemployed and living in the clutches of poverty.

While there may be some truth to the old saw that "misery loves company" and the discovery that there are a billion people in the boat may be somehow weirdly comforting, you have to wonder how long the dinghy will dally on the surface before behaving more like an anchor.

It's also unsettling to realize just how long the unemployment lines are and how many people have applied for the job you so desperately need. With 1.1 billion people waiting the line will stretch around the globe 25 times so you're not likely to get home for lunch.

Globally as well as here at home the young are hit particularly hard:

"Youth unemployment increased by more than 4 million from 2007 to 74.8 million in 2011. Also, the current global youth unemployment rate of 12.7 percent remained a full percentage point above the pre-crisis level." RTTNews

As if the world weren't tense enough the thought of 75 million young people out of work and without prospects in a time of rising prices for tuition, food, shelter, fuel and nearly everything else should give pause to the so called job creators who are sitting on their trillions waiting for a time of certainty.

Even here at home the prospects have diminished for young workers. According to a Pew Research Center study released yesterday only 54 percent of Americans in the 18 to 14 age bracket are working:

"That's the lowest employment rate for this age group since the government began keeping track in 1948. And it's a sharp drop from the 62 percent who had jobs in 2007 -- suggesting the recession is crippling career prospects for a broad swath of young people who were still in high school or college when the downturn began." Alexander Eichler/Huffington Post

It would seem that watching the events unfold in the "Arab Spring" the Libyan uprising and the now unfolding Syrian tragedy might convince the money holders to loosen the purse strings and begin to stem the rising tide of economic inequality.

From the ILO report:

There has been a marked slowdown in the rate of progress in reducing the number of working poor. Nearly 30 per cent of all workers in the world – more than 900 million – were living with their families below the US $2 poverty line in 2011, or about 55 million more than expected on the basis of pre-crisis trends. Of these 900 million working poor, about half were living below the US $1.25 extreme poverty line.

The number of workers in vulnerable employment globally in 2011 is estimated at 1.52 billion, an increase of 136 million since 2000 and of nearly 23 million since 2009.

Among women, 50.5 per cent are in vulnerable employment, a rate that exceeds the corresponding share for men (48.2).

Favourable economic conditions pushed job creation rates above labour force growth, thereby supporting domestic demand, in particular in larger emerging economies in Latin America and East Asia.

The labour productivity gap between the developed and the developing world – an important indicator measuring the convergence of income levels across countries – has narrowed over the past two decades, but remains substantial: Output per worker in the Developed Economies and European Union region was US $ 72,900 in 2011 versus an average of US $ 13,600 in developing regions.

The gap between the extremely rich and the average Joe in the US has widened to a yawning gulf and the trend continues worldwide. How much the impoverished, the young, people who see only hunger and despair on the horizon will tolerate before they become... restive is anyone's guess but the oligarchy would be well advised to pay close attention.

This beast may not sleep much longer.

Bob Higgins

Fracking for Treasure in Trinidad and Tobago

08 02 2012 12:08:12 +0000

“Chevron oil rig on fire in Niger Delta,” “BP’s Deepwater Horizon sinks in Gulf of Mexico,” “Shell confirms oil leak in North Sea,”“Massive fish kill in Trinidad and Tobago.” The headlines have become as familiar as announcements of freeway pile ups and severe thunderstorms.

From Nigeria to the North Sea, from the icy chill of Alaska’s Beaufort Sea to the azure bathwater of the Southern Caribbean the scripts are eerily similar. They tell stories of thousands of oil or gas rigs, tens, hundreds of thousand of abandoned wells and the extraction of fossil fuels from the earth. Tales of pirates hunting treasure, not cargoes of gold on sunken galleons but poisonous black sludge buried millions of years ago under thousands of feet of rock, under miles of ocean.

The stories begin in sweat and toil, hard labor and mind numbing tedium, stories of men drilling holes in the Earth. Then the special effects begin and the drama unfolds.

There are no award ceremonies for the players in these stories, no red carpets or paparazzi, no glittering celebrities and musical revues, just explosion and fire, sickness and death, wholesale slaughter of wildlife, untold human pain and suffering, horrible contamination and more festering wounds to the Earth.

No matter what continent, land or sea the stories involve the same crimes committed by the same culprits and their rap sheets grow longer year by year.

For the pirates who dig up this treasure the profits are enormous, for the people and other creatures who depend on the the sea, the land, the air, the water the stakes are equally enormous but loss is all they are offered. Loss of livelihood, loss of income, loss of health, loss of life, beauty and joy.

The fishermen of Trinidad and Tobago share the problems of the people of our Gulf coast, they have been fouled with the same crude oil, poisoned with the same methane and misused by the same cast of characters. They’ve watched the fish wash ashore by the thousands and lie lifeless, one dead eye turned sightlessly to the sun, rotting and stinking on the beach where even the gulls won’t eat them. Between the blasting for gas and leaking oil rigs and encroachment by commercial trawlers, catches are down as much as seventy five percent.

“Before we could feed the family, buy something for the home, fix the house.”
“Twenty two years I worked outside as a fisherman, in those years they didn’t have oil in the water…”
“The fish not stayin’, they’re movin’, that is a killer to the sea.”

As the fishermen watch their lines come up empty they can smell the chemical foulness in the air, and feel the despair grow in their hearts.

The pirates are fracking in these waters, forcing natural gas from wells beneath the water, deep in the bedrock, using hydraulic pressure to fracture rock formations and drive the gas to the wellhead. The wells leak, methane, benzine, they leak a toxic carcinogenic soup that poisons the fish and they die. The pirates will deny this, that’s what pirates do, rape, plunder, run away, deny everything and strike again elsewhere.

There are I’m told, as many as thirty million abandoned oil and gas wells around the world, on land and sea. Many of them are spewing oil or methane or both. How many and which ones are leaking no one knows. Having extracted their profits the culprits, the pirates, don’t care, they’ve moved on to drill elsewhere.

I am also told that there remain more than twenty trillion dollars ($20,000,000,000,000) worth of oil and gas still buried, still unclaimed in the Earth. The piracy will continue until the last fish has died and the last fisherman has folded his nets and tossed them aside in despair.

Every day we dump billions of gallons of poison into our waters and atmosphere. We then breathe the air, a pint per breath, drink the water and consume the produce and livestock raised on the same poisons. We will continue this until we cleanse the earth of our presence.

The Earth will then cleanse itself of our memory.

Bob Higgins

The Mayor of Kabul

13 01 2012 10:34:05 +0000

I imagine that being mayor of a city, despite decent pay and perks, could be a thankless job. Whether you're the mayor of East Podunk (pop 236) or a metropolis of millions of people most of the problems land on your desk. Problems of moving people around from work to home to play.

Keeping the streets clean and safe. Keeping coalitions together, satisfying the divergent interests of the various neighborhoods and competing groups.

Power failures, sporting events, conventions, fires, storms, crimes both petty and spectacular, strikes, all bring an overnight bag or more of grief for the Mayor.

But what must it be like to be Mayor in a city that has grown in population from just over a million to nearly 5 million in eight years, a city of mostly unpaved roads, a city 3500 years old, with a dozen ethnic groups and half a dozen languages, a city with one foot in the present, one foot in the past and both planted firmly in a war.

Muhammad Yunus Nawandish is a civil engineer by training who spent much of his career in the oil, gas and power sectors before being appointed as Mayor by Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai in January 2010. The former Mayor, Mir Abdul Ahad Sahebi, was convicted of corruption and sentenced to four years in prison.

They call Nawandish a hands on Mayor because he is visible, often seen in the street. Meeting with neighborhood groups, checking construction, highway and infrastructure projects, reporting to the Jirgas, Afghanistan's two houses of parliament.

His anti corruption program is said to have reduced the level of official bribery his road building program gets good reviews as does his ability to raise funds through foreign aid. Kabul is able to raise only about $30 million a year and needs a dozen times that number to make a dent in its infrastructure and other problems.

Nawandish is said to work 16 and 17 hour days and has said that he took the job only out of a sense of patriotic duty. He has a long road ahead in repairing the infrastructure and economy of Kabul and helping to restore peace and security.

Bob Higgins