L'état du jour

-

2021 is barely 3 months in and already there has been an attempted armed insurrection in the US capitol, a polar vortex that crippled Texas, and a US covid death rate of 519K. For the state of Texas, this has happened before, most recently in 1989 and, in 2011 when natural gas plants reported failures that resulted in rolling blackouts. The state of Texas has a GDP of $1.9 trillion with a capital "T," and still could ill-afford to deal with Winter. According to IMF info, Texas has a larger economy than Brazil (which comes in at 10th at $1.84 trillion), South Korea, and Canada. 

While Gross Domestic Product is not an accurate measure of development (unlike HDI, GINI, and per capita income), Texas has always been a state on the move, with some of the world's largest corporations setting up shop in the state, most notably Oracle and Hewlett Packard. Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, also set up in Austin TX. 

This is the state with the second largest GDP (after California) in the wealthiest union of states in the world. This a country which wastes 40% of all food produced and in which food security is not assured for 1 in 9 Americans. Basically, the United States of America is a land of fabulous wealth for increasingly fewer of her citizens. One just has to look within the lines and see that the carnage initially wrought by the pandemic predictably affected poorer and, almost by design, darker complexioned Americans. 

The US also is the only developed nation without assured paid leave, and universal healthcare which has unironically been referred to by politicians as "socialism." However, like any "free market" economy, the US will keep getting ever richer.

This pont draws us to the crises basketcase of Peronism that is Argentina. This is one country whose development would have been unhindered were it not for his running against the grain of common sense and nationalizing every sector of the economy. Had Argentina embraced free market economics, who knows if the county would have descended into catastrophic crisis in 2002. 

With high taxes and an increasingly onerous business environment, Argentina, once one of the wealthiest countries on the plant, and whose land is chock full of natural resources and beauty, always seems to be forever descending into a madness which can only be christened as economic suicide. Like some moron who has been trying to shoot themselves in the head, Argentina has almost succeeded at complete economic suicide were it not for the little fact that the gun is rusty and the country cannot afford the damn bullets.

This is a country that insanely decided to attack the Falklands Islands (or Malvinas) and thus antagonize one of their closest allies, further compounding their economic woes. Their neighbor to the north, Brazil, also has high taxes, but, unlike Argentina, they (Brazil) have a free market market that encourages foreign direct investment. The less said about the president of Brazil though, the better.

Like some type of South American curse though, the other little entity that is not so little in economic impact is corruption. Corruption is so endemic in Latin America that, in some countries, it actually takes up a large sector of the GDP. Astonishingly, corruption has effectively swallowed 12.5% of the GDP of Honduras, a country which is almost effectively a narco state.¹ Just like her corrupt compadre of South Sudan, infrastructure is crumbling, social amenities are nearly nonexistent, and the country has a sky high homicide rate. 

²Corruption is the scourge of any country's development. A cursory look thru the any list ranking the most corrupt countries in the world reveals a list that is full of nations with an abysmal human development index. While there's no surefire way to measure corruption, its effects can and will be evident of a country's economy, infrastructure, and criminal justice systems, among others.

Let us make 2021 a less corrupt year.


A view from TX during the storm.





Somwhere in Argentina

FURTHER READING:

¹https://www.lawg.org/corruptionhonduras/#:~:text=The%20Observatorio%20de%20Pol%C3%ADtica%20Criminal,of%20corruption%20in%20the%20country.&text=By%202018%2C%20that%20amount%20skyrocketed,totaling%2012.5%25%20of%20Honduras's%20GDP.


²https://voices.transparency.org/honduras-how-a-surge-of-corruption-scandals-has-fueled-political-crisis-85af16ceac85

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mad Cow Disease

-
Image
The variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) crisis, also known as the "human mad cow disease" crisis, was a significant event that followed the "mad cow disease" (BSE) crisis that occurred primarily in the United Kingdom (UK) in the 1980s and 1990s. vCJD is a rare and fatal neurodegenerative disorder that is believed to be caused by exposure to the abnormal prion proteins that are associated with BSE. The first cases of vCJD were identified in the UK in 1996, and it quickly became apparent that the disease was linked to the consumption of beef from infected cattle. Prion protein (stained in red) revealed in photomicrograph of scrapie-infected mouse neural tissue. Produced by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) As the number of vCJD cases continued to rise, concerns grew about the potential scale of the outbreak and the potential risks to public health. The UK government initially downplayed the risks of vCJD and resisted ca...
Read more

The Dire Dregs Of Days

-
Image
"We are a blessed nation and people!" Yes, there was an election, and Kenyans rushed to congratulate themselves in a manner akin to patting their dicks after an orgasm. The land is a blessed one, it has to be said: it is a land blessed with ignorance, irredeemably corrupt leeches, general political shithousery, drought, inflation, near-theocratic leadership with a touch of the corruptly macabre....it's a long list of blessings. It's a land where wealth simply disappears into the blessed pockets of a few, and, just like the "holy ghost," reappears in the pockets of the same well-heeled elite who are all seemingly acquainted with some fellow named "scratch." High net worth folk tell tales of "rearing chicken" and "selling corn cobs by the roadside," and sell the capitalistic hope of success from "scratch." As an aside, who the hell is this scratch? Can he scratch a few tickets to every scroungers wealth, maybe sate every...
Read more

Palestine

-
Image
Israel has long implemented a policy of demolishing homes belonging to Palestinians accused of killing Israelis. This extends to the extended family of those accused. Basically, it is a cycle of revenge and deprivation. Anyone with a locum of thought can easily see what the Israeli regime is doing: it is a scorched earth policy on steroids. And still the fighting goes on unabated, albeit mostly away from the larger global stage. Apartheid is a policy or system of discrimination on grounds of race. It can loosely apply to systematic segregation on gender and religious basis. Quite obviously, what the Israeli regime is carrying on with and in the Palestinian Territories is a form of apartheid.  Zones of French and British influence and control proposed in the Sykes-Picot Agreement¹ Now, as with everything inane in 20th century history, colonialism played a massive role in the état de choses today. As with India and Pakistani, the British royally bent over and historically...
Read more