Growing difficulties to enjoy the booty

During the recent meetings of the World Bank, as a result of the current mess surrounding its president Mr. Wolfowitz, some issues were unfortunately relegated to the background.

One of them refers to the announcement of the Initiative for the Recovery of Stolen Assets, which, together with other agreements such as OECD’s against corruption, shows how the world progresses, very slowly but safely, on the path of better global governance.

The ease by which until now thieves managed to hide their loot is shameful; sometimes even under the noses of their victims. There is of course still a long way for an initiative like this to become an effective instrument ... but perhaps in less time than what the outlaws in the world suspect.

Parallel to official initiatives, the technological advances that allow access, archive and send information is converting civil society, citizens, whether we like it or not, into real-time investigators. It’s not they are searching, but when they do see a knowingly corrupt, and have their cell phone with camera in hand, they will take a photo of him in his moments of enjoyment, which will swell the truth-files until these explode.

In the same way, all those concealment of ill-gotten goods services, to which some corrupt countries have been dedicated are becoming more expensive; as that international community of civil societies develops and understands they have all better row in the same direction, if they are to have a chance for survival on an ever shrinking planet.

Finally and observing how in Canada an ordinary court recently began a trial on violations of human rights (the genocide in Rwanda), the day should not be far away when one of those millions of emigrants in the world who have been much forced to emigrate as a consequence of corrupt acts by their rulers, could successfully sue one he finds enjoying ill-gotten money in their new alternative country. The tests you would need to enter your claims, would all be sent to you on the web.

Does the above threaten the sovereignty of nations? Sadly yes! So therefore it is always much better for nations to free themselves, sovereignly, from their own corrupt.

One of the 4,292,466 shadow citizens of a shadow nation. (Insolently there are still records to be scrutinized)

Translated from El Universal

Distinctively Alike

We so frequently hear about the importance of finding ones identity that sometimes we forget that our human reality is also to share so many identities and so that even though we should feel identified we also need to fight against being miniaturized and put into little boxes as is preached for better than none by Amartya Sen the Nobel Price in Economics who also a professor in philosophy, might also line up for a Nobel Peace Price.

Sen, in his most recent book Identity and Violence attacks vehemently those who seed divisions fomenting bad identities, quite frequently with bad intentions. From his own memories as a child in the India of the 40’s Sen remembers “the speed with which the broad human beings of January were suddenly transformed into the ruthless Hindus and fierce Muslims of July . . . hundreds of thousands perished at the hands of people who, led by the commanders of carnage, killed others on behalf of their ‘own people’”. Sen concludes that “Violence is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible people, championed by proficient artisans of terror”.

Unfortunately, Sen does not face difficulties finding more recent examples and Rwanda, Yugoslavia and even the prisons of Abu Graib are all places where terror find its origin in a “you know, they are so different from us”. Of course from Sen’s book to our Venezuelan reality of "pro chavistas and not chavistas”, those divisive and senseless identities that we did not even dream of less than a decade ago, there is too little distance for us not to feel deeply anguished.

Friends, let us at all times discredit those who try to instigate us buying into an identity that only looks to divide and let us instead search for with run-amok-humanity all those identities that unites us, like Venezuelan, fathers, mothers, children and our taste for arepas.

Friends, let us not allow anyone to divide us, in us and them, because as humans, in each one of us there is so much of them, and in each one of them there is so very much of us, and so that, at the moment of truth, we are all in fact distinctively alike. If this sound like a sure recipe for a collective multiple personality disorder, so be it, the mental health of our Venezuela depends on it.

Translated from El Universal, Caracas, June 1, 2006

PS. Social media, which allows polarization and redistribution profiteers to send out their hate and envy messages at zero marginal cost, has become social harmony’s worst enemy.

Other posts in which I started to fight odious polarization profiteers

Red and blue, or, red or blue

Communications in a polarized world