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Carlos Slim: In the money, but who would know it? | Paul Harris
Mar 14th
The new king of the rich list is well-known in his native Mexico, which some wags dub Slimlandia. And now his low profile abroad is about to go sky high
Until recently, articles introducing the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim have often run under some variation of the headline: “The richest man you’ve never heard of.” That is unlikely to be the case for much longer.
Slim was anointed last week by Forbes magazine as the richest man in the world, unseating Microsoft founder Bill Gates. He is worth $53.5bn, which is not a bad sum for a man born to an immigrant father in the teeming and desperately poor metropolis of Mexico City.
At first glance Slim’s unseating of Gates seems counter-intuitive. Gates is a product of the modern information age that has transformed the world’s economy in ways not seen since the Industrial Revolution. Meanwhile, Slim has made his fortune building an old-fashioned conglomerate empire with a finger in every pie from cement to telephones to restaurants.
Gates’s business hails from Seattle, one of the most cutting-edge cities in the world for technological innovation, and Gates himself lives in a lavish, ultra-modern home. Slim comes from the relative backwater of Mexico, a country whose economy traditionally bleeds poor workers north across the Rio Grande in search of riches. He struggles with computers, and even mobile phones, and still to a large extent relies on simple charts he drafts himself. He lives in a modest six-bedroom mansion that is luxurious by the standards of most of his fellow countrymen but small when compared to many much less successful Mexicans.
Yet now Slim sits on top of the global billionaire pile, an unlikely king who wields a power known only to a few, and most of them tend to have entire countries at their beck and call. And he has done it the old-fashioned way. He buys when prices are low, then watches his wealth accumulate. Then he buys again. He has been the master of the fire sale, swooping in to snap up bargains in the midst of panics and sell-offs. All of which actually makes the current state of the world uniquely suited to a man of Slim’s talents. For, in the middle of a recession, prices have rarely been lower. Slim is already buying again, snapping up stakes in Citigroup and the New York Times. In 2008, he became the largest shareholder in the newspaper and, in some estimates, helped save it from bankruptcy.
Do not look for Slim’s wealth to go down anytime soon or for him to disappear from the headlines. The world’s subeditors are now going to have to think of more original ways to describe a man set to become a household name.
Carlos Slim Helú was born the fifth of six children to Lebanese-Mexicans who ran successful small businesses in Mexico City. His mother, Linda, came from a distinguished family of Lebanese origin who had brought the first Arabic printing press to Mexico in the 19th century. His father, Julián Slim Haddad, was more of a classic immigrant-on-the-make who had arrived in the country in 1902 in order to avoid conscription into the Ottoman army.
In this marriage of the artsy middle-class girl with a working-class striver it was clear that the influence of his father won out. Julián had set up a dry goods store and then invested the profits in property during the Mexican revolution. He gave all his children a ledger and taught them how to keep track of simple financial transactions. Slim took that lesson to heart.
Slim started young. Even on the school playground he would carefully monitor the trades in baseball cards he made with other children so he could see if he was coming out ahead (he generally was). By 11 he had already bought his first government savings bonds. By 15 he had invested in Banco Nacional de México. He discovered a genuine fascination and obsession with numbers and the elaborate dances they make on a balance sheet. He could also see where those dances could be turned into making serious cash. He studied civil engineering at university and kept his passion for maths going by teaching algebra on the side. On graduation he became one of a clique called “los Casabolseros” or “the stock market boys”, young wheeler-dealers in the nascent world of the Mexican stock market. He started snapping up businesses, turning around a couple of companies, and then came the most important year of his life.
In 1982 Mexico plunged into economic crisis and, spurred on by a rising oil price, the government nationalised the banks. The country’s elite sold off their assets. There, waiting on the sidelines, as his father had taught him, was Slim. By the time the panic was over he had picked up dozens of companies at rock-bottom prices. Slim was now a major player and he only got bigger. He grew close to the rising star of Carlos Salinas, a modernising politician who became president in 1988. Wags dubbed the pair the “Carlos and Charlie show” after a local chain of rowdy bars.
But no one was laughing when a wave of privatisations began at what critics said were a series of undervalued deals. In 1990 Slim snapped up Telmex, the former state telephone firm. It was a sign of the times. Salinas’s privatisations created a new veneer of super wealth in Mexico. In 1991 the country had just two billionaires on Forbes’s rich list. Three years later, it had 24 and Slim was among the biggest. Just as Slim had often proved the value of knowing numbers, he also proved the value of knowing people.
His empire has grown since then, and is now vast in scope. He owns controlling interests in at least 222 different companies and minor stakes in countless more. By some estimates his firm accounts for a third of Mexico’s leading stock market index and some 7% of its annual economic output. By comparison John Rockefeller at the peak of his powers as a 19th-century industrialist was worth just 2.5% of American gross domestic product. The sheer scope of Slim’s holdings is breathtaking. It is virtually impossible for Mexicans to go about their lives without in some way contributing to his fortune. Some say Mexicans are really living in “Slimlandia”. They are born in Slim’s hospitals, drive on his Tarmac, smoke his tobacco. They build their houses from his cement, eat in his restaurants, talk on his phones, and sleep in bed linen made in his factories.
Many argue that creates an effective monopoly in too many industries, especially telecoms, allowing Slim to keep prices high. They see his tentacles stretching throughout the Mexican economy and complain that it stifles the county’s ability to generate small, independent companies. In Slim’s great power they see a suffocating blanket that helps keep Mexico poor and its people still looking to El Norte for their salvation. There may well be an economic truth to that argument (though Slim would argue against it). But there is also likely a hint of racial prejudice there. Mexicans have a mixed relationship with the world’s richest man. There is pride of having one of their own at the peak of the world’s financial pyramid. But there is distrust over his Lebanese background, though Slim himself says he knows no phrase in Arabic apart from swear words.
Detractors aside, there is something universally appealing about Slim. The rich may be different to the rest of us, but Slim is a quite human billionaire. His modest mansion reflects none of the egomania so common among other industrialists and billionaires, including Gates. He owns no yacht, nor any home outside Mexico (what is the point, he says, when hotels are cheaper and less trouble). He does not spend much of his huge wealth and indeed is still known to drive a hard bargain for even day-to-day things. One friend has recounted a holiday spent with Slim in Italy during which the billionaire haggled for two hours to knock the price of a tie down by $10.
He is still a family man and has his family over for a communal meal every week, just like millions of other Mexicans. He married well – the Lebanese-Mexican Soumaya Domit Gemayel – who was the love of his life. When she died in 1999 he built an art museum and named it after her.
He is not a fixture in the gossip columns and has already handed large chunks of the running of his businesses to his three sons. Not that he will ever retire fully.
In a life lived mostly on a curiously normal scale, Slim has indulged a monumental passion for art. His home is stuffed with sculptures by Rodin and paintings by Renoir and Van Gogh.
Yet it is still the numbers game that he loves most of all. Nor is that a game he will ever retire from. He sees his business not so much as a trading empire, but more like the works of art that adorn his walls.
“Artists don’t just stop doing what they are doing because they have painted a beautiful painting,” he told one interviewer who asked about his retirement plans “They carry on until they die.”
Born Carlos Slim Helu, 28 January 1940, in Mexico City. He married Soumaya Domit Gemayel, another Maronite Christian of Lebanese descent. Six children.
THE SLIM FILE
Best of times 1982. During Mexico’s crisis year while all around him were losing their heads, Slim kept his and stuck to his maxim that buying in a panic is a good idea. It was. He emerged unscathed and on course to be one of the richest men in Mexico and then the world.
Worst of times 1999. Slim’s beloved wife died. Friends say he has been married to his business ever since.
What he says “When you live for others’ opinions, you are dead. I don’t want to live thinking about how I’ll be remembered.”
What others say “It’s virtually cradle to grave. It’s Slimlandia. You are engulfed by Slim in Mexico.” George Grayson, a Mexico expert at the College of William & Mary, in discussing Slim’s impact on the Mexican economy.
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The wisdom of recycling trade surpluses | George Irvin
Mar 13th
Look to Keynes for a way to rebalance the world economy – force surplus countries to spend money in deficit countries
How is the global economy to be rebalanced? Is there a distinction worth making between Chinese and German mercantilism? One can argue that China’s astonishing growth has sucked in other countries’ imports while lifting millions out of poverty. But growth continues to be export-led, and the Central Bank of China has accumulated the world’s largest stash of dollar-denominated assets. Germany runs an even larger current account surplus, but much of it is recycled into buying companies in the US and elsewhere.
Is exchange rate adjustment the answer? While the US Congress seems to believe so, a large revaluation would in practice serve nobody’s interests. Chinese export-driven growth rate would slow, and Americans would find themselves poorer in real terms having to buy dearer goods at Wal-Mart.
In the EU, things are slightly different because the euro has appreciated strongly against the dollar. But appreciation has had only had a marginal effect on Germany’s surplus; Germans have accepted slower wage growth as a price worth paying for the prize of being the world’s leading exporter. By any measure, exchange rate adjustment – even allowing for lags – seems to have done little to rebalance the world economy.
The financial crisis has complicated matters, with fiscal deficits growing alarmingly. The German response to resulting downward pressure on the euro has been to insist that all countries should balance the books like Germany. But as Martin Wolf correctly observes: “Germany is in a trap of its own devising. It wants its neighbours to be as like itself as possible. They cannot be, because its deficient domestic demand cannot be universalised”.
In macroeconomics, the basic savings identity says that the sum of the private sector surplus (of savings over spending) and of government’s fiscal deficit must equal the current account (or external) balance. Thus, if a country is in approximate external balance, but an external shock like the credit crisis leads to a sudden increase in the private sector surplus, this must be mirrored by a similar increase in the fiscal deficit. In plain English, as the private sector pays off its debts by spending less, this is reflected by an increase in public sector spending.
There are only two ways out: the first is getting the private sector to start spending again and the second is for net exports to expand rapidly. The problem with the first solution is that, by definition, private consumption falls in a credit crunch; in consequence, business confidence falls dragging down private investment.
The problem with the second solution is slightly more complex and involves what philosophers call the “fallacy of composition“. While one country may be able to boost its exports, all countries taken together cannot. Because my exports are your imports, everyone trying to boost their exports simultaneously by means of, say, currency devaluation leads to a 1930s style “beggar my neighbour” result. This is broadly the logical flaw of those who argue that Britain was fortunate in not joining the euro and retaining its own currency.
What of the weaker members of a currency union, eg Greece and the “Club Med” countries? The German solution, currently dressed up as a debate about the merits of a European Monetary Fund (EMF), is for all countries to adhere to strict fiscal discipline and slash the public deficit. The EMF in its present guise is simply another version of the EU stability and growth pact. This “solution” only works through cutting the real wage and driving down national income to such a degree that the private sector surplus falls and imports contract drastically – ie though expenditure cutting rather than expenditure switching. The rub is of course that were a number of eurozone countries forced to adjust in this way, Germany’s current account surplus would contract.
Is there another answer? John Maynard Keynes proposed a perfectly sensible solution at Bretton Woods in 1944, namely, forcing surplus countries to spend their extra money in deficit countries, thus both their private spending and export capacity. The “Keynes solution” as is has been dubbed by the US economist Paul Davidson, was unfortunately vetoed by the Americans. In fairness, one must add that America rechannelled part of its surplus at the time into the Marshall Plan, thus enabling Europe to grow and to overcome its deficit.
Under such a scheme applied to the eurozone, the EMF would use the German euro surplus to create new sources of income and jobs in the Club Med countries, thus raising their ability to buy future German exports. In the absence of an EMF, a new eurozone economic structure which provided it with a Federal Treasury could capture such surpluses and direct them towards an ‘extended’ solidarity fund.
Too idealistic? Not at all. Just as Keynes and Marshall recognised that the failure to reflate Europe after the war might be catastrophic for the west as a whole, so Germany should draw the same lesson today – just as China now seems to be recognising that the new mercantilism leads nowhere. Recycling trade surpluses is a win-win game. Alternatively, insisting on budgetary balance will almost certainly lead to prolonged recession with high social costs.
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Official: it’s fine for racists to teach | Joseph Harker
Mar 13th
By refusing to bar BNP members from the classroom, the government is allowing these vile people to spread their hatred
The BNP’s march into the mainstream moves forward. Fresh from their top-table seat on the BBC’s Question Time (which marked International Women’s Day with an all-female audience; it marked last year’s Black History Month with an invite to Nick Griffin), party members have now been told that it’s OK for them to teach our children.
In a review which will shock many members of the teaching profession, not to mention ethnic-minority parents, Maurice Smith, former chief inspector of schools, concludes: “I do not believe that barring teachers or other members of the wider school workforce from membership of legitimate [sic] organisations which may promote racism is necessary.”
He reaches his decision because, in the last seven years, only four teachers, and two governors, have been found to be BNP members, and only nine incidents of teachers making racist remarks or holding racist materials have been uncovered. Banning BNP members would, he says, therefore be a “taking a very large sledgehammer to crack a minuscule nut”.
Two things here are breathtaking: one is that a man who held such a senior position in the running of Britain’s schools has such a one-dimensional and uninformed view of the issue of racism in our education system. Is he not aware of the underachievement statistics for many of Britain’s racial minorities, widely believed to be party fuelled by low teacher expectations? Is he not aware of the massive rates of exclusions and disciplinary procedures against black boys?
Does he really believe that racism is all about making offensive remarks, rather than promoting, openly or covertly, a system of inequality and injustice? If that’s the case, then, with people like him in charge, no wonder so little has been achieved in improving these statistics over the years.
He lists a number of bureaucratic “safeguards” to prevent racism in schools, but this is utterly unconvincing. Schools equal-opportunity policies are notoriously ineffective in making real differences, merely satisfying the box-ticking mentality which pervades the education system. And the “duty to promote social cohesion” is equality easy to subvert, the term often being used as a cover for anti-Muslim propaganda.
The second shocking development here is that his recommendations were immediately accepted in full by the schools secretary, Ed Balls.
Actually, given that all three parties are crawling over each other to win the votes of the “white working class” – whom they now subconsciously equate with racism and bigotry – it shouldn’t be a surprise.
Let’s be clear: the BNP is a racist party. It is anti-migrant and defines those of non-white racial origin as permanent second-class citizens, regardless of whether they were born here. It has been forced against its will to admit ethnic-minority members, but that doesn’t mean it’s suddenly become a party of race equality. In fact, the handful of minority members the party may attract will be fellow Muslim-hating extremists.
So when Ed Balls, in his reply to Smith, begins, “There is no place for racism in schools”, he shows himself to be a complete hypocrite by then going on to agree with BNP teachers.
If he’s OK with the party in the classroom, then he should be honest at least and say: “Yes, there is a place for racism in schools.” And, to black and Asian families in particular: “Yes, parents, when you leave your five-year-old at the school gates, we don’t care if you’re handing them over to someone who despises your race, despises your faith, and who wants to terrorise you and run you out of the country. As long as they don’t say it so anyone can hear.”
The complacency, as the BNP gains council seats and could possibly even gain its first MP this year, is staggering.
It is often said that for evil to flourish, all it takes is for good people to do nothing. As the BNP’s message of hate moves onwards, it is time for good people to take a stand.
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How others see Mary Robinson – and how she sees herself
Mar 13th
New clothes, new hairdo – How others see Robinson
“She stood at the dangerous cross-roads of sex, politics and religion for two decades and emerged not merely unscathed but with the respect of even her most ferocious enemies.”
Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole, in 1996, when Robinson was briefly touted as a successor to Boutros Boutros-Ghali as UN secretary-general
“She has to have new clothes and her new look and her new hairdo, and she has the new interest in family, being a mother and all that kind of thing. But none of us, you know, none of us who knew Mary Robinson very well in previous incarnations, ever heard her claiming to be a great wife and mother.”
Pádraig Flynn, Fianna Fáil politician. He later apologised
“Robinson presided over little more than an intellectual pogrom against Jews and Israel.”
Academic Michael Rubin on the 2001 world conference against racism in South Africa, from which the US and Israel withdrew
I felt shamed, shamed, shamed’ – In her own words
“I was elected by the women of Ireland, who instead of rocking the cradle, rocked the system.”
Inaugural address as president of Ireland, 1990
“As president directly elected by the people of Ireland, I will have the most democratic job in the country. I’ll be able to look [the PM] in the eye and tell him to back off.”
“I felt shamed by what I saw, shamed, shamed. I have such a sense of what the world must take responsibility for.”
On visiting Somalia in 1992, when, uncharacteristically, she broke down in tears
“In a society where the rights and potential of women are constrained, no man can be truly free. He may have power, but he will not have freedom.”
“Mrs Robinson means something private to Nick and I.”
On deciding to take her husband’s name not because it was traditional, but because she had to fight to marry him
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Letters: Fear and loathing in New Labour
Mar 13th
In light of the articles by Simon Jenkins (The bankers lied. And Darling, merely a puppet on their string, knows it, 12 March) and Mehdi Hasan (It’s defeatist nonsense to talk of a crisis of leftwing thinking, 12 March), it seems evident that there is the need for a rearticulating of the political discourse. The hegemony of neoliberal thinking has defined the political space for 30 years, so much so that even in the present crisis, when we all should be marching on the streets against the bankers, New Labour is still running in fear of framing the debate in social democratic terms.
For the 30 years the right have had a stranglehold on how we define freedom. The political classes have been fearful of any reference to the state as a means of solving problems. Individual freedom, essentially defined in terms of freedom from the state, has been their mantra. For example, George Osborne’s first reaction to the nationalisation of the banks was to jump enthusiastically up and down, claiming that old socialist nationalisation is here again. Cameron is careful that his slogan that there is such a thing as society is followed up by a clear rejection of any idea that this means a bigger state.
The current crisis has left both parties searching for ways to rearticulate a progressive politics, but it is up to the left to grab this opportunity, because they won’t have another like this, to reshape the political discourse and redefine the state and its relation to individual freedom. This is a hegemonic struggle to reclaim the terms of liberty and equality in social democratic terms.
Robert Proni
London
• Donald Hirsch is quite right to say that decent employers should pay a living wage of at least £7.14 an hour, and more in expensive areas (The wages of dignity, 10 March). However, we also need to realise that the legal minimum wage of £5.80 an hour is not being paid to many thousands of employees. The root of the problem is that the statutory enforcement powers are held by Revenue & Customs, and they are failing to do their job properly. That is hardly surprising as there are only 123 enforcement staff for the whole of the UK.
In Hackney, where I live, only 258 investigations have been carried out in seven years. Anecdotal evidence of illegal avoidance abounds, but the onus is on the individual to complain, and few feel able to do so. Ideally the enforcement powers should be transferred to local authorities, but in the meantime high-profile awareness campaigns could be organised by councils with advice and information points located in their buildings. This policy will be part of the Hackney Labour manifesto for the forthcoming local elections.
Tim Webb
London
• Neil Kinnock (Letters, 10 March) utterly fails to comprehend the burning sense of disillusionment that has driven so many former Labour supporters either into cynical abandonment of politics or, like John Kampfner, to embrace the Lib Dems. The charge against the New Labour project is not that it did not deliver the benefits he lists. It did, and there were others which curiously he omits, above all the lancing of the Northern Ireland carbuncle and significant constitutional reforms – devolution and human rights legislation. The charge is that it squandered its massive parliamentary majorities and the goodwill that the electorate bestowed on it to transform a divided, sick society.
On the contrary, it took to its bosom the neoliberal ideology that nourished that divide, extending privatisation; it renounced and even demonised public sector initiatives and went back on the welfare state concordat that was the hallmark of the postwar Labour settlement. So, Labour administrations have presided over the widest gulf ever between the haves and have-nots and now the inevitable massive recession. We have witnessed a generation of politicians intent on feathering their own nests, the expenses “scandal” being a minor part of this. Not to speak, as Neil Kinnock dare not, of the criminal adventure that was the Iraq war. I, a onetime Labour activist, like John Kampfner, have joined the Lib Dems, who I see as a catalyst for, and working partner of, a rejuvenated Labour party once it is purged of the New Labour virus.
Benedict Birnberg
London
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The war on terror: taking Jihad Jane | Marina Hyde
Mar 12th
A civilised justice system might have seen Colleen LaRose’s eccentricities as requiring help. Instead, she may face life in prison
Without wishing to undermine her twin commitments to holy war and talking to cats, the self-styled Jihad Jane might be the war on terror’s least effective bogeywoman. In fact, let’s not be gender specific. She might well be its least effective bogeyperson, making “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, as we refer to that chap who couldn’t even set a match to his own trainers, look like the KGB’s deadliest agent.
Jihad Jane’s real name is Colleen LaRose, and in between caring for her partner’s sick father, this suburban Pennsylvanian is alleged to have put postings on YouTube in which she made herself available for any fundamentalist situations vacant. Last year she travelled to Ireland, where she met some people allegedly plotting to kill a cartoonist, before flying home and being arrested on her return. She has been in custody since, according to federal documents unsealed this week – and when the news broke, LaRose’s neighbours forewent the usual cliches about her having “kept herself to herself”, declaring instead that she talked to cats a lot. Mm. As our leaders are given to telling us, tapping their nose in reference to their security clearance: if you saw what I saw, it would curdle your blood.
Even Lars Vilks – the Swedish artist whose sensationally witty cartoon of Muhammad’s head on a dog sparked the alleged plot with which LaRose is accused of being associated – appears dismissively amused, pitching the affair as a caper movie, “with this fantastic name Jihad Jane”. Vilks described his alleged nemeses as not exactly professionals and “rather low-tech”, hitting a note of ironic understatement indiscernible in what we know of his work.
The movie Colleen was presumably thinking about as she settled on her nickname was GI Jane, in which a super-buff Demi Moore trains as a Navy Seal and has to retrieve some weapons-grade plutonium from the Libyans. As a 4ft 11 Christine Hamilton lookalike so luminously inept she’d already been warned once by the FBI before she was finally arrested, you have to marvel at Colleen’s self-delusion. However, I’d prefer for the authorities to conjure up footage of her at one of those terrorist training camps in the Hindu Kush, where disaffected westerners have to scramble under rope nets and suchlike, even though their missions are only ever going to consist of doing something antisocial in an aisle seat. As a rare woman at boot camp, Colleen would be a shoo-in for Jihad Benjamin, a winsome modern reboot of the Private Benjamin franchise.
The trailer line for the Goldie Hawn original was “The army was no laughing matter till Judy Benjamin joined it”, and you might agree that the forces of evil ranked against us were similarly mirthless until a pint-sized cat-lady brought the funny. Yet according to the US justice department, the fact that “a woman from suburban America agreed to carry out murder overseas and to provide material support to terrorists, underscores the evolving nature of the threat we face”. Does it? I yield to no one in my admiration for the calibre of evildoers paraded before us in the cause of justifying ever higher anti-terrorism spending and the systematic erosion of individual liberties, but the LaRose business appears yet another instance of a sledgehammer being used to crack a nut.
Just as in the case of Pentagon hacker Gary McKinnon, and on a much smaller level in that of Jack Straw heckler Walter Wolfgang, one has to question the moral wisdom (and the PR nous) of deploying the full force of anti-terror laws against the demonstrably weak or eccentric. A truly strong society would have the sense merely to leave oddballs out there – partly because the world is full of them, and partly to undermine the myth of a crack network of brilliant extremists who walk among us.
Jurists have long been fascinated by the so-called doctrine of impossible attempt, the question of whether someone can really be punished for attempted crimes that have infinitesimal or no chance of succeeding. Classic examples are trying to pick an empty pocket, or an attempt to murder a man by voodoo. It remains to be seen precisely how cackhanded were LaRose’s bunglings in what she imagined to be the world of international terrorism, but it doesn’t exactly have the flavour of the Mossad’s recent trip to Dubai.
What has come to light since the news broke, however, are police records of LaRose’s 2005 suicide attempt, reports of alcohol problems, and friends’ accounts of the depression caused by the death of her father. Presumably all of this was picked up by the FBI during their lengthy surveillance of her, and in a more civilised and intelligent justice system LaRose might have been identified as a person with a case of something or other, who could be reasonably handled by a couple of hours a week with a mental health professional. Yet she now faces life in prison if convicted.
Having said all that, I see I’ve made the textbook error of ignoring the fabled deterrent argument that governments like to advance. Do forgive me. If there are any troubled catwomen out there thinking of auditioning for Ocean’s Jihad, this case will no doubt give them pause.
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MEP defects to Liberal Democrats after Tory links with extremists
Mar 12th
Edward McMillan-Scott tells David Cameron he is leaving party because it propagates ‘extremism abroad’
A former leader of the Conservatives in the European parliament today defected to the Liberal Democrats in protest at the Tories’ decision to form a group with “extremist” politicians.
Edward McMillan-Scott, a veteran campaigner for human rights who led the Tory group in Strasbourg between 1997-2001, told David Cameron he was leaving the party because it propagates “extremism abroad”.
In a statement released to coincide with the opening of the Lib Dem spring conference, the vice-president of the European parliament said: “I have long fought against totalitarianism and the extremism and religious persecution it brings. It was wrong of Cameron to associate with MEPs who have extremist pasts.”
McMillan-Scott was deprived of the Tory whip last year after he stood successfully for the vice-presidency of the European parliament. This meant that the Tories’ key new European ally, the Polish MEP Michal Kaminski, was deprived of the post.
Kaminski then insisted on assuming the leadership of the Tories’ new group, the European Conservatives and Reformists, formed after last year’s European Parliamentary elections in the wake of Cameron’s pledge to withdraw from the mainstream EPP-ED group.
Kaminski, a member of the rightwing Law and Justice party, opposed a national apology in 2001 for the notorious anti-semitic pogrom at Jedwabne in which hundreds of Polish Jews were burnt to death in a barn in 1941.
In a letter to Cameron, McMillan-Scott wrote: “You continue to refuse to accept that Michal Kaminski, who now leads the ECR and against whom I stood and won re-election as vice-president of the European parliament last July, has had ‘antisemitic, homophobic and racist links’. You say that you are against extremism at home, yet you propitiate it abroad.”
In an article for the Yorkshire Post the MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber wrote: “It was wrong of Cameron to associate with MEPs who have extremist pasts in his new European alliance.
“Next Tuesday, his associates in Latvia will no doubt join, as usual, in commemoration of the role of the Waffen SS during the war. His partners in Poland will continue to voice their opinions on the vile anti-Semitic Radio Maryja and preach homophobia.”
McMillan-Scott’s remarks about Latvia were a reference to Roberts Zile, a member of the For Fatherland and Freedom Party (LNNK), some of whose members commemorate the Latvian Waffen SS. Zile says the ceremony, attended by members of other political parties, is to commemorate soldiers fighting for independence from the Soviet Union.
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Protect the drug giants’ patents – and harm the health of the poor?
Mar 12th
India has become “the pharmacy of the world”, home to dozens of generic copycat drug companies that have been producing expensive medicines at dirt-cheap prices that the poorest countries can afford. Famously, Mumbai-based Cipla forced down the prices of Aids drugs some years ago with the launch of a twice a day pill, which then became the staple treatment in many sub-Saharan countries.
But Medecins sans Frontieres, also known as Doctors without Borders, which played a role in that epic turnaround, is now warning that a Free Trade Agreement between the EU and India could ensure that sort of Robin Hood episode never happens again. Yesterday, its supporters demonstrated in New Delhi. They fear the EU, negotiating behind closed doors, will push or cajole India into recognising tough new intellectual property rights. The winners, it fears, will be Big Pharma, while the losers will be the impoverished sick.
This was Loon Gangte, president of the Delhi Network of Positive People (DNP+):
We are marching to call on the Indian government not to trade away our lives. Lifelong treatment for people living with HIV depends on continued access to newer AIDS medicines. Because of international trade rules that India has already signed in the past, some of our newer AIDS medicines are already patented and completely unaffordable. We are protesting against India’s accepting terms that would further compromise access to life-saving medicine.
This is a complicated issue, which is why it gets little attention in the mainstream press. Trade rules and agreements are tough going for any but the dedicated and the nerdy. But essentially, for some years now Big Pharma has been trying to use its influence over politicians in the US and in Europe (who don’t want to lose the investment, jobs and taxes that drug companies bring at home) to demand tighter rules on the Indian copycats. Patents normally last for 20 years, so drug companies can recoup the millions they spend on R&D. They want India to observe their patents, just as Europe and the US do.
India gets cheaper drugs if the generic whizzkids can knock off copycat versions of the blockbusters. While India is middle-income and getting richer, unfortunately a tough trade agreement with the EU would probably penalise the Indian poor. But it also threatens the poorest of the poor, in Africa and other parts of Asia. Look in an African health centre and all the drugs are Indian-made. With a growing need for new and better HIV drugs in sub-Saharan countries, it may be no time to curb the Indian generic manufacturers.
Meanwhile the lobbying for more money for HIV/Aids moved seamlessly this week from London to Washington, where Dr Peter Mugyenyi, director and founder of Uganda’s Joint Clinical Research Center, gave evidence on the Hill. The Center is the biggest implementer of Pepfar (the president’s emergency plan for Aids relief) funds in East Africa and Mugyenyi was one of a handful of people in the room when Pepfar was conceived in 2003. He says that cuts in US funds for Aids are already beginning to bite. This is what he told me:
I’m panicking about it. That’s how bad it is because I’m foreseeing the return of the catastrophic times of the 90s, when everything in Africa came to a standstill and the hospitals couldn’t function and the staff fled the health service – and many of them died. They couldn’t get access to treatment and had nothing to offer their patients. The patients were abandoning the health facilities and flocking to witch doctors and traditional healers who were clearly helpless.
Could we go back there? Mugyenyi says he is already seeing people with newly-diagnosed HIV turned away from clinics as the orders are given only to carry on treating those already on the drugs. The money has been frozen, he says. And yet only 4 million are on treatment and 10 million need to be – and the WHO’s new guidelines say people with HIV should be treated earlier, which would perhaps double the numbers who should be getting drugs.
Read also Chris Collins of the Foundation for Aids Research in the Huffington Post on the hearings in the House and Senate over the Aids budget.
But good news from the Commission on Narcotic Drugs meeting in Vienna this week. After years of blocking resolutions to encourage access to clean needles to protect drug users from HIV, the Obama administration made a break with the past. This was the verdict of Professor Gerry Stimson, Executive Director of the International Harm Reduction Association:
Real progress was made here this week in Vienna – some countries that in the past tried to obstruct resolutions dealing with harm reduction and human rights have backed off. The big – and welcome – development is the US position. The fresh approach of the Obama administration to the UN and to international drug and HIV/AIDS policy is making itself felt. US officials here for the first time were able to voice their support for HIV-related risk prevention measures, and for HIV prevention firmly based in human rights. Let’s hope this continues to play through in the years ahead – if so we are going in the direction of a more rational global response to drug-related harm.
So all eyes are now on Russia, where 65% of HIV infections come from injecting drug users, and which turns a blind eye.
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Amnesty report condemns US death rates of women in childbirth
Mar 12th
Those from poor, African American and Native American backgrounds most at risk
The death rate of women giving birth in the US is worse than in 40 other countries, including nearly all the industrialised countries, Amnesty International said today in a report that describes the country’s approach to maternity care as “disgraceful and scandalous”.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the likelihood of a woman dying in childbirth in the US is five times greater than in Greece.
The US has some of the best medical care in the world, but Amnesty says the lives of poor, uninsured, African American and Native American women are put at risk by neglect.
“This country’s extraordinary record of medical advancement makes its haphazard approach to maternal care all the more scandalous and disgraceful,” said US Amnesty executive director Larry Cox. “Good maternal care should not be considered a luxury available only to those who can access the best hospitals and the best doctors. Women should not die in the richest country on earth from preventable complications and emergencies.
“Mothers die not because the United States can’t provide good care, but because it lacks the political will to make sure good care is available to all women.”
The US ranks 41st in the WHO’s league table of maternal mortality, with a risk of women dying in childbirth at one in 4,800. Top of the league is Ireland with one in 47,600, which has partly to do with the small population, followed by Bosnia and Herzegovina and then Italy and Greece. The UK ranks 26th with a risk of one in 8,200.
The damning report comes in a year of unprecedented international effort to reduce the death rate among mothers in developing countries, which will include a major conference called Women Deliver in Washington in the summer. The cause has been taken up by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as well as Sarah Brown in the UK.
That context makes the Amnesty report all the more shocking. Death rates among women in pregnancy and labour have doubled in the US from 6.6 per 100,000 in 1987 to 13.3 per 100,000 in 2006.
Although some of the increase is due to better data collection, there is no doubt that deaths have risen while the technology and know-how to prevent them has improved.
Whatever form they finally take, President Obama’s healthcare reforms will not resolve the crisis of unavailable and unaffordable maternal care, says Amnesty.
The reform proposals will still leave millions without cover and do not address race discrimination, systemic failures and lack of accountability. Amnesty is urging Obama to set up an office of maternal health to address the issues directly.
The report, Deadly Delivery, reveals that severe pregnancy-related complications that nearly cause death – known as near misses – are rising at an alarming rate, increasing by 25% since 1998. Currently nearly 34,000 women annually experience a “near miss” during delivery.
Discrimination is costing lives, it says. Women who are poor, who are African American, Native American or immigrants and those who do not speak English face serious barriers in obtaining care. One in four women do not get the antenatal check-ups they need, which can warn of pregnancy complications. Among African American and Native American women, one in three go without antenatal care.
One in five women of reproductive age (15-44), amounting to about 13 million, are not insured. Half of them are women of colour, says the report. The burdensome bureaucratic procedures involved in Medicaid enrolment delay women access to check-ups, risking their lives.
Nearly a third of all deliveries in the US are by caesarean section, which is a rate twice as high as that recommended by the WHO. Caesareans carry a risk of death three times as high as natural birth.
Amnesty says that the death rate in the US is probably even higher than it appears, because there is no federal requirement for the reporting of deaths in childbirth.
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Carlos Slim: In the money, but who would know it? | Paul Harris
Mar 14th
Posted by Paul Harris in Business
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The new king of the rich list is well-known in his native Mexico, which some wags dub Slimlandia. And now his low profile abroad is about to go sky high
Until recently, articles introducing the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim have often run under some variation of the headline: “The richest man you’ve never heard of.” That is unlikely to be the case for much longer.
Slim was anointed last week by Forbes magazine as the richest man in the world, unseating Microsoft founder Bill Gates. He is worth $53.5bn, which is not a bad sum for a man born to an immigrant father in the teeming and desperately poor metropolis of Mexico City.
At first glance Slim’s unseating of Gates seems counter-intuitive. Gates is a product of the modern information age that has transformed the world’s economy in ways not seen since the Industrial Revolution. Meanwhile, Slim has made his fortune building an old-fashioned conglomerate empire with a finger in every pie from cement to telephones to restaurants.
Gates’s business hails from Seattle, one of the most cutting-edge cities in the world for technological innovation, and Gates himself lives in a lavish, ultra-modern home. Slim comes from the relative backwater of Mexico, a country whose economy traditionally bleeds poor workers north across the Rio Grande in search of riches. He struggles with computers, and even mobile phones, and still to a large extent relies on simple charts he drafts himself. He lives in a modest six-bedroom mansion that is luxurious by the standards of most of his fellow countrymen but small when compared to many much less successful Mexicans.
Yet now Slim sits on top of the global billionaire pile, an unlikely king who wields a power known only to a few, and most of them tend to have entire countries at their beck and call. And he has done it the old-fashioned way. He buys when prices are low, then watches his wealth accumulate. Then he buys again. He has been the master of the fire sale, swooping in to snap up bargains in the midst of panics and sell-offs. All of which actually makes the current state of the world uniquely suited to a man of Slim’s talents. For, in the middle of a recession, prices have rarely been lower. Slim is already buying again, snapping up stakes in Citigroup and the New York Times. In 2008, he became the largest shareholder in the newspaper and, in some estimates, helped save it from bankruptcy.
Do not look for Slim’s wealth to go down anytime soon or for him to disappear from the headlines. The world’s subeditors are now going to have to think of more original ways to describe a man set to become a household name.
Carlos Slim Helú was born the fifth of six children to Lebanese-Mexicans who ran successful small businesses in Mexico City. His mother, Linda, came from a distinguished family of Lebanese origin who had brought the first Arabic printing press to Mexico in the 19th century. His father, Julián Slim Haddad, was more of a classic immigrant-on-the-make who had arrived in the country in 1902 in order to avoid conscription into the Ottoman army.
In this marriage of the artsy middle-class girl with a working-class striver it was clear that the influence of his father won out. Julián had set up a dry goods store and then invested the profits in property during the Mexican revolution. He gave all his children a ledger and taught them how to keep track of simple financial transactions. Slim took that lesson to heart.
Slim started young. Even on the school playground he would carefully monitor the trades in baseball cards he made with other children so he could see if he was coming out ahead (he generally was). By 11 he had already bought his first government savings bonds. By 15 he had invested in Banco Nacional de México. He discovered a genuine fascination and obsession with numbers and the elaborate dances they make on a balance sheet. He could also see where those dances could be turned into making serious cash. He studied civil engineering at university and kept his passion for maths going by teaching algebra on the side. On graduation he became one of a clique called “los Casabolseros” or “the stock market boys”, young wheeler-dealers in the nascent world of the Mexican stock market. He started snapping up businesses, turning around a couple of companies, and then came the most important year of his life.
In 1982 Mexico plunged into economic crisis and, spurred on by a rising oil price, the government nationalised the banks. The country’s elite sold off their assets. There, waiting on the sidelines, as his father had taught him, was Slim. By the time the panic was over he had picked up dozens of companies at rock-bottom prices. Slim was now a major player and he only got bigger. He grew close to the rising star of Carlos Salinas, a modernising politician who became president in 1988. Wags dubbed the pair the “Carlos and Charlie show” after a local chain of rowdy bars.
But no one was laughing when a wave of privatisations began at what critics said were a series of undervalued deals. In 1990 Slim snapped up Telmex, the former state telephone firm. It was a sign of the times. Salinas’s privatisations created a new veneer of super wealth in Mexico. In 1991 the country had just two billionaires on Forbes’s rich list. Three years later, it had 24 and Slim was among the biggest. Just as Slim had often proved the value of knowing numbers, he also proved the value of knowing people.
His empire has grown since then, and is now vast in scope. He owns controlling interests in at least 222 different companies and minor stakes in countless more. By some estimates his firm accounts for a third of Mexico’s leading stock market index and some 7% of its annual economic output. By comparison John Rockefeller at the peak of his powers as a 19th-century industrialist was worth just 2.5% of American gross domestic product. The sheer scope of Slim’s holdings is breathtaking. It is virtually impossible for Mexicans to go about their lives without in some way contributing to his fortune. Some say Mexicans are really living in “Slimlandia”. They are born in Slim’s hospitals, drive on his Tarmac, smoke his tobacco. They build their houses from his cement, eat in his restaurants, talk on his phones, and sleep in bed linen made in his factories.
Many argue that creates an effective monopoly in too many industries, especially telecoms, allowing Slim to keep prices high. They see his tentacles stretching throughout the Mexican economy and complain that it stifles the county’s ability to generate small, independent companies. In Slim’s great power they see a suffocating blanket that helps keep Mexico poor and its people still looking to El Norte for their salvation. There may well be an economic truth to that argument (though Slim would argue against it). But there is also likely a hint of racial prejudice there. Mexicans have a mixed relationship with the world’s richest man. There is pride of having one of their own at the peak of the world’s financial pyramid. But there is distrust over his Lebanese background, though Slim himself says he knows no phrase in Arabic apart from swear words.
Detractors aside, there is something universally appealing about Slim. The rich may be different to the rest of us, but Slim is a quite human billionaire. His modest mansion reflects none of the egomania so common among other industrialists and billionaires, including Gates. He owns no yacht, nor any home outside Mexico (what is the point, he says, when hotels are cheaper and less trouble). He does not spend much of his huge wealth and indeed is still known to drive a hard bargain for even day-to-day things. One friend has recounted a holiday spent with Slim in Italy during which the billionaire haggled for two hours to knock the price of a tie down by $10.
He is still a family man and has his family over for a communal meal every week, just like millions of other Mexicans. He married well – the Lebanese-Mexican Soumaya Domit Gemayel – who was the love of his life. When she died in 1999 he built an art museum and named it after her.
He is not a fixture in the gossip columns and has already handed large chunks of the running of his businesses to his three sons. Not that he will ever retire fully.
In a life lived mostly on a curiously normal scale, Slim has indulged a monumental passion for art. His home is stuffed with sculptures by Rodin and paintings by Renoir and Van Gogh.
Yet it is still the numbers game that he loves most of all. Nor is that a game he will ever retire from. He sees his business not so much as a trading empire, but more like the works of art that adorn his walls.
“Artists don’t just stop doing what they are doing because they have painted a beautiful painting,” he told one interviewer who asked about his retirement plans “They carry on until they die.”
Born Carlos Slim Helu, 28 January 1940, in Mexico City. He married Soumaya Domit Gemayel, another Maronite Christian of Lebanese descent. Six children.
THE SLIM FILE
Best of times 1982. During Mexico’s crisis year while all around him were losing their heads, Slim kept his and stuck to his maxim that buying in a panic is a good idea. It was. He emerged unscathed and on course to be one of the richest men in Mexico and then the world.
Worst of times 1999. Slim’s beloved wife died. Friends say he has been married to his business ever since.
What he says “When you live for others’ opinions, you are dead. I don’t want to live thinking about how I’ll be remembered.”
What others say “It’s virtually cradle to grave. It’s Slimlandia. You are engulfed by Slim in Mexico.” George Grayson, a Mexico expert at the College of William & Mary, in discussing Slim’s impact on the Mexican economy.