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Sep. 14th, 2011
After offering to buy Portuguese bonds, rising economic power Brazil has offered to support the Eurozone in its time of trial through purchases of sovereign bonds of different Eurozone member countries. A sign of pure Brazilian altruism? It's as much a Brazilian play for a higher global profile.
The other BRICS economic powers, notably, seem less than enthusiastic about the idea of helping bail out Europe.
Brazil aspires to become the world’s fifth-biggest economy sometime this decade, and senior officials in President Dilma Rousseff’s government see the financial crisis in Europe and the United States as an opportunity to push for a role in global affairs that is commensurate with their country’s rise.
Brazil’s proposal for members of the BRICS group of emerging markets to make coordinated purchases of bonds of euro zone countries, which will be discussed next week in Washington, allows it to portray itself as a diplomatic bridge between the West and the rising economies of Asia -- a role it has long sought.
It also reinforces Brazil’s role as a mature voice of reason, and a net foreign creditor, in the crisis -- a sharp contrast to just a decade ago, when Brazil had to negotiate its own bailout with the International Monetary Fund to avoid default.
By floating the proposal first in the news media, Brazilian officials have ensured themselves maximum exposure despite growing evidence on Wednesday that the idea may not get support from their partners in the BRICS group, which also includes Russia, India, China and South Africa.
The money on the table appears to be largely symbolic, and insignificant compared to Europe’s financing needs. Brazil, for example, would not make its $352-billion in foreign reserves available for European bond purchases, relying instead on a sovereign wealth fund that as of August totaled only about $9-billion, an official told Reuters.
The bottom line is that, rather than providing a major lifeline to Europe as some investors had originally hoped, the bond-buying proposal may ultimately end up advancing Brazil’s interests as much as anyone else’s.
The other BRICS economic powers, notably, seem less than enthusiastic about the idea of helping bail out Europe.
Mayor Rob Ford's popularity, it's reported, is falling sharply.
In the Toronto Star, Bozinoff went into greater detail about what he sees as the reasons for Ford's declining popularity and his predictions about Ford's future popularity.
The National Post goes into greater detail about the different cost-cutting possibilities which have turned out to be massively unpopular. Torontoist's Hamutal Dotan broke down the numbers by former municipality and found that, in the communities that used to be the City of Toronto's innermost suburbs, Ford's popularity is falling sharply.
Might all this lead to a generalized city-wide backlash against Ford, perhaps even the strengthening of the city's post-amalgamation civic culture and a shift away from the cuts paradigm? I'd like to believe that, really I would, but this is far too little data accumulated over far too short a time to make such a conclusion.
What all this might mean is that, with declining popularity, Ford may think twice about implementing some of the cuts. Many city councillors may also be reluctant to support Ford for fear of negative reaction in their communities. I don't see the sorts of tax increases--re-installations, some of them; Ford's deletia encompasses too much--necessary to reduce the deficit occurring, sadly.
A poll conducted by Forum Research suggests that Ford's approval rating has declined to 42 per cent. That is down from 57per cent on June 1 and 60 per cent on Feb. 25.
Ford, who campaigned on the promise of eliminating the so-called "gravy" from the city's budget has struggled to find ways to pare down the city's massive $770-million budget shortfall.
Since the summer, the mayor has left no stone unturned in his bid to shave down the expenses. This has included plans to cut subsidized day care, scale back on snow plow service, cut library branches, reduce service and raise fares on the Toronto Transit Commission, and axe thousands of city of Toronto jobs.
“Mayor Ford is facing a significant uphill battle to regain approval in the city of Toronto,” said Forum Research president Lorne Bozinoff.
“Rob Ford campaigned on a promise to cut the gravy, none was found and the reality of cutting services residents rely on — often on a daily basis — is setting in. This has obviously shaken public confidence in his ability to handle the job of mayor.”
Among the findings, the poll suggests 84 per cent of the residents disapprove of eliminating late night TTC buses, while 61 per cent were against selling the TTC and Toronto Parking Authority parking lots and garages.
Earlier this week, the TTC unveiled a comprehensive plan featuring job cuts, route frequencies extended, and a possible fare hike.
Cuts to library services was also a hot button issue among respondents with 79 per cent against closing public libraries and 70 per cent against reducing services and hours.
In the Toronto Star, Bozinoff went into greater detail about what he sees as the reasons for Ford's declining popularity and his predictions about Ford's future popularity.
“This drop in support has come without any cutbacks actually coming into effect, we’re only at the idea stage,” Bozinoff said. “This is a ceiling — I think it’s going to get a lot worse for him before it gets better.
“He campaigned on a gravy train, none was found and the reality of cuts to services that residents rely on, often daily, is setting in. That has shaken public confidence in his ability to handle the job of mayor.”
The poll also found no public appetite for the major KPMG-suggested cuts Pennachetti is forwarding to the executive committee Monday as part of Ford’s solution to fix Toronto’s finances.
“It’s one thing to say, ‘look at this, look at that,’” Bozinoff said. “Now, when people see cuts in black and white, all of these things are extremely unpopular.
“It’s also the process, I think — the mayor’s people haven’t been very good at building public support. It’s all, ‘My way or the highway.’”
[. . .]
Ford took office Dec. 1 on a wave of popularity fuelled by his “Stop the gravy train” mantra. By comparison, former mayor David Miller enjoyed an 82 per cent approval rating in May 2004, six months into his first term.
Ford remains more popular with older Torontonians than young, while his disproportionately weak appeal for women is eroding further, the poll suggests.
But the budget isn’t Ford’s only problem. Since the last poll, Bozinoff said, Ford and his brother Doug have “squandered a lot of political capital” with controversies over refusing to attend Pride celebrations, a public feud with author Margaret Atwood over the fate of libraries, and the like.
The National Post goes into greater detail about the different cost-cutting possibilities which have turned out to be massively unpopular. Torontoist's Hamutal Dotan broke down the numbers by former municipality and found that, in the communities that used to be the City of Toronto's innermost suburbs, Ford's popularity is falling sharply.
Etobicoke-York: 50% (down 8% from June 1)
Scarborough: 49% (↓ 10%)
North York: 43% (↓ 26%)
Toronto East-York: 30% (↓ 14%)
TORONTO OVERALL: 42% (↓ 15%)
Might all this lead to a generalized city-wide backlash against Ford, perhaps even the strengthening of the city's post-amalgamation civic culture and a shift away from the cuts paradigm? I'd like to believe that, really I would, but this is far too little data accumulated over far too short a time to make such a conclusion.
What all this might mean is that, with declining popularity, Ford may think twice about implementing some of the cuts. Many city councillors may also be reluctant to support Ford for fear of negative reaction in their communities. I don't see the sorts of tax increases--re-installations, some of them; Ford's deletia encompasses too much--necessary to reduce the deficit occurring, sadly.
Do communications disruptions in potentially revolutionary situations accelerate change? 80 Beats' Veronique Greenwood linked to and summarized a recent study, Yale graduate student Navid Hassanpour's paper "Media Disruption Exacerbates Revolutionary Unrest: Evidence from Mubarak’s Natural Experiment", draws from the experience of--among others--the recent Egyptian revolution to say that is the case.
If Hassanpour's theory is correct, this has interesting repercussions, not least of which are implications for authoritarian governments. The Chinese government may tolerate the human flesh search engine--briefly, the mass mobilization of Chinese Internet users to identify, and punish, ill-doers--because crackdowns on the specific networks and users involved would risk redirecting the energies of China's hundreds of millions of Internet users against the People's Republic. Authoritarian governments that have enabled the Internet are stuck with it, in other words. Any manipulation of online social networks is going to have to be subtle indeed.
Using the theories of Mark Granovetter, a social scientist who pioneered the study of social networks in the 70s, Hassanpour took a close look at how a sudden dearth of information would affect individual actions. Granovetter helped popularize the “threshold” model of group dynamics, which holds that what neighbors are doing and how many of them are doing it determine the point at which an individual decides to get involved.
When information about protests is freely available, individuals can be passive while remaining informed. Additionally, the government can promulgate both reassurances that protests will soon be resolved and threats that military force will be used against protestors, thus maintaining the status quo and deterring involvement.
But when people are suddenly plunged into radio silence, they almost by default must take action: they have to leave the house to check up on family members and learn more about events. If they hadn’t heard of the protests before, they will have now, and they will have to take to the streets as well. And the government loses its ability to spin the situation through Internet channels. In Cairo, as more and more people who’d stayed inside began to leave their homes, the process accelerated, and protests exploded all over the city and the rest of the nation.
“The disruption of cellphone coverage and Internet on the 28th exacerbated the unrest in at least three major ways,” Hassanpour summarizes. “It implicated many apolitical citizens unaware of or uninterested in the unrest; it forced more face-to-face communication, i.e., more physical presence in streets; and finally it effectively decentralized the rebellion on the 28th through new hybrid communication tactics, producing a quagmire much harder to control and repress than one massive gathering in Tahrir.”
If Hassanpour's theory is correct, this has interesting repercussions, not least of which are implications for authoritarian governments. The Chinese government may tolerate the human flesh search engine--briefly, the mass mobilization of Chinese Internet users to identify, and punish, ill-doers--because crackdowns on the specific networks and users involved would risk redirecting the energies of China's hundreds of millions of Internet users against the People's Republic. Authoritarian governments that have enabled the Internet are stuck with it, in other words. Any manipulation of online social networks is going to have to be subtle indeed.