Americas

A Mexican Standoff with Reality

by

WASHINGTON, DC – Flanked by the embattled President of Mexico, Felipe Calderon and the Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, a weary looking President Barack Obama used a press conference to angrily denounce as “Alarmist and inflammatory” a recent report issued by the conservative Heritage Foundation that declared the massive chain of UN administered Mexican Refugee camps in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas as “a bottomless well for narco-insurgency” and “a threat to the territorial integrity of the United States”. The camps, home to at least 2.5 million Mexican nationals, are dominated by the “Zetas Confederales”, a loose and ultraviolent umbrella militia aligned with the feuding Mexican drug cartels that now control upwards of 80 % of Mexico.

President Obama’s political fortunes have been reeling recently in the wake of high profile incidents that include the kidnapping of his Special Envoy for Transborder Issues, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, and the car bombing assassination of popular California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger that killed 353 people in Sacramento last month. Both events have been tied directly to factions of Zetas “hardliners” who operate with impunity on both sides of the US-Mexican border. President Obama used the conference to point to the “clear and hold” COIN strategy that has recently restored order and even a degree of tourism to Las Vegas, once the scene of bloody street battles between Zetas, local street gangs and right-wing American paramilitary groups, as a sign of the success for his administration. Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill remain skeptical and say that it is likely that President Obama will face a primary challenge next year from Senator Jim Webb (D- Va), a former Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, who called the president’s COIN strategy “The right course of action” but ” Two years too late”….

That fictional scenario above is offered as a thought experiment.

Read more

Costa Rica Economy

by

Recently I had an opportunity to travel to Costa Rica. Being a rather boring blogger / analyst type, I thought a lot about the Costa Rica economy.

The Costa Rican dollar is known as the “colon“. Being the finance type, I went out to exchange money into local currency prior to entering the country. Most big local banks like JP Morgan didn’t have colones on hand – although they said that they could order the money and I’d have it in a few days – so they sent me to a specialized currency exchange. At this currency exchange there was a pretty wide “bid / ask” spread, or the difference at which they would purchase currency back from you against what they’d sell it to you for, indicating a rather thinly traded currency. I gave them 300 USD and received a big wad of Costa Rican currency – the common denomination I used was the 2,000 note which was a bit over 4 USD. This is a rate of about 500 colones to the dollar, or each one is worth about 2/10 of a cent.

I spoke to a settler from the US who was a Quaker who opened a cheese factory in Monteverde in the 1950s – he said that the colon was worth about 5 to 6 to the dollar in the 1950s. Thus even while the US dollar has depreciated against other major currencies, such as the Yen, the colon has plummeted from 20 cents on the dollar to .2 cents on the dollar, or to 1% of its “relative” value from the 1950s.

Read more

Thomas PM Barnett, Rule-Sets, and Democratic Sovereignty

by

In a recent post on the Thomas PM Barnett Weblog, Tom laments the Irish people voting against the Lisbon Treaty:

It is weird how the EU can let one country decide to run a plebiscite and then kill a treaty.  Better is majority like we did with the Constitution.

(I might add that the Constitution wasn’t adopted by the United States by way of a majority; it required consensus of all thirteen states under the Articles of Confederation.  Tom is correct, however, in that Treaty ratification today requires the consent of the Senate, which is not unanimity.  But I digress…)

Tom’s view seems to fall in line with his views on forms of governance around the world:  In the first of his books he discusses the concept of the Rule Set:

A collection of rules (both formal and informal) that delineates how some activity normally unfolds.

Read more

The Sun is Not Setting II: Unfurl the Old Banners …

by

In this earlier post, I should have linked to this piece by Fareed Zakaria, which is the first chapter of his new book. It is very much worth reading.

I like this Zakaria piece because he seems to be in broad agreement with me. Ha. We all like it when that happens. Also, his little capsule summary of the British Empire as our predecessor is nicely done. However, as I have complained to anyone who will listen, even Zakaria fails to understand how different the British Empire was from all its land-based predecessors. The one current writer to who “gets it” on this issue is Walter Russell Mead. Mead, in his excellent recent book God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World discusses the “maritime order” founded in recent centuries by the Dutch, then handed off to the British, then the Trident was passed to the USA. This is exactly correct.

Read more