2011 was year for the protester

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This image released by Time Magazine shows the Person of the Year issue featuring "The Protester." The magazine on Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2011 cited dissent across the Middle East that has spread to Europe and the United States, and says these protesters are reshaping global politics. (AP Photo/Time Magazine) >>

Year that was for the protester

The silly season is already on us and no doubt will be a fractious and prolonged one going into 2012. 

 MUSINGS By MARINA MAHATHIR

IT’S the end of the year and, like everyone else, I’m going to try and summarise what made it an interesting year indeed.

Time magazine named The Protester as its Person of the Year in 2011.

I couldn’t agree more, because really few people have made an impact on society than protesters this year.

From the protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya and Syria to the Occupy Wall Street protesters and its many offshoots, these largely peaceful protests have forced things to change in their societies.

In the Middle East, corrupt and authoritarian leaders have been forced to step down. In some, it’s still an ongoing battle.

Of course, these steps towards democracy are not perfect. Nor are the results. But that’s democracy for you.



Just because people don’t know what they want is no reason to dismiss democracy.

It is the fact that they finally have choices is the triumph, after so many years of not having any.

For those who insist on equating the London riots with the Arab Spring, do get your facts right.

The former was not about changing an authoritarian government for a more democratic one, nor was it meant to be peaceful.

The latter was a peaceful demand for change; the violence came from the government response.

If you want to equate the London riots with the Syrian government’s response, perhaps it would be more accurate.

Time magazine has mostly recognised the Arab, Spanish and American protesters in their essay.

But perhaps they should have also looked eastwards.

I think the Bersih rally goers, protesting peacefully for clean and fair elections, are also deserving of the award.

For the first time, ordinary Malaysians went out to demand what should be their right, to be able to vote fairly.

Young and old of all races and religions, Malaysians marched to protect this basic human right. And were demonised because of it.

While the Government responded to the Bersih demands by establishing the Parliamentary Special Committee on electoral reforms, at the same time the so-called Peaceful Assembly Act – aimed at curbing any other rallies like Bersih – was passed.

In any case, it is delusional to think that curbing protests will curb rebellious thoughts. These will continue to thrive in 2012, that’s for sure.

Perhaps 2011 was also the year of the Strong Woman.

On the international scene, not one but three women won the Nobel Peace Prize this year: President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, Leymah Gbowee, also of Liberia, and Tawakkol Karman of Yemen, the youngest-ever recipient.

It’s interesting that all of these women are rebellious women, who refused to accept the established, and patriarchal, way of doing things.

Instead, they found their own way, and worked for peace in their countries.

Malaysia, too, has its share of strong women. Datuk Ambiga Sreenevasan is the prime example of someone who has had to withstand personal attacks from all quarters like no other person has had to in our country, yet still carries on with her strong principles.

Let it never be said that she lacks courage.

For women to get ahead, it really is imperative that they have the sort of integrity and display the sort of ethical behaviour that we often find lacking in men.

This year is, of course, also the year of the Obedient Wives Club, hardly a great leap forward for womankind.

Nevertheless, the OWC knew exactly how to get publicity for their causes.

And, I suspect, despite the sniggers over their sex manual, there are many who actually agree with their basic premise, that a good wife is one who blindly obeys her husband even when she doesn’t feel like it.

Finally, this year has been a bad year for justice and equality.

Children born less than six months after their parents married are considered illegitimate, thus forcing them to bear the sins of their parents.

Even if legitimate, children can be married off at even 10 years old, surely a blight on our society if we are to consider ourselves progressive.

Muslim women still don’t have the same rights as their non-Muslim sisters when it comes to marriage, property and inheritance.

And people of different sexual orientations are not regarded as full citizens.

I’d like to be optimistic about 2012 but that does not look likely.

The silly season is already on us and no doubt will be a fractious and prolonged one.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, folks!

The Exchange Rate Delusion of US Trade Deficit !

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Michael Spence: The Exchange-Rate Delusion

A 100 yuan banknote (R) is placed next to a US$100 banknote. -- PHOTO : REUTERS >>

If one looks at the trade patterns of the global economy's two biggest players, two facts leap out.

One is that, while the United States runs a trade deficit with almost everyone, including Canada, Mexico, China, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, not to mention the oil-exporting countries, the largest deficit is with China.

If trade data were re-calculated to reflect the country of origin of various components of value-added, the general picture would not change, but the relative magnitudes would: higher US deficits with Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, and a dramatically lower deficit with China.

The second fact is that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan - all relatively high-income economies - have a large trade surplus with China. Germany has relatively balanced trade with China, even recording a modest bilateral surplus in the post-crisis period.

The US has a persistent overall trade deficit that fluctuates in the range of 3-6 per cent of GDP. But, while the total reflects bilateral deficits with just about everyone, the US Congress is obsessed with China, and appears convinced that the primary cause of the problem lies in Chinese manipulation of the renminbi's exchange rate.

One problem with this view is that it cannot account for the stark differences between the US and Japan, Germany, and South Korea. Moreover, the real (inflation-adjusted) value of the renminbi is now rising quickly, owing to inflation differentials and Chinese wage growth, particularly in the country's export sectors. That will shift the Chinese economy's structure and trade patterns quite dramatically over time.

The final-assembly links of global-value added chains will leave China for countries at earlier stages of economic development, such as Bangladesh, where incomes are lower (though without producing much change in the balance with the US).

A somewhat more sensible concern might be that the dollar's reserve-currency status causes it to be 'over-valued' with respect to every currency, not just the renminbi. That could create additional pressure on the tradable part of the US economy, and thus might help to explain why the US tradable sector has not generated net employment for two decades.



But, in order to explain performance relative to Japan and Germany, one would have to argue that the euro and the yen have been undervalued, which makes no sense.

In fact, the employment generated by the tradable sector has been in services at the upper end of the distributions of value-added per person, education, and income. As a result, growth and employment in the tradable sector have gone separate ways, with healthy growth and stagnant employment. In Germany, by contrast, the tradable sector is an employment engine. The same is true of Japan.

The US economy's distinctive features for at least a decade prior to the crisis that began in 2008 were an unsustainably high level of consumption, owing to an illusory wealth effect, under-investment (including in the public sector), and savings that fell short of the investment deficiency. That excess household and government consumption fueled the domestic economy - and much of the global economy as well.

In several European countries that now confront fiscal and growth challenges, the pattern was somewhat different: most of the excess consumption and employment was on the government side. But the effect was similar: an unsustainable pattern of income and employment generation, and lower productivity and competitiveness in these economies' tradable sectors, leading to trade deficits, stunted GDP, and weak job creation.

One could argue that the euro has been and still is overvalued, and that this has hindered many eurozone economies' productivity relative to non-eurozone countries. But the relative productivity deficiencies within the eurozone are more important for growth, and have nothing to do with the exchange rate.

 Excessive Focus on currencies

The focus on currencies as a cause of the West's economic woes, while not entirely misplaced, has been excessive. Developing countries have learned over time that real income growth and employment expansion are driven by productivity gains, not exchange-rate movements. This, in turn, requires public and private investment in tangible assets, physical and telecommunications infrastructure, human capital and skills, and the knowledge and technology base of the economy.

Of course, it is possible for a country's terms of trade to get out of line with income and productivity levels, requiring a rebalancing. But resetting the terms of trade is no substitute for tackling the structural underpinnings of productivity.

None of this is peculiar to developing countries. Underinvestment has long-term costs and consequences everywhere. Excess consumption merely hides these costs temporarily.

In the US, productivity deficiencies have led to a pattern of disconnection from global supply chains. So the challenge for America is not only to restore productivity, but also to restore its links to the main currents of world trade.

China's growth - and, more generally, that of the major emerging economies - provides a substantial potential tailwind. That is certainly true nowadays for Germany, Japan, and South Korea. The US and others can take advantage of it as well, but only if productivity relative to income levels in specific areas of potential competitiveness begin to rise.

As long as America economic policy remains focused primarily on deficits, domestic demand, exchange rates, and backsliding on trade openness, its investment deficiencies will remain unaddressed. That means that its employment and income-distribution problems will remain unaddressed as well.

The good news is that, at a deep level, incentives across advanced and developing countries are aligned. The emerging economies would like nothing more than the restoration of sustainable patterns of growth in the advanced economies, and are prepared to be cooperative players in that process. But focusing on these countries' exchange rates is not the right way to go about it.

Michael Spence, a Nobel laureate in economics, is Professor of Economics at New York University's Stern School of Business, Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His latest book is The Next Convergence - The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World (www.thenextconvergence.com).

Can Kim Jong-un be North Korea's Deng Xiaoping?

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By Isabel Hilton guardian.co.uk,

The death of Kim Jong-il recalls Mao's. But China, unlike paranoid North Korea, opted for the path of reform 

A North Korean child is overcome by grief at the death of Kim Jong-il. Photograph: AP

There is little room for nuance in our view of North Korea. State television parades sobbing citizens and soldiers apparently convulsed with grief at the loss of Kim Jong-il. Western commentators dismiss these scenes as propaganda.

Much of this display is certainly ritual, enacted for the camera and for watching comrades and informers. To fail to grieve for the loss of the "dear leader" is a poor career move. But for some the emotions may be real enough: the regime has cultivated in the people an intense gratitude to the Kim family, from the hero-founder Kim Il-sung, whose centenary will be celebrated next year, to his grandson, Kim Jong-un.

Kim Il-sung died in 1994, a time of terrible famine when there was little to be grateful for in North Korea. But refugees interviewed by the American journalist Barbara Demick – men and women who escaped to the south – reported their own intense feelings of bereavement for a leader whom they had been taught to revere as the embodiment of North Korean resistance, nationalism and independence.



Viewed from Beijing, these displays are easier to read: the death of Mao Zedong, whose tyrannical gifts were more than equal to those of the Kim dynasty, sparked similar scenes in China. Like the North Koreans, Chinese had lived under a regime of intense ideological control with limited information about the outside world, and were taught to regard their leader as the embodiment of national resistance to foreign aggression. Mao has never been dethroned as the regime's founding father, but as Beijing struggles to maintain its own internal stability, the question it asks of its troublesome neighbour is: will North Korea follow the Chinese path to reform?

In China Deng Xiaoping was waiting in the wings, a military and political veteran who triumphed over Mao by outliving him and doggedly undoing his legacy. North Koreans, instead, are expected to transfer their affections to a chubby 28 year-old who was catapulted to four-star general status in September last year. The customary chestful of medals will doubtless follow.

Kim Jong-il was nobody's political naif, so we must assume that he judged his third son the best available choice. The fact remains that, beyond the cachet of his DNA, Kim Jong-un has no military or political heft. Whether he has any interest in reform is impossible to gauge; whether it would matter if he did seems unlikely – he will depend on the support of military and the party for his power, and any change of course would have to begin there.

Planning for this transition has been under way since Kim Jong-il's stroke in 2008 with Beijing taking a close interest. China has muted its irritation at North Korea's repeated provocations and stepped up economic and trade relations as a buffer against any derailment of the succession planning. For now, Beijing hopes it will go smoothly enough to avoid any disturbance in China's three north-eastern border provinces.

The Chinese army has well-honed contingency plans to intervene in North Korea in the event of a breakdown, but hopes never to be forced to enact them, standing instead as Pyongyang's guarantor of investment, and of food and energy supplies. Beijing has no desire to cope with a flood of refugees across its nearly 900 miles of border, or to risk the intervention from US-backed South Korea that a collapse in the north could provoke.

The Chinese press has increasingly questioned what China gets out of the relationship with North Korea. For now, though, China has little choice but to pay the bills, while nudging the regime towards the kind of transformational reforms that Deng Xiaoping launched after the death of Mao.

A leadership change offers the regime an opportunity to shape a new narrative, and China's experience till now shows that economic reform need not threaten authoritarian power. To date, though, Pyongyang has shown only limited enthusiasm for the Chinese model. Without more radical reform, the already enormous economic gap between North Korea and its neighbours will only grow, and keep the country isolated and paranoid.

North Korean dependency on China is already stark: China provides 90% of the investment and accounts for 80% of North Korea's trade. China is building power plants, roads and transport infrastructure, Chinese businesses have invested in factories in North Korea's economic development zones, and exports of iron ore and coal to China from North Korea are important earners.

For both Beijing and Pyongyang, this dependency is a mixed blessing. South Korea, Japan and the US may be the bogeymen invoked to frighten North Korean children, but North Korea is also wary of becoming an economic colony of its giant neighbour. North Korea's main international weapon is blackmail: waving its nuclear capability in the face of the US and threatening China with instability. It works, after a fashion, but it is not a recipe for early reform.

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Display Ads, Facebook Beating Google In The 'Battle For Eyeballs'

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Image by Getty Images via @daylife By Agustino Fontevecchia, Forbes Staff

Facebook’s Zuckerberg and Google’s Schmidt meet Merkel and Sarkozy >>

Facebook is “winning the battle for eyeballs and advertising in the internet display arena,” according to a report by Enders Analysis.  While Google is still “the king of internet advertising” with greater global reach than the social network, Facebook’s more dynamic growth, and rising rates of engagement and usage, suggest it will continue to dominate the display ad market going forward.

  Google Taking Over 40% Of Total U.S.Online  Ad Spend

Google’s net display ad revenues totaled $1.5 billion in 2010, according to Enders Analysis, and will rise to $2.5 billion in 2012.  Facebook, on the other hand, will report 2011 display revenues at about $3.5 billion, and can expect those to rise to about $5.3 billion in 2012.

While Facebook is clearly the market leader in display, Google remains the internet’s largest advertising player.  In 2012, its revenues will hit $35 billion, 90% of which come from Google’s search operations.
 Jeff Bezos Eyeing Apple's Lunch? Amazon Smartphone

 

Bringing all these numbers together is the fast-growing display ad market.  The company founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page has proven its capacity in transforming the search ad market, becoming practically a monopolistic force.  But display remains underdeveloped.  According to former Google CEO, and current Chairman Eric Schmidt, the display market could grow to $200 billion in coming years.  “Despite Google’s and Facebook’s growing strength, the online display market remains highly fragmented, [Enders Analysis] project[s] their aggregate share of global spend will be just over 25% in 2012.” 

Don't Worry About Google's Rising Costs And Tighter  

  There are four major players in the display ad world: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Google and Facebook exert their dominance via reach and consumption. In terms of monthly unique visitors, Google beats its competitors with 1.1 billion users, about 75% of the global audience. Facebook counts with 770 billion, but is growing at an impressive pace, accounting for 18% of the net increase in internet usage in Q3, compared with a combined 1% for Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo combined.

 Mark Zuckerberg's Private Photos Exposed Thanks To Facebook 

 

Mark Zuckerberg’s social network derives its strength from engagement.  Users spend an average 12 minutes per day on Facebook, a figure that is up 40% over the last 12 months.  That’s about 15% of total time spent online, compared with something like 10% for Google (which ranks second among the big display players).

Facebook’s “expanding reach and rising time spent on the site” are the keys to its display ad success.  Revenues will continue to grow faster than over at Google, particularly given the rise of the social media ad format and the surge in programmatic ad buying (through the use of exchanges, networks, demand side platforms, etc) which will make it easier to “programme [sic] and optimize large-scale ad campaigns.”



Also playing to Facebook’s favor is Google’s weakness in the social sphere.  “At this stage, Google’ late entrant look-alike social network, Google+, looks set to remain niche,” explained the analysts.

Facebook has slowly opened up its display ad platform to outer players, and will continue to improve it through the addition of new products, such as the “rumored rollout of ads on its highly popular mobile apps” (which run on Apple’s iPhones and Google’s Android OS).  But these don’t necessarily play against Google.  As mentioned above, the market is fragmented and small, and still has room to grow.  “Rising advertiser demand for both scale and performance will make many publishers increasingly reliant on one or both of the internet giants for traffic and revenue growth,” explained the analysts.

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Start a Clean Slate New Year 2012 !

Image by juleskills Tweet

So come the New Year, what is your resolution going to be?

 

THERE are traditionally four days in the year when this newspaper is not published. We call them press holidays.

Next Monday is the final press holiday for the year and so this is the final instalment of Monday Starters for 2011.

While men rely on the calendar to put some organisation and predictability into their lives, the truth of the matter is that events are not so easily demarcated.

In the natural flow of things, the 12-month calendar year has very little control over what actually happens.

The best-laid plans can go awry due to internal, external, natural and divine factors.

We can only live one day at a time, for we know not what tomorrow will bring.

To those who can cheerfully count down time at a public spot come Dec 31, there will be those in hospitals where the dates no longer matter, but every minute with loved ones is precious.

Do you know that you and I are blessed with the same 24 hours in a day? Work and sleep take up almost two-thirds of that, so what do you do with the remaining eight hours each day?



A wise man said that we should number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. It is good advice not only for those who actually have to number their days because of a critical illness (“I only got six months to live, so I am going to do every crazy thing possible”), but for everyone.

To number our days means we make every day count. We may be overwhelmed by work and other commitments, but it is always better to do the necessary things first so that we end each day with a clean slate. Saying thanks and sorry, for example, belongs to this category.

The last day of this calendar year will be special for me because my youngest son achieves his independence as he turns 21.

I have not figured out what present to get him but in the family tradition, he will register as a voter and make his vote count in the 13th general election.

My eldest son did the same when he turned 21 but has yet to vote because he was not of age for the March 2008 elections.

I believe it is important that we fully exercise our rights as citizens and be as socially-convicted and aware of the many public issues that affect us.

So come the New Year, what is your resolution going to be?

Will you show more faith, more hope and more love to the people around you? Will you make a difference and touch lives, be it in your workplace or your neighbourhood?

There is certainly room for revelry during the festive seasons, but maybe we should resolve to scale down our lifestyles and focus on what is good for the soul.

This is indeed the season for giving, but a more meaningful gift, and it’s free, would be to forgive.
May we reach out to those who have hurt us and those whom we may have hurt, and start the year afresh.

● Deputy executive editor Soo Ewe Jin wishes Christian readers a Blessed Christmas, and all readers a Wonderful New Year. He is especially happy to meet up with Sunny, a dear friend of his Papa, who shared fond memories of his father and reminds him that the real legacy of anyone is not in the things he leaves behind but in the many lives he touched.