NOTHING P€R$ONAL

Bestseller

2011-02-11T05:19:00.001-08:00

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report just released has become a bestseller.

So much for inevitability

2011-01-26T10:03:00.000-08:00

From the forthcoming Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report, according to the New York Times:

The crisis was the result of human action and inaction, not of Mother Nature or computer models gone haywire

So, stuff doesn't just happen, after all.

Not quite out of the mud

2011-01-26T07:03:00.000-08:00

In my last post I was letting Bill Daley, Obama's new chief of staff, off the hook somewhat for JP Morgan Chase's ethical lapses in the run up to the financial crisis. It has been pointed out to me that from May 2004 until he took on the corporate responsibility role in June 2007, Bill Daley was the Chairman for the same bank's Midwest Region, which means that part of the buck for irresponsible lending in that parish stopped with him.

Daley's corporate responsibility mantle was, in any event, a bit of a red herring. Part of his portfolio was government relations. While the bank was always a big political spender, the lobbying and political contributions watchdog OpenSecrets.org notes that on Bill Daley's watch JP Morgan Chase was:

a company that spent $5.8 million on federal lobbying -- and hired dozens of well-connected lobbyists -- during the first nine months of 2010.

For more background on JP Morgan Chase's lobbying and political contributions go here.

Daley's role at JP Morgan Chase could come under further scrutiny when the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission delivers its final report tomorrow, if the banks in general, JP Morgan Chase in particular and the money-backed friendliness between Wall Street and DC come in for criticism.

The New York Times appears to have received an advance look at the Commission's report.

Bill Daley's record on corporate responsibility

2011-01-11T08:17:00.000-08:00

As previously noted, Bill Daley - President Obama's pick for chief of staff - was until last week head of corporate responsibility at JP Morgan Chase.

The chart above shows Covalence's EthicalQuote score for JP Morgan Chase over the last five years. The data is based on positive versus negative news items commenting on the bank's ethical performance. In a way, it is more a measure of the bank's PR than actual ethical performance, but clearly JP Morgan Chase's PR people have struggled to cope with its central role in generating the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Does this chart reflect on Bill Daley's performance in the corporate responsibility role? Not as such. The damage attributable to debt securitization was already essentially done by the time he came on board, and must figure massively in the downward trend. Secondly, there is the question of how much influence would Daley have had in setting core strategy such as that continuing to lend irresponsibly or to securitize poor quality debt as high quality securities. Most bank corporate responsibility departments - judging by their corporate responsibility reports - have influence at best on the periphery of core banking practice.

It might be more interesting to track Daley's influence through the company's corporate responsibility reports, and through the accumulated evidence of lobbying expenditure and political contributions made by the bank. If I get a moment...

Scruples

2011-01-06T10:24:00.000-08:00

President Obama's new Chief of Staff is currently the head of corporate responsibility at JPMorgan Chase & Co., a key player in the investment banking activities that helped create the global financial crisis.

Makes me think of the line from Paper Moon (this video at 3:10):

Moses Pray: I've got scruples too, ya know. You know what that is... scruples?

Addie Loggins: No, I don't know what it is but if you've got 'em, it's a sure bet they belong to somebody else!

The World Justice Cup: USA vs Germany

2010-07-15T08:00:00.001-07:00

Striking differences are becoming apparent in the way respective national justice systems are handling the question of responsibility for the global financial crisis.

In Germany, the former CEO over at German's IKB Deutsche Industriebank AG, Stefan Ortseifen, has been found guilty of market manipulation. He was found guilty of misleading the market about the true impact of the sub-prime crisis on his institution, effectively manipulating the market.

By contrast, in the USA, Goldman Sachs is said to be in negotiation with the Securities and Exchange Commission to obtain a settlement that would simultaneously eliminate the fraud lawsuit against the bank as well as some of the SEC’s lower-profile probes of the firm’s mortgage department.

As the Wall Street Journal reports:

The settlement idea was floated by Goldman, which is eager to end the bad publicity swirling around the New York company ever since the SEC sued it in April over a collateralized debt obligation called Abacus 2007-AC1, these people said. Combining a settlement of the Abacus lawsuit with a resolution of related SEC probes could soothe Goldman clients and investors, while shielding the firm from the release of information that could be used against Goldman in private litigation.

With Bhopal still fresh in my mind, it reminds me of other successful corporate strategies to buy themselves cheaply out of a whole lot of trouble.

Underscoring the importance of banking reform

2010-07-15T05:53:00.001-07:00

If people haven't lobbied their lawmakers yet on banking reform, some articles from today you might want to read:

You may be unable to reach your lawmakers because they are out collecting contributions from the financial sector. Seriously.

The Daily Show reports on the Catholic Church vs. Goldman Sachs

2010-06-18T19:13:00.000-07:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Holier Than Dow

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Tea Party

While we’re on the subject

2010-06-11T03:58:00.001-07:00

I am in Bhopal. This morning I took an auto (like a tuk tuk) from my hotel in the heart of the old town, over to what was Union Carbide's chemical plant. I wanted to see just how close the plant had been located to a centre of population.

On 2nd December 1984 the plant leaked a substantial amount of MIC (Methyl Isocyanate) into the air. Some 20,000 people died within a few weeks of exposure to the gas, and tens of thousands more are still seriously ill.

Compensation paid by Union Carbide thus far bears little relation to the scale of the ongoing medical need, and Dow Chemical bought Union Carbide with the specific understanding that no further compensation would be payable. There has also been no criminal consequence for Union Carbide's US parent company.

It remains a symbol of corporate impunity.

There is next to no public discussion about the responsibility of banks for the tragic consequences of the financial crisis known to have occurred across the globe. Will the financial crisis be allowed to go down in history as the next Bhopal?

"You can't eat money" and other deep thoughts

2010-06-02T16:52:00.000-07:00

Andrew and I have been in touch with one another throughout our Nothing Personal project and one thing keeps coming up...this ain't easy work. It's uncomfortable and emotionally fatiguing to talk to folks whose lives have been shattered by the crisis.

I'm tired of living this crisis and talking about it. But we have a lot more important work to do. The events of 2008-2010 have changed my life and the lives of countless others.

Here's a windblown me trying to make sense of it all.

And here's me talking to cows...

Beyond the killing fields

2010-06-01T04:15:00.001-07:00

Phoung Rin and Lun Loang married in 1975. They lived in the same village but had never met. This was no traditional arranged marriage; this was one of the 200,000 marriages forced upon young people by the Pol Pot regime in the mid-Seventies as part of a social engineering program to produce a new generation of farmer-soldiers.

It is a period that Phoung Rin would prefer to forget, I learned, when I caught up with her tending the family’s cows near their rice paddy. But it also became clear that her marriage is untainted by the circumstances of its birth. I asked her if she and her husband love each other. Of course she said yes. So I suggested that given the circumstances perhaps it had taken hard work and time to find that love. “Actually, no”, she says, “it didn’t take long”. Many of these forced marriages ended in divorce in 1979 when the Pol Pot regime fell. Phoung Rin and Lun Leong chose to stay together.

They have two children: a married daughter aged 20 and working in a garment factory in Phnom Penh, and a sixteen year old son attending school.

Phoung Rin works the family’s two plots of land, growing rice and tending their three cows.

Until he became ill Lun Loang worked as a builder. He got ill around five years ago, but did not become severely incapacitated until a couple of years ago.

When I spoke to him at their home earlier in the day he showed me the pattern of large lumps visible across his body wherever he pulled his loose skin tight. His eyes are dulled. One doctor linked his illness to his liver, but more tests would be needed before there could be any certainty. He showed me a plastic bottle half full of dark liquid that he said contained his medicine, but no one seems to think this is anything more than a palliative.

Lun Leong spends a lot of time lying in pain on the wooden day bed under the house. When he is feeling up to it, he helps in the fields.

Their crops bring in around US$175 a year – not enough to feed themselves, let alone to cover the medical help they need or to keep their son equipped for his grade 10 studies.

Every few years one of their cows produces a calf that they can sell for US$150. That helps with ad hoc bills. They used to have more cows but sold a couple to cover visits to the hospital.

To cover the bulk of their living expenses they depend upon the income their daughter and her husband send from Phnom Penh. When their son-in-law was working in a garment factory alongside his wife the couple sent Phoung Rin around US$80 per month. The family could get by on this and could even contemplate medical help for Lun Loang. But the global financial crisis has hit Cambodia’s garment industry badly. The sector contracted by some 30% in value in 2009 compared to 2008. In July 2009 the factory where the son-in-law worked closed down, orders having dried up from the company’s crisis-hit principal market: the USA. Now the couple send Phoung Rin just US$25 to 30 a month.

Back in the hut overlooking her field I ask Phoung Rin how she deals with her husband’s illness. She says she has given up hope of them being able to find a cure for him. She cannot afford to do more for him.

There were no visible signs of emotion. No melodrama. I find as I travel from country to country and from story to story that for the people most acutely affected by the financial crisis the feeling of anguish is a rarely afforded luxury.

I asked her what she would do if they had more money again. “I would look everywhere for a cure, of course.”

It turns out it isn’t a cure she has given up on, but the ability to afford one.

The garment worker’s daughter

2010-05-23T22:48:00.001-07:00

I am not sure what context to give this. I was visiting a garment workers' dormitory in Phnom Penh, looking for people prepared to share their stories of the impact of the financial crisis on their lives. I just saw this young girl at work and asked her mother if I could video her. She is six year's old, and wields a cleaver like an expert. I was torn between admiring her mature dexterity and sheer horror at the idea of a six year old being let loose with a sharp blade. She started showing off a little when I started filming. She was chopping less and being much more careful with her vegetable cutting when I first saw her.

Leaving Uganda but Uganda won't leave me

2010-05-23T13:52:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I leave Uganda for Ireland. It's been a busy few weeks. Some, the Ugandan government and anyone with money, say that the Global Financial Crisis hasn't hit Uganda.

Try telling that to these folks.

Meet Susan:
She is a single mother of 6 and is HIV+. She received food from the clinic, but not since the financial crisis.Now her children eat one meal a day.

Meet Jacob:
Jacob was my main man in Uganda. He's a college-grad who had a good job with an NGO supported by USAID. The contract was supposed to last for five years. Jacob got married and soon his wife Sarah was pregnant. Shortly thereafter it was announced that USAID was pulling the funding as a result of the global financial crisis. Jacob has been without work for 8 months. His daughter Nawira is now 2 weeks old.

Meet Cornelius :
Cornelius used to own several small businesses partly supported by his brother's remittances from the US. Cornelius doesn't hear from his brother anymore. Many of the businesses have been "crushed" by the crisis.

Meet Gerald:
Gerald lost his father to AIDS when the ARV meds were no longer free at the clinic. Gerald had to drop out of school to help support his family. He now lives and works at a small dry cleaners.

A lot on my mind

2010-05-18T21:58:00.000-07:00

There’s been a lot on my mind lately between the stories I’ve been working on during the day and the reports I receive from home at night.

It’s crazy what my parents are going through. I’m not comfortable sharing the stuff here, but maybe as some time passes, I will. It’s not anything major in the sense of health or relationships. The false rumors of the local coconut telegraph already circulated that they were separating. How that got started we’ll never know. Mom and Dad joked that they should start making out in public.

Actually as a duo they are doing quite well. I get the sense that they are really there for one another right now.

I’m reporting on the crisis that I’m living. That’s a little weird. I have a lot on my mind, yes, but I could have more on my head.

I was walking behind this woman with bananas on her head. The plate wasn’t even teetering. Most of us carry out burdens inside our heads, not outside. In Uganda they do both.

Crisis chronicles: mental health takes a hit

2010-05-17T00:53:00.000-07:00

While the NOTHING PERSONAL project continues to put a face on the more obvious pain inflicted by the global financial crisis, new research details trouble beneath the surface.

On APEsphere we have often noted the negative impact on happiness of contemporary business practices, but the global recession has made the problem all the more acute within the workplace itself.

According to the research by UK mental health charity MIND, one in fourteen British workers is now on anti-depressants. Other findings include: 10% have seen a doctor as a result of work-related stress; 8% left work last year because of job-related stress; 5% of staff have seen a counselor; half of those questioned reported staff morale as low; antidepressant prescriptions rose from 35.9 million in 2008 to 39.1 million in 2009.

Meanwhile, research by the Shaw Trust found that half of UK managers think their staff do not suffer from mental illness.

Mooted solutions include:

ensuring staff take breaks

giving staff opportunities to raise concerns without fear of reprisal

better availability of psychological therapies as well as medication

counselling services

more innovative approaches, such as BT's vegetable garden

More than distance

2010-05-16T10:27:00.001-07:00

I went to Tuol Sleng this afternoon. Tuol Sleng, or S-21 as it was labelled by the Khmer Rouge, used to be a school. When the revolution came it was turned into a detention and torture centre through which people would pass on their way to Pol Pot’s killing fields.

The building has been preserved largely in the state in which it was found, a reminder to new generations of the genocide that between 1975 and 1978 eliminated a fifth of the country’s population.

The buildings have that corroded air about them typical of concrete buildings in the tropics that have not been recently painted. Wooden doors rest wide open now, while the louvered and barred windows stay firmly shut.

Building A, the ground floor, was reserved for senior officials and their special, solitary treatment. You can still see the empty bed frame in the middle of the floor of each room. On each bed lies the steel bar and leg irons used to keep each person immobile. Photos on the wall show the bodies of the last fourteen inmates found dead in the rooms of S-21 when Phnom Penh was liberated. In what are now sun and time bleached prints you can see their bodies twisted into unnatural shapes, the lake of blood beneath the bed frame, limbs battered out of shape. Some bodies have a glazed look, as if they had been burned. But I think it was just the blood caked to their flesh reflecting the light.

In other rooms there are displays of thousands of photos of the newly admitted prisoners. Their numbers are pinned to their shirts or in at least one case to the man’s chest. They are taken sitting bolt upright. Many look simply serious; others look frightened. In some you see the petrification of the most profound fear imaginable. In one I detected a smile of defiance.

One particularly haunting image is an admission photo of a woman posing stiffly upright with her baby on her lap apparently asleep. Whether it was asleep then or not it is difficult to say. In any event, it would not have outlived its mother. Apparently, babies were killed in front of their mothers by being bashed against trees, or dropped from a high balcony.

A further room contains an assortment of torture apparatuses. A large tank that would contain water. The prisoner would first lie down on his or her front in the tank and the feet would be cuffed to the bottom. The prisoner’s wrists would then be cuffed to the rim of the tank, and the tank filled with water. Drowning – real or simulated makes little odds – seemed to feature heavily in the contraptions present.

Pervading everything is an air of intimacy. Tuol Sleng is human scale; it was a school, after all, before it was turned over to detention and torture, and no doubt the kind of school where the teachers all knew all the children. The classrooms would have been small enough to manage the attention of a huddle of twenty or thirty young children against the noises competing from other classes. Now they stand divided into multiple cells by low cheap earthenware brick walls. Where teachers would have kept an eye on children playing on the ropes suspended from a high wooden frame, fellow prisoners would have been able to hear the screams and eventual silence of their fellow inmates suspended by their wrists with their hands tied behind their backs.

It is a big leap from financial malfeasance to torture, even if the outcomes can both be tragic. But they both raise questions about human nature. NOTHING PERSONAL is premised on the idea that if only those who took the actions that ultimately led to the financial crisis could see the faces and learn the stories of the human tragedy they had provoked, they would be deterred from taking such actions again.

But in Tuol Sleng – as in the concentration camps behind the Nazi genocide against the Jews – proximity and an intimate understanding of the pain being caused to others was not enough to stop them inflicting that pain or eventual death.

There is clearly something else in play in that situation, something that overrides our empathy-driven natural moral sense. It seems to me to be ideology - a mental cage, containing the arguments and assumptions that justify the end regardless of the means. When we accept such cages they constrain our awareness of our own individual ability to think and to choose to act differently. We may be motivated to accept them out of fear, of the need to survive or even flourish within a given reality; a desperation to reach the top of the pile of humanity.

For many of those we are trying to reach through NOTHING PERSONAL, helping them learn about the stories we are finding may prove to be enough to motivate them to change the way they do business. For others we may need to dismantle the ideological lens through which they see the world and justify their actions. That would be a book in itself – one that this financial crisis is helping to write.

Recap: why are we doing this?

2010-05-15T02:02:00.000-07:00

For new readers of this blog I thought it would be useful to point you to Kelsey's excellent post that set out what the NOTHING PERSONAL project is all about:

It is personal

We both added to this in a couple of other posts:

Goldman Sachs: why the crisis needs a face
The case for "the human factor"

That's a lot of explanation, but it is worth repeating as Kelsey is about to start collecting stories for the project in Uganda.

Oshurmo’s soup

2010-05-14T19:42:00.001-07:00

Another catch up post: you will remember Oshurmo, the lady in Khorog who was trying to make ends meet for her household of 12 when her children in Russia were no longer able to send money home.

After I left Oshurmo’s place following that first interview I felt more and more confused by what I had heard. Oshurmo’s whole attitude was to minimize their hardship, and that created a fog around the precise nature of the changes they had had to make when the household’s already scant income dropped by more than half.

While returning to my hotel the previous day I had seen a landcruiser belonging to the World Food Program parked outside. I asked at the building reception whether the WFP was in the building, thinking there was perhaps a conference on. Yes, I was told, their office was on the second floor – the same floor as my Delhi Darbar hotel room. Bed, breakfast and food scarcity expertise along my corridor, all for $30 a night. What a steal.

So when I returned to my hotel from Oshurmo’s place I called upon the World Food Program’s office and had a great meeting with Malohat Shabanova and Gulazor Mamadrizobekova. We brainstormed the kinds of things I should be asking in order to cut through the fog and get a clearer understanding of how her household’s life had changed since the crisis hit.

I returned with my translator Farid to see Oshurmo and learnt the following:

The size of the household has changed over the last two years. Two years ago she had eight mouths to feed, now she has 12 mouths to feed: two of her daughters-in-law and nine of the grandchildren.

Proteins: the family used to eat meat three times a week before the crisis, but now buy just 1kg (2.2 lb) of meat each month. They mix beans into their rice a couple of times a week. That has not changed.

Even though the size of the household has increased they still buy the same quantities of sugar (1kg), carrots (2kg) and potatoes (5kg) that they were consuming two years ago.

They have six apricot trees on their land which together provide a sack of dried fruit to last them that lasts all year. They use them in a local dish called Noshkhukhpa (about which I would like to learn more).

Since the crisis began they have acquired US$1,200 of debt that cannot be repaid from the combined household income of 280 somoni (US$60) (Oshurmo and her daughter-in-law’s wages, and Oshurmo’s pension). The debt is split between a rising backlog of electricity bills and the cost of a ticket to send her fifth son to Moscow to find work.

It seemed to me that one of the principal ways the household has adapted to the loss of remittance income from Russia following the crisis is to not pay the electricity bill. But apart from the cutback in protein I still didn’t feel I had a complete handle on their food situation.

I decide to get still more specific. I ask what dish they eat for the main evening meal. Twice a week they eat soup. OK, so how do they make the soup now, and how did they make it before?

Before the crisis (for 8 people)	Since the crisis (for 12 people)
200g (7 oz) rice 2 potatoes 2 onions 3 carrots 150g oil	250g (8.8 oz) rice 2 potatoes 2 onions 3 carrots 150g oil

Oshurma also explained that they add more water to the soup to make it go further.

So that’s it, their other coping strategy: they thin the soup.

As with the previous interview, Oshurma had responded to all my questions but with a certain brusqueness. I got the impression that she was being purposely dismissive of the significance of the questions, as if we were not touching on something as important as basic survival. As before, when we started, the family members were all gathered around. But this time, now we had started to drill down into the detail of their hardship and the decisions she was having to take to ensure they got by, I realised they had all disappeared from view. Oshurma was sitting here alone.

I turned off my sound recorder and sat on a low stool just in front of her. I commented on the way she seems to acknowledge the family’s deteriorating situation only grudgingly. I asked how she felt when the remittances stopped flowing.

She smiled and swayed back and brought her hands down with a light slap onto her knees as she sat. Yes, she said, sometimes she does get frustrated and angry about the situation, but what else can she do? Yes, it is hard, but she hopes and really believes that it will get better.

But then this tough, weathered woman’s eyes began to redden, and she hurriedly brushed a few escaped tears from her cheeks. She is not one to let her emotions show, and I hurriedly gathered my things, thanked her and left.

In and out of Osh, b’gosh

2010-05-13T16:57:00.001-07:00

I set off from Khorog on 1st May for Kyrgyzstan’s southern city of Osh. This was the day my five-day Kyrgyzstan transit visa was dated to start, a deadline that added a certain frisson given the uncertain state in Spring of this, the only road I could take.

The journey took me through the Pamir mountains and a cut through the snow laden Akbaytal pass some 15,000 feet above sea level. The journey and the arrival in Osh on the 2nd of May warrant a blog post all to themselves. Just remind me to tell you the bit about the Kyrgyz border guard and the leg of mutton.

I had only one contact in Osh: a number I had received from Abdulfattoh, a cousin of the family who had looked after me so well in Dushanbe. Abdulfattoh’s text had simply read: “[telephone number] Tell him I’m friend of Mirasror”.

I still have no idea who Mirasror is. I repeated the message to the voice at the end of the phone line and in short order Hakimjon, a journalist with Radio Free Europe, arrived at my guest house. His lanky form unfolded itself from the back of his black car with precise moves, leaving the door wide open. He stepped aside and gestured to me to get in. As I did so I saw his illuminated and connected laptop on the back seat with Google Translate on screen, ready for my instructions from English into Kyrgyz. There was more than a touch of Mission Impossible in his style and in the manner of our interaction.

I explained that I was in Osh to get a comment from a political analyst about the causes of the seizure of power the previous month, a struggle that left 84 people dead and hundreds injured. President Kurmanbek Bakiyev had been ousted by the political opposition, and was now holed up in Belarus. The self-declared interim government that followed has since been recognized by both the Russian Federation and the USA, but the situation is far from resolved. And the USA depends upon its Kyrgyz base at Manas as a supply line for troops in Afghanistan. Political upheaval in Kyrgyzstan threatens the US’s national security interests.

Hakimjon took me to meet a translator, Elmurad Kasym, whose English was astonishingly good. He had spent a year in LA but that hardly explained his grasp of idiom. He would be perfect for the task. They put their heads together to think of a suitable interviewee. It took them just a few seconds.

Elmurod made the appointment and we drove to the home of Ganijon Khalamatov in a well-to-do street in the northern part of the centre. Though just 61 , my interviewee has a ravaged air about him that I was informed stems from long term illness. We sat cross-legged on cushions around the table in his drawing room and his wife set down the tea.

There is more than one way of telling the story of the country’s descent into political upheaval; Ganijon Khalamatov’s preference is for grand narratives. A theatre director for some forty years, his sweeping histories of ethnic rivalry make him a journalist’s talking head of choice on political developments in the country.

An Uzbek by ethnicity, Ganijon sees himself as an outsider to the national political scene dominated by the 60 per cent of the population that are Kyrgyz.

His explanation is insistently punctuated with one word: “Tribalism!” When you meet an Uzbek, he elaborates, he asks you which part of town you are from. When you meet a Kyrgyz he wants to know from which tribe you are from. The Kyrgyz feel greater allegiance to the tribe than to the nation. Hardly surprising, I reflect, given the arbitrary boundaries by which the modern state was created in the Fifties.

Mountains divide Kyrgyzstan into north and south. The people in the north, he said, include many people from Russia, and make up a goodly proportion of the country’s intelligentsia. The people in the south look to the north for spiritual leadership, tapping into the northerners’ deeper history. This leaves southerners, he said, with an identity crisis.

Northern clans had been ruling the country for a hundred years until the Tulip revolution in 2005 when a southern clan took the reins. Since then the new president and his son Maksim had become bywords for rampant corruption.

In this year’s uprising it was the northerners taking to the streets. Apart from the ousted president’s own tribe, the south has been “semi-neutral” to the seizure of power, he noted.

The political opposition used the economic condition of the population, he said, as a trigger to get them out onto the streets. There had also been recent substantial increases in electricity and heating costs, while the people had thought of Kyrgyzstan as a country of abundant natural energy.

I interrupted his flow to ask Ganijon whether he thought the economic crisis had anything to do with the political crisis. He was dismissive. There has always been an economic crisis, he said, but then he acknowledged that everyone in the country was dependent to some extent on remittances from family members working abroad and that remittances had fallen substantially following the global crisis. Then he insisted that the global crisis had been good for the country because it had actually reduced prices. But prices had fallen, surely, because falling remittances meant many people no longer had the money to buy goods.

His own son worked in Russia as a cook. He observed happily that cooks are always in work as people need to eat.

While acknowledging that there had to be an economic crisis to bring people to the streets, he insisted again that the economy was merely used by the opposition as an excuse, and that the real reason for the seizure of power was tribalism.

The people in the south, he went on, have been doing better economically over the last five years than people in the north. In the south the economic drivers are the trade in goods from China and the trade in drugs. In the north there is perhaps greater reliance on remittances because of the stronger connections (ethnic, linguistic and transport) to Russia.

Even so, he was sure that people in the north could have been brought out onto the streets even without the economic crisis. People have stronger allegiances to their tribe than to dealing with their own personal economic positions, he said sipping his tea. We were diverted a moment translating the English word “china” as used for fine crockery.

So why, I wondered aloud, had it happened now; not a year or two ago or a year or two hence but this year, in the aftermath of economic meltdown.

But for Ganijon the conversation was over. We stopped to eat Mustava – a soup containing meat and rice that gets its name (literally “drunk-heat”) because it used to be made early in the morning with lots of pepper, an antidote for a hangover.

For a less magisterial but insightful view of the roots and timing of the political crisis in Kyrgyzstan, take a look at this analysis by Madeleine Reeves. She argues that

it is poverty, in an absolute sense, as much as inequality that brought people out to demonstrate.

She goes on:

For many households the choice this winter has been a simple and stark one of cutting down on heating or cutting down on food. At the same time, the single primary source of income for many rural and peri-urban families – the remittances sent by family members working in the Russian construction sector – has declined dramatically this year. Many of those who travelled to Russia in search of work in 2008 or 2009 are “working on empty”. My research in the south of the country earlier this year suggests that many families who would ordinarily expect to receive money from family members in Russia once every one or two months have been waiting, without transfers, for a year or more as the financial crisis stopped Russia’s mid-2000s building boom in its tracks.

On the political dimension, she argues:

There has been a crisis of governance in Kyrgyzstan, certainly. But an analysis focused on state failure conceals the extent to which what has occurred is also the product of a glaring social and economic crisis – part of the “long-range” fall-out from the global financial crisis that has pushed many families to the brink.

Making that fall-out feel less long-range is what NOTHING PERSONAL is all about. So let me paraphrase Madeleine Reeves’ conclusion: the global financial crisis triggered Kyrgyzstan’s upheaval and with it the loss of those 84 lives.

If it still feels too distant to matter, let me put it another way. Patriotism features often in public discourse about the economy, often enough in protectionist form. So here’s a question: how patriotic is it for Wall Street to unleash an economic shock wave of planetary proportions, placing in jeopardy not just fragile economies, but fragile states – some like Kyrgyzstan that are crucial to the US’ national security interests?

Some catching up to do

2010-05-12T16:59:00.001-07:00

Yesterday morning at about this time (6:00am-ish) I was on a sleeper train pulling into the terribly modern Shenzhen station. It was the last leg of my train journey from the far (they might say “wild”) north west of China to the far corner of the industrial south east.

In the last week I have spent over eighty hours on trains – almost as much time as my brother Michael spends commuting to work in London in a regular week.

Just kiddin’ Mikey.

The station is buried within a massive shopping centre. You glance up as you walk inside and see signs indicating where to walk for restrooms, different metro lines, oh, and to Hong Kong.

Yes, one country, two systems, and one consuming passion.

Once through immigration I headed straight to Hong Kong’s international airport, grumbling to myself that I was missing out on the opportunity for some fabulous Dim Sum. But the last week had been a slow one for NOTHING PERSONAL and I was anxious to get back to some intensive story-gathering here, where I have landed up, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Before getting into why I’m here, I need to bring you up to speed with what I saw between my last post from Khorog and the start of that epic cross-country train journey. Stay tuned.

A walk in the slums

2010-05-05T11:15:00.000-07:00

Andrew and I are exploring the lives of folks who were plugged into the global economy only to have their world and the economy come crashing down. Some folks never had the luxury of being a part of the global economy. I spent the past week with an organization called Life in Abudance that works in the slums.

Here’s a post I first wrote for my own blog:

A billion people live in the slums of our world.

As one of the 5 billion that don’t, I think we have an obligation to at least know what life is like for the other 17% of humanity. So, I thought we would take a stroll together through the slums of Mathare.

Wait, you are going to wear those shoes? Are you sure? They look awfully white.

Man makes things in straight lines. The Mathera valley is anything but. The tin shacks, rickety antennas, rusting roofs, and winding paths are awkward and uneven, organic. Nature takes what’s given to it and makes what it can. People living in poverty do the same.

This path leads down the valley. It hurts my knees to take such large steps without anything to hang on to. I’m 31 with a bad set of knees and it’s a bit challenging. What about the old folks? Well, considering the average person lives to be 50 in Mathare, it’s not that big of a deal. Something else usually gets you before your joints fail completely. There aren’t any walkers or scooters here.

You’re asking me what you just stepped in? How am I supposed to know, you are the one who stepped in it. I told you that you shouldn’t have worn the white shoes.

There are puddles here. Lots of them. You can’t really call them water puddles or mud puddles because they are a mix of bathwater puddles, laundry puddles, pee puddles, and any other form of thing that oozes and runs from high places to low. You stepped in a slum puddle.

You’ll get used to the smell after awhile. Trust me, I’ve been sprayed by a skunk. The smell would never be canned and sold, sure, but I don’t think it’s bad as you think. You know how when you don’t like the way something tastes, you hold your nose? Well, here in Mathare, if you don’t like the way something smells you can close your eyes and it won’t smell so bad. You won’t see the four-year-old boy dropping trowel, you won’t see the three little piles of poo next too each other, each unhealthier looking than the next. You won’t see food scraps, plastic, cardboard, and people in various stages of decomposition and degradation. You won’t see the screaming toddler on the ground kicking his feet after a painful fall, not looking for his mother because she’s not watching, dusting himself off and going about his unsupervised toddler business.

Speaking of the kids…just let the kids tug on your arms. They don’t see people like us that often. We have arm hair and they don’t. Anytime you meet someone with hair or an excessive amount of hair in a place where you never knew that hair grew - or at least in such a quantity - it is natural to pet them. Enjoy it.

While you’re being petted, I recommend working on a few Swahili words, Jamba and Sassa both mean hi. You could also teach the kids how to thumb wrestle, how to pull your thumb off, or anything else with your hands that requires the movement of your hairy little digits.

Watch your step, it’s especially slick and steep here near the river. Yep, that’s not a river of Orange Crush splitting the valley. This isn’t Candy Land. In board games everyone plays by the same rules, everyone has the same chance of getting to the Peppermint forest before any other player, everyone has an equal chance to be a winner. Mathare is full of losers.

The people started at home - likely a surrounding province - moved to Nairobi “the land of opportunity,” and foud themselves stopped in the land of molasses with little hope of ever returning.

The river of Orange Fanta is nearly worthless. It’s good for carrying waste of humans or from humans away. It can’t be used for drinking or washing. It damages homes when it floods. And the true test of any body of water to it’s usefulness, kids can’t/won’t play in it.

The bridge is a bit tricky. I’m sure you could build a better one with a $25 gift card to Lowe’s and 20 minutes. Still, there’s no other way to cross. Yes, it’s uneven. Yes, it bows beneath your weight. No it probably hasn’t been “inspected” since the last person walked across it and it didn’t break. But it didn’t break, so buck up and cross.

Welcome to the west side of Mathare. It’s pretty much like the east side so I’ll shut up now and you can soak up Mathare for yourself.

There is one last thing you should know: the folks on the west side think the folks on the east live tougher and more dangerous lives. In turn, the people on the east believe the same thing in reverse.

It’s our nature to think someone else always has it worse than us. In some instances, it’s healthy. But for you and me, who belong to the privileged 80% who don’t live in a slum, it’s anything but healthy.

In fact, it makes us sick.

Terrorists wanted

2010-04-30T09:22:00.001-07:00

The beard count is up in Khorog.

A French film production company is recruiting extras for a feature film with a terrorism story line. Posters are up all over the town. My translator Maqsad grew his beard especially and, I have to say, it works very well with sunglasses. The man I interviewed yesterday afternoon had also grown a beard for the purpose and had already secured a place in the film when I saw him. The film will be made later in the year in Ishkashim - some three hours drive south of here along the Afghan border.

Money and mad dogs

2010-04-29T22:47:00.001-07:00

When I woke up this morning I was beginning to lose faith in Khorog. The town is in a stunning setting; the Aga Khan Foundation is investing a substantial amount of money in building infrastructure, including a stunning landscaped park in the centre and the campus for the University of Central Asia that will confirm the already distinct sense that this is a university town; the people seem essentially prosperous, and for such an isolated community are very open to outsiders. Could it be that Khorog is just too damn happy to furnish the kinds of stories I am looking for?

My main hope for introductions has been a microfinance organisation called Madina, led by Nabot Didikhudoyera. Their first two suggestions – clients who are clearly experiencing hardship – were not sufficiently linked to the financial crisis. Perhaps I had been barking up the wrong tree.

Yet this is a country that gets 55% of its national income in the form of remittances from migrant workers in other countries, and remittances fell 31% in 2009 compared to 2008 thanks to the slump in the Russian economy that the crisis triggered. There simply had to be stories here.

So the good people at Madina put their heads together and came up with a couple of ideas. There was a family they knew of in Khorog living in a house near the botanical garden. This was not a client, but they knew that family to be highly dependent on remittance income. Then Farid Zamirov, a young director at Madina, thought back to his time as a volunteer doing household surveys out in the sticks around Khorog and Murghab and suggested we simply head out to a village and ask around.

So we took a minibus taxi over to the home of Jomahonova Oshurmo, a pensioner of 63 who still works as a hospital cleaner.

Oshurmo’s five sons all work in Moscow. Her four daughters-in-law and nine grandchildren all live with her in their small home. They have a sleeping room and a drawing room, plus a covered space outside used for storage.

Collectively the brothers used to send Oshurmo US$100 per month to augment her 180 somoni (US$45) monthly income from her wages and pension. It was not a handsome sum for a household of 14 people, but it was enough, she says. Back then prices in Tajikistan were lower so it was enough to cover food basics and also meat, essential clothes, and electricity to power their summer stove (a single hotplate) and lighting.

When the crisis hit Russia the sons collectively could not find sufficient work even to send US$100 a month. Oshurmo received no money from her children from the spring of 2009 until the Russian economy began to improve this year. She received US$100 in March, and US$50 in April.

I wanted to know how on earth someone in Oshurmo’s position coped with such a catastrophic loss of income. I asked her what she could not buy now that she used to buy. She replied that she just bought less stuff, that she still had enough for the basics, as before. Cashflow was tricky; they had to buy food on credit from a neighbour’s shop to see them through from wage packet to pension packet. But she seemed to be saying that not much had changed. I couldn’t understand it. US$100 was a lot of money to someone in her position. Before she used to receive that each month, but for a year she did not. Before she was just buying the basics, so surely now life was harder still?

Suddenly while speaking to Oshurmo I realised my frame of reference was wrong. Oshurmo does not have the luxury of whining about the present. She is too focused on feeding her household. She does not sit there thinking back to how life used to be better, but on how to juggle with what she has now.

I changed tack and began to itemize what she has in her larder: some potatoes, a sack of flour, oil, pasta or noodles, dried beans, and some onions – the only fresh food I saw. Then I asked whether they eat meat. Not any more, she said, though they used to eat meat quite often. I made a mental note to interview the World Food Program people here in Khorug about the nutritional value of such a diet. Beans are a good protein substitute for meat, but I wondered whether food quantities had likely reduced.

I changed tack again. How did she spend the US$100 that came from Moscow in March? She bought a sack of flour, and paid something towards her electricity bill. She had only succeeded in part paying her electricity bill each month for a long time, and had built up a debt of 650 somoni (US$160). Twice this year the electricity company had cut off her supply pending further payments. The supply had last been cut for three days in March, preventing the family from using their electric stove to cook.

These physical hardships loomed large, but were not the complete picture. Before, Oshurmo had never needed to ask for credit from anyone, now it was a fact of daily life. And culturally this community places great importance on helping each other in times of need, such as when putting together food for a wedding, for helping after a death. Though clearly in a state of distress herself, Oshurmo clearly finds it shameful to be unable to provide material help to her family and friends as the need arises.

So here it was, a story of real hardship in Khorog. A story of a vulnerable family driven to the brink by the consequences of the global financial crisis. I was feeling satisfied that I had found something important here, and hurriedly set about taking photos.

I took Oshurmo’s portrait and the family group, and backed away to take a broader shot of their home. Suddenly I heard a growl and felt something tearing into my ankle. I whirled around in shock to see the family dog slinking angrily away from the spot where I had trod on it.

Great, I thought. Here comes a rabies shot.

We returned to Madina’s office and Nabot on hearing about the bite phoned her brother, a doctor at the hospital. I was shepherded along the road to see him. The small wound was cleaned with alcohol and he prescribed antibiotics. There’s no rabies in this area, he reassured me.

It was a sudden end to a valuable morning, but no real drama. Now I need to think if there is anything I missed that I should ask Oshurmo before I leave town.

The lair of the dog that bit me

Khorog 101

2010-04-27T19:36:00.001-07:00

Mountaineers, avert your eyes.

I’m not especially outdoorsy so I had always imagined mountain passes to be a low point between two mountains.

Instead, the day before yesterday, some 8 hours into an extremely cramped ride with six other passengers in a Toyota Landcruiser, I found myself being negotiated along a muddy single lane road above the snowline at around 3,000 metres. Sometimes we drove through what felt like a corridor of snow as it stood 8 foot high one either side. Other times one or other side would be a vertiginous drop into the valley hundreds of metres below. Every now and then we would pass an empty bulldozer that had long done its work for the day having cleared a segment of the pass.

It was already getting late. We did not descend below the snow line again until nearly 8pm. With visibility falling I was glad we were not attempting this any later in the day.

So why did I end up taking this route by road through the Khaburabot Pass at all? Good question.

The previous morning I turned up at 8am at Dushanbe airport’s domestic terminal with Jovidon, a member of the wonderful family that hosted me in Dushanbe (a heartfelt shout out to Manon, Mavjigul, Ejod, Ehson, Bibijon and Soima). I was expecting a scrum. What I did not expect was the sense that the game was already over.

Bad weather frequently stops the Khorog flight from departing, especially in Spring when weather is so variable. Once it is announced that the flight will take off hopeful passengers race to get their names onto lists being maintained by a couple of entrepreneurial travel agents standing around who appear to have a duopoly of time in front of the small ticketing window. They stand there running through their list, occasionally calling out a name of a lucky winner who then leans over with their 400 somoni (USD 100) fare.

It took me an hour to realise that the first flight to Khorog had already departed, and that the second one was now full and would leave soon. Normally there are just two flights a day in 16-seater turboprops that skim across the tops of the mountains. But the main road route through the Khaburabot Pass had been closed for over a week because of a bridge being knocked out by a flooding river, so the flights were in high demand.

For this reason there was a rumour of a third so I hung around a while longer. Not only did the third flight not go, but the second flight was turned back from Khurog just ten minutes before the end of its 45 minute flight because of a thunderstorm.

It sunk in that I was not going to be able to move on that day. Such a dark feeling hit me. NOTHING PERSONAL takes me away from my family for two and a half months. Even though that time is pretty much set in stone, it helps at least to feel like I am on the move, heading home.

So yesterday I set off for the airport again with new resolve, this time at 6:30am, with a better idea of how the system works, and with the youthful assistance of Ehson, my host’s youngest son. He was primed to cut through any crowd that might ensue, get my name on any and every list going and my passport into the hands of the agents.

We never got our chance. Nothing happened at all until after 8am. Ominously I did not see either of the two travel agents loitering around. They clearly have contacts on the ground with better knowledge of the local weather conditions than the rest of us. The flight was cancelled. I hung around for a while at discussed possibilities with a couple of English-speaking would-be fellow voyagers.

One of them had heard that the land route had been open for a day now, but you normally take that route early in the morning in order to get to Khorog before midnight. But it might still be possible to find a car willing to drive into the night. I made up my mind. A genial fixer-type from the airport throng accompanied me and my posse and an elderly lady to the station where such long distance journeys depart. He helped us find a good car and driver and waved us on our way. Price: about USD 45.

My fellow passengers were a soldier, Rahmon, returning to his post on the Afghan border at Ishkashim just south of Khorog, a couple of elderly Tajik women and two grizzled Tajik men, and Faridah, a young woman working for the Aga Kahn Foundation who helpfully spoke fluent English. Faridah was one of the unfortunate passengers on the second Khorog flight the previous day that had been turned back. She was trying to get to a wedding on time.

The three women took the middle row of seats, and Rahmon had the front seat. This meant that I and the old Tajik men were folded up like so much canned food into the bucket seats in the back. I’m 6’2”. The road was rough. The Pamir Highway I am convinced is so named to reflect its altitude rather than its quality. At times it feels like a procession of dirt, mud, snow and endless potholes in search of a road, rather than a road itself.

Sleep was impossible. By the end my knees were bruised from rubbing against the top edge of the seat in front of me. As I crawled creakily out of the Landcruiser at every opportunistic stop I felt like a man twice my age.

We stopped for lunch and dinner, a couple of flocks of sheep, numerous donkeys, goats and dogs, and for several police checkpoints that were mainly concerned to see the driver’s documentation. The checkpoint marking the entry into the Badakshan region wanted to contrive a problem with my paperwork but Rahmon followed me into their office and began berating the officer, even taking out his mobile phone to video the officer in action and record his name and serial number from his uniform. I left unfleeced. Thanks Rahmon.

As we headed south in the darkness along bank of the Panj river on the last leg of the journey Faridah pointed out the lights in houses across on the other bank perhaps 100 metres away. “That’s where I work! We put in generators there to provide lighting.” That was my first glimpse of Afghanistan.

We had two flat tyres – one just before dinner and the last just on the outskirts of Khorog at around 3.30am. We stood around for an hour in the light rain and cold mountain night air and finally rolled into the centre of town. Our journey from Dushanbe had taken 17 hours. A guest house was roused to take me in and I pulled the bed covers over me at 5am on the dot.

The room number on my key enigmatically reads “Khorog 101”. Quite a lesson.

Video: Tajik entrepreneurs take a hit

2010-04-24T18:10:00.001-07:00

Microfinance is put forward by developed country governments and aid recipients alike as a way of fostering economic growth in the developing world without create a culture of dependency. Poor people (though it is not claimed to work for the very poorest) take out small loans without security in order to help them start up economic activity. The loan must be repaid.

So it is particularly ironic, not to mention painful, to hear about the impact on microfinance activity and clients of a global economic crisis derived from a financial system crisis.

While here in Dushanbe I have had tremendous help from Humo, a major microfinance institution in Tajikistan, in finding stories of people impacted by the crisis. I took the opportunity this week to interview Humo’s Director General, Mavsuda Vaisova, about Humo’s work and about how their clients have been affected by global economic events over the last few years. The videos of the interview are here, in three parts:

Part 1

Part 2:

Part 3: