This is my confession — and explanation: I — a 51-year-old, a Muslim, an immigrant woman “of color” — am one of those silent voters for Donald Trump. And I’m not a “bigot,” “racist,” “chauvinist” or “white supremacist,” as Trump voters are being called, nor part of some “whitelash.”
In the winter of 2008, as a lifelong liberal and proud daughter of West Virginia, a state born on the correct side of history on slavery, I moved to historically conservative Virginia only because the state had helped elect Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States.
But, then, for much of this past year, I have kept my electoral preference secret: I was leaning toward Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Tuesday evening, just minutes before the polls closed at Forestville Elementary School in mostly Democratic Fairfax County, I slipped between the cardboard partitions in the polling booth, a pen balanced carefully between my fingers, to mark my ballot for president, coloring in the circle beside the names of Trump and his running mate, Mike Pence.
After Hillary Clinton called Trump to concede, making him America’s president-elect, a friend on Twitter wrote a message of apology to the world, saying there are millions of Americans who don’t share Trump’s “hatred/division/ignorance.” She ended: “Ashamed of millions that do.”
That would presumably include me — but it doesn’t, and that is where the dismissal of voter concerns about Clinton led to her defeat. I most certainly reject the trifecta of “hatred/division/ignorance.” I support the Democratic Party’s position on abortion, same-sex marriage and climate change.But I am a single mother who can’t afford health insurance under Obamacare. The president’s mortgage-loan modification program, “HOPE NOW,” didn’t help me. Tuesday, I drove into Virginia from my hometown of Morgantown, W.Va., where I see rural America and ordinary Americans, like me, still struggling to make ends meet, after eight years of the Obama administration.
Finally, as a liberal Muslim who has experienced, first-hand, Islamic extremism in this world, I have been opposed to the decision by President Obama and the Democratic Party to tap dance around the “Islam” in Islamic State. Of course, Trump’s rhetoric has been far more than indelicate and folks can have policy differences with his recommendations, but, to me, it has been exaggerated and demonized by the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, their media channels, such as Al Jazeera, and their proxies in the West, in a convenient distraction from the issue that most worries me as a human being on this earth: extremist Islam of the kind that has spilled blood from the hallways of the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai to the dance floor of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla.
Cordially invites all participants to the monthly Meeting / Discussion
On Sunday, October 30th, 2016
Time
11: 30 AM
To
2: 30 PM
GENERAL OPEN DISCUSSION
1- (a) Current elections and its impact (b) Bernie Sanders’ Revlolution- Zafar Khizer will open the discussion with his brief remarks and then it will open for discussion one topic at a time.
2- Islam and Muslims in next fifty years- Imtiaz Bokhari will open the discussion with his remarks, followed by remarks by Wequar Azeem and then it will open for the general discussion.
If there is more time then we can discuss blasphemy and any other topic that pops up. Opening remarks should be about ten minutes and details will be brought during the discussion.
The attached is the article on the Impact of “IMF and WB policies on the underdeveloped countries. To prepare this topic I researched several sources, Google NYT and other renowned economists. The consensus is not very encouraging and most are skeptics.
I will be addressing their mission and polices as implemented over the past several decades in the underdeveloped countries.
The Impact of IMF, World Bank Polices on the Underdeveloped Countries
The World Bank and IMF both collectively known as Bretton Woods Institutions were founded in New Hampshire USA, by the delegates of 44 countries in July 1944. The goal of the conference was to establish a frame work for economic cooperation and development that would lead to more stable and prosperous global economy. This was central to both institutions; their work is constantly evolving in response to new economic developments and challenges.
The IMF mission is to promote international monetary cooperation and provide advice and technical assistance to help countries to maintain strong economics. IMF also makes loans and help countries to design policy programs to solve balance of payments problems with sufficient financing on affordable terms.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is an organization of 189 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world.
The World Bank Mission is to promote long-term economic development and poverty reduction by providing technical and financial support to help countries implement specific projects such as schools and health centers, providing water and electricity, fighting disease and protecting the environment. World Bank assistance is generally long term and funded by member countries contributions.
Globalization
Globalization is a process where the free flow of ideas, people, goods, services and capital leads to the integration of economics and financial institutions. IMF and World Bank institutions primary goal is to uplift underdeveloped countries out of economic stagnation and poverty. The IMF believes that economic growth is the only way to improve living standards in developing countries and is best achieved through globalization. The mission of globalization is altruistic but in some countries the outcome is not tangible, often mired in debt. Globalization is the free movement of goods, services and people across the world in a seamless and integrated manner.
Cooperation Framework
The IMF and World Bank work in concert with each other regularly and at many levels on several initiatives to ensure effective collaboration in areas of shared responsibilities.
Difference between IMF and World Bank
The process of Globalization is facilitated by three major organizations:
World Bank (WB)
World Trade Organization (WTO)
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
Data Collection, Reliability and Quality
The main source of data collectionon which polices are based comes from the individual member countries, “Recognized Statistical data analysis techniques” are not effectively applied in gathering data especially in the undeveloped countries, which often resulted in faulty policies. Also there are some other problems in collecting economic, demographic and financial data from these countries, the lack of established institutions, or so poorly organized that data is often fudged to obtain funds. The most critical problems IMF and WB are facing in the UDC lack of democratic institutions, political participation and periodical elections. These countries are governed by military generals, dictators and corrupt politician. Funds are often misappropriated and squandered in useless programs. To some extent that was the main reason often IMF and WB polices are criticized, of lack of accountability.
The other main problem is that countries receive funds and allow IMF and WB to frame polices for them which are not conducive to their cultural patterns, traditions and socio political structure. The Western standards are often at variance with their culture. In some cases policies destroyed cottage industries by implementing or introducing new technologies that create more income disparities. Polices designed often resulted in creating a new elite class with money concentrated in a few hands.
Criticism of IMF Polices
Lack of transparency and involvement
The IMF has been criticized for imposing policy with little or no consultation with affected countries.
The IMF allows wealthy countries to dominate decision-making process.
IMF policies promote corporate welfare. Members of affected countries do not participate in designing loan packages.
IMF Polices hurt the environment. It has least concern for environmental impacts on lending policies and environmental ministries of and groups are included in policy making.
IMF pushes countries to deregulate financial systems.
Structural Adjustment—a Major Cause of Poverty
Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) have been imposed to ensure debt repayment and economic restructuring. But the way it has happened has required poor countries to reduce spending on things like health, education and development, while debt repayment and other economic policies have been made the priority…
Economist Joseph Stieglitz has criticized the IMF in recent years. He argues it is failing to take the best policy to improve the welfare of developing countries saying the IMF “was not participating in a conspiracy, but it was reflecting the interests and ideology of the Western financial community.”
For example, when there is an oil discovery in a certain developing country (that owes the World Bank) and the leader of that country is not ready to cooperate (for an easy manipulation and take over by western corporations), it will be decided that that government or country need to quickly get rid of, most of the time through rebellion or war. A case in point is Iraq, Libya, Sudan, etc.
Jeffrey Sachs, the head of the Harvard Institute for International Development said:
“In Korea the IMF insisted that all presidential candidates immediately “endorse” an agreement which they had no part in drafting or negotiating, and no time to understand. The situation is out of hand…It defies logic to believe the small group of 1,000 economists on 19th Street in Washington should dictate the economic conditions of life to 75 developing countries with around 1.4 billion people. “Source
The Formula for a Richer World? Equality, Liberty, Justice
Photo
The French Revolution was one of the events that gave rise to liberalism, which in turn improved the welfare of the masses.Credit National Library of France
The world is rich and will become still richer. Quit worrying.
Not all of us are rich yet, of course. A billion or so people on the planet drag along on the equivalent of $3 a day or less. But as recently as 1800, almost everybody did.
The Great Enrichment began in 17th-century Holland. By the 18th century, it had moved to England, Scotland and the American colonies, and now it has spread to much of the rest of the world.
Economists and historians agree on its startling magnitude: By 2010, the average daily income in a wide range of countries, including Japan, the United States, Botswana and Brazil, had soared 1,000 to 3,000 percent over the levels of 1800. People moved from tents and mud huts to split-levels and city condominiums, from waterborne diseases to 80-year life spans, from ignorance to literacy.
You might think the rich have become richer and the poor even poorer. But by the standard of basic comfort in essentials, the poorest people on the planet have gained the most. In places like Ireland, Singapore, Finland and Italy, even people who are relatively poor have adequate food, education, lodging and medical care — none of which their ancestors had. Not remotely.
Inequality of financial wealth goes up and down, but over the long term it has been reduced. Financial inequality was greater in 1800 and 1900 than it is now, as even the French economist Thomas Piketty has acknowledged. By the more important standard of basic comfort in consumption, inequality within and between countries has fallen nearly continuously.
In any case, the problem is poverty, not inequality as such — not how many yachts the L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt has, but whether the average Frenchwoman has enough to eat. At the time of “Les Misérables,” she didn’t. In the last 40 years, the World Bank estimates, the proportion of the population living on an appalling $1 or $2 a day has halved. Paul Collier, an Oxford economist, urges us to help the “bottom billion” of the more than seven billion people on earth. Of course. It is our duty. But he notes that 50 years ago, four billion out of five billion people lived in such miserable conditions. In 1800, it was 95 percent of one billion.
We can improve the conditions of the working class. Raising low productivity by enabling human creativity is what has mainly worked. By contrast, taking from the rich and giving to the poor helps only a little — and anyway expropriation is a one-time trick. Enrichment from market-tested betterment will go on and on and, over the next century or so, will bring comfort in essentials to virtually everyone on the planet, and more to an expanding middle class.
Look at the astonishing improvements in China since 1978 and in India since 1991. Between them, the countries are home to about four out of every 10 humans. Even in the United States, real wages have continued to grow — if slowly — in recent decades, contrary to what you might have heard. Donald Boudreaux, an economist at George Mason University, and others who have looked beyond the superficial have shown that real wages are continuing to rise, thanks largely to major improvements in the quality of goods and services, and to nonwage benefits. Real purchasing power is double what it was in the fondly remembered 1950s — when many American children went to bed hungry.
What, then, caused this Great Enrichment?
Not exploitation of the poor, not investment, not existing institutions, but a mere idea, which the philosopher and economist Adam Smith called “the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice.” In a word, it was liberalism, in the free-market European sense. Give masses of ordinary people equality before the law and equality of social dignity, and leave them alone, and it turns out that they become extraordinarily creative and energetic.
The liberal idea was spawned by some happy accidents in northwestern Europe from 1517 to 1789 — namely, the four R’s: the Reformation, the Dutch Revolt, the revolutions of England and France, and the proliferation of reading. The four R’s liberated ordinary people, among them the venturing bourgeoisie. The Bourgeois Deal is, briefly, this: In the first act, let me try this or that improvement. I’ll keep the profit, thank you very much, though in the second act those pesky competitors will erode it by entering and disrupting (as Uber has done to the taxi industry). By the third act, after my betterments have spread, they will make you rich.
And they did.
You may object that ideas are a dime a dozen and that to make them fruitful we must start with adequate physical and human capital and good institutions. It’s a popular idea at the World Bank, but a mistaken one. True, we eventually need capital and institutions to embody the ideas, such as a marble building with central heating and cooling to house the Supreme Court. But the intermediate and dependent causes like capital and institutions have not been the root cause.
The root cause of enrichment was and is the liberal idea, spawning the university, the railway, the high-rise, the internet and, most important, our liberties. What original accumulation of capital inflamed the minds of William Lloyd Garrison and Sojourner Truth? What institutions, except the recent liberal ones of university education and uncensored
The Formula for a Richer World? Equality, Liberty, Justice
Photo
The French Revolution was one of the events that gave rise to liberalism, which in turn improved the welfare of the masses.Credit National Library of France
The world is rich and will become still richer. Quit worrying.
Not all of us are rich yet, of course. A billion or so people on the planet drag along on the equivalent of $3 a day or less. But as recently as 1800, almost everybody did.
The Great Enrichment began in 17th-century Holland. By the 18th century, it had moved to England, Scotland and the American colonies, and now it has spread to much of the rest of the world.
Economists and historians agree on its startling magnitude: By 2010, the average daily income in a wide range of countries, including Japan, the United States, Botswana and Brazil, had soared 1,000 to 3,000 percent over the levels of 1800. People moved from tents and mud huts to split-levels and city condominiums, from waterborne diseases to 80-year life spans, from ignorance to literacy.
You might think the rich have become richer and the poor even poorer. But by the standard of basic comfort in essentials, the poorest people on the planet have gained the most. In places like Ireland, Singapore, Finland and Italy, even people who are relatively poor have adequate food, education, lodging and medical care — none of which their ancestors had. Not remotely.
Inequality of financial wealth goes up and down, but over the long term it has been reduced. Financial inequality was greater in 1800 and 1900 than it is now, as even the French economist Thomas Piketty has acknowledged. By the more important standard of basic comfort in consumption, inequality within and between countries has fallen nearly continuously.
In any case, the problem is poverty, not inequality as such — not how many yachts the L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt has, but whether the average Frenchwoman has enough to eat. At the time of “Les Misérables,” she didn’t. In the last 40 years, the World Bank estimates, the proportion of the population living on an appalling $1 or $2 a day has halved. Paul Collier, an Oxford economist, urges us to help the “bottom billion” of the more than seven billion people on earth. Of course. It is our duty. But he notes that 50 years ago, four billion out of five billion people lived in such miserable conditions. In 1800, it was 95 percent of one billion.
We can improve the conditions of the working class. Raising low productivity by enabling human creativity is what has mainly worked. By contrast, taking from the rich and giving to the poor helps only a little — and anyway expropriation is a one-time trick. Enrichment from market-tested betterment will go on and on and, over the next century or so, will bring comfort in essentials to virtually everyone on the planet, and more to an expanding middle class.
Look at the astonishing improvements in China since 1978 and in India since 1991. Between them, the countries are home to about four out of every 10 humans. Even in the United States, real wages have continued to grow — if slowly — in recent decades, contrary to what you might have heard. Donald Boudreaux, an economist at George Mason University, and others who have looked beyond the superficial have shown that real wages are continuing to rise, thanks largely to major improvements in the quality of goods and services, and to nonwage benefits. Real purchasing power is double what it was in the fondly remembered 1950s — when many American children went to bed hungry.
What, then, caused this Great Enrichment?
Not exploitation of the poor, not investment, not existing institutions, but a mere idea, which the philosopher and economist Adam Smith called “the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice.” In a word, it was liberalism, in the free-market European sense. Give masses of ordinary people equality before the law and equality of social dignity, and leave them alone, and it turns out that they become extraordinarily creative and energetic.
The liberal idea was spawned by some happy accidents in northwestern Europe from 1517 to 1789 — namely, the four R’s: the Reformation, the Dutch Revolt, the revolutions of England and France, and the proliferation of reading. The four R’s liberated ordinary people, among them the venturing bourgeoisie. The Bourgeois Deal is, briefly, this: In the first act, let me try this or that improvement. I’ll keep the profit, thank you very much, though in the second act those pesky competitors will erode it by entering and disrupting (as Uber has done to the taxi industry). By the third act, after my betterments have spread, they will make you rich.
And they did.
You may object that ideas are a dime a dozen and that to make them fruitful we must start with adequate physical and human capital and good institutions. It’s a popular idea at the World Bank, but a mistaken one. True, we eventually need capital and institutions to embody the ideas, such as a marble building with central heating and cooling to house the Supreme Court. But the intermediate and dependent causes like capital and institutions have not been the root cause.
The root cause of enrichment was and is the liberal idea, spawning the university, the railway, the high-rise, the internet and, most important, our liberties. What original accumulation of capital inflamed the minds of William Lloyd Garrison and Sojourner Truth? What institutions, except the recent liberal ones of university education and uncensored
