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She actually is trustworthy, smart, capable, and strong. |
She will surround herself with good, capable team. She will work with her allies for the benefit of all Americans. |
She will pull support from center independents and Republicans disgusted with their own party, as well as from Democrats and progressives. |
She is the strongest candidate to compete in the general and the best person to take us forward as President. |
No candidate understands the needs and concerns of women and families in this country and around the world more or is better positioned to implement policies nationally and worldwide to strengthen them. |
Justice and opportunity for all is not just a slogan for her. She has worked for these issues all her life and will continue to do so. |
She’s evolved progressively and with our support will continue to do so. |
Therefore, proud to be standing with Hillary Clinton. |
1. Hillary is not her own person. She’s a puppet for corporations. Don’t believe me? Ask Elizabeth Warren. |
She’s not a skilled negotiator.. A skilled negotiator would have gotten us Single Payer. A skilled negotiator would have won against a black man with a muslim sounding name. |
Her understanding of nuance is similar to a 5 year olds. If she understood it, she wouldn’t have voted for the war in Iraq. |
No. She doesn’t share the goal of universal access to healthcare. She shares the goal of making health insurance companies rich. |
She is NOT honest, trustworthy or capable. Don’t care if she’s smart or strong. |
Her team will be insiders with banks and corporations. |
She is losing to independents by a HUGE margin. Republicans despise her. |
She’s losing to Kasich. Within the margin of error with Cruz. Barely beating Trump. Bernie is trashing all of them. He’s beating Trump by double digits |
Bernie understands it better than her, simply because he’s not in a bubble and surrounded by money. |
Her idea of justice got a third of black men behind bars. |
She’s not evolved. She’s moving to the right as it goes towards the general. |
You’re an idiot. |
2. Please come back to reality. She circumvented the state department by setting up her own email server. Did not respond to FOIA requests until required by courts years after many requests. She tried to wipe the server. There is an FBI investigation. Classified emails were on her private server. She was a classifi... |
3. Hillary IS NOT her own person. She has been bought and paid for actually. She now belongs to Wall Street, the industrialized war machine that has taken over the American Military, and Big Pharm… Just to name a few…. She represents corporate interests over human interests and there is just no denying it. |
As for the rest of your comment… It’s all just opinion. And let me tell you that myself and most of the people in the U.S. and abroad have the exact opposite opinions as you. |
Sorry to burst the bubble of Cinton lies you have been living in. |
4. How many other candidates are being investigated for violating federal law? Can’t remember… |
3. Afraid she is going to commit more voting fraud especially since that she does well when the computers lose people’s party affiliation or regesration |
4. I want change. America wants change. This is evident in the rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. I’ve always been a registered voter with the Green Party of America. I’ve always voted “green”, not because I have an illusion that this great nation will miraculously elect a green candidate, but because people ne... |
5. Why stop ay 60%?? I’m from Seattle Washington. We bumped it to 72%! Make us proud. Get your friends to come with you, have voting parties. |
The time for action is now! |
I commenti sono chiusi. |
Pinterest Google+ |
Ayele Gelan (PhD), Special to Addis Standard |
A substantial sum of money has been illegally flowing out of Ethiopia during the last decade. What is even more worrying is not just that the levels of out flows are high but also the sizes of illicit capital outflows have been rising at alarming rates. This rather unique pattern has attracted the attention of the gene... |
I will also attempt to put some flesh on the bones of facts presented in the GFI database. I will do so by shedding some light on the political economy context of the illicit capital outflow (IFFs) from Ethiopia. |
Stolen money trails |
The natural starting point is to get a sense of magnitude on the levels and trends. The GFI data is summarized and plotted in Fig. 1. For the time being we focus on the total flows, that is the heights of each bar denoting sizes of annual illicit money outflows. The sum of the blue and red colors gives total amount ... |
The average annual outflow was $2.6 billion during 2004 and 2013. This is a sizeable sum of money by any standard. For instance, according to estimates reported by the World Bank, the amount of official development assistant (ODA) Ethiopia received in 2010 was $4 billion but total amount of IFFs during that year was $... |
This means in 2010 alone Ethiopia’s IFFs exceeded the ODA it received that year by $1.6 billion. In other words, Ethiopia’s IFFs amounted to diverting the entire aid money of 2010 to foreign banks and then still transfer abroad an additional sum of money. |
During the entire period (2004 to 2013) the total amount of money that Ethiopia lost due to IFF was $26 billion. This amounts to stealing nearly $300 per citizen. Alternatively, the size of stolen money was about 11 times the total the amount of emergency aid being sought from donors in the current year to buy cereals... |
Potential culprits |
One may wonder – who are the culprits responsible for Ethiopia’seconomic fraud at such massive scale? The GFI categorizes possible perpetrators into three groups: (a) financial institutions; (b) complicit business counterparts, mainly importers and exporters; and (c) government officials. |
In the Ethiopian case, it is reasonable to exclude financial institutions because there is no foreign bank operating in Ethiopia, and the domestic private banks are extremely tightly controlled. Ethiopia’s most influential banks, the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) and the National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE), are owned ... |
That is to say Ethiopia’s IFF can only be undertaken by importers, exporters or government officials. One would hasten to add that there is a huge extent of overlaps between government officials and big businesses in Ethiopia, since big businesses are highly interconnected with the government and/or they are directly ... |
Money diversion channels |
Now we can shift our attention back to fig. 1 and consider the breakdowns of the IFFs, the individual component denoted by the blue and red sections in each bar. The GFI applies a methodological framework that accounts for two types of illegal movements of money from one country to another. |
The first one is export or import trade misinvoicing. This is measured by using a methodology called Gross Excluding Reversals (GER). This simply mirrors exports by one country with imports of another country and vice versa. For instance, items of imports recorded by Ethiopia should agree with records of exporters to... |
The second one is various leakages in the balance of payments, measured by using the “hot money narrow” (HMN) approach.The latter one is often referred to as “net errors and omissions” in the balance of payment jargon. For instance, if a donor agency or country recorded $1 million grants to Ethiopia but this does not a... |
It is clear from Fig. 1 that the bulk of illicit money transfer from Ethiopia has taken place using trade misinvoicing, denoted by the blue component of the bar. In 2004, trade misinvoicing constituted only 14% of the total IFFs. In 2013, however, this proportion has grown to 100%, the entire IFFs began to be accounte... |
False invoices |
Trade misinvoicing can take place in one of the following four ways: over invoicing exports, under invoicing exports, over invoicing imports and under invoicing imports. In Ethiopia’s case, the GFI report indicated import over-invoicing is by far the most important method of transferring money abroad. During the period... |
It is critical to understand how import misinvoicing hurts the Ethiopian economy. This is important in the context of huge public construction projects with substantially large components of imports of machinery and other equipment. For instance, an acquisition of a set of machinery whose real value is $1 million is r... |
The importer allocates project budget at the inflated import value, pays the real value to the supplier and then siphons-off the difference (in this case $0.5 million) and deposits it in a foreign bank account. The real damage to the economy happens in terms of inflated capital expenditure. Perhaps the opportunity la... |
However, it should be noted that public capital projects are often financed through commercial loans that should be paid back with cumulative interests in years to come. The economic return to capital project would partly depend on the cost consideration at project implementation stage. |
The GFI also finds some export trade misinvoicing in Ethiopia’s foreign trade, over-invoicing by $6.5 billion as well as $3 million under-invoicing. In trade based money laundering, the most common types of misinvoicing are import over-invoicing and export under-invoicing. As noted above, the case of import invoicing h... |
Export over-invoicing do happen although they are rare, e.g. China’s trade with Hong-Kong. Export over-invoicing is required when there is a need to plough back money from abroad and report it as inflated foreign direct investment. This is likely the case with Ethiopia where the authorities have been desperate to repo... |
Ethiopia’s capital flights dwarfs rest of developing countries |
It would prove useful to know how bad Ethiopia’s IFFs is relative to other countries. Fig. 2 below compares Ethiopia with its neighbors, the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) as well as the average of developing countries (DCs). The comparison was done by expressing total illicit money outflowas percentage of GDP. The... |
This revealed astonishing patterns of illicit money outflow from Ethiopia which starkly contrasted with those for other countries. First, throughout the years Ethiopia’s records considerably exceeded those for its two immediate neighbors, Kenya and Tanzania. Second, a comparison of 2004 across the countries shows that... |
Third, the situation changed dramatically from 2005 onwards. Ethiopia outstripped Uganda, and then closed the gap with the SSA average. Fourth, Ethiopia’s average annual money outflows between 2010 and 2013 reached 11% of the country’s GDP, considerably exceeding the corresponding figures for the other countries – SSA... |
J 2 |
It should be noted that the SSA average is largely driven by money being squandered by oil and other mineral resources exporting countries such as Nigeria and Angola. It is telling to note that Ethiopia, a country not known for exporting substantial mineral resources, is now characterized by illicit money outflow to GD... |
Blind spots in accounting for remittance flows |
The analysis in the preceding sections relied entirely on the Global Financial Integrity (GFI) report. GFI methodology is strictly confined to official records as starting points and then mirrors records at different places and times. Systemic discrepancies between records are then registered as illicit transactions. |
Clearly, then the GFI methodology does not account for illicit money flows that take place through financial transactions in informal or black markets. Remittance flows are riddled with black markets in hard currencies. The situation is even worse in the context of Ethiopia, where official hard currency flows are tight... |
To the extent that remittances are channeled through formal banking or foreign exchange offices, then the transactions get into the balance of payment records. Leakages from the flow are accounted for through the GFI approach called “hot money” discussed earlier. |
However, there are strong evidences indicating that the bulk of remittance transfers to Ethiopia actually happen through informal channels, mainly because of better rates and lower costs. |
The informal channels may take one of two forms. First, it is common for Ethiopians living abroad to take hard currencies with them every time they visit home and then directly exchange it to birr in local black markets at better rates by avoiding transfer fees. It also happens that they send hard currencies via trav... |
Additionally, there is a more sophisticated black market which operates pretty much like the way foreign money transfer services operate, except that these are operated informally by individuals living abroad. As any Ethiopian living abroad can tell, every big city countries with hard currencies has a few black market... |
I selected a couple of major cities and gathered background information for this piece. The margins offered vary across time and space but the current margin on above Western Union conversion rates were at least one birr per unit of USD equivalents of local currencies in London, Dubai, and Kuwait, excluding foreign exc... |
The role of the black market is simply to collect and bulk the hard currencies. Where exactly the collected money goes is anybody’s guess. One may hope that importers who face constraints in foreign exchange rationing may smuggle out the hard currency they collected and/or importers may assign agents in foreign count... |
In both cases importers may spend the money they bulked on purchasing goods and services that will eventually enter Ethiopia. This is an optimistic scenario since the country may eventually benefit from availability of goods and services in the domestic market, except that the transactions were done informally and the ... |
The upshot of this discussion, however, is that the hard currencies collected from local black markets may get smuggled out and get deposited in foreign bank accounts. Similarly, black market operators residing abroad may also be primarily motivated by a pressing need to convert birr into a hard currency and safely dep... |
It should be noted that the GFI methodology misses out such blind spots in remittance flow accounting, which means Ethiopia’s capital flights discussed in the preceding sections is highly likely to underestimate the size of illicit capital flights from Ethiopia. If so much has been done to move money illegally abroad b... |
Why the rush? |
At this juncture it is appropriate to pool together different lines of discussions in the preceding paragraphs. The most crucial point here is the timing of dramatic changes in Ethiopia’s capital flight. It is clear from the facts presented in this piece that 2005 was a watershed moment in Ethiopia’s capital flight hi... |
For those who closely follow Ethiopia’s political and economic affairs, the fact that dramatic things began to happen soon after 2005 does not come as a surprise. The general election of that year and the upheavals that followed had seriously shaken self-confidence among the elites who held political and economic powe... |
This argument is substantiated by the following logical reasoning established in our discussions earlier. In the Ethiopian context there are no foreign banks, and domestic banks are very tightly controlled by the government. Also, there is a great deal of overlaps between interests of big businesses and those of govern... |
In that case, corrupt government officials and their affiliated businesses are the likely culprits for capital flights from Ethiopia at such epic proportions. The fact that rampant corruption has crippled the current government is openly debated in local media and among the elite at official forums. The evidence provid... |
ED’s Note: Ayele Gelan is an economist by training. He can be reached at augelana@gmail.com. He tweets @AyeleGelan |
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Tuesday, March 11, 2008 |
Bluffer's Guide to Consumer-related Science Papers |
I've been wanting to write something along these lines for a while and the opportunity seems to have presented itself at last. (Which is poor timing, as I won't have time to tell you about the teapot-worshipper who is going to prison for not abandoning any teachings contrary to Islam). |
Wading through PR blurb and advertising copy that relate to 'sciencey' things can be an effort, but with a few key pointers, sense can be made of most of it - for instance, a company will put the strongest claim possible on its strapline, so woolly words like 'may', 'could', help', 'aid', 'reduce', 'some' all go some w... |
Things can get much trickier though, if the advert in question claims "proved by scientific research". If there is grounds for this, the company will no doubt give full access to the research, otherwise, it's fairly safe to assume that it is selling a bum steer. |
So far, so straightforward. Let's say our imaginary company has a product, which claims to have scientific proof for its claims AND is presenting the research. Obviously, advertising will already have convinced/dissuaded a section of public; the "proved by research" strapline will convince another swathe and the presen... |
If you are like me (and if you are, I empathise with your shortcomings) then, depending on the product, the paper may or may not be read. It all depends on the claim. If a toothpaste claims to whiten my yellowing teeth, the paper may not get read. If a nutriceutical claims to alleviate my arthritis pain, then I am reac... |
I have some experience in reading scientific papers. But only really in my area, outwith of that, it can be tough going. What hope is there for someone who is not used at all to dealing with the curt, unloving, perfunctory monotones of thick research text? |
With a bit of persuasion, I hope to have here Dr* T's Bluffer's Guide to Published Research. This will probably be a work in progress, so I'm keen to hear of any additional points which will make it easier for people to wade through. |
What I've decided to do is use a paper I've been reading recently as a case study. |
The product in question is Life Mel Honey. |
As a beekeeper, I was interested to learn the nation's most paranoid shopkeeper, Mohammad (Not The Teddy Bear) Al Fayed has started selling Life Mel honey in his large corner shop at the very reasonable price of £42 for a small jar. |
The reason that this product commands a high price is because (apart from beeing in Harrod's) there is some research to show that Life Mel honey can help patients having chemotherapy avoid a complication called neutropenia. This is caused by a lack of neutrophils (a type of white blood cell which serve as a defence aga... |
Sounds like good stuff - tell me more. Firstly, the advertising blurb - it's a nice website, we get directed to Holywell Health products, the distributor of Life Mel in the UK, which proudly claims the research published in Medical Oncology and has kindly put a link to the .pdf of the paper. |
Zidan J, Shetver L, Gershuny A, Abzah A, Tamam S, Stein M, Friedman E.; |
Prevention of chemotherapy-induced neutropenia by special honey intake. |
Medical Oncology 2006;23(4):549-52. |
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