World Bank contradictions
on healthcare
If the United Kingdom government feels the need to travel to Cuba to learn how to improve its own health system – and if the World Bank itself can admit that there is much to learn – it remains an open question why Bangladesh would turn to the World Bank for advice, rather than go straight to the source for ideas on how to improve things here, writes Fozia Akhtar
IN COUNTRY after country, the World Bank, with its good friend the International Monetary Fund, recommends liberalisation measures that it is well aware will often lead to disaster. Yet occasionally a glimpse of truth sneaks out from even the World Bank’s top executive.
Take the case of former World Bank president James Wolfensohn, certainly no friend of the poor. Just to mention one incident, Wolfensohn expressed delight when the Argentine economy crashed, because companies could now pay far lower wages. Analysts with access to inside information have suggested that the World Bank’s recipes for economic disaster are based on the likelihood that economies will crumble, giving outside investors a chance to buy up assets at bargain rates.
Yet this same Wolfensohn, when still at the helm of the bank, actually praised Fidel Castro – yes, that enemy of trade liberalisation and capitalism – for doing ‘a great job’ for the Cuban people.
The praise occurred at the publication of the bank’s 2001 edition of World Development Indicators, in which the country that soundly refused to do anything the way the World Bank recommends was doing better than almost all other poor countries in terms of health and education.
Things aren’t easy for Cuba. America has maintained a trade embargo against Cuba, despite many concessions on the part of Castro. Further, the US continues to use Guantánamo Bay as an American prison that the US claims falls outside of American and international law, meaning that detainees and prisoners there (including Haitian refugees and terrorist suspects) have no rights. After Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, he stopped cashing annual lease payments after the first check and declared the 1934 lease agreement illegal – but the situation remains.
Denied both its port and many significant trade partners, the Cuban economy has naturally suffered. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba’s economic situation worsened further, yet Cuba actually increased its budget for health care.
But don’t trust me; take it straight from Wolfensohn’s mouth. According to him, ‘Cuba has done a great job on education and health.’ According to a newspaper article at the time, Wolfensohn’s comments ‘reflect a growing appreciation in the Bank for Cuba’s social record, despite recognition that Havana’s economic policies are virtually the antithesis of the ... neo-liberal orthodoxy that has dominated the Bank’s policy advice and its controversial structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) for most of the last 20 years.’
Other Bank officers at the time suggested that other developing countries had much to learn from Cuba. According to the article, ‘Indeed, Cuba is living proof in many ways that the Bank’s dictum that economic growth is a precondition for improving the lives of the poor is over-stated, if not downright wrong. The Bank has insisted for the past decade that improving the lives of the poor was its core mission.’
In 2000, the secretary general of the United Nations Kofi Annan stated that ‘Cuba should be the envy of many other nations’, and that ‘Cuba demonstrates how much nations can do with the resources they have if they focus on the right priorities – health, education, and literacy.’
What is so radically different about Cuba? For one, it is the only developing countries besides North Korea which, since 1960, has never received any assistance, in terms of advice or aid, from the bank. Nor is Cuba a member.
Cuba’s economic policies violate virtually all the rules of the World Bank and its allies. The entire economy is in the hands of the government, with private businesses allowed only the slightest scope for their activities. The government heavily subsidises almost all essential goods. Despite those policies – or rather, because of them – it has achieved ever-increasing benefits on the social front, including a lower infant and under-five mortality rate than America, and a comparable life expectancy rate. Cuba has nearly twice as many physicians as the United States, at 5.91 doctors per thousand people compared to 2.56 doctors per thousand, according to the World Health Organisation.
All Cuban children go to primary school, which is not true even in America. In just a decade, Cuba reduced illiteracy from 40 per cent to zero, despite its severe economic constraints.
The Cuban constitution enshrines the right to free medical and hospital care. The few medical services that are not universally free are charged only to those who can afford it; when a patient can obtain these items at state stores, prices tend to be low as these items are subsidised by the state. For low-income patients, all health care and drugs are free of charge.
The government also produces generic anti-retroviral drugs for treatment of HIV/AIDS. Due to its strong emphasis on prevention, in 2003 Cuba had the lowest HIV prevalence in the Americas and one of the lowest in the world.
All fiscal and administrative aspects of health care in Cuba are run by the state; no private hospitals or clinics are permitted, and medical workers are required to work for the state. Huh. Apparently management issues can be handled by dedication and attention, rather than by handing everything over to private companies – and with infinitely better results.
Cuba actually exports doctors and teachers to other countries. Cuban medical teams have assisted victims of both the South Asian Tsunami and the Pakistan earthquake. Nearly 2,000 Cuban doctors are currently working in Africa in countries including South Africa, Gambia, Guinea Bissau and Mali. Since the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded in 1986, more than 20,000 children from Ukraine, Belarus and Russia have travelled to Cuba for treatment of radiation sickness and psychological problems. Cuban doctors also work in remote Venezuelan slums.
It is not only low-income countries that have much to learn from Cuba. The United Kingdom, with vastly more material wealth than Cuba, has sent teams to Cuba to learn from their system and apply those lessons to its own National Health Services. Among the significant differences noted by the UK visiting team was the very high doctor-patient ratio in Cuba (at one doctor per 175 people, virtually the highest in the world).
The team also noted that in Cuba, general practitioners and nurses are supplied with housing by the government; that there is excellent teamwork and strong integration of hospital and primary care; extensive involvement of patients and the public in decision-making, and at the root of it all, extreme importance – in terms of funding and attention – given to education and health care.
If the United Kingdom government feels the need to travel to Cuba to learn how to improve its own health system – and if the World Bank itself can admit that there is much to learn – it remains an open question why Bangladesh would turn to the World Bank for advice, rather than go straight to the source for ideas on how to improve things here.
The problem with such a strong welfare system as Cuba’s is, of course, that it only exists when capitalism is kept on a tight rein. Once the doors are opened for individuals to grow extremely rich, the situation of the poor inevitably
suffers.
It is not possible to have both poverty eradication and extreme inequality. That, in short, is why the World Bank’s capitalist formulation will never succeed. Rather than study and copy a failed formula, why not imitate what works?
Fozia Akhtar is a policy expert currently residing in East Sussex, UK
Weaponising the Pentagon’s
cyborg insects
Biological weapons delivered by cyborg insects. It sounds like a nightmare scenario straight out of the wilder realms of science fiction, but it could be a reality, if a current Pentagon project comes to fruition, writes Nick Turse
RIGHT NOW, researchers are growing insects with electronics inside them. They’re creating cyborg moths and flying beetles that can be remotely controlled. One day, the US military may field squadrons of winged insect/machine hybrids with on-board audio, video or chemical sensors. These cyborg insects could conduct surveillance and reconnaissance missions on distant battlefields, in far-off caves, or maybe even in cities closer to home, and transmit detailed data back to their handlers at US military bases.
Today, many people fear US government surveillance of email and cell phone communications. With this programme, the Pentagon aims to exponentially increase the paranoia. Imagine a world in which any insect fluttering past your window may be a remote-controlled spy, packed with surveillance equipment. Even more frightening is the prospect that such creatures could be weaponised, and the possibility, according to one scientist intimately familiar with the project, that these cyborg insects might be armed with ‘bio-weapons.’
For the past 50 years, work by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency – the Pentagon’s blue skies research outfit – has led to some of the most lethal weaponry in the US arsenal: from Hellfire-missile-equipped Predator drones and stealth fighters and bombers to Tomahawk cruise missiles and Javelin portable ‘fire and forget’ guided missiles. For the last several years, DARPA has funnelled significant sums of money into a very different kind of guided missile project, its Hybrid Insect MEMS programme. This project is, according to DARPA, ‘aimed at developing tightly coupled machine-insect interfaces by placing micro-mechanical systems inside the insects during the early stages of metamorphosis.’ Put simply, the creation of cyborg insects: part bug, part bot.
Bugs, bots, borgs and bio-weapons
This past August, at DARPA’s annual symposium – DARPATech – HI-MEMS programme manager Amit Lal, an associate professor on leave from Cornell University, explained that his project aims to transform ‘insects into unmanned air-vehicles’. He described the research this way: ‘[T]he HI-MEMS programme seeks to grow MEMS and electronics inside the insect pupae. The new tissue forms around the insertions, making the bio-electronic interface long-lasting and reliable.’ In other words, micro-electronics are inserted at the pupal stage of metamorphosis so that they can be integrated into the insects’ bodies as they develop, creating living robots that can be remotely controlled after the insect emerges from its cocoon.
According to the latest reports, work on this project is progressing at a rapid pace. In a recent phone interview, DARPA spokesperson Jan Walker said, ‘We’re focused on determining what the best kinds of MEMS systems are; what the best MEMS system would be for embedding; what the best time is for embedding.’
This month, Rob Coppinger, writing for the aerospace trade publication Flight International, reported on new advances announced at the ‘1st US-Asian Assessment and Demonstration of Micro-Aerial and Unmanned Ground Vehicle Technology’ – a Pentagon-sponsored conference. ‘In the latest work,’ he noted, ‘a Manduca moth had its thorax truncated to reduce its mass and had a MEMS component added where abdominal segments would have been, during the larval stage.’ But, as he pointed out, Robert Michelson, a principal research engineer, emeritus at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, laid out ‘on behalf of DARPA’ some of the obstacles that remain. Among them were short insect life-spans and the current inability to create these cyborgs outside specialised labs.
DARPA’s professed long-term goal for the HI-MEMS programme is the creation of ‘insect cyborgs’ capable of carrying ‘one or more sensors, such as a microphone or a gas sensor, to relay back information gathered from the target destination’ – in other words, the creation of military micro-surveillance systems.
In a recent email interview, Michelson – who has previously worked on numerous military projects, including DARPA’s ‘effort to develop an “Entomopter” (mechanical insect-like multimode aerial robot)’ – described the types of sensor packages envisioned, but only in a minimalist fashion, as a ‘[w]ide array of active and passive devices’. However, in ‘Insect Cyborgs: A New Frontier in Flight Control Systems’, a 2007 article in the academic journal Proceedings of SPIE, Cornell researchers noted that cyborg insects could be used as ‘autonomous surveillance and reconnaissance vehicles’ with on-board ‘[s]ensory systems such as video and chemical.’
Surveillance applications, however, may only be the beginning. Last year, Jonathan Richards, reporting for The Times, raised the spectre of the weaponisation of cyborg insects in the not-too-distant future. As he pointed out, Rodney Brooks, the director of the computer science and artificial intelligence lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, indicated that the Pentagon is striving toward a major expansion in the use of non-traditional air power – like unmanned aerial vehicles and cyborg insects – in the years ahead. ‘There’s no doubt their things will become weaponised,’ he explained, ‘so the question [is]: should they [be] given targeting authority?’ Brooks went on to assert, according to The Times, that it might be time to consider rewriting international law to take the future weaponisation of such ‘devices’ into account.
But how would one weaponise a cyborg insect? On this subject, Robert Michelson was blunt: ‘Bio-weapons.’
Cyborg ethics
Michelson wouldn’t elaborate further, but any programme using bio-weapons would immediately raise major legal and ethical questions. The 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention outlawed the manufacture and possession of bio-weapons, of ‘[m]icrobial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin... that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes’ and of ‘[w]eapons, equipment or means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict’. In fact, not only did President George W Bush claim that Iraq’s supposed production and possession of biological weapons was a justification for an invasion of that nation, but he had previously stated, ‘All civilised nations reject as intolerable the use of disease and biological weapons as instruments of war and terror.’
Reached for comment, however, DARPA’s Jan Walker insisted that her agency’s focus was only on ‘fundamental research’ when it came to cyborg insects. Although the focus of her agency is, in fact, distinctly on the future – the technology of tomorrow – she refused to look down the road when it came to weaponising insect cyborgs or arming them with bio-weapons. ‘I can’t speculate on the future,’ was all she would say.
Michelson is perfectly willing to look into future, especially on matters of cyborg insect surveillance, but on the horizon for him are technical issues when it comes to the military use of bug bots. ‘Surveillance goes on anyway by other means,’ he explained, ‘so a new method is not the issue. If there are ethical or legal issues, they are ones of “surveillance”, not of the “surveillance platform”.’
Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights and civil liberties group, sees that same future in a different light. Cyborg insects, he says, are an order of magnitude away from today’s more standard surveillance technologies like closed circuit television. ‘CCTV is mostly deployed in public and in privately owned public spaces. An insect could easily fly into your garden or sit outside your bedroom window,’ he explained. ‘To make matters worse, you’d have no idea these devices were there. A CCTV camera is usually an easily recognisable device. Robotic surveillance insects might be harder to spot. And having to spot them wouldn’t necessarily be good for our mental health.’
Does Michelson see any ethical or legal dilemmas resulting from the future use of weaponised cyborg insects? ‘No, not unless they could breed new cyborg insects, which is not possible,’ he explained. ‘Genetic engineering will be the ethical and legal battleground, not cybernetics.’
Battle beetles and hawkish hawkmoths
Weaponised or not, moths are hardly the only cyborg insects that may fly, creep, or crawl into the military’s future arsenal. Scientists from Arizona State University and elsewhere, working under a grant from the Office of Naval Research and DARPA, ‘are rearing beetle species at various oxygen levels to attempt to produce beetles with greater-than-normal size and payload capacity’. Earlier this year, some of the same scientists published an article on their DARPA-funded research titled ‘A Cyborg Beetle: Insect Flight Control Through an Implantable, Tetherless Microsystem’. They explained that, by implanting ‘multiple inserted neural and muscular stimulators, a visual stimulator, a polyimide assembly and a microcontroller’ in a 2-centimetre long, 1-2-gram green June beetle, they were ‘capable of modulating [the insect’s] flight starts, stops, throttle/lift, and turning’. They could, that is, drive an actual beetle. However, unlike the June bug you might find on a porch screen or in a garden, these sported on-board electronics powered by cochlear implant batteries.
DARPA-funded HI-MEMS research has also been undertaken at other institutions across the country and around the world. For example, in 2006, researchers at Cornell, in conjunction with scientists at Pennsylvania State University and the Universidad de Valparaiso, Chile, received an $8.4-million DARPA grant for work on ‘Insect Cyborg Sentinels’. According to a recent article in New Scientist, a team led by one of the primary investigators on that grant, David Stern, screened a series of video clips at a recent conference in Tucson, Arizona demonstrating their ability to control tethered tobacco hawkmoths through ‘flexible plastic probes’ implanted during the pupae stage. Simply stated, the researchers were able to remotely control the moths-on-a-leash, manipulating the cyborg creatures’ wing speed and direction.
Robo-bugs
Cyborg insects are only the latest additions to the US military’s menagerie. As defence tech-expert Noah Shachtman of Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog has reported, DARPA projects have equipped rats with electronic equipment and remotely controlled sharks, while the military has utilised all sorts of animals, from bomb-detecting honeybees and ‘chickens used as early-warning sensors for chemical attacks’ to guard dogs and dolphins trained to hunt mines. Additionally, he notes, the DoD’s emphasis on the natural world has led to robots that resemble dogs, monkeys that control robotic limbs with their minds, and numerous other projects inspired by nature.
But whatever other creatures they favour, insects never seem far from the Pentagon’s dreams of the future. In fact, Shachtman reported earlier this year that ‘Air Force scientists are looking for robotic bombs that look – and act – like swarms of bugs and birds.’ He went on to quote Colonel Kirk Kloeppel, head of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s munitions directorate, who announced the lab’s interest in ‘bio-inspired munitions’, in ‘small, autonomous’ machines that would ‘provide close-in [surveillance] information, in addition to killing intended targets’.
This month, researcher Robert Wood wrote in IEEE Spectrum about what he believes was ‘the first flight of an insect-size robot’. After almost a decade of research, Wood and his colleagues at the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory are now creating small insect-like robots that will eventually be outfitted ‘with onboard sensors, flight controls, and batteries... to nimbly flit around obstacles and into places beyond human reach’. Like cyborg insect researchers, Wood is DARPA-funded. Last year, in fact, the agency selected him as one of 24 ‘rising stars’ for a ‘young faculty awards’ grant.
Asked about the relative advantages of cyborg insects compared to mechanical bugs, Robert Michelson noted that ‘robotic insects obey without innate or external influences’ and ‘they can be mass produced rapidly’. He cautioned, however, that they are extremely limited power-wise. Insect cyborgs, on the other hand, ‘can harvest energy and continue missions of longer duration’. However, they ‘may be diverted from their task by stronger influences’; must be grown to maturity and so may not be available when needed; and, of course, are mortal and run the risk of dying before they can be employed as needed.
The future is now
There is plenty of technical information about the HI-MEMS programme available in the scientific literature. And if you make inquiries, DARPA will even direct you to some of the relevant citations. But while it’s relatively easy to learn about the optimal spots to insert a neural stimulator in a green June beetle (‘behind the eye, in the flight control area of the insect brain’) or an electronic implant in a tobacco hawkmoth (‘the main flight powering muscles... in the dorsal-thorax’), it’s much harder to discover the likely future implications of this sci-fi sounding research.
The ‘final demonstration goal’ – the immediate aim – of DARPA’s HI-MEMS programme ‘is the delivery of an insect within five metres of a specific target located a hundred metres away, using electronic remote control, and/or global positioning system’. Right now, DARPA doesn’t know when that might happen. ‘We basically operate phase to phase,’ says Walker. ‘So, it kind of depends on how they do in the current phase and we’ll make decisions on future phases.’
DARPA refuses to examine anything but research-oriented issues. As a result, its Pentagon-funded scientists churn out inventions with potentially dangerous, if not deadly, implications without ever fully considering – let alone seeking public or expert comment on – the future ramifications of new technologies under production.
‘The people who build this equipment are always going to say that they’re just building tools, that there are legitimate uses for them, and that it isn’t their fault if the tools are abused,’ says the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Eckersley. ‘Unfortunately, we’ve seen that governments are more than willing to play fast-and-loose with the legal bounds on surveillance. Unless and until that changes, we’d urge researchers to find other projects to work on.’
Tomdispatch, March 30. Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Adbusters, the Nation, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch.
Announcement
The New Age ‘Quick Comments’ introduces SMS texting. From now on the readers, along with sending Quick Comments via mail/e-mail, can also send
their comments via SMS to <01713-065-354> and send their reaction on
different national and international issues.
97-year-old man jailed for begging!
Arresting a 97-year-old man for begging! Now, that is indeed the way forward to eradicate poverty from the streets. Lock them away and they will cease to exist. Bangladesh would then be the only Third World country to have come out of the shackles poverty.
Shahed Alam
Dhaka
* * *
Apparently the Dhaka Metropolitan Police Ordinance prohibits begging. It prohibits display of disability or wounds with the intention of seeking charity or alms on the streets. From another point of view then, able-bodied, well-dressed and well-groomed people may ask for charity in air-conditioned boardrooms.
The better-off are allowed to beg but the disabled and poor are not. Now that is championing disparity at its highest level.
Toufique Alam
Gulshan, Dhaka
* * *
I don’t know which is worse, that a law prohibits begging on the streets in a country where at least 40 per cent are poor or that the law enforcers and a magistrate find it justifiable to uphold and apply that law, punishing a 97-year-old man with a prison sentence. It simply defies rational thinking and verges on the surreal.
Zubair
Banani
* * *
Beggars arrested to clear away nuisance from the streets before the president is scheduled to pass through!
This is presumably not to burden the president’s peace of mind that might exacerbate his health condition, one presumes. But the president’s awareness of his surroundings or the consequence of his deeds does not seem to bear too heavily upon him. One must then come to a logical conclusion that his sensory organs are failing him and are not as sharp as they used to be.
In that case he would not see the beggar in the first place and thus would have no reason to become upset.
Sarah Chowdhury
Los Angeles, USA
* * *
It can’t be so bad if proper food and a reasonable shelter are provided for him in the jail. What good life is for a begging man in the street?
However, let the authorities and the people who arrested this poor man make sure that he is not mistreated and civilised norm of behaviour is shown to this old poor man.
An expatriate
On e-mail
* * *
The authorities should forget the beggars, and go after the organised gangs that sponsor the beggars on the street.
AA
On e-mail
* * *
It was a pathetic news in the New Age that a 97-year-old man was jailed for begging on the street through which our president was scheduled to go to Dhaka University. This unfortunate man, Jumman Ali, was jailed for three days.
We also learn that more than 2000 people have been arrested in last three months. However, my question to the government is could you please tell us what will these hapless people do when people have to live by taking only one meal a day?
If begging is not allowed then how would these downtrodden be able buy 1 kg rice at taka 35 and 1 kg flour at taka 45? The day is not probably far away when many would probably consider committing suicide not being able to afford even one meal a day. Would the government permit them to do that?
Md Mushfique Wadud
Department of English, Stamford University
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a. Hasina sent to jail after discharge from hospital: Says she was forced to appear in court (New Age, March 31)
b. Panic buying triggers fresh rise in rice prices (New Age, March 31)
c. Government toughens labour law: Nat’l Identity Registration Authority Ordinance approved (New Age, March 31)
d. Germany may pressure govt if polls not held this year (New Age, March 31)
e. Jacob wants immediate trial of war criminals (New Age, March 31)
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g. Dhaka joins ‘Earth Hour’ observance (New Age, March 31)
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