Comments from thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog

ARTICLE: "'Saudi Arabia of Milk' Hits Production Limits: New Zealand Dairy Thirsts for Capital, A Big Issue in Food," by Patrick Barta, Wall Street Journal, 8 May 2008, p. A1.
The industry wants to raise $1 billion internationally, but the hold-up is getting 11,000 individual farmers in co-ops to agree. Big trick is getting independence-minded farmers to accept more outside say in how they do things.

New Zealand risks plenty by not being able to take advantage of this rising global demand, because if it doesn't, then others will—eventually.

The revealing quote from a farmer's union: "Farmers didn't build up this bloody great asset to throw it away."

Saudi Arabia of Milk you say? In more ways than one. Same narrow-minded fear of outside capital, so a preference to underutilize and dominate a smaller pool that build up a larger pool that makes everyone richer while meeting and sustaining rising international demand.

Why the love of small farms? It's all about jobs and maintaining small towns.

Sounds like the India of Milk—in love with the village.

I say we pump up California and Wisconsin and crush the competition globally.

Thursday, May. 01, 2008
Istanbul's Economic Tension
By Andrew Purvis/Istanbul
Turkey has attracted a lot of attention lately thanks to a series of political crises--from armed forays into neighboring Iraq in pursuit of autonomy-seeking Kurdish militants to an atavistic attempt by Turkish prosecutors to ban the country's own ruling party. The political intrigue has created a speed bump--or maybe a stop sign--for an economy that had been striding with determination toward inclusion in the European Union and recharging its ancient trade links with the Middle East.

Since 2002, annual foreign direct investment in the mainly Muslim but officially secular country of more than 70 million people, which has traditionally served as a crossroads between East and West, has jumped more than 30-fold, to about $22 billion. Investment in banks, retail and commercial real estate has risen sharply. Turkish businesses have been investing aggressively in oil-rich Russia and the Middle East. All told, an economy that was shrinking as recently as 2001 expanded more than 5% a year through last year.

Turkey's economic surge is, moreover, a sign of underlying political progress. The West couldn't hide its nervousness when the Justice and Development Party (AKP) was elected in 2002. The AKP is moderately Islamist, but its economics have turned out to be decidedly liberal. The party has nurtured economic reforms that have tamed inflation, stabilized a jittery currency and entrenched the independence of the country's central bank. Privatization of state-owned properties continues to attract outside investors. Turkey's application to join the E.U. is stalled on objections by France and Germany, among others. But the process of meeting reform benchmarks for membership eligibility has already paid off nicely. Whether or not Turkey joins the E.U., its government says its chief goal is to increase incomes to European levels.

But its Old Guard secular establishment is now backing a lawsuit aimed at banning the democratically elected AKP, casting a shadow over Turkey's prospects, at least in the short term. The suit seeks to bar the party and its members from political activity for allegedly violating Turkey's constitutional prohibition against mixing politics and religion. The move has rattled markets. After tripling from 2002 through last November, Turkey's stock index has dropped 32%. The global credit crunch has not helped. The ratings agency Standard & Poor's in April cut Turkey's credit rating to negative from stable, citing a fraught political and global environment. "The Turkish economy is in a major transformation with high efficiency gains, whose impact will be even more evident in the next decade," asserts Suzan Sabanci, chairwoman of Akbank, Turkey's largest privately owned bank, and a scion of one of Turkey's wealthiest families. "Global events will have an influence on the Turkish economy," she notes. "But I do not expect them to be dramatic."

Modern Turkey has looked Westward since its staunchly secular founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk decreed the separation of mosque and state shortly after World War I. The pro-Western political bent did not immediately translate into liberal economics. Corruption, cronyism and protectionism continued to cloud prospects until the 1980s. Even then, after a period of economic liberalization under reformist Prime Minister Turgut Ozal (a pal of Margaret Thatcher's), the old habits died hard. In 2001, Turkey suffered a full-blown financial crisis in which the Turkish currency lost nearly 50% of its value overnight.

That shock proved to be a wake-up call. Turkey was compelled, as a result, to accept World Bank and International Monetary Fund prescriptions, including fiscal discipline and regulatory changes, that have since paid off handsomely, triggering five years of more than 6% annual growth, single-digit inflation and rising incomes.

Turkish banks have been particularly attractive to outside investors. Citigroup last year bought a 20% stake in Akbank (for $3 billion). "The foreign appetite for Turkish companies and stocks is high," said Hakan Avci, director of asset management at the Istanbul office of Raymond James Securities, a U.S. company, before the recent political blowup. In the past 18 months, Lehman Bros., Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse bought local brokerages in the country. Avci has since lowered his projections because of the political turmoil but says he is "optimistic that this crisis will be overcome and a solution found." The Turkish government has vowed to press ahead with privatization plans, including a 15% treasury-owned stake in Turk Telekom, the Turkish telephone operator, as well as regional electricity-distribution grids and Halkbank, Turkey's second largest state-owned bank.

Commercial real estate in big cities like Istanbul has become particularly attractive to foreign investors who see markets in Turkey that have yet to be picked over. The graceful domes and minarets of Istanbul and other cities are being augmented by a thicket of building cranes, and futuristic shopping malls are competing for space among the red-tiled roofs. Analyst Roger Barris at Merrill Lynch predicts that outsiders will pour more than $15 billion into Turkish real estate in the next five years. Turkish coffee may be famous, but Turkey is now one of Starbucks' fastest-growing markets.

Turkish businesses, meanwhile, invested $28 billion in Russia last year, up from $15 billion in 2005. They are poised to take advantage of the $1 trillion that Russia says it will spend on infrastructure by 2020. And while Turkey refused to permit U.S. troops to invade neighboring Iraq from its territory in 2003, Turkish construction and retail companies have since invested up to $10 billion in the war-torn country.

Falling trade barriers with the West have also reinvigorated some of Turkey's ancient trade centers. In the old Silk Road city of Kayseri, formerly Caesarea, 150 miles (240 km) southeast of Ankara, some 400 factories producing everything from electric cables to blue jeans have sprung up in the past several years. Exports from that city and its sister "Anatolian tigers," as Turks call the industrial hubs of the central part of the country, have doubled since 2002. "We will take care of Europe in its old age," jokes Mustafa Boydak, head of Kayseri's Chamber of Commerce, citing Turkey's entrepreneurial efforts and the youthfulness of its population, 70% of which is under 35. The region's growing economic clout, says Gerald Knaus, director of the European Stability Initiative, an Istanbul-based think tank, suggests that divisions in Turkey between wealthy, secular élites and the conservative Muslim middle class are disappearing. "We are seeing the transformation of an agrarian society into an industrial economy," he says.

But the latest political problems show how Turkey's old secular establishment, a wealthy class rooted in western coastal cities, is not ready to surrender its prerogatives yet. It is backing the court challenge to the AKP, whose electoral base, incidentally, is central Anatolia. (Turkey's President, Abdullah Gul, is from Kayseri.) "The reason the economy was booming in recent years," says Raymond James analyst Avci, "was that there was finally political stability with a single-party government. That is now in jeopardy, which is worrying." And yet businessmen like Serdar Bilgili remain upbeat. The Istanbul entrepreneur just invested in a $75 million project to build a new W Hotel in the trendiest part of Istanbul. "We are very positive in the long term," he says. "The outlook might seem unclear now, but financial markets and bank reserves are strong, and we are confident in the potential of Turkey to grow." The fact that he is not alone in that view is, ultimately, Turkey's real headline news.

With reporting by With Reporting by Pelin Turgut / Istanbul

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http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1736708,00.html

May 4, 2008
Turkish Schools Offer Pakistan a Gentler Vision of Islam

By SABRINA TAVERNISE
KARACHI, Pakistan — Praying in Pakistan has not been easy for Mesut Kacmaz, a Muslim teacher from Turkey.

He tried the mosque near his house, but it had Israeli and Danish flags painted on the floor for people to step on. The mosque near where he works warned him never to return wearing a tie. Pakistanis everywhere assume he is not Muslim because he has no beard.

“Kill, fight, shoot,” Mr. Kacmaz said. “This is a misinterpretation of Islam.”

But that view is common in Pakistan, a frontier land for the future of Islam, where schools, nourished by Saudi and American money dating back to the 1980s, have spread Islamic radicalism through the poorest parts of society. With a literacy rate of just 50 percent and a public school system near collapse, the country is particularly vulnerable.

Mr. Kacmaz (pronounced KATCH-maz) is part of a group of Turkish educators who have come to this battleground with an entirely different vision of Islam. Theirs is moderate and flexible, comfortably coexisting with the West while remaining distinct from it. Like Muslim Peace Corps volunteers, they promote this approach in schools, which are now established in more than 80 countries, Muslim and Christian.

Their efforts are important in Pakistan, a nuclear power whose stability and whose vulnerability to fundamentalism have become main preoccupations of American foreign policy. Its tribal areas have become a refuge to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and the battle against fundamentalism rests squarely on young people and the education they get.

At present, that education is extremely weak. The poorest Pakistanis cannot afford to send their children to public schools, which are free but require fees for books and uniforms. Some choose to send their children to madrasas, or religious schools, which, like aid organizations, offer free food and clothing. Many simply teach, but some have radical agendas. At the same time, a growing middle class is rejecting public schools, which are chaotic and poorly financed, and choosing from a new array of private schools.

The Turkish schools, which have expanded to seven cities in Pakistan since the first one opened a decade ago, cannot transform the country on their own. But they offer an alternative approach that could help reduce the influence of Islamic extremists.

They prescribe a strong Western curriculum, with courses, taught in English, from math and science to English literature and Shakespeare. They do not teach religion beyond the one class in Islamic studies that is required by the state. Unlike British-style private schools, however, they encourage Islam in their dormitories, where teachers set examples in lifestyle and prayer.

“Whatever the West has of science, let our kids have it,” said Erkam Aytav, a Turk who works in the new schools. “But let our kids have their religion as well.”

That approach appeals to parents in Pakistan, who want their children to be capable of competing with the West without losing their identities to it. Allahdad Niazi, a retired Urdu professor in Quetta, a frontier town near the Afghan border, took his son out of an elite military school, because it was too authoritarian and did not sufficiently encourage Islam, and put him in the Turkish school, called PakTurk.

“Private schools can’t make our sons good Muslims,” Mr. Niazi said, sitting on the floor in a Quetta house. “Religious schools can’t give them modern education. PakTurk does both.”

The model is the brainchild of a Turkish Islamic scholar, Fethullah Gulen. A preacher with millions of followers in Turkey, Mr. Gulen, 69, comes from a tradition of Sufism, an introspective, mystical strain of Islam. He has lived in exile in the United States since 2000, after getting in trouble with secular Turkish officials.

Mr. Gulen’s idea, Mr. Aytav said, is that “without science, religion turns to radicalism, and without religion, science is blind and brings the world to danger.”

The schools are putting into practice a Turkish Sufi philosophy that took its most modern form during the last century, after Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s founder, crushed the Islamic caliphate in the 1920s. Islamic thinkers responded by trying to bring Western science into the faith they were trying to defend. In the 1950s, while Arab Islamic intellectuals like Sayyid Qutub were firmly rejecting the West, Turkish ones like Said Nursi were seeking ways to coexist with it.

In Karachi, a sprawling city that has had its own struggles with radicalism — the American reporter Daniel Pearl was killed here, and the famed Binori madrasa here is said to have sheltered Osama bin Laden — the two approaches compete daily.

The Turkish school is in a poor neighborhood in the south of the city where residents are mostly Pashtun, a strongly tribal ethnic group whose poorer fringes have been among the most susceptible to radicalism. Mr. Kacmaz, who became principal 10 months ago, ran into trouble almost as soon as he began. The locals were suspicious of the Turks, who, with their ties and clean-shaven faces, looked like math teachers from Middle America.

“They asked me several times, ‘Are they Muslim? Do they pray? Are they drinking at night?’ ” said Ali Showkat, a vice principal of the school, who is Pakistani.

Goats nap by piles of rubbish near the school’s entrance, and Mr. Kacmaz asked a local religious leader to help get people to stop throwing their trash near the school, to no avail. Exasperated, he hung an Islamic saying on the outer wall of the school: “Cleanliness is half of faith.” When he prayed at a mosque, two young men followed him out and told him not to return wearing a tie because it was un-Islamic.

“I said, ‘Show me a verse in the Koran where it was forbidden,’ ” Mr. Kacmaz said, steering his car through tangled rush-hour traffic. The two men were wearing glasses, and he told them that scripturally, there was no difference between a tie and glasses.

“Behind their words there was no Hadith,” he said, referring to a set of Islamic texts, “only misunderstanding.”

That misunderstanding, along with the radicalism that follows, stalks the poorest parts of Quetta. Abdul Bari, a 31-year-old teacher of Islam from a religious family, lives in a neighborhood without electricity or running water. Two brothers from his tribe were killed on a suicide mission, leaving their mother a beggar and angering Mr. Bari, who says a Muslim’s first duty is to his mother and his family.

“Our nation has no patience,” said Mr. Bari, who raised his seven younger siblings, after his father died suddenly a dozen years ago. He decided that one of his brothers should be educated, and enrolled him in the Turkish school.

The Turks put the focus on academics, which pleased Mr. Bari, who said his dream was for Saadudeen, his brother, to lift the family out of poverty and expand its horizons beyond religion. Mr. Bari’s title, hafiz, means he has memorized the entire Koran, though he has no formal education. Two other brothers have earned the same distinction. Their father was an imam.

His is a lonely mission in a neighborhood where nearly all the residents are illiterate and most disapprove of his choices, Mr. Bari said. He is constantly on guard against extremism. He once punished Saadudeen for flying kites with the wrong kind of boys. At the Turkish school, the teenager is supervised around the clock in a dormitory.

“They are totally against extremism,” Mr. Bari said of the Turks. “They are true Muslims. They will make my brother into a true Muslim. He’ll deal with people with justice and wisdom. Not with impatience.”

Illiteracy is one of the roots of problems dogging the Muslim world, said Matiullah Aail, a religious scholar in Quetta who graduated from Medina University in Saudi Arabia.

In Baluchistan, Quetta’s sparsely populated province, the literacy rate is less than 10 percent, said Tariq Baluch, a government official in the Pasheen district. He estimated that about half of the district’s children attended madrasas.

Mr. Aail said: “Doctors and lawyers have to show their degrees. But when it comes to mullahs, no one asks them for their qualifications. They don’t have knowledge, but they are influential.”

That leads to a skewed interpretation of Islam, even by those schooled in it, according to Mr. Gulen and his followers.

“They’ve memorized the entire holy book, but they don’t understand its meaning,” said Kamil Ture, a Turkish administrator.

Mr. Kacmaz chimed in: “How we interpret the Koran is totally dependent on our education.”

In an interview in 2004, published in a book of his writings, Mr. Gulen put it like this: “In the countries where Muslims live, some religious leaders and immature Muslims have no other weapon in hand than their fundamental interpretation of Islam. They use this to engage people in struggles that serve their own purposes.”

Moderate as that sounds, some Turks say Mr. Gulen uses the schools to advance his own political agenda. Murat Belge, a prominent Turkish intellectual who has experience with the movement, said that Mr. Gulen “sincerely believes that he has been chosen by God,” and described Mr. Gulen’s followers as “Muslim Jesuits” who are preparing elites to run the country.

Hakan Yavuz, a Turkish professor at the University of Utah who has had extensive experience with the Gulen movement, offered a darker assessment.

“The purpose here is very much power,” Mr. Yavuz said. “The model of power is the Ottoman Empire and the idea that Turks should shape the Muslim world.”

But while radical Islamists seek to re-establish a seventh-century Islamic caliphate, without nations or borders, and more moderate Islamists, like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, use secular democracy to achieve the goal of an Islamic state, Mr. Gulen is a nationalist who says he wants no more than a secular democracy where citizens are free to worship, a claim secular Turks find highly suspect.

Still, his schools are richly supported by Turkish businessmen. M. Ihsan Kalkavan, a shipping magnate who has built hotels in Nigeria, helped finance Gulen schools there, which he said had attracted the children of the Nigerian elite.

“When we take our education experiment to other countries, we introduce ourselves. We say, ‘See, we’re not terrorists.’ When people get to know us, things change,” Mr. Kalkavan said in his office in Istanbul.

He estimated the number of Mr. Gulen’s followers in Turkey at three million to five million. The network itself does not provide estimates, and Mr. Gulen declined to be interviewed.

The schools, which also operate in Christian countries like Russia, are not for Muslims alone, and one of their stated aims is to promote interfaith understanding. Mr. Gulen met the previous pope, as well as Jewish and Orthodox Christian leaders, and teachers in the schools say they stress multiculturalism and universal values.

“We are all humans,” said Mr. Kacmaz, the principal. “In Islam, every human being is very important.”

Pakistani society is changing fast, and more Pakistanis are realizing the importance of education, in part because they have more to lose, parents said. Abrar Awan, whose son is attending the Turkish school in Quetta, said he had grown tired of the attitude of the Islamic political parties he belonged to as a student. Now a government employee with a steady job, he sees real life as more complicated than black-and-white ideology.

“America or the West was always behind every fault, every problem,” he said, at a gathering of fathers in April. “Now, in my practical life, I know the faults are within us.”

Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Karachi and Quetta in Pakistan and from Istanbul

Drill Here. Drill Now.
Pay Less.
OVER 100,000 HAVE SIGNED!

More than 100,000 Americans have now signed a petition urging Congress to immediately start drilling for oil domestically to ease gas prices. The petition is part of the Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less campaign American Solutions launched last week.
The petition reads:

"We, therefore, the undersigned citizens of the United States, petition the U.S. Congress to act immediately to lower gasoline prices by authorizing the exploration of proven energy reserves to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources from unstable countries."
Next week, these signatures, gathered from citizens in all 50 states, will be delivered to the U.S. Senate as a first step towar d stopping the destructive Warner-Lieberman bill which would raise the cost of gasoline, diesel fuel, heating oil, and aviation fuel

Barnett blogs some good points in looking at Turkey and its influence in a wholistic way in terms of foreign direct investment and how its religion is being moderated by economic development.
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ARTICLE: "Turkish Schools Offer Pakistan a Gentler Islam," by Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, 4 May 2008, p. A1.
ARTICLE: "Istanbul's Economic Tension: A lawsuit threatens to undo the pro-Islamic government's record of reform and growth," by Andrew Purvis, Time, 12 May 2008, p. G1.
First one is about a group of Turkish educators who create a sort of Muslim Peace Corps volunteers for pushing an "entirely different vision of Islam" from the nasty stuff peddled so pervasively by the cynical House of Saud.

These Turks are pushing their new package specifically in Pakistan. How much you want to bet this does more to change things than our Spec Ops?

This is classic Sufi moderation that embraces science and technology in a natural coexistence. Good stuff.

According to Time, FDI jumps 30-fold in Turkey since 2002, up to $22 billion. Better yet, Turks are investing abroad, like $28B in Russia last year alone. Russia says it needs $1 trillion in infrastructure by 2020, and Turkish construction firms are ready and willing to clean up while building up.

Oh yes, Erdogan makes a show of punishing the PKK over the border in Kurdish Iraq. Turkey also pours $10B in FDI into the same emerging nation—like 'em or not.

To the surprise of some but not me, such prosperity makes Turks more interested in religion, not less. Abundance has done that everywhere except aberration Europe, where the World Wars so freaked out the locals about nationalism and religion that they've sought defensively to move beyond it. Good luck with that as the population ages and "others" are let in, others who need religion to retain identity.