Obiang in Spain

Great! Teodoro Obiang, the president of Equatorial Guinea, was supposed to visit the Spanish Parliament this morning, but it was all cancelled

The official reason is timetable organisation apparently, not the opposition of the MPs of PNV (Nationalist Basque party), IU (Izquierda Unida, left) and ERC (Republican Catalan party) to the visit. Of course!

Why such opposition? Simple. Equatorial Guinea has the second highest income in the world at about £ 26 000 per head, thanks to oil revenues from its Zafaro oil field. But it also comes bottom in the United Nations' Human Development Index, which measures quality of life says the Guardian

Teodoro Obiang has $ 700 million in foreign bank acounts, and was recently re-elected with 97% of the votes. According to a 1999 report by the International Monetary Fund, oil companies received “by far the most generous tax and profit-sharing provisions in the region.” The state received only 15 to 40 percent of the revenues from its oil fields, while the norm in sub-Saharan Africa was 45 to 90 percent.

Glad to see a Parliament care about human rights for once!

More can be read on the corruption in Equatorial Guinea in this Mother Jones article

El Roto

In the middle east, we wear the burka to be invisible, and in the west we wear it to be seen.

El Roto publishes daily for the newspaper El Pais.

We answer to the name of Liberals

A letter, signed by 44 American professors, in the magazine American Prospect, denouncing the failures of the Bush Administration. In there, a very good definition of what being a liberal (ie from the left) and what binds us together in a democracy.

"We reaffirm the great principle of liberalism: that every citizen is entitled by right to the elementary means to a good life. We believe passionately that societies should afford their citizens equal treatment under the law -- regardless of accidents of birth, race, sex, property, religion, ethnic identification, or sexual disposition. We want to redirect debate to the central questions of concern to ordinary Americans -- their rights to housing, affordable health care, equal opportunity for employment, and fair wages, as well as physical security and a sustainable environment for ourselves and future generations"

"Reason is indispensable to democratic self-government. This self-evident truth was a fundamental commitment of our Founding Fathers, who believed it was entirely compatible with every American's First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion. When debating policy in the public square, our government should base its laws on grounds that can be accepted by people regardless of their religious beliefs. Public commitment to reason and evidence is the bedrock of a pluralist democracy"

Read the whole letter here and in French here

Ted Honderich on Terrorism

I watched with interest the Channel 5 programme Don't get me started, where a well-known figure talks about an issue they feel strongly about. This week, it was the philosopher Ted Honderich (Profesor Ted Honderich for the intimates), who talked about the war on terror bla bla bla.

His point was that we had to address the causes of terror, not just terror itself, and the cause is rooted in the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. Who would have thought? Thanks for that, Ted, we had figured that out before.

As a reminder, Israel was created in 1948 by the Western powers, in some sort of compensation to the Jewish people, victim of the Holocaust, on a land called Palestine. ie a land where people already lived, but we didnt really think about that. So we can imagine the anger of the Palestinian people, having their land taken away, and realising that their fellow Muslims were powerless to regain that land for them. Today, Palestinians still suffer from Israeli domination (checkpoints, the wall etc...) and that can be said to fuel extremism and terrorism among Muslims (the same way Nazi brutal occupation of France fueled the ranks of the Resistance during WWII)

Anyway, 2 interesting points in the programme:

• One, Honderich presented his principle of Humanity: the principle by which one takes rational actions to prevent people from leading bad lives (ie from being deprived of length of lives, well being, freedom, respect, goods of relationships and satisfactions of culture). (A principle that can be liked to Amartya Sen's view of development as freedom)

• Two, based on that principle, Honderich said the Palestinians had a moral right to terrorism, since they were being almost ethincally cleansed and had no other means. I am not exactly sure how that goes with the principle of Humanity.

Ha, how I like programmes with interesting and challenging messages nicely presented and argumented, where the trail of thoughts is easily identifiable and things make sense. Well done. Tap on the back Ben, for feeling clever tonight.