Accolades for change

It's almost the end of the year and it is customary to compile best of lists or make predictions for the coming year. I can't think of too much that was worth being on a best of list, 2012 was a pretty mediocre for the arts and entertainment world. The viral video has become the pinnacle of artistic expression. Though more professionals are getting involved with internet productions and this could be last stand for the amateur before electronic frontier is completely commercialized, fenced in, censored and tamed.

Back in college in the mid 1970's I use to hang out with a circle of Political Science majors. One New Year's Eve I predicted the fall of Communism and the reunification of Germany. They both seemed like safe bets to me but I figured those events would happen around 2030 after just about everybody alive from World War 2 was dead. It was a shock to see how bankrupt the Soviet Union really was in 1989. The only sector of their economy that worked was their weapons industry -mostly because it openly competed with the rest of the world. Ironically it was their out of proportion military spending and political adventurism in the Third World that brought the whole system down (if you have all those weapons, you have to use them). When the average Russian saw what the West had, they could not help to ask If the Soviet Union is such a great nation why can't they make a toaster that works?

Ten years back I pronounce that Africa will become the New Asia. Even among my few friends and contacts in the investing world no one seems to notice that the 54 nations in Africa have had an average 5%  rate for the last three years. Africa is still a relatively poor place but the Chinese are investing big in the continent. A few years back it was to secure access to mineral rights and commodities. Next Chinese companies purchased and developed large commercial farms. Now the first manufacturing centers are springing up to capitalize on the vast pool of inexpensive labor. The rest of the world still seems to think of Africa as a land of famine, corruption and on-going civil wars.  

The biggest surprise has been the Arab Spring. Five years ago I thought there would be the rise of a popular religious reformer that would bring about a new and more moderate interpretation of Islam. The changes in the Middle East have come from the combined efforts of very conservative Islamists and liberal Secularists. Both these groups fought together in Libya and Egypt -and are now fighting against the government in Syria. In conflicts there are alliances that are made out of necessity and the real battle will be in the peace. You would not be able to see it in the mass media news but Secularism is capturing the hearts and minds of the youth from Morocco to Indonesia.

So like any other prognosticator of the future I'm right about half times. And when I'm right the results aren't quite what I expected or they came to fruition for reasons that were totally out of left field.


One of those small cracks that I see as evidence of bigger fissures of change to come is the alternative rock band AccoLade. They take their name from the painting by Edmund Blair Leighton. What makes them special is they all women and live in Saudi Arabia. Not too long ago this would not be permitted, these women would have been hunted down and jailed.







I have come across a growing number of agnostic and atheist websites from the Middle East. These people have found a way through the internet to contact each other and break though their isolation. One of the biggest trends for potential change is education rates of women. There are places where young girls risk their lives just to got to school but you have the opposite going on in countries like Iran. In Iran education is seen as a right and now over 70% of the college graduates are women. The next Supreme Leader might find it difficult rule without considering what women want -especially when they become the majority of the professionals and managers in the nation.        

Egypt will always be in turmoil unless they get their economy together. One of the most crowded neighborhoods in Cairo is the Necropolis, the huge urban cemetery where thousands of the living now squat between the tombs. I think eventually the Muslim Brotherhood will have to give up on their dream of a Islamic Republic not because religion or government are inherently bad but like many other nations through out history have found out -you get the worst of both worlds when you combine the two together. The strongest states do their best to keep government and religion separate and let people make their own decisions on faith. And the internet is helping to make it possible, as tame as the ideas I just expressed are, they would have gotten me prison term if I said or printed them in half the countries around the world only a generation ago.



As parts of the world are become incorporated into larger trading blocks or influenced by into de facto rule by a super-state; other parts of the world economically crumble into failed states. The failed states become threats to world peace because they react to their poverty with a ideology of desperate violence.

One economist brought up the history of coffee. Once it was an Arab monopoly. Coffee was once a rare and exotic commodity in the rest of the world. As world trade developed the Islamic world retreated into itself. Today coffee is world's most traded commodity and almost all of it consumed in the Middle East is imported.

So I'll end things here with a song by The Clash. the tune is like 30 years old and yet it seems more contemporary than ever.

For next year the old regime in Syria will fall. Egypt will take another five years before it gets its act together. Both the Iranian and Saudi governments will start to worry how much longer they can control their populations. Some one right now is reading a blog and is thinking "what if".