segunda-feira, 31 de dezembro de 2012
segunda-feira, 24 de dezembro de 2012
sábado, 22 de dezembro de 2012
terça-feira, 18 de dezembro de 2012
domingo, 9 de dezembro de 2012
Waking Dead Capital (Article)
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2000/0515/6511098a.html
THE SHACK ON THE EDGE OF A SEETHING GARBAGE DUMP IN Quezon City, a suburb of Manila, suggests a loan prospect as unreliable as the hovel's hole-pocked tin roof. But inside, Tarsila Dawisa, 55, has an active business making rattan shelving units. It makes 5,000 Philippine pesos a month, about $125. That pays the electricity bill and buys water and food for her 12 family members, but isn't enough to get them a decent home away from the smelly, sooty refuse.
"If the government or someone can help me, I need a little more capital," says Dawisa, sounding--at least in the translated Tagalog--more like an M.B.A. than a gritty grandmother. "We'd increase our volume and be able to supply to exporters. That way we could make 9,000 or 10,000 pesos a month."
But Dawisa has no practical access to capital. She and her family have been squatting near the government-owned dump for six years; they cannot buy the land.
Impoverished but entrepreneurial, Dawisa is not alone. At a time when untold wealth is reaching all parts of the globe, four-fifths of the world's 6.1 billion people scrape by, many doing odd jobs or running small businesses.
As more of the world's poor congregate in cities, they ought to benefit from the specialized division of labor that has fueled growth in industrialized nations. But in many instances poverty just seems to get worse.
One school of thought blames the plight of the poor in the Third World on cultural factors. Something in the work or savings ethic, this theory goes, prevents them from fully developing like their Northern or Western neighbors. In the former communist world, state dependency fostered attitudes seen as discouraging successful enterprise.
There's another line of thinking: that much of the world has never done capitalism the right way. If it did, poor countries would be a lot richer. Enter Hernando de Soto, a 58-year-old Peruvian economist who made his mark a decade ago with the book The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World (FORBES, Jan. 23, 1989). In it he argued that developing countries were poor not because the poor weren't entrepreneurial, but because they couldn't get economic oxygen.
The key to doing so, he said, was property rights--and for everyone, not just the elite. With such rights, land title could be leveraged with a mortgage, used as collateral for a bank loan, or sold more easily. If De Soto has his way, poor folks like Dawisa could soon get the access to the capital they wish for.
Licenses are a form of property. In Lima De Soto found that it took 289 days to register a garment shop with one worker, at a cost of $1,230--31 times the monthly minimum wage. To get permission to build a house on state-owned land took six years and 11 months of navigating the bureaucracy and getting papers notarized. For a private bus or jitney driver to obtain official recognition of his route, 26 months.
It's not that the Peruvian, or any government, sets out to make life hard for its poor people. Rather, inertia and entrenched interests weigh in favor of maintaining the status quo, and ruling elites seldom understand how serious an issue property law is. Says De Soto: "Emancipating people from bad law is a political job." Without the head of government making such changes a priority, they won't get pushed through multiple layers of bureaucracy.
Starting in the late 1980s De Soto, with the support of then Peruvian president Alan Garcia and his successor Alberto Fujimori, transformed his theory into action. He talked government agencies and private foundations across the globe into funding (now to the tune of $4 million a year) his Lima-based think tank, the Institute for Liberty & Democracy. With the institute he devised a plan to help Peru's poor get title to land and businesses more quickly and efficiently. Instead of going through up to 14 different government agencies to obtain a title, poor Lima residents only had to deal with one. The time it took to generate a title was reduced to four months; to register a business, it cost just $12.
Under the guidance of De Soto's think tank, 300,000 titles were registered in urban Lima from 1991 through 1995. Results were soon palpable. By 1998 the value of the registered urban land had typically doubled; previously nonexistent private mortgage and consumer credit markets had begun to develop.
Politicians in other developing countries took notice. A dozen called De Soto and asked him to come visit and dispense advice. Those calls, and an ideological split with Fujimori in 1993, spurred De Soto to take his "poor people's capitalism" program on the road. Since 1997 he's been brought in by the governments of Haiti, Egypt and the Philippines to undertake efforts similar to those in Lima. Other underdeveloped and former communist nations have expressed interest as well. "We're opening up a new paradigm for which there is no established system of collecting data," De Soto says of the assessment stage of his efforts. "We're looking at this from the point of view of the democratization of property rights."
His findings have proved controversial, but ultimately convincing. "Essentially we've been talking about the poor, but we haven't had a real understanding of who the poor are, what kind of resources they have available, what we can do so they can really participate in the development of the economy and of the country," says Ronaldo Zamora, executive secretary of the Philippine government. "What De Soto has discovered are things that change our perspective about the whole idea of poverty. The poor are not so poor, for instance."
Indeed. De Soto estimates that 4 billion poor people in the Third World and former communist nations hold, but don't legally own, real estate worth $9.3 trillion. That's 46 times the amount of all World Bank loans made over the past three decades. Without legal ownership, De Soto says, such assets are just dead capital. "These people have houses but not titles, crops but not deeds, and businesses but not statutes of incorporation," he says. "Without these essential representations, they have not been able to produce sufficient capital to make their domestic capitalism work."
In Manila, one way the poor obtain funds is through a method called "five-six." You borrow 5,000 pesos from a lender who trolls the alleyways and pay back 6,000 pesos within two months, in installments of 100 pesos a day. Bernadette Ubaldo, who squats with her family in a shack along a waterway not far from the Manila airport, borrowed from a five-six lender to buy a used refrigerator. "Sometimes we do five-six for food," she says sheepishly.
If you live in the U.S. or the U.K., you can take recorded deeds for granted; the notion of enforceable rights to real estate goes back to feudal times. On that foundation of ownership is built a huge edifice of capital that includes trillions of dollars in mortgage debt and trillions in real estate equity. Contrast that with the many parts of the world, from Mexico to Russia, where control of land has in the past century lurched from aristocrats to government confiscators to peasant squatters. It is likely, though, that basic property ownership early on underpinned economic growth. Nobel Prize-winning economic historian Douglass C. North asserts that the development of enforceable property rights was critical to mankind's move from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies about 10,000 years ago.
What passes for property law in the Third World would give shudders to any mortgage lender. Consider the case of Rey Estillore, 60, who taught biological science at Manila's University of the East for 20 years. In 1993, one month after Estillore moved in to the simple home he'd built in Veteran's Village, a longtime squatter zone in Quezon City set aside for families of those who fought in World War II, a woman showed up claiming she owned his lot.
"I did some research on this before coming here, and I found out her claim was fraudulent," he says, sitting in the front room of his spartan home. "There are unscrupulous people who have connections within the bureaus and get spurious titles." The court case has so far cost him $2,500, and that's with legal help from friends at minimal or no charge. In the meantime, Estillore tries to scrape out a living in the printing business, with 1960-era presses that can't compete with more modern machinery. Without land to use as collateral, he can't afford better.
Scratch the surface and some 45 million of Estillore's 76 million countrymen probably have a similar story to tell. Philippine President Joseph "Erap" Estrada, who ran for office with the slogan "Erap para sa Mahirap"--Erap for the poor--realized previous administrations' efforts to alleviate poverty hadn't worked. So his government brought in De Soto and his team. Their findings: The country's legal and administrative systems force about 60% of Filipinos to hold their real estate assets outside the law. That translates into an estimated $133 billion in dead capital in the country--assets incapable of being used as collateral, mortgaged or easily traded.
De Soto's think tank is now working on legislation to streamline, among other things, the land title process while addressing the plight of millions of squatters, a myriad of government-established and private settlements and the complex history of Filipino property rights. They hope to have the laws ready to go in two years.
Change will come more slowly in Egypt. Zein El Abdeen, a 37-year-old Cairo taxi driver, lives with his wife and 9-month-old daughter, his parents, grandmother and his two sisters in a 900-square-foot home where his father has squatted for 40 years. The government has allowed El Abdeen and his neighbors to live on state-owned land (it belongs to the Ministry of Endowment), but has never granted them official recognition. "We're all aware of the bad part about living as we do," says El Abdeen. "At any moment the ministry could demand that we vacate this area."
El Abdeen dreams of opening a small factory to make plastic dishes. "But I need $1,500 to start, and I don't have anyone to lend me the money," he laments. "My father's home is worth around $35,000, but unfortunately he doesn't have papers, and no one will accept it as a guarantee."
De Soto's team, along with the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies, found that to acquire and legally register a lot on state-owned desert land in Egypt requires dealing with 31 public and private agencies, and red tape that can last from 5 to 14 years. No wonder 85% of Egyptians live in homes without functioning property titles.
Then there's Russia, where the very idea of middle-class property ownership is foreign. Plots of land are registered in one office, buildings in another. Meanwhile, to get a bank loan, one must put up 150% -200% of the face value of the loan in collateral, plus get three guarantors with good incomes. On top of that, it takes two months for the bank to process; interest rates are currently around 45%. But the cost of obtaining documents, presenting a business plan and getting everything notarized in addition to the other requirements make such loans out of the question for many small entrepreneurs.
Anna Kostrova, 30, is a born entrepreneur. Near her home in Dzerzhinsk, Nizhny Novgorod (250 miles northeast of Moscow), she ran akiosk near the bus stop selling chewing gum, cigarettes and candies when she was 25. After she got married and had two children, she and her husband decided to rent a small cafeteria. They were able to borrow money from the bank to get it started, but that was before the 1998 crisis. With her assets devalued she couldn't go back to the bank for the loan she wanted for a soda dispensing machine. Were it not for the assistance of a local microlending organization, Vozmozhnost, Kostrova would not have been able to expand her business. "I have a lot of plans to materialize," she says, thankful that she has a financing alternative.
Microlending--disbursing working capital in tiny doses to small businesses and solo proprietors--is now all the rage at the World Bank and other antipoverty agencies. But a well-entrenched system of deeds and mortgages would make this specially designed lending a lot more meaningful.
Stephan Schmidheiny, a billionaire Swiss philanthropist whose Latin America-focused Avina foundation has funded De Soto, says as much: "An important part of the work we do in sustainable development and entrepreneurial education is the framework. I found Hernando's approach the most convincing of any. The whole world talks about poverty alleviation, but very few have a practical idea on how to do it. He has."
DeSoto figures only 25 of the world's 207 countries are reaping the benefits of having a contractual, urban society. In the rest, the people congregate, but they lack a legal basis for exchange. "It's the industrial revolution happening 150 years later," he says. Think of it: It's not so much the lack of capitalist ethos that impoverishes the people of Peru or Madagascar, but the lack of durable capital that can be traded back and forth. Absent that basis for capital markets, the billions of dollars of capital showered on the world's poor by international agencies is like seed falling on barren ground.
A side effect of granting formal title to the poor's assets is a boost to government coffers. In Peru 276,000 extralegal entrepreneurs recorded their businesses voluntarily from 1991 to 1994. Over that period, the tax revenue from the formerly extralegal businesses was $1.2 billion. But the majority of the informal sector isn't staying outside the law simply to avoid paying taxes. The truth is, doing business outside the law presents all kinds of added costs. In Peru 15% of gross income in extralegal manufacturing is paid out in bribes, says De Soto.
As it stands now, De Soto's approach is promising but not proven. In Peru only a small percentage of the country's informal sector has new land titles. In Haiti, where his team began work in 1997, the package of laws they designed still awaits passage by the Congress. In Egypt, where De Soto began in 1998 and has 12 Peruvians and 30 Egyptians at work, the detailed assessment of the existing property and legal situation is under way; the Philippines is at an earlier stage of assessment.
The true test of his ideas will come after they've been tried in a variety of developing nations. If he can help alleviate poverty through legal reform and properly titling the slums of Latin America, an Islamic country, an Asian ex-colony and a former communist nation, De Soto will have truly proven his theory. And the Third World will owe him a big debt of gratitude.
THE SHACK ON THE EDGE OF A SEETHING GARBAGE DUMP IN Quezon City, a suburb of Manila, suggests a loan prospect as unreliable as the hovel's hole-pocked tin roof. But inside, Tarsila Dawisa, 55, has an active business making rattan shelving units. It makes 5,000 Philippine pesos a month, about $125. That pays the electricity bill and buys water and food for her 12 family members, but isn't enough to get them a decent home away from the smelly, sooty refuse.
"If the government or someone can help me, I need a little more capital," says Dawisa, sounding--at least in the translated Tagalog--more like an M.B.A. than a gritty grandmother. "We'd increase our volume and be able to supply to exporters. That way we could make 9,000 or 10,000 pesos a month."
But Dawisa has no practical access to capital. She and her family have been squatting near the government-owned dump for six years; they cannot buy the land.
Impoverished but entrepreneurial, Dawisa is not alone. At a time when untold wealth is reaching all parts of the globe, four-fifths of the world's 6.1 billion people scrape by, many doing odd jobs or running small businesses.
As more of the world's poor congregate in cities, they ought to benefit from the specialized division of labor that has fueled growth in industrialized nations. But in many instances poverty just seems to get worse.
One school of thought blames the plight of the poor in the Third World on cultural factors. Something in the work or savings ethic, this theory goes, prevents them from fully developing like their Northern or Western neighbors. In the former communist world, state dependency fostered attitudes seen as discouraging successful enterprise.
There's another line of thinking: that much of the world has never done capitalism the right way. If it did, poor countries would be a lot richer. Enter Hernando de Soto, a 58-year-old Peruvian economist who made his mark a decade ago with the book The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World (FORBES, Jan. 23, 1989). In it he argued that developing countries were poor not because the poor weren't entrepreneurial, but because they couldn't get economic oxygen.
The key to doing so, he said, was property rights--and for everyone, not just the elite. With such rights, land title could be leveraged with a mortgage, used as collateral for a bank loan, or sold more easily. If De Soto has his way, poor folks like Dawisa could soon get the access to the capital they wish for.
Licenses are a form of property. In Lima De Soto found that it took 289 days to register a garment shop with one worker, at a cost of $1,230--31 times the monthly minimum wage. To get permission to build a house on state-owned land took six years and 11 months of navigating the bureaucracy and getting papers notarized. For a private bus or jitney driver to obtain official recognition of his route, 26 months.
It's not that the Peruvian, or any government, sets out to make life hard for its poor people. Rather, inertia and entrenched interests weigh in favor of maintaining the status quo, and ruling elites seldom understand how serious an issue property law is. Says De Soto: "Emancipating people from bad law is a political job." Without the head of government making such changes a priority, they won't get pushed through multiple layers of bureaucracy.
Starting in the late 1980s De Soto, with the support of then Peruvian president Alan Garcia and his successor Alberto Fujimori, transformed his theory into action. He talked government agencies and private foundations across the globe into funding (now to the tune of $4 million a year) his Lima-based think tank, the Institute for Liberty & Democracy. With the institute he devised a plan to help Peru's poor get title to land and businesses more quickly and efficiently. Instead of going through up to 14 different government agencies to obtain a title, poor Lima residents only had to deal with one. The time it took to generate a title was reduced to four months; to register a business, it cost just $12.
Under the guidance of De Soto's think tank, 300,000 titles were registered in urban Lima from 1991 through 1995. Results were soon palpable. By 1998 the value of the registered urban land had typically doubled; previously nonexistent private mortgage and consumer credit markets had begun to develop.
Politicians in other developing countries took notice. A dozen called De Soto and asked him to come visit and dispense advice. Those calls, and an ideological split with Fujimori in 1993, spurred De Soto to take his "poor people's capitalism" program on the road. Since 1997 he's been brought in by the governments of Haiti, Egypt and the Philippines to undertake efforts similar to those in Lima. Other underdeveloped and former communist nations have expressed interest as well. "We're opening up a new paradigm for which there is no established system of collecting data," De Soto says of the assessment stage of his efforts. "We're looking at this from the point of view of the democratization of property rights."
His findings have proved controversial, but ultimately convincing. "Essentially we've been talking about the poor, but we haven't had a real understanding of who the poor are, what kind of resources they have available, what we can do so they can really participate in the development of the economy and of the country," says Ronaldo Zamora, executive secretary of the Philippine government. "What De Soto has discovered are things that change our perspective about the whole idea of poverty. The poor are not so poor, for instance."
Indeed. De Soto estimates that 4 billion poor people in the Third World and former communist nations hold, but don't legally own, real estate worth $9.3 trillion. That's 46 times the amount of all World Bank loans made over the past three decades. Without legal ownership, De Soto says, such assets are just dead capital. "These people have houses but not titles, crops but not deeds, and businesses but not statutes of incorporation," he says. "Without these essential representations, they have not been able to produce sufficient capital to make their domestic capitalism work."
In Manila, one way the poor obtain funds is through a method called "five-six." You borrow 5,000 pesos from a lender who trolls the alleyways and pay back 6,000 pesos within two months, in installments of 100 pesos a day. Bernadette Ubaldo, who squats with her family in a shack along a waterway not far from the Manila airport, borrowed from a five-six lender to buy a used refrigerator. "Sometimes we do five-six for food," she says sheepishly.
If you live in the U.S. or the U.K., you can take recorded deeds for granted; the notion of enforceable rights to real estate goes back to feudal times. On that foundation of ownership is built a huge edifice of capital that includes trillions of dollars in mortgage debt and trillions in real estate equity. Contrast that with the many parts of the world, from Mexico to Russia, where control of land has in the past century lurched from aristocrats to government confiscators to peasant squatters. It is likely, though, that basic property ownership early on underpinned economic growth. Nobel Prize-winning economic historian Douglass C. North asserts that the development of enforceable property rights was critical to mankind's move from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies about 10,000 years ago.
What passes for property law in the Third World would give shudders to any mortgage lender. Consider the case of Rey Estillore, 60, who taught biological science at Manila's University of the East for 20 years. In 1993, one month after Estillore moved in to the simple home he'd built in Veteran's Village, a longtime squatter zone in Quezon City set aside for families of those who fought in World War II, a woman showed up claiming she owned his lot.
"I did some research on this before coming here, and I found out her claim was fraudulent," he says, sitting in the front room of his spartan home. "There are unscrupulous people who have connections within the bureaus and get spurious titles." The court case has so far cost him $2,500, and that's with legal help from friends at minimal or no charge. In the meantime, Estillore tries to scrape out a living in the printing business, with 1960-era presses that can't compete with more modern machinery. Without land to use as collateral, he can't afford better.
Scratch the surface and some 45 million of Estillore's 76 million countrymen probably have a similar story to tell. Philippine President Joseph "Erap" Estrada, who ran for office with the slogan "Erap para sa Mahirap"--Erap for the poor--realized previous administrations' efforts to alleviate poverty hadn't worked. So his government brought in De Soto and his team. Their findings: The country's legal and administrative systems force about 60% of Filipinos to hold their real estate assets outside the law. That translates into an estimated $133 billion in dead capital in the country--assets incapable of being used as collateral, mortgaged or easily traded.
De Soto's think tank is now working on legislation to streamline, among other things, the land title process while addressing the plight of millions of squatters, a myriad of government-established and private settlements and the complex history of Filipino property rights. They hope to have the laws ready to go in two years.
Change will come more slowly in Egypt. Zein El Abdeen, a 37-year-old Cairo taxi driver, lives with his wife and 9-month-old daughter, his parents, grandmother and his two sisters in a 900-square-foot home where his father has squatted for 40 years. The government has allowed El Abdeen and his neighbors to live on state-owned land (it belongs to the Ministry of Endowment), but has never granted them official recognition. "We're all aware of the bad part about living as we do," says El Abdeen. "At any moment the ministry could demand that we vacate this area."
El Abdeen dreams of opening a small factory to make plastic dishes. "But I need $1,500 to start, and I don't have anyone to lend me the money," he laments. "My father's home is worth around $35,000, but unfortunately he doesn't have papers, and no one will accept it as a guarantee."
De Soto's team, along with the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies, found that to acquire and legally register a lot on state-owned desert land in Egypt requires dealing with 31 public and private agencies, and red tape that can last from 5 to 14 years. No wonder 85% of Egyptians live in homes without functioning property titles.
Then there's Russia, where the very idea of middle-class property ownership is foreign. Plots of land are registered in one office, buildings in another. Meanwhile, to get a bank loan, one must put up 150% -200% of the face value of the loan in collateral, plus get three guarantors with good incomes. On top of that, it takes two months for the bank to process; interest rates are currently around 45%. But the cost of obtaining documents, presenting a business plan and getting everything notarized in addition to the other requirements make such loans out of the question for many small entrepreneurs.
Anna Kostrova, 30, is a born entrepreneur. Near her home in Dzerzhinsk, Nizhny Novgorod (250 miles northeast of Moscow), she ran akiosk near the bus stop selling chewing gum, cigarettes and candies when she was 25. After she got married and had two children, she and her husband decided to rent a small cafeteria. They were able to borrow money from the bank to get it started, but that was before the 1998 crisis. With her assets devalued she couldn't go back to the bank for the loan she wanted for a soda dispensing machine. Were it not for the assistance of a local microlending organization, Vozmozhnost, Kostrova would not have been able to expand her business. "I have a lot of plans to materialize," she says, thankful that she has a financing alternative.
Microlending--disbursing working capital in tiny doses to small businesses and solo proprietors--is now all the rage at the World Bank and other antipoverty agencies. But a well-entrenched system of deeds and mortgages would make this specially designed lending a lot more meaningful.
Stephan Schmidheiny, a billionaire Swiss philanthropist whose Latin America-focused Avina foundation has funded De Soto, says as much: "An important part of the work we do in sustainable development and entrepreneurial education is the framework. I found Hernando's approach the most convincing of any. The whole world talks about poverty alleviation, but very few have a practical idea on how to do it. He has."
DeSoto figures only 25 of the world's 207 countries are reaping the benefits of having a contractual, urban society. In the rest, the people congregate, but they lack a legal basis for exchange. "It's the industrial revolution happening 150 years later," he says. Think of it: It's not so much the lack of capitalist ethos that impoverishes the people of Peru or Madagascar, but the lack of durable capital that can be traded back and forth. Absent that basis for capital markets, the billions of dollars of capital showered on the world's poor by international agencies is like seed falling on barren ground.
A side effect of granting formal title to the poor's assets is a boost to government coffers. In Peru 276,000 extralegal entrepreneurs recorded their businesses voluntarily from 1991 to 1994. Over that period, the tax revenue from the formerly extralegal businesses was $1.2 billion. But the majority of the informal sector isn't staying outside the law simply to avoid paying taxes. The truth is, doing business outside the law presents all kinds of added costs. In Peru 15% of gross income in extralegal manufacturing is paid out in bribes, says De Soto.
As it stands now, De Soto's approach is promising but not proven. In Peru only a small percentage of the country's informal sector has new land titles. In Haiti, where his team began work in 1997, the package of laws they designed still awaits passage by the Congress. In Egypt, where De Soto began in 1998 and has 12 Peruvians and 30 Egyptians at work, the detailed assessment of the existing property and legal situation is under way; the Philippines is at an earlier stage of assessment.
The true test of his ideas will come after they've been tried in a variety of developing nations. If he can help alleviate poverty through legal reform and properly titling the slums of Latin America, an Islamic country, an Asian ex-colony and a former communist nation, De Soto will have truly proven his theory. And the Third World will owe him a big debt of gratitude.
terça-feira, 4 de dezembro de 2012
sábado, 1 de dezembro de 2012
March / 2012 DOP Notes Rebelle: A Congolese Tale in Incredible Colour
http://www.csc.ca/news/default.asp?aID=1559
In the spring of 2011, Nicolas Bolduc csc travelled from Montreal to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to shoot Kim Nguyen’s latest featureRebelle, a drama about teenagers fighting with a rebel army. Bolduc had worked with Nguyen before, lensing his 2010 film La cité.
Other films Bolduc has shot include Le banquet (2008) and Denis Villeneuve’s short film Next Floor.
THE APPROACH
The Congolese way of life has an energy that director Kim Nguyen wanted to capture. He had visited Kenya, Burundi, Cameroon and Rwanda before choosing the Democratic Republic of the Congo. From Montreal I couldn’t quite understand the choice from a cinematographer’s standpoint. The pictures Kim had showed me after finding the first locations were so alien to me that I couldn’t even imagine shooting in a country so vast, chaotic and unfriendly. I couldn’t see the film. But Kim had felt something over there and it was difficult for him to explain what it was. Realism was the most important part of our work on the film, and the challenge was trying to capture the magic that transcends everyday life there.
As the plane approached the capital, Kinshasa, I could see thousands of grey metal rooftops stretched out as far as the eye can see, all scattered between trees like sprouts of broccoli. Abandoned, rust-coloured planes -- some no more than 10 years old -- sat on the runway, looted and gutted. I stepped out of the airport to a bustling crowd of taxi drivers, Congolese families, and people who were obvious airport pickpockets. It all was very chaotic and made me a bit uneasy. There was the smell of dust, smoke and burning plastic in the air, and the humidity mixed everything up into a salty tropical cocktail. Even accompanied by a security officer, the stories I had heard of corruption, violence and war obviously came to mind as we walked through the dark open-air parking. We drove for more than an hour toward the city on a six-lane boulevard with no street lamps, in a black cloud of dust and burning diesel. In the smog the slow traffic was lit only by the car headlights, and there were thousands of people everywhere. Some children were selling the traditional plastic bags of water to motorists. Others sold car carpets, cloths, toys or anything they could find to make a dollar. It seemed like a hell of a mess. The chauffeur leaned over and locked my door as I was texting my girlfriend about what I saw. The light of the phone in the dark could be seen from far away, he said. A minute later, a kid appeared from nowhere and fiddled at the door latch to go for the phone.
Not even an hour in Congo and my idea of the film we were going to shoot wasn’t clear, but I crossed off any classic storytelling, moody lighting and over-organized schedules serving complex camera work and machinery! All that was completely out of the question. Kim's approach seemed perfect for this place.
SHOOTING
When I was prepping La cité with Kim in 2008, we flirted with the idea of shooting it digital. In Tunisia, shooting in the desert with the dust-filled air, the washed out skies, and knowing that we were going to shoot with a lot of available light, including torches, well, there just was no compromise. Nothing could beat 35 mm. For Rebelle, we were going in a similar direction, lots of handheld with tons of natural light, but it was a more realistic tale that had to feel almost like a documentary. On top of that, there were some night scenes, and I didn’t want any of that classic "moon lighting" or any lighting, for that matter, that could feel artificial. So I didn’t even try to avoid digital, and just thinking of getting film in and out of the Congo was a logistical nightmare!
I tested the many digital formats available before the shoot, and I fell in love with the ALEXA in a flash. It was light, versatile, and I could pick it up with one hand and throw it on my shoulder for an improvised shot. The cards held 14 minutes of footage, and some takes would actually fill up the card. Sometimes during a very long take, so as not to break the actors' bubble, I would drop the camera on a thigh and my assistant would quietly reload in 10 seconds in the midst of the action. What an evolution! And the digital eyepiece was so bright and so precise that I could adjust the aperture by eye on the fly. It even gave any milky sky contrasted with dark black skin the depth I could filter and colour time as easily as with film.
There is no "culture" as we know it in Kinshasa. No theatre, no cinemas, no museums. But there are thousands of artists waiting to be pushed in the right direction. They don’t have the means to create, but the raw talent is quite remarkable. The kids Kim cast for the film lived on the streets. They had no parents and no education. They couldn’t even read or write, but their energy was astounding and genuine. Since they couldn’t read the script, the dialogue was improvised, and given that they weren’t trained actors, we shot the film in continuity to give them a sense of the complete story. Page one was day one of principal photography, and Kim took it one day at a time, feeding them information gradually. They were living the film as we went through the pages, and so was I. I woke up every morning without knowing what was to come, or how to shoot it. How rare is that in this business?
On set we would discuss the plan of action, and I would usually give myself a 300-degree radius workspace so I could pan and hop around the actors with Eric Bensoussan my first AC, and François Péloquin the boom operator. The set was always prepped to be shot from any angle. We would never rehearse because I feared we would miss the best action, and Kim wanted to keep the spontaneity in the acting. If we had to shoot something more than once, I became self-conscious, and the camera work didn’t feel as natural, as improvised, as documentary. If I knew too much what was going to happen, the feeling was lost. If we were loosing spontaneity, I would quickly tell Kim that I’d do something different in the next take. I would change the framing dramatically, back up quickly or get really close in the action. This was a game I loved to play with Eric the focus puller, who never got a chance to take a single mark on the whole film! When I would improvise suddenly, he was fantastic at picking up the pace and – I don’t know how – never got crosschecked. Except one time, on the second day of shooting, in a village plagued by cholera in real life, Eric was running madly at my side, and we were zigzagging between fake rebels shooting their way through a village. I felt him trip and fall and roll in a heap of garbage and torn metal. He got up dazed and unharmed, but he admitted that his judo years had come back to save his ass. The shot was in focus till he dropped. That’s a truly devoted professional.
On La cité the desert light had a soft, round texture, almost too perfect for photography. The February skies brought tons of dust and sand-pumped clouds that would reflect the sun like the biggest unbleached bounce I could ever dream of. Sometimes when the sun was out, I only had a difference of a single stop on the light meter between shadow and light. It was quite incredible. Kinshasa, on the other hand, is south of the equator, and July is their winter. During the two months I was there, the clouds were very low and thin and they felt wet. My Western instinct was constantly telling me it was going to rain, but it never did in two months. Not a single drop. The skies were milky, soft and terribly polluted. Three hours before the sun would set, it became an orange orb in the sky, as if it were setting. There was something very apocalyptic about it. The city itself has 8 million people packed in a cloud of diesel and humidity with open-air sewers and burning waste on the street.
To go as natural as possible, the simpler I built a lighting and camera package the more liberty I had and the more I could be in the actors' physical bubble. Kim and I always wanted to be close to Rachel Mwanza – who plays the lead Komona – with a 32 or a 40 mm, and this was quite challenging from the start because if there’s something insane to non-actors it's those three bumbling fools who are jumping around them every time they hear, "Action!" The actors had to get used to me and accept my presence, and they could never be intimidated by me, never wait for me, never redo a take because of me and never think I was anything other than part of what they had to do.
For the lenses, I opted for the Ultra-Primes because they’re sharp as hell, but also because they’re lighter than the Cookes for handheld. Furthermore, in wide-open mode the Ultras don’t have that strange circular flare effect like the Cookes do. Then I got the new SHAPE handheld grips that are made in Montreal, and they made an incredible difference for the camera work. While framing, I could adjust the handles with a quick click of a button and modify the configuration of my hands to almost anywhere around the lenses and follow focus. This was truly a major step for holding longer takes.
For the lighting package, while intentionally shooting in a 300-degree radius, large bleached bounces were often of no use, and HMI lights during the day were out of the question. In the jungle, there’s nothing I hate more than feeling the shadow of an HMI, bounced or not. I didn’t want to "feel" any light, and I was often so close with a 40 mm that I would have had problems with shadows anyways. But mostly – since I got so close to the actors, and their skin is so dark – I avoided the square bounce effect in the eyes of the actors. That felt phony and staged. Black actors have fantastic reflective skin to film, and the light, be it natural or artificial, just envelops their faces elegantly. Trying to light them artificially so that it seems natural isn’t as simple as with Caucasians, I find.
The only times we lit with HMI were for those rare day interior scenes, and I used the 1.8 ARRIs that are very powerful and that can be plugged into a wall. I would then bounce the light on an existing surface so the eye of the actor would reflect the set and not a white artificial surface. We also had a couple of small tungsten lights in the truck, some 650s, 300s and peppers that we used for the night shots, but I rarely used them, preferring normal sockets with bulbs that I could actually put in the shot or just throw on the ground like they would have done in real life.
One scene in the film that I’m quite fond of is the rebel camp scene at night. We were shooting at an old palace that Mobutu Sese Seko – the crazy dictator that ruled the country for more than 30 years - had built in the 1980s. The palace was inspired by a visit he made to China where he had been so fascinated by the Imperial Palace that he flew in 200 Chinese architects and painters and built a Chinese palace with a view on the Congo River. The insane buildings and ponds - where he would throw unwanted guests in the basin with the crocodiles - were now an abandoned concrete ruin, inhabited by thousands of bats. Our rebel camp, set in the old crocodile basin, was the biggest set of the film. The night scene was a victorious rebel party thrown by the leader to congratulate the soldiers on a successful assault. On the menu: an improvised soccer game, musicians, dancing, food grills on wood fires, the works. Rebel sentinels surveyed the camp, and actors roamed the scene participating in the celebration.
I was thinking if real rebels were having a party in this exact spot, how would they have lit the place with the little they had? So to remain authentic to our approach, I wanted to light the set, not the actors, and still be able to shoot 300 degrees. I asked our incredible set designer Emmanuel Fréchette to hang bare neons on the walls here and there and have a couple of wooden stands lying around on the set where I could suspend some clear household bulbs. We also built real wood fires everywhere, and I had the art department get the rebel vehicles' headlights pointing in the direction of the soccer game. That way, the camera was always getting a light in the frame at any moment or a violent flare. Even the main palace building in the background was lit simply with a double 4-foot neon thrown on the ground. The effect was amazing and the ALEXA was getting it all with so little light. We threw in a little smoke to get some silhouettes, and I put the camera on my shoulder. We did two improvised 14-minute takes of the whole scene without any rehearsals. I jumped around the kids playing soccer, I ran between them to catch some of the actors in the melee, I shot the sentinels guarding the citadel, I got wide shots and close-ups of the musicians, others eating, dancing, laughing, whatever I saw that could be cool. In two long takes, the scene could never be more natural. No one knew where I would be going next, and it kept the actors and extras in the moment and the team on their toes. In this case, the realism of the lighting was more important than the classic physical beauty of it. And it came out great.
Films are not shot in Kinshasa, or anywhere in the Congo, for that matter. The reasons are of course political, and that is why hundreds of United Nations trucks patrol the city. The armed rebels are outside the city, thank God, but when the sun sets in Kinshasa, it’s to each his own. The under-lit streets are very dangerous and no one goes out at night without a chauffeur, locked inside an SUV. Gangs of kids – the chégué - are hidden in shadows. These are just street kids with no families, trying to make a dollar. They have no guns because they’re too expensive, but knives and machetes are common.
In the script, there were a lot of night scenes, but they were almost all changed to day scenes because of the dangers of shooting night. We needed more guards and more police protection, but because of the corruption we couldn’t even trust the police.
This is why this film for me was not just a film; it had much more meaning than anything I’ve shot. Upon my return, my impressions of Kinshasa are a never-ending palette of colours, lights and shadows that stayed printed on my retina for months. Just can't wait to shoot like that again.
DOP Notes
Rebelle: A Congolese Tale in Incredible Colour
Rebelle: A Congolese Tale in Incredible Colour
by Nicolas Bolduc csc
In the spring of 2011, Nicolas Bolduc csc travelled from Montreal to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to shoot Kim Nguyen's latest feature Rebelle, a drama about teenagers fighting with a rebel army. Bolduc had worked with Nguyen before, lensing his 2010 film La cité. Other films Bolduc has shot include Le banquet (2008) and Denis Villeneuve's short film Next Floor.
 |
In the spring of 2011, Nicolas Bolduc csc travelled from Montreal to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to shoot Kim Nguyen’s latest featureRebelle, a drama about teenagers fighting with a rebel army. Bolduc had worked with Nguyen before, lensing his 2010 film La cité.
Other films Bolduc has shot include Le banquet (2008) and Denis Villeneuve’s short film Next Floor.
THE APPROACH
The Congolese way of life has an energy that director Kim Nguyen wanted to capture. He had visited Kenya, Burundi, Cameroon and Rwanda before choosing the Democratic Republic of the Congo. From Montreal I couldn’t quite understand the choice from a cinematographer’s standpoint. The pictures Kim had showed me after finding the first locations were so alien to me that I couldn’t even imagine shooting in a country so vast, chaotic and unfriendly. I couldn’t see the film. But Kim had felt something over there and it was difficult for him to explain what it was. Realism was the most important part of our work on the film, and the challenge was trying to capture the magic that transcends everyday life there.
 |
As the plane approached the capital, Kinshasa, I could see thousands of grey metal rooftops stretched out as far as the eye can see, all scattered between trees like sprouts of broccoli. Abandoned, rust-coloured planes -- some no more than 10 years old -- sat on the runway, looted and gutted. I stepped out of the airport to a bustling crowd of taxi drivers, Congolese families, and people who were obvious airport pickpockets. It all was very chaotic and made me a bit uneasy. There was the smell of dust, smoke and burning plastic in the air, and the humidity mixed everything up into a salty tropical cocktail. Even accompanied by a security officer, the stories I had heard of corruption, violence and war obviously came to mind as we walked through the dark open-air parking. We drove for more than an hour toward the city on a six-lane boulevard with no street lamps, in a black cloud of dust and burning diesel. In the smog the slow traffic was lit only by the car headlights, and there were thousands of people everywhere. Some children were selling the traditional plastic bags of water to motorists. Others sold car carpets, cloths, toys or anything they could find to make a dollar. It seemed like a hell of a mess. The chauffeur leaned over and locked my door as I was texting my girlfriend about what I saw. The light of the phone in the dark could be seen from far away, he said. A minute later, a kid appeared from nowhere and fiddled at the door latch to go for the phone.
Not even an hour in Congo and my idea of the film we were going to shoot wasn’t clear, but I crossed off any classic storytelling, moody lighting and over-organized schedules serving complex camera work and machinery! All that was completely out of the question. Kim's approach seemed perfect for this place.
SHOOTING
When I was prepping La cité with Kim in 2008, we flirted with the idea of shooting it digital. In Tunisia, shooting in the desert with the dust-filled air, the washed out skies, and knowing that we were going to shoot with a lot of available light, including torches, well, there just was no compromise. Nothing could beat 35 mm. For Rebelle, we were going in a similar direction, lots of handheld with tons of natural light, but it was a more realistic tale that had to feel almost like a documentary. On top of that, there were some night scenes, and I didn’t want any of that classic "moon lighting" or any lighting, for that matter, that could feel artificial. So I didn’t even try to avoid digital, and just thinking of getting film in and out of the Congo was a logistical nightmare!
I tested the many digital formats available before the shoot, and I fell in love with the ALEXA in a flash. It was light, versatile, and I could pick it up with one hand and throw it on my shoulder for an improvised shot. The cards held 14 minutes of footage, and some takes would actually fill up the card. Sometimes during a very long take, so as not to break the actors' bubble, I would drop the camera on a thigh and my assistant would quietly reload in 10 seconds in the midst of the action. What an evolution! And the digital eyepiece was so bright and so precise that I could adjust the aperture by eye on the fly. It even gave any milky sky contrasted with dark black skin the depth I could filter and colour time as easily as with film.
There is no "culture" as we know it in Kinshasa. No theatre, no cinemas, no museums. But there are thousands of artists waiting to be pushed in the right direction. They don’t have the means to create, but the raw talent is quite remarkable. The kids Kim cast for the film lived on the streets. They had no parents and no education. They couldn’t even read or write, but their energy was astounding and genuine. Since they couldn’t read the script, the dialogue was improvised, and given that they weren’t trained actors, we shot the film in continuity to give them a sense of the complete story. Page one was day one of principal photography, and Kim took it one day at a time, feeding them information gradually. They were living the film as we went through the pages, and so was I. I woke up every morning without knowing what was to come, or how to shoot it. How rare is that in this business?
On set we would discuss the plan of action, and I would usually give myself a 300-degree radius workspace so I could pan and hop around the actors with Eric Bensoussan my first AC, and François Péloquin the boom operator. The set was always prepped to be shot from any angle. We would never rehearse because I feared we would miss the best action, and Kim wanted to keep the spontaneity in the acting. If we had to shoot something more than once, I became self-conscious, and the camera work didn’t feel as natural, as improvised, as documentary. If I knew too much what was going to happen, the feeling was lost. If we were loosing spontaneity, I would quickly tell Kim that I’d do something different in the next take. I would change the framing dramatically, back up quickly or get really close in the action. This was a game I loved to play with Eric the focus puller, who never got a chance to take a single mark on the whole film! When I would improvise suddenly, he was fantastic at picking up the pace and – I don’t know how – never got crosschecked. Except one time, on the second day of shooting, in a village plagued by cholera in real life, Eric was running madly at my side, and we were zigzagging between fake rebels shooting their way through a village. I felt him trip and fall and roll in a heap of garbage and torn metal. He got up dazed and unharmed, but he admitted that his judo years had come back to save his ass. The shot was in focus till he dropped. That’s a truly devoted professional.
 |
On La cité the desert light had a soft, round texture, almost too perfect for photography. The February skies brought tons of dust and sand-pumped clouds that would reflect the sun like the biggest unbleached bounce I could ever dream of. Sometimes when the sun was out, I only had a difference of a single stop on the light meter between shadow and light. It was quite incredible. Kinshasa, on the other hand, is south of the equator, and July is their winter. During the two months I was there, the clouds were very low and thin and they felt wet. My Western instinct was constantly telling me it was going to rain, but it never did in two months. Not a single drop. The skies were milky, soft and terribly polluted. Three hours before the sun would set, it became an orange orb in the sky, as if it were setting. There was something very apocalyptic about it. The city itself has 8 million people packed in a cloud of diesel and humidity with open-air sewers and burning waste on the street.
To go as natural as possible, the simpler I built a lighting and camera package the more liberty I had and the more I could be in the actors' physical bubble. Kim and I always wanted to be close to Rachel Mwanza – who plays the lead Komona – with a 32 or a 40 mm, and this was quite challenging from the start because if there’s something insane to non-actors it's those three bumbling fools who are jumping around them every time they hear, "Action!" The actors had to get used to me and accept my presence, and they could never be intimidated by me, never wait for me, never redo a take because of me and never think I was anything other than part of what they had to do.
For the lenses, I opted for the Ultra-Primes because they’re sharp as hell, but also because they’re lighter than the Cookes for handheld. Furthermore, in wide-open mode the Ultras don’t have that strange circular flare effect like the Cookes do. Then I got the new SHAPE handheld grips that are made in Montreal, and they made an incredible difference for the camera work. While framing, I could adjust the handles with a quick click of a button and modify the configuration of my hands to almost anywhere around the lenses and follow focus. This was truly a major step for holding longer takes.
For the lighting package, while intentionally shooting in a 300-degree radius, large bleached bounces were often of no use, and HMI lights during the day were out of the question. In the jungle, there’s nothing I hate more than feeling the shadow of an HMI, bounced or not. I didn’t want to "feel" any light, and I was often so close with a 40 mm that I would have had problems with shadows anyways. But mostly – since I got so close to the actors, and their skin is so dark – I avoided the square bounce effect in the eyes of the actors. That felt phony and staged. Black actors have fantastic reflective skin to film, and the light, be it natural or artificial, just envelops their faces elegantly. Trying to light them artificially so that it seems natural isn’t as simple as with Caucasians, I find.
The only times we lit with HMI were for those rare day interior scenes, and I used the 1.8 ARRIs that are very powerful and that can be plugged into a wall. I would then bounce the light on an existing surface so the eye of the actor would reflect the set and not a white artificial surface. We also had a couple of small tungsten lights in the truck, some 650s, 300s and peppers that we used for the night shots, but I rarely used them, preferring normal sockets with bulbs that I could actually put in the shot or just throw on the ground like they would have done in real life.
 |
One scene in the film that I’m quite fond of is the rebel camp scene at night. We were shooting at an old palace that Mobutu Sese Seko – the crazy dictator that ruled the country for more than 30 years - had built in the 1980s. The palace was inspired by a visit he made to China where he had been so fascinated by the Imperial Palace that he flew in 200 Chinese architects and painters and built a Chinese palace with a view on the Congo River. The insane buildings and ponds - where he would throw unwanted guests in the basin with the crocodiles - were now an abandoned concrete ruin, inhabited by thousands of bats. Our rebel camp, set in the old crocodile basin, was the biggest set of the film. The night scene was a victorious rebel party thrown by the leader to congratulate the soldiers on a successful assault. On the menu: an improvised soccer game, musicians, dancing, food grills on wood fires, the works. Rebel sentinels surveyed the camp, and actors roamed the scene participating in the celebration.
I was thinking if real rebels were having a party in this exact spot, how would they have lit the place with the little they had? So to remain authentic to our approach, I wanted to light the set, not the actors, and still be able to shoot 300 degrees. I asked our incredible set designer Emmanuel Fréchette to hang bare neons on the walls here and there and have a couple of wooden stands lying around on the set where I could suspend some clear household bulbs. We also built real wood fires everywhere, and I had the art department get the rebel vehicles' headlights pointing in the direction of the soccer game. That way, the camera was always getting a light in the frame at any moment or a violent flare. Even the main palace building in the background was lit simply with a double 4-foot neon thrown on the ground. The effect was amazing and the ALEXA was getting it all with so little light. We threw in a little smoke to get some silhouettes, and I put the camera on my shoulder. We did two improvised 14-minute takes of the whole scene without any rehearsals. I jumped around the kids playing soccer, I ran between them to catch some of the actors in the melee, I shot the sentinels guarding the citadel, I got wide shots and close-ups of the musicians, others eating, dancing, laughing, whatever I saw that could be cool. In two long takes, the scene could never be more natural. No one knew where I would be going next, and it kept the actors and extras in the moment and the team on their toes. In this case, the realism of the lighting was more important than the classic physical beauty of it. And it came out great.
Films are not shot in Kinshasa, or anywhere in the Congo, for that matter. The reasons are of course political, and that is why hundreds of United Nations trucks patrol the city. The armed rebels are outside the city, thank God, but when the sun sets in Kinshasa, it’s to each his own. The under-lit streets are very dangerous and no one goes out at night without a chauffeur, locked inside an SUV. Gangs of kids – the chégué - are hidden in shadows. These are just street kids with no families, trying to make a dollar. They have no guns because they’re too expensive, but knives and machetes are common.
In the script, there were a lot of night scenes, but they were almost all changed to day scenes because of the dangers of shooting night. We needed more guards and more police protection, but because of the corruption we couldn’t even trust the police.
This is why this film for me was not just a film; it had much more meaning than anything I’ve shot. Upon my return, my impressions of Kinshasa are a never-ending palette of colours, lights and shadows that stayed printed on my retina for months. Just can't wait to shoot like that again.
domingo, 25 de novembro de 2012
segunda-feira, 19 de novembro de 2012
Delia Derbyshire - Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO (1968)(Music)
This track is taken from the album "BBC Radiophonic Music" which was released in 1968.
The track is by Delia Derbyshire, who was better known from creating the original Dr Who theme tune.
She was a pioneer in electronic music, using reel to reel tape systems to create looping drums and sounds, essentially kick starting the whole idea of sampling and looping music.
This track was later used by Die Antwoord in their track "Hey Sexy".
domingo, 18 de novembro de 2012
sexta-feira, 16 de novembro de 2012
domingo, 28 de outubro de 2012
quarta-feira, 24 de outubro de 2012
Greece and Its Parallel Society (doc)
http://studyingabroadingreece.wordpress.com/2012/08/18/greece-and-its-parallel-society/
The social trends taking place in Greece in the past three years have been stunning.
According to published reports, 20% of the population of Athens has left the city to go to live in the countryside.
Because Greece has a high percentage of homeownership, 80%, higher than most industrialized countries (67% for the United States), there is a home waiting for those exiting the capital city.
Once there, they can raise vegetables and animals on their property and get by.
Fishing, too, has seen a great uptick.
What emerges is a parallel society different from the mainstream one.
Regular society is about consumption, spending, shopping and racking up bills. It’s about fancy vacations in other parts of Europe, including Turkey, and maintaining a certain lifestyle – car, vacation home, expense account, going out to eat, drink and regular plastic surgery visits.
The economic crisis has fundamentally changed all that in Greece.
Greeks are not spending like what they once did. They tied with Italy in the highest per capita consumption of clothing and hours watching television (is this why they got the stereotype of being “lazy?”).
Clothing consumption has fallen dramatically, as increasingly shuttered clothing and shoe stores reveal. Just a simple walk along Ermou Street in downtown Athens highlights this stark reality.
The consumptive world that so dominates industrial nations is taking a beating in Greece.
Instead, the country reverts to old traditional methods of sustaining itself.
Has anything like this happened on such a grand scale?
The contrast between this parallel society and the mainstream one is unprecedented. It’s as if Greeks live in two completely different and contradictory worlds.
I have high hope for Greece because in a strange way the country represents the future.
It is a fact of modern life that we as a global society have reached a kind of end point in the efficacy and utility of our social institutions.
Most of our modern institutions, particularly those of the industrialized west, grew out of the Renaissance after the 1500s.
Today those institutions have become fat and bloated and no longer serve the needs of human beings. They are, in short, completely corrupt.
It is not just the sex assault scandals of the Catholic Church, or the excessive corruption of governments in Europe and the U.S., but it is the reality that as a society we live under tremendous suppression and control that has made life often unbearable and stifling.
Under these circumstances, it is impossible to “breathe.” To be fully human beings. To be something other than shopping robots.
Eventually these corrupt institutions will harden and not be able to face crisis.
And only those societies that developed people-centered, parallel institutions will thrive.
Parallel Societies (doc)
http://www.economicthinking.org/international/parallelsocieties.html
Parallel Societies
"This movement should create a situation in which authorities will control empty stores, but not the market; the employment of workers, but not their livelihood; the official media, but not the circulation of information; printing plants, but not the publishing movement; the mail and telephones, but not communication; and the school system, but not education." Solidarity's Wiktor Kulerski on Poland's parallel society (written while in hiding).
[This essay was first published in 1987 in Econ '87 and was later reprinted in the International Society of Individual Liberty's Freedom Network News.]
Dozens of countries around the world hold parallel societies--one on the record, obeying government regulations, paying taxes, following orders, and the other off the record and underground. Often, individuals keep one foot in each world and learn to play by two sets of rules.
In Poland and Peru free societies are flourishing--off the record. Poland's underground may lead to an anti-Communist revolution [it later did, of course--Editor]; Peru's black markets may hold the answer to Third World poverty. Two world-class problems solved with one stroke. Maybe.
The "second society" in Poland has a long history. Operating in parallel to the legal economy, it has provided products from refrigerators to books to dozens of other goods consumers want, but which the legal economy seems unable to provide.
When Polish authorities imposed marshal law in 1981, they pushed the Solidarity movement underground. Pamphlets began to appear in Warsaw calling for the "self-organization of society." Polish dissident Adam Michnik, in his book Letters from Prison and other Essays, says, "Our unofficial life is our authentic life," and called on his fellow Poles to act as if they were free. Many Poles acted out their freedom by joining any of the hundreds of private enterprises that make up Poland's diverse black markets.
Long before Solidarity, Polish authorities had quietly relied on black markets to produce goods and services their planned economy could not. In doing so they let loose a whole new set of incentives. As Poles earned profits from these private enterprises, they learned the benefits of economic freedom, even in its severely limited form. Over time black market enterprises grew in scope and complexity, and have crossed over into political life through private publishing firms.
In universities, banned books by free-market economists are turning up on assigned reading lists. Seven major underground publishing operations have--among them--translated and printed works by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and others.
The Polish government is not alone in its worries about growing black markets and demands for political freedom. The Economist reported on "The Stirrings of Yugopluralism" (February 21, 1987 p. 45), in Yugoslavia. Aged Eastern Bloc leaders are caught between growing "second" societies underground, and Gorbachev's calls for economic and political reform above ground.
But black markets are a much wider phenomenon than those known in communist countries. Black markets arise wherever government regulation makes voluntary economic activity illegal. And virtually every government does that to some extent.
Black markets in the Third World
Although U.N. officials and other development experts are blaming corruption and black markets for hampering economic growth in the Third World, David Osterfeld, a fellow of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, sees it differently.
Osterfeld argues that Third World corruption is fundamentally different than in western societies. "In the West," Osterfeld says, "the market is the basic social institution within which business is conducted. Corruption here takes the form of payments to public officials in return for licensing restrictions, tariffs or other policies or practices that shield businesses from competition… In contrast, throughout the Third World the state rather than the free market is the basic social institution. Their corruption often takes the form of payoffs to public officials, or other illegal measures, designed to obtain permission to enter the market. Hence, in contrast to corruption in the West, which reduces competition. Third World corruption tends to increase market competition."
Osterfeld cites China's absence of labor markets as an example. Without such markets, Chinese managers hire peasants illegally to meet production quotas. Fancy bookkeeping hides their wages, but such illegal workers are estimated to make up 25-50 percent of China's entire industrial work force.
In some western countries though, individuals have launched their enterprises completely outside the system. Take Peru, for example.
Peru: where black is informal
Hernando De Soto is in favor of black markets. So is Mario Vargas Llosa, the famous Peruvian novelist Llosa's major New York Times Magazinearticle on De Soto, "In Defense of the Black Market" (February 21, 1987), argues that because government bureaucracies are the problem in Peru, black markets are the solution.
In his new book El Otro Sendero ("The Other Path"), De Soto describes the "informal" economy that has arisen because the "formal" economy is tightly bound by thousands of regulations. Llosa explains "In Peru, there are more than 500,000 laws and executive orders governing even the simplest of daily living needs. Given that burden, illegal solutions are all that remain." Peru's informal economy forms a vast parallel society, operating next to but largely independent of the legal Peruvian economy.
In 1980, De Soto founded the "Institute for Liberty and Democracy" to study the phenomenon of black markets in Peru and around the world. Black markets are often criticized as competing unfairly with legal firms (since they rarely pay taxes). But De Soto found that entrepreneurs turned to black markets to avoid regulations more than taxes. Endless regulations protect the wealthy and established firms from competition. Llosa explains that the real problem is the state "whose Byzantine legal system seems designed to favor those already favored and to punish the rest by making them permanent outlaws. The informal market is actually the solution to the problem: the spontaneous and creative response of the impoverished masses to the state's inability to satisfy their basic needs."
How extensive is Peru's informal economy? According to Llosa and De Soto, over 400,000 people in Lima, Peru's largest city, are directly supported by the commercial black market. The informal economy has invested more than $1 billion in transportation (in Lima 95 percent of public transportation is in the hands of the informal economy). Half the population of Lima lives in houses constructed by the informal economy, which between 1960 and 1984 spent $8.3 billion on housing, while the government spent only $173 million. The black market businesses of the informal economy are not only far more efficient than their regulated and government counterparts; they utterly dominate much of the Peruvian economy.
But why doesn't the government face up to the reality? Why not deregulate the economy and thus make legal the thousands of enterprises that, in reality, keep the Peruvian economy operating. De Soto calls the problem "mercantilism," a word that describes an economic order based on detailed government control of the economy, in partnership with established businesses.
De Soto says that though the Peruvian government defends its taxes and regulations on the grounds of social justice, and claims to redistribute wealth from rich to poor, the reality is very different. Llosa explains "Redistribution, which is supposed to mean the taking of money from the elite to give to the poor, actually involves the concession of monopolies or favored status to the elite, who depend on the good graces of the state--which, in turn, is dependent on the elite… While the nation's wealth remains concentrated in a small minority, the interests of the majority are largely ignored."
De Soto's Institute for Liberty and Democracy, with 40 full-time employees, provides studies to document the effectiveness of black markets in solving economic problems and to expose the true nature of Peru's legal economic problems and to expose the true nature of Peru's legal economic system, "De Soto's studies strip away any pretensions anyone may have about the validity of the mercantilist system. This system, he shows with devastating accumulation of data, is not only immoral but also inefficient. Within it, success does not depend on inventiveness and hard work but on the entrepreneur's ability to gain the sympathy of presidents, ministers and other public functionaries--which usually means his ability to corrupt them."
Peru's mercantilistic economy, like Poland's communist economy, is based on privilege. Instead of all people being equal in the eyes of the law, their laws look first for the mark of status--one's family or party membership decides which set of rules apply. But black markets are based on equality before the unwritten laws of the market. Informal markets are open to men and women of all races and religions. Wealth accumulates through production, and labor is rewarded according to the combined and voluntary valuations others place on one's labor in the marketplace. Peru's informal economy grows ever more efficient, its formal economy is the stagnant clone of ten dozen other impoverished Third World countries.
Poland and Peru offer a strange vision of the future. An unauthorized future that no authorities anywhere seem willing to accept. These growing free economies may--at any moment--be crushed by new "reforms" designed to stamp out "corruption," and establish purer socialist or communist ideologies. Just as the Cambodian economy was crushed by the idealistic Khmer Rouge in 1975.
Or, they may continue to evolve toward freedom. Political freedoms grow from the economic freedoms practiced daily in black market activities. These parallel free societies may over time gain strength and stability as their command economies fade. The authorities in Poland and Peru may eventually be left with only bare shelves, unproductive firms, unread newspapers, and empty schools. And their own endless and unenforceable regulations.
Afterword (August, 2001)...
Communism fell, but informal economies still flourish. For the latest work by Hernando de Soto, see the review of his recent book on the Laissez-Faire Books web site: The Mystery of Capital. Also recommended, this Forbes article on De Soto's work, "Waking Dead Capital" (sign in required)]
http://books.google.pt/books?id=geagUiHx4GsC&pg=PA7&lpg=PA7&dq=parallel+societies&source=bl&ots=ZDJ5Nx9iA3&sig=0ArZyxL8at9t5truT1A-H76zxQo&hl=pt-PT&sa=X&ei=aQaIUPOZOtSAhQfowoGYBw&ved=0CHcQ6AEwCTgo
http://aa.ecn.cz/img_upload/f76c21488a048c95bc0a5f12deece153/WHiscott_Parallel_Societies.pdf
http://books.google.pt/books?id=geagUiHx4GsC&pg=PA7&lpg=PA7&dq=parallel+societies&source=bl&ots=ZDJ5Nx9iA3&sig=0ArZyxL8at9t5truT1A-H76zxQo&hl=pt-PT&sa=X&ei=aQaIUPOZOtSAhQfowoGYBw&ved=0CHcQ6AEwCTgo
http://aa.ecn.cz/img_upload/f76c21488a048c95bc0a5f12deece153/WHiscott_Parallel_Societies.pdf
terça-feira, 23 de outubro de 2012
quinta-feira, 18 de outubro de 2012
quarta-feira, 17 de outubro de 2012
Chucky's name comes from (trivia)
Chucky's true name is Charles Lee Ray, (Charles Manson, Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Manson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Harvey_Oswald
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Earl_Ray
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Manson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Harvey_Oswald
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Earl_Ray
quarta-feira, 10 de outubro de 2012
Campanhas de sensibilização (Work)
A Sensibilização Ambiental é uma ferramenta fundamental para a mudança comportamental relativamente ao meio ambiente. Sensibilizar é procurar atingir uma predisposição da população para uma mudança de atitudes. Mudar atitudes requer educação, apresentando os meios da mudança que conduzem à melhor atitude, ao comportamento adequado perante o ambiente.
As acções de sensibilização e educação ambiental, visam estimular nos cidadãos mudanças de condutas e comportamentos, em particular ao nível do espírito de participação e responsabilidade civil, demonstrando a importância da limpeza pública, do planeamento e execução da recolha de resíduos, de reduzir a produção dos resíduos e reutilizar, reciclar e/ou valorizar determinados resíduos.
São assim os objectivos da Sensibilização para a Higiene Urbana:
- Reforço da consciencialização dos munícipes e dos operadores económicos visando a adopção de comportamentos mais adequados.
- Diminuição da quantidade de resíduos produzida por habitante, promovendo hábitos de consumo sustentável.
- Maximização da reciclagem de materiais que permita o cumprimento das metas estabelecidas em termos de recolha selectiva e reciclagem.
- Reforço da capacidade de intervenção da gestão municipal, sobretudo ao nível do controlo operacional e do apoio aos munícipes e operadores económicos.
- Sustentabilidade económica da gestão municipal, com a recuperação de custos e a adopção de instrumentos económicos adequados.
CAMPANHAS DE SENSIBILIZAÇÃO
Através de soluções personalizadas que visam despertar consciências, a área de Comunicação de Marketing desenvolve um conjunto de campanhas de sensibilização (ver portfólio) que se dirige a diferentes públicos internos e externos.
A comemoração de Dias Nacionais, Internacionais ou Mundiais, o Universo FEUP vivido diariamente pela Comunidade que o compõe, etc, constituem apenas alguns pontos de partida.
A Casa África apoia esta campanha da Fundação CEAR- Habitáfricaque irá desenvolver actividades de sensibilização e formação durante todo o ano de 2011. A apresentação desta iniciativa terá lugar na sede da Casa África no próximo dia 6 de Abril às 17h.
O projecto "África nos fogões" contribui para a sensibilização da sociedade canária pela mão das mulheres cozinheiras africanas, através da realização de ateliers de gastronomia africana. Por outro lado, promove-se o emprego das cozinheiras africanas que irão receber formação específica em animação gastronómica, bem como em técnicas empreendedoras.
As linhas de acção desta campanha coincidem, em grande parte, com os objectivos fixados no enquadramento da iniciativa do "Cantinho Gastronómico Africano (RGA)" promovido, em 2010, pela Casa África e cuja primeira edição decorreu no local África Vive.
Mais informações:
BGH in Argentina is promoting its new line of silent air conditioners with “Big Nose”, an integrated advertising campaign offering 25 percent discounts to people with big noses. The new line, with 5 stages of filtered air, was considered to be most helpful to people with big noses. The company worked with Del Campo Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi to create the nose-o-meter, an in-store device capable of measuring noses. If your nose touches the sensor, an alarm goes off and you win the discount. Atbignosebgh.com online visitors can upload their profile picture, in order to find out if their nose has the chance to win. The site indicates where shoppers can find the nearest nose-o-meter and includes a gallery of noteworthy big noses.
http://www.delcamposaatchi.com/es/trabajos/tv/bgh_-_padres_en_slip
Sensibilization campaign "Death on the Road"
6 June-30 September 2011, ACA-M - Associação de Cidadãos Auto-Mobilizados
This campaign aims to raise awareness among drivers, especially younger drivers, about the dangers of driving under the influence of alcohol, which remains a major cause of road accidents in Portugal, especially among young people. The campaign has the slogan "If you drink, let me drive", message that is presented by the metaphorical figure of "death". This campaign is conducted in collaboration with the public security police, in Lisbon, with the possibility of being extended to the entire country in the near future. The message includes statistics on accidents in Lisbon and safety tips for drivers.
Contact: Manuel João Ramos
Tel: +351 217801997 / +351 931406941 Email: aca-m@aca-m.org
(How to: ideia - Design)
Primeiros passos para aceitar comida diferente.
How to accept something different
social/cultural refers to the "personal relations, community values, and cultural relations which affect peoples use of food."[3]
Food system refers to how food is produced and reaches consumers, and consumer food choices. It subsumes the terms ‘food chain’ and ‘food economy’, which are both too narrowly linear and/or economic. The food system can be broken down to three basic components: biological, economic/political, and social/cultural. The biological refers to the organic processes of food production; the economic/political refers to institutional moderation of different group's participation in and control of the system, and the social/cultural refers to the "personal relations, community values, and cultural relations which affect peoples use of food."[3]
Local food systems are an alternative to the global corporate models where producers and consumers are separated through a chain of processors/manufacturers, shippers and retailers. They "are complex networks of relationships between actors including producers, distributors, retailers and consumers grounded in a particular place. These systems are the unit of measure by which participants in local food movements are working to increase food security and ensure the economic, ecological and social sustainability of communities."[4]
Promover comunicação através da partilha de cultura gastronómica para melhorar a qualidade de vida das pessoas.
How to create 'local food systems?
(Spot ideia televendas bimbas/Superhomem, explosão de energia..)(Step 1 plant food, Step 2 sell in market, step 3 buy from market...)
O prazer proporcionado pela comida é um dos factores mais importantes da vida depois da alimentação de sobrevivência. A gastronomia nasceu desse prazer e constituiu-se como a arte de cozinhar e associar os alimentos para deles retirar o máximo benefício. Cultura muito antiga, a gastronomia esteve na origem de grandes transformações sociais e políticas. A alimentação passou por várias etapas ao longo do desenvolvimento humano, evoluindo do nômade caçador ao homem sedentário, quando este descobriu a importância da agricultura e da domesticação dos animais.
Local food or the local food movement is a "collaborative effort to build more locally based, self-reliant food economies - one in which sustainable food production, processing, distribution, and consumption is integrated to enhance the economic, environmental and social health of a particular place.
the economic/political refers to institutional moderation of different group's participation in and control of the system, and the social/cultural refers to the "personal relations, community values, and cultural relations which affect peoples use of food."[3]
These systems are the unit of measure by which participants in local food movements are working to increase food security and ensure the economic, ecological and social sustainability of communities."[4]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Madre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ark_of_Taste Conclusão: FOOD SURFING! At CouchSurfing, we envision a world where everyone can explore and create meaningful connections with the people and places they encounter. Building meaningful connections across cultures enables us to respond to differences with curiosity, appreciation and respect. The appreciation of diversity spreads tolerance and creates a global community. |
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