Una mujer y nueve meses | ELESPECTADOR.COM

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Opinión| 2 Ene 2010 - 11:00 pm

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Una mujer y nueve meses

Por: Mauricio Botero Caicedo

LOS ESTUDIOSOS DEL DESARROLLO están de acuerdo en que el capital humano es tal vez el principal eslabón en la compleja cadena que conduce a la riqueza de las naciones.




Pero a diferencia del capital físico que requiere esencialmente inversión en dinero, hormigón y equipos, el capital humano —además de inversión— requiere tiempo… mucho tiempo. Bernardo Quintero, el ejecutivo y ocasional filósofo payanés afirma que para procrear un hijo se necesita una mujer y nueve meses, no nueve mujeres y un solo mes. Con el capital humano ocurre lo mismo.

Existe, sin embargo, una excepción que acelera la formación de este recurso y es que el capital humano se desplace, voluntaria o involuntariamente, de un lugar a otro. Con creces se benefician los países que acogen a los inmigrantes profesionales, a medida que perjudican los países que los emigrantes abandonan. La historia nos brinda innumerables ejemplos de estos flujos migratorios como fue las expulsión de los judíos de la península ibérica en los siglos XV y XVI, que les permitieron principalmente a los Países Bajos acelerar su desarrollo; la expulsión de los hugonotes de Francia, torpeza que empobreció intelectualmente al reino galo, pero que enriqueció a sus vecinos y a Inglaterra; y en nuestra era las masivas migraciones huyendo del fascismo y del comunismo, inmigrantes que contribuyeron de manera decisiva al liderazgo de países como Estados Unidos, Canadá, y Australia.

Con discreción y timidez al inicio, pero cada día con mayor fuerza, a Colombia le está llegando un gigantesco acervo de capital humano procedente de Venezuela. Aquel chafarote de quinta categoría que es Hugo Chávez le está prestando a Colombia un invaluable servicio: proveerle un capital que duraríamos una o dos generaciones formando. Hoy, cerca de 600 ingenieros petroleros venezolanos laboran en el país, y dentro de sus inmensos aportes está la contribución a que el campo petrolero de Rubiales en el Meta, en vez de producir 9.000 barriles diarios, haya sobrepasado los 100.000 barriles y en fechas cercanas lleguen a 300.000 barriles. En buena parte estos ingenieros y ejecutivos formaban parte de Petróleos de Venezuela, Pdvsa, empresa que hoy en día se dedica es a atender las necedades del socialismo del siglo XXI que pregona Chávez. Pero no sólo son los ingenieros petroleros los que se han desplazado a nuestro país: miles de empresarios, profesionales y académicos buscan en Colombia, como afirma Miguel Gómez Martínez en su columna de El Espectador (diciembre 6/09), el refugio y la tranquilidad, por no hablar de la libertad, que les fue arrebatada en su país de origen.

Con el fin de acelerar el flujo migratorio de los venezolanos hacia Colombia, la Cancillería les debe agilizar los trámites para que puedan obtener la residencia o la ciudadanía sin tropiezo alguno. Paralelamente, el Ministerio de Comercio Exterior debe promover aún más la inversión de Venezuela en nuestro país, especialmente aquella relacionada con el sector exportador. Chávez, chafarote tropical que sigue pensando que los inmensos problemas que enfrenta Venezuela se solucionan con ponerles a sus ciudadanos bozales de arepa, entreteniéndolos simultáneamente con el espectáculo bufo en que ha convertido sus alocuciones dominicales, va a continuar promoviendo —sin que los colombianos tengamos que mover un dedo— migraciones masivas de capital humano. El coronel, sin proponérselo, terminará siendo un gran benefactor de Colombia. ¿Será que por cada profesional que nos llegue, a Chávez en reciprocidad le podemos enviar un terrorista de las Farc?

• Mauricio Botero Caicedo

 

Intentan rescatar a 34 mineros atrapados en derrumbe de mina - Diario EL PAIS - Montevideo – Uruguay

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Intentan rescatar a 34 mineros atrapados en derrumbe de mina

Unas 130 personas se encontraban trabajando en las labores de rescate de los 34 mineros atrapados desde el jueves a las 14H00 locales (17H00 GMT) en el yacimiento San José de la Minera San Esteban, una mina de mediano tamaño en las cercanías de Copiapó, 800 km al norte de Santiago, sobre el desierto de Atacama, según la Oficina Nacional de Emergencia (Onemi).

Después de casi 24 horas de trabajos en el lugar, los rescatistas habían logrado avanzar sobre los ductos de ventilación, sin aún tener contacto con los mineros atrapados, que se encontrarían a unos 450 metros de profundidad y estarían presumiblemente guarecidos en un refugio que cuenta con abrigo, oxígeno y comida por unas 72 horas.

“De manera permanente se han intentado establecer líneas de comunicaciones con los atrapados para conocer el estado en que se encuentran, y asimismo se ha intentado consolidar maniobras de preparación y aseguramiento del sitio para ingresar a la chimenea”, señaló un reporte del Gobierno regional de Atacama.

Las labores de rescate están concentradas en acceder a través de los ductos de ventilación de la mina, porque el derrumbe obstruyó el camino de acceso.

“Hay dos entradas a la mina. La rampa no es una posibilidad, porque está totalmente colapsada y la solución es (ir) por la ventilación que está despejada, lo que es una buena noticia”, explicó a medios locales la ministra de Trabajo, Camila Merino.

“Tenemos que trabajar con mucho cuidado, porque si provocamos un derrumbe ponemos en riesgo a los rescatistas y la posibilidad de sacar a la gente rápidamente”, agregó la ministra, quien llegó a la zona a coordinar las tareas de rescate.

La mina, ubicada a 800 mt sobre el nivel del mar, es un socavón al costado de un cerro al que se baja por una rampa, “un camino que baja y va dando vueltas, y hay una parte en la que se produjo el derrumbe, por lo que no se puede bajar más”, explicó la intendenta de Atacama Ximena Matas.

“El derrumbe ocurrió en el nivel 350 (metros de profundidad) y ellos se encuentran más abajo, en el nivel 100, una zona más profunda, y confiamos en que estén en un sector donde no ha habido derrumbe y donde además hay un refugio”, dijo Matas.

Más temprano, la intendenta indicó que “no podemos hablar de víctimas todavía. La información que tenemos es que están atrapados, pero no tenemos ninguna información concreta del estado en que se encuentran. Esperamos que estén bien porque debieran estar en el refugio”, insistió.

Familiares de los trabajadores atrapados hacían vigilia en las afueras de la mina, en una campamento montado por el Gobierno donde a medida que pasaban las horas cundía la incertidumbre y la preocupación.

El gerente de la mina, Pedro Simonevic, quien conversó con los familiares que lo increparon por la falta de información, dijo que “el accidente no se podía prever” y que “la mina funciona en el marco de la ley”.

Trabajadores del yacimiento denunciaron no obstante que la mina estaba sobreexplotada y no contaba con vías de escape.

“En 2002 se cambió el método productivo de la empresa y se empezó a sobreexplotar, debilitando la fortificación del cerro, y esto genera derrumbes”, denunció el secretario del sindicato de la Minera San Esteban, Javier Castillo, a CNN Chile.

“Siempre hemos dicho que no se puede trabajar en nuestra mina (…) no existen vías de escape”, agregó.

Dentro de la lista oficial de mineros atrapados figura Franklin Lobos, un ex jugador de fútbol que militó en varios equipos de la primera división chilena e inclusive fue seleccionado nacional en la década de los 80. (AFP)

 

Dorothy Rabinowitz: Liberal Piety and the Memory of 9/11 - WSJ.com

 

• OPINION
• AUGUST 4, 2010

Liberal Piety and the Memory of 9/11

The enlightened class can’t understand why the public is uneasy about the Ground Zero mosque.

By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

Americans may have lacked for much in the course of their history, but never instruction in social values. The question today is whether Americans of any era have ever confronted the bombardment of hectoring and sermonizing now directed at those whose views are deemed insufficiently enlightened—an offense regularly followed by accusations that the offenders have violated the most sacred principles of our democracy.

Deputy Editorial Page Editor Bret Stephens and Editorial Board member Matthew Kaminski on the plan for a ‘Mosque at Ground Zero,’ and Senior Editorial Writer Joseph Rago reports on the Missouri results.

It doesn’t take a lot to become the target of such a charge. There is no mistaking the beliefs on display in these accusations, most recently in regard to the mosque about to be erected 600 feet from Ground Zero. Which is that without the civilizing dictates of their superiors in government, ordinary Americans are lost to reason and decency. They are the kind of people who—as a recent presidential candidate put it—cling to their guns and their religion.

There is no better exemplar of that faith than New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, though in this he is hardly alone. Compared with the Obama White House, Mr. Bloomberg is a piker in the preachments and zealotry department. Still, no voice brings home more unforgettably the attitudes that speak for today’s enlightened and progressive class.

Immediately after the suspect in the attempted car bombing near Times Square was revealed to be Faisal Shahzad, of Pakistani origin, Mayor Bloomberg addressed the public. In admonishing tones—a Bloomberg trademark invariably suggestive of a school principal who knows exactly what to expect of the incorrigibles it is his unhappy fate to oversee—the mayor delivered a warning. There would be no toleration of "any bias or backlash against Pakistani or Muslim New Yorkers."

That there has been a conspicuous lack of any such behavior on the part of New Yorkers or Americans elsewhere from the 9/11 attacks to the present seems not to have impressed Mr. Bloomberg. Nor has it caused any moderation in the unvarying note of indignation the mayor brings to these warnings. It’s reasonable to raise a proper caution. It’s quite something else to do it as though addressing a suspect rabble.

It’s hard to know the sort of rabble the mayor had in mind when he told a television interviewer, prior to Shahzad’s identification, that it "could be anything," someone mentally disturbed, or "somebody with a political agenda who doesn’t like the health-care bill." Nowhere in the range of colorful possibilities the mayor raised was there any mention of the most likely explanation—another terrorist attempt by a soldier of radical Islam, the one that occurred to virtually every American who had heard the reports.

The citizens were, of course, right. Those leaders bent on dissuading them from their grasp of the probable cause of this near disaster were left with their red herrings hanging—but remembered. Mr. Bloomberg’s "someone who doesn’t like the health-care bill" would be inscribed in the golden book of howlers these events have yielded, along with Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano’s brisk assurance there was no evidence this was anything but "a one-off."

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When a car bomb was discovered in Times Square in May, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg suggested every possible motivation but the obvious and correct one: Islamist terror.

The notion that it is for the greater good that the people be led to suspect virtually any cause but the one they had the most reason to fear reflects a contempt for the citizenry that’s of longstanding, but never so blatant as today. It is in the interest of higher values, Americans understand—higher, that is, than theirs—that they are now expected to accept official efforts to becloud reality.

Such values were the rationale for the official will to ignore the highly suspicious behavior of Maj. Nidal Hasan, who went on to murder 13 Americans at Fort Hood. A silence maintained despite all his commanders and colleagues knew about his raging hostility to the U.S. military and his strident advocacy on behalf of political Islam.

Those who knew—and they were many—chose silence out of fear of seeming insensitive to a Muslim. As one who had said nothing in the interest of this higher good later explained, Maj. Hasan was, after all, one of the few top-ranking Muslim officers the army had.

In the plan for an Islamic center and mosque some 15 stories high to be built near Ground Zero, the full force of politically correct piety is on display along with the usual unyielding assault on all dissenters. The project has aroused intense opposition from New Yorkers and Americans across the country. It has also elicited remarkable streams of oratory from New York’s political leaders, including Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.

"What are we all about if not religious freedom?" a fiery Mr. Cuomo asked early in this drama. Mr. Cuomo, running for governor, has since had less to say.

The same cannot be said for Mr. Bloomberg, who has gone on to deliver regular meditations on the need to support the mosque, and on the iniquity of its opponents. In the course of a speech at Dartmouth on July 16 he raised the matter unasked, and held forth on his contempt for those who opposed the project and even wanted to investigate the funding: "I just think it’s the most outrageous thing anybody could suggest." Ground Zero is a "very appropriate place” for a mosque, the mayor announced, because it "tells the world" that in America, we have freedom of religion for everybody.

Here was an idea we have been hearing more and more of lately—the need to show the world America’s devotion to democracy and justice, also cited by the administration as a reason to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City. Who is it, we can only wonder, that requires these proofs? What occasions these regular brayings on the need to show the world the United States is a free nation?

It’s unlikely that the preachments now directed at opponents of the project by Mayor Bloomberg and others will persuade that opposition. Those fighting the building recognize full well the deliberate obtuseness of Mr. Bloomberg’s exhortations, and those of Mr. Cuomo and others: the resort to pious battle cries, the claim that antagonists of the plan stand against religious freedom. They note, especially, the refusal to confront the obvious question posed by this proposed center towering over the ruins of 9/11.

It is a question most ordinary Americans, as usual, have no trouble defining. Namely, how is it that the planners, who have presented this effort as a grand design for the advancement of healing and interfaith understanding, have refused all consideration of the impact such a center will have near Ground Zero? Why have they insisted, despite intense resistance, on making the center an assertive presence in this place of haunted memory? It is an insistence that calls to mind the Flying Imams, whose ostentatious prayers—apparently designed to call attention to themselves on a U.S. Airways flight to Phoenix in November 2006—ended in a lawsuit. The imams sued. The airlines paid.

Dr. Zuhdi Jasser—devout Muslim, physician, former U.S. Navy lieutenant commander and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy—says there is every reason to investigate the center’s funding under the circumstances. Of the mosque so near the site of the 9/11 attacks, he notes "It will certainly be seen as a victory for political Islam."

The center may be built where planned. But it will not go easy or without consequence to the politicians intent on jamming the project down the public throat, in the name of principle. Liberal piety may have met its match in the raw memory of 9/11, and in citizens who have come to know pure demagoguery when they hear it. They have had, of late, plenty of practice.

Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.

 

Obama’s White House Is ‘Too White’?

By Rosslyn Smith

According to Maureen Dowd, Barack Obama’s latest problem may be because he isn’t black enough:  

The Obama White House is too white.

It has Barack Obama, raised in the Hawaiian hood and Indonesia, and Valerie Jarrett, who spent her early years in Iran.

But unlike Bill Clinton, who never needed help fathoming Southern black culture, Obama lacks advisers who are descended from the central African-American experience, ones who understand "the slave thing," as a top black Democrat dryly puts it.

Dowd continues:

The West Wing white guys who pushed to ditch Shirley Sherrod before Glenn Beck could pounce not only didn’t bother to Google, they weren’t familiar enough with civil rights history to recognize the name Sherrod. And they didn’t return the calls and e-mail of prominent blacks who tried to alert them that something was wrong.

Dowd then collects quotes from several aging veterans of the 1960s civil rights era — John Lewis, James Clyburn, Eleanor Holmes Norton — as well as unnamed sources. Here is one of the anonymous quotes: "Who knew that the first black president would make it even harder on black people?"

Outside of wondering when the Irish-American Dowd became the arbiter of the authentically black in American politics, my first reaction to the above was, Who ever suspected that Andrew Breitbart was such an evil genius? In plucking Shirley Sherrod out of obscurity to make a point about the NAACP and the Tea Parties, could Breitbart have started a small-scale war among black American politicians? 

All I can say is, thank God that instead of telling them all to shut up, baby boomer Maureen Dowd encouraged these political old timers to publicly nurse egos bruised when the Generation X occupants of the White House didn’t fall down in awe of all things from the 1960s. The fault lines Dowd writes about have actually existed for some time now, but it is hard to imagine a less appropriate time for veterans of the civil rights era to be dissing Obama for lacking a personal claim to authentic black victim status. While Obama may not have shared their experiences in a pre-Civil Rights era South, neither do millions of other blacks born in the north at too late a date to recall seeing stories about Freedom Riders on the Huntley-Brinkley Report, or who heard parents talk about newspaper headlines about members of the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee over breakfast. 

Those doing the complaining about Obama on race seem to miss what the focus of most people in the Tea Party is. Obama not only shares the redistributionist agenda many so-called civil rights activists have promoted their entire political careers, but he is also coming close to putting that agenda into operation in major segments of the economy. There is nothing racial about being opposed to Marxist-style class warfare solutions that, for all their claims of social justice and fairness, have been repeatedly proven to worsen economic conditions for the vast majority of a nation’s citizens.     

This fall, Democrats need an enthusiastic turnout by black voters in several statewide election contests. Missouri, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Ohio immediately come to mind. While expressed support for Obama among blacks remains very high in the polls, converting that support to actual votes for other Democrats on the November ballot is not a given — not with the stated black unemployment rate currently exceeding 15%, black-on-black crime high, and large cities all across the nation cutting back on services.

Even a small drop in the turnout percentage among black voters could cost the Democrats several Senate seats and governor’s mansions. Intensity of political support can be very much a function of what-have-you-done-for-me-lately. This is not usually measured in the the abstract terms favored by academic types, who love mankind in general while showing disdain for most humans as individuals. "Where are the jobs?" is an almost universal political question this summer.

As someone who was a local political junkie when I lived in Chicago, Dowd’s unawareness that Obama has heard the complaints she reported at least once before in his political career is amusing. In the tribalism of Chicago politics, the reaction to the Hawaiian-born, Indonesia-raised Barack Obama’s status until quite recently was the wait-and-see attitude reserved for an untried son in-law, not the full embrace given a genuinely beloved member of the civil rights community. For years, some blacks looked at Obama’s exceptionally large number of "present" votes in the State Senate and wondered what exactly his game was. Where could he be fit along the traditional local scale between the greedy pragmatists, who wanted only to run the Cook County Democrat machine for themselves, and the starry-eyed reformers, who desired to tear it all down in favor of their own pet theories of government?

Then, in their 2000 primary contest, Civil Rights-era veteran Congressman Bobby Rush effectively painted primary challenger Obama, the favorite of the University of Chicago community in Hyde Park, as an "educated fool" and an elite outsider. In promoting his own long career as a black nationalist to voters in Illinois’ First Congressional District, Rush noted exactly what Dowd’s sources say today: "Barack Obama is a person who read about the civil-rights protests and thinks he knows all about it."

Chicago political insiders also noticed that in a redistricting map drawn after the 2000 census that was notorious for allowing incumbents of both parties to pick their constituents instead of the other way around, Obama ended up with a district that contained more affluent white liberals and fewer poor blacks. Black political colleagues would poke fun at Obama’s trying to fit in as one of them by talking jive even as he also reminded everyone of his Harvard law degree. Several expressed open dislike of him to one of the few white reporters in the 2004 election cycle who bothered to ask.

My own suspicion is that we will know if the black dissatisfaction Dowd writes about is real by how actively partisan the First Lady is on the campaign trail this fall. If her schedule includes a great many stops in cities in key states and appearances in front of local chapters of the NAACP, ACORN offshoots, and other black activist venues, we will know there is a general enthusiasm gap, and not just some grousing by old-timers about the Generation X crowd. That’s because, in her criticism of Barack Obama’s "too white" set of advisors, Dowd overlooked Michelle Obama. Her family’s background in Chicago’s identity politics makes her the member of the administration best-suited for outreach to those who refuse to let go of "the slave thing."

Coming on the heels of the Journolist revelations, Dowd’s musings about Obama’s White House being too white call to mind one of Obama’s peers in the Illinois State Senate. Before the national media climbed onto Obama’s bandwagon and he started bringing home the political bacon from Washington, D.C., critical comments about him were far from heresy in Chicago political circles. In 2000, Illinois State Senator Donne Trotter also challenged Congressman Bobby Rush in the primary. When asked about the campaign, Trotter said this to a reporter from the alternative weekly, the Chicago Reader:  

Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in blackface in our community. You have only to look at his supporters. Who pushed him to get where he is so fast? It’s these individuals in Hyde Park, who don’t always have the best interest of the community in mind.

Today, Senator Trotter’s criticism can be seen as both insensitive to Obama’s mixed-race background and remarkably prescient about his political base being strongest among the white radical left. Over twenty months after they elected Obama president, many American voters feel they still don’t know the full measure of the man they voted for, while the motives of those supporters on Journolist who labored to keep the voters intentionally blind — even while urging them to make a leap of faith — have become increasingly suspect.

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