Avuncular American

Europe & Turkey: Let It Fly On Its Own

As we approach the 100 day mark for the Obama Administration, the desire of European political parties, public interest groups, think tanks and media to analyze its impact on Europe continues unabated.  On the whole, the verdict is that the election of Barack Obama was a good thing for the United States, but also for Europe.

There is a lingering resentment, however, over one thing: President Obama's April 6 speech in Ankara supporting Turkish candidacy for membership in the European Union. (Photo of EU and Turkish flags from Wikimedia Commons).

"We speak not as members of the EU, but as close friends of both Turkey and Europe," said the President.  After listening to European reaction by informed EU citizens, let me say that I speak as an Obama supporter and American with strong European ties when I say that the US Government needs to, in the words of Dutch MP Hans van Baalen, "mind its own business" on Turkish-EU matters.

We know, of course, that Barack Obama is not the first American President to weigh in on behalf of  Turkey's European ambitions.  Nevertheless, at a time when fence-mending across the Atlantic is so important, and concerted action on a number of fronts with European allies is essential (NATO in Afghanistan, a unified approach in the G-20 on economics, energy, and climate), the US need not raise hackles in this sensitive area.

In any case, Turkey has to make its own case, and appearing like a US client is not a good means of having one's EU application favorably reviewed by a Europe still smarting from smart-ass Donald Rumsfeld's division of the continent into "Old" and "New" (pro-American) halves.

Turkey, as President Obama underlined, has made remarkable strides in matters of democracy, industry, and international stature.  Its credentials need to be seen in that light, and not in a knee-jerk rejection of its application simply because its citizens are primarily Muslim.  If Europe rejects Turkey because of religion, then why would Turkey want to join the EU anyway?

Auteurs Find a Film Home on the Web

My first inclination was to give this post a screaming come-on title like WATCH FREE LEGAL ART HOUSE FILMS ON THE WEB!!!  However, I was concerned that I'd get the wrong kind of traffic.  But that's what a great new site called The Auteurs is offering - for a limited time only.

Oops.

Sorry, but I missed informing readers about Zeitgeist Films' and The Auteurs' internet "screening" of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's "Three Monkeys" (photo) on April 26.  If you can bring yourselves to forgive me, they are also showing the director's 2006 film "Climates" through May 3 here (but only for people living in the United States and Portugal - the vagaries of international film distribution rights).

Apparently here in Europe I can watch - for a price anywhere from €2 to €5, which appears to be fair - certain recent and classic films from what appears to be a very impressive international, subtitled, collection.  Again, not every film is viewable from every country.

Reminders of the Bush Legacy: Torture, Iraq

It's been a while since I used my Iraq and Torture category tags.

For the latter, I've not written about torture since the Inauguration of President Obama.  Now not a day goes by without a new revelation about the depths of the previous administration's depravity, or a call for investigation, prosecution, accountability, or just plain truth.

On Iraq, well, that's been overshadowed by concerns over systemic survival and other cosmic economic matters.  But Iraq, as Secretary of State Clinton would tell us after her lightning visit this weekend, will not be forgotten: "As we draw down militarily, we will deepen our civilian cooperation," she said, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Nor will future generations be likely to forget Iraq, as they'll be paying for the "$3 Trillion War" for the foreseeable future.

Five years ago, you'd never have known that costs were a concern, or that the price of the Bush war on Iraq would include the soul of the United States.  Back then, the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC, Paul Bremer's hand-picked coterie of exiles from Saddam Hussein) apparently had nothing better to do than dream up a new symbolic flag for the country that was then tearing itself apart outside the Green Zone (see image, thanks to CRW "Flags of the World," of the ill-fated flag unveiled 26 April, 2004).  The flag was such a laughing stock that it joined other great IGC/CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) ideas in the dustbin of history.

While Viceroy Bremer and the IGC were playing at governance within the Emerald City, the niceties of torture were being observed at places like Abu Ghraib.  Just like the trillions that will haunt future generations, so too will the images of torture and abuse - soon to be multiplied by additional, graphic, horrors to be released next month.  Will that include photographic evidence of the sexual abuse of women and children that Seymour Hersh alluded to five years ago?

At a recent Brussels discussion of President Obama's 100 day report card, someone had the temerity to suggest that there was no difference between George W. Bush and Barack Obama, only "stylistic" changes.  It was all I could do to remain diplomatic and suggest that there were in fact many crucial policy differences, and a monumental moral difference.

The "Program" that Bush liked to justify was nothing other than what autocrats, bullies, and zealots have justified over the centuries, that the ends justified the means, and that only they could define what is permitted/forbidden, good/bad, us/them...  It was called "the unitary Presidency."

Those days are over, but should not be forgotten.  Today, in a style and with an erudition that few journalists can match, Frank Rich of the New York Times showed us the link between torture and Iraq.   The link was a straight line, drawn by crooked men.

In the Electric Mist - Tavernier Does Burke

The smoke curling from your monitor could be from flaring swamp gas, could be from Confederate campfires, or it could be the fumes coming from my ears.  Why is your correspondent fuming?  Because Dans la brume électrique, Bertrand Tavernier's adaptation of the 1993 James Lee Burke novel In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, has suffered "direct release to DVD" treatment in the United States of America.  Yep, here are the numbers:  Theatrical Release: $0.  DVD sales since March 3 release: $1.5 million.  Will that even pay for a week's worth of the cast's catering contract?

I understand that the US DVD version has had 15 minutes' of material chopped from the international version.  Dommage, truly a pity.

Author James Lee Burke's website (poster image) gives a synopsis of the cinematic treatment of his novel:

While on an investigation into a series of grisly murders, veteran detective Dave Robicheaux (Tommy Lee Jones) navigates his way through the Louisiana bayou and the dark, sultry world of New Orleans mobster "Baby Feet" Balboni (John Goodman). Layers of corruption and long-dead secrets reawaken grudges and a lethal alliance.  A tangled web of killings, past and present, converges in a shocking showdown with stakes that become deeply personal to Robicheaux and his family. Featuring music from five-time GRAMMY Award-winner Buddy Guy, this film takes you deep into Cajun country's hidden worlds.

So you have big name American actors (in addition to Jones and Goodman, there's also Mary Steenburgen, Peter Sarsgaard, and Ned Beatty), a haunting evocation of exotic Louisiana locations (bayous, Spanish moss, Katrina-devastated New Orleans), and a great blues and Cajun soundtrack.  Plus French director Tavernier, a monument of modern cinema with over thirty films and as many awards (including multiple Cannes winners) under his belt.  So why has this excellent film been consigned to DVD limbo?

I guess it's a "distribution" issue.  The French distributor, TFM - what did they do wrong?  Not pay appropriate obeisance to Hollywood?  John ("Baby Feet Balboni") Goodman, the bad guy of the film, has had his fill of Tinsel Town, and has spent the last twelve years living in... Louisiana.  In an interview with Brussels' Le Soir, Goodman castigates the "destructive Hollywood fixation with business and celebrity; it's not far from corruption, and the glamor circuit is a trap."

So unless you check out In the Electric Mist from your local video shop or order it from Netflix, you'll miss out on one of the most cerebral (but also viscerally physical) whodunits of the year.  James Lee Burke (who appears to be worshiped by Tavernier and Goodman alike) has not been served well by Hollywood.  Two of his novels, Heaven's Prisoners and Two For Texas, have been turned into film, the latter into a TV movie, the former a minor film by a minor director.

In the Electric Mist is neither a minor film (though its direct-to-DVD release in the US would make it seem so), nor a film by a second-rate director.  Is there some Hollywood mogul who is still smarting from incessant French dissing of George W. Bush?  Somebody resent those silently eloquent images of the New Orleans skyline of skyscrapers, with wrecked Lower Ninth Ward in the foreground?

Bertrand Tavernier - Leonard Maltin called his 'Round Midnight (1986) "a loving homage to jazz musicians and their world" - certainly deserves a wider audience in the US for his American film.  Did I mention that it's an English-language film, made by a renowned French director?  I give up.

See it on the big screen - but only in Europe.

The Day(s) After Earth Day - Go Plant a Tree

Bet you didn't know that the day after Earth Day was World Book and Copyright Day - here's the UNESCO page in its honor.  But that's already yesterday's news.  Today, you have your choice: either celebrate Global Youth Service Day or - if you're an Armenian (or a Turk with a guilty conscience) - the Day of Mourning and Commemoration, marking the massacre of Armenians in Anatolia close to a century ago.

But before all of the above, there was Arbor Day, begun in 1872.  Given the name of this blog, naturally I assumed that the last Friday in April was Arbor Day everywhere.  So culturally imperialistic of me.  It is celebrated in most - but not all - American states today.  The good people at the Arbor Day Foundation have provided an interactive map showing the dates where people plant trees as a public service throughout the world.

I have nothing against Earth Day.  If my chronological memory is right, I was an active participant in the very first Earth Day in 1970, as a high school senior in Ecology class, then a brand new and cutting edge course.  At the time, I was torn between preparing for a tree-planting life in the US Forest Service and a forest-destroying life of writing memos in the US Foreign Service.  I chose the latter, but have tried to make the most of paperless technology... by writing a blog!

Seriously, people actively marking Arbor Day are doing something, however individually small, for the good of the planet.  I daresay that much of the pious hype about Earth Day two long days ago was just that, as the eternally relevant Russell Baker said of the same event almost twenty years ago:

For or against Earth Day? What difference does it make? A few hours after Earth Day is over there will be something new, a New Thing, demanding everyone's attention.

The always ravenous media maw will insist upon it and public-relations people, who know how quickly we tire of yesterday's fantastic event, will create it for us: a brand new New Thing, rich in photo ops and feel-good potential.

Russell Baker, curmudgeonly critic of the NYT Editorial Page, was writing during the days of the Bush I succession to the Reagan feel-good era.  During the Dark Age of the Bush II ("W") succession, there indeed was a going-through-the-motions marking of Earth Day, by an emasculated Environmental Protection Agency that would have made the EPA of its founder (Richard Nixon!) want to change its name.  Compare the sparse Bush Administration site "EarthDay.gov" (significantly, last updated January 17, 2009, i.e., pre-inauguration) to the re-born EPA Earth Day page under President Obama.

In my Ecology Class days with Mr. Klavon (I was so loyal to him that I joined the HS wrestling team which he coached; my commitment to ecology has been longer lasting), we had a wider appreciation of the dangers of pollution in all its forms, even if we lacked a proper understanding of the overarching threat of CO_² and global warming.  Air pollution was to be fought (later, as a headhunter, I recruited "sanitary engineers" who installed smokestack "scrubbers" to filter out the dirty particles), but we were more concerned with the visible, smellable, and audible kinds of pollution.

This year I didn't plant any trees, but my wife and I did perform a semi-public service to our condo neighbors by going into the wooded lot in back of our building and filling two big trash bags with assorted junk.  In the US, civic-minded Scout troops, Rotary Clubs, and communities can "adopt" a road that their fellow citizens (plus maybe a few foreign tourists and "illegal aliens") have littered.  That's the way of the world.  Some people plant trees, others consume them.

Earth Day is every day.  Today, it's "Happy Arbor Day!"  But that doesn't stop you from doing that good civic/environmental deed tomorrow, or the day after...

(Image from AppleWorks Clip Art)

Iran, Israel, and Intolerance: Ahmadinejad & Avigdor

The fact that a racist like [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad is the main speaker proves the true aim and nature of the conference.

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, speaking on the eve of the UN conference on racism in Geneva, from the Israel Beytenu website

Following World War Two, they [note: WW II victors] resorted to making an entire nation homeless on the pretext of Jewish suffering. They sent migrants from Europe, the United States and other parts of the world in order to establish a totally racist government in the occupied Palestine. In compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe, they helped bring to power the most cruel and repressive, racist regime in Palestine.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Geneva; excerpted remarks on the BBC website

The old saw about the pot calling the kettle black comes to mind.  Personally, I don't think either Mahmoud Amadinejad or Avigdor Lieberman represent all their citizens or the ethos of their respective countries.  Both, however, are the product of elections, and therfore do represent currents that are alive in broad segments of their societies.  That said, I would like both of them to go to hell.

Since they are respectively President and Foreign Minister of Iran and Israel, my wish to send them to Hades is irrelevant.  Maybe as irrelevant as the UN Conference - official site here - itself.

A UN conference to condemn racism?  I am not going to fall into the facile complaint about wasting money on sending hundreds of people to talking shops; international conferences can often lead to useful conclusions.  Even the original Durban Declaration is credited with fostering minority rights in places like Latin America and India.

But yesterday's set-piece speech + walkout/boycott was guaranteed from the start to steal whatever credibility the organizers had provided the conference.  They would have done better to invite Avigdor Lieberman, so that he could expound on his plan - remember, he is now Israel's Foreign Minister - to eject Arab citizens of Israel and "trade" their land for the burgeoning Israeli settlements in the West Bank.  "The more homogeneous a country is, the better it develops," he told Der Spiegel in 2007.  According to Ben Lynfield, Jerusalem-based freelance writer for The Nation, Lieberman illustrates "the ascendance of fascist ideas in Israel."

Whatever pious imprecations are mouthed in Geneva over the next few days, racism and intolerance will continue to abound.  A few leagues south of Geneva, in Italy, football crowds continue in their racist ways.  In Iran, Ahmedinejad has returned to a rapturous welcome after sticking it to the West.  Maybe he can apply himself to the question of press freedom and Roxana Saberi.  And, out of sight of the world's media, Israel under Netanyahu/Lieberman continues to make life miserable for Arabs.

Here's my question: will any of the countries whose delegations walked out on or boycotted Ahmadinejad similarly spurn Avigdor Lieberman?  A man whose current "diplomatic" duties cannot cover a lifetime of racism?

Summit Island

Back in blog land after a week in France (more on that later).  Today's news about the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad - and some grumbling from the host citizenry about being cut off from their own country - brought forth this brain wave: let's designate a nice island, somewhere in the world, as "Summit Island."

"Summit Island" - Mont Saint Michel (photo above left) on the Norman/Breton coast probably won't do - would be a secure, sunny, standardized summit venue for all such groups: Summit of the Americas, G-20, G-8 (if they insist on maintaining that outdated group), NATO, climate change, UN, OPEC, AU, and EU.  All of them.

Ideally, the island would be leased long-term from a needy developing country - Cape Verde in the Atlantic off the African coast might have an available uninhabited island, though water supply and port/runway might have to be arranged.  They would be paid handsomely for supplying experienced, vetted, and multilingual personnel from their existing tourism industry.  There are plenty of "private islands" too.

Local citizens, instead of being walled off from their usual shopping districts (see NATO Summit in Strasbourg), would simply be over the horizon.  No fear of disruption by the usual assortment of anarchists or other professional protesters, who seem to sniff out every such summit and are duly filmed by the news media for their efforts.  Landing rights would be for official parties, period.

This move would only confirm what is already a common practice among national hosts.  George W. Bush, playing host to the 2004 G-8 Summit, chose Sea Island Georgia (inhabited mostly by wealthy Republicans) as his venue.  Seal off a couple of bridges to the mainland and you're in business.  The place already is a resort.

The US has other offshore islands - here's lovely Catalina Island ("Santa Catalina, 26 miles across the sea") in the Pacific off Los Angeles.  Again, the Catalina Chamber of Commerce probably could supply plenty of willing workers in these days of rising unemployment.

But I do think that the wealth should be spread around, and why not to those deserving Chagos Islanders, the "Ilois" who were (and remain) exiled from Diego Garcia and the other islands in the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) when the US Navy turned the place into "The Footprint of Freedom."  They certainly need the work, and the place is about the most secure site I can imagine for permanent summiteering.

Sherpas and others charged with preparing summits might tire of endless trips to the same island, and someone is bound to criticize the choice of venue ("politicians sun themselves on Alcatraz Island"), but we'd all eventually get used to it.  Carbon miles would be minimized, and fresh fruit and vegetables could be flown in the Air Force One cargo hold.  Local livestock could be raised on the sunny uplands of St. Helena.  The possibilities are endless.

Confidence, Man!

You know where I'm going with this, if you're a regular reader of this blog:

-  First, a definition.  Confidence man: a person who swindles others by means of a confidence game.

-  Then, another definition.  Confidence game: a swindle in which the swindler, after gaining the victim's confidence, robs the victim by cheating at a gambling game, appropriating funds entrusted for investment.  (Definitions courtesy Random House Webster's College Dictionary).

Perhaps you're thinking of the sub-prime, hedge-fund, bonus-bailout crisis, and its similarity to above.  You wouldn't be mistaken.  You, me, we, everyone was had.  But just like Hitler had his Willing Executioners, Mr. Fat Cat had his acolytes, and they included elected representatives of the very people who were fleeced.  And before they were fleeced, they too went along with the snake oil salesmen - "after gaining the victim's confidence..."

Probably the best single article I've read so far on the origins of how we got where we are - and some ideas on how to right the wrongs - is in the current issue of Harper's Magazine.  "Infinite Debt: How Unlimited Interest Rates Destroyed the Economy," by Thomas Geoghegan, a Chicago labor lawyer, should be required reading by members of Vice President Joe Biden's Middle Class Task Force.  A key excerpt:

We dismantled the most ancient of human laws, the law against usury, which had existed in some form in every civilization from the time of the Babylonian Empire to the end of Jimmy Carter’s term, and which had been so taken for granted that no one ever even mentioned it to us in law school. That’s when we found out what happens when an advanced industrial economy tries to function with no cap at all on interest rates. Here’s what happens: the financial sector bloats up. With no law capping interest, the evil is not only that banks prey on the poor (they have always done so) but that capital gushes out of manufacturing and into banking. When banks get 25 percent to 30 percent on credit cards, and 500 or more percent on payday loans, capital flees from honest pursuits.

Geoghegan tries to help some of the victims of those payday loans and "free" credit cards, whose portraits should make even a cold-hearted banker weep.  Geoghegan writes that he had

a retired schoolteacher in my office the other day whose husband is deep into Alzheimer’s. The two had taken a loan for $1,700, somehow managed to pay back $3,000, and still they had not even begun to pay off the principal. That’s not uncommon...

Usury.  First outlawed (or at least capped) in Babylon.  Brought back in the Reagan era.  So much for "Morning in America."

This is the kind of practice that now must be documented, publicized, and eradicated.  The man to lead the way is "Mr. Confidence Man" - the original sense of "confidence," without the pejorative undertone - President Barack Obama.  No point in bailing out banks and financial institutions if the underlying foundations are rotten.  Usury, loan-sharking, but also union-bashing, must go.  Rebuilding the industrial base will be a full court press.

Obama is capable of providing a confidence boost to populations from Anchorage to Ankara, as we saw last week in his string of summits and international whistle stops.  If you think public diplomacy of the kind Obama practices is so much fluff, well, I have news for you: it can work wonders.  And it has its domestic equivalent, called morale-building.

If, as John McCain mistakenly (but understandably) said during the campaign, "the fundamentals of the economy are sound," then at least part of what we're up against is psychological.  Confidence builds confidence, and our President has plenty of reserves of that stuff.

Have a happy Passover and/or Easter, and watch for a return to posting in about 7 days.

Algerian Elections: A Very Easy Call

Dilem, Liberte-Algerie.com

Algeria has gone full circle: 19 years ago, I arrived in Algiers in advance of the June 1990 regional and municipal elections, which saw the emergence of the Islamist FIS Party as a force to be reckoned with (the reckoning came when the Algerian Army quashed the second FIS victory in as many years, the December 1991 parliamentary elections whose cancellation signaled the beginning of Algeria's bloody years of political violence).

In 1990, while monitoring the elections in a one-man mission for the US Embassy, I took a lunch break for a plate of couscous.  The government clerk sitting at the table next to me wasn't a "man on the street," but he would do.  "Voted yet?" I asked.  "Not going to," the functionary answered.  "The FLN will win again, as it always does," a reference to the previous one-party rule of the National Liberation Front.

My lunch partner was, of course, wrong: the FIS won, and won big, because they got out the vote.  Fast forward to 2009, and today's presidential elections.   Don't know if my clerk is still around, but if he sat out the election this time, his cynicism would be well-placed.  As the excellent Maghreb-watching blog "The Moor Next Door" puts it, this is a "cakewalk" for the re-election of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

Though Algerian politics has been far from fair, at least it had avoided the "President For Life" malady that afflicts it North African neighbors.  As Ahmed Aghrout and Yahia H. Zoubir write in Middle East Report Online MERIP

Until recently,  Algeria was the North African exception -- Article 74 of its  1996 constitution set two five-year terms as the limit on the  mandate of a given president. On November 12, 2008, however, the parliament voted overwhelmingly to approve several constitutional  amendments, the most important of which removed the stipulations  of Article 74. This far-reaching amendment opened the way for President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to run for a third successive  term, as he will do on April 9, despite his poor health and controversial performance. Algerians are convinced that, as in Tunisia or Egypt, the result of this election is a foregone conclusion.

If you count out the FIS, which was disbanded after the Army coup in 1992, most of the remaining credible politicians and parties are boycotting the election (see this useful BBC Q & A).  There are international observers in Algeria for the event: the African Union has agreed to deploy 100 monitors.  But three prominent French weeklies, including L'Express, have been banned for apparently getting too close to the inconvenient truth.

As a service to readers who want to browse previous coverage of Algerian topics, here's a link to my "Algeria" tag category.

FYI, for myopic readers who haven't clicked on Dilem's "Presidential Elections" cartoon above, that ballot box is a shredder.

 

Katanga Business

To lead the mineral-rich Congolese province of Katanga, you don't have to be named Moïse.  But Moïse Katumbi, the current governor and "star" of Katanga Business, and Moïse Tshombe, the leader who tried to break away from newly-independent Congo in 1960, have the French version of the name "Moses" in common.  And this: the ground they rule(d) is the source of international competition, a contemporary Scramble for Africa over precious cobalt, coltan, tungsten, and plain old copper.

Like the hero of Chinua Achebe's novel, "A Man of the People," Governor Katumbi is a "Big Man," the kind of African leader who, as long as he continues to distribute largess to his people, remains popular.  He's the guy - you guessed it - in the black cowboy hat on the poster.  Katumbi is a sort of reverse Obama; his father was a Jewish exile from Hitler's Europe who took refuge and thrived in then Belgian Congo.

Belgian documentary film maker Thierry Michel's latest work, just released in Belgium and France, is a "sort of economic parable via an industrial saga," according to the director.  Michel knows the Congo (DRC) well; he's been making films there on and off for the last 17 years, and shot Katanga Business over five separate trips.  Note to self: must go and rent DVDs of his other Congo films; two of the latest were Congo River and Mobutu, King of Zaire.

For francophones, the film's official website offers an interview with Michel, where he gives credit to Governor Katumbi for being a "modernist, extracting agreements from international mining companies to develop the province's agriculture," but at the same time calls him "an ambivalent figure, a capitalist/populist mix of Silvio Berlusconi and Hugo Chavez." Colette Braeckman, Africa correspondent of Le Soir, paints a lively portrait of the man's ambiguities here.

In an extensive interview with Fabienne Bradfer of Le Soir, Thierry Michel expands on his fascinating Governorator:

He's a wealthy businessman, who governs like he runs his businesses (like Berlusconi, he too has TV station and football club).  He was elected because he was very rich; for the Congolese, being rich means he's less likely to try to enrich himself and therefore better able to govern the province.  He's visionary, charismatic, and a communicator.

But Katanga Business is not a biopic of a provincial African governor, photogenic as he is.  It's about globalization, capitalism, and economic colonialism.  Thierry Michel turns Chinese wildcat investors, Belgian holdover industrialists, and Canadian "pension fund" investors into a rich mix, but none are caricatured as they might be in a Michael Moore film on similar ground.

The most dignified players - though some of them are reduced to begging for handouts from "papa" the governor - are the Congolese miners.  Creuseurs or diggers, they try their best to maintain discipline (it's their byword) in set-piece confrontations with politicians, employers, and police.  The odds are always against them - anyone would be intimidated by the armored, helmeted, and masked Congolese police, bearing down on the workers with tear gas, batons, and bullets.

Hemmed in between Chinese and Western investors, cajoled by politicians in suits or cudgeled by police looking like Samurai warriors, the barefooted miners have only one choice: work, for whatever pittance their masters deign to hand out.  The word "slavery" is used more than once - not by the narrator, but by the men who provide the world what it needs to keep its mobile phones charged.

In places from Katanga to Kazakhstan, "business" (often pronounced beeznis with a leering grin), is synonymous with corruption, exploitation, and destruction.  It's a long way from nostalgic Main Street notions of private enterprise.  In other words, a timely film, one that presents lessons beyond Lumbumbashi.