Friday, November 19, 2010

Can CCM sustain stranglehold on power?

This is a link to my article featured in Africa Review

Tanzania’s fourth multiparty elections were, in some ways, not significantly different from the first three, held in 1995, 2000 and 2005.

Just like before, the long-time ruling party, the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM).....

Read more....

Update: a longer version is also posted at Pambazuka.

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Take Action and Help Stop Bush Tax Cuts for the Richest 2%!


As all of you know, as the sun sets on the Democrat controlled House, one of the dominant issues is the possible extension of the Bush tax cuts, primarily those cuts that specifically target the country’s highest income earners. As all of you also know, taxes levied on the wealthiest Americans are at an all-time low, while the deficit is rising, along with income inequality and America’s entry into the Banana Republic club (seriously). 

Just as I did during health care reform efforts, I now take the liberty of posting some key tax cut tweets here. You may have already seen them floating around on “#p2” and “p2b”. Please, get the word out by tweeting them profusely and don’t waste space by crediting me. Tweet to trending hash tags if needed. Most of mine include “#Fact”, in an effort to reach an audience beyond the progressive crowd. Also, below are a few Act.ly petitions that you should also tweet and tweet and tweet. Now, for the good of our country, get to work, and happy tweeting.

Petitions
Top 1% getting 65% of GDP!! Hey Rep @jahimes! With windfalls like this, who needs a tax break? http://act.ly/2ew RT2Sign #p2 #p21

Top 1% getting 65% of GDP!! Hey Sen @evanbayh! With windfalls like this, who needs a tax break? http://act.ly/28u #p2 #p21

Top 1% getting 65% of GDP!! Hey @Rep_Giffords! With windfalls like this, who needs a tax break? http://act.ly/2fg RT2Sign #p2 #p21

Top 1% getting 65% of GDP!! Hey @repschrader! With windfalls like this, who needs a tax break? http://act.ly/2fh RT to sign #p2 #p21

Top 1% getting 65% of GDP!! Hey Rep @LeonardBoswell! With windfalls like this, who needs a tax break? http://act.ly/2ff RT2Sign #p2 #p21

Top 1% getting 65% of GDP!! Hey Rep @HarryEMitchell! With windfalls like this, who needs a tax break? http://act.ly/2ev RT2Sign #p2 #p21

Top 1% getting 65% of GDP!! Hey Rep @GlennNye! With windfalls like this, who needs a tax break? http://act.ly/2eu RT2Sign #p2 #p21

Top 1% getting 65% of GDP!! Hey @SenBenNelson! With windfalls like this, who needs a tax break? http://act.ly/28l RT2Sign #p2 #p21

Top 1% getting 65% of GDP!!  Hey @RepJimMatheson! With windfalls like this, who needs a tax break? http://act.ly/2et RT2Sign #p2 #p21

Top 1% getting 65% of GDP!! Hey @repjohnbarrow! With windfalls like this, who needs a tax break? http://act.ly/2es RT2Sign #p2 #p21

Top 1% getting 65% of GDP!! Hey @whitehouse! With windfalls like this, who needs a tax break? http://act.ly/28l RT to sign #p2 #p21

Tweets
#Fact: Bush tax cut extensions=lowest bang 4 the buck versus 11 other stimulus plans (CBO) http://bit.ly/cRrLzd #p2 #p21

#Fact: The CBO ranked tax cut extension for the top 2% as DEAD LAST out of a range of stimulus options. #p2 #p21

#Fact: $200 billion=cost of Bush Tax cuts in 2010, $34 billion=cost of jobless benefits for 2010. #p2 #p21

#Fact: Payroll tax cut for firms hiring more workers=4 to 8 times as many jobs per $ as extending high-income tax cuts. #p21 #p2

#Fact: Every $ spent on Bush tax cut yielded a mere 32 cents in economic growth (Moody's Analytics)! #p21 #p2

#Fact: 1990s, b4 Bush tax cuts, small businesses added 756,000 jobs per year vs 367,000 during Bush years. #p21 #p2

#Fact: If Bush tax cuts expire, the high income marginal tax rate wld still be lower than it was at end of Reagan's 1st term. #p2 #p21

#Fact: Cost of the Bush tax cuts to the top 1% alone is larger than the Department of Education's budget http://bit.ly/aXCoGY #p2 #p21

#Fact: In the long-run, Bush tax cuts will be the largest contribution to the deficit! http://huff.to/9Q1BlM #p21 #p2

#Fact: Between 2002 & 2007 two-thirds of the nation’s total income gains flowed to the top 1% of households. #p21 #p2

Sources
Posting sources is difficult to do, given the 140 character limit. In case someone asks, here are the sources for these tweets. If it's a teabagger asking, blow their minds and tell them that all data is from Glenn Beck. After all, for them, any other source is just a hub in the Obama/Chavez/Marx/Kim Jong Il communist nexus of tyranny based in Kenya.

Tweet #1 includes a link (http://bit.ly/cRrLzd) that covers tweets #2,

Tweet #3 http://nyti.ms/bSNCHU

Tweet #4 http://bit.ly/cTILeH

Tweet #5 - http://usat.ly/9hzP4u. This could also cover tweets #1 and #2

Tweet #6: http://bit.ly/cTILeH

Tweet #7 - is actually a quote from http://huff.to/cggxdb

Tweets #8, 9 include links

Tweet #10 http://bit.ly/ao5fTU

As far as the petitions go, the 65% figure is an adjustment made to an article (http://yhoo.it/dcCSJJ)that says 66%. I remember the number being 65%, so I errored on the side of caution.

Hope this helps. I try to keep these sources in order, but I literally have hundreds (maybe several thousand) tweets across a couple of different spread sheets. 

Thursday, November 4, 2010

How Does Political Participation in Tanzania Stack Up?


I’ve often heard the claim that Tanzanians are, politically speaking, relatively apathetic – the corruption and moral decay that has accompanied the CCM’s rule (especially since the 1980s) leads people to shun politics. While I’d certainly say that, given then revolving door between the CCM and big money in Tanzania’s politics, people might have every reason for being apathetic, some of the empirical data simply fails to measure up to the claim about apathy.

Currently, I’m doing a bit of academic research for a paper exploring the relationship between political competition and political participation throughout Africa. The work is still somewhat preliminary. However, given the energies around the recent election, I thought I’d share - in a casual blog post - some of the more interesting pieces of data on political participation in Tanzania.

The data in the tables below are frequency distributions based on data obtained from Afrobarometer. For those of you less familiar with this data, Afrobarometer surveys are complied by a network of 23 research partners and supporting units in 21 different countries and are rich sources for social, political, and economic data from standardised surveys taken from 19 African countries since 1999. Each table contains a statistical summary of the respondent answers to some of the survey questions related to political participation. Also, for those who might be less familiar with statistics terminology, the “percentile” categories are nothing more than rankings. So, a percentile score of “100” is the highest, while “0” is the lowest.

The data in table one tabulates the responses to a question about the inclination of people to talk with family and friends about politics. As the data shows, respondents from Madagascar are the least likely to engage in conversation about political matters, while Senegalese respondents are the most likely to engage. However, Tanzanians are not far behind Senegal’s citizens. A full 32.2% of the Tanzanian respondents reported “frequently” engaging in political discussions with family and friends – the second highest percentile ranking (94.10%). 

TABLE 1 (Click for larger image)

 
Table 2 tells a similar story, but this time the question is about one’s interest in public affairs. Again, Tanzanians stand out as some of the most likely to take an interest, while the Senegalese now rank in the middle. Some 45.7% of the Tanzanian respondents reported a “very” strong interest in public affairs, second in ranking only to Lesotho.

TABLE 2 (Click for larger image)



The next table I find especially interesting. It tabulates the responses to the question asking about the participation in demonstrations or protests. Again, those respondents from Madagascar turnout to be the least inclined to engage in protests, while Tanzanians are the most inclined to “often” engage in demonstrations or protests and one of the least inclined “never” participate.  

TABLE 3 (Click for larger image) 


Of course, this data should be taken with an understanding of all the caveats of survey research. Moreover, I'm not at this point offering any explanations for why the participation rates for Tanzanians are so high. Maybe Tanzanians have more to complain about, although I suspect that Nigerians might be insulted by this claim. What is true is that, during single-party rule under Nyerere's leadership, political participation was not only accepted, but expected, in contrast to politics in places like Kenya and even Botswana, where participation has never been something sought after by political leaders. Whatever the case might be, the data here should, at the very least, bring pause to the claim about political apathy in Tanzania without an understanding of how political participation in the United Republic stacks up to other African countries.