Motor Booty
Despite the crushing weight of election coverage my favorite news story last week was out of Vietnam globeandmail.com: Motorcycle driving: Slight to slight people? Vietnam bans small or thin people from riding motor bikes. Even to the point of specifiying a 28 in. minimum chest size
Vietnam considers driving ban for small-chested people | World news | guardian.co.uk. Every article I saw on this cued the same set of jokes at this point: entire Vietnamese nation comes to abrupt transport halt. I brought this up with Tran who has riden motor bikes through the streets of Saigon. She murmured something mostly inaudible about the ability of Vietnams leaders to come up with idiotic ideas. Then she shot me a sidelong glance and I let the subject shift. This points up the danger: though, of letting imortant societal matters, be decided on the whim of non-expert opinion. Road accidents in Vietnam are at public health crisis levels. A million motor bikes all going through the same intersection at the same time. They could have decreed a helmet law, or some minimal level of road rules and education. This would have required process and follow-up. And perhaps I am being unimaginative, but I don't see the obvious sources of payoffs and graft from helmet laws either.
This brings up another story out of Vietnam from the previous week. There was a slow moving corruption scandal from a couple of years ago. Officials from the transportation ministry were revealed to be betting on soccer matches using funds from Japan and the World Bank. But hey who doesn't do that? News reports had broken the story, the police got involved, people were arrested and the case was wending its way through to justice. Everyone was congratulating themselves on free press and rule of law - until a Deputy Minister was named, then the charges were dropped with out explanation and the reporters are arrested and sent to jail.
"Nguyen Viet Chien was convicted of "abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the state." One of his sources, Lt. Col. Dinh Van Huynh, was given a one-year sentence for "deliberately revealing state secrets."
Vietnam Imprisons Reporter - washingtonpost.com
There is a thin thread of a line that can be drawn between this and the Melamine affair in China. [This weblog used to get hits from places like Vietnam and China it doesn't any more. I don't know why]. What is seen here are regimes of regulatory failure. Melamine mystery scandal? That didn't exist. The last reports on this indicate it was an open secret and had been for years, It's use widespread in the food industry
BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Chinese melamine scandal widens. Underlying food production techniques for urban concentrations that characterize structural shift was a house of cards centered on tests for nutritional levels that could be gamed by melamine that boosts nitrogen results. It is indicative of the contradictions inherent in a mass society of independent buyers and sellers. Once one player out of thousands chooses the low easy route, the profit squeeze is on for everyone to follow suit. Nothing and no one polices themselves. A successful regulatory regime requires rules, standards, paperwork, inspection, and sanction. Differing groups interests do not align themselves without such systemic grounding.
There was a New York Times commentary about a month ago that likened the Melamine situation to the New York milk scandals of the 19th and early 20th century The Swill Is Gone - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com. It involved things like milking cows which were surviving largely on a diet of used whiskey mash. It was not wholesome. This went on for more than a generation. In the end it took more that just legislation and regulators. It took those people; police, the judicial system, judges. All of them feeling the public were looking over their shoulders before the problem abated. The way out is only through the disinfectant of open information - a free press is integral here. Decisions by some governments to partially unlock - then re-lock the press upon whim, occaisionly quite literally, is reactionary and will never allow the neccesary awareness to even start the process of driving corruption out of their societies.
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