By Kthi Win

Hello everybody,

I am Kthi Win from Myanmar and I am a sex worker. I manage a national organization for female, male & transgender sex workers in Burma & I am also the chairperson of the Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers.  Until now, organizing anything in Myanmar has been very difficult.  And people ask, "how did you set up a national program for sex workers?"  And my answer to them is "Our work is illegal.  Every night we manage to earn money without getting arrested by the police.  We used to work and organize together, so we use this knowledge in order to work out how we can set up the National Network without making the government angry".

This topic is about transforming economic power.  I want to say to you, that when a woman makes the decision to sell sex, she has already made the decision to empower herself economically.  What we do in organizing sex workers, is we build on the power that the sex worker has already taken for herself - the decision to not be poor.

For the past few weekends, I've been gradually deleting information from my Facebook account. Each Sunday, a few more photos come down. That's because I read Rebecca MacKinnon's call to arms, Consent of the Networked, which shows that Facebook, Twitter, and Google are acquiring the size and power of nation-states, but without the democratic accountability or transparency citizens may demand of the states that govern them. Mackinnon asks, "How do we make sure that people with power over our digital lives will not abuse that power?"

By Gregg Gonsalves

Lant Pritchett--a Professor of the Practice of International Development at the Harvard Kennedy School--has been leading a campaign against the election of Jim Kim to the World Bank presidency.   While he isn't the only critic of Dr. Kim's nomination, he is among the most vocal and well-known.   Though his views are his own, they have been amplified by other leading development economists, such as William Easterly at New York University and people associated with the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC.

Over the past few weeks, Pritchett has publicly questioned Kim's qualifications, saying a lack of training in economics and experience in world finance should disqualify him from the post. He has further suggested that Kim's nomination shows  the arrogance and hegemony of American power over the institution.  He has called for Kim to step aside for a merit-based election, in which the Nigerian candidate for the post, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (a World Bank, Harvard and MIT alum, also finance minister of Nigeria) would presumably sweep to victory.

A few days ago, Pritchett wrote an article in the New Republic (TNR) which comes clean about the real reasons for the escalating, grasping campaign of opposition to Jim Kim. The piece is called "Why Obama's World Bank Pick Is Proving So Controversial."   The title is an overreach:  It should really read "Why Obama's World Bank Pick Is Proving So Controversial to Me and My Friends."