Saswat Blog
All that's Left!
Tax Deduction Day: Together We Sink
By Saswat Pattanayak
Today will be remarkable for its deep venality and outright disgust. To add to the tragedy, not that many will mind it a wee bit. But as people will rush to finish filing taxes to meet tomorrow’s deadlines, it is perhaps a time to candidly examine the system of taxation that defines capitalism to a great extent.
For whom the taxes toll?
Instead of a banal question that wonders if taxation is a good thing or a bad thing (which is as debatable as ethics of don Imus), lets ask if it serves the purpose –and more importantly, whose purpose. Logically, the taxation system must be serving some purpose—else, we would not be having the IRS at the first place emerging as the biggest bureaucratic makeup in the country. Now the critical question is whose purpose is it serving.
Surface answers are quite obvious: taxes serve the rich in a capitalist country. After all, the rich get richer, and the poor poorer as the economic gaps in the first world countries would indicate. But it is this extent of disparity that must force us to pause and rethink the strategies to make the taxation system work- for the majority. (And I am not talking about tax reforms here.)
Perhaps it would be fruitful to assume that the taxation system means differently for the power structure at various phases of history. At one point not so long ago, the landless alone paid the taxes. Slavery was the most visibly institutionalized taxation format in the world. Be it under the ruthless kings, the colonialists or the slaveowners, the sarbahara (dispossessed) was exploited beyond humane reasons. From this exclusively oppressive taxation limited to the poorest, to the current practice of universal taxation aimed at the larger population—the point to ponder is how much has changed ever since, and how much needs be replaced.
Capitalism as Charity:
Indeed, no one wrests for capitalism. There is never a revolution enacted with an aim to provide capitalism. Capitalism is the biggest antidote to revolution, because it is based on charities. Not only it thrives on charities, it in fact originates as one. As inherently mocking is charity towards its recipients, capitalism is doubly so. Doubly, because it transcends the hypocrisy of charity and even declares charity itself as a revolution.
If a car brand called Chevrolet amuses itself as the American Revolution or a TV producer Oprah Winfrey declares the push-up bras she gifts out to standardized women as the biggest revolution in the world, its because in an depressingly shell-shocked environment, only the most ignorant can be permitted to legitimize their views.
As the ancestral philosophies of these ribald declarations, charities have been equated with the “revolutionary” thoughts of capitalism. From the founding days of so-called revolutions in all the first world countries, one has only witnessed filthy “free” rules by the master class over their slave classes of subjects. It was not until the middle of last century that the oppressed class received some of the political rights, if at all. Why did the owner class of the “democracies”- Greek to American- call themselves free rulers of a subjugated people for hundreds of years? Because they thrived on their charities towards the “commoners”—at once, getting rid of the psychological guilt and financial burden.
Likewise, political power was granted in charities—indeed this continues to be the case, as we witness the perfect embodiments of rich capitalist class wielding political power in all the “modern democracies”. A system of taxation, thus was evolved to sustain the class character of charities.
Class Character of Charities:
Its rather simple to understand—the more we have, the more we can donate. In fact, many even go to the extent to justify why they need to have more: because they can donate more! In the perfect sense of reformism, the only way a human being can be useful to the world is by being able to donate more to the world. And the donation is not “empty” thoughts that might turn “dangerous” (and therefore the collective disdain at the Communists in this country, for example), but the donations have to be in form of goods, lotteries, charity shows –all forms of capitalistic exhibitionism.
Individual prerogatives:
Many reformists in the past and present argue for opposing the payment of taxes. Some pacifists argue, since a portion of it goes towards war purpose, it is rather not to be paid. By that logic, the absolutely illiterate celebrities (sounds like a redundant phrase here) protest they are paying way too much for (education of) the poor. Both are dangerous freedom frolics who would probably wish for both Imus and Hip-Hop lyrics to stay on, because they would want to have a piece at the dirt arena too. With all the cameras focused on Al Gore and Anna Nicole (these types are born immortal, after all), its rather a good idea for them to maintain the circus of abuses in the name of freedom! More money, more freedom. Add a pinch of Charity, Cause, or Commotion—and we will have another guilt-free year when we file the taxes.
So what is our role here? All of us—the majority of people- who want to pay honest taxes so that they will be spent for good cause? Should we merely refuse to pay taxes? Hell, no. So should we not apply for “deductions”? Yes? Sounds like a noble idea. This way at least we can make sure that our share of tax remains with the IRS, and not paid back. Sounds good.
But highly improbable. With the hundreds of thousands of tax consultants who are ready to swing the carrots of refunds on our face, and the perfectly “legal” clauses that ask for the Thrift Store receipts or Tuition Fee deductions, why would one refuse to claim the benefits? After all, do we ever insist that the discounts at JC Penney be just not applied to our counter purchases?
Ironically, the truth of charities is that it creates a society based on greed and competition. Both greed and competition promote lies, deceit and outright oppression. For an instance, as a student, perhaps one would say a deduction should be claimed on the textbook purchases. At the same length, a venture capitalist would claim deductions based on massive property. In fact while filling out the form yesterday I noticed one could claim deduction if one had provided shelter to a Katrina victim! On all the above three counts, the acts of deductions are absolutely dishonest. What thoughts go through our minds when pay the tax at the counter? Thoughts that we will have it partially back once the tax season comes? What then, remains of the usefulness of taxation system? Of course its dangerous redundancies are obvious from the continuing state of ill-health that the poorest sections continue to suffer at the hand of apathetic administration. But it also begs for a critical reflection over the concept of taxes, charities and their tunes of deductions.
Charities are inherently oppressive. First, the benefactors gain eminence over the recipients. It is so vulgar that the benefactors in fact name institutions after them for throwing in some illegitimate money that pays them tax dividends. At the same time, they weaken the spirits of the “benefited” who thrive on the charities of the rich—essentially, so that they can never revolt against their own state of dispossession. Charities in this sense merely perpetuate the cycles of oppression, hopelessly, ceaselessly. They do not address the causes of disparities, they work to maintain it in a more acceptable fashion. And so that charities do not cause harm to the donor, the flawed system of taxation comes to the rescue. As a trickled-down effect, this provision also comes to help some of us in the lower rung, and we gladly act on it in the manner we would if a ticket price is “discounted” for us (no matter if it merely means we pay 10% of our income for the discount, while the rich pay less than a percent of theirs at the full price). Why do we let this happen?
What should be done?
As long as we can ‘get away’, we will tend to let others ‘get away’ (even if getting away is a matter of vastly varying degrees). Unfortunately, this is still true for most part in the human society, no matter how much we blow the trumpets of individualistic freedoms, the social equality as a principle must always be aimed at curtailing individual liberties.
Taxation, like healthcare, needs to be truly effective, not figuratively universal. Tax reformers have been arguing that tax should be collected on a proportionate basis. That is, the rich will pay more tax, and the poor will pay less. This is an almost perfect argument. Why it is almost so, is because this is an incomplete argument. The point is collection of tax has something to do with deduction of it as well, because in the final analysis, the effects of collection are impacted by the amount of deductions.
For the taxation to be effective, the state needs to enforce the collection of proportionate taxes at a rate that may not be “convenient”, but maybe socially desirable. For those of us who whine at the relativity of “social desirability’ citing postmodern angst, all we have to do is to position ourselves in the lowest social class ladder to get a grasp of reality that is material, not philosophical.
Tax cuts and deductions must be revisited as a system of operation that may not sound very lucrative (as stated above, no one will give away their freedom to cash a check if the free check is around). And it is because of this temptation, this greed to hold onto our “hard-earned” money (because the poor apparently do not earn…and by this crude logic only the rest of us who pay taxes hard-earn), we need a system at place, not some good hearted individuals.
Deductions Depict Class Society:
Tax deductions are indeed the lifeline of a class society. So long as tax deductions are in place, what is important is not merely to grasp the gaps in deductions that people can afford to ‘get away’ with, but the fact that deductions are present so that they must be unequally applicable to people.
In other words, tax deductions are the biggest proof, and, the biggest security for the existence of a class society. If only all the people, irrespective of mental or physical labor, were employed at equitable income level, there would not be such a thing as ‘tax deductions’.
If only people had an equal stake in the maintenance of social structure, and their roles would not have to depend on their level of income, there would not be deductions in practice to promote acts of charity—whose purpose is to make a hero/heroine of the rich, and to silence the potential dissent by the masses who are fed the cakes thrown from tall balconies.
As a reminder, capitalism will never stop the system of deductions, because that is the manner in which it normalizes the income of the richest—those who own the structure and create its norms.
And if we do not question the system that is designed by the rich, of the rich and for the rich, we would be perhaps talking merely wishfully about social justice and peace and happiness. No amount of either personal charities or noble actions of paying “proportionate” taxes will be useful as a means, if the ends themselves are based on promoting a class society—one in which the poor people have nothing to claim as deductions, for they do not even pay the taxes, because they do not even work, and they do not even have healthcare, nor can afford education. And they are accused as the wretched of America—the “freeloaders”, the social security beggars and the charity-seekers. Give it a thought today: it is not they that are at fault.
Instead of “providing shelter to a Katrina survivor’ as a means of tax deduction, we should have engaged the victims of a massive administrative disaster in all the forms we could to snatch for them the rights to be treated equally by the state apparatus thus ensuring no administrative loopholes exist any longer. But then, in a “free” market economy, we have even sold the state’s responsibilities off, where individuals are left to fend for themselves.
On the “Tax Deduction Day”, lets resolve to take the “power” back from the free markets, and truly have a system that “enforces” equality.
Today will be remarkable for its deep venality and outright disgust. To add to the tragedy, not that many will mind it a wee bit. But as people will rush to finish filing taxes to meet tomorrow’s deadlines, it is perhaps a time to candidly examine the system of taxation that defines capitalism to a great extent.
For whom the taxes toll?
Instead of a banal question that wonders if taxation is a good thing or a bad thing (which is as debatable as ethics of don Imus), lets ask if it serves the purpose –and more importantly, whose purpose. Logically, the taxation system must be serving some purpose—else, we would not be having the IRS at the first place emerging as the biggest bureaucratic makeup in the country. Now the critical question is whose purpose is it serving.
Surface answers are quite obvious: taxes serve the rich in a capitalist country. After all, the rich get richer, and the poor poorer as the economic gaps in the first world countries would indicate. But it is this extent of disparity that must force us to pause and rethink the strategies to make the taxation system work- for the majority. (And I am not talking about tax reforms here.)
Perhaps it would be fruitful to assume that the taxation system means differently for the power structure at various phases of history. At one point not so long ago, the landless alone paid the taxes. Slavery was the most visibly institutionalized taxation format in the world. Be it under the ruthless kings, the colonialists or the slaveowners, the sarbahara (dispossessed) was exploited beyond humane reasons. From this exclusively oppressive taxation limited to the poorest, to the current practice of universal taxation aimed at the larger population—the point to ponder is how much has changed ever since, and how much needs be replaced.
Capitalism as Charity:
Indeed, no one wrests for capitalism. There is never a revolution enacted with an aim to provide capitalism. Capitalism is the biggest antidote to revolution, because it is based on charities. Not only it thrives on charities, it in fact originates as one. As inherently mocking is charity towards its recipients, capitalism is doubly so. Doubly, because it transcends the hypocrisy of charity and even declares charity itself as a revolution.
If a car brand called Chevrolet amuses itself as the American Revolution or a TV producer Oprah Winfrey declares the push-up bras she gifts out to standardized women as the biggest revolution in the world, its because in an depressingly shell-shocked environment, only the most ignorant can be permitted to legitimize their views.
As the ancestral philosophies of these ribald declarations, charities have been equated with the “revolutionary” thoughts of capitalism. From the founding days of so-called revolutions in all the first world countries, one has only witnessed filthy “free” rules by the master class over their slave classes of subjects. It was not until the middle of last century that the oppressed class received some of the political rights, if at all. Why did the owner class of the “democracies”- Greek to American- call themselves free rulers of a subjugated people for hundreds of years? Because they thrived on their charities towards the “commoners”—at once, getting rid of the psychological guilt and financial burden.
Likewise, political power was granted in charities—indeed this continues to be the case, as we witness the perfect embodiments of rich capitalist class wielding political power in all the “modern democracies”. A system of taxation, thus was evolved to sustain the class character of charities.
Class Character of Charities:
Its rather simple to understand—the more we have, the more we can donate. In fact, many even go to the extent to justify why they need to have more: because they can donate more! In the perfect sense of reformism, the only way a human being can be useful to the world is by being able to donate more to the world. And the donation is not “empty” thoughts that might turn “dangerous” (and therefore the collective disdain at the Communists in this country, for example), but the donations have to be in form of goods, lotteries, charity shows –all forms of capitalistic exhibitionism.
Individual prerogatives:
Many reformists in the past and present argue for opposing the payment of taxes. Some pacifists argue, since a portion of it goes towards war purpose, it is rather not to be paid. By that logic, the absolutely illiterate celebrities (sounds like a redundant phrase here) protest they are paying way too much for (education of) the poor. Both are dangerous freedom frolics who would probably wish for both Imus and Hip-Hop lyrics to stay on, because they would want to have a piece at the dirt arena too. With all the cameras focused on Al Gore and Anna Nicole (these types are born immortal, after all), its rather a good idea for them to maintain the circus of abuses in the name of freedom! More money, more freedom. Add a pinch of Charity, Cause, or Commotion—and we will have another guilt-free year when we file the taxes.
So what is our role here? All of us—the majority of people- who want to pay honest taxes so that they will be spent for good cause? Should we merely refuse to pay taxes? Hell, no. So should we not apply for “deductions”? Yes? Sounds like a noble idea. This way at least we can make sure that our share of tax remains with the IRS, and not paid back. Sounds good.
But highly improbable. With the hundreds of thousands of tax consultants who are ready to swing the carrots of refunds on our face, and the perfectly “legal” clauses that ask for the Thrift Store receipts or Tuition Fee deductions, why would one refuse to claim the benefits? After all, do we ever insist that the discounts at JC Penney be just not applied to our counter purchases?
Ironically, the truth of charities is that it creates a society based on greed and competition. Both greed and competition promote lies, deceit and outright oppression. For an instance, as a student, perhaps one would say a deduction should be claimed on the textbook purchases. At the same length, a venture capitalist would claim deductions based on massive property. In fact while filling out the form yesterday I noticed one could claim deduction if one had provided shelter to a Katrina victim! On all the above three counts, the acts of deductions are absolutely dishonest. What thoughts go through our minds when pay the tax at the counter? Thoughts that we will have it partially back once the tax season comes? What then, remains of the usefulness of taxation system? Of course its dangerous redundancies are obvious from the continuing state of ill-health that the poorest sections continue to suffer at the hand of apathetic administration. But it also begs for a critical reflection over the concept of taxes, charities and their tunes of deductions.
Charities are inherently oppressive. First, the benefactors gain eminence over the recipients. It is so vulgar that the benefactors in fact name institutions after them for throwing in some illegitimate money that pays them tax dividends. At the same time, they weaken the spirits of the “benefited” who thrive on the charities of the rich—essentially, so that they can never revolt against their own state of dispossession. Charities in this sense merely perpetuate the cycles of oppression, hopelessly, ceaselessly. They do not address the causes of disparities, they work to maintain it in a more acceptable fashion. And so that charities do not cause harm to the donor, the flawed system of taxation comes to the rescue. As a trickled-down effect, this provision also comes to help some of us in the lower rung, and we gladly act on it in the manner we would if a ticket price is “discounted” for us (no matter if it merely means we pay 10% of our income for the discount, while the rich pay less than a percent of theirs at the full price). Why do we let this happen?
What should be done?
As long as we can ‘get away’, we will tend to let others ‘get away’ (even if getting away is a matter of vastly varying degrees). Unfortunately, this is still true for most part in the human society, no matter how much we blow the trumpets of individualistic freedoms, the social equality as a principle must always be aimed at curtailing individual liberties.
Taxation, like healthcare, needs to be truly effective, not figuratively universal. Tax reformers have been arguing that tax should be collected on a proportionate basis. That is, the rich will pay more tax, and the poor will pay less. This is an almost perfect argument. Why it is almost so, is because this is an incomplete argument. The point is collection of tax has something to do with deduction of it as well, because in the final analysis, the effects of collection are impacted by the amount of deductions.
For the taxation to be effective, the state needs to enforce the collection of proportionate taxes at a rate that may not be “convenient”, but maybe socially desirable. For those of us who whine at the relativity of “social desirability’ citing postmodern angst, all we have to do is to position ourselves in the lowest social class ladder to get a grasp of reality that is material, not philosophical.
Tax cuts and deductions must be revisited as a system of operation that may not sound very lucrative (as stated above, no one will give away their freedom to cash a check if the free check is around). And it is because of this temptation, this greed to hold onto our “hard-earned” money (because the poor apparently do not earn…and by this crude logic only the rest of us who pay taxes hard-earn), we need a system at place, not some good hearted individuals.
Deductions Depict Class Society:
Tax deductions are indeed the lifeline of a class society. So long as tax deductions are in place, what is important is not merely to grasp the gaps in deductions that people can afford to ‘get away’ with, but the fact that deductions are present so that they must be unequally applicable to people.
In other words, tax deductions are the biggest proof, and, the biggest security for the existence of a class society. If only all the people, irrespective of mental or physical labor, were employed at equitable income level, there would not be such a thing as ‘tax deductions’.
If only people had an equal stake in the maintenance of social structure, and their roles would not have to depend on their level of income, there would not be deductions in practice to promote acts of charity—whose purpose is to make a hero/heroine of the rich, and to silence the potential dissent by the masses who are fed the cakes thrown from tall balconies.
As a reminder, capitalism will never stop the system of deductions, because that is the manner in which it normalizes the income of the richest—those who own the structure and create its norms.
And if we do not question the system that is designed by the rich, of the rich and for the rich, we would be perhaps talking merely wishfully about social justice and peace and happiness. No amount of either personal charities or noble actions of paying “proportionate” taxes will be useful as a means, if the ends themselves are based on promoting a class society—one in which the poor people have nothing to claim as deductions, for they do not even pay the taxes, because they do not even work, and they do not even have healthcare, nor can afford education. And they are accused as the wretched of America—the “freeloaders”, the social security beggars and the charity-seekers. Give it a thought today: it is not they that are at fault.
Instead of “providing shelter to a Katrina survivor’ as a means of tax deduction, we should have engaged the victims of a massive administrative disaster in all the forms we could to snatch for them the rights to be treated equally by the state apparatus thus ensuring no administrative loopholes exist any longer. But then, in a “free” market economy, we have even sold the state’s responsibilities off, where individuals are left to fend for themselves.
On the “Tax Deduction Day”, lets resolve to take the “power” back from the free markets, and truly have a system that “enforces” equality.
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Capitalist Tsar of a Lost Superpower
By Saswat Pattanayak
Ironies in the post Soviet days surpass those that characterized it. Despite longueurs of economic progress that “Tsar Putin” has made an exhibition out of, it must appear to be ironical that every publication worth its name declares there is more poverty and less equality in Russia these days than they ever were during Soviet days.
But what’s even more satirical are the suggestions from the concerned quarters that see this as an essential problem of the formerly controlled economy, than as an obvious aftermath of the presently capitalistic one. Considering that the crisis is evident (and multiplying) after the collapse of communism, it should come as no uncommon sense to perceive the root of disarrays. And yet the more populist and political correct accusations are aimed at the former era than the present regime.
Well, that’s not such a surprising finding if we traverse back at the hundreds of thousands of myths that the private capital masters have spread over past few decades about the merits of capitalism. In such ways the myths have been reinforced that even the biggest apostles of capitalism would have to pause awhile.
Its over 15 years since the USSR dissolved in its political form, and yet the only path that its economy has taken for the majority of people is downwards. This, despite absence of any capricious elements in an otherwise compromised economy. Apart from a few oligarchs who have been prosecuted, the country has seen one of the more stable forms of capitalistic expansions by business interests. Despite talks of nationalization or renationalization, only sectors affected thus far have been oil and gas. International currencies, free market and prosperous middle classes are characterizing the country in its free-est market condition in its entire history.
And yet, inequalities of wealth among the population are greater. Poverty, unemployment, crime, and prostitution are way higher. Social security is nearly absent and “terrorism” is at the highest. The country is struggling even to hold bilateral talks, its Nato membership pleas challenged by its own people.
Kremlin is gaining notoriety for “getting rid” of its enemies: Murders of eminent people include journalists (Anna Politkovskaya), research scholars (Indologist Grigory Bondarevsky), scientists (Alexander Krasovsky and Viktor Frantzuzov), security service agents (Alexander Litvinenko), and top officers (Andrei Kozlov- vice president of Central Bank, and Alexander Plokhin, director of Foreign Trade Bank), to mention only a few.
Chechnya crisis, high corruption rate, growth of the Russian “Mafia”, racism by “skinheads”, ban on Communists to conduct parades are not the only features that characterize a fragmented country unable to celebrate its national and cultural diversity. According to the Reporters Without Borders, Russia ranks below many African countries in terms of its press freedom ranking, indeed out of 168 countries, its rank is 147 (worse than Mugabe’s Zimbabwe)! In terms of corruption, Russia is the top most corrupt country in the world, according to Transparency International’s global corruption reports. Lets not even bring up the controversial but almost accurate Amnesty International which maintains horrific databases.
“The Road Ahead”:
And yet, most economists suggest that even greater private investments hold the key for a country like Russia to gain a foothold. Putin has been acclaimed on one hand for raising the nationalist level among the people so as to take back the country to the days of Tsarist glory (implying the biggest feudal society in the contemporary times where private capitals will be concentrated in the hands of selected domestic business houses). This is the more popular choice considering the general anti-Americanism prevailing among the people and unduly being milked by the Americanized leaders of Europe themselves to further their political (read: democratic) ambitions.
And on the other hand, from the critics’ quarters, he has been advised to opt for greater concentration on capitalistic expansion so as to make way for a truly “free market” (implying the establishment of a neo-American society where money will engage people as a commodity, and take away the human elements that are needed for any progressive dissent).
The third front is, alas an alternative, least explored. While visiting Borders book store, I usually chuckle at the sections such as History and Government & Politics. Several racks of books are collected under different sub-headings for easy perusal. It is there that one understands how silently, and effectively the alternatives are purged. You will surely find subheadings such as “Russian History”, and “Russian Government”, but under parenthesis they have carefully typed out phrase: “Non-Soviet”.
Somewhere between Tsarist oppressions and Capitalistic expansions, the Soviet intentions are conveniently buried. And it’s most ironically absent in Putin’s Russia.
Ironies in the post Soviet days surpass those that characterized it. Despite longueurs of economic progress that “Tsar Putin” has made an exhibition out of, it must appear to be ironical that every publication worth its name declares there is more poverty and less equality in Russia these days than they ever were during Soviet days.
But what’s even more satirical are the suggestions from the concerned quarters that see this as an essential problem of the formerly controlled economy, than as an obvious aftermath of the presently capitalistic one. Considering that the crisis is evident (and multiplying) after the collapse of communism, it should come as no uncommon sense to perceive the root of disarrays. And yet the more populist and political correct accusations are aimed at the former era than the present regime.
Well, that’s not such a surprising finding if we traverse back at the hundreds of thousands of myths that the private capital masters have spread over past few decades about the merits of capitalism. In such ways the myths have been reinforced that even the biggest apostles of capitalism would have to pause awhile.
Its over 15 years since the USSR dissolved in its political form, and yet the only path that its economy has taken for the majority of people is downwards. This, despite absence of any capricious elements in an otherwise compromised economy. Apart from a few oligarchs who have been prosecuted, the country has seen one of the more stable forms of capitalistic expansions by business interests. Despite talks of nationalization or renationalization, only sectors affected thus far have been oil and gas. International currencies, free market and prosperous middle classes are characterizing the country in its free-est market condition in its entire history.
And yet, inequalities of wealth among the population are greater. Poverty, unemployment, crime, and prostitution are way higher. Social security is nearly absent and “terrorism” is at the highest. The country is struggling even to hold bilateral talks, its Nato membership pleas challenged by its own people.
Kremlin is gaining notoriety for “getting rid” of its enemies: Murders of eminent people include journalists (Anna Politkovskaya), research scholars (Indologist Grigory Bondarevsky), scientists (Alexander Krasovsky and Viktor Frantzuzov), security service agents (Alexander Litvinenko), and top officers (Andrei Kozlov- vice president of Central Bank, and Alexander Plokhin, director of Foreign Trade Bank), to mention only a few.
Chechnya crisis, high corruption rate, growth of the Russian “Mafia”, racism by “skinheads”, ban on Communists to conduct parades are not the only features that characterize a fragmented country unable to celebrate its national and cultural diversity. According to the Reporters Without Borders, Russia ranks below many African countries in terms of its press freedom ranking, indeed out of 168 countries, its rank is 147 (worse than Mugabe’s Zimbabwe)! In terms of corruption, Russia is the top most corrupt country in the world, according to Transparency International’s global corruption reports. Lets not even bring up the controversial but almost accurate Amnesty International which maintains horrific databases.
“The Road Ahead”:
And yet, most economists suggest that even greater private investments hold the key for a country like Russia to gain a foothold. Putin has been acclaimed on one hand for raising the nationalist level among the people so as to take back the country to the days of Tsarist glory (implying the biggest feudal society in the contemporary times where private capitals will be concentrated in the hands of selected domestic business houses). This is the more popular choice considering the general anti-Americanism prevailing among the people and unduly being milked by the Americanized leaders of Europe themselves to further their political (read: democratic) ambitions.
And on the other hand, from the critics’ quarters, he has been advised to opt for greater concentration on capitalistic expansion so as to make way for a truly “free market” (implying the establishment of a neo-American society where money will engage people as a commodity, and take away the human elements that are needed for any progressive dissent).
The third front is, alas an alternative, least explored. While visiting Borders book store, I usually chuckle at the sections such as History and Government & Politics. Several racks of books are collected under different sub-headings for easy perusal. It is there that one understands how silently, and effectively the alternatives are purged. You will surely find subheadings such as “Russian History”, and “Russian Government”, but under parenthesis they have carefully typed out phrase: “Non-Soviet”.
Somewhere between Tsarist oppressions and Capitalistic expansions, the Soviet intentions are conveniently buried. And it’s most ironically absent in Putin’s Russia.
Corporate Perceptions of Telecom Monopolists
By Saswat Pattanayak
In what could be the most visibly grotesque appraisal of monopolistic trends of capitalism, Jeffrey Nelson for Verizon Wireless says, the telecom industry of America is highly competitive. Washington Post quotes him as saying that consumers can choose among numerous handset models and four major providers of cellular services: Verizon, AT&T, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile. “If you don't like what one company enables,” he said, “find somebody else.”
Perhaps what’s lost on the corporate communicators is the fact that “four major providers” are signs of monopoly, and not of competition. American capitalism is on its path to perfection in the sense of its graduations. In the film production industry, six studios control over 90 percent of theater revenues. The newspaper industry is owned by only six major chains now. Book publishing industry is handled by seven firms and five largest groups account for all major music production in the country.
One may feel nostalgic about the good old days when the situation was not this drastic, and private families were free to own as much as they wanted to since there were communication regulations in place. One may even argue that after the deregulations bills were passed in 1996, things have started looking murkier with consolidations and clustering of firms at the forefront. But I will not debate at that forum.
The fact of the matter is then, and now, we have failed to understand the nature of capitalism to predict its inevitable trends. What the Washington Post article perhaps says could be a tribute to success of cell phone industries elsewhere in the world where more features are available for the users. But again, that’s a matter of relativity in discussion. What is crucial to understand here is neither the features and plans, nor the brand availabilities (although both these factors are attractive on the surface); but the true accessibility of the technology to all concerned.
In the race to have the best of the services limited to the few of us, is there a ceiling on the accessibility of technology? One would perhaps muse that contrary to my apprehensions, technology has become more accessible today than it was few decades back. But that would be to challenge the very nature of the collective course of human actions. Nothing will remain constant and progress is inevitable with collective endeavors at the research, training and development levels. A progress by default is merely a movement in propelled direction. Only a progress that inculcates struggles to uplift common aspirations is of any intrinsic value.
The gifts of technology, by and large have not been shared by the world populace. And in an era of abundant resources at our disposal and accompanying funds to realize many potentials, it should not come as a surprise as to why the distribution of technological assets has failed to earn commendable results.
The answer lies in the pattern of controlled and monopolized territories of technological know-hows and their ownerships. Even where there is an apparent distribution of access, it is owing to the “market demands”, not for human needs. Of course the phrase “market demands” is as elusive as one can get, considering that the market is as real as its proponents make it to be. The demands are “created” out of profit needs riding the waves of accompanying hypes (what they call in more civilized sense as ‘advertising&rsquo
.
In this backdrop then it should come as no surprise to us when we see the entire media industry of America are dominated by three understanding, friendly (as long as they don’t consolidate further) mini empires called Time Warner, Disney and NewsCorp. There are scores of other rulers who are defined as new media monopolists by several research scholars and to avoid the academic traps I will not dwell on them. But just as a pointer to the issue than covering it comprehensively, I am deliberating here on the obvious questions we may need to scratch the surface for:
Cooperative economies have produced immense technological benefits. For instance, the erstwhile soviet system did produce the ultimate scientific progresses we have attained thus far: our exploration of the space. And yet we are ever so ready to dismiss the method while reaping the benefits claiming our consumerist society (where getting enslaved to market lures holds the key) as more conducive an environment for technological progress than the socialist society (where minimum standards defined lives of scientists and farmers alike—a notion entirely lost to the imagination of class society pundits).
However, without questioning the merits of competition and fairness --they are different concepts unfortunately, and no matter how soothing it may sound to some liberal economists, there is no such thing as ‘fair competition’ except in their utopian lexicon—one can safely preclude any form of competition from the capitalistic society.
Coming back to the Verizon staff, the four major telecom giants have a history of throttling competitions on their necks and emerging as “giants” than mere fellow traveling companies. The accompanying limitations of power-sharing are also mutually understood notions. The fact that they are monopolists fooling an entire country in a way Lincoln clearly knew-- although he once said briefly you could not fool everyone all the time—is best paraphrased by Verizon’s best friend (in the press of course they are rivals and what-not) AT&T:
“This whole issue is a giant red herring. This is a fiercely competitive industry which has grown almost entirely through the force of competition in the marketplace, more innovative devices and services, and continually lower prices.” (AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel.)
If Verizon and AT&T are right, then the rest of us must be fools for sure. The question is for how long this grand Ayn Randian narrative of capitalism-as-citadel-of-competition will be believed? And for how long our media will report these as problems with “four major providers”, and not as inevitable consequence of capitalism?
Perhaps when our media wont be corporate themselves anymore. Well, that’s the point!
In what could be the most visibly grotesque appraisal of monopolistic trends of capitalism, Jeffrey Nelson for Verizon Wireless says, the telecom industry of America is highly competitive. Washington Post quotes him as saying that consumers can choose among numerous handset models and four major providers of cellular services: Verizon, AT&T, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile. “If you don't like what one company enables,” he said, “find somebody else.”
Perhaps what’s lost on the corporate communicators is the fact that “four major providers” are signs of monopoly, and not of competition. American capitalism is on its path to perfection in the sense of its graduations. In the film production industry, six studios control over 90 percent of theater revenues. The newspaper industry is owned by only six major chains now. Book publishing industry is handled by seven firms and five largest groups account for all major music production in the country.
One may feel nostalgic about the good old days when the situation was not this drastic, and private families were free to own as much as they wanted to since there were communication regulations in place. One may even argue that after the deregulations bills were passed in 1996, things have started looking murkier with consolidations and clustering of firms at the forefront. But I will not debate at that forum.
The fact of the matter is then, and now, we have failed to understand the nature of capitalism to predict its inevitable trends. What the Washington Post article perhaps says could be a tribute to success of cell phone industries elsewhere in the world where more features are available for the users. But again, that’s a matter of relativity in discussion. What is crucial to understand here is neither the features and plans, nor the brand availabilities (although both these factors are attractive on the surface); but the true accessibility of the technology to all concerned.
In the race to have the best of the services limited to the few of us, is there a ceiling on the accessibility of technology? One would perhaps muse that contrary to my apprehensions, technology has become more accessible today than it was few decades back. But that would be to challenge the very nature of the collective course of human actions. Nothing will remain constant and progress is inevitable with collective endeavors at the research, training and development levels. A progress by default is merely a movement in propelled direction. Only a progress that inculcates struggles to uplift common aspirations is of any intrinsic value.
The gifts of technology, by and large have not been shared by the world populace. And in an era of abundant resources at our disposal and accompanying funds to realize many potentials, it should not come as a surprise as to why the distribution of technological assets has failed to earn commendable results.
The answer lies in the pattern of controlled and monopolized territories of technological know-hows and their ownerships. Even where there is an apparent distribution of access, it is owing to the “market demands”, not for human needs. Of course the phrase “market demands” is as elusive as one can get, considering that the market is as real as its proponents make it to be. The demands are “created” out of profit needs riding the waves of accompanying hypes (what they call in more civilized sense as ‘advertising&rsquo
.
In this backdrop then it should come as no surprise to us when we see the entire media industry of America are dominated by three understanding, friendly (as long as they don’t consolidate further) mini empires called Time Warner, Disney and NewsCorp. There are scores of other rulers who are defined as new media monopolists by several research scholars and to avoid the academic traps I will not dwell on them. But just as a pointer to the issue than covering it comprehensively, I am deliberating here on the obvious questions we may need to scratch the surface for:
Cooperative economies have produced immense technological benefits. For instance, the erstwhile soviet system did produce the ultimate scientific progresses we have attained thus far: our exploration of the space. And yet we are ever so ready to dismiss the method while reaping the benefits claiming our consumerist society (where getting enslaved to market lures holds the key) as more conducive an environment for technological progress than the socialist society (where minimum standards defined lives of scientists and farmers alike—a notion entirely lost to the imagination of class society pundits).
However, without questioning the merits of competition and fairness --they are different concepts unfortunately, and no matter how soothing it may sound to some liberal economists, there is no such thing as ‘fair competition’ except in their utopian lexicon—one can safely preclude any form of competition from the capitalistic society.
Coming back to the Verizon staff, the four major telecom giants have a history of throttling competitions on their necks and emerging as “giants” than mere fellow traveling companies. The accompanying limitations of power-sharing are also mutually understood notions. The fact that they are monopolists fooling an entire country in a way Lincoln clearly knew-- although he once said briefly you could not fool everyone all the time—is best paraphrased by Verizon’s best friend (in the press of course they are rivals and what-not) AT&T:
“This whole issue is a giant red herring. This is a fiercely competitive industry which has grown almost entirely through the force of competition in the marketplace, more innovative devices and services, and continually lower prices.” (AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel.)
If Verizon and AT&T are right, then the rest of us must be fools for sure. The question is for how long this grand Ayn Randian narrative of capitalism-as-citadel-of-competition will be believed? And for how long our media will report these as problems with “four major providers”, and not as inevitable consequence of capitalism?
Perhaps when our media wont be corporate themselves anymore. Well, that’s the point!
Vidarbha Farmers: Genocide, not Suicide.
By Saswat Pattanayak
I am unsure if Shakespeare had such premonitions engulfing his worst tragedies, but the Hindu superpower India with its proud “economic growth rates” has been forcing me to wonder if we are missing the coming signs of the times. The tell-tales are here, the hints of misfortune are looming large, the sustained oppression by the Indian state on its peoples with “foreign aids” is rampant. And yet somewhere since last couple of years a major chunk of world’s geographical region is dancing away at a maddening pace, drinking the drink of its blood and dancing the dance of its death.
The world’s largest democracy is also the biggest booming free market economy. With exception to no other land today, the enthusiasm of the urban youths of India has emerged pure, and unbridled. The mass popular culture of subservient bollywood films, inferior diaspora literatures and profit hungry mainstream media have a projection of jubilance, of multifarious vibrancy in social lives that’s almost instantaneously appealing. In no contrast, the elite high class societal circles are doing their Manhunts, race courses and business parties, relatively different in degrees since they were upto the social mischiefs even decades before the educated mass had its date with ‘freedom’.
Far too often this comfortable dichotomy of mass/class paradigm finds entry into the social consciousness. Whether the cart drives the horse or the horse does it becomes a redundant issue so long as the movements occur for both. In economics, its called a trickling down effect of the riches of the rich which the rest have a privilege to enjoy depending on which ladder of the hierarchy are they located at the time of the rain.
What’s super ironic at such junctures of “progress” in any society based on the premise of those who define the progress is that the ladder is usually placed upon a pedestal to begin with. That is, the hierarchy of profiteers does not begin with the ground, but with the elevated first step that misses the dirt and the wretched entirely before the stepping up can take place.
These dirt of India, entirely absent from global long-term memory are the peasants of the country who hold the ground, but who do not feel the trickles falling on them. Remember how during the natural disasters, helicopters throw relief goods targeted at some places which are usually devoid of women and children. And even when the women and children are present, somehow they don’t succeed at running for the food packets because they are busy holding the grounds under thatched roof, doubly oppressed by the central governments and their oppressive patriarchal custodians. Case against the peasants is almost similar. In a predominantly agrarian economy like India, ever since its “independence”, the ruling class has acted like patriarchs while overstepping and conveniently ignoring them on its way to new heights of power.
Not that, anything else was expected of the ruling elites class characters. Systematically suppressing every peasant rebellion in India during the British rule, the rulers (kings, british, and Indian elites) promised non-violent glories in place of revolutionary emancipation. Although the different strands of national struggle for liberation against the colonialists needed to find support among the larger revolutionary masses, the people were half sensitized about the nature of the national struggles engaged in by a faction of elites who surely fought the foreign power, but also because they wanted to hold onto their own.
Five year plans in India were formerly known to be based on a socialistic desire to industrialize the country soon after the British were shown the door. But instead, the plans with every phase systematically were fine-tuned to improve the lot of the secondary and tertiary sectors at the cost of the primary. This suited the class characters of the ruling elites of course, but what’s more distressing is that it was accepted almost unequivocally as a “progress” for the country which housed more than 80% peasants, that constituted as much percentage of below poverty line populace for the whole country.
Agrarian Crisis Continues:
Agrarian crisis in India are nothing new. Indeed, without any effort to bring the peasantry back to cultural fold, the homegrown capitalists of India have only heightened the crisis with every passing phase. As a result, what we have today is indiscriminate murders of peasants of India. Forcing them to lead lives without a sense of human dignity or basic standards of life, they have been forced to take extreme steps. While some have invariably joined the naxal movements to raise up arms against the Indian state, many are killed by the state power structure.
The media, the maneuvered toy of the Indian capitalists plays the corporate tune at such mass genocide committed by Indian state. More than 800 peasants have been killed in this kharif season alone. The Indian media not only portray these heroic submission to state atrocities as “suicides”, it also pities the deaths. The world must remember that the peasants who are dying every day in India are not committing “suicides”. Indeed, suicides are reactionary steps taken voluntarily by people weak by their willpower. Indian peasants have been among the most brave lot of all peoples of the world when one considers the British oppressions and Indian government atrocities upon them. Despite that, the peasants have carried on with unmatched courage to face the “man-made” disasters perpetrated upon them by the ruling class. If now there have been deaths subsequent to this, just as there are everytime following artificial famines, its not because of their inability to pay off debts, its because of the state power machine inflicting deadly repressive measures against them in particular.
Suicide Pathology of the Elites:
Indian intelligentsia, pathetically devoid of critical reflections have been allowing the corporate media to thrive on assumptions about the citizens. Firstly, there have been no suicides in Vidarbha. Suicides are caused by people themselves. These deaths of peasants are state-aided murders.
Ramu Bhagwat’s report in an unforgivable mistake of Indian fourth estate called, The Times of India, is headlined “3 farmers kill selves; toll 200 in 2 months”. Even after an effete shame of a prime minister by the name of Manmohan Singh visited Dhamangaon village with empty rhetoric which made him famous at Oxford last year, these farmers died because they were unable to repay Rs 13,000 to State Bank of India. That’s how much for two farmers lives? Remember its less than $300. Or in Indian urban class value today, less than half of what a first IT job gets a teenager in a month.
The government of India gleefully enjoying its power trip has not resigned following hundreds of murders it commits on its poor by forcing them to death, because it clearly has no morality. Its opposition, the absolutely brazen right wing coalitions, who at the first place assisted their private business funders to cause price hikes is also unabashed in its hypocrisy. But the worse, the Indian media and the watchdogs of so-called democracy are continually harping on their masters’ tunes by calling deaths as suicides, as though it were the fault of the farmers, and lulling the rest of India into web of ignorance.
That, people have expressed disgust at Manmohan Singh’s promises which has not even helped them to gather little money to sow seeds after saplings were washed away by rain, has been completely lost on the mainstream perception. That if one contextualizes the background of peasant crisis in India, one will realize that this is no sudden aberration on part of teeming millions of peasants but a continuation of systematic exploitation unleashed upon them specifically during the days of the British and during anti-people regimes of Indian state which decidedly started favoring private industries at cost of public cooperatives. And most importantly, that the Indian journalists and researchers are not entirely ignorant of the agrarian crisis and the stoic silence around the issue which is a great socio-political crisis of neo-liberal India.
Despite the social significance of the struggle of the peasants against the Indian state, the self-professed enlightened young and old analysts have decided to treat the deaths as some personal deviance. Indeed, since suicide is a cognizable offence under the law, perhaps the peasants have been declared as criminals by the media experts.
Pathetic pity of indifferent experts:
Take a look at NDTV. Just like Times of India, this mainstream grapevine has a report by Supriya Sharma who proposes that the “suicide epidemic of this scale should be seen and treated as a crisis of mental health”. Indeed she goes on to interview a psychiatrist to trace the etiology. Whereas psychiatry is not such a despicable path to solutions, after all, that the media have a habit of finding problems elsewhere than where it is most obvious is something worth reflecting over. Dr Patil, the subject of Sharma’s study says of a farmer “patient”: “He lost his crop due to the rains. Last year he lost his crop because there were no rains. So for the last 2-3 years he consecutively lost money. So he got depressed.”
She goes on to report:
Journalists like Sharma are no simplicists, indeed no reductionists either. They are even literate to the point that they find a need to complicate the situation further to understand it better, in a perfectly academic fashion. But what happens in the process is that their limitations guide their intuition than their grounding in social history of the people they survey. As a result, the superficial flourishes, the blame-game continues at the most trivial manner and the headlines surge them to promotions since they systematically let the system go do its own brutalization even as people are “treated” for mental illnesses.
Oppressors’ aids for the brutalized people:
I will not delve into the other pathetic media stances where the need for peasant revolution for today’s India has been dismissed abjectly to the extent that there is no such mention to begin with. The kinds of questions that are being raised are only sufficiently complimenting the kinds of answers the corporate nation of India today seeks. For example, the conscientious journalists like Rajdeep Sardesai through their media request donations to help farmers by using heart-rending pictures. Tax-exemptions for the rich are obviously on the offing. Sardesai and his likes receive huge accolades for their so-called social concern, to “help the needy”. And the guilt-free doners go back to business of furthering their oppressions.
The cyclic amnesia of the Indian elites while it comes to dealing with their own crimes, (which they translate as peasant suicides) is beyond mere reproach. These are punishable offences that the elites must be taken to task for. Equitable distribution of wealth is not a role of some politicians sitting high on an elected platform. This takes place only through organized revolution by the oppressed classes against the feudal lords of India (who by mistake presume they are some advanced capitalist class, even as they continue to practice the most extreme form of casteism,—Karan Thapar was pronouncedly against the Dalits when it came to reservation issue, for example—sexism,--corporate houses washed their hands off for the murder of HP female employee at the dead of the night, and class society—the division between the rich and the poor has never been so widely marked ever before in the history of India—some people talking of donation of crores of rupees, and most other sell their children for paltry sums on astonishingly regular rate as in states like Orissa.
What we need at the moment is to organize the farmers to demand not aid, but reparation. The peasants of India in the past have upstaged the royal families, they have forced the colonialists out through mass uprisings, and now they need to get rid of the new feudal class of India, the class of oppressors who have been systematically making way for capitalism in India, to make gains for their own class interests, and detrimentally working against the farmers who have been rendered without food, housing and education, far too much, far too long. The feudal ruling elites of India did not demand reparations from the British and facilitated their comfortable exits so that they would continue from where their masters had left. But the peasants and farmers and working class of India must gather up all their might to ensure reparation for the exploitation they have been unleashed upon. And nothing less than an organized revolution by the most oppressed will replace the course of history.
Do not call their sacrifices suicides as yet. They are the martyrs of a feudal India in protest against the elitist rule in their name carried on by confessed agents of imperialism. And these ruling class of liberal politicians, conservative religious cults, their police, military, nuclear regime, and media stooges will be forced to tremble.
Watch out for the wrath of the wretched!
I am unsure if Shakespeare had such premonitions engulfing his worst tragedies, but the Hindu superpower India with its proud “economic growth rates” has been forcing me to wonder if we are missing the coming signs of the times. The tell-tales are here, the hints of misfortune are looming large, the sustained oppression by the Indian state on its peoples with “foreign aids” is rampant. And yet somewhere since last couple of years a major chunk of world’s geographical region is dancing away at a maddening pace, drinking the drink of its blood and dancing the dance of its death.
The world’s largest democracy is also the biggest booming free market economy. With exception to no other land today, the enthusiasm of the urban youths of India has emerged pure, and unbridled. The mass popular culture of subservient bollywood films, inferior diaspora literatures and profit hungry mainstream media have a projection of jubilance, of multifarious vibrancy in social lives that’s almost instantaneously appealing. In no contrast, the elite high class societal circles are doing their Manhunts, race courses and business parties, relatively different in degrees since they were upto the social mischiefs even decades before the educated mass had its date with ‘freedom’.
Far too often this comfortable dichotomy of mass/class paradigm finds entry into the social consciousness. Whether the cart drives the horse or the horse does it becomes a redundant issue so long as the movements occur for both. In economics, its called a trickling down effect of the riches of the rich which the rest have a privilege to enjoy depending on which ladder of the hierarchy are they located at the time of the rain.
What’s super ironic at such junctures of “progress” in any society based on the premise of those who define the progress is that the ladder is usually placed upon a pedestal to begin with. That is, the hierarchy of profiteers does not begin with the ground, but with the elevated first step that misses the dirt and the wretched entirely before the stepping up can take place.
These dirt of India, entirely absent from global long-term memory are the peasants of the country who hold the ground, but who do not feel the trickles falling on them. Remember how during the natural disasters, helicopters throw relief goods targeted at some places which are usually devoid of women and children. And even when the women and children are present, somehow they don’t succeed at running for the food packets because they are busy holding the grounds under thatched roof, doubly oppressed by the central governments and their oppressive patriarchal custodians. Case against the peasants is almost similar. In a predominantly agrarian economy like India, ever since its “independence”, the ruling class has acted like patriarchs while overstepping and conveniently ignoring them on its way to new heights of power.
Not that, anything else was expected of the ruling elites class characters. Systematically suppressing every peasant rebellion in India during the British rule, the rulers (kings, british, and Indian elites) promised non-violent glories in place of revolutionary emancipation. Although the different strands of national struggle for liberation against the colonialists needed to find support among the larger revolutionary masses, the people were half sensitized about the nature of the national struggles engaged in by a faction of elites who surely fought the foreign power, but also because they wanted to hold onto their own.
Five year plans in India were formerly known to be based on a socialistic desire to industrialize the country soon after the British were shown the door. But instead, the plans with every phase systematically were fine-tuned to improve the lot of the secondary and tertiary sectors at the cost of the primary. This suited the class characters of the ruling elites of course, but what’s more distressing is that it was accepted almost unequivocally as a “progress” for the country which housed more than 80% peasants, that constituted as much percentage of below poverty line populace for the whole country.
Agrarian Crisis Continues:
Agrarian crisis in India are nothing new. Indeed, without any effort to bring the peasantry back to cultural fold, the homegrown capitalists of India have only heightened the crisis with every passing phase. As a result, what we have today is indiscriminate murders of peasants of India. Forcing them to lead lives without a sense of human dignity or basic standards of life, they have been forced to take extreme steps. While some have invariably joined the naxal movements to raise up arms against the Indian state, many are killed by the state power structure.
The media, the maneuvered toy of the Indian capitalists plays the corporate tune at such mass genocide committed by Indian state. More than 800 peasants have been killed in this kharif season alone. The Indian media not only portray these heroic submission to state atrocities as “suicides”, it also pities the deaths. The world must remember that the peasants who are dying every day in India are not committing “suicides”. Indeed, suicides are reactionary steps taken voluntarily by people weak by their willpower. Indian peasants have been among the most brave lot of all peoples of the world when one considers the British oppressions and Indian government atrocities upon them. Despite that, the peasants have carried on with unmatched courage to face the “man-made” disasters perpetrated upon them by the ruling class. If now there have been deaths subsequent to this, just as there are everytime following artificial famines, its not because of their inability to pay off debts, its because of the state power machine inflicting deadly repressive measures against them in particular.
Suicide Pathology of the Elites:
Indian intelligentsia, pathetically devoid of critical reflections have been allowing the corporate media to thrive on assumptions about the citizens. Firstly, there have been no suicides in Vidarbha. Suicides are caused by people themselves. These deaths of peasants are state-aided murders.
Ramu Bhagwat’s report in an unforgivable mistake of Indian fourth estate called, The Times of India, is headlined “3 farmers kill selves; toll 200 in 2 months”. Even after an effete shame of a prime minister by the name of Manmohan Singh visited Dhamangaon village with empty rhetoric which made him famous at Oxford last year, these farmers died because they were unable to repay Rs 13,000 to State Bank of India. That’s how much for two farmers lives? Remember its less than $300. Or in Indian urban class value today, less than half of what a first IT job gets a teenager in a month.
The government of India gleefully enjoying its power trip has not resigned following hundreds of murders it commits on its poor by forcing them to death, because it clearly has no morality. Its opposition, the absolutely brazen right wing coalitions, who at the first place assisted their private business funders to cause price hikes is also unabashed in its hypocrisy. But the worse, the Indian media and the watchdogs of so-called democracy are continually harping on their masters’ tunes by calling deaths as suicides, as though it were the fault of the farmers, and lulling the rest of India into web of ignorance.
That, people have expressed disgust at Manmohan Singh’s promises which has not even helped them to gather little money to sow seeds after saplings were washed away by rain, has been completely lost on the mainstream perception. That if one contextualizes the background of peasant crisis in India, one will realize that this is no sudden aberration on part of teeming millions of peasants but a continuation of systematic exploitation unleashed upon them specifically during the days of the British and during anti-people regimes of Indian state which decidedly started favoring private industries at cost of public cooperatives. And most importantly, that the Indian journalists and researchers are not entirely ignorant of the agrarian crisis and the stoic silence around the issue which is a great socio-political crisis of neo-liberal India.
Despite the social significance of the struggle of the peasants against the Indian state, the self-professed enlightened young and old analysts have decided to treat the deaths as some personal deviance. Indeed, since suicide is a cognizable offence under the law, perhaps the peasants have been declared as criminals by the media experts.
Pathetic pity of indifferent experts:
Take a look at NDTV. Just like Times of India, this mainstream grapevine has a report by Supriya Sharma who proposes that the “suicide epidemic of this scale should be seen and treated as a crisis of mental health”. Indeed she goes on to interview a psychiatrist to trace the etiology. Whereas psychiatry is not such a despicable path to solutions, after all, that the media have a habit of finding problems elsewhere than where it is most obvious is something worth reflecting over. Dr Patil, the subject of Sharma’s study says of a farmer “patient”: “He lost his crop due to the rains. Last year he lost his crop because there were no rains. So for the last 2-3 years he consecutively lost money. So he got depressed.”
She goes on to report:
"When a farmer is in distress, if we could call doctors from Akola or a government official, he feels someone is there to listen to him. And if no one listens, he may feel ignored and contemplate suicide," said a local.
All the cases are a grim encounter that reinforces the fact that the sprt in suicide cases in the region should be seen and treated as a crisis of mental health.
Journalists like Sharma are no simplicists, indeed no reductionists either. They are even literate to the point that they find a need to complicate the situation further to understand it better, in a perfectly academic fashion. But what happens in the process is that their limitations guide their intuition than their grounding in social history of the people they survey. As a result, the superficial flourishes, the blame-game continues at the most trivial manner and the headlines surge them to promotions since they systematically let the system go do its own brutalization even as people are “treated” for mental illnesses.
Oppressors’ aids for the brutalized people:
I will not delve into the other pathetic media stances where the need for peasant revolution for today’s India has been dismissed abjectly to the extent that there is no such mention to begin with. The kinds of questions that are being raised are only sufficiently complimenting the kinds of answers the corporate nation of India today seeks. For example, the conscientious journalists like Rajdeep Sardesai through their media request donations to help farmers by using heart-rending pictures. Tax-exemptions for the rich are obviously on the offing. Sardesai and his likes receive huge accolades for their so-called social concern, to “help the needy”. And the guilt-free doners go back to business of furthering their oppressions.
The cyclic amnesia of the Indian elites while it comes to dealing with their own crimes, (which they translate as peasant suicides) is beyond mere reproach. These are punishable offences that the elites must be taken to task for. Equitable distribution of wealth is not a role of some politicians sitting high on an elected platform. This takes place only through organized revolution by the oppressed classes against the feudal lords of India (who by mistake presume they are some advanced capitalist class, even as they continue to practice the most extreme form of casteism,—Karan Thapar was pronouncedly against the Dalits when it came to reservation issue, for example—sexism,--corporate houses washed their hands off for the murder of HP female employee at the dead of the night, and class society—the division between the rich and the poor has never been so widely marked ever before in the history of India—some people talking of donation of crores of rupees, and most other sell their children for paltry sums on astonishingly regular rate as in states like Orissa.
What we need at the moment is to organize the farmers to demand not aid, but reparation. The peasants of India in the past have upstaged the royal families, they have forced the colonialists out through mass uprisings, and now they need to get rid of the new feudal class of India, the class of oppressors who have been systematically making way for capitalism in India, to make gains for their own class interests, and detrimentally working against the farmers who have been rendered without food, housing and education, far too much, far too long. The feudal ruling elites of India did not demand reparations from the British and facilitated their comfortable exits so that they would continue from where their masters had left. But the peasants and farmers and working class of India must gather up all their might to ensure reparation for the exploitation they have been unleashed upon. And nothing less than an organized revolution by the most oppressed will replace the course of history.
Do not call their sacrifices suicides as yet. They are the martyrs of a feudal India in protest against the elitist rule in their name carried on by confessed agents of imperialism. And these ruling class of liberal politicians, conservative religious cults, their police, military, nuclear regime, and media stooges will be forced to tremble.
Watch out for the wrath of the wretched!
Overheard Development of India
By Saswat Pattanayak
“So what do they have to say?”
“Didn’t you read the paper? The American president visited us.”
“What does that mean?”
“Of course, it means we are finally making progress. In your days, only heads of the third world countries used to come to India.”
“But we are a third world country, my child. Don’t you..”
(Interrupting..) “Yeah that’s what you think. Come to Bangalore and you will see. Everyone is having a party”
“How many more parties do we need? I think the Congress and the Communists were two big enough parties..”
“Oh no..not those parties. Who needs ideology? I am talking about parties. The late night parties. India rocks. You have to come out of that village. Come to Bangalore. This time you really need to visit my city. It’s where the future of India lies.”
“Future of India? What’s that going to be like?”
“Of course, just like us. We are the future. We got the FDIs.”
“FBI? Are they now concentrating on foreign lands too? I thought it was only CIA.”
“Hell, no. FDI..Foreign Direct Investments.”
“Oh, it’s the same thing, I guess. By the way, why are they investing on us?”
“Well how else shall we make progress?”
“You mean, how else they will make progress? Because we never needed anyone in the history for our progress. They always came after us.”
“Oh come on. They are already developed. They don’t need to make any more progress. Now they want to take care of the entire world.”
“You mean like the way the Kings took care of the subjects, after they had conquered...”
“Yeah, whatever. But remember there are just 7 to 8 countries today who are helping the rest of the world. They have taken up the responsibility to save the world.”
“Like James Bond did in his old movies…”
“Well, even in new ones that you have not seen since some time now...”
“So what do these countries do in Bangalore?”
“Well they have set up big offices. They give us well paid jobs. We work night and day, and earn good money.”
“Do they understand your language? How can they work in Bangalore? I don’t believe you.”
“Come on…they don’t have to understand our language. We have mastered their languages and cultures already. I have a map of Maryland right here beside me. The weather is 37F. Feels like 28F…”
“You can feel Maryland weather? How so?”
“Oh, that’s a lie. But we talk in American English. So it doesn’t matter anyway.”
“So the world is being saved by training the poor people to become expert liars?”
“Don’t start off there again. I am not poor. I have everything with me. I have a car. A flat, a laptop and even an ipod.”
“Oh so, you mean you can actually afford to buy all that? How do you do that?”
“Simple, I buy everything on credit.”
“You mean there are money-lenders in Bangalore?”
“Yeah, but not like the ones in Mother India. So relax. I just pay some interests. At times they are a lot. But then, this government sucks too. They also charge a lot of taxes. But then, it’s ok. You know, I get to own. I have the visa power.”
“Power. You mean you actually have some power by going on debt?”
“Yeah that’s real power. Why else would President Bush have visited India?”
“You mean to make you more indebted?”
“Come on, didn’t you read the papers? If not, at least watch the TV. You should have seen our Manmohan Singh. He was so grateful. Actually we all are.”
“All are? Where? In Bangalore?”
“Hello”
“—Hello …”
“Darn..these Indian villages…they will never improve”
“Hello, my child…I think the line got disconnected. You know your village has a very weak telephone system. But our neighboring village is even worse. So don’t worry. Just send me a letter. Sounds very exciting. This visit of one president to another.”
-hung up—
“So what do they have to say?”
“Didn’t you read the paper? The American president visited us.”
“What does that mean?”
“Of course, it means we are finally making progress. In your days, only heads of the third world countries used to come to India.”
“But we are a third world country, my child. Don’t you..”
(Interrupting..) “Yeah that’s what you think. Come to Bangalore and you will see. Everyone is having a party”
“How many more parties do we need? I think the Congress and the Communists were two big enough parties..”
“Oh no..not those parties. Who needs ideology? I am talking about parties. The late night parties. India rocks. You have to come out of that village. Come to Bangalore. This time you really need to visit my city. It’s where the future of India lies.”
“Future of India? What’s that going to be like?”
“Of course, just like us. We are the future. We got the FDIs.”
“FBI? Are they now concentrating on foreign lands too? I thought it was only CIA.”
“Hell, no. FDI..Foreign Direct Investments.”
“Oh, it’s the same thing, I guess. By the way, why are they investing on us?”
“Well how else shall we make progress?”
“You mean, how else they will make progress? Because we never needed anyone in the history for our progress. They always came after us.”
“Oh come on. They are already developed. They don’t need to make any more progress. Now they want to take care of the entire world.”
“You mean like the way the Kings took care of the subjects, after they had conquered...”
“Yeah, whatever. But remember there are just 7 to 8 countries today who are helping the rest of the world. They have taken up the responsibility to save the world.”
“Like James Bond did in his old movies…”
“Well, even in new ones that you have not seen since some time now...”
“So what do these countries do in Bangalore?”
“Well they have set up big offices. They give us well paid jobs. We work night and day, and earn good money.”
“Do they understand your language? How can they work in Bangalore? I don’t believe you.”
“Come on…they don’t have to understand our language. We have mastered their languages and cultures already. I have a map of Maryland right here beside me. The weather is 37F. Feels like 28F…”
“You can feel Maryland weather? How so?”
“Oh, that’s a lie. But we talk in American English. So it doesn’t matter anyway.”
“So the world is being saved by training the poor people to become expert liars?”
“Don’t start off there again. I am not poor. I have everything with me. I have a car. A flat, a laptop and even an ipod.”
“Oh so, you mean you can actually afford to buy all that? How do you do that?”
“Simple, I buy everything on credit.”
“You mean there are money-lenders in Bangalore?”
“Yeah, but not like the ones in Mother India. So relax. I just pay some interests. At times they are a lot. But then, this government sucks too. They also charge a lot of taxes. But then, it’s ok. You know, I get to own. I have the visa power.”
“Power. You mean you actually have some power by going on debt?”
“Yeah that’s real power. Why else would President Bush have visited India?”
“You mean to make you more indebted?”
“Come on, didn’t you read the papers? If not, at least watch the TV. You should have seen our Manmohan Singh. He was so grateful. Actually we all are.”
“All are? Where? In Bangalore?”
“Hello”
“—Hello …”
“Darn..these Indian villages…they will never improve”
“Hello, my child…I think the line got disconnected. You know your village has a very weak telephone system. But our neighboring village is even worse. So don’t worry. Just send me a letter. Sounds very exciting. This visit of one president to another.”
-hung up—
Poverty in America: Demythifying a Class Society
By Saswat Pattanayak
“The Czar of all the Russias is not more absolute upon his own soil than the New York landlord in his dealings with colored tenants. Where he permits them to live, they go; where he shuts the door, they stay out. By his grace they exist at all in certain localities; his ukase banishes them from others. He accepts the responsibility, when laid at his door, with unruffled complacency. It is business, he will tell you. And it is. He makes the prejudice in which he traffics pay him well, and that, as he thinks it quite superfluous to tell you, is what he is there for.” (Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 1890)
“One of the most distinctive things about most American cities is that it is not easy to distinguish social class on the streets. Clothes are cheap and increasingly standardized. The old “proletarian” dress—the cloth hat, the work clothes—either disappeared or else was locked up at the shop…… The ironic dialectic that threads its way through the culture of poverty is at work. The industry that comes to these places (rural America) is not concerned with moral or social uplift. It seeks out rural poverty because it provides a docile cheap labor market. There is income supplementing as a result, but what basically happens is that people who have been living in the depressed areas of agriculture now live part-time in the depressed areas of industry. They get the worst of two worlds.” (Harrington, The Other America, 1962)
“In the aftermath of the election of 1980, the Reagan administration and its big-business allies declared a new class war on the unemployed, the unemployable, and the working poor. By the summer of 1981, congressional approval had been obtained to slash $140 billion from the social programs over the years 1982-1984, more than half of it from the income-maintenance programs that provide low-income people with cash, food, health care, and low-cost housing. At the same time, the Reagan administration announced that additional social program reductions of $45 billion and $30 billion would be proposed in 1983 and 1984…” (Pive & Cloward, The New Class War, 1982)
“In the United States, the federal government defines poverty very simply: an annual income, for a family with one adult and three children, of less that $18,392 in the year 2003. That works out to $8.89 an hour, or $3.74 above the federal minimum wage, assuming that someone can get a full forty hours of work a week for all fifty-two weeks of the year or 2,080 working hours annually. With incomes rising through the economic expansion of the 1990s, the incidence of official poverty declined, beginning the new decade at 11.3 percent of the population, down from 15.1 percent in 1993. Then it rose slightly in the ensuing recession, to 12.5 percent by 2003.
But the figures are misleading. The federal poverty line cuts far below the amount needed for a decent living, because the Census Bureau still uses the basic formula designed in 1964 by the Social Security Administration, with four modest revisions in subsequent years. That sets the poverty level at approximately three times the cost of a “thrifty food basket.” The calculation was derived from spending patterns in 1955, when the average family used about one-third of its income for food. It is no longer valid today, when the average family spends only about one-sixth of its budget for food, but the government continues to multiply the cost of a “thrifty food basket” by three, adjusting for inflation only and overlooking nearly half a century of dramatically changing lifestyles.”
(Shipler, The Working Poor, 2004)
Even going by the thrifty food basket standards that clearly undermine needs of people to go beyond food (free time, luxury to spend those times, staying fit, watching movies, traveling, learning technical skills, reading books etc., to realize human potentials), poverty in America is on an alarming rise. There are 37 million Americans living below the poverty line today. This not only indicates an increase by five million since President George W. Bush came to power, it also should remind us that more than one in 10 citizens are below poverty line. The number is actually higher when we calculate the needs of people for education, employment and necessities in life other than just cheap, junk, fatty foods.
In the meantime, Congress has endorsed NASA’s mission to Mars which will cost $500 billion. (Of course, during the 60’s, American poor children sang, ‘Who wants to go to the Moon, Ma? I want to go to school’.) But even before that plan materializes, the Congress has already let more than $250 billion to be spent in the war in Iraq alone (not to mention the consequential costs for civilians, or the dozens of other wars, where no investment ever reaps returns). And we need just $24 billion a year to fully fund every anti-hunger effort in the world.
If for some reason, any reasonable person has doubt about capitalism’s contribution to world poverty, one just needs to look at the storehouses of illicit wealth that fosters the disparity between the haves and have-nots: the billionaires of the world, quite naturally, the highest number of them in the planet, 269, live in the United States. As a traditional bastion of ill-gotten wealth, the billionaire club has amassed such wealth in exclusionary lines. Not just through colonial weapons have certain western countries monopolized over world resources, even within them, certain groups of people have held the power of money so far. As a result, in the United States, whereas almost a quarter of all black Americans live below the poverty line; and 22 per cent of Hispanics fall below it, the figure for the whites is just 8.6 per cent.
The statistics can be pretty informative, but for those who need to seek the solutions, the same statistics can also be used quite effectively. In case of world hunger, if we know the disproportion, we also are aware that only a small minority actually controls the huge majority of the world resources, and in them or lack of them, lies the solution.
Long gone are the days when half of the people in the world did not know how the other half lived because they did not care. With advent of capitalism, only a few people do not appear to care how the rest of the world lives. And if this is not opportunity enough for people to realize that the apathetic few arrogantly immersed with undeserved wealth are not exactly the ones who deserve tax-cuts, then nothing is.
Fortunately, nothing can be said with as much clarity as the class issues. There is no ambiguity, there is no pretension. There is a clear demarcation between those in command, and those in state of despair. Maybe this is the reason why there is no talk around economic class, in a country where every ninth person is unsure of where the next meal is coming from. For, if the real issues come to surface and people ‘come gather round’ and talk it out, there is surely going to be a change in the times.
Till then, the elite minority that anyway controls the mental means of productions, creates a cultural vacuum that drifts away from the issues into the world of sit-coms, fantasies and comedy shows. If that doesn’t suffice, then it reinforces the law and order to silence the potential resistance from protesting the existing structures of inequities of a massive class society.
This should not come as a surprise that the real issue with America today—conflicts of interests between its two economic classes—is thwarted constantly by the media, since there is an attempt at manufacturing both content and consent to draw people’s mind away by the owners of media houses—who are again, from the club. But what should come alarming is that even as the conflicts of interests take place every passing day among these classes, their interpretations are encouraged to be done in an individualistic, religious, and meritocratic way, instead of being prompted to act on the grounds of social justice—organized and agitated, to stake claim, and challenge. Its not poverty of wealth in the world that should matter at this point when we know only too well that this world can spend $500 billion in Mars; rather its the poverty of mass directions that’s grappling today’s age which fails to help the world rise up to the demands of the day. For revolutions do not take place in a historical battlefield. Revolutions must occur in our politicized minds first.
“The Czar of all the Russias is not more absolute upon his own soil than the New York landlord in his dealings with colored tenants. Where he permits them to live, they go; where he shuts the door, they stay out. By his grace they exist at all in certain localities; his ukase banishes them from others. He accepts the responsibility, when laid at his door, with unruffled complacency. It is business, he will tell you. And it is. He makes the prejudice in which he traffics pay him well, and that, as he thinks it quite superfluous to tell you, is what he is there for.” (Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 1890)
“One of the most distinctive things about most American cities is that it is not easy to distinguish social class on the streets. Clothes are cheap and increasingly standardized. The old “proletarian” dress—the cloth hat, the work clothes—either disappeared or else was locked up at the shop…… The ironic dialectic that threads its way through the culture of poverty is at work. The industry that comes to these places (rural America) is not concerned with moral or social uplift. It seeks out rural poverty because it provides a docile cheap labor market. There is income supplementing as a result, but what basically happens is that people who have been living in the depressed areas of agriculture now live part-time in the depressed areas of industry. They get the worst of two worlds.” (Harrington, The Other America, 1962)
“In the aftermath of the election of 1980, the Reagan administration and its big-business allies declared a new class war on the unemployed, the unemployable, and the working poor. By the summer of 1981, congressional approval had been obtained to slash $140 billion from the social programs over the years 1982-1984, more than half of it from the income-maintenance programs that provide low-income people with cash, food, health care, and low-cost housing. At the same time, the Reagan administration announced that additional social program reductions of $45 billion and $30 billion would be proposed in 1983 and 1984…” (Pive & Cloward, The New Class War, 1982)
“In the United States, the federal government defines poverty very simply: an annual income, for a family with one adult and three children, of less that $18,392 in the year 2003. That works out to $8.89 an hour, or $3.74 above the federal minimum wage, assuming that someone can get a full forty hours of work a week for all fifty-two weeks of the year or 2,080 working hours annually. With incomes rising through the economic expansion of the 1990s, the incidence of official poverty declined, beginning the new decade at 11.3 percent of the population, down from 15.1 percent in 1993. Then it rose slightly in the ensuing recession, to 12.5 percent by 2003.
But the figures are misleading. The federal poverty line cuts far below the amount needed for a decent living, because the Census Bureau still uses the basic formula designed in 1964 by the Social Security Administration, with four modest revisions in subsequent years. That sets the poverty level at approximately three times the cost of a “thrifty food basket.” The calculation was derived from spending patterns in 1955, when the average family used about one-third of its income for food. It is no longer valid today, when the average family spends only about one-sixth of its budget for food, but the government continues to multiply the cost of a “thrifty food basket” by three, adjusting for inflation only and overlooking nearly half a century of dramatically changing lifestyles.”
(Shipler, The Working Poor, 2004)
Even going by the thrifty food basket standards that clearly undermine needs of people to go beyond food (free time, luxury to spend those times, staying fit, watching movies, traveling, learning technical skills, reading books etc., to realize human potentials), poverty in America is on an alarming rise. There are 37 million Americans living below the poverty line today. This not only indicates an increase by five million since President George W. Bush came to power, it also should remind us that more than one in 10 citizens are below poverty line. The number is actually higher when we calculate the needs of people for education, employment and necessities in life other than just cheap, junk, fatty foods.
In the meantime, Congress has endorsed NASA’s mission to Mars which will cost $500 billion. (Of course, during the 60’s, American poor children sang, ‘Who wants to go to the Moon, Ma? I want to go to school’.) But even before that plan materializes, the Congress has already let more than $250 billion to be spent in the war in Iraq alone (not to mention the consequential costs for civilians, or the dozens of other wars, where no investment ever reaps returns). And we need just $24 billion a year to fully fund every anti-hunger effort in the world.
If for some reason, any reasonable person has doubt about capitalism’s contribution to world poverty, one just needs to look at the storehouses of illicit wealth that fosters the disparity between the haves and have-nots: the billionaires of the world, quite naturally, the highest number of them in the planet, 269, live in the United States. As a traditional bastion of ill-gotten wealth, the billionaire club has amassed such wealth in exclusionary lines. Not just through colonial weapons have certain western countries monopolized over world resources, even within them, certain groups of people have held the power of money so far. As a result, in the United States, whereas almost a quarter of all black Americans live below the poverty line; and 22 per cent of Hispanics fall below it, the figure for the whites is just 8.6 per cent.
The statistics can be pretty informative, but for those who need to seek the solutions, the same statistics can also be used quite effectively. In case of world hunger, if we know the disproportion, we also are aware that only a small minority actually controls the huge majority of the world resources, and in them or lack of them, lies the solution.
Long gone are the days when half of the people in the world did not know how the other half lived because they did not care. With advent of capitalism, only a few people do not appear to care how the rest of the world lives. And if this is not opportunity enough for people to realize that the apathetic few arrogantly immersed with undeserved wealth are not exactly the ones who deserve tax-cuts, then nothing is.
Fortunately, nothing can be said with as much clarity as the class issues. There is no ambiguity, there is no pretension. There is a clear demarcation between those in command, and those in state of despair. Maybe this is the reason why there is no talk around economic class, in a country where every ninth person is unsure of where the next meal is coming from. For, if the real issues come to surface and people ‘come gather round’ and talk it out, there is surely going to be a change in the times.
Till then, the elite minority that anyway controls the mental means of productions, creates a cultural vacuum that drifts away from the issues into the world of sit-coms, fantasies and comedy shows. If that doesn’t suffice, then it reinforces the law and order to silence the potential resistance from protesting the existing structures of inequities of a massive class society.
This should not come as a surprise that the real issue with America today—conflicts of interests between its two economic classes—is thwarted constantly by the media, since there is an attempt at manufacturing both content and consent to draw people’s mind away by the owners of media houses—who are again, from the club. But what should come alarming is that even as the conflicts of interests take place every passing day among these classes, their interpretations are encouraged to be done in an individualistic, religious, and meritocratic way, instead of being prompted to act on the grounds of social justice—organized and agitated, to stake claim, and challenge. Its not poverty of wealth in the world that should matter at this point when we know only too well that this world can spend $500 billion in Mars; rather its the poverty of mass directions that’s grappling today’s age which fails to help the world rise up to the demands of the day. For revolutions do not take place in a historical battlefield. Revolutions must occur in our politicized minds first.
Alive n Kicking Ideologies of Corporate China
By Saswat Pattanayak
The lesson that China provides is simple, yet very revealing. True that the old guards of the left haven’t had a say in decades, during which periods, puppets of free markets, like Jiang Zemin have only created a “privatized” communist party by allowing business houses to have a say in the country’s governance. It’s also true that the current president Hu Jintao has proved no better with his pro-market initiatives whereby China allows FDIs worth billions in its continued commitment to the World Trade Organization, the single biggest global testament of capitalism.
Alongside, Wen Jiabao, who can be called the Manmohan Singh of China, in that both the prime minister are famous for their constant adoration of a brand of liberalization that promotes national growth only to increase rich-poor divide, has also kept the official policies of China in line with free market than socialist economy.
Clearly it signals two things: after its official differences with the erstwhile Soviet Union following Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in early 60’s and of the Soviet-Chinese border clash in the mid-60’s (following Czech crisis), the US of A has grown to be a bigger player in determining Chinese future courses. It became apparent also recently with the unfolding of Nixon archives , where it was found that the US was clearly subverting the subcontinent region by playing China and Pakistan against India in Indira Gandhi’s pro-Soviet decision to liberate Bangladesh. If not in relative types, in certain degrees more or less, the bipolar world (highly ideology driven, and entirely governed by conspirators who were no mythical then as active they are today) has continued to exist.
I would argue that from an entirely Eurocentric view, the end of cold war may have signaled an end to bipolarism and hence led to the demise of the ideological battles. But from an international peoples’ viewpoint, this is entirely untrue. First, the cold wars were never cold—the obsession to contain communism from spreading caused to numerous mass-scale wars initiated by the pro-capitalist lobby of western militarists in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Secondly, after the demise of Soviet Union, the philosophy and practice of communism never withered away. Rather quite a few places in the world started grappling with the fact that the power of capitalist lobby that they were in constant tussle with, in cooperation with the erstwhile Soviet Union, were looming yet larger without the union. It led even Fidel Castro to buckle under pressure, letting Cuban economy go liberal (a topic not often discussed, lest it becomes another classic case of study to see the disparities in economy during and after a socialist economy). Likewise, just about the same time that his long time friend Nelson Mandela had declared emancipation of working class in the South Africa, to avoid a further escalation of peoples’ armies, the world body “granted” immediate power to the African National Congress, not to lead a revolution by no means, but to conduct structural adjustments with the oppressor class of the country and simmer down the power of its revolutionary peoples forever by singing the garb of newly declared (and never found) freedom. The 90’s heralded the so-called liberation of Eastern European economies too—Czech, long considered as occupied (by the western media), the Poland of its Pope, who never lost interest in ranting his anti-communist views in every trip to his land, and in his enthusiast trips to all lands the then communistic. In other words, the economic pressures, after the systematic downfall of the Russian communism definitely led to (in)voluntary end of many socialist economies in the world. The capitalism had succeeded to intervene in many countries, by sheer intervention, blackmailing, and economic hijacking.
But what had not ended was the bipolarity of the world. What had never ended was the battle of ideologies. With the much less publicized, way less talked about hundreds of events of protests against the world trade organization (the holy cow of capitalism, considering the fates of people who voiced anything undesirable about it) in several countries of the world, where millions of protestors clearly represented the unified voices of the billions of underrepresented people of the world, the private media industry refused to acknowledge these contradictions of its ‘free world’.
With the homegrown crises of capitalism rocking its world, increasing the poverty circles in the so-called western societies, the ruling elites (who also call themselves G-7) decided to shift focus from their unique needs (a la Nato) to massive onslaughts on the economies that still refused to partake in its expansion mode (a la Wars). What we saw in the early 90’s throughout the world was a with-the-enemy-or-with-us approach to free trade agreements. By the mid 90’s, several of those poor yet dignified countries of the so-called third world had already succumbed to the papers. Those who did not, or did so partially, (like India’s yes to markets, and no to NPT), there have been pressures which would eventually make them do so. Recently, Indian PM’s overly enthusiastic agreement to everything that was on the offing is one indication. Not only during the late 90’s, the partners in crime of global militarist lobby, the Indian right wing party BJP was allowed to conduct the N-test, thus leaving behind a corpse of past glories of disarmament advocacies, but with the present Singh government, the unabashed partner in crime of the global capitalist lobby, it was allowed to enter into nuclear pact –very soon it will also sign the NPT. Ha! Don’t be surprised—and go have a dance of death on the debris.
Again, not to say that the entire country of India was dancing on the deathbed of its dignity. Indeed a huge majority of people in China or India –that comprise the majority of people in the world, by the way—work in agrarian sector (if that helps to shatter the myth of a “great Chinese consumer class”, a “great Indian middle class” or “the hi-tech India/China&rdquo and they did not dance to the
tunes of mantras that would bereft them from
whatever they still have—a home in the forest
they do not want to give away to the
industrialists, a village by the river they do
not want to sacrifice, a low rent apartment in
the cities they do not want to let go for their
inability to pay higher on the same, a medical
bill that continues to spiral by global price
rise, a grocery bill that rises in price for
essential commodities. This refusal to buckle
under pressure to the high price rise of
essential commodities, a avowed disapproval to
any moral deviation from the disarmament pledge,
an economic decision to live cooperatively, a
social rejection of the conditions leading to
disparities between the elites and the poor—this
is an ideology that’s shaped to counter its only
one opponent—the high priests and missionaries
of corporate capitalism.
The most glaringly obvious example today can be found in China today. The introduction of a bill to usher in right to privileges to the private property owning class, has been challenged highly and mightily by the minority left law makers, making it almost difficult to bridge away from the main question. The question, that was being taken for granted for so long as a non-existent one. A question when answered will show not the predictable fall of communism, but the predictable trends of market economy that result in greater divide between the rich and the poor. In the resurgent neo-capitalist China of 10% annual economic growth, the disparities between the rich and the poor has in fact grown in the proportion of 3.3:1. The case for every capitalist economy is more or less same or worse today in the world, with the flagship country US reeling under economic crises of the poor majority which it refuses to officially acknowledge. But the crack, beginning with China, has started to show and the pundits of market reforms better watch out.
The national economic growth does not have anything to do with the poorest section of the society, purely because the line of development, until taken in the direction of cooperative economic emancipation, will not broaden its base to be inclusive; rather from a purely economic sense of competitive market economy in a capitalist or neo-capitalist society what will prevail are monopolistic trends, bringing in more profits alone, to stay exclusively elitist. For all we know from our basic standards of education, profits are differentiated from welfare in that, they are hoarded for personal greed, not distributed for social benefits.
The lesson that China provides is simple, yet very revealing. True that the old guards of the left haven’t had a say in decades, during which periods, puppets of free markets, like Jiang Zemin have only created a “privatized” communist party by allowing business houses to have a say in the country’s governance. It’s also true that the current president Hu Jintao has proved no better with his pro-market initiatives whereby China allows FDIs worth billions in its continued commitment to the World Trade Organization, the single biggest global testament of capitalism.
Alongside, Wen Jiabao, who can be called the Manmohan Singh of China, in that both the prime minister are famous for their constant adoration of a brand of liberalization that promotes national growth only to increase rich-poor divide, has also kept the official policies of China in line with free market than socialist economy.
Clearly it signals two things: after its official differences with the erstwhile Soviet Union following Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in early 60’s and of the Soviet-Chinese border clash in the mid-60’s (following Czech crisis), the US of A has grown to be a bigger player in determining Chinese future courses. It became apparent also recently with the unfolding of Nixon archives , where it was found that the US was clearly subverting the subcontinent region by playing China and Pakistan against India in Indira Gandhi’s pro-Soviet decision to liberate Bangladesh. If not in relative types, in certain degrees more or less, the bipolar world (highly ideology driven, and entirely governed by conspirators who were no mythical then as active they are today) has continued to exist.
I would argue that from an entirely Eurocentric view, the end of cold war may have signaled an end to bipolarism and hence led to the demise of the ideological battles. But from an international peoples’ viewpoint, this is entirely untrue. First, the cold wars were never cold—the obsession to contain communism from spreading caused to numerous mass-scale wars initiated by the pro-capitalist lobby of western militarists in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Secondly, after the demise of Soviet Union, the philosophy and practice of communism never withered away. Rather quite a few places in the world started grappling with the fact that the power of capitalist lobby that they were in constant tussle with, in cooperation with the erstwhile Soviet Union, were looming yet larger without the union. It led even Fidel Castro to buckle under pressure, letting Cuban economy go liberal (a topic not often discussed, lest it becomes another classic case of study to see the disparities in economy during and after a socialist economy). Likewise, just about the same time that his long time friend Nelson Mandela had declared emancipation of working class in the South Africa, to avoid a further escalation of peoples’ armies, the world body “granted” immediate power to the African National Congress, not to lead a revolution by no means, but to conduct structural adjustments with the oppressor class of the country and simmer down the power of its revolutionary peoples forever by singing the garb of newly declared (and never found) freedom. The 90’s heralded the so-called liberation of Eastern European economies too—Czech, long considered as occupied (by the western media), the Poland of its Pope, who never lost interest in ranting his anti-communist views in every trip to his land, and in his enthusiast trips to all lands the then communistic. In other words, the economic pressures, after the systematic downfall of the Russian communism definitely led to (in)voluntary end of many socialist economies in the world. The capitalism had succeeded to intervene in many countries, by sheer intervention, blackmailing, and economic hijacking.
But what had not ended was the bipolarity of the world. What had never ended was the battle of ideologies. With the much less publicized, way less talked about hundreds of events of protests against the world trade organization (the holy cow of capitalism, considering the fates of people who voiced anything undesirable about it) in several countries of the world, where millions of protestors clearly represented the unified voices of the billions of underrepresented people of the world, the private media industry refused to acknowledge these contradictions of its ‘free world’.
With the homegrown crises of capitalism rocking its world, increasing the poverty circles in the so-called western societies, the ruling elites (who also call themselves G-7) decided to shift focus from their unique needs (a la Nato) to massive onslaughts on the economies that still refused to partake in its expansion mode (a la Wars). What we saw in the early 90’s throughout the world was a with-the-enemy-or-with-us approach to free trade agreements. By the mid 90’s, several of those poor yet dignified countries of the so-called third world had already succumbed to the papers. Those who did not, or did so partially, (like India’s yes to markets, and no to NPT), there have been pressures which would eventually make them do so. Recently, Indian PM’s overly enthusiastic agreement to everything that was on the offing is one indication. Not only during the late 90’s, the partners in crime of global militarist lobby, the Indian right wing party BJP was allowed to conduct the N-test, thus leaving behind a corpse of past glories of disarmament advocacies, but with the present Singh government, the unabashed partner in crime of the global capitalist lobby, it was allowed to enter into nuclear pact –very soon it will also sign the NPT. Ha! Don’t be surprised—and go have a dance of death on the debris.
Again, not to say that the entire country of India was dancing on the deathbed of its dignity. Indeed a huge majority of people in China or India –that comprise the majority of people in the world, by the way—work in agrarian sector (if that helps to shatter the myth of a “great Chinese consumer class”, a “great Indian middle class” or “the hi-tech India/China&rdquo
and they did not dance to the
tunes of mantras that would bereft them from
whatever they still have—a home in the forest
they do not want to give away to the
industrialists, a village by the river they do
not want to sacrifice, a low rent apartment in
the cities they do not want to let go for their
inability to pay higher on the same, a medical
bill that continues to spiral by global price
rise, a grocery bill that rises in price for
essential commodities. This refusal to buckle
under pressure to the high price rise of
essential commodities, a avowed disapproval to
any moral deviation from the disarmament pledge,
an economic decision to live cooperatively, a
social rejection of the conditions leading to
disparities between the elites and the poor—this
is an ideology that’s shaped to counter its only
one opponent—the high priests and missionaries
of corporate capitalism.
The most glaringly obvious example today can be found in China today. The introduction of a bill to usher in right to privileges to the private property owning class, has been challenged highly and mightily by the minority left law makers, making it almost difficult to bridge away from the main question. The question, that was being taken for granted for so long as a non-existent one. A question when answered will show not the predictable fall of communism, but the predictable trends of market economy that result in greater divide between the rich and the poor. In the resurgent neo-capitalist China of 10% annual economic growth, the disparities between the rich and the poor has in fact grown in the proportion of 3.3:1. The case for every capitalist economy is more or less same or worse today in the world, with the flagship country US reeling under economic crises of the poor majority which it refuses to officially acknowledge. But the crack, beginning with China, has started to show and the pundits of market reforms better watch out.
The national economic growth does not have anything to do with the poorest section of the society, purely because the line of development, until taken in the direction of cooperative economic emancipation, will not broaden its base to be inclusive; rather from a purely economic sense of competitive market economy in a capitalist or neo-capitalist society what will prevail are monopolistic trends, bringing in more profits alone, to stay exclusively elitist. For all we know from our basic standards of education, profits are differentiated from welfare in that, they are hoarded for personal greed, not distributed for social benefits.
Why Schaefer must be Schaefer?
By Saswat Pattanayak
Once again, let’s stop making the individual an issue. Let’s not become patrons of decency by crying foul at one old politician.
Maryland Comptroller 84-year old William Donald Schaefer did ogle at a 24-yr old female aide to Governor Ehrlich. He even called her back at Wednesday’s Board of Public Works Meeting and asked her to walk again in front of everyone so that he could watch her. And the entire country now is being fed with the video for endless times.
Going by the way the video is playing into the headlines of television channels, it appears that the whole of America is shocked. Clearly highlighting the moral standards of a capitalistic hypocritical fiber, Schaefer has become the safest bet. He is eliciting reactions like “what a shame!” to “how can this be?”
A channel like Fox has gone on exhibiting the video to public on the streets and telecasting their responses. No one is feeling any sense of déjà vu. The entire country is shown to be appalled. All the while, making Elizabeth Krum a familiar face for everyone, producing a mordant series of reproduction of the scene where a bunch of old white men are making lewd gesture in a public meeting that’s funded with money that we taxpayers pay every fortnight, the media are turning into a derisive leaf of being loath accomplice in the crime. The media say, “we are shocked beyond belief: Let’s watch it one more time”.
When I was watching this clip being discussed as the main headline everywhere in the country, even as the seasoned journalists were scratching their beards to wonder how did this happen, even as the seasoned legislators were saying it was most unfortunate, as the seasoned feminists were saying actions must be taken against Schaefer and the general beat of the moment was that his romance with the voters may now be over, I was wondering where is the news.
Just like the media being necrophilous is not something new, rich, powerful capitalists at higher seats of privilege transforming the alive into the unalive is no news. William Donald Schaefer, who is one of the most seasoned politicians in the national capital territory of Washington DC-Maryland-Virginia area has served in public office since 1955 including as a mayor, councilman and finally as Governor of Maryland. As twice elected to the office of Comptroller of the state, Schaefer has won peoples’ trust in this country in rejuvenated manner.
Despite being what he has been all the times. Indeed he was in news for his attitudes which are of supposedly bigger repercussions. In May 2004, after his interaction with a McDonald employee, he opined that the immigrants are liabilities. “I don't want to adjust to another language. This is the United States. I think they ought to adjust to us.”
It is the same man who since years now has been ignorant of the federal privacy laws which prohibit an individual’s medical records. Being at the helm of affairs of fiscal sector, being in charge of collecting more than $13 billion dollars per year as state and local tax revenues, which also covers health sector, here is a man who has said people with HIV/AIDS are “bad people”. Two years back, at yet another Board of Public Works meeting he called for a public registry listing HIV-positive individuals! Schaefer said, “As far as I'm concerned, people who have AIDS are a danger. They're a danger to spread AIDS. People should be able to know who has AIDS. It costs an awful lot of money to treat them.” And this reelected representative of our people gave us a slice of his wisdom: “They bring it on themselves, they don't get it by sitting on the toilet seat. ... A person who gives AIDS, who spreads AIDS, they're bad people.”
Wow! Again, this should not surprise us. I mean, if there needed to have been an authentic demand for this man to withdraw, this need not be on the ground that he was ogling at a young female. He should have been culled with more serious charges.
We know that a system exists in our democracy that allows people like this to get away with anything they have to say. Come on, without any pretensions, we know the human rights issues in the US are in shambles. Domestic violences against women are on increase. Sensitivity towards the LGBT community is abysmal. Respect for women and concern for children can be reflected through the unabashed show of commodified women and violent video games. One that does not let women rule the country nor children to organize as communities.
The question is, do we have a system in place which can effectively challenge these? A system that can challenge the status quo. As to why since 1851, the year the comptroller’s office was founded, all of the comptrollers have been old white men? We know well that the people who control the finances are the most powerful. The question is why all of them have to be men.
The question is under the circumstances, what happens to the governor of the state? Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr.’s aide was clearly harassed as we all noticed on the television screen. Will he bear responsibility and condemn Schaefer? Ha! Did he do it when Schaefer bad-mouthed immigrants who were not well versed with English? Well here is what Ehrlich said: “Once you get into this multicultural crap, this bunk, that some folks are teaching in our college campuses and other places, you run into a problem….There is no such thing as a multicultural society that can sustain itself, in my view, and I think history teaches us this lesson.”
Sure, his history teaches him different lessons! Publicly advocating supremacist societies which does not tolerate ethnic identities of diverse population, here is a governor, alright.
Baltimore Sun quotes Steven L. Kreseski, Ehrlich’s chief of staff, saying that the governor has spent time thinking about the concept as a congressman. 'Ehrlich believes that different ethnic groups should embrace American values such as capitalism and the celebration of Thanksgiving.'
Sure, why is it that I am not surprised? How fast, how effortlessly we have moved from issues of Schaefer to issues concerning Ehrlich. Because the issues concern them similarly, because they share the common platform, power and agenda. This is the only truth. There is no news value in this. People deserve the kind of government they elect. And in a god-fearing America, this may be the fate and we are all destiny’s children.
There have been strong critics of the current comptroller. Just like there were critics of McCarthy. Just like there were critics of Clinton. Or there are today critics of Bush. The pressing issue however is not to recognize that there are some odd ones out there who we need to recognize as bad when they target “our own” people. Remember as long as McCarthy was blaming the Soviets for everything, he was a darling. After he harassed a few good men of America, he had to become a ghost. Remember that as long as Clinton was bombing Kosovo and killing civilians in the process, it was fine. When we got the moral yardstick of one white female, the world went upside down.
Regarding our current president, the lesser said the better. War on Iraq is a good thing, American troops dying is a bad thing. Not that President Bush ever said anything different from President Clinton.
It’s just that he has not yet found time from dealing with issues of same-sex marriages, right to abortions and mothers against war. And guess what, he has been reelected too! With all the moral stories and preachings of good over the evil, our good better than theirs, he better be.
Well meaning critics of the comptroller have opposed the way the media have projected Schaefer as acting like his own. Intellectuals have condemned (they said the same thing in 2004 too in this brilliant article) this boys-will-be-boys excuse. The mainline argument is that he has to pay for his attitude. No one wants to buy the cliché that ‘Schaefer will be Schaefer’. After all, we are supposed to be God’s Blessed Land. We are to be upholders of moral standards.
But guess what, I think clichés are words of wisdom at times. And yes, the boys will be boys. Especially, the rich capitalist powerful men will behave like rich capitalist powerful men. Because its not they who are at fault. It’s their system they have carefully structured that’s capable of retaining them no matter what and changing the headlines every flickering moment so that people forget the crimes in the annals of reality TV shows, standardized female bodies, and hopeless comedies of modern times.
Once again, let’s stop making the individual an issue. Let’s not become patrons of decency by crying foul at one old politician.
Maryland Comptroller 84-year old William Donald Schaefer did ogle at a 24-yr old female aide to Governor Ehrlich. He even called her back at Wednesday’s Board of Public Works Meeting and asked her to walk again in front of everyone so that he could watch her. And the entire country now is being fed with the video for endless times.
Going by the way the video is playing into the headlines of television channels, it appears that the whole of America is shocked. Clearly highlighting the moral standards of a capitalistic hypocritical fiber, Schaefer has become the safest bet. He is eliciting reactions like “what a shame!” to “how can this be?”
A channel like Fox has gone on exhibiting the video to public on the streets and telecasting their responses. No one is feeling any sense of déjà vu. The entire country is shown to be appalled. All the while, making Elizabeth Krum a familiar face for everyone, producing a mordant series of reproduction of the scene where a bunch of old white men are making lewd gesture in a public meeting that’s funded with money that we taxpayers pay every fortnight, the media are turning into a derisive leaf of being loath accomplice in the crime. The media say, “we are shocked beyond belief: Let’s watch it one more time”.
When I was watching this clip being discussed as the main headline everywhere in the country, even as the seasoned journalists were scratching their beards to wonder how did this happen, even as the seasoned legislators were saying it was most unfortunate, as the seasoned feminists were saying actions must be taken against Schaefer and the general beat of the moment was that his romance with the voters may now be over, I was wondering where is the news.
Just like the media being necrophilous is not something new, rich, powerful capitalists at higher seats of privilege transforming the alive into the unalive is no news. William Donald Schaefer, who is one of the most seasoned politicians in the national capital territory of Washington DC-Maryland-Virginia area has served in public office since 1955 including as a mayor, councilman and finally as Governor of Maryland. As twice elected to the office of Comptroller of the state, Schaefer has won peoples’ trust in this country in rejuvenated manner.
Despite being what he has been all the times. Indeed he was in news for his attitudes which are of supposedly bigger repercussions. In May 2004, after his interaction with a McDonald employee, he opined that the immigrants are liabilities. “I don't want to adjust to another language. This is the United States. I think they ought to adjust to us.”
It is the same man who since years now has been ignorant of the federal privacy laws which prohibit an individual’s medical records. Being at the helm of affairs of fiscal sector, being in charge of collecting more than $13 billion dollars per year as state and local tax revenues, which also covers health sector, here is a man who has said people with HIV/AIDS are “bad people”. Two years back, at yet another Board of Public Works meeting he called for a public registry listing HIV-positive individuals! Schaefer said, “As far as I'm concerned, people who have AIDS are a danger. They're a danger to spread AIDS. People should be able to know who has AIDS. It costs an awful lot of money to treat them.” And this reelected representative of our people gave us a slice of his wisdom: “They bring it on themselves, they don't get it by sitting on the toilet seat. ... A person who gives AIDS, who spreads AIDS, they're bad people.”
Wow! Again, this should not surprise us. I mean, if there needed to have been an authentic demand for this man to withdraw, this need not be on the ground that he was ogling at a young female. He should have been culled with more serious charges.
We know that a system exists in our democracy that allows people like this to get away with anything they have to say. Come on, without any pretensions, we know the human rights issues in the US are in shambles. Domestic violences against women are on increase. Sensitivity towards the LGBT community is abysmal. Respect for women and concern for children can be reflected through the unabashed show of commodified women and violent video games. One that does not let women rule the country nor children to organize as communities.
The question is, do we have a system in place which can effectively challenge these? A system that can challenge the status quo. As to why since 1851, the year the comptroller’s office was founded, all of the comptrollers have been old white men? We know well that the people who control the finances are the most powerful. The question is why all of them have to be men.
The question is under the circumstances, what happens to the governor of the state? Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr.’s aide was clearly harassed as we all noticed on the television screen. Will he bear responsibility and condemn Schaefer? Ha! Did he do it when Schaefer bad-mouthed immigrants who were not well versed with English? Well here is what Ehrlich said: “Once you get into this multicultural crap, this bunk, that some folks are teaching in our college campuses and other places, you run into a problem….There is no such thing as a multicultural society that can sustain itself, in my view, and I think history teaches us this lesson.”
Sure, his history teaches him different lessons! Publicly advocating supremacist societies which does not tolerate ethnic identities of diverse population, here is a governor, alright.
Baltimore Sun quotes Steven L. Kreseski, Ehrlich’s chief of staff, saying that the governor has spent time thinking about the concept as a congressman. 'Ehrlich believes that different ethnic groups should embrace American values such as capitalism and the celebration of Thanksgiving.'
Sure, why is it that I am not surprised? How fast, how effortlessly we have moved from issues of Schaefer to issues concerning Ehrlich. Because the issues concern them similarly, because they share the common platform, power and agenda. This is the only truth. There is no news value in this. People deserve the kind of government they elect. And in a god-fearing America, this may be the fate and we are all destiny’s children.
There have been strong critics of the current comptroller. Just like there were critics of McCarthy. Just like there were critics of Clinton. Or there are today critics of Bush. The pressing issue however is not to recognize that there are some odd ones out there who we need to recognize as bad when they target “our own” people. Remember as long as McCarthy was blaming the Soviets for everything, he was a darling. After he harassed a few good men of America, he had to become a ghost. Remember that as long as Clinton was bombing Kosovo and killing civilians in the process, it was fine. When we got the moral yardstick of one white female, the world went upside down.
Regarding our current president, the lesser said the better. War on Iraq is a good thing, American troops dying is a bad thing. Not that President Bush ever said anything different from President Clinton.
It’s just that he has not yet found time from dealing with issues of same-sex marriages, right to abortions and mothers against war. And guess what, he has been reelected too! With all the moral stories and preachings of good over the evil, our good better than theirs, he better be.
Well meaning critics of the comptroller have opposed the way the media have projected Schaefer as acting like his own. Intellectuals have condemned (they said the same thing in 2004 too in this brilliant article) this boys-will-be-boys excuse. The mainline argument is that he has to pay for his attitude. No one wants to buy the cliché that ‘Schaefer will be Schaefer’. After all, we are supposed to be God’s Blessed Land. We are to be upholders of moral standards.
But guess what, I think clichés are words of wisdom at times. And yes, the boys will be boys. Especially, the rich capitalist powerful men will behave like rich capitalist powerful men. Because its not they who are at fault. It’s their system they have carefully structured that’s capable of retaining them no matter what and changing the headlines every flickering moment so that people forget the crimes in the annals of reality TV shows, standardized female bodies, and hopeless comedies of modern times.
Goal-setting for Indian Economy
By Saswat Pattanayak
India’s economy is now fully liberalized. With the retail market open to international competition, the economy that was once predominantly agrarian is now fully capitalistic.
I spoke to few fellow Indian bloggers over the past week and found out that the scene is so euphoric that there seems to be no need to challenge even the mainstream coverage of this issue. After all, the argument goes: more flow of capital eventually helps in more residue of capital.
According to the proponents of this school (which is as varied from purely libertarian school to overtly capitalistic), the rich not only get richer, even the poor get rich. The ‘rich’ poor now own television sets at most homes, and they understand well enough to distinguish the fine products from the rotten. So why deprive human beings from their right to choose? The arguments in favor of the blatant liberalization in India run from philosophical quarter (freedom from the angst) to social (right to aspire) and economic (privilege to own).
Freedom from angst:
I have been brooding over this for a long time now. Very ironically, the market was fully liberalized on January 26 of this year. This piece of news was announced on the 56th year commemoration day of India turning a Republic. The tone that accompanied it was significantly cheerful. Just like the day when former PM Vajpayee waved a victory sign to a surprised Indian people after declaring India as a Nuclear-state (whatever that is).
My well-meaning friends resist that comparison, because unlike the secretive nature of the N-test (when no one had an inkling of it, CIA claims it had no idea either), the liberal nature of Indian markets has been a welcome news in India since 1991, if not before. Some even wonder, what’s the news here? “Didn’t you anticipate this?”
Oh no, I at best, was not anticipating. At worst, was apprehensive. Because the people that Friedman writes about, or we talk about in the talk shows with celebrities are the people who are always visible on the radar screen of the active world audience. And this miniscule minority of India is represented as the public opinion makers.
The angst of the majority people in India are hardly accounted for. The way with which the farmers, the mill workers, the poor students, the unemployed youths, the debt-ridden ‘middle class’ (what a sardonically thing to celebrate this class every now and then), the blackmailed employees, the downtrodden women and children and the indigenous peoples perceive these hype around liberalized economy of their land is never projected in the media.
But the downside of the private economy that has been able to almost obliterate a governmental responsibility to tend to its people is never played on the channels. Where there was a right wing government in power, there used to be a disinvestment ministry selling off the public undertakings. With the advent of the centrist party, there is a prime minister who loves to flaunt how much he can sell off what remains of it.
Between these self-proclaimed intellectuals (Arun Shourie and Manmohan Singh), there is no scope for the views of the largest labor force. There is hardly any discussion about the angst of the 60% of the labor force which is working in the agriculture sector (only 17% are in industries, and 23% are in service sectors). The talk is about the growth rate of Indian economy (which basically means rich become richer), but there is hardly any talk about the budget deficit at 9% of GDP (which basically means the welfare sector for the poor receives the worst treatment)! There is always the talk about the software engineers and English speaking educated youths India has been churning year after year, but there is scarcely any projection of the innate disinterest of the majority to be technocratic and the loss of culturally rich languages due to sheer atrophy.
Freedom from the angst is definitely happening, but just as it suits the ruling elites of the country, it suits the serving elites quite well. And the comfortable conversation among this small group of people must not be misconstrued as beneficial to the people as a whole.
Right to aspire:
It is said that the aspirations of a country changes with its economy. Naturally so, because the goal-setting takes different shapes. For India and most third-world countries, the goal of most part of the 20th century was to free themselves from colonial rule. Upon hard-earned freedoms, the countries then formed alliances whereby mutual cooperation would bring the next desired results of the planned economies. Sectors were prioritized, peoples’ strengths were assessed and economies were developed at times to cater to unique potentials, and at times to reinforce the existing abilities. For example, there were cooperative societies formed to take stock of agrarian sectors dealing with poultry, milk, and varied crops. To allow vent of industrial potentials, adult education schemes, trade unions, and minimum wage standards were fixed.
At this point it is always crucial to recognize that unlike many European nations which thrived on colonizing different cultures, most Afro-Asian nations never went beyond their territories to commit the loots. This was so, not out of any predisposed prosperity of any country, as often projected by revisionists (some like PM Singh, say India was really a rich country before the invasions…obviously forgetting that only the royals were the rich lot, anyway..), but because the prevailing natural settings provided for all the needs to be met with. The people could sow and reap, could cultivate and exist, and were largely worshippers of nature for this very reason. Of course as an alibi to exploit the lands of the indigenous, European savages declared they had a burden to civilize these people and went on draining all the resources exploiting the native masses.
Fast-forward, and with revolutionary shifts in the ownership of world territories, and with the balance of power for the first time shifting in favor of the oppressed people (than the greedy monarchies or the ruling elites of political democracies) after the successful October Revolution of 1917, most countries aspired to be free from the shackles, of both the imperial rulers and their domestic lords.
In the countries where the agriculture workers led the revolution, the scenario brimmed with progressive plans for the sector of the underprivileged, the uneducated, the farmer-at-large. In the countries like India, where agriculture workers were not allowed to dominate the national scene of struggle, the plans were laid out in favor of the privileged, the educated, the engineer-at-large.
Hence no wonder, every educated family demanded its children to aspire to be educated further (not in the history of slavery, casteism, African peoples or French misadventures), and become doctors or engineers (not because, India has one of the worst industrial infrastructure and medical facility anywhere) so that they can make individual financial progresses (of course doctors and engineers are highest paid in the Indian class society, be they live in the country or abroad).
The levels of aspirations of elite Indians continued to be the same. They produced the elite engineers in the 60’s, and they became elite engineers in the 21st century. The students of humanities, of social sciences, fine arts and regional literature remained in need of constant assistance. If individuals have rights to realize their potentials, Indian youths had lost them since quite some time now. Frustrations, constant peer pressure and looming unemployment in every other sector had been forcing most youths to take up studies that required them to work for others, not to pursue their instincts. Now, they have been normalized into a sense of achievement. Only that they have lost their rights to aspire; it is only their occasion to despair.
Privilege to own:
The biggest myth of modern times is that there is such a thing called a Middle Class. So much so that there are bestsellers being written about the great Indian middle class etc. In every way that can suit the entry of multinational profiteers into a third world country, a sizeable population is being declared as middle class. This class is always seen with much applaud, as one which is the backbone of the economy, as one where people should be proud to be part of. This middle class is educated (sic!), well-informed (sic!) and going places (sic!).
Let’s deconstruct. Liberal economists point out that the middle class is the driving force behind a successful economy. Because they consume. In order to consume, they need to be informed. To get their information, they need to be educated.
Precisely! I could not agree more. In other words, there has indeed been a constant effort at creating a middle class, in India or elsewhere. This is very much needed for the multinational businesses flourish. Up until 50 years back, we knew that there was the class of rulers which were minority (landlords, kings, presidents), and there was the class of subjects (the rest of the people). The prime distinction between the two was the right to own. The former had the privilege to own (they owned palaces, lands and virgins). The latter was the dispossessed, always working hard on the land that was never their own!
Come the great equalizer, the proponents of market economy, the torchbearers of French freedom, of American capitalism, of individual liberty hallmarkers. They not only destroyed the feudal societies that came on the way of market competitions, but they also slowly killed the competitions themselves forming market monopolies. So we had giant supermarkets and retail chains, not confined to any specific lands. The first world flourished with such unadulterated exploitation of the market, clearly creating a consumer class whose only work was to buy things, because they had no resources left to challenge the elite producer class whose only work was to invest money to earn more capital. The European capitalism thus produced the largest class societies the world has ever witnessed. To succeed with this mission, they produced huge amount of propaganda materials, we know today as business management, marketing management, advertisement and public relations etc.
As happens with any propagandist move of
India’s economy is now fully liberalized. With the retail market open to international competition, the economy that was once predominantly agrarian is now fully capitalistic.
I spoke to few fellow Indian bloggers over the past week and found out that the scene is so euphoric that there seems to be no need to challenge even the mainstream coverage of this issue. After all, the argument goes: more flow of capital eventually helps in more residue of capital.
According to the proponents of this school (which is as varied from purely libertarian school to overtly capitalistic), the rich not only get richer, even the poor get rich. The ‘rich’ poor now own television sets at most homes, and they understand well enough to distinguish the fine products from the rotten. So why deprive human beings from their right to choose? The arguments in favor of the blatant liberalization in India run from philosophical quarter (freedom from the angst) to social (right to aspire) and economic (privilege to own).
Freedom from angst:
I have been brooding over this for a long time now. Very ironically, the market was fully liberalized on January 26 of this year. This piece of news was announced on the 56th year commemoration day of India turning a Republic. The tone that accompanied it was significantly cheerful. Just like the day when former PM Vajpayee waved a victory sign to a surprised Indian people after declaring India as a Nuclear-state (whatever that is).
My well-meaning friends resist that comparison, because unlike the secretive nature of the N-test (when no one had an inkling of it, CIA claims it had no idea either), the liberal nature of Indian markets has been a welcome news in India since 1991, if not before. Some even wonder, what’s the news here? “Didn’t you anticipate this?”
Oh no, I at best, was not anticipating. At worst, was apprehensive. Because the people that Friedman writes about, or we talk about in the talk shows with celebrities are the people who are always visible on the radar screen of the active world audience. And this miniscule minority of India is represented as the public opinion makers.
The angst of the majority people in India are hardly accounted for. The way with which the farmers, the mill workers, the poor students, the unemployed youths, the debt-ridden ‘middle class’ (what a sardonically thing to celebrate this class every now and then), the blackmailed employees, the downtrodden women and children and the indigenous peoples perceive these hype around liberalized economy of their land is never projected in the media.
But the downside of the private economy that has been able to almost obliterate a governmental responsibility to tend to its people is never played on the channels. Where there was a right wing government in power, there used to be a disinvestment ministry selling off the public undertakings. With the advent of the centrist party, there is a prime minister who loves to flaunt how much he can sell off what remains of it.
Between these self-proclaimed intellectuals (Arun Shourie and Manmohan Singh), there is no scope for the views of the largest labor force. There is hardly any discussion about the angst of the 60% of the labor force which is working in the agriculture sector (only 17% are in industries, and 23% are in service sectors). The talk is about the growth rate of Indian economy (which basically means rich become richer), but there is hardly any talk about the budget deficit at 9% of GDP (which basically means the welfare sector for the poor receives the worst treatment)! There is always the talk about the software engineers and English speaking educated youths India has been churning year after year, but there is scarcely any projection of the innate disinterest of the majority to be technocratic and the loss of culturally rich languages due to sheer atrophy.
Freedom from the angst is definitely happening, but just as it suits the ruling elites of the country, it suits the serving elites quite well. And the comfortable conversation among this small group of people must not be misconstrued as beneficial to the people as a whole.
Right to aspire:
It is said that the aspirations of a country changes with its economy. Naturally so, because the goal-setting takes different shapes. For India and most third-world countries, the goal of most part of the 20th century was to free themselves from colonial rule. Upon hard-earned freedoms, the countries then formed alliances whereby mutual cooperation would bring the next desired results of the planned economies. Sectors were prioritized, peoples’ strengths were assessed and economies were developed at times to cater to unique potentials, and at times to reinforce the existing abilities. For example, there were cooperative societies formed to take stock of agrarian sectors dealing with poultry, milk, and varied crops. To allow vent of industrial potentials, adult education schemes, trade unions, and minimum wage standards were fixed.
At this point it is always crucial to recognize that unlike many European nations which thrived on colonizing different cultures, most Afro-Asian nations never went beyond their territories to commit the loots. This was so, not out of any predisposed prosperity of any country, as often projected by revisionists (some like PM Singh, say India was really a rich country before the invasions…obviously forgetting that only the royals were the rich lot, anyway..), but because the prevailing natural settings provided for all the needs to be met with. The people could sow and reap, could cultivate and exist, and were largely worshippers of nature for this very reason. Of course as an alibi to exploit the lands of the indigenous, European savages declared they had a burden to civilize these people and went on draining all the resources exploiting the native masses.
Fast-forward, and with revolutionary shifts in the ownership of world territories, and with the balance of power for the first time shifting in favor of the oppressed people (than the greedy monarchies or the ruling elites of political democracies) after the successful October Revolution of 1917, most countries aspired to be free from the shackles, of both the imperial rulers and their domestic lords.
In the countries where the agriculture workers led the revolution, the scenario brimmed with progressive plans for the sector of the underprivileged, the uneducated, the farmer-at-large. In the countries like India, where agriculture workers were not allowed to dominate the national scene of struggle, the plans were laid out in favor of the privileged, the educated, the engineer-at-large.
Hence no wonder, every educated family demanded its children to aspire to be educated further (not in the history of slavery, casteism, African peoples or French misadventures), and become doctors or engineers (not because, India has one of the worst industrial infrastructure and medical facility anywhere) so that they can make individual financial progresses (of course doctors and engineers are highest paid in the Indian class society, be they live in the country or abroad).
The levels of aspirations of elite Indians continued to be the same. They produced the elite engineers in the 60’s, and they became elite engineers in the 21st century. The students of humanities, of social sciences, fine arts and regional literature remained in need of constant assistance. If individuals have rights to realize their potentials, Indian youths had lost them since quite some time now. Frustrations, constant peer pressure and looming unemployment in every other sector had been forcing most youths to take up studies that required them to work for others, not to pursue their instincts. Now, they have been normalized into a sense of achievement. Only that they have lost their rights to aspire; it is only their occasion to despair.
Privilege to own:
The biggest myth of modern times is that there is such a thing called a Middle Class. So much so that there are bestsellers being written about the great Indian middle class etc. In every way that can suit the entry of multinational profiteers into a third world country, a sizeable population is being declared as middle class. This class is always seen with much applaud, as one which is the backbone of the economy, as one where people should be proud to be part of. This middle class is educated (sic!), well-informed (sic!) and going places (sic!).
Let’s deconstruct. Liberal economists point out that the middle class is the driving force behind a successful economy. Because they consume. In order to consume, they need to be informed. To get their information, they need to be educated.
Precisely! I could not agree more. In other words, there has indeed been a constant effort at creating a middle class, in India or elsewhere. This is very much needed for the multinational businesses flourish. Up until 50 years back, we knew that there was the class of rulers which were minority (landlords, kings, presidents), and there was the class of subjects (the rest of the people). The prime distinction between the two was the right to own. The former had the privilege to own (they owned palaces, lands and virgins). The latter was the dispossessed, always working hard on the land that was never their own!
Come the great equalizer, the proponents of market economy, the torchbearers of French freedom, of American capitalism, of individual liberty hallmarkers. They not only destroyed the feudal societies that came on the way of market competitions, but they also slowly killed the competitions themselves forming market monopolies. So we had giant supermarkets and retail chains, not confined to any specific lands. The first world flourished with such unadulterated exploitation of the market, clearly creating a consumer class whose only work was to buy things, because they had no resources left to challenge the elite producer class whose only work was to invest money to earn more capital. The European capitalism thus produced the largest class societies the world has ever witnessed. To succeed with this mission, they produced huge amount of propaganda materials, we know today as business management, marketing management, advertisement and public relations etc.
As happens with any propagandist move of